Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

No political advisor would ever tell you to announce a serious candidacy on The Tonight Show , but I’d been a guest dozens of times and felt comfortable there. Jay was a good friend. I knew he’d cover me and ask interesting questions and get the audience involved. You don’t hear the roar of the crowd at a press conference.

Leno had announced countless times that I’d be there to make a very important announcement. Everyone from my close friends to the driver taking me to the studio was asking, “What are you going to say?” In the green room, Leno came in and asked the same question. But everything leaks in the political world, where everybody owes a journalist and every journalist wants a scoop. The only way I could truly make news was to answer no one. I never said anything until we were on camera.

By sunset it was done: I was in the race. The Tonight Show airs at eleven but tapes at five thirty in the afternoon California time. After I made my announcement, I answered questions for a hundred reporters and TV crews gathered outside.

The crazy California recall suddenly had a face! Within days, I was on the cover of Time , wearing a big smile over a one-word headline: “Ahhnold!?”

The next day, my Santa Monica office became Schwarzenegger for Governor central. When you launch a campaign, you’re supposed to already have a thousand ingredients in place: themes, messages, a fund-raising plan, a staff, a website. But because I’d kept everybody in the dark, there was none of that. Even a fund-raising team would have been a giveaway. So all I had was my Prop 49 team. We were organizing on the fly.

This was bound to result in ragged moments. On Friday, I got up at three in the morning for interviews with the Today show, Good Morning America , and CBS This Morning . We started with Matt Lauer from Today . As he pressed me for specifics on how I would bring back the California economy and when I would release my tax returns, I realized I was unprepared. Unable to answer, I finally had to resort to the old Groucho Marx stunt of pretending the connection was bad. “Say again?” I put a hand to my earpiece. “I didn’t hear you.”

Lauer ended the interview by remarking sarcastically, “Apparently we are losing audio with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Los Angeles.” It was my lamest performance ever.

Maria had kept her distance up to now, adjusting to this new drama in our lives. But seeing me stumble on TV roused the sleeping Kennedy lioness. Later that morning, she joined a meeting of the consultants who were scrambling to put together the campaign.

“What is your plan?” Maria asked quietly. “Where is the staff? What is the message? What was the point of these TV appearances? What direction is the campaign going in?” Without raising her voice, she was bringing generations of authority and expertise to bear.

Afterward, she decided, “We need more people and soon. And we need someone to come in on top and stabilize this thing.” She called Bob White in Sacramento, who had helped launch the after-school campaign and who had recommended most of the guys I was working with. “You’ve got to come down here,” she told him. “You’ve got to help.” So Bob opened his Rolodex and guided us to a campaign manager, a strategist, a policy director, and a communications chief. He also stayed on himself, informally overseeing it all. Ex-governor Pete Wilson pitched in as well. Not only did he endorse me but he also volunteered to hold a fund-raiser at the Regency Club and joined me in lining up big donors over the phone.

One of my very first moves as a candidate was to seek out Teddy Kennedy. There was no chance of getting an endorsement; in fact, Teddy put out a written statement that said, “I like and respect Arnold … but I’m a Democrat. And I don’t support the recall effort.” Still, on Eunice’s advice, I went to see him. When she heard that I had to fly to New York for an After-School All-Stars event in Harlem right after I announced—a commitment I’d agreed to months before—she urged me to stop at Hyannis Port and talk to her brother. “You’re not up his alley politically,” Eunice said, “but he has run many campaigns and won all of them except the presidential election, so I would pay close attention to what he says.”

Teddy and I talked for several hours, and he gave me one piece of advice that had a profound effect: “Arnold, never get into specifics.” He told me a little story to explain. “There is no one who knows more about health care than me, right? Well, I once held a four-hour public hearing in which we talked about health care in minute detail. Then I came out of the hearing chamber and went to my office, where the same reporters who’d been at the hearing caught up with me: ‘Senator Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, can we talk to you about health care?’

“ ‘Yes, what do you want to know?’

“ ‘When do we finally get to hear the specifics?’ ” Teddy laughed. “That just shows that you can never provide enough details that they won’t ask for more. It’s because what they really want is for you to trip up and say something newsworthy. Covering a four-hour congressional hearing is one thing, but journalists are trying to break news. That’s what makes them shine.”

Teddy continued, “Right away, from the top, all you say is, ‘I’m here to fix the problem.’ Make that your approach. In California, you need to say, ‘I know we have major problems—we have blackouts, we have unemployment, we have companies leaving the state, we have people who need help—and I will fix it.’ ” Hearing this made a big impression on me. Without Teddy’s advice, I would probably always have felt intimidated when a reporter asked, “When are we hearing the specifics?” It was Matt Lauer demanding specifics that had embarrassed me on Today . But Teddy showed me that instead of responding to that question, I could say confidently, “Let me give you a clear vision for California.”

It was my financial advisor Paul who pointed out that my first campaign challenge was credibility. He, Maria, and Bonnie Reiss were my closest advisors, and Paul had flown back from a family vacation the minute he heard that I’d announced. As the campaign headed into its second week, he reported that he was getting calls about me from friends in business and finance, saying, “C’mon, he’s not serious.” Sure, everybody knew who I was, and at least some people knew of my long track record in public service, but in this recall circus, as the reporters liked to call it, I had to show that running for governor was not just some celebrity vanity project. How could I convince them that I wasn’t just another clown in the clown car?

My campaign team urged me to call George Shultz. He was like the godfather. Secretary of state under Reagan and secretary of the treasury under Nixon, Shultz was now at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and was perhaps America’s most distinguished Republican senior statesman. He was expecting to hear from me, but even so, when I reached him, he growled, “You’ve got two minutes to tell me why I should endorse you.”

I said essentially, “The state shouldn’t spend more money than it has, and it needs a leader to get it into that position. I want to be that leader, and I would appreciate your help.”

That was the right answer.

“I’m in,” he said. I told him I’d like to do a press conference with him.

“Let me call you back,” he said. On our next call, he told me, “I have an idea. Warren Buffett has said positive things about you, and he’s a Democrat. It might be wise for you to call him and have him be in the press conference too. It sends the message that you’re not partisan, you just want to fix the problems. We’ll talk about goals that set you above the political stuff.”