Campaign 2000: On Her Trail

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Even more old-fashioned is that for all her hard squints into the typewriter to get the story right, she made the Big Bargain. She could breeze through the halls of power, even in her 20s, and she could phone the President because--paging Dr. Freud--she was beautiful. And she knew how to work her beauty as well as her stopwatch. Just listen to one of the letters to her parents about the events lined up for the week ahead. "Monday I will be with Senator Scoop Jackson for dinner. Tuesday Senator Keating has invited me to a party for the Vice President [Nixon]. Friday I'm going out with a New York Times columnist. I sure am getting fancy." Her journal at age 12 foretells how she would later play the game. "Last week, Allan Wood said he would give me three Cokes if I would wear a sweater and skirt this week to dancing class. I got the three Cokes."

A lot of scoops came from those dates and the parties she threw. Of course, her male colleagues whispered that she was sleeping around. They would do that today too. But by letting herself be wined and dined, Mom was only working to overcome a locker-room atmosphere that favored her male colleagues. She may have given some pols a pass for making one. But not more so than the guys who sat by the pool with John F. Kennedy and said nothing when he went off to the cabana. She protected what we once considered private, just like the guys. When a drunken Wilbur Mills took her to see stripper Fanne Foxe perform and declared, "I own her," Mom didn't report it. She also stayed mum after having dinner with Johnson the night after J.F.K.'s shooting, keeping to herself the panic in his eyes, his wild talk that he would be the next victim.

I haven't been invited to Bush's ranch the way my mother was to Johnson's, but after covering John McCain in the primaries, I spent a weekend with a colleague and our wives at McCain's mountain cabin. The stories and insights and blunt talk crackled like fireworks. As we left, I had an urge that I still can't shake. I thought, "I've gotta tell Mom about this."