From This Day Forward

Introduction

This is a book of stories about marriage, not sermons or sociology. We deliberately focus on American marriages, our own and others’, because marriage in this country is a rather peculiar institution. You might even say it’s un-American. After all, the Founding Fathers made it clear that individuals—not couples or groups or communities—have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But by definition, marriage is a partnership, not an individual enterprise. Married couples have to pursue happiness together, not as separate entities. And the essence of any successful marriage is self-sacrifice, not self-absorption. A friend recently told us about a twenty-fifth-anniversary party where the husband gave a toast and said, The key to our success is very simple. Within minutes after every fight, one of us says, ‘I’m sorry, Sally.’ Good line, but it’s also true that what you don’t say in a marriage can be as important as what you do say. We often joke that the success of a marriage can be measured by the number of teeth marks in your tongue. Keeping quiet in the first place means you don’t have to say I’m sorry quite so often.

Since America is a nation that constantly reinvents itself, the institution of marriage is always changing and adapting as well. We write about John and Abigail Adams, keeping their union together over long periods of separation and anxiety; slaves who defied the indignity of bondage to dignify their own vows to each other; immigrants and pioneers who had to live by new rules in new places with new partners. In our own lives, we were children of the fifties, coming of age in the sixties, and living through a series of cultural aftershocks, from birth control and the Beatles to the rise of feminism and the decline of civility. As a result, concludes the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, when young couples marry today, they are entering a union that looks very different from the one that their parents or grandparents entered. True enough, and here are some of the reasons:

• Divorce is much more common. If current trends hold steady, almost half of all contemporary marriages will not survive. And the divorce revolution, which picked up steam in the early sixties and reached a peak around 1980, is now into its second generation. Young people today are much more likely to be the products of a failed marriage than their parents or grandparents ever were.

• Marriage is no longer a rite of passage for most Americans, the moment when they leave home and become adults. The mean age at marriage has jumped sharply since 1960—from twenty to twenty-five for women and from twenty-three to twenty-seven for men—so most newlyweds have been out working and supporting themselves for some time. They are also having sex earlier—more than half of all women lose their virginity by age seventeen—so the average bride has been sexually active for seven or eight years before her first marriage. Indeed, notes the National Marriage Project, the term premarital sex has lost its meaning, because sexual activity is no longer tied in most cases to the promise or expectation of marriage.

• The sexual revolution has helped fuel a 1,000 percent increase since 1960 in the number of unmarried couples living together. By one estimate, about one out of four single women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-nine is now living with a partner, and about half have done so at some point. But to call these living arrangements a trial marriage strikes us as profoundly wrong. The whole point about marriage is making a permanent commitment to each other, and any relationship lacking that commitment is not a marriage, trial or otherwise. In fact, researchers for the National Marriage Project found some evidence that couples who live together before marriage are slightly more likely to get divorced than those who don’t cohabit.

• Americans will spend a smaller portion of their adult lives being married. Later marriages, longer life spans, and more common cohabitation all play a part. So does the easy availability of sex outside of marriage. The current college culture has spawned the term friends with privileges, which basically means, we sleep together but aren’t really a couple. Add in another important trend: more people are remaining single permanently. Going back to the mid-1800s, well over 90 percent of American women married by age forty-five. If current rates continue, that figure could drop below 85 percent.

• Mobility has always been a fact of American life and marriage, but it’s getting more pronounced. Steve grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, with one grandfather in the house and two other grandparents a few blocks away. Cokie’s grandmother lived with her family a good part of the time and the Boggs house in New Orleans was next door to a great-aunt. Today our own children live in San Francisco and London, and most of our adult nieces and nephews don’t live anywhere near their parents. Young marrieds are often far from home, and while we know the advantages of that experience, we also know how painful it can be. And when a marriage hits a rough patch, the absence of a supportive community can be devastating. A friend of ours, reflecting on his grandparents’ sixty-five-year marriage said, "When they got married it was a package deal. You bought into the whole family network. Divorce was inconceivable, because you had to divorce all of those people."

• Feminism has had an enormous impact on marriage. Women are far less dependent on a husband for financial support or sexual gratification. Moreover, adds the Marriage Project, women have higher expectations for emotional intimacy in marriage and more exacting standards for a husband’s participation in child rearing and the overall work of the household. Thus a paradox: women have less need of marriage just as they expect more from the relationship. But just because women need marriage less does not mean they want it less. Many of our single female friends, all accomplished and independent women, would still prefer the support and companionship of a committed mate.

• Marriage has been devalued and even defamed by the popular culture, according to some scholars in the field. One of them, Professor Leon R. Kass of the University of Chicago, argues that most young people today lack a cultural script whose denouement is marriage. As a result, for the great majority, the way to the altar is uncharted territory. It’s every couple on its own bottom, without a compass, often without a goal. Those who reach the altar seem to have stumbled on it by accident.

But we do not despair about the future of marriage. Our parents were married for a combined total of more than ninety years, and we see strong unions of old friends all around us. Our children seem to attend a wedding every few weeks. We are also heartened by the number of young people who come to us for conversation and counsel, wanting eagerly to make their relationships work. One of them, an Italian-Catholic woman, wrote recently to announce she was marrying her Jewish boyfriend. It took them three years and a lot of heartache. They didn’t stumble on the altar by accident; they made it there because marriage meant so much to them.

For all of its many problems, marriage is also showing other signs of health. While the divorce rate is still at historically high levels, it’s leveled off in recent years and even seems to be declining a bit. Moreover, a wide variety of forces are mobilizing to bolster the institution. A group of therapists and counselors has started a movement devoted to teaching couples the practical skills that seem to be present in most enduring matches. One of the founders, Diane Sollee, voices the hope that in the near future, couples will come to accept that the most romantic thing they can do is walk hand in hand into a course on making marriages work. A similar effort, Marriage Savers, urges pastors to require several months of counseling for any young couple wanting to get married. And after the ceremony, older couples in the congregation are assigned as sort of marriage mentors to the newlyweds. In one widely watched experiment, Florida has become the first state to mandate marriage education courses as a high-school graduation requirement. Louisiana has passed a law enabling couples to enter a covenant marriage, which makes divorce a lot harder.

We do have a prejudice. We’re big fans of marriage and don’t apologize for that. We have always agreed with the author Judith Viorst, who once wrote a book called Married Is Better. Not better for everyone, to be sure, but for most people. And we believe strongly that a devoted marriage can be reconciled with individual growth and development. Marriage has enlarged our lives, not encircled them; it has opened new doors, not closed them. We are better people together than we are separately.

But let’s be honest. We quote a young woman in this book as saying marriage just scares me, and she has a right to feel that way. Marriage is serious business and hard work. It’s not just becoming roommates, it’s becoming soul mates; it’s not just signing a license, it’s sharing a life. That explains our title. The words in the marriage ceremony from this day forward are scary. At the moment a couple exchange those vows, they can never know what they really mean, what hills and valleys stretch out in front of them in the years ahead. But if you take the words seriously, there’s no going back. There’s only the future, unlimited and unknowable, and the promise to make the journey together.

Chapter One

OUR LIVES

EARLY DAYS

COURTSHIP

We are often asked how we met, usually by young people who are still wondering about this marriage thing. When do you know you’ve found the right person? How can you tell? The problem is summed up by Steve’s twin brother, Marc, who likes to put it this way: Choosing a mate is like being told to walk through a forest and pick up the biggest stick you can find. But you only get to pick up one stick and you never know when the forest will end. In our case it was even more complicated. Since Cokie is Catholic and Steve is Jewish, the kind of stick each of us chose was also an issue—to ourselves and to our families. But in another sense we were following a familiar pattern, meeting and marrying young. We both have brothers who married at twenty. Like us, Cokie’s parents, Hale and Lindy Boggs, met in college, where they worked on the student newspaper together. Steve’s father, Will, met his bride, Dorothy, on her seventeenth birthday. And he used to look around at gatherings of his children and grandchildren, when the tribe had reached eighteen, and say with considerable pride, See what happens when you walk a girl home from a birthday party? Our story is not quite so romantic, but typical of our life—public and private threads woven together. Steve was nineteen, Cokie eighteen. It was the summer of 1962, between our sophomore and junior years in college, and we both were attending a student political conference at Ohio State.

CR: I saw Steven across the yard and he looked familiar to me because I knew his twin brother. And I kept thinking, Is that Marc Roberts? He doesn’t quite look like Marc Roberts, but he looks a whole lot like Marc Roberts. And then I got up close to him and he had a name tag, so I said, Are you Marc Roberts’s brother? And he said, Yes, are you Barbara Boggs’s sister? And that’s how we met.

SR: I had actually heard of Cokie all that summer. I had been recruited by one of my Harvard professors, Paul Sigmund, who was looking for student journalists to put out a newspaper at the World Youth Festival in Helsinki, Finland. I didn’t know that our trip was financed by the CIA, or that Paul would later marry Cokie’s sister, making us brothers-inlaw as well as co-conspirators. Another recruit was Bob Kaiser, then at Yale, an old friend of the Boggs family, and in Helsinki he kept telling me about this girl he knew at Wellesley, Cokie Boggs. But Bob made a critical mistake: he stayed in Europe. I went home early for the political meeting, and since I’d heard about her from Bob, I knew who she was when I met her.

CR: But he has this picture in his mind that I was wearing a pair of charcoal-gray Bermuda shorts and I have never in my life owned a pair of charcoal-gray Bermuda shorts. It was 1962. It might have been 1932 in terms of men and women. The fact that I actually spoke at this meeting was highly unusual.

SR: But I also found that intriguing. I think from the very beginning, the fact that Cokie was so independent-minded and so forceful appealed to me. I mean, she was not the secretary sitting at the back of the room taking notes.

CR: Although really, I took quite a few.

SR: We started flirting, writing notes to each other during these endless meetings, and Cokie has actually saved some of them all these years. On a long list of people who had been nominated for national office, I scribbled on the side, You’re so efficient it hurts. She wrote back, I’m the youngest child of an insane family—somebody had to be efficient, otherwise we’d starve! I answered, Be efficient, but Jeezus—don’t ever get comfortable. It’s such a deadly disease! That statement probably defines the word sophomoric, but it also shows how little I knew about myself. I was actually looking for comfort and I think she might have known that. Her final word on the deadly disease question was, Would that I could ever have the opportunity to catch it!

CR: And then we went back to school. Our dorms were only twelve and a half miles apart, we later learned, but at first he didn’t call me. So I think I called him and invited him to the Junior Show. Is that what happened?

SR: That would be typical. I remember sitting in the audience, watching her sing—a symbolic way to spend our first date. I remember afterward she was wearing a bright green dress, and we went to the Howard Johnson’s down in the village for something to eat.

CR: And then I came home and I’d had such a good time, such a good time, I went dancing up the stairs singing I Feel Pretty. And then he never called.

SR: I didn’t call because I was petrified. I had this rule that I didn’t call a girl more than twice. I really liked her and I enjoyed the show, but I was unnerved. I was a typical guy. I was nineteen. But there were other guys from Harvard who went out to Wellesley regularly and I would hear from them, Cokie Boggs asked after you. So we had this long-distance communication. I knew where she was. I knew where to find her.

CR: And then in March of ’63 my sister was putting on a big conference in Washington on creating a domestic peace corps. Most of the schools paid for their students to stay in hotels, but Harvard didn’t, so Barbara had arranged for people to stay at our parents’ house if they wanted to. We were expecting a whole crowd, but in the end, it was just me and Steven.

SR: We drove down to Washington together. I remember walking up to the car in Cambridge and seeing Cokie in the backseat of the car and saying to myself, You made a mistake by not calling her. Even before I got in the car, I knew there was something there. And the whole way down to Washington, we talked even though others were in the car.

CR: When we arrived at the house late that night, Steve had a terrible cold; he was coughing and hacking all through the night.

SR: I was staying in Cokie’s girlhood room—later our daughter’s room—and at some point I heard a knock on the door. Since this was 1963, I pretty much figured it wasn’t Cokie. The door opened and there stood my future mother-in-law dressed in this flowing peach negligee—clouds of peach. I sat up in bed and my mouth just dropped to the floor. I had never met a woman like this in Bayonne, New Jersey. And she whispered, Now, darling, you sound terrible, drink this. She didn’t have to say Open your mouth because my mouth was already open! And it was some home brew, probably three-quarters bourbon, but it did the trick. The family joke is that I fell in love with my mother-in-law first and then got around to Cokie! And there’s some truth to that.

We went to the conference the next day and a party that night. Bob Kaiser was there, and he was angling to take Cokie home, but since I was staying there, I had the inside track. We stayed up half the night talking in the den, and at some point Cokie made us scrambled eggs. In many ways we’ve been together since that night. It was clearly a turning point in terms of starting to feel connected to each other.

CR: Also during that trip, we went to visit my brother Tommy and sister-in-law Barbara’s house. They were only twenty-two and twenty-three but they already had two children. Elizabeth was six months old and Hale was one and a half. We walked in and I said, Hale, this is my friend Steve. Hale immediately started chanting, Bite, dump, bite, dump. Steve was totally mystified and somewhat miffed because he didn’t understand why everyone was laughing. Well, Hale had a Little Golden Book called Steve the Steam Shovel, and the steam shovel spent all day going, Bite, dump, bite, dump. You learned quickly that if you were going to have a relationship with me, you were going to have a relationship with all these other people.

SR: That’s true. That first weekend certainly set a tone—meeting Cokie’s mother, meeting Barbara and Tommy and those tykes who are now the parents of our grand-nieces and-nephews. And that was very much the way life was and continued to be; family always comes first.

CR: Then we drove home and we smooched all the way back even though there were other people in the car—but that part was embarrassing.

SR: That was embarrassing. But fun.

CR: So we had had this whole long night of talking, we had our embarrassing ride home, then we went out on a date and had a good time. Then you didn’t call again.

SR: True enough—it took some sherry to push me over the edge. I lived in Eliot House, and our master, John Finley, regularly invited interesting people over for dinner. The guest one evening was a visiting professor of English named Mark Van Doren, and since I was taking his wonderful course that spring, I was the first one to sign up. Those dinners were among the few times that serving alcohol was officially sanctioned—we always heard that some rich alum had given a grant to supply the house with sherry. I had several drinks and was getting a buzz going and Van Doren was a marvelous speaker and the whole evening was just terrific. And I had to talk to somebody about it. I went back to my dorm room and I was bouncing off the walls and I called Cokie and started babbling.

Luckily I was supposed to speak on a panel at Radcliffe the next weekend. Harvard was a very sexist place—Master Finley used to say that his job was to keep his young men thinking about women 60 percent of the time instead of 80 percent—and girls were thought of as weekend dates, period. This never struck me as right, and I had been writing some articles in the Crimson, the student newspaper, about how women were not taken seriously enough in the community. Mary Bunting, the president of Radcliffe, was thrilled to discover this odd Harvard man who actually thought that women had brains. So she would trot me out at various events, and in my inebriated excitement, I told Cokie about my speech. And she said, Well gee, I’d like to come hear it.

CR: No dummy I!

SR: I started to say, Great, come to the speech Saturday afternoon and we’ll go out that night. Somewhere in my deepest male soul I knew that I was crossing a line that I had never crossed before. This was breaking my rule of only dating a girl twice. It was so traumatic.

CR: Terrifying.

SR: So terrifying that I choked on the words. I actually had trouble getting them out, but eventually did. So she came to that event and we did go out that night.

CR: And then we went out all that spring. It was one of those years where the weather was gorgeous during the week and poured every weekend and our dating was pretty much confined to weekends because there were all these college rules. I had to be in the dorm at ten o’clock on a weeknight. Despite the rain, we had a very nice spring. We knew our religious differences could block any long-term relationship, so we kept saying, Well, this is just because it’s spring.

SR: It later became something of a joke, as the seasons changed and we were still together, so we engraved forever spring into our wedding rings. But that spring did have a magic quality to it. I had always been uncomfortable and uptight on dates, but at some point I realized I could be at ease with this girl. That I could be myself with this girl. That I didn’t have to worry about going to exactly the right restaurant or making sure we had the right movie tickets. If one thing didn’t work out, something else would. It was the first time in my life I felt that way in the presence of a girl.

CR: On spring break we went to New York for the weekend. Steve was staying at home in New Jersey and I was staying at a friend’s apartment in Manhattan. We went for a walk through Central Park, then to a movie, then to the Russian Tea Room. We had apricots and plums and Steve said he liked those colors together, and from there on out I kept desperately trying to find apricot-and-plum combinations.

SR: I still plant flowerpots with those colors.

CR: And then we went back to my friend’s and sat up all night talking and reading poetry, if you can believe it! Early Sunday morning I went to church and Steve got on a bus and went back to Bayonne.

SR: I walked into the house and my grandfather, who lived with us, was up already. He looked at me sternly because I had been out all night. He didn’t say anything; he was a rather mild-mannered man. But I remember thinking, Pop, if you knew the half of it. The girl I just left went straight to Mass.

CR: We still told each other it was just a spring romance. And I certainly thought that was the safest thing to say. Anything more would have scared him off. But we were very happy and clearly in love. Then came summer and I went home to work for the government and Steve stayed in Cambridge to edit the student newspaper. But we did spend a few weekends in Washington together, and I went to visit Steve’s parents in Bayonne for the first time.

SR: That was important because my parents were very uneasy about this relationship and we knew instinctively that the best way to deal with it was for them to get to know Cokie in a way that the Boggses were getting to know me. As a real person, not just a stereotype.

CR: But that summer Steve dated somebody else, which I found out about and didn’t like a bit.

SR: I was still struggling with the whole commitment thing, and there were a lot of girls around who thought that the editors of the Harvard Crimson were pretty neat. At the end of that summer we went to another student political meeting in Bloomington, Indiana. I was flat-out mean to Cokie; that’s the closest we ever came to breaking up.

CR: When we went back to school, it was tense.

SR: Slowly we started seeing each other again and we rediscovered there was something special between us. But it took a while to get over the resentments of the summer, and at one point she agreed to go to the Harvard–Yale game with somebody else.

CR: But I broke that date, and then the day before the game Jack Kennedy was killed. Steve and I decided to go away for that weekend because I was too upset to stay in the dorm with everybody watching TV and crying. We stayed at a friend’s house in New Hampshire and I remember driving to church that Sunday. By this time Steve’s parents had given him a car for senior year, so that made a big difference, but it was a miserable car which did not have a heater. This was Boston. Trying to get to church that Sunday was terrifying because the weather was bad and the car didn’t have a defroster. This little tiny church in this little town in New Hampshire had a catafalque in the middle of the aisle to represent Kennedy. It was so strange.

SR: But that was an important weekend. We decided that we wanted to be together. Our college careers were defined by Kennedy’s presidency—he was elected in the fall of our freshman year—and killed in the fall of our senior year. He gave young people a sense that we could participate and make a difference, and we fully shared that belief. It was one of the things that attracted us to each other.

CR: In some ways we missed a huge American pageant that weekend because we didn’t have a TV. All of America was experiencing the same thing and we weren’t.

SR: We were learning a lot about each other. But I was starting to write a senior thesis and working very hard and continuing to act out these silly male attitudes toward dates.

CR: He would call me on Saturday morning and break a date for that night, saying he had to work too hard. So I finally caught on and started going in to Cambridge early on Saturdays and studying in the stacks at the Harvard library so he couldn’t reach me to break the date. I would just show up at the appointed hour.

SR: Many of our dates followed the same pattern. I was working for The New York Times as their campus correspondent. It was a great job because I got a chance to write stories for the paper and establish a relationship with them and make a few dollars as well. My typical Saturday assignment was to cover some Harvard sporting event, like a track meet, then write a brief story. I would have to send it to New York and I had two choices. One was a really old-fashioned Western Union office, where I would peck out a cable on a totally dilapidated typewriter. Or I would call a recording room at the Times and dictate the story and spell all the names, to make sure there were no mistakes. To this day Cokie remembers the spelling of the star sprinter, Chris Ohiri, who was Nigerian. I repeated his name so often because I was convinced the desk would put in an apostrophe and try to make him Irish. I would make a swift $5.00 for this effort, but there was a restaurant in Harvard Square named Cronin’s that had a dinner special for $1.98, so the $5.00 covered dinner for two, plus tip. After dinner, Cokie often sang with her a cappella group, the Wellesley Widows. On many Saturday evenings they would perform around Boston, at different clubs or events, and I would sit in the audience with the other groupies. As the head of the group, Cokie was the emcee, so not only did I learn the words to every one of their songs, I heard her jokes over and over again. I guess not much has changed.

CR: Then your thesis was done. It was spring break and you decided to break up with me.

SR: I did? What happened?

CR: I went to Jamaica to sing and I came back really tan, which was a good thing because you met me at the airport determined to break up with me. But I looked great. Thank goodness I wasn’t worried about skin cancer and wrinkles in those days. You had been home seeing your parents and they were quizzing you because we were getting close to graduation and the real world was about to happen. You had essentially said to them, Not to worry, this relationship is not going anywhere. And then you met the tan me and we went to Princeton to see my sister, Barbara, and her husband, Paul, and had a really nice time. So you went back home the next day and said, Well, actually, maybe it is going somewhere. And that was the beginning of the conversations with your folks and what it meant for the future.

SR: They were very uneasy. Bayonne was a strange place; the Jewish community was completely self-contained. I had friends outside of the Jewish community because I played sports around town. And occasionally there were non-Jewish girls in my high-school class who I got to know. I went to a sweet-sixteen party at a Polish-American home and it was like going to another country, because hardly any Jews dated non-Jews. Also many of the brightest Catholic kids went to Catholic high schools, so I had had a very unfortunate experience in high school—I knew relatively few smart Catholic kids. It was easy to absorb the prejudice that most smart people were Jewish. In Bayonne, the first question anyone asked was What’s your religion? At Harvard it was the fifth or sixth question. It was a thoroughly different environment. But my parents still lived in a world where it was the first question you asked. I remember my father saying, If you marry this girl, we’ll be strangers in your house, and we won’t know our grandchildren. That understandably frightened him terribly. But that’s why the time we spent getting to know each other’s parents was very well invested. At some point my father admitted to me, Well, it would be a lot easier to oppose this match if it weren’t so obvious that she’s the perfect girl for you. When I counsel young people these days who are in a mixed religious relationship, I always tell them, the more time you spend with each other’s families, the better.

CR: My mother actually thought I might be taking up with Steven in order to show the world that my parents weren’t prejudiced. My sister, Barbara, had been engaged to Allard Lowenstein and my parents opposed the match. Barbara and I believed they objected because Al was Jewish, and we were hurt and upset because we thought they had raised us not to have any prejudices at all, except, as Barbara used to say, against Republicans and senators. This was flying in the face of everything they had taught us, and I told Daddy that when he was driving me to work one day. He said, Cokie, I’ve gone around and around in my own mind about this and I swear to you that is not it. If it were Hermie Kohlmeyer, he insisted, the son of a Jewish friend in New Orleans, he would be giving his blessing. But Al scared him. I just don’t think this guy will ever be there for her, he said, which was fair enough. He had really thought about it a long time, grappled with it in his own mind, and that conversation convinced me that it was not prejudice that caused their opposition. But a lot of other people thought it was.

SR: I think it made a big difference that Cokie’s parents had fought through this issue before I came along and had confronted their own feelings. It also helped that many of Hale and Lindy’s strongest political supporters and good friends in New Orleans were Jewish, so they had had a different life experience from my parents.

CR: But none of this was easy. We graduated from college in an era when everyone got married right out of college. We were going to a wedding a week. So that began a period of angst, not knowing if we could ever work it out.

SR: One of Cokie’s roommates got married in the summer after junior year and moved to California, taking her wardrobe with her. Suddenly many of Cokie’s best outfits disappeared. There was one in particular, a beige corduroy number, that I missed for years.

CR: So while many of our friends were getting married, we were still dating. But we both ended up in Washington after graduation, so that meant we continued to see each other often. I got a job through the college placement office, of all things, working for a television production company here.

SR: During the fall of senior year I had heard about an internship offered by James Reston, the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, and after I wrote to him, he invited me to Washington for an interview. I came down on November 1, 1963—I remember the date because it was the day the Diem government fell in Vietnam, a huge news story. Still, Reston spent hours with me. Then of course the Kennedy assassination happened three weeks later, and yet, when I was home for Christmas, Reston sent me a handwritten letter saying, Here’s another Christmas present, you have the job!

CR: My mother wrote you a letter of recommendation.

SR: Is that right? I had forgotten that.

CR: He said you were recommended by everybody but Charles de Gaulle.

SR: It was a very good thing that I came to Washington. Cokie was living at home and I was living downtown, but I was at the Boggs house—now our house—all the time. I even got used to Tabasco sauce on my eggs and chicory in the coffee, a New Orleans specialty that is definitely not for everybody. The other thing that really made a difference that year was the example of Scotty Reston. When I worked for him he was the most influential person in American journalism. His column set the tone and rhythm of the city. Yet he cared very much about helping me and developing my writing and he always made time to answer questions. But he was even more important as a personal role model. He had a long wonderful marriage to his college sweetheart, Sally—my gal Sal, he called her—and his wife and three sons were absolutely central to his life. Just by living that way and setting those priorities, he communicated to me that being married and having a family were completely compatible with reaching the top of your profession. In addition, he was a relentless advocate for marriage. He knew Cokie. He liked Cokie. He knew her parents. He would storm into my office, trailing pipe ashes, and say, When are you going to marry that girl? It made a big difference.

CR: But they were agonizing years, they really were. Oh, I don’t mean we didn’t have fun. Of course we did, a lot of fun. I particularly loved a trip to Coney Island where you won a stuffed animal for me by shooting basketballs, and then I made you go on the parachute jump. After showing off with the baskets, you were so terrified on the parachute ride—I can still see that look of sheer horror on your face.

SR: I’ve never quite forgiven you for that.

CR: Too late for that. It was because we liked being together so much that we agonized. There were times when we absolutely