What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  What did they want him to do? Just take it? Give up? If Bob Dole was the kind to give up, he could have lived his life in a hospital bed, or a wheelchair, with someone taking care of him twenty-four hours a day. But nobody had to take care of Dole. He made sure of that. Dole never quit. “Don’t give up, guys. ... They can still go sour. ...”

  So he flew into Fargo, North Dakota, where the prairie wind blew brutal cold—cold to make Dole’s bones ache—and where Mark Andrews had fallen to a dead heat with his young Democratic challenger. Dole claimed that a Democratic victory would shift attention to the cities, away from the wide-open places like the North Dakota plains. (Wide open! Some of these North Dakota towns made Russell, Kansas, look urban.) Without Mark Andrews, how was Ronald Reagan going to lead the country? Without Mark Andrews, North Dakota would have two Democratic Senators—no political balance, at all! Without Mark Andrews, how was North Dakota going to get its share from a Republican administration? “He not only brings home the bacon,” Dole said, “he brings home the whole hog!”

  Later that day, it was gray and even colder in Pocatello, then Boise, where Dole warned that if Steve Symms lost, Republicans from the western states would lose their key chairmanships. The West would be stripped of influence! The country had come a long way since 1980, when Idaho sent Steve Symms to the Senate, but all that progress could be lost. If Steve Symms lost, it would turn the country over to liberals, to TEDDY KENNEDY! Without Steve Symms, how was Ronald Reagan going to lead the country? That night they finished at a shopping mall, the no-frills sort of place with discount stores that sprawl over acres in the western states. Dole’s voice was going bad as he shouted out a speech for Symms in the tacky atrium. It was a bad sound system and bad fluorescent light that showed the cracks in the quick-pour concrete. He’d already done the state with Symms, done press conferences, done the satellite feeds. But Dole wouldn’t give the mall short shrift. There were a couple of hundred people there, and God knows how far they’d driven in the dark. They were holding up hand-lettered signs for their favorites: Doris Jones for Deputy Clerk! ... So Dole said he wanted everyone to vote for a leader, Doris Jones! ... And for the County Sheriff! ... And the County Treasurer! There wasn’t a Republican within a hundred miles whom Dole didn’t tout that night. In that grungy mall, with a few hundred votes, Dole put on a show. Said he knew Steve Symms would win, along with Andrews in North Dakota, and Abdnor in South Dakota, and victories in the West would more than offset any GOP loss in other parts of the country.

  Next day, Dole’s plane set down in Seattle in a steady rain. The only event was an airport press conference, and just a handful of press, at that. The airport room was damp and cold. Slade Gorton’s campaign had the smell of death. But Dole knew he could win! The point was, he had a chance! The point was, the nation needed Gorton and GOP winners in the West, to keep the Senate in safe hands, to keep the country on a steady track. “It looks real good,” Dole insisted, “for maintaining Republican control of the Senate ...”

  But it was only that night, when he got to California, that Dole started to feel it. It was the kick he always got, the rush, when it started to come together. Ed Zschau, the Republican, was gaining: the latest Field Poll had him for the first time within one point of Alan Cranston. There it was on the TV news, as Dole walked into the San Jose airport: one point! In any poll, that meant a flat-out tie. Dole knew he could win, he could feel it. Zschau’s people were all over the airport, running on the adrenaline high that fuels the last days of winning campaigns. If Zschau beat Cranston, that meant the Democrats would need not four, but five new seats to take the Senate from Bob Dole. If Symms could win, or Gorton, or Andrews—surely, Andrews ought to win ...

  Everything looked better from here, with the next day’s California sunshine streaming in the windows of his borrowed jet, with the lush wine country rolling below, with Ed Zschau and his wife, Jo, chatting in the plane, bubbling with hope. Zschau told Dole he had a new ad going on the air for the final weekend, and it was a beauty! Ronald Reagan, campaigning for Zschau, urging his fellow Californians, from the heart, to win just one more for the Gipper. That had to be worth a couple of points! ... In L.A., they drove to the Sheraton Grand for a luncheon, and it was great! Huge! It looked like a convention, with a thousand people milling on the darkened ballroom floor, a horde of press and cameras all pointed at the tall dais, a spotlight stabbing through the dark in that room, size of a stadium, packed with cheers for Zschau and Dole, Dole and Zschau ...

  “I smell VICTORYYY! ...”

  And then Dole dropped his strained voice into a husky, confidential tone, as he told these Southern Californians what their work in these last few days could mean, to Ed Zschau, to the Senate, to the country—and to the man who turned this country around, Ronald Reagan. ... God, they loved it! They stood and cheered him for a minute and a half. Then Zschau stood and made his speech, which he finished with a song, a song he wrote. He stood up there and sang to the crowd!

  Z-S-C-H-A-U!

  I can spell it, you can too ...

  Dole couldn’t believe it! He’d never heard it before. Had no idea! But it wasn’t bad!

  He’s our hero

  Cutting deficits to zero ...

  There’ll be dancin’ ...

  When he’s beaten Cranston ...

  There was a band, an eight-piece combo, and they were banging out the tune, and Zschau was singing, and the Bobster stood up and got with it! Started swinging his arm, keeping time to the music, bouncing on his feet, up and down ... it was fantastic! They were going to win!

  It was that day, the Friday before the election, on the afternoon flight to Colorado, Dole said:

  “Aghh, better get a release together.”

  Things were going to turn out all right. And if there was credit to be shared, well ... better put out the word on what he’d done: must be a hundred cities—God knows how many candidates, speeches, dollars ...

  “You know, all of it, miles, cities, the money ...”

  His press guy, Walt Riker, started drafting the release in his head. Problem was, how to get the totals. He picked up the air-to-ground phone and called the office.

  Sure, fat chance.

  Friday afternoon, on Capitol Hill, with the Senate out, Senator away? And where were the schedules? You gonna ask Betty? Yip yip yip?

  The PAC must have them. Campaign America had to have them.

  Sure, maybe Monday.

  How about the miles?

  Who’s got an atlas?

  Dole still had a few thousand miles to put on those totals. He had three stops in Colorado, where Gary Hart’s retirement meant the GOP might pick up a seat the Democrats had held for the last twelve years. That would eat up the day, Saturday. And Dole had to be in Kansas City Sunday morning, to do a remote for Face the Nation, and spend at least a day in his home state, so it didn’t seem he was kissing it off while he sought his own reelection. But that left him Saturday night, so he decided to fly halfway across the country and back, to pick up Elizabeth in North Carolina, do a couple of events there for Senator Broyhill. He could still get back to Kansas, maybe midnight, maybe 1:00 A.M. Sunday, to get a few hours’ sleep before the TV show.

  Dole looked left, across the aisle of the small jet, to the staff seats in front, facing backward. No one ever sat in the front seats on Dole’s side, staring right into his face. “Agh, got the release?”

  Riker was still on the air phone. “Tryin’ to get the figures,” he said.

  Dole reached across his chest with his left hand and pulled down his window shade. He was a master airplane napper. The plane was even better than the car: no one could get at him. He didn’t have to pack a 707 with staff and machinery, like Bush or Reagan, and carry around some press in the back, to badger him every time he landed. Must be nice, though, that big plane ...

  He knew Reagan’s guys would be back in the press seats of Air Force One, claiming credit for every Senate race they won. That was the White Hou
se plan for ’86: they sent Bush out to do the scut work, the Governors and House seats. The big deal, keeping the Senate, and all the credit for it, was reserved to the Big Guy. So Reagan had been out on the grand tour, brought out of the barn for one last race, with a big White House send-off, and everybody wrote about the Gip going out to win one more. Of course, it made all the papers, too, when the President flew into Oklahoma, made a speech there for Senator Don Nickles, and called him throughout: “my friend ... Don Rickles.” But no one wrote what else Reagan said. Problem was, Reagan didn’t have anything to say, except the same general stuff: America standing tall ... you know, the vision business. Dole tried to talk to Don Regan about getting the President onto some issues that made a difference out there, but Regan insisted he knew what he was doing. “We’re going to tailor the speeches for the states involved, that kind of thing.” Too bad—Don Regan didn’t know anything about the states involved. If you asked Bob Dole, Don Regan didn’t know politics at all.

  Truth be told, Bob Dole wasn’t calling Regan anymore, asking the Chief of Staff what had to get done ... like he used to call Jim Baker: on the phone with the White House, every day or two. There wasn’t any point with Regan. If you wanted to call the tune for Dole, you had to know more than he did. In fact, Dole wasn’t carrying water for the White House at all—not after ’85. That was the time Bob Dole, the new Majority Leader, put it on the line for the White House. Reagan kept saying the deficit was Public Enemy Number One. But then he sent up a budget that would have pumped red ink up over the window sills. It was a laughingstock! So Dole picked up the ball and ran. He’d cut the budget, like he’d done in ’81. Better than ’81: he bit the bullet hard, made a $56 billion package—and it was everything, not just the easy stuff. He proposed to freeze the defense budget, to freeze the cost-of-living hikes for all federal pensions—even Social Security. It meant $300 billion in savings over the next three years. It was pure Dole, brass balls ... and he made it stick. He made Reagan swallow the freeze on the Pentagon. And he took the heat no one wanted for fooling with Social Security. It was more than just Social Security: veterans’ benefits, military pensions, civil service, black-lung payments ... every federal entitlement, the kind of middle-class welfare no one else had the guts to touch. It amounted to the toughest vote anyone had tried in years. But it was the only fair way, Dole insisted: everyone had to take a hit. For Republicans in the Senate, he made a compelling political case: unless they did something strong on the deficit, the Party was down the drain in ’86—or the minute the economy went south, as it would, inevitably, someday. For farm-state Senators, he made sure their growers wouldn’t suffer unduly: his farm bill would take care of them. He got Jim Abdnor with $200 million to save the Rural Electric program. For the few GOP liberals, he was offering a major prize: a Pentagon freeze. And he sweetened the pot with money for Amtrak, a bridge, a naval contract. ... In the last couple of days, he was locked in his office in nonstop session—in his offices, really: he’d have Weicker in one room, holding out for a deal to fund some mass transit, and Zorinsky (a Democrat!) in the next room, bargaining for the wheat growers, and David Stockman in the back room, wheeling and dealing on small business—as Dole shuttled back and forth among the members, probing and nudging for their bottom lines. He was holding the package together by force of his own will and savvy, bargaining down the straddlers, vote by vote. And when it came down to an all-night floor fight, Dole finally choked off the desperate opposition by packing all amendments into a single roll of the dice, one vote, for which the White House turned George Bush and Air Force Two back in midflight, en route to Phoenix, and sent Bush to the Senate to break a tie. Dole was calling hospitals, trying to get John East and Pete Wilson to come back from sickbeds for the vote. East, it turned out, was too weak, and his wife wouldn’t let him go. But sometime after 1:00 A.M., some forty hours after his emergency appendectomy, Pete Wilson rolled up to the Capitol in an ambulance, and medics wheeled him in, wearing his brown bathrobe, with an IV tube still in his arm, and to a standing ovation from his colleagues, he cast his “Aye,” and Bush broke the tie, and by 3:08 A.M., that same night, Dole had slain the deficit vampire.

  But it was Dole who got the stake through the heart. When the bill got to the House, Jack Kemp, that blow-dried windbag, started conniving with Regan, peddling his standard supply-side snake oil:

  No one wants more doom and gloom on the deficit ...

  Why should Republicans take the heat? ...

  We can grow out of the deficit!

  And Regan put him right in front of the President, who buckled. Reagan flapped like an old faded flag. Pretty soon, he backed off the freeze on the pensions. That was half the cuts, right there. Then it wasn’t everybody taking a hit anymore. The package just came apart. The White House tried to peddle the retreat as Ronald Reagan hanging tough against the Congress. Problem was, he wasn’t really tough enough. In the end, the deficit kept growing: they just swept it under the rug. But not before they’d jerked that rug out from under every Republican in the Senate. They left Dole’s guys with nothing to stand on, with “a vote against Social Security” to explain, out there with nowhere to hide, while the Democrats and the AARP leisurely took aim and shot them down.

  God knows, half these races wouldn’t be so tough, if Reagan hadn’t flip-flopped, if Jack Kemp had, for once in his life, shut up and made the tough vote. ... Dole applied the “Be Nice” rule to Kemp only with struggle, and with imperfect success. No one was going to convince a boy from Russell-in-the-thirties that debts were going to grow away. That was the subtext of Dole’s good-news, bad-news joke, during the tax fight of 1982:

  “Good news is, a bus full of supply-siders went over a cliff last night ...

  “Bad news is, there were three empty seats.”

  When Kemp and his right-wing friends returned fire, branding Dole “the tax collector for the welfare state,” Dole’s jokes got more personal. During the wrangle over tax reform, Dole said Kemp must be holding out for a deduction on hair spray.

  But Dole was more careful with truths about Reagan. Ronald Reagan was still huge out there, in the Party, with the people who’d vote in the primaries, especially in the South and West. At Campaign America, Don Devine made up a flip-chart, a breakdown of the voters Dole was after. It was a poll of how Americans saw themselves. More than half the voters these days called themselves conservatives. They were Reagan’s voters, and now Dole had to reel in his share. At least, he had to keep Kemp from getting them, claiming he was Reagan’s heir. Or keep Bush from getting them, though Dole couldn’t see how Bush could get a vote from any working man. (“Gaghh! ... I mean, guy never had to do a day’s work in his life!”)

  Anyway, Dole had nothing but praise for Reagan, and deference, at least in public. Whenever Dole spoke in a state where Reagan’s grand tour would later touch down, Dole always reminded the crowd that the Big Guy was on his way. “Aghh, I’m just doin’ little advance, f’the President ...” Whenever Dole talked about the need to cut spending, he said it was Reagan who showed the need to cut spending. It was Reagan who’d changed the tone: “Y’don’t see anybody these days proposing big new spending programs ...” And no one ever heard from Dole that Reagan had already dropped the ball; that Dole did forty-three states, this year, for Dole. No one ever heard from Dole that if it weren’t for Reagan waffling, maybe they’d have some money to spend. If it weren’t for Reagan’s mania of self, they might have a bigger bulge in the Senate. Dole might not have to spend Saturday night flying an extra three thousand miles to get on the front page with Broyhill ... wouldn’t have so many tight races, wouldn’t have to go to North Carolina, could have sent another plane for Elizabeth, maybe wouldn’t have lost his voice, wouldn’t have to listen to Riker losing his, yelling into a bad connection on the air phone ...

  “NO! REPUBLICAN CAN-DI-DAYTZZZ ... YEAH, PLURAL!”

  Riker was dictating the press release to the Capitol office. He’d written it on a legal pad, wit
h blank spaces for the numbers and totals. Dole looked it over and changed the lead, made it more than an announcement of the final campaign swing. Now the top paragraph predicted a win: “... the U.S. Senate will remain Republican.” Dole knew how to get ink: you had to make news. He also knew when to make news, and Saturday afternoon was too late. They’d already missed the first Sunday papers. And they still didn’t have the totals.

  “NO, YOU STICK IN THE NUMBER. ... WELL, GET THE REST OF ’EM AND GET IT OUT! ... JEEEZUS!”

  The jet was flying back into weather, bouncing around in the sky. Just what they needed on that final push. At least Dole could smell the finish line. None too soon. His throat was raw, and dark circles shaded the tan under his eyes. Well, Elizabeth’d be there. She’d have everything arranged.

  But there was no arranging the Broyhill campaign—not at that point. Elizabeth had no more idea than Dole what they were getting into. Dole landed late, in a rainstorm, at Hickory, North Carolina, and sat in a van while they drove him through the dark on slick mountain roads ... for forty-five minutes! It was like a hostage scene. No one he knew had any idea where they were going. Dole Advance never scheduled any car ride more than thirty minutes. But this wasn’t Dole Advance.

  They got to a high school, some kind of fish fry: bad vibes; no media; crowd was down; Dole was late; raining like hell. Everyone wanted this to be over—especially Dole. But this was Elizabeth’s home state. Of course, she was being “nahce,” meeting the locals. ... “Whah, thank you so much,” she’d say, in response to their effusions. Dole was halfhearted, working the crowd, as he listened for her silvery chuckles of delight behind him. He meant to keep this short and sweet. He’d say a few words—more than he should with his voice gone—then: “Gottagooo ...”

  But there was no escape. After the fish fry, they packed into the van for another forty-five-minute trek. This time, they got lost in the rain, trying to find a recreation center in the town of Lenoir.