Sickness and Health.(Review)

Saving Milly: Love, Politics, and Parkinson's Disease, by Morton Kondracke (Public Affairs, 320 pp., $25)

Morton Kondracke is a veteran journalist and syndicated columnist, a television "talking head" best known as the eminently reasonable man in the gray political middle-the Democratic answer to Republican David Gergen. In recent years, Kondracke has also become an outspoken advocate for increased spending on medical research in general and embryonic-stem-cell research in particular.

Although Kondracke is a political animal who earns his living in highly political Washington, Saving Milly is an intensely personal memoir. Above all, it is a beautiful love letter to Milly: wife, friend, and mother of the couple's two daughters, a vital and dynamic woman who is the center of his life.

The first part of the book quickly covers their meeting, courtship, and early married years. At first, Kondracke rejected Milly as a potential mate, out of ambition: He was looking to marry an upper-crust lady possessing money and, most especially, Washington connections-someone who could help him become the big-time Beltway journalist he wanted to be. But bright, moral Milly's working-class charms bored past Kondracke's pretensions, and finally he asked her to marry him.

The Kondrackes' marriage is tempestuous and passionate but utterly solid. The depth of their love is made all the more obvious by the author's description of the ephemeral matters about which they argued. "I'd blame her . . . for committing me to do something I didn't want to do," Kondracke writes. "She'd blame me for never wanting to do anything." In other words, they had a typical marriage. True, in the midst of an argument the D-word would occasionally be thrown-but ending the marriage was never seriously considered. "Somehow within minutes of such discussions, we'd end up apologizing and making love."

If the ups and downs of their happy marriage constituted the sum and substance of Saving Milly, it might be worth at best a magazine article. But the author is hunting bigger game. When Milly comes down with a devastating case of Parkinson's disease, the book acquires focus and becomes a truly compelling read. Milly's struggle with Parkinson's could easily have been reduced to a soap opera, but Kondracke isn't asking for pity. Rather, he earnestly seeks to help other families who are living through the tragedy of catastrophic illness or injury by assuring them that they are not alone. To accomplish this, he bravely lifts the veil of privacy off his own home: He shares his wife's raw terror of becoming disabled and of being abandoned by her husband, who she fears will no longer love her. He reveals the irrationality that often accompanies dreaded diagnoses: the denial, the anger, the recriminations. He explores the pain of losing robust health and the ability to walk and talk. Kondracke's unflinching prose sometimes makes for difficult reading. But his openness will undoubtedly help members of other families forgive one another's shortcomings, and ease the guilt that often accompanies human imperfection.

Kondracke has a spiritual purpose: to give his testimony. He describes how Milly's illness forced him to cling to God as his power and hope, and he extols the beneficence of Christian community. Kondracke repeatedly asks God to tell him his life's purpose. The answer is always the same: "Take care of Milly." He does so with a depth of love and devotion that should become an example of ideal husbanding in premarriage counseling sessions.