Some found out the news only on their way into the D.C. headquarters, from friends via cell phone: CNN was reporting that John Kerry had fired his campaign manager, their boss, Jim Jordan. At the cramped townhouse near Union Station they huddled in conspiratorial circles, sorting out why? when? how exactly? who else might follow? Certainly no one had fully digested the news by the 8:30 a.m. staff meeting in the townhouse's basement when the stranger among them laid down the law.
"I want you to stay," began Mary Beth Cahill, Kerry's new campaign manager as of that morning, Nov. 10. "But if you're going to leave I want you to leave now."
Boiled down like that, it sounds "kind of harsh," says Simone LiTrenta, Cahill's assistant. Some staff members were still in shock, still figuring out where their loyalties lay. But only three people quit, and pretty quickly the rest bought the practical explanation from a woman who likes her campaigns running on time:
"I wanted to avoid the drip-drip of people leaving," she says now, when minor resentments seem so irrelevant given the outcome. "There was a lot to get done."
Kerry's campaign was resurrected for many reasons outside the campaign's control, including Howard Dean's implosion and the surprise appearance in Iowa of a Vietnam vet whose life Kerry had saved. And much of the blueprint that proved successful had already been laid out in those early days, hidden in all that chaos. Still, when the story of how Kerry sealed the Democratic presidential nomination gets told, it will date back to that Monday morning when Mary Beth Cahill took over the top-floor office in campaign headquarters.
"Slow and steady," she told the talk shows in a rare series of TV appearances the night before the Iowa caucuses in January. She waited her turn after Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, finished his verbal pirouettes about "empowerment" and "taking charge of democracy" and "a different kind of campaign."
"Slow and steady," she said. "Step by step," and it sounded sort of tedious, certainly no way to jazz up the voters. Yet Iowa turned out to be it, the beginning and end of the Democratic primary campaign. A month later, Trippi's a professional TV pundit while Cahill, 49, is fending off dozens of sycophants desperate to join the winning campaign.
Campaigns are usually bad for personal upkeep: People just can't find the time to get a haircut or clean off their desks. Yet here is Cahill, lipsticked, her nails buffed and polished, her office in perfect order. There's an inspirational poster above the desk ("To be finally alive is to work for the common good"), floral curtains drawn back, binders and videos stacked neatly on shelves, even an orchid! A live one, in a campaign office! What passes for messy indulgence here is a stack of Washington Post Food sections she's saving for later, but even those are arranged in a box.
The first thing Cahill does when she takes over a campaign is clean out the wastebasket in her office, says Luke Albee, who worked with her on Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy's campaign. Her acolytes have spent a lot of energy figuring out the layers of symbolism in this opening act:
Her parents are working-class Irish, so she's humble, a democrat with a small "d." It signals people to have "less airs," ventures Albee. "You can't be too puffed up when the person in charge is emptying trash."
Or she's letting the staff know that winning is about the smallest of details.
Or maybe she's just impatient with clutter, which is exactly the type of person the Kerry campaign needed in November. Back then, the campaign was known for hiring two of everyone. The candidate made news when his staff was fighting, which was arguably better than the long stretches of media silence. Kerry was polling in single digits, trailing Al Sharpton in South Carolina.
The lasting memory from that time for many staffers is Kerry on his cell phone, wasting precious hours seeking layers of advice, or negotiating office disputes. "John was calling from the road repeatedly to referee decisions for the strategic team," recalls Michael Meehan, a senior adviser. "That just doesn't work." Judy Reardon, state director for New Hampshire, recalls that "instead of focusing on the next event [in the car], we would spend a lot of time worrying about what was going on in D.C." in campaign headquarters.
"He ought to give his phone away," Sen. Ted Kennedy told the Boston Globe at the time. "He is a compulsive telephoner. He talks to everybody, sometimes particularly if the campaign is not going well. Getting a lot of advice, it can be distracting."
The campaign was stuck in neurotic second-guessing -- a triangulation of distrust running from Kerry to his D.C.-based campaign manager, Jim Jordan, to a set of Boston consultants headed by Bob Shrum. The consultants felt frozen out by Jordan. Jordan made no secret of his disdain for some of them, according to several people interviewed who still work with the campaign. Kerry couldn't keep himself from getting sucked into the middle, couldn't leave it to Jordan to sort out.
"We were doing a lot right, mechanically and strategically, and I think that's mostly been borne out," Jordan wrote in an e-mail. "But there were broken pieces, too, a lot of frayed personal relationships. John was spending too much time refereeing the infighting, and that had become a real distraction. So he made the right decision, both in making a change and in hiring Mary Beth. She's been superb, absolutely professional, a perfect cure for the problems that were bogging things down."
Cahill had been Kennedy's chief of staff for three years at the time. He had already endorsed Kerry and traveled with the campaign and wanted to "further his investment," Cahill says, in her bottom-line lingo.
Kennedy thought of her because she'd turned around difficult campaigns in the past, because she was "no-nonsense," made "quick decisions" and because "she's sort of beyond personal ambition," he says. "You have the sense that she'll make judgments that are always in your interest. That she doesn't have another agenda."
The campaign was floundering, but Cahill swears she never hesitated. "I didn't ever doubt he would win," she says. "It was sort of a joke in my family. That was back when the Dean phenomenon was approaching its apex, and they thought I was crazy."
The Taciturn Tactician
Her friends say Cahill's favorite places are flea markets and craft fairs, places where you have to sift through a lot of junk to find a winner. Her sister Ann Castagnetti says she was always in charge of keeping the chaos at bay; as the oldest of six children, it was her job to corral her siblings, stroll them around the neighborhood, entertain them when they were dropped off at her dorm at Emmanuel, then an all-women's college in Boston.
Cahill grew up in Framingham, west of Boston, steeped in local and national politics; her father was a steamfitter who came home and chewed over the newspaper, took the kids to battle sites on vacations to learn about America. Her mother was a neighborhood activist, an envelope stuffer. Cahill's first race was high school committee, behind the scenes, of course, putting up posters for a fellow student who's now a state representative.
In style Cahill seems to have stuck close to her roots. Boston insiders place her in the generation of political operatives who worked on Ted Kennedy's 1980 race for president, a class that includes Trippi and many of the consultants who work for Kerry now.
"We got trained in an era when campaign operatives did not talk to the press, when the idea of writing a story about a campaign manager would seem, frankly, ridiculous," says Charlie Baker, who's of the same generation. "There are people who've looked at the modern era of operative as celebrity and embraced it and others who've rejected it. She's one of the latter."
Cahill almost never goes on TV. She has sat for her latest series of profiles only grudgingly, out of duty more than pleasure. A few times in a couple of interviews she thought of an anecdote about herself most people would find entertaining and harmless, and then squelched it, and then squelched that she squelched it. Obviously, she prefers boring to any hint of indiscreet.
"She really doesn't like the amount of attention paid to herself," says Kiki McLean, a friend of her sister's and a Democratic spokeswoman. "It's been the hardest part of her job to swallow."
The first race she worked on as an adult was Rep. Barney Frank's in 1980. "There she was around these tough, tall guys, a few years off the streets, and they're saying some young woman is not going to tell me what to do," recalls the Massachusetts Democrat. One man who was hitching a ride with her held out his hand for the car keys because, of course, only men drive. Baker, who worked on the race, too, remembers much the same dynamic, a bunch of young male consultants sitting around blustering.
"She was unintimidatable," says Frank. "She knows what she knows and she has no patience for people sitting around thinking great thoughts. Ideals are only useful if you can implement them, is how she thinks."
Cahill remembers mostly her fear that some detail would be forgotten and she would feel responsible. Once her mother saw her struggling to hoist yard signs onto her roof rack: "If he loses, it won't be your fault," she recalls her mother saying. "Yes, it will," she recalls saying. "I really felt like that."
Mention a past campaign and Cahill will instantly call up a minor mistake -- that she mispronounced the names of certain Vermont towns while managing Leahy's campaign, for example. Leahy remembers the main point -- that he started out 20 points behind the late Richard Snelling and ended up 30 ahead, "in large part due to Mary Beth," he says.
In that case, her contribution was strategic as much as organizational. Snelling had run ads charging Leahy with a list of vices -- big spender, social liberal, etc. Cahill made the decision to get aggressive early. She ran ads featuring a local couple shaking their heads at Snelling's lack of collegiality and he stayed on the defensive the whole race.
"She was conducting the orchestra, but she was the one you never saw," says Leahy. "And it was not like a drill sergeant, where after it's over, everyone on the staff says, 'I'm going to get you.' They all loved her."
Cahill ran Ed Markey's House race in 1984, Claiborne Pell's Senate campaign in 1990 and Les AuCoin's Senate race in 1992, her only high-profile loss. She worked as director of Emily's List, the political action committee for Democratic women, for five years. There she was credited with adding a level of political sophistication. Instead of just handing over money to female candidates, she attached strings -- scrutinizing and overhauling their campaign strategies. She also worked in the Office of Public Liaison at the Clinton White House before moving to Kennedy's staff.
Many who've worked with her have described her style the same way -- no small talk, no face time, no sucking up to the candidate, none of those operative-style temper tantrums, no passive aggression, no waste. It's a little Don Corleone, says Albee, but the result is less intimidation than an antidote to fakery. In two decades of political work, she seems to have left behind no obvious enemies. "I'm blindly loyal," says Albee.
She is famous for her economy of language, the Mary Beth shorthand, as it's known. "She doesn't waste words," says Joe Solmonese, who worked with her at Emily's List. "And she always knows 10 times more than she's telling you. But what she does say really hits you between the eyes."
Here for example is her half of a conversation with Kennedy, who called during an interview.
"Hello? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think? Right. Right. Right. Right. Okay, I'll get back to you before we finalize this."
When he hangs up, she does her Kennedy imitation: "Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh," she says, in a low grumble that sounds like the moment before spitting. Apparently, that's all Kennedy says when he calls her at home, a noise her husband, lobbyist Steve Champlin, has come to translate generously as "Please, may I speak to Mary Beth?"
It's Iowa, Stupid
Cahill's contribution to Kerry's recovery reads more like a business school case study than a political turnaround. There was no strategic wizardry, no fundraising gimmick. Many of the key campaign decisions that proved successful had already been discussed. There was just the highly effective habits of one manager, brought to bear on an existing mess.
Cahill re-engaged many of the Boston consultants she felt knew Kerry best: strategists John Martilla and Michael Whouley, pollster Tom Kiley, adviser and spokesman Michael Meehan. But she lectured them, saying some version of her usual mantra: "This isn't about you," she recalls saying. "We all do this for a reason, to elect John Kerry. There are tremendously talented people here, each of whom is a tremendous plus to this campaign. But this campaign is not the distillation of the genius of the moment. This is a joint effort."
She set up a system for "information flow." Everyone's views would be heard in a 7:30 a.m. conference call. She would referee and make a decision and tell Kerry. No more back channels, no more endlessly ringing cell phone.
The system, particularly the morning conference calls, "made a major difference," says Reardon, the New Hampshire director. "They increased our confidence about what the campaign was doing. We were able to put our two cents in and move on," she says. "And the effect on him [Kerry] was huge."
"I would shock you," Kerry said in an interview, "by how rarely I am in touch with or involved in details like that. I know all the trains are running on time. . . . It freed me up to be a full-time candidate rather than worry about day-to-day operations."
Even before Cahill came, the campaign had been looking to the Iowa caucuses for its salvation. Every day at 10:30 a.m., Reardon and the rest of the New Hampshire staff logged on to the latest American Research Group tracking poll of the state showing Kerry stuck in single digits, about 20 points behind Dean. Even former New Hampshire governor Jeanne Shaheen, an adviser to the campaign, said they should shift course. Pollster Mark Mellman liked to say either Kerry would rescue a drowning baby from New Hampshire's Merrimack River or they should count on Iowa.
Cahill set that plan on a fast track. First she hired Whouley, "one of the best political analysts," she says, to work full time in Iowa. Then she set about easing fears, particularly from the New Hampshire staff. The plan was risky, Kerry was the senator next door, and New Hampshire voters expected to see their candidates up close. Under the new schedule, he wouldn't be in New Hampshire for 13 days leading up to the Jan. 27 vote -- an eternity in primary time.
On Dec. 10, Cahill called the New Hampshire and Iowa staffs to Washington for a meeting. "It gave us all anxiety," Reardon recalls. But Cahill made her case, comparing the New Hampshire and Iowa polls: "It was a data-driven conversation," is how Cahill puts it. In a conference call after New Year's, New Hampshire staffers were still arguing for some of Kerry's time. But Cahill put her foot down. "We're in Iowa," she recalls saying. "That's it."
For a while everyone waited nervously. "There was no news," Cahill recalls. "All Dean, maybe some Gephardt, Clark going up like a rocket. But for us, dead, dead, dead."
But the campaign had its own reasons for confidence: Internal polls showed Kerry shooting ahead. At one point the campaign even decided to leak those polls, "but no one cared," recalls Cahill.
By mid-January, the campaign was getting traction. Iowa papers were giving Kerry glowing reports. Then Christie Vilsak, the Iowa governor's wife, endorsed Kerry in what was arguably the state's most high-profile endorsement. Her husband wasn't endorsing anyone in the race, so she was considered a stand-in.
Around that same time, Jim Rassman, a former Green Beret, a Republican and a retired police officer, called the campaign headquarters. Kerry had saved his life in Vietnam, Rassman told the receptionist, and now he wanted to help him. By that time, Cahill felt confident Kerry would do better than anyone expected. Rassman's sudden appearance was less a saving miracle than confirmation from the heavens, something even the super-manager couldn't have engineered.
"You could try your hardest to make something like this happen and you couldn't," she says. "It was serendipity of the highest order. Really sort of a magical moment."
Earlier this month, the staff gathers in the basement of Kerry's headquarters off Stanton Park. This is the same 8:30 meeting nearly four months later. Everyone's on time, waiting for Cahill to make her entrance. The New York Times has endorsed Kerry that morning in the state's primary, and the weather outside has turned balmy.
The meeting basically runs itself. Terry Krinvic goes over the schedule, Marcus Jadotte announces the latest endorsements, Steve Elmendorf gives the political update (2,500 Deanies in Minnesota heard out Kerry. They said he "was much different than they expected"). Then meet-ups, fundraising. Cahill thanks a staffer for getting her cell phone to work again, says she's "everlastingly grateful." All in all, pretty boring, slow and steady.
"Anything else?" asks Cahill. "Okay. Let's win another day."
