Andrew Young - The Politician

At home, I spied on my dad as he wrote his sermons late on Saturday nights and then practiced the lines. I came to walk and talk just like him, and his example became my guiding star. Of course, I knew I could never match my dad’s achievements. A tall, powerfully built man, he was the twelfth of thirteen children born to a farmer in the tiny town of Woodfin. With his intelligence, talents, and determination, he rose to the top of North Carolina society. My mother, a smart and beautiful woman, was equally accomplished and driven. At the University of North Carolina, when Dad requested a visit with her at her sorority house (back then the “house mother” played gatekeeper), she came downstairs to meet him only because she thought he was a basketball player named Bob Young. Confident and charming, my dad nevertheless swept Jacquelyn Aldridge off her feet. Soon they married. He was elected president of the UNC student body, and she was elected secretary.

In contrast to my outgoing parents, I was a naive, bookish kid, the youngest of four, who found adventures and heroes in books and got so nervous when called only hen cal in class that I could barely speak. I started to come out of my shell at fourteen, when I served as a page at the state legislature. I saw enough whiskey bottles and sexual intrigue in the statehouse to realize you take the good with the bad in politics. (From Raleigh to Washington, the bad always seemed to involve infidelity.) But I remained idealistic. I also developed into a young man who threw himself heart and soul into every challenge. When my brother insisted I try out for football, like every good Southern boy, I hated it at first but stuck it out and eventually started. I made friends easily, and the experience reinforced my belief that everything good was possible.

Then, when I was seventeen years old, came a series of events that shook me to the core. My dad, always strong as a horse, had several heart attacks that led to his first double bypass. It changed Dad and my family forever. The following year, my senior year in high school, my parents attended counseling and traveled extensively in a futile attempt to save their struggling marriage. The week after I graduated high school, my father left his Duke job for a much lower-​profile pulpit in the little city of Statesville. Soon after, he was caught in an affair with a church deacon’s wife. The deacon videotaped my dad and his wife at a Red Roof Inn. I’ll never forget my father calling to tell me, “They caught me, Andrew. They caught me.” The scandal became widely known. My hero was exposed as an adulterer, and our family broke apart. While my father’s brilliant career was destroyed, my neat little world spun out of control.

Disillusioned and heartbroken, I stumbled through my early twenties, dropping out of Furman University and then opening a sports pub (ironically named Winners) in Asheville, which thrived until I lost control of the finances and it went belly-​up. Bankruptcies were rare and shameful in those days, and when I locked the door and ran away from my debts, I left behind a great many angry and disappointed people who thought Andrew Young was the lowest son of a bitch in the world. I would have agreed with them. The lowest point may have been the night I used an expired key card to sneak into a hotel room and slept hidden on the floor between the bed and a wall because I was broke and desperate to get in out of the cold. During this time, I drank way too much and got into plenty of minorleague trouble, the worst of which involved a stupid attempt to steal a fifty-​dollar sign from a bar. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

When I finally grew up and got serious about life, I went back to school for a bachelor’s degree at the University of North Carolina and a law degree at Wake Forest. The most difficult thing for me at law school was responding to the professors when it was time for me to stand in front of the class to review a case. Whenever this happened my heart would pound, I’d grow flushed and sweaty, my voice would tighten, and I found it almost impossible to express myself coherently. Despite this problem, I managed to get through the program, and along the way, I realized I didn’t want to practice law. I was far more interested in politics, especially the politics of my home state.

North Carolina has a unique, almost bipolar political history. In 1898, the coastal city of Wilmington saw the only violent coup in American history when a mob of white vigilantes called “Red Shirts” wielded a Gatling gun bought by the famous Daniels publishing family to take over the city and drive away thousands of black res an of blaidents. (From that day to the Jesse Helms era, fear-​based racism played a big role in the state’s political affairs.) But North Carolina is also home to great progressives like Terry Sanford, who broke down racial barriers and built some of the best public and private universities in the country. We gave the country Sam Ervin, chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee, and we went for Barack Obama in 2008. Regressive, progressive, and everything in between: That’s North Carolina.

My first full-​time involvement in politics came in 1994 when I became part of Democratic governor Jim Hunt’s campaign. As a volunteer, low-​level fund-​raiser, I saw old-​fashioned politics firsthand. The four-​term governor was a progressive, and his policy priority was a terrific education program called Smart Start. He was also a hard-​driving politician who knew how to run his machine. At his quarterly fund-​raising conferences-staff called them “Come to Jesus” meetings-Hunt would work himself into a lather urging his people to raise campaign funds “for those kids.” He would then display a color-​coded map of the counties, which showed who was winning in the money game and who was losing. People would be publicly praised for meeting their quotas-like star salesmen at a convention-or criticized for falling short.

Everyone knew that campaign donations were rewarded with jobs or public works projects. More than a few men got rich because they knew to buy land where a new road was going to be built or received contracts to provide goods and services to the state. These connections also explained why one county might get a big new bridge or an eight-​lane highway and another did not. Although this kind of horse-​trading was common, it was obviously unfair to outsiders, and the participants liked to keep it quiet.

After Governor Hunt’s reelection, I worked briefly for the state Commerce Department, then with the North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers in the state capital. My boss was the group’s main lobbyist, and my work revolved around fund-​raising, staging events, and helping to keep the office going. It wasn’t the kind of work I had dreamed of doing while I listened to the sermons at Duke Chapel, but it was a responsible job in politics-by now I was a full-​fledged political junkie-and I was on my way toward building a career. I knew I would never be a candidate or a very public figure, because my anxiety about speaking in front of people wasn’t getting any better. (If anything, it was worse.) But I could dream that I might one day become an insider who could have an exciting career and perhaps make the world a better place.

The pieces were coming together in my personal life, too. After I spent more than a decade as a committed bachelor, a kind and beautiful woman had finally broken my complacency. The chance meeting happened in the spring of 1997 in Cancún, in one of the most famous bamboo tourist bars in the world, Señor Frog’s. We had both gone to the bar to fetch drinks for friends. Cheri wore a sexy black dress. I wore a red polo shirt and a baseball cap. We fell to talking, and I was completely taken by her beauty, warmth, and openness. We forgot our friends and danced the night away. When I got back to my hotel, I was so partied out that I couldn’t remem Hu#8217;tber her name or the name of her hotel. All I could recall was her room number-312-and I couldn’t find anything to write with. Finally, in desperation, I laid out three bottle caps (for the number 3) next to a single credit card and two room keys so I could remind myself in the morning and then fell asleep.