John Paul Cisneros
Cisneros wasn't supposed to live this long. Here's how Henry's headline-making son got to be a healthy fourteen-year-old boy with an identity of his own.
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Even in the hothouse that is San Antonio, where politicians are routinely elevated to folk heroes, the media coverage of John Paul's health crisis seems, in retrospect, a little much. But Henry had so thoroughly blurred the line between private and public that it seemed perfectly natural at the time. It came off as not at all strange, for instance, when Henry allowed lighting equipment and stylists to be brought into his home for an afternoon so that photographer James McGoon could shoot him and his ailing four-week-old son for the cover of the September 1987 Texas Monthly.
By late summer Henry had become an authority on John Paul's condition. He had telephoned cardiologists all over the world, studied medical textbooks, and learned to sketch the peculiarities of John Paul's heart. Through letters from parents of children with similar problems, Henry found out about two specialists in Philadelphia who had experience in treating children with complex heart defects. He arranged to take John Paul there in October.
The intervening months were grim. Henry sought comfort and support from Linda Medlar, Mary Alice from a small group of Christian friends who rallied around her. "I was terrified of losing John Paul," she says. "Henry and I were like Jack and Jill, rolling down the hill as fast as we could." Everything seemed to be coming apart. In August, when Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby announced he would not run for governor, Henry told reporters he wouldn't be a candidate either, and he began to reconcile himself to the fact that he wouldn't seek a fifth term as mayor. On September 13 Pope John Paul II made his long-awaited visit to San Antonio. Henry, wracked with guilt about his affair, and Mary Alice, draped in a black veil, took John Paul for a private blessing from the Holy Father.
In October, for the first time, there was finally cause for optimism. Henry and Mary Alice took John Paul to Philadelphia for two days of extensive tests, then met with John Murphy, a pediatric cardiologist, and William Norwood, a surgeon who had invented a number of procedures for congenital heart defects, including the one that afflicted John Paul. "We can fix this," Norwood told them. "What do you mean?" asked Henry, who was flabbergasted but instantly buoyed. The doctors explained two possible approaches: One was to reconstruct the heart from the inside and create four working chambers that would perform the functions of a normal heart; the other was to repair the heart's routing system, a simpler procedure. "We told them we might be able to restore the heart function," Murphy recalls. "It helped that John Paul had all the components and two well-preserved ventricles." They added that while the operation could be done at any time, allowing John Paul to grow a little older and stronger would make him a better candidate for surgery. Henry and Mary Alice were told to take John Paul home and watch for signs of trouble: clubby toes and fingers, blue lips and nail beds, fatigue and coughing.
Although their marriage had been damaged by the Medlar affair, Henry and Mary Alice were unified over John Paul. "I found that when it came right down to it, I couldn't leave her to deal with such a big problem," Henry says. Separately, Mary Alice tells me, "Our problems were difficult but compared to the situation John Paul faced, they were secondary. We pulled together to give him the best chance. Ultimately, we saw a lot of good in each other."
When John Paul was old enough to talk, he often asked why he had to take so much medicine. "Because you're special," his mother said. "Because this is what you have to do to stay healthy," his father said. He also asked if he was going to die. "Not if we can help it," his father said. "We all live in God's hands, John Paul," his mother said.
In January 1993, after Bill Clinton nominated Henry to be the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the family moved to Washington, D.C. Mary Alice enrolled John Paul in kindergarten at a public bilingual elementary school. Some of Mary Alice's happiest memories are of the Easter egg hunts at Hickory Hill, Ethel Kennedy's compound. The Cisneros family was always invited, and one year she sat on a hill and watched Attorney General Janet Reno go down a rope swing with Henry and John Paul not far behind.
The heart surgery was scheduled for late July 1993. When they arrived at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Mary Alice and Henry were beginning to feel at peace. He carried John Paul in his arms to the door of the operating suite and handed him over to the eight doctors and nurses who would rebuild his heart over the next two and a half hours. To hear John Paul describe the procedure, you'd think it was as simple as building a drainage project on the West Side. "Dr. Norwood built a septum, which is like a wall that made my two-chamber heart into a regular four-chamber heart," he says. "Then he had to create some valves for pumping and do a little more rerouting." As Norwood himself told Henry and Mary Alice, the surgery stabilized John Paul's heart and its circulatory system. "None of us knows the future, of course," he said, "but the basic fix is in." Ten days later John Paul left the hospital and came home to Washington. Except for being more susceptible to colds while he was regaining his strength after surgery, John Paul was soon back in school, playing soccer and baseball.
In 1996 the Cisneros family moved to Los Angeles, where Henry had taken a job as the president of Univision, the nation's largest Spanish-language television network. They bought a large house in Bel-Air Crest, and John Paul lived the kid version of the California dream. He played on a baseball team with the children of movie stars, skateboarded on the Santa Monica Pier, went to beach parties. At St. Paul the Apostle Catholic School, on L.A.'s West Side, he studied hard but was a real cutup in class and made many friends.
Then, in April 1999, he developed a complication. When he exercised too much, his lips and nail beds turned blue. By then Norwood and Murphy had moved to the Alfred I. DuPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Delaware. Soon Henry, Mary Alice, and John Paul were on their way there. As it turned out, a large anomalous vein was draining into the pulmonary venous atrium of his heart, reducing his oxygen efficiency. The surgery took place on a Friday and was performed by a doctor named John W. Moore. The plan had been to close off the large vein by inserting two small metal devices, but the procedure was only partially successful. The doctors told Henry and Mary Alice to come back in six weeks and try again. "There's another option," John Paul chimed in. "Let's just stay here now and try again." The following Tuesday, Murphy operated for a second time—and it worked. John Paul has been free of health problems ever since.
John paul loved living in L.A., so he was sorry when his parents announced last August that the family was relocating back to San Antonio. "How can you do this to me?" he asked his father. "I don't want to leave." By then, however, Mary Alice was ready to come home. She wanted her son to grow up and go to school on the West Side, where she and Henry had grown up. And, sure enough, John Paul adjusted to the move quickly. He has just finished the seventh grade at St. Anthony's Catholic School, where he made the honor roll. In the evenings he and his father play basketball at Sacred Heart Church. He's learning to drive. Next up—well, down the road—is medical school. "I want to train as a pediatric cardiologist," he tells me. "I saw other kids die in the hospital. I figure there's a reason I lived."
What he doesn't want is for his father to go into politics again, although he knows the pressure is intense. "I don't want my dad to get hurt," he says. "He's been hurt enough."
"Well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it," Mary Alice says, sounding very much like a woman who has seen her share of unlikely comebacks.
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