How and why did one of D.C.’s most powerful couples decide to head to the Big Easy? Excerpted from “James Carville and Mary Matalin,” January 16, 2014.

MARY MATALIN and JAMES CARVILLE, Co-authors, Love & War: Twenty Years, Three Presidents, Two Daughters and One Louisiana Home

In conversation with
TERRY CHRISTENSEN, Professor Emeritus, San Jose State University

 

TERRY CHRISTENSEN: Your move from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans is a major topic throughout the book. What made two political junkies move away from the political capital?

JAMES CARVILLE: After the [Hurricane Katrina] events of August of 2005, we knew we weren’t going to stay [in Washington] forever; I just didn’t want to grow old among strangers. The tug and the depression set in about how fragile everything was. And the culture – she always loved it. We got married in New Orleans. That was at her insistence; it was the only way she would marry me – if we got married in New Orleans. I grew up 60 miles up the river.

We look back on it and it was really an almost insane thing to do to take two young children and [settle] in a city that was [buried]. It was very fragile. It turned out to be superb, but we didn’t know it at the time; it was a gamble. It was time to go home, and I give Mary all the credit in the world. She did a terrific job in getting the children to adjust. It’s a very different culture down there, and you just don’t walk into it. That’s one of the appealing things about New Orleans, but it’s also one of the difficult things if you’re a newcomer. The culture’s different, the social structure’s different and everything is different. So it was a real risk, and our children had a period of adjustment.

MARY MATALIN: For me, it was a confluence of events. We did not get married to have children. But then I had one at 42 and one at 45, and they’re such blessings.

One day, I was at school with the little one in the bookstore – first day of school. If you have children, you know that, particularly [for] girls, there is no greater calling in life than anonymity. They want to be like, “Don’t separate me out. Don’t be looking at me.” So I’m standing there with an armful of her stuff and this little perky tennis-wearing ponytailed babe behind me says, “You were such a bitch on ‘Meet the Press’ yesterday.” So my six- or seven- – whatever age she was – year-old reaches for my hand and is squeezing it so hard. I know she’s thinking, “My mom’s gonna blow; she’s gonna blow bad.”

I came home that night and said, “This is a hard place to raise children.” Confluent with that was his saying after Katrina, “Sugar, we’re going to become a sliver on a river.” I’m from Chicago. Anything that follows “Sugar,” I will follow it. So I loved New Orleans long before I knew James Carville. I thought it was important for the kids to grow up by family. I thought we might be able to contribute something. It was not an anti-Washington thing; we still have a farm in the Shenandoah Valley, we have a home in Washington.

I think there are very few bastions of authentic eccentricity left in the country. New Orleans is definitely one of them as are plenty of places in California. So I think we have a bond there.

CHRISTENSEN: Mary, you write a lot about your admiration, affection and deep respect for Dick Cheney and George H.W. Bush. Could you tell us a little bit about what you saw in them that some other people might have missed?

MATALIN: I’m 60, so I got into politics when it wasn’t right, left. I grew up with Democrats. I didn’t know any Republicans. The college I went to, there were 11 out of 17,000 kids that were Republicans. I was a Democrat. I worked in steel mills and I was [in] a union. I became a conservative when I started thinking and paying taxes, so I know why I am what I am. But in politics as in life, I divided people between good guys and jerks. So there’s a lot of jerky Republicans and there’s a lot of jerky Democrats.

But I’ve had the great blessing to work for some men and women of great integrity of both parties. The way in which you see politics conveyed does not portray what happens behind the cameras. You might be surprised to learn that when Dick Cheney was president of the Senate, one of his go-to people in the Senate was Hillary Clinton, because that woman never promised anything she wasn’t going to deliver and she always under-promised and over-delivered, and you can’t say that about every senator. Dianne Feinstein was [also] good. There were a lot of good people on both sides of the aisle, and we both respect them for their integrity, their honesty, their loyalty without getting into the policies. In terms of being smart and having integrity, I have really been blessed and I am happy to like some of James’s people. [Laughter.]

CHRISTENSEN: James, are there political leaders you’ve worked with that you revere in the same way?

CARVILLE: Yeah. I’ve been very fortunate. I obviously love President Clinton to death. I mean, to actually have a chance to work for somebody like that is remarkable. 

First of all, I love politics. I have nothing but joy when I think about how I’ve earned my living. I’m not in any way feeling bad about it or anything else, and I’ve worked in probably seven, eight different states. I’ve worked in 22 different countries. I’ve really been privileged to meet a lot of remarkable people and to have been part of a lot of remarkable things. But the thing that I take most from my time in politics is the relationships that we’ve made.

I’ve been very fortunate. When we thought about writing this book, after 20 years, we were ground zero for some of the big stories, from the brouhaha over the Clinton impeachment to 9/11, the recount, the Katrina reconstruction; and politics has been very good to James Carville and has allowed me to see and participate in things that a kid from a one stop-sign town in south Louisiana could only dream of.

MATALIN: People are people. I love “Poppy” Bush. He took me under his wing after my mother died; that was my family. And we weren’t just losing [the 1992 presidential election]; we were getting our behinds kicked by [Carville]. The weekend before the election, we’re on separate Sunday shows and then I went right from the Sunday show to Andrews [Air Force Base], I get on the plane and the military aide says, “President Bush wants to see you right now in his cabin to talk to you about James.” I hadn’t seen what James had said on the show and I’m like, “Oh no, what did he say?” So I go in there and “Poppy” Bush goes, “They asked James Carville if there was one nice thing he could say about George Herbert Walker Bush, and he said anybody that Mary Matalin loves as much as she loves ‘Poppy’ Bush has got to be a great guy.” And he gets all choked up and so that’s – people are people.

And on the Clinton side of things, President and First Lady Clinton had an engagement party for us right after the campaign. President Clinton was still angry enough to not look at me, but while we were on stage together, he told everybody how much he appreciated how loyal I was to my guy. We’re now really good friends; he comes to the house and we sneak around and look at all of the furniture that James keeps complaining about my buying; it turns out that President Clinton is a secret antiques aficionado, the guy knows something about everything: “That’s a fourteenth century Italian Corona.” I’m like, “Get out of here, you know that?” And James goes, “What the hell is it?” So I mean everything is not politics with politicians.

CARVILLE: We’ve done a number of events at [George H.W. Bush’s presidentiallibrary]. However classy a guy you think he is, you really have no idea; he’s as classy as you think. He is a real first-class charming man. Very decent.

I was mortified of his wife –

MATALIN: Scared. He was very scared

CARVILLE: – who would not mention my name.

MATALIN: Mrs. Bush called him for 10 years, “He who shall not be named.”

CARVILLE: And then I probably said an uncomplimentary thing or two about her child, too. Then we have this dinner after we make this presentation, and she makes me sit by her. I don’t get intimidated by much, but I was really scared to death. Then she stood up and said some nice things about me and I was like “Whew, man!” Cuz, I tell you, I could see she’s a tough cookie. [Laughter.]

CHRISTENSEN: I want to talk a little bit about September 11, 2001. It’s a very moving part of the book because you had very different experiences during that time. Mary spent days in the bunker, as it were, with the vice president, and you two weren’t even able to speak for several days. Could you both talk a little bit about your experience?

CARVILLE: We had a thing called the Sperling Breakfast, which is this legendary Washington institution where you go talk and maybe there’s 40 reporters. We walk out and Bob Shrum said, “A plane just flew into the World Trade Center.” I remember looking up and it was a blue sky. In general, if it’s a blue sky in Washington, it’s a blue sky in New York and I remember thinking, “Well, planes don’t fly into buildings anymore, you know.” Shortly thereafter, it became apparent what happened.

We were on 16th Street; we lived in Alexandria and my children were in school; one must have been in first or second grade and the other was in preschool I think. I knew that I had to get to the kids. I had no idea what was going on. To say that there was traffic would be an understatement. So I didn’t know anything about what Mary was doing. I didn’t know anything, and the Pentagon was smoking. I got to the kids, then we got home, and I was panicked. I didn’t know; there were rumors about a plane that was on the mall, and there was a chemical attack and should you go get duct tape and tape up your windows. No one knew anything until about five o’clock in the afternoon. You might pick up the phone and say, “Hello,” and this voice comes on and says, “Mr. Carville?” I say, “Yes,” and he goes, “This is Major Dickerson. I’m authorized to tell you that your wife is fine and I can say nothing else. Goodbye.” That was it. I was like “Whew.” So about every four, five days, the good major would call to say, “I’m authorized to tell you that your wife is fine.” I had to tell a first-grader and a preschool kid what was happening. “Your mother’s fine. We don’t know where she is. Nobody can tell us.”

MATALIN: Our neighbors subsequently told me that after he got the call from the major, he was seen running through the whole neighborhood with a beer in each hand, “Mary’s alive! Mary’s alive! Mary’s alive!” Thank you, honey, for that.

[At that time]I had a two-year-old, a five year-old. You leave [for work in the morning] way before the sun comes up, and you get home way after the sun comes down. It might be a great job, but you’ll never look worse in your life. My entire makeup regime was Chap Stick, and to dry my hair, I would hang out the window in the car in the morning. But this particular day, on 9/11 – men, please ignore this, I think the women will like this – I had on a royal purple Louis Ferro pencil skirt and tailored jacket and black and red six-inch patent leather [shoes], because I was meeting with the energy people – the Democrats and teamsters who supported our energy policy – so I had makeup on; I had my hair done; I was all dressed up. I sit down in my office and go, “Whoa, this is a first” – and a plane hits. What the heck?

I went down to the vice president’s office. We knew immediately that something was wrong. The second plane hit and we moved right into action, calling the mayor, trying to contact the president, who was on the road. Before we could get very deep into it, two guys who were very handsomely dressed but built like movers came in and picked up Dick Cheney like he was a feather pillow and just said, “We’re evacuating. We’re going now, sir. We’re evacuating. We’re going now, sir.” I’m not very proud of this but the first thought in my mind was, “What am I? Chopped liver? Like what’s gonna…?”

They answered no questions. Somebody came down the hall and said, “Everybody who is in the West Wing report to the mess for further instructions.” We all got down there. Everybody was clueless. It’s not a very big place. We didn’t stay clueless for long, because we got our instructions, which were and I quote, “Run for your life. A plane is going to hit the White House.” Now again – I’m not proud of this but – I’m thinking, “Everybody knows I’m not going to run for my life in these six-inch [shoes] and everybody knows if you nick patent leather, you can never fix it.” I’m not trying to be funny, but it’s so surreal. I’m thinking to myself, “Run for your life. A plane’s going to hit the White House. What is this, like a movie script or something?”

So I judiciously walked for my life in my high heels, which is a good thing, because I didn’t get very far when two guys with big guns found me and said, “The vice president wants you in the bunker.” With the clearance level that I had, you can’t tell your family where you are, where you’re going, how long you’re going to be there, when you’re coming home. That’s what James is referencing. But I did know and I will say this about the depth of love for my husband at the cellular level: I knew the kids were blocks away from the Pentagon; I knew the Pentagon had been hit, we could not find Rumsfeld, who is a dear friend of ours, because he was pulling dead bodies out of where it’d been hit; and one of my friends who was replacing me on “Crossfire” was on the plane that hit the Pentagon. We got a call from Ted Olson, “My wife was on the plane.”

It was scary. I knew [James] was in Washington, on the wrong side of the river, I knew at a cellular, primal level that if he had to swim the Potomac, he would get those kids and he would get them to safety. I just knew it. I couldn’t have melted down. There was no luxury to melt down, but I would have, had I not had such faith in him to be able to take care of his family, which is how we were able to move to New Orleans. I trust in my heart that he’ll never let anything happen to any of us.

CHRISTENSEN: As a teacher of local government and politics, I was really happy to read in your book an advocacy of engaging in local politics, local government. And you’ve done a lot in New Orleans. Could you talk about that a little bit?

CARVILLE: Yeah, let me, first of all, try to explain New Orleans to you.

CHRISTENSEN: We only have half an hour.

CARVILLE: If you live here, you’re very proud, as you should be, of your quality of life. You’ve got universities, the greatest high-tech companies in the world; the climate here is unbelievable – you’re close to the ocean, the mountains, almost with a better quality of life than you have here in the Valley in Palo Alto. The thing to remember about New Orleans is no one ever speaks of a quality of life. It is only a way of life: you know what our food tastes like, you know what it is, you know what it looks like, you know what our music sounds like, you know what a carnival crew looks like, you know what our architecture is like, you know what our funerals are. It’s an entire culture. Some people say, “Man, down there, there’s humidity, there’s hurricanes, there’s poverty…” Whatever. That’s all secondary. But it’s like any other culture: it is very fragile. It is very fragile with its outside influences. It has environmental threats. It has political threats. It has any number of things.

My grandmother was from New Orleans, I grew up north of it. It was great. I lived there a couple of times, but I had abused that culture in every way that you could. I would drink, I’d eat, I’d party; I would do all of the things, enjoyed it. After [Katrina in] 2005, I realized that we lost a thousand trumpets. The music may have stopped and you can’t go to a conservatory and learn this stuff. It’s just passed down. I just felt like I really wanted this culture to not just survive but to thrive. That’s really what the fight was about to me, and now my kids. One time, I was at the house and my daughters came in and said, “Daddy, will you give us a ride to Pinkberry?” I said, “Pinkberry? What the hell is that?” They said, “It’s a yogurt place.” I said, “Let me tell you something, we don’t eat yogurt in this house. We eat snowballs, goddamnit. We’re not having any yogurt around here cuz snowballs are part of our culture.” I became just sort of a, you know, cultural Ayatollah. I was like “You can’t do this….” But that’s really the nature of what we are. It became economical in not a very significant way—we’re only 370,000 or 375,000 people. But culturally, we are the most identifiable place in the country, probably as deep in nuance a culture as any city in the world, when you think about it.

MATALIN: Look, we did not go down there, we didn’t get involved in local politics because we’re junkies. I like to garden. I like to cook. I like architecture. I like painting. I like music. I like everything that it offers. But it was clear after two years and having brought our children there that without proper leadership, we were going to be a sliver on a river. So, we talked to [the mayor] this morning. His election was at the end of the month – the mayor who said he didn’t even want to run. We said, “You’ve got to run.” We were like, we don’t do this anymore. We became his voluntary [advisors], he calls us the apostles, and we won that race with 67 percent of the black vote, 67 percent of the white vote, uptown, downtown, 74 percent approval. I mean, you’ve never even seen this.

The point is that his whole solution is – and this is why the book is positive about politics – Americans want to save something. We pulled together and we saved it. And as he said it, after the Super Bowl, despite that little blackout – but who hasn’t blacked out in New Orleans? You know, seven years ago, we were 15 feet underwater, and now we’re rivals, we’re Silicon South; we have the third film industry. Anyway, it takes leadership. He’s a Democrat, okay? There’s a handful of Republicans but not as many as there are in this room here. The point was that everybody came together. The objective, or the guiding principle, was outcome-based. He said, “If you come to this office and you want to talk about old fights or you want to create new fights, get the hell out of here. You’ve got to try, want a new solution. Let’s try it.” From teaching entrepreneurship to innovation to medical to every sector of the economy to crime. That’s why you have to have an engaged and active and informed citizenry. That’s why we did it.