What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  “Well ...”

  So they scheduled a speech for him at Ottawa U, where Hart could talk political philosophy ... and everybody was happy. Hart was actually, quietly, excited. There were aunts—Nina’s sisters—and cousins, still in town ... and friends from school ... people he’d love to see. He’d gone back in ’84 (after his campaign—he purposely went after he was out of the race), just to see friends ... went to his high school reunion. And he had a great time.

  So Sue Casey scheduled time for a private meeting with family ... before the speech. Just an hour, maybe less, but he’d have time to visit.

  And Hart wrote into his notes some lines about the ethic of the town, his school, his friends, his parents ... what he’d learned from them. He was actually going to talk Family Values.

  Well, the white boys were in a lather, and they put out the word: this showed how much Hart had grown—see? He was playing by the rules. He was sharing his life! He was so ... comfortable!

  But when Gary and the press herd got to town, The Ottawa Herald greeted them with a front-page streamer about the sixteen different houses where Carl and Nina Hartpence lived, while Gary grew up ... and there was a big map, showing the locations, and a long story of explanation:

  It was his mother, see ...

  Then, there were interviews with people who lived in the houses now, the first with Ronald D. Cowdin, a schoolmate of Hart’s who owned the house where Gary was born in 1936: “I knew him as Hartpence,” Cowdin snarled to the Herald. “I don’t remember him as Hart. I try to forget those deals.”

  And that afternoon, while Gary and Lee cut away to visit his parents’ graves ...

  (“No pictures.”)

  (“Gary, one photographer ...”)

  (“No pictures.”)

  ... the herd found his uncle, Ralph Hartpence, who entertained on his front porch with stories of Gary as a strange, persnickety kid ... “Never once did get dirty—thought he’d catch the dickens from his mother ...”

  And Gary tried to eat a chicken-fried steak at the L&L Restaurant, where Carl used to eat, but the cameramen started crowding and shoving, and he had to finish and go. And then he got to his private session with the family, in the chapel at Ottawa U—no press, absolutely not, no—and he walked into the room and found ... about a hundred people. Hart’s face froze.

  There was family ... he could see his Aunt Louise (who married Nina’s brother), and Nina’s favorite niece, Letafay Weien, and a few cousins—maybe six or seven Pritchards in the group as a whole. But the rest ... well, they said they were Hartpences. Cousins ... somehow. One had an autograph book, and he came right at Gary, wanted him to sign. So Gary signed, and then another one came, with a loose piece of paper for Gary to sign, and then more: they were around him two and three deep, with napkins, telephone bills, whatever they could find—they wanted his autograph. Wanted him to pose for pictures. Gary only had a half hour to the speech, and this went on twenty minutes. They treated him like a movie star—and all the time, Gary’s wondering: Who are these people? Why are they doing this? Why can’t he have a few minutes’ peace to see his family?

  Aunt Louise got to him for a minute, just to tell him how proud his mother and dad would be now, if they could see him. And she saw his eyes grow shiny with tears, though she didn’t know whether that was the thought of his folks, or frustration. ...

  And Gary got up to the podium in the chapel, and stood before the crowd, and gracefully thanked the Mayor for the welcome of the city ... and the university ... even The Ottawa Herald. And then he meant to thank his family, but he’d barely got to talk to anyone he remembered as family. So he said:

  “I’m constantly amazed at the increasing number of relatives that I have ...”

  He meant it as a joke, but it set off an anxious, whispery rustle in the hall. Gary tried to lighten it up:

  “Actually, what happened was ... I didn’t have that many relatives in 1983, during that period ... I was only one or two percent in the polls. Then after the primary, I had a lot of relatives ... and then after the convention, I didn’t have as many relatives ... no, I’m just kidding.”

  Kidding! Jeez! The press herd (absent perforce from the “family visit”) was slapping this stuff right into notebooks. Christ! The guy’s mocking his own family!

  But Gary hadn’t come to mock; he came to tell what Ottawa had given him, and he was making an honest effort now, in the body of the speech ...

  The Church of the Nazarene gave him the moral foundation of his life; the Santa Fe Railroad gave him a job and a chance to know how working people lived; the Main Street merchants, The Ottawa Herald, the radio station, KOFO—they were all teachers to him. The town itself taught its values of hard work and community, the way Ottawa pulled together when the river rose and flooded the downtown, and the north side was cut off from the south, and people drove a hundred miles to help their friends on the other side. The schools taught him to read and study, offered him friendships that he felt he still had, thirty and forty years down the road. ... And then his parents:

  “I don’t think anyone’s had ...” Hart said, and he stopped. He could not continue. Ten seconds passed, then twenty, and the camera shutters began to click and whirr, as Hart fought off tears. His parents died in this town.

  “I don’t think there is anyone in this country who has ever had better parents than I had ...”

  And then he stopped again. What would they say, if they could see him now? With the keys to the city ... what would Carl have given for that recognition in his town?

  “My father,” Hart said, “was as honorable and decent a man as I think ever walked the face of the earth ...”

  The Wall Street Journal wrote that his mother was crazy ... and she could not speak now, to show them, to defend. ... What did she have to explain? Her love?

  “My mother loved life, she loved the people around her, and she loved good humor ...

  “You’ve often heard the term ‘salt of the earth,’ and I think that’s what they were ... and they represent about the best that this society has to offer ... and what they gave to me, I don’t think I could repay, except to try to raise my children as well as they raised me.”

  After the speech, when Hart shed the last reporter ... (Senator, were you crying? ... Senator, why did you stop in your speech?), he and Lee snuck over to Letafay’s house. She was Nina’s favorite; he hadn’t even got to see her. And he’d be leaving tomorrow, after a visit to Ottawa High.

  Gary sank into the armchair near the fireplace. He looked so tired. Lee did, too. But with Gary, Letafay thought, there was sadness. ... Lee was complaining that she had to pack her own bags, make her own arrangements, get herself to the airport.

  “Lee, you need somebody,” Letafay said.

  “I know I do, Letafay. But I don’t have anybody.”

  Gary was staring at the floor, with that somber look on his face. He didn’t respond to what Lee said. Letafay looked over at him, and thought with a start that he’d have to get up early—have to travel again tomorrow. Letafay felt she was keeping him, that he just came over to be nice.

  Hart looked up, and said, “Letafay, why would anybody want to run for President of the United States?”

  “Why, Gary, that was my question to you!”

  Gary didn’t say anything.

  They visited for a few minutes about the family. Then Gary and Lee stood to leave. Letafay felt she must have been boring. He just came out of the kindness of his heart.

  “You know. Gary, I’m honored you came here to visit like this.”

  Hart’s eyes gathered slightly and a furrow appeared in the center of his brow, like he didn’t know what language she was speaking.

  She stumbled on. “And, you know ... I really appreciate it.”

  Hart still stared at her, pain mixed with confusion on his face. “Why would you say something like that?”

  Then he kissed her, and went into the night.

  24

  1960r />
  YALE DIVINITY WAS A school of social conscience: all but the most academic types had to mull, on occasion, the place of the church in society, or the duty of a Christian in combating the miseries of this earth. There were students and teachers committed to the struggle for civil rights. One divinity student was crushed to death under the treads of a bulldozer in Cleveland, trying to block the “urban renewal” of a poor people’s neighborhood.

  But that was social service, commitment, idealism ... something other than politics. Politics was crass, too clearly part of Caesar’s realm. Even Gary Hartpence, on whom the Nazarene Church had lost its hold, who was not sure anymore whether he could sit still for a lifetime of philosophic inquiry and teaching, would never have named politics as a possible career. Hartpence was a young man of ideas—commitment, yes, but to principle. Politics was the province of cigar-chomping ward bosses: patronage, payoff, one hand washing the other ...

  And then came John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

  Gary heard about him in a social ethics class—where Professor Miller asked, one day, what they thought of a practicing Catholic in the nation’s highest office. This young Senator, Bill Miller said, might force the question. Gary didn’t have any trouble with that issue—any opposition to Kennedy on those grounds struck him as simple intolerance. But the more he heard about the Senator, the less was it a matter of academic interest.

  Kennedy was new, young, bold, intelligent (qualities, each and all, that struck a gong with Hartpence), and yet possessed of a polish, a sense of irony, personal grace. He was the embodiment of that ease that was Gary’s great envy and aspiration, but he bent it (along with his talent, his time, and gobs of his father’s money) to the service of those social principles that were the core of Gary’s own belief. Lord, what a combination! What a man!

  It seemed to Gary a Providence, surely, for the nation: after eight long years of Ike, of tired, gray businessmen speaking for the country, years of inwardness and self-satisfaction, here was Kennedy, calling, demanding ... to get America moving! It was time for youth, experimentation, action: the best of a new generation, hauling the nation forward toward its ideals ... and just as Gary Hartpence was searching out a new way to serve his ideals.

  Yes, surely, a Providence ... after all, Gary was at Yale because his idea of service could not fit in the narrow ambit of the Nazarene ministry (in the end, that had so little to do with the great and needy world outside). By instinct, by philosophy, by his stubborn insistence that faith must make a difference in this world, he had turned away from the Nazarenes’ endless dark struggle for salvation—soul and self. He would never fall prey to that baneful self-dissection that would make suicides of his two brilliant Bethany friends. ... But even Yale Divinity, so much larger in its view, so richly oxygenated after Bethany Nazarene ... seemed still, somehow, at one Platonic remove from the world as Gary longed to know it. Sure, the path to professorship was wider than the dog track to personal salvation ... still, it was not the grand boulevard of life.

  In that first year at Yale, his friend and fellow Nazarene, Tom Boyd, came to Gary’s apartment to study for the big test on Aquinas, only to find Hartpence with his feet propped up, his face in the new issue of Time. “This is my question,” Hartpence announced. “Why do I find this magazine so much more interesting than Saint Thomas Aquinas?”

  By his second year, fall of ’59, Gary had almost decided that a life as professor of philosophy was not for him. Maybe literature, which after all, dealt with every sort and shard of life. And so, he began to roam the campus, sampling here and there—modern culture, history, comparative lit. ... By the spring of ’60, he’d applied for the honors program, which would give him the run of Yale’s riches. (In his third and final year, still nominally a divinity student, he would spend his time in study of Faulkner, Tolstoy, Dostoyevski ...)

  But by that time, too, he had marched himself to Democratic Party headquarters, to volunteer for Jack Kennedy—offered himself not at Yale’s student union, but the office in New Haven ... the real world. He may not have been the only one in his class, but there weren’t too many, that was sure. Even at “liberal” Yale Divinity, there were plenty who thought a Papist had no business in the White House ... even more who thought this Kennedy fellow seemed too young, too sharp, too worldly—awfully hard-eyed. (Stevenson was more their style: mild, intellectual, impeccably Protestant.)

  Not Gary. More and more, Kennedy’s progress (or lack) came to color his days. More and more, the evening talks in the apartment drifted off philosophical swordsmanship, onto politics, primaries, the agenda for the nation. What lure had Luther ... when Ribicoff was endorsing the young Senator? Of what moment the torment of Vronsky ... while, in West Virginia, that old pol Lyndon Johnson was threatening to unhorse Our Hero?

  Well, not everybody’s hero.

  Even in Gary’s own social set, the three or four couples with whom he and Lee spent their time, Gary was the only Kennedy man. Of course, he knew more about the campaign than most people in the graduate building. That’s how he went into things—whole hog, to know. Then, too, there was the way he held to his judgments. (Gary, as one friend put it, “could argue like a dog.”) He became implacably a Kennedy man. He was so in love with his hero, so obviously, teasably in thrall, that a couple of neighbors got a picture of Jesus (the best-known one—Jesus with long hair and arms extended downward, palms out) and pasted a cutout of Kennedy’s face over Christ’s ... and tacked the thing onto Gary’s door.

  But Gary would not be laughed off this; it didn’t matter if no one else saw it as he did. In a way, that made it better. It mirrored the crusade he saw in Kennedy’s quest. More and more, Gary became convinced that Kennedy was not the choice of the Party—the insider, politics-as-usual hacks would never gamble on a Catholic, never choose his bold brand of leadership, no. ... JFK would have to take over, from below, from the outside ... by the power of his ideas.

  And so he did, week by week, state by state ... New Hampshire, Wisconsin, West Virginia ... as Gary watched, and leafleted New Haven, and had the satisfaction of seeing its citizens, and his classmates, come around. That summer, back to work for the railroad, Gary pressed his case on the folks back home, the Republicans of Kansas, and that was a tougher sell. His own folks were simply bemused by his zeal. They weren’t much for politics, after all ... though, like everybody in Kansas, they’d been proud to vote for Ike ... and Nixon was Ike’s Number Two. Experience had to count for something! Still, Carl and Nina Hartpence were easy, mild, compared to S.T. Ludwig, Lee’s dad, in Kansas City.

  For all his reputation as a “liberal” Nazarene, S.T. was a man of entrenched ideas, and some familiarity with politics. He was Republican, when pressed on matters of party ... but this had little to do with party. S.T. was a churchman, and that Kennedy boy was everything that good Nazarenes mistrusted: he was eastern, worldly (i.e., corrupt), stylish, handsome (i.e., vain). Harvard-polished (a rationalist) ... with a shine bought and paid for by his father’s money—dirty liquor money! (The Republicans made sure Joe Kennedy’s history made the rounds in the dry Midwest.) And those were just S.T.’s stated reasons! By the time he and Gary thrashed it out, Gary, in his maddening way, had peeled back the layers of S.T.’s argument, to reveal the hidden, glistening core: that boy was a Catholic! And if the Pope of Rome meant to place his minion in the White House—well, he’d have to do it without S.T.’s help.

  Gary called that simple prejudice. As for S.T., he could not understand what got into his son-in-law, Hartpence—or, for that matter, a whole generation of his family! Lee’s sister, Martha, was touting that Kennedy boy, and her husband, Sam, was just as wildly liberal as Gary (though, thank Heaven, he favored Stevenson). Even dutiful Oletha ... well, Lee, as she called herself now ... was sticking up for Kennedy, or at least sticking up for Gary.

  It was a summer on the griddle for Lee, Oletha, caught between the two beloved men in her life, between her old life and her new. She wished Gary wouldn’t be so h
ard on her dad ... of course, she knew Gary was right. What she tried to explain to her father—though the words were not so clear that summer: it wasn’t just Kennedy; it wasn’t even politics—not really. But Kennedy wanted people to do something for the country. That’s the call she and Gary heard: not to politics—it was Public Service! If they all did something, if they all bent their talents to the needs of the age, there was no limit. They could change the world!

  And there was another reason—though she couldn’t have begun to explain, at the time. This call, this Public Service, this politics that had taken over their home was something she and Gary could share. That spring, that fall, 1960, the arguments in her living room were not arcane philosophic ponderings, the fruit of lectures she hadn’t heard, or books she had no time to read. Kennedy, politics, the campaign, they were hers, too—as accessible to her as the newspaper, or TV news. She’d always had good sense about people ... that’s what politics was, after all. If it came to that with Gary—Public Service, as Kennedy said—if the agenda of the nation became the agenda of the household ... well, Lee Hartpence would be in that mix. In fact, she’d be darned good at it!

  And she knew, the way Gary was when he believed, it would have effect in life. He’d been searching, she knew. It would not be small, this change of focus. It could not be small with him. It was after Kennedy won, that fall, and excitement was high in the country—the most brilliant people from every sort of life were heading for Washington, heeding the call—that Gary decided he’d apply to Yale Law School, and not just for law, but for Public Service. And the next summer, there would be no more work on the rails. He got his summer job in Robert F. Kennedy’s Department of Justice. The country was on the move. He and Lee, together, were headed for the engine room—Washington ... and, yes, a new life. That was the summer they got the name changed to Hart. Gary had wanted to do it for years. And now was the time. Carl and Nina went along. Gary’s hair got longer, his ties narrower. But those were just the outward signs, not the big changes—they were in his head. That was the summer he began his new study—power, the means of moving a nation—a study that would occupy his next thirty years. It was a heady subject for a new life, yes ... there were no limits! Not for the nation, nor even the world ... not for Gary and Lee Hart, together.