What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  It was left to Jean to make the message explicit, which she did in her own fierce Finnegan way. She told those kids, every day, over and over, that they were Bidens. And there was nobody better than a Biden. Nobody was better bred. In fact, Jean Biden had a set of lessons for those kids—all interlocking, all important.

  The most important was: tell the truth, and do what you promised. “Whatever you do,” she’d say, “if you tell us, we’ll do anything we can to help. But if you ever tell me one lie, I’ll never trust you completely again.” And the most solemn thing you could say was, “I give you my Biden word.”

  Whenever a Biden kid needed help, all Biden kids had to drop what they were doing. Jean told them, again and again: “There is nothing in life but family. ... There is no one on earth closer than brother and sister. They’re the same blood! Even closer than parent and child. It’s the same blood!”

  And they must take care of themselves. They didn’t have to put up with guff. They were Bidens, and Bidens did not have to take anything. If someone in school was bothering her child, Jean would counsel: “Well ... punch ’em in the nose!” Or sometimes, to Frankie, or Jimmy, she’d advise: “Why don’t you take your brother Joe along? He’ll show you how to throw a punch.” ... One time she paid Jimmy two bucks to give another boy on the block a bloody nose. That kid was impossible! ... When a nun at school got it into her head that Jean’s daughter ought to be named Valeria (which she pronounced Val-er-ee-ah), Jean told Val not to stand up if that nun could not learn her proper name. “You have to respect the habit,” Jean said. “But not necessarily the person in it.” And the next day, Valerie, trembling for her mortal soul, refused to stand in class. She was scared to death of what the nun would do ... but she was more afraid of coming home and telling Mom that she’d knuckled under.

  With Joey, Jean Biden never had to supply the will: he knew what he wanted to do. She would always recall, when he was two, and playing on the kitchen floor, with a spoon, whanging and banging her pots and pans—noise to wake the dead!—she asked him, please, to stop. Joey looked up at her with his blue eyes flashing anger, and he said: “Look, Mom. You do your work, I’ll do mine. Okay?”

  And that was fine with her. The one thing she didn’t want was followers—anything but that. She wanted her kids to drive their own trains. Whatever they wanted to do—that was fine. As long as it was theirs ... and their way, as Bidens. That’s what Jean’s lessons always came back to:

  “You’re a Biden. You can do anything. There’s nobody, anywhere, better than you. Maybe just as good, in a different way ... but not any goddam better.”

  “Look, I don’t want Bobby Kennedy. I want my own stuff. I’ll say it my own way. And I’m gonna say it better than any ... well, okay, look, here’s what I’m gonna say ... first, I’m gonna tell ’em they may not like it, but it’s time to stop screwing around. We’ll use the economy thing—‘... forces of decline.’ Then, I’m gonna go for the other problems, the education thing first ...”

  Joe had his hands on the speech now, and he was running through the moves in his head, making his guys into the audience, trying out each line, the order, the cuts. ... These meetings could go on all day, all night, when a big speech was in the works.

  “You guys may not believe this, but I’m absolutely convinced—absolutely ... I was talking to Jill about it—that the most important thing I’m gonna do in this whole campaign is education: okay, listen to this ...”

  Sometimes, it was hard to see what the other guys were in the room for—what they thought they were doing. Except Caddell: Pat would break right in and start correcting Biden, arguing ... and then those two would go at it, an hour at a time, one-on-one, while Joe chopped up Caddell’s text, and Pat fought a bloody, line-by-line retreat. Caddell would stew, and start muttering into his beard: “You just don’t understand this, Joe. That’s the problem. This is very, very important, that this stay exactly here ... said exactly like this.”

  “Why, Pat?” Joe’s jaw was clenched, and his teeth showed in a little grin.

  “Oh, well, okay, fine.” Caddell was steaming, too—he wouldn’t look at Biden. “Do it your way. Fine. We’ll do it your way.”

  “Pat, don’t give me that crap. What’s the problem?”

  “Well, if you don’t understand, Joe, you know, I can’t explain it to you.”

  Then Joe blew. Exploded:

  “It’s my fucking campaign! I’ll say this the way I want to. I don’t like this. This is yours and Mark’s bullshit. I know your bullshit. Remember? You think this is some kind of fucking crusade. It’s not. We’ve got to talk to regular Americans.”

  When Pat knows he’s lost the argument, he just laughs. So now he was forcing a chuckle. It wasn’t that they wanted to make Joe into Robert Kennedy ... it just happened that Robert Kennedy was important ... to the time, to a whole generation. And that was the message: that a whole generation was lost, submerged, driven off from the struggle for a better world, twenty years ago, in ’68, bloody ’68, the Year of the Locust, and the Tet Offensive, the Chicago Convention, and Richard Nixon, and the murders of Martin Luther King and ... Bobby KENNEDY! That was the whole fucking point! ... That a whole generation had to come back now, that they had to wake up!

  That’s what Caddell and Mark Gitenstein talked about for months, that’s why the California speech was hung up—why there was no speech, for months—while they tried to get it right. That was the generational message. And now, they got a speech ... and it was like Joe didn’t get it.

  Joe said he got it. He also said he’d heard the same shit from them for three straight years, since Atlantic City, and this speech had to be more. This speech had to be about him, why he should be President. And now there’s only days till he has to give the goddam speech, and he wanted his words. So Joe took out a lot of “my generation” stuff. Meanwhile, he marched around the room, running through the lines, like he wanted them to sound.

  “Then I tell ’em: the education system—the dual education system—is exactly the model of what Reagan has done ... on everything. Dividing the haves and have-nots. That’s what we’re really trying to get to, right? ... Well, that’s what I’m trying to get to ...”

  This is how he always did it—out loud, with his guys in attendance upon him, to listen, to react, while he worked the thing around in his head. Always been the same way, since the start, since ’72, when he’d get Caddell and John Marttila down to Delaware, and they’d sit down in the kitchen to figure out the moves. And it worked, God knows: he won three terms, won bigger each time he ran. That’s why Marttila was still on board, still came down from Boston to run the meetings—as much as anyone could run those things. And Caddell was heading off to California, to teach at Santa Barbara, but Pat would still do the message. Like everyone in the Biden world, Joe was just waiting for Caddell to find the message, to hit that big nerve in the public knee that would focus the whole Biden campaign. Pat was a fucking genius! That’s why Biden would wait for months. ...

  But for months, Caddell was dry. Around the turn of the year, he gave Joe some kind of mega-memo that concluded this was the sixties, all over again. Twenty years since Sergeant Pepper. Twenty years, and we’re coming full circle. And look! Here’s proof! Even the Monkees are coming back! Well, that was nice, but what about the speech? ... So, by that time, everyone in Joey’s orbit was trying to come up with message—hey, without message, Biden’s not going to run; he said that a hundred times, he’s got to have a message! And what made it harder: it wasn’t just two or three guys sitting down now—sometimes there were twenty guys in the room, each with his own idea. It was a tribute, when you thought about it: guys wouldn’t be here if they didn’t think Joe could do it—do it better than anyone else. That’s why they kept coming at him ... why they wanted him to run. The best in the business, coming at him for years ...

  Lots of politicians say people come to them, asking them to run for the White House, but with Biden, it was true. Caddell and D
oak and Ridley all ganged up, in ’83, wanted Joe to go against Mondale ... and he almost did. Filled out the papers, almost filed for the primary in New Hampshire. Hell, you had to think about it, when guys that smart believed you could do it. Joe knew they were smart. In fact, that was one of the reasons he called them all in, wanted to have all the gurus around: just their presence, their willingness to be there, was proof... he’s doing something right.

  But the problem was Guru Madness—and it didn’t have anything to do with Joe. They were after each other. Doak—David Doak—Joe liked him. He could be very influential with Joe. And Doak loved Biden, always wanted him to run ... always. But Doak was partners with Bob Shrum, the old Teddy Kennedy speechwriter. They had a consulting firm, Doak and Shrum ... and Shrum thought Biden was a looneytune. So the whole thing with Doak was on-off, on-off, while Doak tried to work it out with Shrum.

  And the two of them, together, used to be with Caddell, except now they hated each other. In fact, it was Joe who had to sit them all down, back in ’85, and work out their separation agreement. He got them all in a room for a whole day, with these big bowls of candy on the table, and he made them crazy with candy, until they sugar-shocked, and finally he got them to sign the deal. But Caddell said Doak and Shrum still owed him money—a couple of hundred thousand dollars from campaigns they did together—and he was going to sue, he wouldn’t drop it ... when did Caddell ever drop anything? So Doak and Caddell both loved Joe, but they weren’t going to work together—and Shrum didn’t want to be listed on the same sheet of paper with Caddell.

  So, instead, Caddell formed a consortium with Marttila, and those two figured they’d buy the airtime for the commercials. That’s where the money is in campaigns—from commissions on the purchase of TV time ... that’s worth millions. So Ridley was working on Doak and Shrum (fuck Caddell—Ridley would lose Caddell in a minute!), and he’d almost got Shrum convinced that Biden was for real, serious about this, and, of course, Doak would have come along, with pleasure, even would have worked with Caddell ... but then Ridley and Donilon mentioned their progress with Shrum to Marttila, and Marttila had a fit. Shrum, he said, is not ethical. Of course, that’s what Marttila said about anybody he didn’t like. Marttila’s a big guy, Nordic (the name is from Finland), and imperious. So when he didn’t want something, or someone, he’d pull himself up to his full Viking height and say they were not up to moral snuff. This time, he added: “I would have to reconsider my participation in the campaign.” Of course, he really didn’t know shit about Shrum. The real problem was, Marttila didn’t want to cut Doak and Shrum in on the airtime. No fuckin’ way! So, then, they were going to lose Marttila.

  But it wasn’t just these professional pitbulls—no, with Biden, there had to be more. He’d also got, from Boston, Tommy Vallely, who used to serve in the Massachusetts State Legislature, and ought, by all rights, to have been with Dukakis—except he didn’t like Dukakis, and he loved Joe Biden. So, Vallely had to be factored in, with full guru status, on account of his personally ballsy move. And from Chicago, Joe had Bill Daley, son of the old Mayor, and a hell of a pol, and a Daley has to get listened to—which, in this case, probably wouldn’t do any harm. And sometimes, Daley was joined by Joe Cari, another Chicago op, who also was there on account of a personal relationship to Joe, and also quite savvy on politics. But the way things were going, it never got to politics ... Joe couldn’t say if he was running, they couldn’t get a speech out the door ... so how was anybody doing politics for him? And then there were more Washington guys—came in like roaches. The one Joey wanted was John Reilly, Mondale’s main man for thirty years, a guy who knew a hell of a lot, and Reilly was in there, but he wasn’t dropping anything else, which bothered Joe. What the hell did he have to do to come first with these guys? They were still in their consultancies and their law firms, and no one was coming in every morning, to run his campaign. Hey, what gives? ... So, there was endless talk about how to get Reilly signed on. And then there were a bunch of free-lance gurus, who couldn’t even decide whether they were in the campaign business. Hodding Carter showed up at meetings, and he was working for public TV. And William Schneider, the ubiquitous pilgarlic, who worked for anybody, wrote a column, and showed up on TV whenever anyone spent a dime to call him—he was in there, too ... no one knew why.

  And, of course, all these guys wanted to talk—that’s all these guys do is talk—but with Biden in the room, what they mostly did was listen (“... So all I’m gonna say about Japan—the whole competitiveness thing—is ... I don’t want to compete. I want to win! ... ”).

  So what they did was, they’d get out of the meetings, and then they’d talk ... to their friends in the press. Hell, some of them were press. So everybody in the country who could read knew that Biden wanted to run, but he wasn’t going to run without message ... and he didn’t have a message ... nothing to say.

  Great.

  Of course, that meant every day, every few days, there’s another columnist on the phone to the staff—they want Joe’s comment on the “message problem.” And that meant the staff had to come to the meetings, too. They were the ones had to answer this shit. Anyway, they had to keep an eye on Joe and the gurus, make sure the Senate stuff didn’t get screwed up, and committee stuff... Joe must have said a hundred times, he wasn’t going to run unless the Senate piece, the Judiciary Committee, could be kept on track ... that was Number One, right? And when you got down to it, the staff people were the only ones who were doing anything. The gurus talked about the Senate staff like misfits and weak links—like Joe would fire them all, if he wasn’t such a softie. Meanwhile, the only thing the campaign could do right was raise money—and that was Ted Kaufman, the Chief of Staff. And the only guy who actually wrote a speech that Biden liked was Mark Gitenstein, from the committee staff. Gitenstein wrote the Atlantic City speech, and that was the biggest “connect” Joe had. Gitenstein was supposed to be organizing the Judiciary staff—that was Number One, right? But he was also talking to Ridley, every night, and trying to plug pennies into Caddell’s fusebox ... they had to get a speech that connected—or Joe wouldn’t go.

  “And the first cut on this,” Gitenstein counseled Ridley, “has to come from Pat ...” In other words: back off of Caddell. Joe wasn’t going to take message from anybody else.

  So for a while, Ridley stopped trying to ax Caddell, hoping maybe they’ll get the goddam speech. And he made a resolve, to live with the Guru Madness—he would work with them all, get them all to work with Joe ... whatever it took. And then, one night, he was up in Wilmington with Biden, and Joe said: “Fuck ’em. Let’s get rid of ’em all.”

  And Ridley just stared at Biden, like he must have heard wrong, while Joe said: “You know, it’s like pulling a tablecloth out from under the dishes. I always worried I was going to bust all the dishes. Now, you know, I don’t even care. I just want the table clear. ...”

  Then, with barely a pause for breath, Joe said: “This is between us. Don’t tell anybody.”

  Now, what the hell did that mean? If you’re going to get rid of them, who cares if they know? Was Ridley supposed to do this secretly?

  Turned out, they couldn’t do it at all. Because the message had to come from Caddell. And if they fired everybody and kept Caddell, the press would immolate Biden. What a story! Pat Caddell body-snatches another candidate ... this time, it’s the Biden-pod! ... The only reason they could keep Caddell was, the Washington wise-guy pundits thought that Doak, and Donilon, and Marttila, and Reilly were adults. Otherwise, everyone would just assume Pat was pouring his screed nonstop into Biden’s ear ... they didn’t know, of course, Pat was stuck on the first goddam speech.

  But Gitenstein was on the phone to Caddell: “Pat, I think I got it. You’ve got to listen to this song.” So Pat went out and got the album—Invisible Touch, by Genesis—and listened to the track that Mark named, about saving the world, just us together, the one that had the hard sixties beat, “Land of Confusion.”


  That was it—exactly—what they were trying to say, what Joe should be saying: what he had said, a dozen different ways. It was time to bend the spirit of the country to renewal. It was not a matter of position papers, or fourteen-point programs on trade, or higher ed. It was about waking up the whole damn country!

  “That’s it,” Caddell reported back. He was writing, finally. He was writing a speech. He actually produced a speech. It was about renewal, healing the wounds that had only scabbed over since ’68 ... fateful ’68, the end of the dream. And that’s what Joe Biden would be out there to do. To reawaken the dream of a better land.

  I won’t be comin’ home tonight.

  My generation will put it right.

  That was the song. ... In the Biden campaign, every message had a song. This was a new generation, the first MTV campaign; every message guru had a song to back him up, or a video, or a whole movie ... they were always talking movie-talk.

  “What Joe has to do,” said Gitenstein, in epiphany, to Ridley, one midnight, “... he’s got to break through The Big Chill!”

  And Ridley was earnestly nodding. Movie-talk meant something to him. That’s what Ridley would do to cool out, he’d rent videos. One night, that January, after another day of Guru Madness, Ridley brought home a British movie, a George Stephens, Jr., film. And Ridley was flat on his back, idly watching, and there was a speech in the film, a quote from Shakespeare, Henry V: