Believer: My Forty Years in Politics Read Online Free Page A

Within a decade, she became director of qualitative research and, later, a vice president for Young and Rubicam, one of the nation’s largest ad agencies. Mom was hardly a feminist, but in both journalism and advertising, she surely was a trailblazer.
    As Mom’s career took off, my parents’ marriage crumbled. She was frustrated by my dad’s lack of ambition. He was content with a small psychotherapy practice and insisted on charging his patients modest fees. “These people have enough problems,” he would explain when she pushed. Never a great pairing, Mom and Dad now increasingly lived in different worlds. Many of their friends in the 1950s were psychologists and intellectuals. Always sensitive to slights, Mom felt they looked down on her and viewed the crassly commercial world of Madison Avenue with scorn. Now her circle included the martini-loving
Mad Men
crowd, with whom my dad had little in common. They separated, tried to reconcile, and by the time I was eight, split for good—though they didn’t get divorced for another five years. When we were all together, the tension was palpable and painful. My mother was as subtle as a sledgehammer. When she was unhappy, her face dissolved into what my dad would call her “hangdog look.” My sister often had to play mediator, and deal with Mom’s demanding moods.
    The wounds of childhood never fully heal and often cut across generations. Driven by the ravenous need for the recognition and approval she seldom got growing up, my mother was so preoccupied by the demands of her career that she had little time or emotional space for me. Mom also saw her kids mostly as a reflection on her. When we did well in the eyes of others, she was thrilled. When we did not, she was horrified. “What did they say?” she would ask when talk turned to school or work or whatever venture I was involved in at the time. I never exactly knew who “they” were. They could be teachers, bosses, or, when I became more visible, elite commentators or the public. When I worked for popular candidates or causes, my mother bragged. When I worked for controversial or, God forbid, losing campaigns, she would keep it to herself like a dark family secret.
    We think that we can escape the pathologies of our past, but too often that turns out not to be true. My mother was scarred by her upbringing, and without malice or the least trace of self-awareness, she passed the virus on to me. On the one hand, I credit much of my professional success to the drive and skills I drew from her. On the other, I have spent my life fighting off the same debilitating self-doubt, too often fretting over the very same questions that obsessed her: “What did
they
say? What did
they
think?” It’s painful to acknowledge that my own children also paid a price, often losing out to my career in the battle for my attention.
    If my mother didn’t have the time or emotional bandwidth for me, I have to confess that I also wasn’t the easiest child to parent. In the parlance of today, I was a “hyperactive kid,” filled with maddening, unfocused energy. My mother called me “the Monster,” only half in jest. I couldn’t sit still, and even when I was sitting, my legs would be pumping, shaking everything within a hundred-yard radius—a habit that rattles my family and friends to this day. My handwriting was as far from “perfect” as one could imagine. As for reading, I could rip through a newspaper but had a hard time concentrating on anything long enough to finish my homework. I was a handful, salvaged, in part, by a few extraordinary (and extraordinarily patient) public school teachers.
    My dad, Joan, and Jessie, our caretaker, filled in the gap, providing the love and support I was missing. Stuyvesant Town also was a safe haven, yielding a community of loyal, lifelong friends. As kids, we would hang out at the playgrounds until it was too dark to see. Later, we shared the raptures and torments of adolescence in a wild