Read an Excerpt

Introduction

Thank you!” I called out to the massive crowd in front of me. “What an incredible night! Optimism is in the air.”

I was deep inside enemy territory. That’s what my old friends were telling me. It was Thursday, September 6, 2012, a couple of minutes after 8:30 P.M., and I had never stood before a throng so huge: more than twenty thousand men and women, a loud and raucous mix of anticipation and fun, in the TV glare of the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, North Carolina—every age, race, region, and hat style you could imagine. Most of them were jammed onto tiny folding chairs. Others were crowding the narrow aisles. As I peered over the top of an oversize, wooden podium, I could see hundreds—was it thousands?—of white-on-blue Obama-Biden posters and many, many pole signs. “MINNESOTA.” “TENNESSEE.” I found “FLORIDA” off to my right. Halfway back in my home-state delegation, one poster said “I-4 Obama,” a little play on the highway that connects Tampa and Daytona Beach, always a crucial swing-vote corridor. But as I moved through my opening pleasantries, I have to say, the applause sounded a little tepid to me.

I got the distinct feeling that the audience was holding back. It was as if all these people were taking a careful measure of me, trying to decide whether I’d fully earned the right to be here.

Were they happy to see me? Were they asking themselves, “Who the hell is this guy? Who invited him?” I hadn’t seen any polling data or focus group reports. But I’d been around this business long enough to know: People with résumés like mine weren’t supposed to speak at Democratic National Conventions. This wasn’t the way that game was played.

I’d been the low-tax, pro-life, pro-gun Republican governor of Florida. As a young state senator, I’d been such an anti-crime crusader, people called me “Chain Gang Charlie”—and I considered it a compliment. Heck, I’d named my boat Freedom. Was that Republican—or what? I’d risen through the ranks from education commissioner to attorney general to governor, always running with an “R” next to my name. In the 2008 presidential campaign, I’d worked diligently for John McCain, even making his short list for vice president. At various points along the way, I had referred to myself as a “Ronald Reagan Republican.”

And here I was with a prime-time, Thursday-night speaking role at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, preparing to sing the praises of Barack Hussein Obama. That’s how many of my old party mates liked referring to him, as if he weren’t just a president from a different party but a highly suspect, otherworldly creature and probably a Muslim too.

No, this wasn’t politics as usual.

I was addressing this Democratic crowd the same night the president was. My slot was after Caroline Kennedy and just before John Kerry and Joe Biden. The big addresses from Michelle and Barack Obama were coming right after that. You’d have to look long and hard in the annals of American politics to find a fish more out of water than I was that night.

I’d even joked with my wife, Carole, when I first got the call from Jim Messina, who was managing the president’s reelection campaign: “Didn’t anyone do a background check?”

I wasn’t even invited when Republican delegates gathered August 27 to 30 for their national convention in Tampa, just a short drive from my rented condo in St. Petersburg. Why would I be? I wasn’t one of theirs anymore. They were brimming with Tea Party fervor and anti-Obama zeal. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have enjoyed what I had to say.

“What an honor to be here with you to stand with President Barack Obama,” I told the Democratic crowd.

A small fan was whirring at my feet. I always like a fan at the podium when I give a big speech. You have no idea how hot those TV lights can be. But I could still feel tiny beads of sweat forming on my forehead. I don’t usually get nervous giving speeches. My heart was pumping now.

Before I got to the business at hand, I wanted to address the elephant in the room. Never before, I thought, had that old expression been quite so apt.

“Half a century ago,” I began, “Ronald Reagan, the man whose optimism inspired me to enter politics, famously said that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party, but the party left him. Well, listen, I can relate. I didn’t leave the Republican Party. It left me.”

It had been a while, I was sure, since Ronald Reagan was quoted so approvingly at a Democratic convention. “Then again,” I added, “my friend Jeb Bush recently noted Reagan himself would have been too moderate, too reasonable for today’s GOP.”

People clapped at that. Right there, I could feel it. I had the attention and the support of the room. We might have come from different places. But I could tell—and they could tell—we were talking the same language and talking the same way. It had taken me a while to get here, but I felt thoroughly at home.

I had already changed my registration from Republican to Independent. By the time the year was over, I would officially be a Democrat. But despite those changing labels, I felt the same way I always had. I had the same basic values. I’d never been an ideologue. It was just that, in an ugly bow to extremism, the party I’d grown up in had abandoned people like me. And the place I was heading, I was happy to see, wasn’t run by enforcers with mandatory checklists.

Standing at the podium in Charlotte, I wanted to share with the Democratic delegates some of the causes I cared most about. Not the divisive, hot-button issues so many Republican politicians seemed suddenly obsessed with—birth control, abortion, gays, and guns. Not the nasty caricatures that fueled so much of talk radio and cable TV news. Just as I always had, I wanted to talk about issues that touch all people’s lives, whatever their party might be.

So I did.

“We must create good middle-class jobs so we can have an economy built to last,” I said. “We must rebuild our roads and bridges and improve our public schools. And particularly important to me and my state is the challenge of saving Medicare and Social Security so we can keep our promise to seniors.”

These shouldn’t be divisive issues at all.

“As a former lifelong Republican,” I said, “it pains me to tell you that today’s Republicans—and their standard-bearers, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan—just aren’t up to the task. They’re beholden to my-way-or-the-highway bullies, indebted to billionaires who bankroll ads and are allergic to the very idea of compromise. Ronald Reagan would not have stood for that. Barack Obama does not stand for that. You and I won’t stand for that.”

I was laying everything right out there. It sure felt great. I had to mention the hug.

“One of the president’s first trips in office brought him to Fort Myers, Florida, where I was proud to embrace him and his plan to keep our teachers, police, and firefighters on the job,” I said. “Well, that hug caused me more grief from my party than you can ever imagine.”

Embracing Barack Obama had made me an instant pariah in the eyes of some Republicans. Yet the president and I, coming from different places, had been on similar journeys all along.

“I’ll be honest with you,” I told the Democratic delegates. “I don’t agree with President Obama about everything. But I’ve gotten to know him, I’ve worked with him, and the choice is crystal clear. When he took office, the economic crisis had already put the state of Florida on the edge of disaster. The foreclosure crisis was consuming homeowners, the tourists we depend on couldn’t afford to visit, and our vital construction industry had come to a standstill. President Obama saw what I saw: a catastrophe in the making. And he took action.”

Then I delivered the formal endorsement I had come to Charlotte to make.

“When I look at President Obama,” I said, “I see a leader with a cool head, a caring heart, and an open mind, a president who has demonstrated through his demeanor and through his deeds that he is uniquely qualified to heal our divisions, rebuild our nation, and lead us to a brighter future together.

“That’s the leader Florida needs. That’s the leader America needs. And that’s the reason I’m here tonight, not as a Republican, not as a Democrat, but as an optimistic American who understands that we must come together behind the one man who can lead the way forward in these challenging times: my president, our president, Barack Obama!”

And the people went wild.

It felt so liberating, saying those words to that crowd on that night and being received the way that I was.

There was one last line in my written text I had planned to end my speech on. It was a funny line, I thought, a little self-deprecating and 100 percent accurate. But the reaction to what I’d said was just so warm and so genuine—and so earsplittingly loud—those final fourteen words felt almost gratuitous. The point had been made and received. I had done as well as I could.

“If you see the president before I do,” I was going to say, “give him a hug for Charlie!”

But I didn’t use the line. I didn’t think I needed to. Whatever hug the president needed had already been delivered by me and by this grateful Democratic crowd.

I waved. I said, “God bless you, God bless America, and thank you so much.” Then I left the stage.

 • • • 

What a ride these last few years have been!

I have gone from lifelong Republican to the Nowheresville of being an Independent to finally becoming a Democrat. Some of my friends tell me I’ve always been a Democrat—it just took me fifty-six years to figure that out. I wish someone had mentioned something sooner. Everything was rolling smoothly along. I loved being governor of Florida, helping people, high in the polls, showing the warring parties of Tallahassee how they could actually get along. Then, I had this notion about bringing our bipartisan Florida values to Washington. It was just about then that a band of crazy extremists hijacked the party I’d grown up in. Pedal to the metal, they drove it off an ideological cliff. I got banged up riding with these unsavory characters. But thankfully, I leapt to safety just in time. Now I’m happier than I’ve ever been and feeling thoroughly at home.

Along the way, I got to see American politics as few others have seen it—up close and personal at the very highest levels and from both sides of the aisle. I’ve been appalled at the cynicism I have seen as my former party slipped into the clutches of the Tea Party haters and extremists of various sorts. I have felt sympathy and then sadness as people I’d been close to decided they had to accommodate these rising demands. But I have been truly inspired by the goodness in the hearts of the vast majority of people. I have learned some unexpected lessons along the way—about where we are headed as a nation and the great possibilities that are ahead for us.

That night in Charlotte—me! addressing a Democratic convention!—was one amazing stop on this unexpected journey. But it didn’t start in Charlotte, and it certainly didn’t end there. And as I look to the future, here’s the part I’m most excited about: I’m convinced this journey of mine has truly only begun.

Chapter 1

I never became a Republican. I was born that way.

My father is a lifelong Republican. His father voted Republican until the day he died at ninety-six. The members of my mother’s family were Republicans too. Most of the people I knew growing up in St. Petersburg, Florida, were Republicans. Even though Florida was a heavily Democratic state at the time, the west coast was a relative bastion of Republicanism, mostly because so many people had moved down from the Republican Midwest. Political parties are like religions that way. They choose us even more than we choose them. Very few people actually conduct a comparative study before they declare “I’m a Republican” or “I’m a Democrat,” any more than they interview clergymen or weigh doctrines before deciding to be a Baptist, a Hindu, or a Jew. My three sisters and I were Republicans for the same reason we were Methodists. Those before us had been, and we just were.

That said, I felt perfectly comfortable with the party I found myself in. The basic beliefs of the Republicans, as I understood them when I was growing up and becoming curious about the world, sounded pretty sensible to me. Don’t waste the people’s money. Maintain a strong national defense. Respect the views of others. Keep government on a fairly short leash. Who’s not for that?

I’ve always believed that it matters where a person comes from. We are all, in part, products of our upbringings and environments. That’s why I still like to ask people when I first meet them, “Where ya from?” I am hugely grateful to come from the family, the city, and the state that I do. The original family name was Christodoulos. They came from Cyprus, a small island nation in the eastern Mediterranean just south of Turkey and five hundred miles south of mainland Greece. Cyprus is divided between Greeks and Turks, who get along about as well as Washington Republicans and Democrats. My father’s father, Adam Christodoulos, traveled to America in 1912 at the age of fourteen for the same reasons immigrants have always come: for freedom and opportunity and the chance to build a better life. Family photos show a tall, lean boy with thick black hair. Everyone said he had a cheery, upbeat demeanor. I’ve always thought I inherited that. His older brother was the one who was supposed to make the trip. But on the dock in Cyprus, the assertive young Adam said, “Let me go instead”—and his more reserved older brother quickly agreed. Adam didn’t have the proper papers. Some people today might call him an illegal immigrant. He was certainly too young to be making the journey to America alone. When the boat finally reached Ellis Island, he was allowed onshore only after a helpful gentleman said, “Come here, son”—and whisked him through immigration. But soon enough, the kind man disappeared into the swirling crowd of the reception center’s giant auditorium, leaving young Adam to fend for himself. He was sitting on a bench, trying to figure out what to do next, when another man walked over and said to him in Greek: “You need a job?”

“I felt like the sun came out when I heard those words,” Pappap told me years later. We always called him Pappap.

The Greek-speaking man owned a shoe-shine parlor in a gritty railroad-and-steel-mill city called Altoona, Pennsylvania. As a boy, my grandfather spoke little English. He had a third-grade education. He earned five dollars a month shining shoes.

It’s a great immigrant story, the kind of story modern America is built on. When World War I broke out, the immigrant shoe-shine boy from Altoona joined the US Army and fought in Belgium. Earning an honorable discharge, he was eligible to become a citizen of the United States—not so different from today’s immigrant “Dreamers” nearly a hundred years later.

He saved his money and married a local girl named Mary Khoury, whose people were of Lebanese descent. They started their own family, raising seven children in all. My grandfather eventually opened a café, a bar, and a hat-cleaning shop and bought some real estate. He was proud to be an American and especially proud of his right to vote.

Most new immigrants—then as now—joined the Democratic Party. In industrial cities like Altoona, ward bosses and precinct captains helped to steer them in. But my grandfather considered himself a businessman. “If you’re a businessman,” he would often tell people, “you’re a Republican.”

My father, Charles Joseph Christodoulos, was born in 1932, Pappap and Grandma’s sixth child. People had big families back then. Like the children of many immigrants, my father wasn’t too interested in the ways of the old country. He never learned to speak more than a few words of Greek. He was still in high school when he and his older brother, my uncle Harry, went down to the courthouse in Altoona and shortened their last names to Crist.

“No one can spell it, and no one can pronounce it,” he said to Pappap.

My grandfather didn’t mind. “We’re Americans now,” he said.

One day my dad asked his father to attend a parent-teacher conference at school. Pappap said he’d rather not. “My accent’s too heavy,” he told his son. “I might embarrass you. Your mother should go instead.” Pappap hated any sign that he might not be fully American. With his own lack of schooling, he believed deeply in education. He wanted all his children to learn the value of working hard and to get as much education as they possibly could.

My father had after-school jobs in his father’s little businesses. One day, my dad sliced off part of his right index finger, trying to fix a fan in Pappap’s appliance-repair shop. Dad thought the fan was broken. It was not. He attended Pennsylvania State University, where he joined a fraternity and majored in science, in that order. His grades weren’t stellar, but he did okay, and he had a large circle of friends. On campus, he met a blue-eyed, brown-haired young woman from a well-off Scots-Irish family. Her name was Nancy Virginia Lee.

He was outgoing and gregarious. She was quiet and more reserved. They fell hopelessly in love. He was twenty-one and she was nineteen in February of 1954 when they drove to Virginia and got married. Her parents did not approve. They didn’t want their daughter settling for “that Greek boy.” The newlyweds rented an apartment near the campus in State College and got busy starting a family of their own. My older sister, Margaret, arrived later that year as my father was thinking about applying to medical school.

The Americanized son of immigrants kept being reminded how Greek he was. One of the schools he applied to was Jefferson Medical College in downtown Philadelphia. He went for an interview, and the admissions officer spoke frankly to him.

“Your grades are good enough,” he said. “You did well on the admissions exam. But we already have our quota of southern Europeans. We won’t be able to offer you a place.”

It wasn’t anything like the prejudice African Americans and others have experienced in our society. But it was real. And it made my father push himself harder. He went back to Penn State, began working on a master’s degree in biochemistry, and tried again, applying to another round of medical schools. But he was starting to doubt he would ever get in. Late one night, as he loved to tell the story, he was working at the lab on an experiment that involved the digestive system of a cow. He was having trouble proving his thesis. He hadn’t heard from the medical schools. His pregnant wife was home with their baby daughter. As far as he was concerned, things weren’t going too well.

On his two-mile walk back home, he said a quiet prayer.

“God, please help me.”

He woke up the next morning. His experiment had been proved valid. He received a letter in that day’s mail saying he’d been accepted to Emory University’s highly regarded School of Medicine in Atlanta. And a couple of days later, July 24, 1956, I showed up. I was born at Altoona Hospital. My parents named me Charles Joseph Crist Jr., for my dad. When I was six weeks old, my father, mother, older sister, and I piled into my mom’s parents’ car—we didn’t have our own yet. Her parents and the four of us and all our suitcases made the long drive south to Decatur, Georgia. My mom says I fussed the whole way. Only after we got settled into a small apartment near the med school did Dad go and buy a family car, a maroon-and-cream-colored Packard.

My father loved medical school, especially when he got a chance to interact with real patients. While many of his classmates were drawn to narrow specialties, he liked treating the whole person the way that family doctors do. On his occasional free afternoons, he’d play with me and Margaret in the backyard or go fishing with his medical school friends. Halfway through med school, the family grew to five when my younger sister Elizabeth was born.

After my dad graduated from Emory in 1960, he had to choose where to do a one-year internship. My mother’s family had been spending winters in St. Petersburg since the 19-teens. Why not do the year there? He knew he’d be working horrible hours at the hospital. But in St. Pete at least Mom could get some babysitting help from her family. We arrived in June of 1960, a month before my fourth birthday, part of a giant postwar influx to the booming Sunshine State. We moved into a rental house for a year while Dad built us a new home in the rising Pinellas Point subdivision at the southern tip of St. Petersburg. The area was growing rapidly. Everyone in Florida seemed to be moving, buying, and trading up back then.

My dad felt immediately at home in Florida, and so did the rest of us. The winters were perfect—especially compared to central Pennsylvania’s. The breezes off the Gulf of Mexico and Tampa Bay made the summers much more bearable than Georgia’s. There was water everywhere, and everyone—rich people, poor people, kids, and adults—seemed to have a boat. The fishing opportunities—kingfish, mackerel, grouper—were spectacular. For at least part of the year, my mother had relatives around. “We’re never going back to all that snow,” my father said, and no one argued with him. That was the day, I think, we really became Floridians.

After his internship, my dad took a medical position at Mound Park Hospital, what is now called Bayfront Medical Center. It’s the oldest hospital in Pinellas County and its only trauma center. He began seeing patients as a general-practice family doctor—just like that levelheaded Marcus Welby on TV—providing hands-on care to young families and settled retirees. He was hugely dedicated to his patients, and they loved him back. I’ll bet he’s treated at least half of St. Pete by now. He always saw both white patients and black patients, which wasn’t too common in those days. What I remember is that he was constantly in motion, phoning in prescriptions, fielding emergencies, running back to the hospital, even making house calls.

 • • • 

Our new one-story house on Colony Drive South was right on Tampa Bay. We had a deck out back and thick Bermuda grass. I could easily walk the one mile to Bay Vista Elementary School. My mom stayed home with the children. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for us. It was eggs sunny-side up for breakfast and frequent little tips on how to behave. She and Dad were both big believers in doing things correctly.

“Sit up straight at the table,” Mom would say.

“Keep your left hand in your lap.”

“The little boat goes out to sea,” reminding us to move our soup spoons forward, not back.

Dad insisted on “yes, sir,” “yes, ma’am,” and firm, look-’em-in-the-eye handshakes.

We always had lively conversations at the family dinner table. Even when my sisters and I were little, Dad would go around the table and ask:

“What did you do today?”

“Have you started your homework yet?”

“How did your team do in the game?”

“Did you hear what the president said?”

We were expected to have answers and to deliver them—early training, I’ve always thought, for a lifetime of speeches and interviews.

I was seven years old when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. At such a young age, I didn’t fully understand what that meant. But the teachers at school all seemed worried, and some of them cried. I knew what getting shot was. I’d seen that happen in cowboy movies and on TV. I knew that President Kennedy was the youngest president ever, and he had a very pretty wife. I knew their daughter, Caroline, who had her own pony, was a grade younger than I was. I knew she had a little brother who liked to climb on things and under them. His name was John. I saw him on television, saluting at the funeral. I knew it was all very sad. Given the family I grew up in, we talked a lot at dinner about what happened in Dallas and what it all meant.

But mostly, the life we had together was just about idyllic. My dad loved his work. My mom loved being a mom. My sister Cathy, the youngest, arrived in 1964. My three sisters and I had every advantage we could possibly ask for, and that included the biggest one: We always knew we were loved.

Leave It to Beaver had nothing on the Crists of St. Pete. We were so darn wholesome, a friend of mine once joked: “Compared to you guys, Wally and the Beav are almost criminals.”

As the only son, I developed a special bond with my father. He would take me everywhere—to the hospital, on Saturday-morning errands, even sometimes on house calls. In 1966, when I was almost ten, my dad decided to run for the Pinellas County School Board—as a Republican, of course.

I guess you’d call my dad fiscally conservative and socially moderate. He liked low taxes. He wanted local businesses to thrive. He was naturally suspicious of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and other big-government solutions from Washington. But he was troubled by the racial segregation that lingered in Florida and elsewhere. He very much believed in equal opportunity and social programs that worked.

My dad had never shown the slightest interest in running for office. But as a family physician, he’d gotten involved with a new federal program called Head Start. He loved the idea of Head Start, preparing children for school long before the first day of kindergarten. He’d clearly taken his father’s education advice. But he didn’t like the way the local Head Start office was being operated. He knew the school board was supposed to have oversight. So he decided to run.

Apparently, it never occurred to him that he might also have to campaign.

He didn’t give any speeches. He didn’t buy any ads. And he hadn’t raised any money. I don’t think he felt too comfortable asking people for their votes. Finally, a man at the county Republican office suggested maybe he should attend some local political events. “You’re going to have trouble getting elected,” the man said, “if you don’t do something.”

Dad decided to print up a stack of palm cards with his picture on one side and his educational credentials on the other. One Saturday afternoon he heard about a Republican Party fish fry at Lake Maggiore.

“Feel like coming along?” he asked me.

“Sure,” I said.

“All right,” he said. “Come on. We’ll go see what’s going on over there.”

After we got to the fish fry, Dad sat down at one of the big round tables and began talking to some of the adults. He handed me a little stack of his cards.

“Go hand these out,” he told me.

“Okay,” I said.

I walked from table to table along the side of the lake, talking with the people as I went, handing each one of them one of my father’s cards.

“I hope you’ll vote for my dad,” I said. “He’s running for the school board.”

I don’t remember my father going around to any of the tables, but he might have. What I do remember was how much fun I had. Talking with the people. Asking for their votes. Working the fish fry like a seasoned, pint-size political pro.

Everyone was nice to me. They listened to what I said. And I thought it was kind of neat that my dad was running for office as the Republican candidate for the Pinellas County School Board. I definitely hoped he would win.

When it was time to go, my father told me how impressed he was. He said he’d noticed how comfortable I seemed. “You did more campaigning than I did,” he said.

Something must have clicked. He won fairly easily and added “school board member” to all the other things going on in his life.

In those years, race was never far off the public-education agenda. For the schools in Pinellas County, integration was still a work in progress. Some of the schools were integrated. Some were not. We escaped a lot of the rancor of other cities. But busing became an issue. And my dad felt like it was his responsibility to set what examples he could.

Gibbs High School, which at the time had only black students, needed a team doctor for the football team.

“We can’t find anyone,” the principal said at the school board meeting one day.

My father volunteered to do it. “But there’s one condition,” he said. “Only if my son Charlie can be on the sidelines with me.”

He never told me why he did that. But I think he realized we lived a fairly comfortable lifestyle. He wanted to make sure I began to get a broader view of life. Those were the kinds of people who raised me—open, generous, always leading by example. And I was gradually figuring out who I was.

I spent hours on Tampa Bay, looking at sea life, taking my sisters for rides in the family boat, a seventeen-foot Glasspar with a 75-horsepower Johnson outboard. It wasn’t anything fancy, but to me, that was like having my own car on water. My friends could come along. I could go and see nature whenever I felt like it.

I was a friendly, energetic kid who was always taking on some fresh project or getting involved in something new at school. I was the boy who organized the class recycling program and raised the money by holding a school dance. I had a knack for bringing people together. I discovered that early. It gave me a special place in the crowd, and it brought real pleasure to me. While I was still in seventh grade, Dad began building a new two-story house on Snell Isle, a small peninsula in Tampa Bay. The street was called Brightwaters Circle. The house had white columns out front, a pool and a patio and a dock in the back. I moved from Bay Point to Riviera Junior High in time for eighth grade. I was the new kid, which is always awkward. I didn’t know anyone in the new school. But late in the year, with Dad’s encouragement, I decided to run for student council president, hoping at least I’d meet some new friends.

I sealed the race on Speech Day. The whole student body was in the gym, which doubled as the school auditorium, to hear from the candidates.

“Stand up,” I told everyone as I began my remarks.

The students glanced at one another, not quite sure what to do. But they were used to being bossed around by teachers and coaches. Everybody stood.

What if they hadn’t? That was a little risky.

“Now please sit down,” I said. And everyone did.

I let them all settle down and then I said: “Look how much power I have over you, and I haven’t even won yet.”

“Power” isn’t a word I used often, then or now. And the gesture was totally pointless. It didn’t achieve a thing.

Except for this: The students thought it was hilarious. And of the six hundred who voted, I believe I got about five hundred votes.

I don’t think my opponent knew quite what hit him.

 • • • 

Up through junior high, the schools my sisters and I attended were all white. But St. Petersburg High School drew from across the city and was racially integrated. I wouldn’t say we had a lot of racial tension when I got to St. Pete High in 1971. But there was some. I noticed little clumps of students—blacks with blacks, whites with whites—sitting at separate tables in the school cafeteria. One time, the crowd had to be cleared from the gym before a basketball game, as rumors of a big fight were flying around, but I don’t believe anything actually materialized. Compared to some places I’d read about, in the Deep South especially, St. Petersburg in the early 1970s was an island of relative tranquility. I know I never had any personal problem attending an integrated school, and I think football was one of the reasons why. Without a doubt, the best interactions I had were on the field. Our team—go, Green Devils!—was totally integrated. Coach Forrest Page didn’t care what race you were. If you could run, block, tackle, throw, catch, or kick a football, he would find a place for you on the team. He wanted to win games.

Don Collins, Mark McGarry, Jerry Lewis, and the others—we were a high-spirited and highly loyal group of guys, brothers on and off the field. Football teaches important lessons for life. I could see that even then. Everyone had much to contribute, and we all had to work together for a common cause. We’d only win if we pulled together.

I loved playing football, especially as I developed my skills as a quarterback. The coach had the vision and the overall game plan. But the quarterback got to call the plays, throw the football, and create the whole tempo of the offense. It was the quarterback who got to lead on the field. I liked that. And, no, being quarterback didn’t hurt my dating opportunities.

I wasn’t big—six foot one, 180 pounds. But I had a strong arm and was a good, accurate passer. Junior year, I was actually getting recruited to play at colleges like Rice University and the University of Virginia. Then, one day at Stewart Field in a game against our rivals from Northeast High, I dropped back to pass. Northeast had a linebacker named Gilbert Mavro. I’d gone to junior high with Gil. He came roaring up the middle at me, slamming my left knee with his shoulder. My knee bent off to the side at a highly unnatural angle. I went down instantly, a fiery pain shooting through my leg. The doctors said I’d torn my medial meniscus. All I knew was that it felt like someone had jammed a rusty fish-scaling knife deep into cartilage and wiggled it around in there. Over Christmas break, I had an operation at St. Anthony’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, praying I’d be able to play my senior year. The doctor called the surgery a success. But my recovery was painful and slow. I was still in a full-leg cast at the junior prom. My father called Lenox Hill Hospital in New York to find out about the special knee brace that Joe Namath had worn. Broadway Joe had the most famous messed-up knees in football. But just like Namath, I never got all my speed and agility back.

This was extremely frustrating to me. For a moment, I was pretty sure my whole life was over. Long-term perspective is not something most teenagers excel at. I certainly didn’t. I’d dreamed of playing big-time college football—somewhere. That disappointment, I believe, is a big part of the reason I turned my attention to that other extracurricular where I thought I could be a leader.

Politics.

My father’s service on the school board and our lively dinner-table talk must have stuck in my head somehow. I’d always kept up with the news and always admired great leaders. Watergate was the big news story when I was in high school. What President Richard Nixon and those around him did, I thought, was terrible. It was cheating. It was wrong. And it was unnecessary. Even without the dirty tricks, he probably would have beaten George McGovern in a landslide.

At the end of junior year, I ran for senior class president. My opponent was a young lady named Sarah Snyder, who was very smart and nice. We had a short campaign, nothing like the endless marathons I’d go through later. We made our speeches, but there weren’t too many issues that I recall. Who’s more popular—that’s usually the issue in high school campaigns. When the votes came in, Sarah and I were in a dead-even tie. The principal, Ron Hallam, floated the idea of us being co-presidents. But we decided to have a runoff instead, and I squeaked in.

I really enjoyed helping my fellow students. But even with the responsibilities of senior class president—even with the blown-out knee—I still wasn’t entirely done with football. No more recruiters had me on their call sheets. I knew I’d never get to play at a football powerhouse like University of Florida or Florida State. But thankfully, I still had some other options. I was happy to be accepted at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The Wake Forest football team plays in Division I of the Atlantic Coast Conference. It’s the smallest Division I school in the country. I didn’t have a football scholarship. I wasn’t guaranteed anything. I just walked onto the practice field my freshman year and asked for a shot.

I didn’t make the big team. But I played junior varsity and ran the scout team for the varsity. Like a surrogate preparing a politician for an upcoming debate, we scrimmaged as the opposing team. No great accomplishments. But this was college football, and I was thrilled just being there.

Academically, Wake Forest was a tough school. When I saw my grades, I consoled myself recalling that my father hadn’t done so well in college either, and he’d made something of himself. And I made some really good friends, especially on the football team. But I missed my family. I missed the Florida sunshine. And I discovered something I hadn’t paid adequate attention to before. North of Atlanta, the weather is cold and gray in the winter. I didn’t like that at all. After my second season of Wake Forest football, I transferred back home to Florida State University in Tallahassee.

I knew the Seminole football program was far out of my league. The legendary coach Bobby Bowden arrived the same week I did. The ’Noles were a Division I powerhouse. With my taped-up left knee and my JV experience, I was Division Forget-About-It. I joined a fraternity, Pi Kappa Alpha, and found my way back into student politics. What can I say? It’s who I am. I was elected to the Student Senate from the College of Education. Small-world alert: Steve Geller, who would become Senate Democratic leader when I was governor, was the one who recruited me to run.

When the student body president was impeached for some alleged impropriety, the vice president moved up to president and I was chosen by my fellow senators for the VP job. I vowed to pull my grades up so I might have a prayer at law school.

As a large public university, Florida State drew a wide diversity of students—rural, urban, people from different family backgrounds and different parts of the state. There were moderates, liberals, and conservatives on campus. This was Florida State—not Berkeley. Politically, I’d say I was somewhere in the middle of the pack.

The fall of my junior year, President Gerald Ford, who’d taken over after President Nixon was forced to resign, faced a challenge from Jimmy Carter, the Democratic governor of Georgia. This was the first year I was old enough to vote for president. I liked President Ford. I believed he was doing his best to heal the country after Watergate. Carter campaigned as an outsider with a fresh approach.

College students aren’t always the most organized people, and Election Day somehow crept up on me. At noon on November 2, I was in the living room of the fraternity house, pacing back and forth and feeling frustrated with myself for being there.

“I can’t believe I didn’t vote absentee,” I told my friend Tom Dzien.

“Me neither,” said Tom, who, like me, came from St. Petersburg.

Tom and I jumped into my red Mustang. We took the old way home, Apalachee Parkway east to US 19, south to SR 589 south, almost exactly 250 miles. We walked into the polling place, St. Raphael Catholic Church on Snell Isle Boulevard, just south of the Shore Acres Bridge. This was thrilling, our first time voting in a presidential race. I turned the lever on the voting machine for President Ford and his running mate, Senator Bob Dole, two moderate Republicans. Tom told me he did the same. Then we got back into the Mustang and headed straight to Tallahassee.

It was very late when we finally got back to campus. That was a lot of driving for one day. But it was worth it. It made me think about Pappap and all he’d struggled for. Voting felt mighty good to me.

I was disappointed when my guy lost. But Jimmy Carter seemed like a decent, hardworking man to me. I figured President Carter would do his best for the country. And I was proud that, the first chance I got, I’d been a full participant in an inspiring system of self-government. I had helped elect the leader of the free world, the president of the United States.

Win or lose, I still feel that way every time I vote.

 • • • 

Florida State was a great place to go to college. I made wonderful friends. I really did develop some confidence there. Senior year, I started dating a beautiful, blond-haired girl named Amanda Morrow, who came from Palm Beach County. She was active in student government and a member of Tri Delta, one of the top sororities on campus. She ran for student body vice president with my friend Cory Ciklin. I felt lucky to have Mandy as my girlfriend. She was smart, cute, and fun.

But just after we all returned to school from Christmas break, the whole Tallahassee campus was badly shaken by an absolutely harrowing event. Around 2:45 A.M. on January 15, an unknown man walked into the Chi Omega sorority house and savagely beat four young women. He then broke into a basement apartment eight blocks away and attacked another Florida State student.

It took three weeks for the assailant to be caught. He was a former law student from Washington State named Ted Bundy, on a cross-country, multiyear murder spree. Before he was finally put to death in 1989, he confessed to thirty murders in seven states between 1974 and 1978. The true total could be much higher. The attacks left me with an intense empathy for crime victims that has followed me through my life. It also cemented my interest in attending law school.

But first I had to get in.

I earned good grades at Florida State, but my average was dragged down a bit by my three semesters at Wake Forest. My LSAT scores were okay, but not great.

The first few schools I applied to didn’t make me wait long for an answer. “No thanks,” they said right away.

My dad knew a lawyer in St. Pete named Joe Fleece whose son had applied to a law school in Birmingham, Alabama, called Cumberland, which was part of Samford University. The word was that Cumberland wasn’t so hard to get into, at least back then. I submitted my application, and my dad followed up with a call to Dean Don Corley.

“My son’s applied to these other schools,” he said, “and he hasn’t gotten in. But he was vice president of the student body at Florida State. He played football at Wake Forest. Charlie will make you proud. Just give him a chance.”

Cumberland’s one-man admission committee gave me a chance. To this day, when people ask me why I attended Cumberland School of Law at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, I have a four-word answer:

“Because they took me.”

Once you’ve been attorney general, you can joke about that. I would end up being the fifth Florida governor to attend law school at Cumberland. I believe that’s even more than the University of Florida has.

Being accepted to law school was a life-changing moment for me. It was my version, two generations later, of how my grandfather must have felt when he was offered a job by that man on Ellis Island. I too felt like the sun had come out. Yes, I thought, I can see my future now. I’m going to law school. I’m going to be a lawyer. I am going to make it in life.

Was I getting ahead of myself?

My first year at Cumberland was a nightmare. Before classes started, I read a book called One L by Scott Turow. I should never have read that book. It was about the first year of law school. That book scared the crap out of me. When I first arrived on campus in August of 1978, I met a guy in the class ahead of me who was out on a porch having a beer. Dorian Damoorgian was his name.

“I’m worried about school,” I told him.

“Hey, man,” he said, shooting me a big grin. “I’m from Florida too. If you just read the cases, you’ll be fine. If I can make it, anybody can.”

When I became governor, I ended up appointing Dorian to an appellate judgeship. He hid a super-sharp mind behind that laid-back attitude.

Law was a whole new language for me. I read with a dictionary open on my desk. Torts, contracts, real property, constitutional law—and your whole grade hanging on a single exam at the end of the term. I was pretty sure I was going to flunk out.

I came home at Christmas after my final exams and told my father, “I’ve washed out.”

“Maybe so,” he said calmly. “But let’s go on a little duck hunting trip, and you can tell me about it.” My dad had a friend named Eric Whitted, who was an assistant county school superintendent with a hunting lodge in Chassahowitzka on the Nature Coast. That’s about seventy-five miles north of St. Petersburg.

On the drive up, my dad started asking me:

“Tell me about your contracts exam. What was it like? What were the questions? How did you answer?”

I told him as well as I could recall.

“What about real property?” he asked. I explained that too.

Finally, he said: “You know this stuff. You’re not gonna flunk out. You’ve got a lot of knowledge in your head. I think you’re going to be okay.”

And I was. I didn’t make Law Review. I wasn’t at the top of my class. But when the grades came out, I did all right. And Dad felt vindicated, I think. I know the dean breathed a sigh of relief.

“What’s coming next might not always be easy,” my father told me. “But I’m pretty sure you’re going to find your way.”

Chapter 2

I appreciated my father’s stirring confidence. But this whole grown-up thing, I kept discovering, was a little tougher than it looked.

I really liked Mandy Morrow. One Sunday afternoon during my first year at Cumberland Law, she was visiting me in Birmingham. We were sitting on the couch in my apartment. I hated that she had to head back to Tallahassee.

“Let’s get married,” I said.

“Really?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Why not?”

“Okay,” she said.

Mandy called that night and asked, “Are you sure about what you said this afternoon? We’re kind of young.” We were both twenty-one.

“Yeah,” I told her. “It’s exactly what I want to do.”

We had a big wedding that summer in Delray Beach, where her family lived. During the ceremony, we were sitting in front of the minister when a candle shattered its glass holder at the end of one of the pews. That’s a weird omen, I thought.

My family liked Mandy, and I believed her family liked me. We went to the Bahamas for our honeymoon. She moved to Birmingham, got a job as an urban planner, and we started arguing about silly stuff. Who was cleaning the apartment. Which brand of toothpaste to use. Stupid, trivial things. I hated to argue. I still do.

One night, I was talking on the phone with my father. “You doing okay?” he asked me.

“Yeah, I’m doing fine,” I said.

“Why don’t you call me tomorrow when I’m at the office.”

“What’s going on?” he asked me the next morning. “Is something wrong? Your voice didn’t sound right.”

“My marriage is not going well,” I told him. “We’re arguing all the time. I don’t think I’m ready for this.”

“What do you want to do?” he asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What about getting out?”

Nobody in my family had ever been divorced before, not that I’d ever heard about. I didn’t even like saying the word. But when my dad said “What about getting out,” it was like a light went on. I told Mandy: “You’re a great person, but I just can’t do this anymore. It’s not good for either of us.”

We cared for each other. She was a lovely person. She still is. It just didn’t work out for us. The first person I told outside my family was Mike Hamby, one of my closest law school friends. Mike’s parents were divorced.

“You’re both great people,” he said. “People are going to ask you what happened. When they do, just say, ‘It didn’t work out.’”

I do think the experience made me think long and hard before marrying again, and it made me a believer in living together before marriage.

 • • • 

I am grateful for what I learned at Cumberland, especially how to focus on complex issues and see the core principles buried in there. Law school is a perfect training ground for that. I ended up connecting with a lot of people from Florida, and I got my first up-close look at Bill Clinton.

He was our Law Day speaker in 1979, a young, first-term Democratic governor from Arkansas who hardly anyone had heard of before. But the speech he gave that day—and especially the way he connected with the students one-on-one—inspired everyone at Cumberland, Democrats and Republicans. And I remember saying to one of my friends: “That guy could be president one day.” And I wasn’t the only one who thought that.

By the grace of God and with a lot of grinding work, I graduated from Cumberland in 1981. But I flunked the Florida bar exam. After an internship in the state attorney’s office in St. Petersburg and a brief stint in the graduate tax program at Emory University School of Law—what was I thinking? I hated math!—I got a job as general counsel at the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues. That’s the commissioner’s office for minor league baseball.

The association’s president, John Johnson, was a veteran of the New York Yankees organization and a wonderful man. I’m convinced the only reason he hired me was because the office manager, Barbara Douglas, had been a neighbor of ours. She must have told Mr. Johnson: “He’s a good kid. He comes from a nice family.” They started me at $19,000 a year.

I couldn’t believe my good fortune. The job mixed law and sports, two things I loved. I reviewed contracts and protected trademarks. I settled territorial disputes among the different minor leagues, whose owners sometimes had conflicting needs and easily bruised feelings. That was ideal training for politics. I went to the baseball winter meetings in Honolulu and to the player drafts in New York. I got to work under baseball commissioners Bowie Kuhn and Peter Ueberroth.

And then I flunked the bar exam a second time.

I was devastated. I was sure I’d be fired from my baseball-lawyer job. I wondered, Am I ever going to get my license? Is my law career over before it even begins? I went into Mr. Johnson’s office to face my future.

“I’ve got some bad news,” I said. “I didn’t pass the bar again. I’m not sure what to do or what your thoughts are.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he told me. “Stay on. You’ll do administrative stuff. Take the exam again. How many times can you take it?”

“I don’t think there’s a limit,” I said. “As many as you want.”

“Just study harder, and take it again.”

Talk about a lifeboat! Mr. Johnson gave me a shot and another chance. Years later, when my Republican friends were in an uproar over my efforts to restore the rights of Florida felons, I would remember that. Everyone deserves a second chance—or, in my case, a third chance.