What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  And Bob worked, alone, day and night, on his problem. That’s what he called it, his problem: there were no good words for this enemy, his body. What words could anybody use that would not burrow into him and eat at the will that was keeping him alive? It wasn’t that he chose to wall himself away, but what else could he do, when he heard those words that would never leave him? One day, when he was with Doran at the grain elevator, a farmer came in and, by way of chat, asked: “This your crippled son?” There wasn’t a thing for Bob to say, but for days after, he was clouded over with gloom and rage. One afternoon, when he’d been home awhile, he screwed up his courage and walked to Dawson Drug. Main Street seemed a hundred miles long. He was sure everybody was looking at him—120 pounds: he was a spectacle!—the way his feet shuffled, his right arm cocked up in a lead brace that a high school pal, Adolph Reisig, made for him at his auto body shop. Bob got into the drugstore and hauled himself, without help, onto a seat at the counter. But even then his bones wouldn’t sit right on the stool. Bub and Chet had to adjust him for balance, like a rickety piece of furniture. One of the geezers at the wooden-top tables said: “Gee, that’s too bad. ... You prob’ly wished they woulda finished you off ...” Bob turned and glared, felt his face flush hot. “If I thought like that, I’da been dead a long time ago.” But for months, he didn’t go back to Dawson’s.

  He worked alone. He pulled down the dark curtain of reserve that he could not lift again, even when he chose. He’d spend all day behind the house, working himself to exhaustion with the ropes on the garage wall. Bina would stand at the back door and call: “Bob, don’t you want to rest? Bob! Come in and rest awhile ...” He’d just say: “No.” He’d growl it. Or he wouldn’t answer. He’d pull harder. He was trying to pull with the bad right arm. If he could straighten that out, he’d play again. Even when he was in the house, he’d be squeezing a rubber ball, or a nutcracker, with the left hand. Even when he sat in a chair, his legs were moving. Time was weighing on him: months were flying by, and he felt he was standing still. He could walk around the block, but that wasn’t good enough. He pushed it, faster, harder, until he was dragging his bony form along in a shuffling run. He brought the lead arm brace back to Adolph in the body shop: he wanted more lead in it, more, and more, a constant weight, so it ached, so he knew he was working it every minute.

  There was no schedule in the house anymore, except for Bob’s racing internal clock. Chet and Ruth Dawson would show up to play bridge at midnight, and Bina’d do a load of wash while the card game went on around her. Food was whatever he wanted, when he wanted, and where: if Bob said he’d like to be outside, Bina would move the whole show outdoors: tablecloth, silver, the dishes with the pattern of pink blossoms and green leaves. ... Or Bina’d ask Bob in the middle of the morning: “You want a Coke?” And everyone would pile into the car, and ride out to the highway. Norma Jean would come in the afternoons, and Bob would ask: “You doin’ anything tonight? ... No?” And then she’d stay with him in the front room and rub that arm for hours. Gloria was married by then, living out of town, but she’d come back to visit, too, mostly to talk to Bob. She’d ask about the war sometimes, in case he wanted to get it off his chest. But Bob would only say, “Agh, the heroes are still over there.” He meant the dead ones. That put an end to the questions. Now Kenny was married, too, living with his beautiful Dottie in a little brick house, right next door. Of course, Kenny was still on call. If Bob had to go anywhere, Kenny took him. (He was driving Bob back to Michigan on Dottie’s twenty-first birthday.) But mostly, it was Bina who did for Bob. Kenny would do for Bina. And she wasn’t shy about asking. More and more, as Bob’s problem wore her down, she didn’t have patience for anyone else. When Dottie was in labor with Kenny’s first child, Bina visited her in the delivery room and rasped: “Are you all right?”

  Dottie said: “Feel like I’m gonna die.”

  “Aw, you’ll live,” Bina snapped, and went back home to Bob.

  On his darker days, Kenny’s marriage and his new baby girl were hard for Bob, too. It wasn’t that he grudged it to his younger brother—not at all. But Bob was the elder ... always a mile out in front of that kid. And now Kenny was a husband, a father ... and Bob? Treading water, trying to get back to where he was. Who would he live his life with? Who’d take him now ... like this? Did he even have the right to impose his ... problem? No, he’d probably be alone. Hell, he was alone. No matter how everybody did for him, how long they sat and talked with him, how late they stayed up to see if they could get him to sleep ... when it got down to it, it was Bob, alone. Sometimes, Dottie would wake, next door, to give the baby a bottle or quiet her in her crib. And through the darkness outside, she’d hear the music from Bina’s house. It was Bob, with the record player he got when he went off to KU. And he’d play that song, over and over, Jane Froman’s song from Carousel ...

  When you walk through a storm,

  hold your head up high

  Sometimes, after he played that song, you could see he felt better, and he’d say, “How ’bout s’more music?” And he’d play it again, and whistle along.

  Walk on, walk on

  with hope in your heart.

  And you’ll never walk alone.

  You’ll never walk alone!

  And then, everyone was lighter. Even Bina was happy. But just as suddenly, the dark curtain could descend. One day, back by the garage, Bob fell and couldn’t get up. “Never gonna work ...” he was muttering afterward. “Terrible ... crawling around like an animal.” Then there was nothing they could do for him. That was the awful fact at the bottom of their every day. It didn’t matter what they did for him. It didn’t count unless he could do it himself. He had to do it alone. Now he wouldn’t let anyone light a cigarette for him. Sometimes, with a match, he’d char his numb left hand black ... but don’t try to get in his way. Or, he’d be sitting at the table, getting along okay with a fork in that balky left hand. But then a piece of food would tumble to his lap. And his face would go dark with helpless rage. And he wouldn’t say a word. He’d just get up and walk out. No one dared follow him, or say anything.

  One afternoon, the family came home, and there was no Bob—not in the bedroom, the living room, he wasn’t out back, pulling on the ropes. Bina called Dawson’s, then Doran: no Bob, not a sign of him. Finally, they looked inside the garage, and there he was, hanging from the rafters by the bad right arm. Hanging with his feet swinging off the floor. Soaked and trembling with sweat and pain. Bina burst into tears right there. Thought he was dead. But his will was alive: Bob wouldn’t come down. If he could straighten out that arm, he was going to play ball again.

  He was still hunting the miracle, when an uncle who’d served in the Medical Corps told him about Dr. K. This was Hampar Kelikian, who’d escaped to America as a boy, with twenty dollars and a carpet from his family home in Armenia, and had worked his way to eminence as a neurosurgeon in Chicago. Dr. K. knew about wars: his three sisters were killed in the massacres that posed as war in his native land; his brother, a soldier in World War II, was killed in the Italian campaign. Dr. K. also enlisted, in the Army Medical Corps: he became a pioneer in the restoration of damaged limbs. President Truman awarded him a medal for special contributions to military medicine. In 1947, Dole made his pilgrimage to Chicago.

  Kelikian was a small man, with curly hair, prematurely gray. He was friendly, brisk, optimistic. He spoke with an accent, but no hesitation. He knew what could be done for Dole, and he knew he could do it. But he wanted Dole to know something, too: there wasn’t going to be a miracle. He could give Dole partial use of the arm, maybe forty percent: the rest was up to Bob. He could jerry-rig a shoulder of sorts, but there was no way it would rotate: the arm would not lift; Dole would not play ball. What Dr. K. could do was corporeal carpentry, not magic. ... That was the most important work he did for Dole, and he did it with words. There was something about Kelikian, his certainty, his self-possession, the big office in Chicago, or the way he’d pulled him
self up by his own will ... or maybe Dole was just ready. But he listened. Kelikian told him: “Don’t think anymore about what you’ve lost. You have to think about what you have ... and what you can do with it.”

  Kelikian would not take a fee for his work, not from Bob, not a dime. He’d do it out of gratitude to his adopted land. To Dr. K., Bob Dole represented something fundamental about the country: “This young man ...” the doctor said later. “He had the faith to endure.”

  Still, Dole would have to come back to Chicago, to check into a hospital, and this wasn’t on the Army’s ticket anymore. Back in Russell, Chet Dawson spread the news: Bob had to go to Chicago for an operation. And he put a cigar box on the drugstore counter: the Bob Dole Fund ... the Dawson boys started it off with a few bills themselves. And Chet was post commander at the time, so the VFW took up the charge. Pretty soon, Bub Shaffer at the Home State Bank was taking collections, too. Then, they started across the street at the Russell State Bank, and then Banker’s Mercantile and the rest of the shops pitched in. Everybody in town lent a hand, one way or another. One lady put thirty cents in the box—that was all she could afford. But there was some serious money, too, and by June, when Bina packed the car for the trip to Chicago, the people of Russell had collected one thousand eight hundred dollars to help Bob Dole get back on his feet.

  It turned out there were three operations: the first to cut away the bone in the shattered shoulder, to hang the arm instead by a strip of muscle that Dr. Kelikian took from Dole’s thigh. But in recuperation at Percy Jones, the arm wouldn’t come down: it fused instead in front of Dole’s chest, about at the level of his chin. So Kelikian went at it again, and after the second operation, the arm healed at Dole’s side. It was as Dr. K. had told him: no miracle, nothing magic about it. The arm would hang shorter than his left arm, Dole would never be able to lift it much, or control it at full rotation. But the point was, Dole could do something with it. He could hold it a certain way—like this ... and it looked like an arm again.

  In a third operation, Kelikian tried to transplant muscle and tendon back to the right hand. Most of that didn’t take, so Dole’s fingers would always splay unnaturally on that right hand; but he learned he could roll it around a pen, a folded paper, something to give it shape. It started to look like a hand again.

  The point was, he could do something with it. The biggest change was how Dole looked at it. Look what he could do! In October, Norma Jean was married, and Bob went to the wedding as best man. He wore his lieutenant’s uniform—not the fussy dress stuff, but the Eisenhower jacket, with the square padded shoulders. He was thin, but his eyes ... he looked so handsome. The minister put Norma Jean’s ring onto one of Bob’s fingers: that was the only way Bob could hold it, until the proper moment; but nobody saw that, the way Bob did it. What they saw was the way he stood up at Trinity Methodist, on Main Street, in front of all the guests, like a soldier, proud, straight as a rod.

  8

  1948

  ADVENTURE WAS NOT a word that would have leapt to most minds in that apartment. Nothing wrong with Hillhouse Avenue, of course: the president of Yale lived next door. But 37 Hillhouse was cut up into thirteen flats, divvied out to married veterans with children. So thirteen couples lived in the house, each with a child, save for one couple with twins: that made forty souls altogether. And they were lucky to get the place. After the war, when almost ten million men and women suddenly qualified for the GI Bill, the campuses took the brunt of the avalanche. The vets lived in trailers, Quonset huts, abandoned barracks. At the University of California, couples were living in cars.

  Poppy and Bar were extra-lucky: they had their own bathroom. The two couples with whom they shared a kitchen also had to share a bathroom. That was apparently too much to take. So the two other couples feuded endlessly, and there were battles about the two refrigerators that three couples (and three children) had to share. One of the neighbors got so furious at the others that he brought in inspectors to test their germs. He claimed there were more germs in their fridge than in the sewers of New Haven. Mostly, the other couples never spoke. One family ate at five and the other at seven, so they wouldn’t have to pass. Well, Utopia this was not.

  But adventure ... it surely was, to Barbara Bush. New Haven was the first place Bar had lived on her own, without her parents, or some school authority (or the U.S. Navy, which greeted her as a bride) ruling her destiny in loco parentis.

  Ever since Bar could remember, her mother and older sister had imposed their wisdom on whatever Bar had to do. Her mother, Pauline Pierce, another daughter of the good Midwest (her father, James Robinson, served on Ohio’s first Supreme Court), was a woman of great and refined beauty, an insatiable, somewhat spendthrift collector of beautiful things, and a woman of expert enthusiasms. Horticulture, fine needlepoint, management of the home and children, matters of dress, taste, and decorum—Pauline had firm, often idiosyncratic, ideas on everything, and her notions, however insupportable, were not subject to argument. She was a joiner and a ferocious doer, who had, as Barbara concluded at length, not much sense of humor in general, and none about herself or her children. Barbara’s older sister, Martha, got her mother’s looks, her brains, and her temperament: she had definite ideas, five years’ more experience on the planet, and no discernible shyness about instructing her ungainly younger sister. What’s more, Martha was thin. Barbara was not.

  Barbara was what parents call a big-boned girl: at age twelve, she stood five-foot-eight and weighed, as she would forever recall, one hundred forty-eight pounds. Pauline had definite ideas on food, and the Pierces sat to a splendid table: garden vegetables shining with butter, mashed potatoes, real cream for the cereal. ... Pauline would urge: “Eat up, Martha ... Not you, Barbara ...” It was maddening: Martha stayed thin, no matter what. Barbara might have taken the contrast more to heart were it not for her father (whose big bones, after all, she’d inherited) defending his favorite.

  Marvin Pierce was a big, broad-faced man, easygoing, funny, a splendid athlete at Miami of Ohio, yet another scion of good Midwest manufacturers who’d moved the family east to New York, and thence to the stately commuter town of Rye, New York, as he climbed the ladder at McCall Publishing. By the time his third child, Barbara, was born, Marvin had long since learned to survive his wife’s fierce certainties with resort to irreverent humor and the quiet pleasures of the golf course.

  Barbara learned to survive, too, with her own mix of irreverence and imagination. She was a great reader, not only of the classic girls’ books of the day, Little Women, Jane Eyre, and the dog stories by Albert Payson Terhune, but also the serial stories that appeared in her father’s McCall company magazines. Then, too, there were McCall pattern books, suitable for Barbara and her friends to cut up, to dress a thousand paper dolls, for romance and daring exploit in all corners of the world. There was her dog, Sandy, to run with, her bike to ride through the neighborhood, tree-climbing, rope-skipping, swimming in Long Island Sound, tennis lessons (Barbara had her father’s—ungirlish, at the time—love of sport), and a general unconcern for dainty appearance. Even after she’d slimmed down to quite a lovely young woman herself; even after she’d followed Martha’s path, and Pauline’s notion of proper education, to three years at a finishing school (Ashley Hall) in South Carolina; even after she’d followed Martha, again, to Smith College (where Martha had been discovered by Vogue and photographed for its cover as “College Girl of the Year”); even after Christmas ’41, when her large bright eyes and open smile, her off-the-shoulder green-and-red dress, her flowing auburn hair and soft, pale skin had attracted the notice of Poppy Bush across the dance floor at the Round Hill Club in Greenwich, Connecticut, Barbara Pierce was a young woman notable for not putting all her stock in appearance. Identity (hers, at least) was distinct from pose. She was, fetchingly, Not That Way. In fact, as Poppy was amazed to discover, as they sat out a dance, then a second, and a third, she was better at spotting airs or airheads, better at eschewing pretense,
more direct, more down-to-earth, than he! And why not? Poppy was Not That Way as an act of civility. But Bar was a natural: hers was an act of survival.

  As for her, she thought he was, well ... wonderful. Attractive, accomplished at school, funny ... he wasn’t stuck-up like some big seventeen-year-olds could be ... he was just ... perfect! Bar would later tell her children that she married the first man she ever kissed. (It always made them retch when she said it.) Later still, when she was campaigning, and her life was laid out for viewing on a hundred hotel coffee tables, she was always asked: How did you know he was The One? Well, she’d say, it was simple: “Whenever he came into a room, I had a hard time breathing.”

  But for the moment, for a long time, there was still the family. ... Right after that fateful Christmas dance, Barbara came back from the Round Hill Club and mentioned she’d met a nice boy, Poppy Bush. That was at 2:00 A.M. By the time Barbara awoke the following day, Pauline had been on the phone all morning, finding out everything about the family. (Thank heaven, all reports were good.) Even after matters had progressed for two years, and Poppy and Bar were adult enough to plan a marriage, there was still a supply of female family wisdom:

  “Now Barbara, you’ll have to pick out silver, and you must get the most ornamental pattern you can find. Take it from me, dear, it’s so much easier to clean ...” So Bar scoured the stores for the plainest, flattest silver made. It was time to get out from under.