What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  What he saw was suspicion.

  Even before Joe Biden withdrew, everybody knew ... it was Gephardt who did him dirty.

  It started in the sour soup of the pack, of course. Not that it showed up in stories ... but still, everybody knew. Tell the truth, the pack was edgy—this Karacter Kop routine was screwing up their campaign, their own shining shot at History! Candidates toppling like trees in a clear-cut! Where would it stop? People were blaming them! ... So, someone was gonna pay for Biden. That video started the whole sooty snowball—who sent it?

  Gephardt, Gephardt, Gephardt ...

  The wise-guy community echoed back this delicious and well-known poop, the more avidly in Iowa (they might be in Council Bluffs, but hey!—they were in the know). And from that point, it was an epidemiological certainty that the “activist” population would be infected.

  People stood up at events and asked Gephardt: Why’d you do it?

  Gephardt said he didn’t do it. As far as he knew, no one in his campaign did it.

  As far as he knew! ... Wasn’t that wiggle room?

  Even if they believed him—say, half those staring citizens on the courthouse lawn—they didn’t believe for long. Their neighbor heard for sure. ... Anyway, this thing spread like herpes B—no way you’d catch up with one man in a Ford van.

  Dick was supposed to be bringing in the old Biden folks ... forget it! Lowell Junkins, the top of Biden’s Iowa heap, the last Democratic candidate for Governor, was jobbing Gephardt every chance he got. And as he was the one man the big-feet consulted to find out where Biden-folk were likely to land ... his chances were legion.

  But the press didn’t need persuading. They’d always had that Gephardt figured: the man would do anything! (He made his mother move to Iowa ... what is she? Ninety?)

  It was like his flip-flop on abortion ... the guy got off the pro-life wagon just before going national—how convenient.

  Then he discovered the trade deficit because he needed the unions.

  Then he signed onto Harkin’s farm bill because he’d need the farmers.

  It all fit, see ... not just Doak and Shrum plotting to ruin Biden because they hated Caddell. The whole Gephardt operation was a band of desperadoes! The newest was Joe Trippi ... brilliant, yes, but his pockets were filled with grenades—everybody knew that! Trippi was going to do message—God only knew what Gephardt would say now, now that he’d tailored his whole image to Iowa ... that whole Eagle Scout thing ... and Iowa saw through it. (D’you see the poll? Guy’s fallin’ apart!)

  Now there were rumors Gephardt meant to sack his Iowa operation (after Fleming put an army out there for him!). Was he getting rid of the guilty parties?

  Everybody knew something was fishy in that Gephardt office. You never even saw those people out to dinner! ... Teresa Vilmain, head of the Dukakis Iowa campaign, threw a party—it was for the Biden folks, but everybody came ... everybody but the Gephardts. That’s what people talked about, all night—and days thereafter. Not one Gephardt person! Teresa was nobody’s fool—she wouldn’t invite them! The Duke’s people hadda know something ... right?

  Missss-ter Eagle Scout!

  Dick was without tools to combat this disaster, unequipped by experience. His life’s method was built on the certainty, the requirement, that people would look into his eyes and see he was decent, optimistic, patriotic, faithful to the Lord, considerate of his fellow man. ... Seldom had he been mistrusted—never attacked.

  He had no idea what to do.

  His problem could not be solved by denial—they did not believe him. And his constant instinct in times of trouble—to work harder—was useless. He could not prove a negative by visiting three more Iowa counties, not even three a day. The intensity of his effort just made it worse. It made him laughable—the dread and fatal affliction.

  His issues, his program, offered no protection: people did not believe that he believed in his issues ... they were campaign-convenient, too clever by half. Reilly took polls in Iowa on the trade issue. Almost eighty percent of the sample agreed with Gephardt’s position ... but they wouldn’t vote for him.

  That’s what was dawning on Gephardt: it was about him ... the issues, the organization, were only important insofar as they showed him. ... And not in the comfortable, unassuming way that had always worked before: Dick Gephardt, honest broker ... that nice young man who helped the community association with its articles of incorporation ... that knowledgeable young Congressman who cut through red tape at the VA ... that patient legislator who sat through 165 conference committee meetings, just to buff the burrs off that Gramm-Rudman bill.

  No, that was not enough.

  “People in this country look at politicians like doctors—solve the problem ...” That’s the way Dick talked about his discovery. “They don’t really know about the gall bladder ... so they want to know something about the doctor.”

  This wasn’t like his other campaigns. It was not just more doorsteps—this was something else. He would have to be something else. There were millions of people out there, going to pick their President. It didn’t matter how hard Dick worked—he was not going to lock the baby blues on their faces and listen to them all. They weren’t going to get in a room with Dick and figure out what they wanted to do. They wanted one guy, at the front of the room, to tell them what they were going to do—or, at least, what he meant to do.

  Dick said, one day, in a plane over Iowa: “You know what’s the amazing thing? The people elect the President ...” He announced this with a grin of wonder—such a radical idea! “That makes all the difference. Isn’t it un-be-liev-able? All those millions of people ...”

  Seeking one guy, of size, to fill the stage.

  Problem was, he did not know how to be that man, or show himself to be that man ... to bestride the stage, to impose his person. He could not impose himself upon his own campaign.

  The most corrosive thing was, he could not know. When they came at him about the Biden mess, he didn’t think his guys had done it. He’d never heard about it ... but ...

  He asked Carrick, who said he was sure they hadn’t done it ... and Dick found himself listening in Bill’s murmur for the thump of conviction.

  So began the Great Chain of Doubt.

  Because there was no conviction in Carrick’s voice. He didn’t know ... surely, he ought to know ... but Doak and Shrum did hate Caddell ...

  And Doak knew he hadn’t done it ... but Carrick ... or Shrum! Shrum thought Biden was wifty anyway, and he would’ve known those Kennedy quotes cold ... but Shrum was in Italy when those quotes came out, and ... no, probably wasn’t Shrum.

  Of course, Shrum knew he hadn’t ... but Trippi—would he do it without telling? Could Joe do anything without talking about it?

  Hell, Carrick could! Or that kid he hired for Deputy Press, that little killer, Mark Johnson: ambition on his face permanently, like a birthmark! That kid could have done it ...

  Carrick could have told him to ...

  Dick could’ve told Carrick! ...

  “Mrs. Gephardt, did your husband put out the attack video?”

  Jane got the question from a reporter in Idaho. She had to ask what he was talking about. She always liked Joe Biden—such a charmer! What was going on? She called the campaign, and Don Foley told her Dick was saying he had nothing to do with it. The line of the day: “We don’t run that kind of campaign.”

  Well, that’s exactly what Jane had said. Dick had never run that kind of campaign ... but this was a new kind of campaign.

  “Have Dick call me as soon as he can.”

  That night, Dick told her not to worry—they hadn’t done it.

  “Are you sure? ...” Jane knew they were all “professionals,” all the new people. Maybe this was part of the deal. “How do you know they didn’t?”

  Dick said he’d asked Carrick—and he had to back his guy! That was the deal with Carrick.

  Jane said quietly: “You don’t know anymore.”

  He�
��d make his move in Iowa: get rid of Fleming, bring back Steve Murphy, the almost-Campaign-Manager whom he’d dumped for Carrick. Murphy had licked his wounds and was looking for a role. And he was, in Dick’s felicitous phrase, “a real ass-kicker.” Murphy would take names.

  It wouldn’t look good—bound to get bad press: GEPHARDT CAMPAIGN IN DISARRAY. ... And Dick never liked bearing bad news. But he had to! All his effort, money, hope ... he sure as hell had to know what was going on! Dick had decided to make this campaign his campaign.

  But it was like watching a kid learn to walk—one or two bold steps, then he’d fall over again.

  He’d fly out that weekend—had a debate there, anyway—and he’d tell Fleming. (Well, actually, Carrick would tell Fleming—but Dick agreed!)

  Murphy couldn’t move to Des Moines for a week or so, but Dick was already talking to him, telling him the problems:

  The schedule was stupid—they were plowing the same ground, over and over.

  The field work was sloppy—people told Dick they’d tried to volunteer, no one ever called them back.

  The speeches were always late—Dick didn’t see them till the day he had to deliver the words.

  “Well, all you gotta do is call ’em up and tell them,” Murphy said. “Tell ’em what you want—demand it! You know? ... Get mad!”

  Dick said: “Okay, good ... we’ll do it.” But he never called.

  Meanwhile, till Murphy came, Trippi had to hold the fort—which was still besieged by suspicion. ... The latest from HQ was, that Deputy Press kid, Mark Johnson, had been handing out clips on Biden’s troubles—right in the middle of the feeding frenzy. Chrissake! The kid was Carrick’s hire ... but he had to be stopped.

  So Trippi pulled an Al Haig (“As of now, I am in control here”) and put out a memo—to everyone—forbidding any talk to the press without his explicit permission. In fact, he forbade talking to the candidate without his permission.

  Then Don Foley went nuclear. He’d been Dick’s Press Secretary for ten years ... been working with Gephardt since 1970, since Don was a senior at St. Louis U and an eager lawyer-pol named Dick Gephardt had come by to organize Students for Symington. Foley was the one guy who knew Gephardt from back when. Foley was the one who told Gephardt from the start: this was his campaign ... his values, his method ... his person. (And Foley knew: that’s why Carrick had to coup him. That’s why Carrick “helped him out” with an assistant, Mark Johnson, the Pit Bull—the kid actually liked the nickname!—and why Carrick gave Johnson the word: Hey, if something should, you know, happen to Foley, well, the job is yours.)

  So Foley went straight to Dick: This has got to stop! How could Foley do his job, help Dick ... when Carrick and his killers were trying to cut off Don’s nuts? This memo ... after eighteen years, Don had to ask permission to talk to Dick Gephardt? It was ridiculous!

  Dick agreed.

  Don said: “Dick ... it’s got to the point, I’m thinking of leaving.”

  Dick said he’d hate to see that.

  Well, then, now was the time, Don said, for Dick to put his foot down. Tell them what you want: Don Foley will be the spokesman, handle the press, travel with the candidate ...

  Dick said he really couldn’t interfere.

  So Foley was history ... and just as the Kops were rooting up the forest floor, like hogs after a truffle, snouting out Dick’s Karacter ... there was no Foley to explain, to tell the old stories. ... No, the campaign ended up with Mark Johnson prowling the press pens.

  And he had been peddling hot clips on Biden ... to CBS ... where they fell into the hands of Lesley Stahl ... who found out they’d come from ... the GEPHARDT CAMPAIGN!

  So she promptly went on the air with the first public confirmation that, indeed, the Gephardts were promoting dirt on Biden.

  Dick was so wounded. And mystified: How could this happen? They were making him look like a schemer, a liar! ... He went so far as to call Lesley Stahl, to protest: This is really unfair!

  Mark Johnson went further (this could affect his future!) ... he called Dan Rather. Of course, Johnson didn’t get through. But he gave Dan’s assistant an earful. He wanted a retraction!

  Well, word must have got through ... because Rather went on the air, the next night, and stuck it to Gephardt again.

  So Carrick had to swing into action.

  He gave the candidate a stern talking-to: “Dick! Y’don’t pick a fight w’the goddam networks ...”

  And he called a meeting, a manage-the-damage. Dick had to come in for that.

  They went round the table—who did what?—because they had to know where they stood. They ran through the answers to every charge—explanations for everything. Dick sat quietly through all that.

  But when they got to the Lesley Stahl story, he picked up his briefing book ...

  “This just shows ...” he said.

  He was standing now, in front of his chair.

  “... you can do nothin’ wrong ... and they’ll STILL ...”

  Gephardt slammed down his briefing book.

  “... FUCK ... YOU ... TO DEATH!”

  They were aghast. No one said a word. They’d never heard him talk like that. They looked at each other, then up at Dick.

  He was smiling. He’d never heard himself talk that way, either.

  He liked that. He’d got mad.

  69

  Matt

  DICK WAS A FIRST-YEAR Alderman, a new partner at Thompson and Mitchell, a young lawyer-pol on the go, in May of ’72, when Matt got the flu—they thought it was flu. Matt was eighteen months old, a blond, bright, and eager boy ... until he got such terrible pains. He was miserable—he cried all the time, his belly hurt, he had diarrhea ... and it didn’t go away—two weeks of flu?

  Then the doctor felt something in his abdomen, a hardness—probably a blocked bowel. He sent the Gephardts home with a laxative. Jane thought, later, she should have known ... the change in Matt was so sudden, total. But how could a first-time mother know?

  In time, X-rays showed a tumor off his prostate, squeezing the bladder and kidneys, pushed against his ureters. The pain came from his inability to urinate. The tumor was too big: surgeons could never cut it out without massive collateral damage. Worse still, the tumor was cancerous. Dick and Jane were told there was little chance for Matt.

  What could they do? Hospitals ... specialists ...

  And the answer, from the chief oncologist at Barnes Hospital, was ... probably nothing.

  Jane was devastated. She felt her life was ending—was ended. Matt had been her life, or its focus, for the last two years—she’d quit her job in advertising when she got pregnant, in 1970. She was a full-time mother, and she loved it ... but now they told her her baby would be gone. She’d walk out from the hospital, and see people on the street, hustling by: they didn’t even look, they didn’t know! “Don’t they know what’s happening to me?”

  She could not accept ... this was not happening to her, to her baby! ... And Dick could not accept. His whole life was testament to faith, and the power of will. So Dick’s answer was his most basic instinct: We’ll fight, we’ll do ... everything.

  There was a young doctor named Ragab, an Egyptian, second man on Matt’s team. Abdul Ragab was the man who told Dick and Jane that there was a treatment, developed in Texas—three drugs administered in combination chemotherapy, along with radiation ... and it showed promise.

  “It is possible ...” Dr. Ragab spoke softly, with the soft consonants of his native land. “Don’t give up.”

  So Dick and Jane sat down with the chief of the team, Theresa Vietti, head of pediatric oncology at Barnes, and they told her they wanted to do everything.

  She said: “There are worse things than dying.”

  Dick stared at her across her desk. What the hell was she talking about? Did she think they’d just let Matt slip away?

  “The treatment could ... could be worse.”

  Dick just blinked once, slowly, and looked her in the eye: “D
o ... whatever ... you have to.”

  Dick always said: “Once you’re in the fight, then you’re fighting, you’re okay.” But this was not okay. They were throwing drugs into Matt as hard as they could, bombarding his abdomen with radiation—they had to shrink the tumor, or he’d be gone before the fight began.

  If they could shrink the tumor, ultimately, they could operate—but how soon? How well? And what would they find? No one could tell Dick and Jane they would beat the cancer.

  And Matt was shrinking, before their eyes, into a withdrawn and fretful shadow of their son. Treatments were terrible. He came to fear the medicine, machines ... he’d grab for Dick’s tie and hold on for all he was worth. He lost his beautiful blond hair. He was so small, bald, weak ... so frightened.

  Sometimes, Dick and Jane—so allied in their activist, willful way in the world—were frightened, too. And they had to wonder: were they right? Did they have the right? ... But they wondered to themselves. They were brave for each other—for Matt. And, really, they could not look back: this was his life!

  And it was Jane’s life—or that’s how it felt. Dick still dwelt in the world, day by day. He went to the office, he practiced law. He went to his aldermanic meetings, he did politics. The amazing thing, said his friends from the time, was they never saw the strain. Maybe it was harder to get him to laugh ... but they never saw him miss a step—he was so determined. Hell, there were people, thought they knew Dick, who didn’t know he had any troubles at home. (They saw him just last week. He was talking about the billboard ban!) Jane, they never saw—not that summer, not that year. She called it “living in a vacuum.” What it was: she lived in Matt’s world. And that world grew so small. With the treatments, he was hanging on the edge: his immune system was shot. He couldn’t be out in crowds. You couldn’t bring a stranger into the house. Jane would go out, and she’d find herself searching the people—as if she could see what germs she had to dodge.

  Then Matt got pneumonia, and even that life stopped. The treatments stopped. The doctors said Matt couldn’t hold on—he was going to die. He was in the hospital. Dick and Jane were in the hospital. Thompson and Mitchell gave Dick the time. Sometimes he’d sit in Matt’s room all night. The hospital staff would bustle in and out, with drugs—antibiotics now—or to take blood, blood pressure, heart rate ... seemed like a thousand stupid tests. They’d pound on Matt’s back to try to loosen his lungs. Dick felt they were pounding on him. Matt had to fight! Dick wanted him to fight! How could he fight when he was so weak? They wouldn’t even let him sleep, to get his strength! They were filling in boxes on their damned clipboards!