What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  Fact was, Gephardt was always not someone. He was not an old ward-heeler Alderman (he was a Young Turk). He ran for Congress in the wash of Watergate as not an old politics-as-usual hack (he was a Fresh Face). He rose in Congress as not an old New Deal Liberal (he was a new-breed Hard-headed Democrat), and then he ran for President ... but Hart screwed up big-time ... so who was Dick going to be not?

  That’s why he started poking at Dukakis in the press, jabbing him on trade (the Duke’s trade policy was like Reagan’s—no policy at all) ... needling Dukakis on the Massachusetts Miracle (it’s no miracle when most of the money came from Pentagon contracts) ... challenging Michael to say what he would do in the White House, say something beyond Good-Jobs-at-Good-Wages.

  Anyway, those two spotted one another the minute the bell rang: Gephardt and Dukakis, both thinking their way through, two guys who’d go the distance, do whatever it took ... and lose no sleep—the baddest German shepherds in the Alley of Process. And it did, frankly, bother Dick when Michael waltzed into the race (just a year before the first votes!) and claimed for himself the mantle of government-that-works ... Mr. Know-It-All! Right! The guy couldn’t find the men’s room in the Capitol!

  And it didn’t improve Dick’s mood that Dukakis immediately owned New Hampshire, where Dick had been trying to make friends for three years ... or that Michael got away with mouthing some palaver about the importance of the family farm (and The Des Moines Register wrote it up like policy!) ... or that Dukakis milked the developer-lawyer-banker-business fat cats of Massachusetts, and Greeks across the country, for more money in his first quarter than Dick would see in a year and a half.

  That was the problem. You knew Dukakis would be in it till the end because he’d never run out of money. And you knew the diddybop Boston press (which provided New Hampshire with its “national” news) would cover Dukakis like the nominee—like no one else (and no place else) mattered. That’s why Duke could go around saying, “I did a good job in Massachusetts—so make me President.” Hey, get serious! ... Massachusetts ain’t Missouri ... or Montana ... or Moscow.

  So Dick was going to hit him—first big debate, the TV debate from Houston—Dick was going to pound Michael’s head. Foreign policy, trade policy, ag policy ...

  That was always the strategy from Gephardt’s hired button men—go in there and kill. That was Dick’s standard debate-prep: Shrum would feed him lines, egging him on to break the rules, jump in, interrupt, make the point—turn right to the guy and take his head off. ... Meanwhile, Carrick would sit in a corner, mashing his fist into his palm, and grinning, like this was going to be fun. Carrick always figured you “won” if you gave the press “red meat.” If you took someone’s head off, you’d be in the lead in the next day’s paper, you’d be the sound-bite on TV for a week! ... And Reilly, the pollster, was blowing up the image of a smirking Dukakis like one of those balloons in Macy’s parade. Reilly knew Dukakis, served as pollster to the last guy (the only guy) to beat him—Ed King, who threw Michael out of the Governor’s chair in ’78. So Reilly—dark, bearded, speaking dire truths in his savvy staccato—was Dick’s font of Dukakis lore: “Y’think y’gonna kill him. Y’can’t kill this little sonofabitch. He’ll get up again—the comeback. That’s his thing, the comeback. Y’gotta drive a stake through his heart.”

  See, Dick’s hit men were convinced he couldn’t pull the trigger. They had to ... make him kill. And Dick, of course, he was trying to listen. He was trying to do the job, like they told him ... same as the speech: look at the crowd, slow up, hit that next line, HIT IT. Same as the makeup: they thought he looked too blond, too boyish, too ... nice. So, for Houston, they made him up in a death mask—couldn’t smile if he tried. And they painted eyebrows on his head—guy’s so fair, y’can’t see his eyebrows! And they put him in the suit: not his own suit, but a suit of their devising ... gray, with shoulder pads, made him look like Clark Kent coming out of the phone booth.

  Problem was, the pads kept sliding around, down his arms, down his chest, till Dick felt he was growing tits, and it made him edgy in his chair, till he couldn’t even, you know, cock his head, or make his dog face ... you know, sit and listen ... so how could he know when to break in and KILL ... with new tits and eyebrows? So he never did deliver any lines on the Duke. And he knew he’d screwed it up, even before he got off stage and his guys started yelling: how were they s’posed to do their jobs when he couldn’t even PULL OFF A SIMPLE GODDAM HIT? ... Well, Dick felt awful. They wiped off his makeup while he hung his head in a chair in the holding room ... damn! ... damn! ... damn!

  “S’not too late,” Carrick murmured. “All th’press’s outside.”

  Dick looked up. Carrick started mashing his palm again.

  “Mahcrophones ...” Carrick said.

  “Let’s do it,” Dick said.

  “Camm’ras ...”

  “Come on, let’s go!”

  So Dick went out and stuck it to Dukakis in the pressroom, and that set off the rumble. Duke’s wise guys started squealing: Knifed in the back! Sneak attack! Gephardt must be desperate! Never said a peep in the debate!

  Gephardt’s killers answered back in the press: Come on, come on ... you wanna debate?

  And that’s how the great Duke-Dick Debate was born. And Duke’s guys were crowing: Gephardt’s supposed to be the front-runner ... now he’s making our guy the man to beat in Iowa!

  Dick’s guys were suddenly quiet in their suits. They were gonna get live TV in the Boston market (i.e., New Hampshire). ... They were going to pin Dukakis, one-on-one, for an hour. ... And they were damn sure going to cattle-prod Gephardt into a bloodthirsty serial-murder rage!

  Well, it was all-around splendid.

  So they started with “opposition research.” That’s what the hit men call it when they Hoover the ground behind another candidate, looking for a silver bullet they can promptly fire into the poor bastard’s neck. In Dick’s case, the big-nozzle vacuum was the CRS, the Congressional Research Service, an arm of the U.S. government created solely to serve members of the club—Congressmen, Senators—and their staffs. Campaign ammo wasn’t exactly what the CRS was supposed to provide, but then again, none of the research requests—for example, “every published article in the last twelve years containing the words ‘Dukakis’ and ‘tax’ ”—came exactly from Gephardt’s staff. House staffers everywhere took a sudden interest in Michael Dukakis. (Hey, what are friends for?)

  And it wasn’t just “Dukakis” and “tax” ... there was “Dukakis” and “trade” ... and “defense” and “agriculture” and “economy” and “environment” and ... and ... and ...

  The upshot was, Dick got books: all kinds of crap. He didn’t just learn what Dukakis said about the Harkin-Gephardt farm bill ... or everything Dukakis said about farming in Iowa. He also had at hand what Michael said (July 1987) on a visit to North Carolina, about the current no-net-cost tobacco program of supply management.

  And, Dick being Dick, he tried to learn the stuff. He carried those books around the country—or rather, Brad, the body man, carried them, guarded them like the magic sword. When, at last, Gephardt swooped back to Iowa (far too late, in the opinion of his killers) to prepare in earnest for the showdown, he was well informed:

  “Massachusetts currently owes one billion dollars to the state retirement system.”

  He was lucid:

  “Massachusetts mental health facilities ranked forty-first out of the fifty states in state support.”

  He was reasoned in his inquiries:

  “Governor, you say the number of people on welfare in Massachusetts dropped significantly during your administration. What was that rate of decline?”

  Of course, his killers were disappointed. This wasn’t a town meeting on changes in Social Security—this was a fucking street fight! Why couldn’t he get that?

  They’d run him through practice, with one of the button men playing Dukakis, and they’d have to stop Dick in mid-disquisition:

&nb
sp; “No, Dick, you’ve got to go right at him! Make the little fucker look at your chest. His eyes are only gonna come up to your chest. Try this: ‘You say Miracle—it sounds like the Massachusetts Mirage!’ ”

  “Okay, mirage. I understand.”

  In fact, he did understand, in a tactical sense—how he had to take the shine off Dukakis, how he had to make this a two-man race, how he had to become (in New Hampshire, at least) not Dukakis. What he didn’t understand was why he had to be angry. They didn’t have to be ... enemies—did they?

  He was the one who had to answer the Iowans: Why are you picking on Dukakis? Why did you start a fight among the Democrats?

  Dick would answer, with an edgy smile: “Well, I think we can disagree ... without being disagreeable, heh heh.”

  Problem was, he meant it. Dick was never disagreeable. He never made enemies—what was that for? Every campaign he’d ever run—there were people who were for him, and there were people who hadn’t got to know him yet. Next time, maybe, they’d be for him ... whenever he got a chance to sit down with them, and really, you know, listen.

  The people who actually knew Gephardt—old staffers, like Don Foley, for instance—tried to tell the hit men: this slash-and-burn just wasn’t Dick’s style. So the killers made sure there was no one who knew Dick in debate-prep: they couldn’t afford a mixed message.

  “Kill’um ...” Carrick would growl in the corner. “Kill’um good.”

  Reilly would pace, like the dark Prince of Mordor, launching his latest and most deadly attack against the Hobbit Castle. “Y’gotta break this guy. S’only way—fuck ’im up.”

  Of course, Shrummy was the genius, with his cigar, and a yellow pad to write out new lines, which he would read to Dick ... then direct him on delivery. Shrum was deep into this—shirttail hanging out, arms waving—Maestro Koussevitzky with the baton.

  And it worked—or it seemed to work. The night before the big debate, Gephardt came to look over the hall. With killers bouncing behind him, firing reminders, he strode onto the stage. There were two podiums, and a pot of ferns between them, a chair off to the side for the moderator. The hot lights were on.

  Dick stood behind his podium. “THIS ...” he barked, “... is the Harvard University RESEARCH REPORT ...”

  Opposition research had turned up a Harvard study on the Massachusetts economy. Dukakis, it concluded, hadn’t hurt the state’s recovery—but he hadn’t helped much, either.

  One of the killers called to Dick: “What if he says he wasn’t try’n’a take the credit?”

  “In front of TWO HUNDRED PEOPLE, at SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS, he SAID: ‘They just wanna see if they can get a piece of the Massachusetts action!’ ”

  Dick’s face broke into a grin: “Isn’t that a great quote?”

  Don Foley asked quietly from the foot of the stage: “Dick, you want that typed out in brief?”

  “No!” Gephardt snapped. “I wanna READ it, right here ... and then I wanna HOLD IT UP.” Dick had the sheaf of papers rolled in a fist, and was waving it next to his ear, like a club.

  Under the white TV light—no makeup, white shirt—Gephardt glowed with menace. The light shone through his skin to the slash of his jaw, the fierce high cheekbones, the ridge of his forehead, with no softening hint of hair ... like a visor of pale steel. He looked like a Visigoth arrived from the north to sack the city, the Avenging Teuton ... as he stared over the empty hall.

  “Where’s our people?”

  “Over here.”

  “Family in front?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’ll come up after?”

  Reilly said: “Yeah. Matt’ll tower over him.”

  Dick’s grin returned. “Yeah, he can stand eye-to-eye ... with my daughter.”

  They brought Dick behind the other podium, so he could see the little step stool the Dukakis wise guys had built for their man. Reilly was in an ecstasy of Mordor-derision. “Remember how you’d sit on the telephone book—when you were so little? ...”

  “Well, I’m going home,” Dick said, “stick pins in my Duke doll ... heh heh hackhackhack ...”

  The killers fell in behind him. You could hear them trading lines through the hall, to the door, to the streets of Des Moines.

  “Yeah. S’more pins ...”

  “Got some holes in it already!”

  “Heh heh, you get done with it, bring it over ...”

  “Prob’ly can’t figure out—OW—what’s that pain? ...”

  “YOWWCH! Ooops! Sorry, Mike!”

  “Yeah, sorry, Mike ... hackhackhack ... Shit Happens! Hackhackhack-heeheehee.”

  “First, Mike, if you’re the Democratic nominee, I’m going to work eighteen hours a day to help you get elected ...” That was Gephardt’s opening salvo.

  What happened to the Killer Teuton?

  Alas, shit happened ... mostly to Dick. On the way to the showdown, he was already in the zombie-zone, trying to remember twenty lines at once, his opening, the way to turn ... trying just to keep it together, when he got to the hall and ran into ... Bonnie Campbell.

  “Heyyy, great to see youuuu,” he said. Bonnie was a friend. Her husband, Ed, former Iowa Party Chairman, was signed on with Gephardt, helping out with more or less constant advice. But now Bonnie was chairperson of the Iowa Democrats ... and in her official high-cheese capacity, she had words for Dick Gephardt that morning.

  “You started this!” she said. Bonnie’s chosen mission was Party unity. Dick Gephardt had picked a knife fight with a fellow Democrat, and brought his gore-stained blade back to Iowa!

  “I don’t see why you can’t let us get through this without giving the Republicans all the ammunition ...”

  “Uh, really, Bonnie, I ...”

  “I don’t appreciate it! Don’t you come in here and leave me with blood and guts all over the streets!”

  Well, the minute he got on stage, you could tell he’d lost it. Dick looked so clean, so young, so fair, so ... reasonable, the way he stood, mannerly, looking down at the papers on his lectern—never turned on Dukakis, never looked at Dukakis, save with that Gephardt sympathy-of-listening, for God’s sake, like he was trying to learn how Mike felt ... so they could, you know, come to an understanding!

  “There’s a lot we agree on, Mike, and we’re on the same team.”

  Gephardt did mention the Massachusetts Miracle (on the way to saying, “You’ve been an excellent Governor ...”) but he never called it a mirage. Never held up the report. Never read out any quotes. Never even asked Dukakis to defend his record in any regard. Instead, he led off with a cantaloupe of a question about the Harkin-Gephardt farm bill—could Mike support it? ... It was just an invitation for Dukakis to do his sound-bite on the family farm.

  Which Michael did. And along the way, he managed to stick it to Dick on his vote for the grain embargo of 1980 ... and Dick’s support of an import-oil tariff (that would cost the average farmer, Michael claimed, $400 a year) ... then he fired off a nasty question on Dick’s vote in 1981 for the Reagan tax cut. Did Gephardt think Michael would meet him halfway, in the Alley of Process, to shake hands? ... Forget it!

  Fifteen minutes into the thing, Michael was hectoring Gephardt:

  “Well, I don’t know how you can be proud of a tax bill that ran up the biggest deficit in history, and has about as much to do with destroying our international position in the world economy as anything I know ...”

  Michael delivered this tattoo with an eloquent shrug that told the world: Anyone can see this—right? Am I right?

  “A hundred and six Democrats, Dick—a hundred and six of your colleagues—voted against that tax bill. And, look: I’ve been a legislator ...”

  Michael was nodding to himself now, as if we all knew the kinda crap legislators get away with.

  “You’re a [shrug] legislator ...”

  Fifteen minutes later, he was back on that theme (on the way to slamming Gephardt’s votes for big-ticket weaponry). He was beating Dick black-and-blue with
jabs:

  “Well, that’s the problem, Dick. You can’t have it on-the-one-hand-on-the-other, in defense policy. That’s part of the problem. You start with weapons systems, and then you stop. You move forward, and then you move back. I’ve been a legislator, and I’ve been a chief executive. The difference between being a legislator and a chief executive is that you can bounce around a little bit when you’re a legislator. You have to make decisions when you’re a chief executive ...”

  And through all this dismissive rat-a-tat-tat from Dukakis, Dick stared ahead, smiling, or busied himself at his lectern ... and never once turned to Michael and asked: What damned decision have you ever made on a weapon?

  And so, a half-hour after that, Gephardt was back in his holding room, staring at the floor again, while they swabbed him off with cold cream.

  “Damn ...”

  46

  There’s This Couple in Bed ...

  IT WASN’T THAT Joe really had a plan. What he had was a speech, and he always felt better when he knew what he was going to say. “Biden is speech-driven,” his guys would explain. But that was just guru-talk for the fact that Joe often didn’t know what he thought until he had to say it. Then, too, there was the sorry corollary: sometimes Biden spoke before he thought.

  But not this time. He wanted a speech for the Senate floor, and he couldn’t afford to screw around. He had to make his case to the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body that Senators must look at Robert Bork’s philosophy—hell, say it plain—Bork’s politics ... to decide whether he should sit on the Court.

  “A really serious speech,” Joe said, when he talked to the staff. Which was not to say he didn’t take other speeches seriously ... but they knew what he meant: no rhetoric, no poetry for the crowd. In fact, it wasn’t a Biden speech at all. It was more like a law school paper—the kind he’d never done.

  Joe could not resist a tiny flourish here and there: the second time he mentioned Justice John Rutledge, for instance, that jurist became, for Biden, “Old John.” When he quoted a 1972 paper from his favorite conservative scholar, Philip Kurland, Joe stopped after the quote, as if he’d just heard it for the first time, and said: “Lemme repeat that... this is not repeated in the quote, but let me repeat that part of the quote.” Then he hammered Kurland’s point home again.