Read an Excerpt
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.
C R: 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' brother?" And he said, "Yes, are you Barbara Boggs's sister?"
And that's how we met.
S R: 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-in-law 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.
C R: 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.
S R: 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.
C R: Although really, I took quite a few.
S R: 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!"
C R: 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?
S R: 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.
C R: And then I came home and I had such a good time, such a good time, I
went dancing up the stairs singing "I Feel Pretty." And then he never
called.
S R: 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 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.
C R: 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.
S R: 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."