All the President's Men

The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority isn't exactly a pool of national-caliber political talent, but strange things are happening in Kerrytown as Election Day nears. At a meeting of the MWRA, one veteran environmentalist boasted to the organization's executive director that when John Kerry became president, he was on tap to be regional administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency, and his wife was going to be Kerry's chief of staff. "All the staff just went white," says a participant at the meeting. "But can you imagine if Kerry heard that? He'd be thinking, 'You have been totally indiscreet. We can't even trust you now.'"

But even the pros are not immune to getting seriously ahead of themselves in a city where politics is about the only major industry experiencing an uptick in employment numbers. At the Kennedy School, always a place for Democratic administrations-in-waiting, the profs and lecturers are feverishly cranking out Op-Eds, the wonky equivalent of a personal ad. And think of Steve Grossman, a failed 2002 gubernatorial candidate, who thought he'd backed a winner in becoming campaign chairman for Howard Dean's presidential bid, only to see the former Vermont governor fade out after "the scream," whereupon Grossman jumped to Kerry. But . . . too late. Having seen Grossman betray Dean, Kerry couldn't believe that he would be treated any differently and has largely frozen Grossman out of the campaign, granting him only a bit part shoring up Jewish support nationally. "Grossman's not going anyplace," says a Boston political insider. "He pissed everybody off."

But Grossman's bigger sin was being way too obvious. He failed to grasp the central paradox of political appointments: This is a job you can have only if you appear not to want it. Oddly, it's the last vestige of the election spirit from the days of the Founding Fathers, when a candidate for elective office would never do anything so vulgar as actively campaign for the position he craved. Instead, early presidential aspirants copied George Washington's example and merely signaled their availability, leaving it to their friends to do the heavy lifting of getting them elected. So, nowadays, even A-listers like Bill Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, Clinton's Treasury deputy, Roger Altman, and longtime Delaware senator and Kerry confidant Joe Biden breathe nary a word of their future employment objectives, even as they make themselves available to the candidate for lengthy policy briefings. An administration job? It's the last thing on their minds!

Take Tom Vallely, the Friend of John so tight with the candidate that his family all but moved to Iowa during the caucuses to help rescue Kerry's candidacy. A friend from the antiwar years, a former state representative, and a Kennedy School specialist in globalization issues close to the candidate's heart, Vallely could have his pick of plummy White House jobs were Kerry to win the election. But, after a long conversation covering all the angles of a Kerry presidency, he clams up when asked about his own ambitions. "Oh, I'm quite happy at Harvard," he says. "It's got pretty good stationery, too."

The candidate himself is no more forthcoming. During the endless veepstakes, Kerry made it a point of pride to reveal nothing about the search until his choice was announced. As for an administration roster, his closest advisers consider it "jinxy" -- Vallely's word -- to ponder the possibilities openly. And, of course, they do have an election to win first. The last Bostonian to be a presidential nominee, Michael Dukakis, says that he was so consumed with his campaign against George Bush I that Cabinet choices were never really on his radar screen. Boston political consultant Chuck Campion, however, helped run Walter Mondale's presidential campaign in 1984 and is closely enough involved with Kerry's to be unable to speak about that process. But he did acknowledge that even Mondale had an office to handle a transition, pathetic as that may appear in retrospect, given that he won only his native Minnesota and Washington, D.C. Vallely believes that Kerry quietly took steps toward a transition team after formally accepting the Democratic nomination at the FleetCenter in July. True to form, though, Vallely professes to know nothing about its operation.

All of this means we now head down the homestretch of a presidential election that appears as close as the last one -- one of the most tightly contested in history -- with no clear idea what a Kerry administration might actually look like. Whom does John F. Kerry like for attorney general? Will it be, in a nod to that previous JFK, his joined-at-the-hip brother, Cameron, a lawyer at Boston's Mintz Levin? How about the secretary of the Treasury? Will it be James Johnson, the former Fannie Mae chief who headed up the veep search, as everybody says? Or Citigroup's Bob Rubin, by far the brightest star in the Clinton administration firmament, in an unexpected reprise? For secretary of state, will we indeed have, as widely rumored, former United Nations envoy Richard Holbrooke, who seemed to purposely set the political class chattering about his prospects when he let a New York Times reporter know that Kerry had called him on his cellphone to ask about a CIA program from the Vietnam days? ("He just wanted to check something," Holbrooke explained.) And so on down the list. The answer is: Who knows?

It's a bit like the NFL letting Bill Belichick conceal the names on the Patriots roster until after the coin toss of the opening game of the season. And Belichick would know why Kerry -- or any presidential candidate -- would want to keep mum: The names only provide more targets for the opposition. Sidney Blumenthal, the former Clinton adviser who is now Washington bureau chief for Salon.com, says that the naming of a "shadow cabinet" would only create competing "centers of interest." He adds that Kerry would have to waste precious time explaining the inevitable variations between his Cabinet appointee's policy statements and his own. But the information vacuum does leave a big hole in the electorate's understanding of what, exactly, it would be voting for. The gap is not filled by the uninformed speculation that will occupy the political pages in the coming weeks, as journalists essentially interview one another to decide who will be on the Kerry team. As with the vice presidential selection, anyone who actually knows isn't saying. And anyone who is saying doesn't know.

The whole mystery is more pertinent than usual because of the fact that, for the first time since that other JFK in 1960, Kerry seeks the job from a perch as a US senator, without any significant executive experience. In a long career in public life, he has never had to staff up before. (Of course, as a senator, he at least knows how the confirmation process works, which might spare him any Zoe Baird-like snafus.) Kerry partisans like US Representative Barney Frank argue that the whole issue of executive experience is overblown -- even if it has congealed into conventional wisdom for more than a generation -- since no route to the White House offers adequate preparation. "There's nothing like being president of the United States," says Frank, who has served in Congress during four presidential administrations. "Nothing." Bill Clinton had been a governor, but of lightly populated, out-of-the-way Arkansas. "What's that?" Frank asks. "A three-day-a-week job?" George W. Bush's Texas, where he was governor for six years, is obviously a more consequential state, but the job of governor there is oddly downsized, giving the incumbent surprisingly little power to assemble his own administration. The agriculture commissioner and state comptroller, for instance, are popularly elected.

TO FRANK, THE WHOLE IDEA OF THE PRESIDENT AS ANY kind of hands-on manager is ridiculous for an entity the size of the United States. "He's not the chief operating officer," Frank says. "He's the policy guy, the one who mobilizes policy." That's why Reagan, who forgot the names of some of his Cabinet members, could still be effective. Still, Kerry's entire top staff now numbers only seven, nowhere near enough even to fill out the top ranks at the Department of Labor.

Plus, there is that aloof thing with Kerry. In caricature, at least, he is the friendless iconoclast, snowboarding alone. But intimates insist that this is a wild misconception. "He has a huge national Rolodex," says Vallely, and one that is, of necessity, based far more in Washington than in Boston. He ticks off the places from which Kerry would likely draw talent: the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rand Corporation, the Brookings Institution, "where Teresa is a board member," he notes, referring to Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry. To Vallely, John Kerry's job in the federal government reflects a largeness to his thinking that contrasts with the more parochial concerns of governors. "Dukakis mastered the Massachusetts government," Vallely says. "But he viewed the United States as 50 states. I think Kerry starts with the world and then thinks of the United States' place in it."

Given such big think, Vallely does not expect that Kerry will put as much stock in loyalty as the incumbent has done. He says, "I don't think he's gonna be saying to anyone, 'Were you in Iowa?' ' Kerry might well reach across the aisle to bring Republicans into his administration, much as John F. Kennedy did by enlisting the GOP heavyweight Douglas Dillon to be Treasury secretary in 1960. Kerry signaled as much by openly wooing John McCain for vice president. And it does seem that the inclusion of a few prominent Republicans -- Vallely offers the name of President Bush's deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage -- would provide the bold stroke needed to convey the idea that a President Kerry is indeed serious about unifying the country after all the squabbling between red states and blue. And while Bush has found it threatening to be challenged intellectually, Kerry does genuinely seem to relish it. "I've never had a conversation with him that ended with my saying, 'Yeah, John, you're right,'' Vallely says. "He doesn't care about that."

In hiring, this attitude also places him above the usual kinds of horsetrading that most politicians engage in. Ted Kennedy saved Kerry's bacon in the campaign by providing his own chief of staff, Mary Beth Cahill, after Kerry's man, Jim Jordan, floundered. Cahill is generally assumed to have first dibs on a Kerry chief-of-staff job if he takes over the Oval Office. But would Kerry think of further rewarding Kennedy by, say, giving nephew Joe Kennedy a little something in a Kerry administration? "They're not keeping score," Vallely says. After nearly 20 years of working together, with Kerry as the junior man to a Senate master who will probably go down in history as a modern Henry Clay, they have reached an equipoise that goes beyond favor-bank calculations. "They're genuine friends," Vallely says, "and friendship eliminates accounting." Then he catches himself. "But I'm sure that if Joe was really interested in something -- sure, it would be entertained."

Because of Kerry's Washington orientation, Vallely acknowledges that a lot of people in Boston will be disappointed if they view Kerry as their ticket to Bob Rubin-esque political stardom. Indeed, that realization will only feed the fundamental local mistrust of Kerry that he has never been able to shake. It's the idea that Kerry is not really from here at all. He just drops in every few years to collect votes. Maybe this is an unfair comparison with Kennedy, who is so manifestly from here. (No one, for instance, seems to hold it against our governor, Michigan-born Mitt Romney.) The sometime political consultant Michael Goldman attributes this malaise to Kerry's carpetbagging in his failed 1972 congressional campaign; after trolling for opportunities to run in two congressional districts, Kerry finally settled in the Fifth, which had a seat open up unexpectedly. That tagged him with the opportunistic label, Goldman says, that he was all about getting elected.

And it may be all the more revealing that the Boston crowd that Kerry is tightest with consists almost exclusively of the two groups that are essential to his presidential ambitions: the moneymen and the savvy politicos. In the first group, Kerry has turned to a coterie of old-time loyalists who have funded Kerry elections virtually since the time he first ran. These are men like Jack Manning of Boston Capital; Bob Crowe of the Boston law firm Perkins Smith & Cohen (so chummy with the Kerrys, he sometimes escorts Teresa to church); and Alan Solomont, the nursing-home entrepreneur who was Clinton's finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee. "They're all good guys, great fund-raisers, and they're working their butts off for Kerry," says real-estate firm Meredith & Grew partner Kevin Phelan, who, as a friend of all of them, has received more than his share of their solicitations. "It's not blind loyalty; it's pure friendship loyalty," says Phelan. "They're the kind of guys who, if Kerry loses on November 2d, they're going to start in on November 3d planning a retire-the-debt party." And if he wins, what will they get out of it? Phelan recalls the old story of the Robert Kennedy loyalist who was spotted walking Bobby's dog during the primaries. Asked about the dog, the loyalist said, "What dog? I don't see a dog. I see an ambassadorship."

As for the savvy politicos, these guys go way back with Kerry. They include John Sasso, the legendary political fixer who is Kerry's liaison to the Democratic National Committee; John Marttila, the Kerry strategist who was first with him in 1970; pollster Tom Kiley; spokesman Michael Meehan, who started out, years back, as Kerry's driver; Michael Whouley, the now-mythic Iowa organizer who started with Kerry at age 23; and Ron Rosenblith, Kerry's first Senate chief of staff. Bostonians all, these are the ones who moved quickly to advise Kerry just before he quit with the dopey idea of not accepting the Democratic nomination at the Fleet-Center convention. And they were said to be the ones who told him to dump the Washington-based Jordan, in part because he was squeezing the Boston boys out. They could all have spots in a Kerry administration, if they are willing to accept the pay cuts that go with them.

Other Bostonians will have to rely on their resumes, and good luck. Joseph Nye, former dean of the Kennedy School, is in good shape for a Kerry post after his stint as Clinton's assistant secretary of defense. And onetime Dukakis aide Jack Corrigan, organizer of the Kerry convention, is smelling pretty sweet about now. And a whole raft of lesser-known local players on the Clinton junior varsity -- like John DeVillars, the former regional administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency -- can expect to move up to a Kerry varsity.

IN SOME AREAS, the future Kerry administration already taking shape before our eyes, as he clusters to him the advisers -- most of them Clinton staffers awaiting a restoration of Clintonism -- who would probably move into the West Wing. The ubiquity of foreign policy specialist James Rubin, former aide to Madeleine Albright, means he is In. The same was true of Samuel "Sandy" Berger, until he admitted pilfering copies of classified documents from the National Archives and was suddenly Out. Sidney Blumenthal expects that a Kerry administration would rely more than usual on old hands because of the crisis atmosphere created by the many-fronted war on terror. "If Kerry wins, he will have to hit the ground running, so he'll need people who already know the lay of the land, know how government works, and can make things happen very quickly." People like himself? Blumenthal demurs: "My aspiration for a Kerry administration? Only to be chief of protocol and present at all state dinners."

But other Bostonians are pushing hard all the same. At the Kennedy School, terrorist specialist Jessica Stern and New Democrat Elaine Kamarck are nipping at the heels of Nye on the latest K-school website tally of Op-Eds. At this point, though, if Kerry doesn't already know who you are, it's probably too late. But if only because of their Clinton experience, the Kennedy School's Graham Allison, Clinton's assistant secretary of defense for policy and plans, and John Holdren, a Clinton science and technology adviser who is now, conveniently, the K-school's Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy, would probably be moving back to Washington.

In the end, the who's-in, who's-out political parlor game may be wildly premature, but it's still revealing in this way: The exquisite agony of the would-be Kerry people, aching to be noticed, but unsure just how, reflects the broader uncertainty of an electorate that is still trying to determine its own standing with one of the more enigmatic men ever to run for president. It is not just Bostonians who don't know where they are with him. After three decades in public life, John Forbes Kerry -- antiwar war hero and Irish Catholic Jewish WASP -- has yet to fully clarify who he is, who his friends are, and where he wants to take the country. When Americans know that, they will know better how, and whether, to serve him.

John Sedgwick is most recently the author of the novel The Education of Mrs. Bemis. He is at work on a family memoir, to be published next year by HarperCollins. His e-mail address is j.sedgwick@comcast.net.