The Imperial City

What's the Matter With Flakiness?

Spontaneity, playfulness, quirkiness. He told the Times he probably wouldn’t run, but added, “You know me: I am just crazy enough to do this.” Lawrence O’Donnell, the West Wing writer-producer, served as chief of staff of the Senate Finance Committee when Kerrey was a member. “There’s a little bit of nuttiness in every one of them,” he says of senators, but 90 percent “are robots who never make a non-robotic move. What’s great about [Kerrey] is there’s also an actual person there.” Before the last election, for instance, he talked to humor writer Patricia Marx about collaborating on a prankish, deconstructionist guidebook to running for president. Quirky enough for you? He also writes poetry, which he illustrates.

In addition to bewildering and upsetting local Democrats and Republicans, however, this latest display of Bob Kerreyism also aggravated the people who employ him. Having just signed a new six-year contract with the New School, Kerrey told the Times that he could “break it” if he decided to run. “It came across very cavalier, and regrettably so,” he admits, particularly “combined with not talking to my board ahead of time.”

It’s hard not to see that as a passive-aggressive gesture, a dis that makes psychological sense if he doesn’t entirely have his heart in the job, as some of his friends say.

It might also make psychological sense that he has had a hard time getting into the New School and New York groove, given that in his first months here, The New York Times Magazine and 60 Minutes II broke the story about his Navy SEAL unit attacking a Vietnamese hamlet in 1969 and killing thirteen civilians. “I would have rather told the story” of what happened that night in the Mekong Delta “in almost any other city,” he told me. “This is a hard place to tell a story like that.”

His particular circumstance aside, how does he find the humid ideological weather in New York, the Village, the university? “There are times I find it exceedingly unpleasant. It’s never healthy—in Nebraska it was the other way around. Everybody had this conventional-conservative way of thinking, and here it’s a conventional-liberal way.”

But his very discomfort—the enforced ambivalence—also fits a Kerrey pattern. He puts himself in situations where he is an insider who feels like an outsider, on the reservation with one foot off it: the sexy liberal in Nebraska, the bipartisan truth-teller in Washington, now the free-range New Democrat in Manhattan.

I asked him if, four years after the Thanh Phong story came out, it had changed the way he reconciled himself to those events. And for the only time during our talk, he was murky and evasive: “It allowed me to talk about it in ways I couldn’t before.”

But why couldn’t he talk about it before?

“Because”—resorting to tautology—“people didn’t know about that part of my life.”

I sent him a follow-up e-mail, asking again why he’d never talked or written about the incident before the news broke. His full reply: “I just couldn’t. I still can’t. I did it once and that’s enough for one lifetime.”

The afternoon I met with him, New School security was on high alert to prevent upset Actors Studio students from storming his office. I asked if he found the work tedious. “Yeah!” he said immediately, Mr. Impolitic Candor once again at my service. “Writing is tedious, everything has a tedious aspect to it. Five or six hundred meetings a year is a lot of meetings.

“I’ve been offered—I’ve been asked to enter searches for [the presidencies of] three large public universities since I’ve had this job. I’ve said no. I’m not sure I could be the president of any other university. The New School is an easier place for someone that lacks academic experience. And Sarah’s here,” he said, the unusual way he put it illustrating the preternatural respect he grants his wife, as if the mother of his 3-year-old son might reasonably decide not to move with him.

Is his career in politics really, finally, over? “Yeah. This may actually be the last moment for me.”

Lawrence O’Donnell introduced the couple ten years ago. “Sarah loved everything about Bob,” he says, “except she wasn’t going to be a Senate wife. She never asked him not to run for president or to quit the Senate. They just always end up seeing things the same way.” Marx, a friend of both Kerrey and Paley, says, “I wonder if he would have quit if she hadn’t been in New York.” According to Kerrey, although his wife didn’t want him to run for mayor, either, “she was willing to be supportive.” However, the night before the Times story appeared, she joked to a friend, “If Bob runs for mayor, then I’ll be the head of Democrats for Bloomberg.”

When I asked Kerrey if he misses the Senate, Mr. Candid Personal Ambivalence replied that he does sometimes regret not being part of the big debates. Such as “the one over Schiavo,” Mr. Thoughtful Independence mentioned. “I support federal habeas for criminals in prison who want to appeal to federal court. It’s not that different. But,” Mr. Philosophical Ambivalence demurred, “I think I would not have supported [federal intervention], because this is a family decision, an intervention against a husband.” “My wife tells me I shouldn’t be so sympathetic to him,” added Mr. Playful Humor, but Mr. Candid Personal Ambivalence returned to finish the discussion. “You know, I think, Well I’d like to be in the debate, but I know what you have to do to be in the debate, and I don’t want to do that.”

I asked if dipping his foot in the mayoral waters and then walking away had forced him to decide that his career in elective politics is really, finally, over.

“Certainly I’m not going to be running for mayor. That one’s out.”

Or governor, or senator? “Yeah . . .”

Or president? “Yeah. This may actually be the last moment for me.”

But his interest in the game remains intense, acute. And his certainty that Hillary Clinton will be the next Democratic presidential nominee approaches 100 percent.

Would he support her if the opponent was a moderate, independent-minded Republican like John McCain or Rudy Giuliani or Chuck Hagel of Nebraska?

“It depends,” replied Mr. Independent, “on what she wants to do. It matters to me what a person wants to do, and what I think they’re capable of doing.” Mr. Candor interceded—“It’s more likely that I’m voting Democratic than voting Republican”—before Mr. Independent insisted on having the final word: “But I am not a party-line guy.”

The prevailing red-state-blue-state caricature notwithstanding, most Americans (if not most New Yorkers) are not party-line guys, either. And yet party-liners utterly dominate national political discourse. New York State voters have welcomed provocative celebrity carpetbaggers (Bobby Kennedy, Hillary), but the powerful preference of the city’s political system is for time-servers in City Hall. Mayor (or President) Bob Kerrey would be splendid, but our politics now demand the very antitheses of all his “flaky” attributes—unwavering consistency, perpetual dissembling, unthinking partisanship, overrehearsed sound bites, bland witlessness. If the flaky politicians are driven out, we shouldn’t be surprised when only the time-servers and robots and ideologues remain.