What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  The Dukakis campaign had rented two floors of an old loft building in a grungy backwater of Boston ... ekonomia: Michael must have got it cheap. John’s corner room had a desk, a desk chair, a smallish glass table, two semi-clean ashtrays, and a few hard chairs covered with nappy polyester-tweed. But one side of the room was dominated by a black Sony video console, the only object in the room that gleamed. Sasso got a tape of the Kinnock ad:

  “Why am I the only Kinnock in a thousand generations ...” Then he slipped in the tape of Biden’s close: “Why am I the only Biden in a thousand generations ...” It was uncanny: it wasn’t just the words—it was every gesture, every pause. And not one mention of the name Neil Kinnock!

  He played the tapes for Tully, Corrigan, Edley ... one after the other, his senior staff: they watched the Sony. John watched them. They couldn’t believe it, either.

  “Why didn’t people write about this?”

  “Maybe they didn’t know ... must not have known.” After that, for days—for a week—John showed the tapes to everyone who visited: politicians, wise guys, reporters ... he watched them all. They were stunned. He didn’t have to say a word. Surely, they’d talk about it. The reporters were bound to write it. No one wrote a word.

  He showed them to Tommy Oliphant, from the Globe. Oliphant sat there, staring, giggling! But then ... not a word in print.

  Was John crazy? ... Was this not a story?

  Then, on Labor Day weekend, Maureen Dowd called. She was doing a profile of Pat Caddell. But along the way, she brought it up: Wasn’t it weird, Biden using stuff from a British Labour leader—who lost to Margaret Thatcher?

  It was, John said, and weirder still, Biden didn’t even credit Kinnock! “... Yeah, really. I’ve been playing the tapes! It’s word for word—and no credit!”

  Of course, Maureen wanted to see the tapes. John said he’d send a copy ... as long as she didn’t say where she got it.

  And Tully said, why not cover their tracks? He was going to Des Moines to spend the weekend with Vilmain. Why not drop off a copy at the Register?

  And Corrigan had a friend at NBC—hey, this shit is made for TV ... so, a third copy went out.

  And that was it.

  The story was true ... it deserved to be told.

  So why, right away, did Sasso feel such gnawing unease?

  And why did he never show the tapes to Dukakis?

  Whenever John talked about Dukakis, about their history together, he always went back to 1978, and the first time he ever saw the Governor, in person.

  Sasso was a New Jersey boy who’d come to school in Boston and stayed on to do politics. In ’78, he was managing a statewide campaign for a fair-tax amendment to the state constitution. He signed up Governor Dukakis as a supporter—he signed up a lot of big pols. They were all supposed to come to Sasso’s kickoff at South Station—he was sending a whistle-stop train across the state, just as the general election began ... in fact, the kickoff was set for the Saturday after the primary.

  But something unexpected happened in that primary—Dukakis lost! The voters threw him out! The state and its pols were still in shock that Saturday as Sasso loaded his train. John was standing on the platform ... when he saw the little guy in a frowzy raincoat—Dukakis! He looked gray, beat-up, unhappy ... it was only four days after the voters of the Commonwealth had kicked him in the teeth.

  Sasso told the Governor how badly he felt. “I didn’t think, uh, well ... you didn’t have to come.”

  Dukakis said: “It’s an important issue.”

  End of discussion.

  The picture John carried in his head, from that day on, was the small, hunched back of Dukakis’s raincoat, as the Governor marched away.

  Of course, there’d been a thousand pictures since—since Sasso signed on to manage Michael’s comeback in ’82 ... since John gave Mike his new persona, elevated his plainness into something like public charm ... since Michael and John took back the State House, together ... since they planned, together, every day, and so many nights, at Michael’s kitchen table ... since they walked the halls of the State House, to Michael’s every public event, with Sasso quietly running through the agenda for Michael, on that stage, that day ... since they traveled together on Michael’s first out-of-state forays, with John working dark reaches of the rooms, or the press pens, while Michael executed in the spotlight ... since they thought through programs, and gave them names, and filed the bills, rode them through House and Senate ... fought, together, to enact their shared vision, to install the best and cleanest officials, to confirm Michael’s nominees, sustain his vetoes, enforce his budgets, fend off his enemies (and his friends) ... to make Massachusetts work better, more rationally, decently, every day, for six years, together ... John had a million mental pictures, sure.

  But taken together—or even (here was the amazing thing) in particular—they did not belie that first vivid image of Governor Dukakis ... marching down that gray station platform ... head-down hard-cheese life-ain’t-a-picnic beat-up ... but in no way shaken in his belief, his certainty, that what was right was right: he knew, and would do, what was right.

  John Sasso loved that.

  The way the wise guys always talked about it—Sasso’s friends, his poker buddies, the Thursday night savants who helped him dream up Mike-Dukakis-the-Persona ... they all said: John was the opposite of Michael.

  They loved the game, so they talked about how Sasso loved the game ... and he did. They saw Michael’s incapacities, so they talked about how John compensated for Michael ... which he did. They’d said, for six years, since the comeback campaign, that Sasso was the politician, the man who loved people, the guy who made wheels turn for Dukakis so Dukakis never had to turn them himself—never had to foul his hands—never even had to know!

  That was all true. But they never said why.

  Why went beyond South Station, 1978 ... beyond politics ... to New Jersey, and Sasso’s own hardworking father, who came to this country as a child (and became an electrical engineer) ... and even beyond, to a village on the heel of Italy (just across the Adriatic from the rocky coast of Greece), a hard place, near Bari, where life held no shortcuts, where men named Sasso worked, cutting stone. Sasso means stone.

  It went back to John’s own stony notion of virtue: work, strength, discipline. ... It went back to how Sasso saw himself—as a man who succeeded by hard labor, stubborn attention to detail, insistence on technical perfection.

  See, Sasso did not consider himself Michael’s opposite. Friends, admirers, talked about John’s “gifts,” his “ease,” his “touch” ... drinks and cigars in his office, late-night poker with the Speaker of the House ... oh, that’s Sasso, the natural politician. They missed the point: that was technical perfection.

  Even Michael missed it: if John was yawning and mentioned to Michael that he’d been up late playing poker ... Michael would shake his head in censure—how couldya live like that? He would never acknowledge the connection between the poker and the bills, or the budget ... though he was happy enough to employ it.

  Technical perfection was their compact—an unspoken Adriatic understanding. Hard work, they both understood. Discipline, of course. And fidelity, service ... each in his own way.

  Michael’s was to march ahead, unyielding, eyes on the path in front of his feet. John’s was to see all, even to the horizon, and to know the side routes darkened by Michael’s blinkers.

  But just as Michael made sure not to see if John darted down one of those side paths ... so John made sure never to make him see.

  And not just because it was important for Michael to maintain his view of himself, marching ahead on the straight and narrow. That view of Michael was just as important to John.

  It was Michael’s impossibly stubborn and straight march that gave Sasso license to practice his technical art, and still ... remain a believer. With all that he knew about Michael, it was the unswerving, unseeing, maddeningly self-righteous trudge of the wing tips that John t
hought would, and should, put Dukakis in the White House.

  He would never show Michael those tapes—not even as a matter of interest. That would be a lapse of technical perfection, a breach of the compact. Anyway, he knew what Michael would do—Dukakis would watch for a minute and conclude, satisfied, that emotional appeal was somehow flimflam. ... He’d affirm, with a disgusted grunt, what he already held as a certainty: Biden had no discipline! ... Michael would march on, surer still: he was worthy—Biden was not.

  Of course, he’d forbid John to use the tapes to show any such thing. John would never suggest it! ... Even so, just for showing them, Michael would give him the look, like John had tracked dirt onto the carpet. That’s what John understood, and avoided. After so many years of believing, Sasso had to measure himself in Michael’s blinkered gaze, too.

  62

  Destiny

  IT’S AN IMPROBABLE, EXCITING ride when a mechanism as complex, as ungainly, as a campaign (like a helicopter, you can’t see how it’ll work) suddenly begins to chudder, shudder, then roar ... and takes off. The Biden campaign was like a miracle ... once it started to fly.

  Even Joe—a man of constant doubt, professional doubt (that was all part of gaming it out: seeing what could go wrong)—felt little but the wind under his wings, soaring into September, heading for the hearings ... then Iowa, New Hampshire, the nomination, the White House. ... He saw the moves, all the way down the field. He knew, at last, how he was going to be.

  Which, in Biden’s case, had to mean: he knew what he was going to say. He’d boiled it down to the nub of a message, in those months of work on Bork. He knew the crucial difference between himself and the judge—knew it so well he could say it in the commonest words, for every voter in the country.

  This was the difference:

  Judge Bork saw the Constitution (hence, the political life of the nation) as a finite set of concessions from the majority—the state—to individuals, who enjoyed the rights listed in the document. He saw the Constitution like a contract, a deed, a will ... wherein each clause had fixed meaning, unchanged by time, unexpandable, except by amendment.

  But Biden saw the Constitution as an enshrinement of natural rights that preexisted and informed American government. (“We hold these Truths to be self-evident,” said the first document of the nation, “that all Men ... are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights... ”) To Biden, the noblest words of the Constitution—liberty, due process, equal protection of the laws—were guides to the aspiration of the American nation, and had to be interpreted anew in every age. The Constitution, in Biden’s view, was a living document, intended from the first to change and grow with the country.

  That made all the difference.

  Because if Biden was right—right about the tenor of the country, the times, the voters and how they felt—then that would form the message he would carry into the campaign. If Biden was right (and he knew he was ... not a doubt!), then the people did not want to go back—not even to the rosy Reaganaut fiction of an America that was right, and white, and neatly authoritarian in its prejudice, politics, and the polar absolutes of its worldview. If Biden was right, what the country wanted was a more perfect realization of its old ideals: Liberty, Justice, Compassion ... and that’s what he’d talked about—tried to talk about—for the last five years!

  That’s what he meant in Atlantic City, ’82, when he told the Democratic Party that the country had not turned away from its ideals—only from old programs and policies that did not work. The special interests, Biden said, had become so wedded to their programs—old “solutions”—that they made busing the issue, instead of equality in education. They let food-stamp fraud become the issue, instead of food for the hungry.

  That’s what he meant when he told the interest groups—over and over—must have said it a hundred times: the solutions would not come from them, but from the people. The people wanted to move forward, to make the fight. The people were not scared of change, like their leaders were.

  That’s why the Kinnock stuff was so great—because that’s what Americans wanted from their government: just a helping hand, to make the fight for a better life for their kids, just a platform to stand on ... so they could reach higher.

  When it came so clear to Joe, he could have slapped himself for ever saying anything else ... listening to all his goddam experts! ... when he should have just listened to the truth in himself. That was his life: he was just a middle-class kid who’d got a little help along the way ... and that was all he had to show. But that’s what connected him to the great body of voters in the country. That’s all he needed! God-dammit! He never should have listened to anybody else.

  It was strange how it worked out, like it always did, like it was, you know ... all figured out. He’d cursed the day he ever took the chairmanship. Didn’t want the job, didn’t want the mess. ... He’d cursed the day he got the Bork nomination—God, he thought his career was over! He’d never pull it off!

  But what it was, was destiny. Someone up there had a plan for Joey Biden ... he needed Bork, to get back, through all the bullshit, to the bottom, to the grit ... to what Joe Biden believed.

  And now he would say it, in the moment—the perfect moment—when the lights and the eyes of the nation were upon him, in the first day of hearings on the nomination of Robert Bork as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. All three networks, and PBS, CNN, and C-Span ... just about every TV screen in the country would flash Biden’s opening statement ... and then the cameras would linger, as Biden locked horns with Robert Bork, to discuss what each man thought must be the nature and direction of the United States. That was the moment. That would be the first speech—the first real speech—of the Biden campaign.

  So the Bork campaign had become the Biden campaign, or vice versa. And the Biden campaign, which had seemed so muscle-bound as it herniated itself over speeches in Iowa coffee shops, suddenly straightened out with something big to push against—something that mattered. This Bork fight took everything a campaign had—a winning campaign. And the Biden campaign, suddenly, could win.

  There was a message—all locked in now—not only for Joe, but for staff, and gurus, who could retail the thing to press and pols. For a few weeks, all the gurus were singing from the same page—they left off trying to kill each other.

  And the staff—in mid-Bork, Ridley announced he was going to “unify the campaign,” move everybody to Wilmington (that’s the way Joe wanted it). So he gave the word: they’d close the D.C. office, and all Biden staff would pick up their lives a hundred miles north, in Delaware. It was a measure of just how gorgeous was the prospect of a win that the campaign didn’t lose a soul.

  Then, too—just as suddenly—there was a nationwide field operation. The biggest and best grassroots organization any candidate had in 1987 was the anti-Bork network run by the liberal interest groups—ACLU, NAACP, NOW, NARAL, and a cupful of lesser-known alphabet soup, all working together now on the Biden team.

  There was the nationwide polling apparatus, led by Caddell, who did not stop at finding the magic brick for Joe. No, Pat put all his ferocious analysis into a memo, which he then personally took to the offices of undecided Senators (he could still open doors in Washington—they were flattered: Hey! Pat Caddell!) ... where he explained why their voters were going to turn against Bork.

  Suddenly, the press was all over Joe—BIDEN’S FIRST PRIMARY ... SHOWDOWN FOR THE SHOW HORSE—they wanted interviews, they wrote features ... the editorial boards opened their doors. That was a moment, sure enough, when Biden, Donilon, and Rasky walked into the boardroom of The New York Times—two poor Irishmen and a Jew, walking into the Bastion of Established Opinion, the richest bottomland of the River of Power, with the original portrait of George Washington on the wall ... to talk about the Constitution, and the Court. That was rich!

  And Biden did fine. In fact, he did great—as he did, too, at The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the L.A. Times, U.S. News, Newswe
ek, Time ... hell, Time was fantastic! Dinner in the private dining room, top of the Time-Life skyscraper in New York, thirty River-of-Power types in gray suits and rep ties, down a table that would have bridged the Brandywine River in Wilmington. And Joe Biden, Syracuse, ’68, took the place over, talked for five hours straight. After hour three, he had his jacket off, his ass perched on top of his chair back—so he could see them all—while he made sure these white men understood where Joe Biden was coming from, on every Constitutional issue of the day. About midnight, maybe after, they were shifting in their chairs, trying to say how interesting it had been ... but Biden was just warming up.

  “Hey! We haven’t talked about foreign policy! Can I come back?”

  The pieces were locking into place ... he could feel it. He could see the thing—how it had to look, every detail: just a few days before the hearings, he decided that the dais for the committee had to come down. He had the same hearing room they’d used for Iran-contra ... but he didn’t want the Senators up on a platform, staring down at the witness—making a martyr, like Ollie North. Hell, no!

  And there wasn’t going to be any camera in the well between the committee and the witness, locked onto Bork’s dewy eyes ... no way. Cameras to the side, and in the back, where they could focus over Bork’s head, onto the committee ... and the backdrop. They’d have to get the backdrop right. And no staff whispering into Biden’s ear. Keep it clean: Bork and Biden ... toe-to-toe.

  He had a run-through, with Larry Tribe playing Bork. They set it up in Joe’s ballroom ... chairs in an arc for the committee, Joe in the center, the witness table right across from him. Tribe was a terrific Bork. They set up video-cams so Joe could take a look, run through his moves, over and over. Joe brought in Jill, and Hunt, to see if they could follow every point.

  It was planned as carefully, as ably, as a convention speech, a Labor Day rally. It was the biggest and best Democratic event since Ronald Reagan appeared on the scene. It was, well, it was so right ... this was just the black Irish that came up in him, he understood ... but it was so perfect, something had to happen.