Diane Patrick lends her voice, personal touch

One in a series of profiles on the spouses of Massachusetts gubernatorial candidates.

Twenty-five years ago, Diane Patrick was at the end of a failed marriage. Her then-husband was ``not a nice man," she said. He did not want to let go.

``I was very afraid," she said. ``He said, `If you can't be with me, you're not going to be with anybody else,' and that was very frightening."

Then one day a close friend reported that she'd met a ``spectacular" young man. Diane resisted at first, but finally agreed to meet Deval L. Patrick , then fresh out of Harvard Law School. She was taken by this ``friendly, funny, well-spoken" fellow who ``seemed a gentleman." But as they began to fall in love, she worried that her first husband would come after them.

``There were times I said to Deval, I don't know if you want to be with me, because I don't know what my husband would be inclined to do to us," Diane Patrick recalled in an interview. ``He said, `I'm not afraid, and you shouldn't be either.'

``I was five years older than he [Deval] was," she said, her steady voice quavering almost imperceptibly. ``I was going through a difficult divorce. I wasn't this Ivy League-educated person. He had the world available to him, and he stuck with me through probably the most difficult time in my life, and I didn't have much to offer him. Deval didn't give me a voice, but he reminded me that I had one, because I had forgotten I did."

Now her husband is running for governor, and Diane Patrick, 54 , is using her voice to champion his candidacy. A high-powered lawyer and the mother of two nearly grown daughters, she has become the campaign's not-so-secret weapon.

She has her own desk at the campaign's headquarters in Charlestown, and, as of this week, she will be the first spouse of any of the candidates to have a full-time campaign aide assigned to her. Her biography appears on his website, which promises that she ``will work alongside Deval" on a plan to improve education. This summer, Diane Patrick says she plans to do as much campaigning as she can, and campaign aides say they couldn't be more pleased about that.

``To double up and have two powerful people, personality-wise, it significantly increases our reach in the campaign," said John Walsh , Patrick's campaign manager.

Stylish and at 5 feet, 1 inch, Patrick exudes warmth and steadiness on the trail, mixing gentle plugs for her husband with easy chit chat. When addressing a crowd, she eschews the traditional stump speech, instead offering herself as her husband's lead character witness. At a recent women's fund-raiser, she shared the story of the breakup of her first marriage, and Deval Patrick's steady support during that time. At a breakfast in Gloucester this spring, she talked about her husband's curiosity, and about how his work in Sudan after college made him reflect on how communities can confront great challenges.

Both Patricks have risen to professional prominence -- she as a partner in the labor and employment department of Ropes & Gray , a prestigious downtown Boston firm, where she represents the management of some of the state's most prominent healthcare and higher education institutions in labor negotiations; he as a civil rights attorney in the Clinton administration and as general counsel for Texaco and Coca-Cola.

A self-described ``voracious consumer of news" whose left-leaning views closely match her husband's, she is just as passionate about politics and civic life as he is.

``You can't separate the campaign from our life," she said over coffee at a diner near the campaign office the other day. ``We always talk about policies. We always talk about politics. We always talk about what's in the news, local and world events. This is just kind of a natural evolution -- it just becomes a little more personal now."

It is her personal touch that draws people to her on the trail. At a seniors' luncheon in his city last week, John F. Hanlon , the mayor of Everett, shook many hands, but he could not seem to stop talking to the diminutive woman in the mint-green pantsuit after she pressed his hand in greeting.

She nodded sympathetically as the mayor went on about the difficulties of his job. She offered congratulations as he bragged about his wife's work at a local bank branch. She thanked him graciously for his offer to show her his mother's paintings on the wall of his office.

As Hanlon beamed at Diane Patrick, it was almost as if he had forgotten that he'd endorsed her husband's rival in the governor's race, Thomas F. Reilly .

``Some people say `Hi, how are you?' and just walk away," he told her.

``I enjoy it, I really do," she replied with a smile.

Though she says she always knew her husband would run for office one day and supported his decision, she is protective of her daughters, 16 and 20, who she said follow the campaign but prefer not to be in the limelight.

``It's such a compromise of time and privacy," she said. ``That's the choice we made; it's not the choice they made."

But she is also fiercely proud of her husband and genuinely thrilled at how his candidacy has taken off, said her sister, Lynn Prime , who lives near Atlanta.

``She calls me from almost every fund-raiser and tells me, verbatim, what was said about him and what was done," she said with a laugh.

Diane Patrick said she wants to continue working at Ropes & Gray if her husband becomes governor, unless conflicts of interest would force her to step aside.

``It's part of who I am," she said. ``He's a part of who I am, too, but I have my own career, and that's important to me. My colleagues and my clients are important to me."

Patrick's legal specialty could stir up political trouble among a key constituency in Democratic politics. Negotiators for the Service Employees International Union, one of the state's largest healthcare unions, which has endorsed Reilly, declined to be interviewed for this story. Still, Deval Patrick has picked up more than 20 union endorsements, including those of the Boston Teachers Union and the state chapter of the American Federation of Teachers.

Diane Patrick was born in Brooklyn into a political family. In 1948, her maternal grandfather, Bertram L. Baker , a West Indian immigrant, became the borough's first black representative in the New York State Assembly, where he served for 22 years. He was a leader in antidiscrimination legislation, co sponsoring the state's fair housing law . She remembers marching with him in parades as a girl. ``He was a firebrand," she said.

The youngest of three children born to a schoolteacher and an electrician, Patrick was a cheerleader and a strong student, graduating from a large public high school in Queens at 16. After earning a degree in early childhood education from Queens College of the City University of New York, she taught for five years. But when the financially strapped city laid her off, she headed west to begin a new career. Loyola Law School in Los Angeles offered her a full scholarship; when she got there, she discovered she loved studying law -- and she excelled.

After graduation, she joined a law firm in Los Angeles and then helped open the firm's New York office. When she and her husband moved to Boston, she became a lawyer for Harvard University and then took a job as Harvard's director of human resources.

The Patricks' careers for years required them to live apart; Deval Patrick's work at the US Justice Department, Texaco, and Coca-Cola have taken him to Washington, White Plains, N.Y., Atlanta, and around the world, and for many years the couple saw each other only on weekends. In 1994, when Deval Patrick was first appointed to the Justice Department, they moved from Milton to Washington for a year. But with her husband's job consuming most of his waking hours, Diane Patrick decided she and her daughters -- then ages 6 and 9 -- needed to be back home with their friends and neighbors.

``We missed our village," she said.

So in 1995 she returned with her girls to their home in Milton and joined Ropes & Gray. Nelson Ross , who recruited her, said he saw her as a very smart lawyer who could ``relate to people at any level." She has become a mentor to young lawyers there.

``Traveling with her is fun. Working with her, there's never a dull moment," said Katherine Kettler , a former associate in Patrick's department. ``She's willing to take her shoes off and dig through the boxes [of documents] like an associate would."

Though her job can be demanding, friends say family is the real center of Diane Patrick's life. Deval Patrick does most of the cooking (her repertoire is limited to hamburgers and spaghetti). She is very close with her daughters, Sarah , a student at New York University, and Katherine, who will be a senior at St. Andrew's School, a boarding school in Delaware. Patrick said she reads all the books on their summer reading lists from school so they can discuss them together, and she talks with them at least once, often several times, a day. Katherine sends her CD mixes of music she likes; Diane Patrick says she's become a fan of Destiny's Child , Black Eyed Peas, and Kelly Clarkson . She said the whole family also adores Broadway musicals; on road trips, they belt out songs from favorites like ``Wicked."

A lifelong bookworm, she says she always has a book going -- Augusten Burroughs, John Steinbeck, and Toni Morrison are among her favorite authors -- and she's now engrossed in ``The Devil in the White City," a popular history of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair . She is less enthusiastic about outdoorsy adventures, said Will Speers, a longtime friend of the couple. He said that when she comes to visit him in New Hampshire, she has been unnerved by some close brushes with bears.

``Diane does not like wildlife up close," he said with a laugh.

The Patricks also have a sprawling extended family; Deval Patrick's mother lived with them for years, helping to take care of the children, and they have taken in many others along the way, including a number of students in the A Better Chance program, which brought Deval Patrick from Chicago to Milton Academy. It is a tradition Diane Patrick learned from her parents, whose house in Queens was also home to various relatives moving up to the city from Mississippi and others who simply needed a place to stay.

``It's an amazing combination, because on the one hand, their house is very large," said Harvard Law School professor Lani Guinier , a longtime friend of the Patricks. ``But there's not only a family intimacy, but an intimacy about their approach to the world that just invites you in."