New Kerry emerging
There was an evening five summers ago when John Kerry sat at the bar at No. 9 Park and asked point-blank, "Should I run against Al Gore?"
Think about that. The most important question I'd handled in months was, "You want that super-sized?" Still, I shouldn't have been surprised. Kerry asked the busboy the same thing. He called directory assistance and asked the operator what to do.
Which is what makes this week even more striking. Put aside, for a moment, the specific selection of John Edwards as his ticket mate. What's far more stunning is the way in which Kerry made and announced his decision, demonstrating, as old Kerry friend Bob Crowe said yesterday, "a real growth in him."
The fact is, the familiar, old Kerry was an intellectual sieve. Things poured in, things spilled out. He couldn't help himself, and his big, messy group of friends tacitly encouraged it, if only because it allowed them to share in his power.
This time, on center stage, under the probing lights of the national media, Kerry showed signs of being an entirely new man.
How new? Yesterday, Jim Johnson, the super-secretive and widely respected Washington sage, one-time chairman of the Walter Mondale campaign, was on the phone describing how the process that led to Edwards began and ended.
It started with voice mail that Kerry left for Johnson at 11:15 p.m. March 2, Super Tuesday night. When Johnson returned the call the following morning, Kerry asked him to run the search for vice president, which would be seen as Kerry's pivotal decision as a presidential candidate.
On the afternoon of March 3, Johnson jetted to Tampa, sneaked onto Kerry's campaign plane before the news media arrived to see him, and spent the two-hour-plus flight to Boston hashing over the rules of the road. Kerry said he wanted the search to be expansive, completely confidential, apart from the campaign. He told Johnson that when the search was over, he wanted everyone involved to be able to say that they had never felt better treated in any process before.
In the next two months, Johnson consulted with more than 200 people, including a couple of dozen senators, House members, governors, historians, and pollsters. A team of 150 tax and medical specialists and political aides pored over records.
Johnson and Kerry met every 10 days or so. They talked on the phone constantly. They weighed unconventional candidates from the business world, the Republican Party, and academia. The process closed with a conference call last Thursday, with Johnson in Los Angeles, campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill in Washington, and Kerry at his wife's Pittsburgh estate (farm is an utter lie).
"I said: `We're done. The analytical phase, the answers to the questions, our work is over. It's in your hands,' " Johnson recalled. "He said, 'Great, I have all that I need.' "
Kerry embarked on a Midwestern campaign swing and returned to Pittsburgh overnight Sunday. When he awoke Monday, he told his wife that he had decided on Edwards. Some time after 10 p.m. Monday, he summoned Johnson and Cahill to the living room. Then he pulled two or three sheets of paper out of a briefcase and recited a prepared explanation of why he chose Edwards.
It was a most un-Kerry moment at the end of a most un-Kerry journey. The rollout, with Tuesday's Internet announcement and speech and Wednesday's joint appearance, was precisely choreographed, and the glow will continue to tomorrow's Kerry-Edwards appearance in Raleigh.
But again, how new, this Kerry? He showed fortitude in the wintry cornfields of Iowa that even many friends didn't know he had. Since then, he withstood demands from Washington's blathering class to pick a vice presidential nominee months ago. He has resisted constant calls to take his strategy negative.
So new enough, so far. Campaigns are long for a reason, and the evolution of John Kerry may prove just the reason.
Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com.
