What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  So they drilled again ... and they hit. And drilled again ... and they hit. The way books were kept in the game, there were two classes of drilling expense. The first was capital expense, which was the wellhead, and the pump, the pipe and like tangibles, all of which could be depreciated over a ten-year term. The second class was called intangibles, and covered things like rental of a drilling rig, special mud to lubricate the drill bits, diesel fuel to operate the rig, labor costs ... and all of that was written right off the top of your taxes. With a setup like that, it almost paid you to keep drilling.

  So they did ... another hole ... and they hit. And another, and another ... and they hit.

  In the span of a year, Zapata and Perkins-Prothro drilled seventy-one holes ... and seventy-one of them hit. By the end of that year, they were pumping out 1,250 barrels of oil each day, at that time worth about $1.3 million a year. By the time the Jameson field was fully drilled, the partnership had bored 127 holes ... and 127 wells produced.

  George and Hugh were the first of the Midland independents to be worth a million apiece. All the fellows talked about them ... well, mostly they talked about Hugh. It was hard to talk to him anymore. Never around—too busy. George Bush they still saw—hadn’t changed a bit. Except now, you wouldn’t find him hanging around The Spot. He might take his lunch at the Petroleum Club. Sometimes he’d go with John Overbey—probably neither one was a member, but they’d go on Bush’s invite. Overbey had dropped out of Zapata—didn’t have much taste for the corporate business, went back to what he knew, which was land work, and leasing ... dropped off too early, as it happened. He lost out. But George Bush never lost a friend. Bush also teamed up with Bob Wood, one of the fellows who snuck in a week ahead on that Jameson deal, and those two started the Commercial Bank and Trust Company. Bush wasn’t quite thirty years old. Meanwhile, Zapata built its own office building in Midland. And hired more staff ... a little more stroke. And George and Bar got a new house, and then another, a bigger house. And then, they were the first of their crowd to have a swimming pool. ... And George Bush really liked that—everybody came over.

  17

  The Night of the Bronco

  THE FIRST THING YOU’VE got to know about Joe is the house. Probably the first thing he’d show you, anyway. You talk with Biden about anything ... somehow, it gets back to home. And the house is gorgeous, an old du Pont mansion, in the du Pont neighborhood called Greenville, outside Wilmington. It’s the kind of place a thousand Italian guys died building—hand-carved doorways, a curving hand-carved grand staircase that Clark Gable could have carried a girl down, a library fit for a Carnegie, or Bernard Baruch, someone like that. And a ballroom—can’t forget the ballroom. And a living room, about half an acre, and a bathroom upstairs the size of a gym, and all dusty rose outside, with beautiful brickwork over the windows, black shutters, white porches, a fountain, a pool ... the place is drop-dead stately.

  Joe found it one night, a couple of years after he became a Senator. He was driving around, like he did back then. He was snooping around Greenville, streets of his dreams, when he saw it, all overgrown, boarded up. Some developer was going to knock it down because the four and a half acres were worth more than the house. The du Ponts couldn’t take care of the place! ... But Joe had to have a look, so he pulled in, and shinnied up a pole in the darkness, onto a second-floor porch, and broke in through the plywood. And when he came out a few minutes later, he had to have it.

  Joe did a $200,000 deal for the house. That was more than he had, of course. But Biden never let money stand in the way of a deal. He got in the developer’s face and started talking—fast. Joe can literally talk fast. It’s like the stutter left it all pent up, and when he starts talking deal, he goes at a gallop. But the beautiful thing is the way he talks deal. By the time Joe’s finished talking, it wouldn’t matter if he didn’t have a thousand dollars cash ... in fact, that no one would see any cash, for years. When Joe Biden gets going on a deal, he’ll talk that deal until it’s shimmering before your eyes in God’s holy light ... like the Taj Mahal. ... Where do I sign?

  Anyway, when he moved in, he started finding out about the place. First winter, first three months, he used three thousand gallons of fuel oil. The top of the house was wide open. Squirrels were living on the third floor. So the second year, he had to get storm windows for the whole place. Of course, he didn’t have the money, so he had to sell off a couple of lots. He lived in fear that the place would need a new $30,000 slate roof. Meanwhile, the place was chock full of asbestos. He had to hire a guy to clean that out, but the guy wanted too much money for labor. So there were weeks when Joe was down in the basement, in a moon suit, ripping out asbestos.

  When he moved in, the old winding driveway led from Montchan Drive. But Joe couldn’t buy all the land that held the right of way, and then he pissed off the owner of the front lot, who put boulders in the driveway ... so Joe had to build a new one around the front—which was great because everybody who drove in would have to see the whole place. But he didn’t have the money to get that paved, so it turned to soup when the weather went bad ... and anyway, he sold the corner lot that held the start of that driveway, so he had to build a third driveway—a little one in the back that he could actually use. But he never liked that dumpy little third one, so eight years later he made a deal with the new owner of the front lot—cost him another fortune in landscaping—but he got the original driveway back.

  He killed one riding mower a year. He’d let the grass get three feet high, until he was going to have someone over, or a function at the house, or something ... then he’d attack with his riding mower, which had been out in the rain for six months. “These damn things aren’t built right,” he’d complain. “I gotta find one that works.”

  Upstairs, the third floor was still driving him crazy. At one point, he was going to lop off the whole thing. Brought in the architects for plans and everything. Why not? The house, the world, were malleable to his will. Then, he decided he’d keep the third floor, but close it off, with its own heating plant and a separate entrance. He could rent it. Maybe offices. He’d make a mint! He brought the architects back, and a contractor. Then he thought of the strangers around his home. He couldn’t stand that. No strangers were going to tromp around his dream world.

  Next, he envisioned a scheme where he’d take the ballroom, library, the entry hall and the carved staircase, the dining room, the living room, and he’d have them disassembled. Then he’d have those rooms reassembled, just like they were, in a house that was smaller, and new, and wouldn’t be so hard to run. See? Then he’d stick in wallboard where the great rooms had been and he’d sell the big place. So he brought back the architects and the contractor ... but it was too hard, so he stayed.

  Meanwhile, he planted. He liked hemlock trees. He found some old Czech guy who ran a nursery up in Pennsylvania. Joe didn’t want any three-foot saplings, no. This guy had big hemlocks. Rhododendron bushes, great ones. Yews—big old yews! See, Joe had to have privacy. When he started having to sell off lots, he had to plant more, so he’d have privacy. When he found this old nurseryman, Joe went bananas. ...

  Joe kept asking: “What’s the biggest you’ve got?”

  Twenty-foot hemlocks! Bushes! Huge bushes! A ton of dirt around the bottom of each.

  His pal Marty was with him that day: Marty Londergan, a dentist, Joe’s buddy from high school. “Joe,” Marty said. “How we gonna get all this shit back?”

  “Get a truck,” Joe said. Like everybody’s brother had a forty-foot flatbed in the garage.

  “Yeah,” Marty said. “Who’s gonna drive it?”

  “I’ll drive,” Joe said. “Used to drive ’em all the time.”

  Sure enough, Marty found somebody’s brother who’d lend a truck, and Joe drove the thing, overloaded, rocking and pitching, with trees hanging off the tail, down the back roads, an hour and a half, back to Wilmington. Then he started digging—a forty-five-foot trench, three feet deep and three
feet wide, through blacktop and paving stones. He was out there in gym shorts and hiking boots, sweating like a pig, with the headlights of four cars shining upon his ditch, with Jill leaning out the window to yell, “Come to bed, honey!” ... while an old friend or two propped the trees and bushes up in the ditch, so Joe could wall away his realm.

  “No, tighter!” Joe’d say.

  “I don’t know, Joe ...”

  “Tighter,” Joe said. He had to have privacy. The rhododendrons, he planted them two feet apart. Next weekend, he’s back for yews. He built a wall of yews around the swimming pool. Never mind there was no room for them to spread their roots.

  “Whaddya think?” Joe asked, grinning.

  Two years, of course, they’re all dead.

  But every time he sold a lot, he needed more trees. When people actually built on the lots, he couldn’t stand it. He spent thousands of dollars on a stockade fence around the whole place, a mile of fence. His friends started calling the place Fort Apache. But Joe had to have it. The day he got it all up, the neighbors began to complain. He had to take it all down.

  And each time he’d get a new scheme for more privacy, he’d have to sell another lot.

  After a while, he was down to three acres. One day, his friends came over to find the swimming pool area staked off. Joe was going to sell that land as a lot, and pick up the pool and move it. “Whaddya think?” Joe said.

  “I think you’re fuckin’ crazy.”

  The thing is, he never did get it sorted out. And now his older son, Beau, was getting ready for college, and Hunter, the second son, was just a year behind. And, of course, Joe hasn’t got cash—whatever he gets, the house eats for breakfast. That house loves cash. ...

  So that’s why Joe decided he had to have another house. This time it was seventeen acres, a $1.1 million estate ... an enormous main house with a sauna in the master bath, a swell apartment over the four-car garage ... and the outdoor pool had a separate cabana that was, itself, like a nice, suburban home ... and then, there was the tennis house, with the other sauna, and the indoor pool, and, of course, the indoor tennis court.

  He had the thing all gamed out in his head, the way he always did before he made a move, and he could see it, with his parents in the apartment, maybe brother Jimmy would build onto the little house, or take a couple of acres, build something new ... Joe and Jill and the kids would take the big one, and then a guest house ... it was a compound, it was ... Hyannisport! He could see the goddam thing in Life magazine, he could just about lay out the photos right now ... touch football on the grass, the house fuzzy in the background, him and his brothers, and the boys, sharp, in white—no, blue jeans!—with Beau-y running out for a pass, which Joe would throw—on a line, tight spiral—maybe catch the damn ball spinning in the air, if the photographer was any good. ... The Bidens. First Family.

  It was beautiful. And he could do it! He could make the deal! ... That’s what his guys were afraid of. The sonofabitch was just crazy enough to do it. That’s why they came up to Wilmington that night, that January—to tell Joe he couldn’t have the new house. And that’s how it began: The Night of the Bronco.

  But wait. Consider for a moment the deal and what it took. Not the money, or, rather, the paper flying back and forth—Joe could explain that, no one else could. Consider the psychic foundations of the deal, the pillars of its possibility.

  There was (to be perfectly blunt, as Joe would say) a breathtaking element of balls. Joe Biden had balls. Lot of times, more balls than sense. This was from the jump—as a little kid. He was little, too, but you didn’t want to fight him—or dare him. There was nothing he wouldn’t do. Joe moved away from Scranton, Pennsylvania, in ’53, when he was ten years old. But there are still guys in Scranton today who talk about the feats of Joey Biden. There was, for example, The Feat of the Culm Dump.

  Culm is the stuff they pile up next to the mine after they’ve taken out the coal. Every mine shaft in Scranton had a mountain of culm, and in the fifties, when people weren’t so picky about the air, the stuff was always on fire. There was just enough coal carbon left in the soot to cause spontaneous combustion; pile would burn for twenty, thirty years. So what you had, for instance, at the Marvin Colliery, down the hill from Green Ridge, three or four blocks from Joey’s house, was a mountain on fire, lava-hot on the surface, except where it burned out underneath, and then there’d be a pocket of ash where you could fall right into the mountain, if you stepped on it ... but, of course, no one was going to step on it ... until Charlie Roth bet Biden five bucks that Joey couldn’t climb the culm dump.

  Actually, Charlie bet two guys: Joey and his friend Tommy Bell. And they both started up the black mountain, but Tommy got to the first swath of fire, and the flames were a foot away from his feet, and he thought about the voids under ash above—it was maybe two hundred feet to the top, maybe twenty-five million tons of burning soot—and Tommy thinks: What the hell am I DOING? ... There is no way in hell, not a Chinaman’s chance in hell, that Charlie Roth is going to part with five dollars. Charlie did have a paper route. Maybe he had a couple of singles, but ... to this day, Joe Biden has never seen the five bucks. Of course, by the time he got to the top, the five bucks wasn’t the point anymore. It was more like ... immortality.

  That was certainly the point in the horrifying incident of The Dump Truck. This was a feat of Joey Biden that is still talked about in hushed tones, with rueful shakes of the head. Regret weighs most heavily on Jimmy Kennedy, who is a parent now, and a judge, and an upstanding citizen in every regard ... but who was four or five years older than Joe, and the one who dared him to run under the wheels of the moving dump truck. Thing was, Kennedy never, never—NO CHANCE—thought the kid would do it ... but Joey did it. The dump truck was loaded to the gills and backing up—not too fast—and Joey was small, only eight or nine, and he ran under the truck from the side, between the front and back wheels ... then let the front axle pass over him. If it touched him, he was finished—marmalade—but Joey was quick. The front wheels missed him clean.

  Joey was always quick, with a grace born of cocky self-possession. He didn’t—like some kids that age—doublethink himself, so his movements got jerky and he screwed up ... no. Once Joey set his mind, it was like he didn’t think at all—he just did. That’s why you didn’t want to fight him. Most guys who got into a fight, they’d square off, there’d be a minute or so of circling around, while they jockeyed for position. Joey didn’t do that. He decided to fight ... BANGO—he’d punch the guy in the face. Joe was kind of skinny, and he stuttered, and the kids called him Bye-Bye, for the way he sounded when he tried to say his name. But Joey would never back down, and he knew how to box, when no one else did. His father must have taught him—just the kind of thing Mr. Biden would know—manly art, and all that. So Joey got into fights, and BANG—it was over quick.

  What he was, was tough from the neck up. He knew what he wanted to do and he did it. That’s why he was the center of the wheel with the guys in Green Ridge, even with the stutter—might have beaten another kid down ... not Joe. Even after he left, after Mr. Biden got the job selling cars in Wilmington and moved the family away, Charlie Roth would still (in moments of duress) tell guys that his friend Joey Biden would come back and beat them up, if they didn’t watch out. (When Joe did come back, Charlie always had a list.) But it wasn’t just fights: if you could run, Charlie, or Larry Orr, or someone, would say Joe Biden could run faster. If you had a dog, they’d say Joe’s dog, King, could murder your dog. Joe was the guy they turned to when the question arose: What are we gonna do? Joe always had an answer.

  Sometimes, Saturdays, they’d go to the Roosevelt Theater, where the matinee, a double feature with a serial adventure, cost twelve cents—but they’d try to sneak in, anyway. When the villain was creeping up in evil ambush on the rocks behind Hopalong Cassidy, Joe was the one who’d stand in the darkened theater to yell: “LOOKOUT HOPPIE! HERE HE COMES!” But the best part was coming back from the
Roosie: with the route Joe led them on, it always took hours. If they’d managed to sneak in and still had their money, it could take an hour just to get to the corner: stops at the Grace Farms Dairy for milkshakes, and Mueller’s Drug Store for candy, and the Big Chief Market, just to raise hell. Then they’d head off, reenacting the movie on the way home, through the alleys, over lawns; they never used the streets, never touched a sidewalk. They climbed all the fences, cut through the backyards ... if it was a western, they were the posse ... up on garage roofs, along the top of the wall at Marywood College ... after war movies, they were up against the Nazis ... climbed a tree here, to get over the fence, or used the latch on a gate, or the garbage cans, for a boost (knocked one over back there, too), down past Joey’s house into the woods, and back across Maloney Field, where sometimes they played Little League ball ... and today, staged the final shootout: the bad guy dead in the dust on Main Street ... High Noon ... but actually, it was almost dark when they got home.

  Here is another game Joey devised: the sisters at Marywood College were building a new arts building, with a big theater, and at one end, behind the stage, where the sets and scenery would hoist up out of sight, the building would rise to a height of six stories. The builders were raising the steel beams with thick hemp ropes that held them in place until the riveters could secure the steel. Joe’s game was to climb the superstructure to the top, where you could edge out on a girder eighteen inches wide, maybe fifty or sixty feet in the air, and then you’d grab the rope and swing out over the stones and cinderblock, out over where the seating would be, screaming through the air, to the end of the rope’s reach, after which you’d come flying back toward the steel beams. Of course, Biden was the first to do it. He was ten. But he’d seen a Tarzan movie ... anyway, Joey had imagination.

  That was the imagination that went into the real estate deal, or this President deal—same thing. Imagination was the essence of his method, the first and most crucial step: Joe got the picture in his head, like he was already there, and he knew how it was going to be ... and most important, how he would be. Joe was continually creating himself. This was how he made things happen. ... Then, once he made that imagination into fact, once he made his move ... BANGO—that defined the game. Others could only react. Same in fights, games, politics, real estate, love—imagination.