What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

  For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

  Shall be my brother ...”

  And Ridley concluded, right there on his couch, that this would be the tenor of the Biden campaign ... a band of brothers ... that’s what he would make of them ... no matter what ... united to move the world!

  And then, his phone rang, and he said, “Hello?” ... and he heard in the earpiece:

  “You tell Doak ... I am going to ... FUCK HIM! ...”

  It was Caddell’s voice, dripping bile and deadly resolve. He had a message for Ridley to pass on, about his dispute over the $200,000 ...

  “You tell Doak ... all I have is time and money.”

  Maybe Pat didn’t see enough movies.

  Thing was, Joe didn’t see those movies, either—and rock ’n’ roll, well ... it wasn’t him. Joe didn’t know what The Big Chill was, much less how to break through it. Sometimes, he tried to explain to his guys, when they got into this generation thing: ’68 ... he really wasn’t, you know, in that. ... He was married. He had kids. Anyway, even in college, he was the guy who wore a suit jacket to class.

  But that didn’t matter—not to the gurus. There was truth to be sung: a generation, a nation, to awaken!

  So, Joe ripped up the speech, chain-sawed half the stuff about the sixties. But Pat’s stuff was like kudzu—kept coming back. Caddell and Gitenstein got another draft together, and took it up to Wilmington—to the house—January 31, only hours before Joe was supposed to go to California.

  But Joe took a look—read the first page—and ripped into the damn thing again. He started crossing out lines and writing between the typescript ... and then he started pulling it apart—physically ripping pages off and putting them in piles on the study floor, the couch, the desk ...

  “Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do. Pages 3 through 6, now that’s gonna go in roman numeral III. The rest of that shit from that section, that’s out. Then, we’re gonna make a new roman numeral VII. That’s the stuff about me and the Kennedy funeral train, and all that ... then we’re gonna make a new transition ...”

  Now Biden had a legal pad, and he was writing a transition, on the spot, that was supposed to bridge to the new section VII, and then he read what he wrote to the others, and then he said it, off the cuff, in a different way, and he wrote that down instead ... and he was pointing at the piles of paper and the odd pages on the couch, with the chicken scratching, where he wrote on them, and he had the idea, somehow, that one of the Delaware staff guys, Bob Cunningham, was going to get all this retyped before he had to go ... but Joe already ought to go ... and Caddell was on the floor, on his knees, bent over the piles of paper—overweight, overwrought, the smell of burnt wires coming off his head—arguing: You gonna cut this? This shit is important! ... And Gitenstein was trying to make notes on Biden’s notes—because someone was going to have to get this shit together again, in a hurry ... and Spike, Tommy Lewis, Joe’s old high school friend, who worked in the Delaware office now, edged into the room with a little smile that said, Joe, don’t pull this shit on me ... and he said aloud, “Joe, I can get to the airport pretty good, but ...” Joe was still writing, and talking at the same time, telling Pat to leave that goddam pile alone: That shit’s out! He’s not gonna say it. And Pat said, what about 11 and 12? Eleven and 12 are not out! And Joe said he’s got those pages—from the other copy, right here. And Tommy Lewis edged back into the study, but this time, he had his coat on, he meant it ... and Joe glanced up with a look that said, Awright. Spike. I KNOW. And Joe ripped a couple of pages off his pad, and put them on the pile that he said was roman numeral II, but the pages he ripped out from the beginning were on there—they were supposed to be in roman numeral III, over there, near the fireplace, so Joe headed for them ... when Jill came in and grabbed him—laid hands on him, and looked in his eyes, and said:

  “Joe. Now. It’s time.”

  So Caddell started grabbing papers, got them under his arm in a raggedy yellow-white pile, and said, “Well, I guess I’ll just have to go with him ...” Which was probably his plan all along.

  And Joe said to Gitenstein, “You wanna go, too? ... No? ... Okay.”

  Joe slipped his coat on, and stretched his jaw up and out for an instant, while he pinched with a deft thumb and forefinger at the tight little knot of his tie, under his Adam’s apple, and he shrugged once, almost a shiver, that magically straightened out his jacket and coat. ... And, all at once, there he was, Senator Biden ... svelte, handsome, calm, clear, stepping with a smile, out the door of his mansion. ... He had a speech to make, across the country, three thousand miles away, today. And he was ready.

  Almost ready. They did use the whole flight to work over the speech. And they had to find a typist in Sacramento. And even then, after they landed, there was an emergency call back to Gitenstein:

  “Mark, you still got roman numeral VII? The old section VII? Could you telecopy it? ...”

  Somehow, those pages got lost along the way.

  But, you know, some of that shit wasn’t half bad, once Joe got a chance to hear it, in his head.

  From Sacramento, Joe called home, to Jill. She was the one with whom he shared his satisfactions. “Listen to this, honey ...”

  And he read her two paragraphs from the speech, a critique of Reagan’s Religion of the Bottom Line:

  “But this standard cannot measure the happiness of our children, the quality of their education, or the promise of their future. ... It cannot measure the intelligence of our public debate, or the integrity of our public officials. It counts neither our wit nor our wisdom, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country.

  “That bottom line can tell us everything about our lives ... except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America ... except that which makes us proud to be Americans.”

  Joe said to Jill. “I told you we had the best speech writers.”

  And she could hear in his voice that game-day quiver. Joe was taking the speech inside, letting himself feel it. That’s how the “connect” happened: on game day, Joe stopped planning his moves, and just did, by feeling, by the spring of the field beneath his feet, the sound of the crowd, and the words, singing in his head. ... And when he felt it—he could make them feel it ... he could make them feel him.

  And he did. Lord, he laid it out that day. It was a big hall in Sacramento, maybe three thousand souls, and he grabbed them, and held on. He could feel the whole hall sit up and listen, when he got to that stuff about the bottom line. And when he got to the end, when he did the dream, and the dreamers ... with conviction, and something like joy, ringing in his voice:

  “Just because our heroes were murdered ... does not mean the dream does not still live ... ”

  They stood up—three thousand people, who did not know him, who’d never seen him until that day, that hour—stood up at the close of that line, and stopped him with applause and cheers, a standing ovation. ... God, they were hungry, for something, someone ... and he could be that someone: Joe Biden could make them feel.

  And when that happened ... then, it was not so important that he could not see himself already in the end zone. Goddammit, he was doing something right. He was halfway down the field. He had the “connect.” And in the end, that’s what he needed, what Joe Biden had to have. In the end, he was as hungry to feel it as they were.

  When that happened ... then he really believed—not a doubt in his mind, word as a Biden—he was going to be President. They’d figure out the moves, they’d hit the nerve in the knee. He had a lot of smart guys with him ... and Pat was a genius—if you knew how to handle him, he could do miracles ...

  Yes, he could.

  Pat tried another miracle that afternoon: he tried to change a speech that was already given, the speech he’d handed to Joe that day, in Sacramento. Joe was still receiving congratulations, still working the hall, pumping hands and meeting new friends, sh
rugging off compliments, when Pat made another emergency call, back East, to Gitenstein:

  “Mark ... have you put out a press text?”

  “Text?... Pat, I don’t even know what he ended up saying. You assholes never even called me. I’m sitting here and nobody calls me to tell me how it went.”

  “It went fantastic,” Caddell said, but his voice was nervy, spooked. “Mark, we got a problem. This paragraph ...”

  “What paragraph?”

  Caddell said it was the stuff about the “bottom line.”

  Gitenstein was relieved. “Oh, I love that paragraph.”

  “Yeah. Well, if you put out a text, it’s gotta have quotes around it.”

  “Shit. Who’s it from?”

  “Well, it’s from a great American.”

  “Who?”

  “It’s a great American.”

  “Pat, don’t fuck around with me. Who is it?”

  “Well ...” Caddell’s voice was small as he said it, the name he couldn’t bring up with Joe ... Caddell murmured into the phone:

  “Bobby Kennedy.”

  18

  They Expect to Be Cold

  WHEN THE END CAME, it was six months after Tet, and LBJ already had shocked the world with his announcement, that he’d pack it up and walk away ... in ’68, Year of the Locust—that was a big year for Dick Gephardt, too. Actually, it happened after the convention in Miami, where they nominated Nixon, and just on the day when the Democrats gathered in Chicago, where Humphrey would beat back McCarthy’s legions, and Mayor Daley’s cops would beat up anyone they saw, in bloody Grant Park. ... That was the end of the dream, after Dr. King was gunned down, and the riots scorched a score of cities, and Bobby Kennedy lay dying in a hotel kitchen ... a year of terrible death it was. But the big one, the one that changed Dick’s life, didn’t happen in Memphis, L.A., or Chicago. It happened in sleepy South St. Louis: the death ... of Phelim O’Toole.

  You couldn’t really call it a shock. Phelim would have been seventy-five that year, he’d been failing, arthritis had him down, and, of course, his lungs were in no shape, either, after half a century of his cigars. It was almost that long he’d been a ward leader, and maybe half that time he’d had his job downtown as Clerk of the Circuit Court. In those days, the Ward Committeemen still got jobs. And after forty years in the game, Phelim had one of the best. See, with the clerkship came some bailiff jobs, and under-sheriff jobs and office jobs and such, not to mention a certain amount of legal work to direct to your friends, or to friends of your friends. In fact, the Fourteenth Ward was entitled, by custom and its Democratic primary vote, to pluck from the great City Hall tree about fifty or sixty jobs. It was all part of the system that started block-by-block in the precincts and went all the way up to the Mayor, Al Cervantes. Wasn’t any different, in substance, from Dick Daley’s system in Chicago—that’s why Daley’s army of cops was out there, that August, cracking heads in Grant Park, loyal to the Mayor rather than the law ... it was the system. And in South St. Louis, in the Fourteenth Ward, Phelim O’Toole was that system.

  Not that Phelim was the kind to crack heads—he was conservative, yes (matter of fact, his son went on to write the hard-line Missouri abortion law at issue in the Supreme Court’s Webster case), but that’s how the whole Fourteenth was. It was a hardworking, white, Catholic neighborhood—Germans (Scrubby Dutch, they used to call them, for the way the housewives would scour the front steps, with cans of Bon Ami next to their buckets) who were hardheaded voters, who stood for no nonsense, and when they called City Hall, they by God wanted that dead dog picked up out of their alley! ... Today! That was part of the system, too. And Phelim obliged, unfailing, for forty years, and saw that deserving officials got votes, and faithful Party workers got jobs, and did it with a smile—even in the worst of times, even when his colleague (supposed to be his partner!) Margaret Butler, the Fourteenth’s Committeewoman, was busting his chops, splitting the ward, running on her own ticket—yes, even in tough times, Phelim worked with a glad hand, a wink for the girls and a sharp eye for young men of talent and energy, young men who had the values, and the good sense, to play ball.

  That’s how he met Dick Gephardt: met him, in fact, not long after Dick came back to St. Louis from law school, just embarking upon his career, and he had to come into the Clerk’s Office to register, to sign the scrolls as an attorney in practice in the city ... and there was Phelim, who heard the address—Fourteenth Ward!—and he looked this young man over. Clean, respectable; you could see that right away. Suit, blond hair short—“neat” was the word Phelim used—and Phelim O’Toole called out right there in the office: “Young man, you ought to come to our meetings!”

  That was 1965, when Dick started coming to the meetings: Dick and Jane, that blond and handsome young couple—she was twenty-three and he twenty-five (about the same age as Tom Hayden, or Rennie Davis, the two past presidents of Students for a Democratic Society ... not much older than the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, who would take to the streets to tear down the system)—they walked into the smoky storefront at 4524 Morganford Avenue, took seats in the back, and that day joined the Fourteenth Ward Democratic Organization, to serve as the club’s youngest precinct workers. In fact, the next youngest member was more than twice their age. And Dick came to every meeting, until Phelim and Margaret Butler made him Captain of his precinct—it didn’t take long—and Dick was part of the system, too. And Phelim O’Toole, who’d seen so many men work, had to go back a long way to remember one who worked like Dick Gephardt—so eager to learn, to listen, to work his blocks, door-to-door. It got to the point where Phelim even talked to Dick about the Alderman job. The Fourteenth Ward was represented on the St. Louis Board of Aldermen by a Republican. A disgrace! And Gephardt might be just the young man to take back that seat for the Party. ...

  But alas, Dick Gephardt was still new in the system—just learning the ropes, Phelim said—more than two years before the next election, when Phelim went into the hospital for his arthritis, and right there it was, he had his heart attack. ... And everyone who knew him was saddened—that’s the kind of man Phelim was, all those years, a lot of friends ... and among them, that young Dick Gephardt, who was twenty-seven now, who’d learned a lot from Mr. O’Toole. Maybe he knew more of the ropes than Phelim figured. For instance, he knew just what the system required now.

  When he heard the sad news, Dick got right on the phone. Called the Committeewoman, Margaret Butler, and told her he’d like to have Phelim’s job. And when he had it, he called the family, to offer his condolence.

  Thing about Gephardt was, he never stopped. He got that Committeeman job, and he was off, door-to-door. He’d go down some little street in the ward, and hit every house on every block, to ask the people: Would they like to have their street made one-way? Nobody asked him to make the darned street one-way. It was just his idea of something to talk about. ... See, that way, they could park on both sides of the street! ... Of course, at every house he introduced himself. And if those people didn’t want to talk about the street, he’d talk about their alley, or the storm drain that clogged whenever it rained, or the tavern two blocks down, where careless patrons left their beer cans on the curb ... or whatever else that voter wanted to discuss. Actually, they did the talking: Gephardt listened. That was the essence of his method, right there. That, and the fact he never stopped. If someone wasn’t home, he’d come back some evening later in the week (he was doing the next street over, anyway), or he’d leave a note, to let them know he stopped by ... to talk about their street. If he’d already made the stupid street one-way, he’d come back in a couple of months ... to see if they liked it. Was there anything else they wanted him to do?

  See, it didn’t matter what it was—that was up to them. He was for them: that’s what they had to know. His message, his program, consisted of showing up at that door. He was the program: that good-looking young fellow who was so smart, respectful, eager, honest, helpful, neat—the embodime
nt of the values he meant to represent. He was there to help them do whatever it was ... same way he operated inside the system. Dick Gephardt, fast as he climbed, seldom pissed anybody off. He seldom had to. In the end, he wanted the same thing they wanted: to make the system work ... for everybody. You could bet the Fourteenth Ward didn’t have a split ticket again, not with Dick Gephardt hitched in the traces with old Margaret Butler—no, they trotted in lockstep. A unified ward was the first demand of the system, the basis of all further gain ... so Dick got that done in a matter of months. And it worked. (See? The system did work.) They got their Democratic Alderman, a terrific young lawyer, a bright new face, first time he ever ran, but he got out there early, worked long and hard, door-to-door ... Dick Gephardt.

  And after one term on that board, after he’d run for reelection, and led the ticket, he started thinking about the next step up. There were people talking to Gephardt about Governor! And his friends on the board wanted him to run for Mayor. Dick was a heck of an Alderman. Saving the city was what he was all about, right? Dick agreed. He was going to run for Mayor. But just as he was about to go public, the Congresswoman from his district announced her retirement—after twenty-four years! So Dick filed for that seat ... (see, the Mayor’s race could have been bloody, but Congress, well, it was almost a straight shot) ... and after the ’76 election, he was off to Washington.

  And with every step up, he got better. Gephardt always—in the argot of ward politics—made a nice appearance. He was blue-eyed handsome, with strong, high cheekbones and a full firm jaw, always unexceptionable in dress, ever sober in demeanor, but friendly, and patient, helpful with the voters. But after a few years in the system, he had command of more subjects. He could explain ... well, anything. He’d get a question in a town meeting about Social Security—just some old coot who wanted to know: Was there going to be any money for him? And Congressman Dick would make a learned, lucid disquisition on the history, current status, and prospects for the trust fund, including a history of his own efforts (and those of his Democratic colleagues) to make sure ... yes, there will be money for you, sir. ... Housing, taxes, small-business loans, veterans’ benefits, deficits, interest rates, banking, insurance, postal regulations ... Gephardt knew about all of them. He was impressive—and so young! It did your heart good just to find a young man like that in politics. ... See, the message—which was the method, which was him, the balm of Gephardt in se—never changed.