What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  Gorbachev ran through every talk in Reykjavík, for an hour and a half, glancing down from time to time to his little leather book with handwritten notes. Hart was fascinated by the man’s mimicry, his recall, but he could not take up the invitation to dump on Reagan: Hart was here to advance, not undermine, American policy.

  Still, Gorbachev kept asking, demanding: Why? Why could Reagan not come up to it, when the moment was so right? His hands were tied! Reagan’s hands were tied! ... Gorbachev was like a guy on a barstool, poking a finger into Hart’s chest: Why? You tell me. You’re from that country. You explain it. ... And with every question, it was clearer: Gorbachev was looking for someone to ride the ripples with him. And with every question, Hart’s excitement grew. There would be someone, there is someone. ... But he could not say that.

  All he could do was try to keep Gorbachev from retreating to his old formulas. At one point, Gorbachev suggested that Reagan was captive to the military-industrial complex. It struck Hart false, tinny, like a phrase from the old Gromyko textbook. (Hart had met, two years before, with Gromyko; that day Hart said two things: “Good morning ...” and “Thank you very much for your time.” In between, Gromyko ranted and pounded the table.) Now Hart told Gorbachev: there was no monolithic “military-industrial complex” that had to make puppets of American politicians.

  The phrase was not his, Gorbachev objected. “That is from one of your Presidents.”

  True enough, Eisenhower said it. But that did not tell the whole story, Hart said. He, for example, was a Senator from Colorado, where the MX missile system was made—and yet, he voted against the MX. There were subtleties to the United States system that, perhaps, the General Secretary had yet to learn.

  No, Gorbachev said, his research was good, his advisers well informed. ... Here, he gestured with a courtly nod to his left, to Dobrynin. ... Anatoli Fyodorovich Dobrynin was newly back in Moscow, to serve at Gorbachev’s elbow, after more than twenty-four years as Ambassador in Washington. He’d observed American government under six Presidents, back to JFK. Now Hart, in turn, glanced at Dobrynin with the hint of a smile. He and the old Ambassador went back a few years, too.

  Yes, it’s true the Ambassador is well informed about American politics, Hart allowed. Indeed, the Ambassador is probably better informed than most American citizens. ... Of course, that did not stop the Ambassador from maintaining at lunch three years ago that John Glenn was a sure thing for the Democratic nomination for President; did not stop the Ambassador, in fact, from suggesting to his friend, Senator Hart, that he give up the race—Glenn was just too popular!

  Hart sat back and allowed himself a small chuckle (no more than Gorbachev allowed himself at that moment) and noted with satisfaction a becoming tide of pink that rose from the ancient Ambassador’s neckline, toward his snowy brow.

  Days later, in Vienna, the memory of that blush still drew a bark of laughter from Hart, as he retold the story. Of course, he hadn’t breathed a word of the joke in Russia. In fact, to the reporters in the National Hotel, he’d held himself to general, positive comments: Gorbachev was open, and interesting ... the meeting had been long, informative ... the General Secretary and he had agreed on the need for arms control progress with the current U.S. administration. ...

  It was left to Tass, the Soviet wire, to let the world know the important fact. The meeting with Senator Hart, Tass said, was “friendly and relaxed,” That was standard Soviet code for the essence of the matter: they’d hit it off fine.

  Vienna was celebration, and a day of decompression. The staff knew Hart had to have a day somewhere to rest and think. (This trip had started with a conference in Korea and a stop in Japan—Hart had flown around the world in a week.) And there were arms talks in Vienna that Hart could check in on: Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction talks—right up Hart’s alley. Warren Zimmerman, the chief U.S. negotiator, was a friend. His son, Tim, had worked on Hart’s New Hampshire campaign. And Zimmerman père was a pro on East–West relations: knowledgeable, experienced, but without a vested interest in the wisdom of the moment. Hart could run the Gorbachev meeting past Warren; it would be useful. ...

  Anyway, there had to be a stopover somewhere, and Vienna was the perfect middle ground between East and West. It was old, cultured, suffused with the half-decomposed air of empire, Hapsburgs, Mitteleuropa, of spies and assignations, of plots whispered over café tables ... the kind of place Hart liked to set scenes in his novels. (His second novel, Strategies of Zeus, had just been published in the United States. It was the story of a U.S. arms control negotiator, a quiet, raw-boned man from the Rockies whose life was caught up in a desperate struggle to save the world—a goal that came clearest to him whenever he gazed at his beloved daughter. ... Hart, of course, insisted it was not, in any way, autobiographical.)

  Withal, there was another reason for Vienna: Hart was determined to take Andrea to the opera, and when he got an idea like that, he was seldom brooked.

  No matter he was not a big opera fan, no matter the tickets would cost a fortune; the Staatsoper, the state opera house, was one of the world’s grandest, most sublime sites for music. Hart was resolved (as his parents had been on an education for him) that Andrea would have the advantages he never had... the familiarity, the ease with the world ... and with the worldly: in Ottawa, young Gary Hartpence never even went to the movies.

  So he had the day all planned: they’d fly in from Moscow early, check into the Imperial ... the hotel manager had figured out who he was (as so many hoteliers had, since ’84) and had bumped them up to a two-bedroom suite, all white-on-white, with huge bathrooms of gleaming white marble, towels as thick as a carpet, bathrobes even thicker, white linens, white upholstery, and ivory-intricate carpets: the perfect hotel antidote to Moscow’s grubby National ... like diving into an ocean of Schlag. Then off for a late breakfast, or at least one of those wicked Austrian treats, a ten-thousand-calorie orgy of hot chocolate and whipped cream. And then a walk around the city, Hart-style, into every old bookshop and twisty street that held mystery, promise. And then, perhaps, lunch, and a stop for a talk at Warren Zimmerman’s apartment, and then to the hotel, to rest, to make a few phone calls, and dress ... and on to the opera, and a glorious supper, and a fine night of sleep in a room constructed a hundred years before ... built for the Duke of Württemberg. It would be exquisite.

  But at the last minute, as a last mark of esteem for Hart, the Soviets decided to send on his plane (in fact, in his care) one of the refuseniks whose case Hart had brought up with Gorbachev—Rimma Brave, a Soviet Jew who needed cancer treatment in the West. Actually, she was kind of a pet case of Al D’Amato, the Senator from New York.

  So Hart escorted her out of the plane in Vienna, and someone from the embassy took them both to the VIP lounge, where there were cameras waiting ... along with Al D’Amato, who was looking a bit sour about Hart horning in on his refusenik. Unhappily for Al, the pic in The New York Times, the next day, showed Rimma Brave with Hart.

  Unluckily for Gary, the business with Al took some time, and when he got to the Imperial, breakfast was out of the question. Hart was still up for a whipped-cream treat, but Andrea and Doug had spotted a McDonald’s across the street. So they snuck over for a Big Mac, despite a look of unalloyed scorn from Hart, and when they got back, it was almost time for Gary’s stand-up on Good Morning America. This was something arranged by his staff in the U.S., a live satellite feed back to Joan and David and the whole of the U.S.A., just then waking up to a grisly gray working Thursday. So Gary had to leave the white-on-white suite to go to a rooftop somewhere in Vienna, to stand under a dripping tarp (it was fairly grisly in Vienna that day, too), chatting brightly with the anchor-humans.

  Thence he scooted right into his walk, and then to Warren’s for a talk about Gorbachev—had to cut that short—and back to the hotel, where he called Billy Shore, his number-one aide, who’d just moved to Denver, along with the rest of the Hart campaign crew. Billy was full of good news and arrang
ements: good press in Boston and New York, “Hart, Gorbachev Exchange New Ideas” ... That was the wire copy in other papers, too, and a new poll from U.S. News showed Hart well ahead of the Democratic pack; Hart at thirty-one percent, to Cuomo at nineteen, tied with “don’t know.” Nobody else was even close. ... And another poll from The Des Moines Register, arbiter of the nation’s first caucus, showed Hart in a cross-party race beating Bush—sixty-five to twenty-nine. ... And then there was the schedule for the weekend, as a matter of fact, day after tomorrow, when Hart, back in Washington (after another eight hours in the air), would make the radio response for the Democrats after Reagan’s weekly chat—Hart would have to get something written, maybe tomorrow, could they fax it? ... And day after that, Face the Nation, and Billy wanted to set up a conference call with Hart and the campaign brain trust on that: just the standard stuff—what’s our message, what’s the headline, what’s the sound-bite ... just had to be arranged.

  As always, Billy was quick and precise, calm, good-natured. Billy Shore, who’d worked with Hart since ’78, was a neat man, with thin blond hair and a round, boyish face that always seemed to look upon the world with quiet, self-sufficient pleasure. Shore was Hart’s point man, his gatekeeper and usual traveling companion. If you wanted to tell Hart anything, you could tell Billy, and he’d write it down in two or three neat words, on one side of his Hart-sheet, always an accordion-folded page from a yellow legal pad, which he kept in the same suit pocket, one sheet a day, every day. And when the time came, he would rattle them past Hart, and write the responses, in two or three neat words, which he’d then relay from the next stop, the next pay phone, the hotel that night ... Nothing got lost. Shore was impeccable. And the best part was, he was a man of sweet juices, which he used to lubricate Hart’s path through the world, or patch things up in his wake.

  Now, in the grand white suite, Hart was perched uneasily on the edge of a white chair, closer each minute to the front edge of the cushion, and his answers to Billy grew steadily shorter as Billy ran down another half-dozen notes—all arrangements. Billy could hear the growing edge in Hart’s voice—he knew his man. Mostly, it seemed to Hart, his life was consumed by schedules, arrangements, things he had to do before he could do what he meant to do ... like a man who lived in too small a house, who always had to move three things to get to the thing he wanted. (In fact, at that moment, Lee was moving them into a too-small house, their log cabin in the mountains outside of Denver, whose three rooms she’d already filled with stuff, while sixty-three cartons from Washington waited, stacked on the porch. ... That was another thing, he had to call Lee back: their friend Terry Tydings had called Lee from D.C., where she had ten copies of Hart’s book for him to sign. Should she take them to the office, or the Washington town house? It had to be arranged. ...) Mostly, it seemed to Hart, he never got a day to think—or even not to think—just to live, be himself, read, go to a bookstore, see friends, a movie ... to feed the individual mind, which, after all, was what he had to offer.

  Instead, what he got was arrangements—sixteen hours a day of arrangements. Things had to be done now, or yesterday, by the time he got to them. That’s what the staff in Denver was supposed to take care of—this time, he’d have a real campaign staff, not like ’84. No, this time, the machinery would all be in place. The First Circle was already moving, hauling lives, homes, and families out to Denver, where offices were already assembling ... 1600 Downing Street, a propitious address—and cheap rent. But somehow, it didn’t lighten the load on Hart. It was just more people for him to teach that it wasn’t about arrangements ... that he wasn’t going to stop, today, now—this minute!—to call the Democratic Chairman of Cumquat County, who was so pissed off ... not even if Hart’s own county coordinator, Mary Makeadeal, said he had to call the Cumquat County Chairman, NOW ... or she’d walk! No, that’s not how it was going to be ... not this time.

  “You feel good about it?”

  Billy’s voice in the phone—he wanted to know about Gorbachev.

  Hart said: “It was ... incredible.” And he gave Billy the outline of the meeting, its length, its sweep. He did, he told Billy, what he’d come to do: he had opened a relationship ... it was important.

  “Yeah, that’s great. I talked to Hal and Dixon”—two of Hart’s senior campaign staff—“and everybody said it was, you know, a really good move. Politically, it played really well, people were just really proud of you, you know, dealing with another world leader. It’s perfect, in terms of what it does to your stature, you know, fits perfectly with that strategy, and Face the Nation, Sunday ...”

  Hart cut in: “No.”

  Hart’s voice had that clipped tone.

  “... No, Billy. This was important.”

  He shouldn’t have to tell Billy that it wasn’t about talk shows, or polls, stature gaps, strategy, not even about becoming President. This was about being President.

  That was the Hart-fact underneath: Hart was getting ready to be President. Not because he thought he had the race won—just the reverse. He knew, somehow, in that extrarational way that led him to most of his truths, that this would be a difficult campaign—vicious, more like it—that’s what he feared. That’s why he had to be ready, now. He had to decide, to know, where he wanted to lead the country. There would be no time to do the work, no time to think, in the campaign. Hart knew what the campaign could do to a man, the constant, restless, know-nothing drive that the system now demanded. Save for Jesse Jackson, who’d run in ’84, Hart was the only Democrat who knew about the bubble. Hart remembered ’84, after New Hampshire, when he touched down at a hundred airports in the space of twenty days, screaming out his New Ideas into the wind on the tarmacs until he was hoarse, weary, shrunken inside around a kernel of himself that he had to protect ... or lose himself altogether. He knew he made mistakes in exhaustion. He knew exhaustion would come again. Hart knew the American campaign system like no one else: he’d helped to invent the long march with McGovern in the run-up to ’72.

  And he knew, they’d have to come at him. They’d try to make him the issue. Like Mondale did in ’84, when Hart had him down on the mat: “Where’s the beef?” Mondale said. That wasn’t about issue papers, Hart had spoken on the issues for two years. What Mondale was saying was: Who is this guy? Where’d he come from? ... And it worked, God knows. This time, they’d come at him harder. And the only thing Hart could do was to get his ideas out there now, to make his ideas the issues. They were his only protection. That’s why he’d spent the last two years, since ’84, building his program, like a brick wall: the book on military reform, the comprehensive trade bill, his own version of the federal budget, the Georgetown lectures on foreign policy, and, soon, the education speech ...Where is that speech? What are they doing with the time? ... That speech would be another brick. That wall had to get built.

  And people would see. He trusted that much. That’s what he kept trying to tell the staff about the “stature strategy.” It wasn’t just a trick to make him stand above the others. It had to be based on a rock-solid fact: he knew what he wanted to do, when the others were just peddling sound-bites. And he knew, now ... much better since the morning with Mikhail Gorbachev. He knew it like he knew every grand Hart-fact, knew it whole and instantly, without a train of reason ... It was the same feeling, the same rush of glorious certainty he’d had six months before, in the Middle East, with King Hussein, and Shimon Peres, and Hosni Mubarak. The old formulas were dead. That’s what Gorbachev was saying to him in a dozen different ways: something great, and new, could occur.

  And it fit. It made perfect sense with the first year in the White House, the agenda that Hart had, even now, running through his head. He hadn’t told anyone, not even Lee. ... But he knew: Gorbachev would be first. Hart would send an emissary to Moscow, even before he took office, to plan an early summit with the Reykjavík agenda: the zero option—no more missiles. They could make it happen. Within ten years, there would be no arms race. He’d invite Gorbac
hev to his inauguration. Hart knew it whole: Gorbachev would come ... and that would wake the world to the change within its reach. And after that summit—as early as February ’89—Hart would set the Secretary of State to detailed negotiations to make real the end of the Cold War. And when those talks were under way, then ... he would go to the Middle East. Himself, he would do it, and in a room with Hussein and Peres and Mubarak, he would work out an end to those wars, that madness. He had already talked to them all, and he knew, there was basis for an agreement. Real peace would take years. But the framework could be set up now, had to be set up now. ... And by the summer of ’89, he’d be back in the U.S., where he’d set in motion a reform of the nation’s basic institutions: military reform—only from the White House could America change how it thought about defense, and then work out what that meant for weapons, basic equipment, training, troops. And education: a total overhaul, freeing up new ways in which people could study, but all based on conservative subjects—languages, classics, more science, mathematics. It had to be done from the White House. ... And there was more: industrial policy, trade, energy, environment—fundamental changes. He saw it whole. And he could do it.

  But he could not do it without a campaign to match that boldness. He could not get there by cutting deals with the politics-as-usual pros who signed on because they liked his chances. It was not going to be that way—could not be. And he couldn’t get there if the campaign was about him, even if magically he could transform himself to the perfect pitch of slogan and slow grin—it would not work. Unless he was hauled into office by his ideas, there would be no mandate, no way to govern. And there’d be no point: Why would he give his life over to this, if it were not for the notion that he could do something great? He didn’t have to be President, not for him—maybe for the kids; he could see it that way, sometimes, for their future—but for him, he could live without. He could write books. He could have ... a life of his own. That was the other truth: he could not do it by losing every shred of himself in ninety-nine Iowa counties, by shaking every hand at every steak fry, press conferences at every airport in every state. What was that for? Ideas did not come from meetings of consultants thinking up slogans, certainly not from press conferences. Ideas came from something deeper, from the life that underlay the candidacy. If there was no life, no time to think, what was the point? That’s what he kept telling the Schedulers: he had to have time, somewhere—anywhere—a day to live, to graze on the world. It wasn’t because he was lazy, God knows. He’d work like a beast, a wiry old donkey. But what was the point, if there was no life inside him? What use would he be then?