A Fighting Chance

There was nothing fun about the National Bankruptcy Review Commission. Nothing.

Our job was to produce a report for Congress that would recommend changes to the bankruptcy code. The battle lines were drawn early. Thanks to my books and speeches, my views about families in trouble were pretty well known by then, and they sharply contradicted the views of the commission’s most outspoken member: Judge Edith Jones.

Jones, a federal judge from Texas, was a very big deal in conservative circles. Her name had been on the short list for the Supreme Court under both George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, and one of my Texas buddies once told me that George W. Bush called her “Auntie Edith.” I think Judge Jones saw bankruptcy as a world of opportunists, one in which many people would take advantage whenever they could. As she once wrote, “Nobody is holding a gun to consumers’ heads and forcing them to send in credit card applications.” She worried about “widespread gaming of the system,” and she said she thought it was a “matter of personal integrity and honor not to take on obligations beyond one’s means.” Judge Jones talked of economic failure as akin to moral failure.

I thought the research showed something very different. Medical problems, job losses, and family breakups had laid these families low. Most had hung on and tried to repay long past any reasonable chance of doing so. As I saw it, the families in bankruptcy were mostly good people caught in a bad situation—a point of view that did not put me high on Judge Jones’s list of favorite people.

Neither Judge Jones nor I had any money at stake in this debate. Neither of us was being paid by bankers to advance our positions. We simply saw the world very differently. She probably thought I was too optimistic about human nature, and I was sure she was too cynical. (Or maybe she thought I was too cynical about the nature of giant banks, and I thought she was too optimistic.) Judge Jones consistently sided with industry-friendly changes in the law—and I fought her at every turn.

The back-and-forth with Judge Jones was relentless and wearing. Not long after starting my work on the commission, I bought a fax machine, which I put in my office at Harvard. When anyone sent me a fax, the machine made a funny warming-up noise. Judge Jones faxed me so many painful memos that at one point I realized that I felt like one of Pavlov’s dogs: whenever I heard the machine revving up, my stomach clenched and I felt sick.

I was also fighting hard to hang on to my daddy. After Mother died, he seemed lost. I called him every night. I told him about things that had happened during the day: about Alex, who loved his computer classes but seemed bored by his other course work at college; about Amelia, who had moved to California after getting her MBA and seemed to be seriously involved with her boyfriend; about the pansies that were starting to bloom or the leaves that were changing color. Most weekends we watched sports together, with Daddy in Oklahoma and me in Massachusetts, and we called back and forth on the phone after a really good (or bad) play. I tried everything I could think of to help fill the gaping, dark loneliness that seemed to be swallowing him whole.

I begged him to come live with us. He made a couple of short trips to Boston but said he felt my mother back in their house, and that’s where he wanted to be. Every few days he drove to Wetumka to visit her grave.

I could tell that I was losing him. He had always been thin, but now he looked translucent and his pale blue eyes were watery. His doctors did some tests and told him he had prostate cancer, although Daddy assured me it was “the slow kind.” He admitted that he couldn’t sleep.

The worst was when he cried. Daddy had always been quiet—quiet and proud. I had almost never seen him cry, but now it was different. We’d be on the phone, talking about gardening, and I’d cheerfully say something about roses and he’d say that Mother loved roses, and then he would get quiet. I could hear him making choking sounds, and occasionally he’d let out a strangled sob. I felt helpless. He wasn’t dying of cancer. He was dying of a broken heart.





The People No One Heard

For two years, I traveled. Back and forth to Washington, back and forth to Oklahoma. Then I’d fly off to various cities where the commission held hearings. Detroit. Seattle. San Antonio. Santa Fe.