What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  Now he just said, “I know ...”

  No one could remember, at the campaign loft on Chauncy Street, when it came clear ... this was not over: it didn’t matter what Michael had said. He was still taking heat, and he was wilting.

  Maybe it was a phone call from the State House (there were scores that day—staff swapping rumors).

  Maybe it was the questions still aswirl in the press pack. The diddybops were camped in the hallways, waiting for Sasso ... trading the story up to spine-tingling scandal: Sasso did the tape—Michael hadda know! ... Michael must’ve known—Kitty hadda know! ... Tully knew—Vilmain in Iowa hadda know. ... Who knew? Farmer? Corrigan? Edley? Estrich? Patricia O’Brien? ... What did they know ... and when did they know it?

  Or maybe it was John, who was sure: this wasn’t over ... no, not the way Michael was treating this—as a moral question. Once it got to that, there was only one place Michael could come down.

  Sasso was closeted in a hideaway office, upstairs, with his wise guys and a few staff. John was going to do his own press conference that afternoon—three o’clock. They had to get this thing square, to bed, in time for the TV news. If they couldn’t kill the questions, this would slop into another day’s news, and another, then another. They could bleed to death like Biden.

  But all the talk was strange, strained. They talked about Tully! Did Tully have to go? How should Tully go? ... As if no one thought that Michael would—that he could—let John go. They were Sasso’s people, after all—not Michael’s. Michael was a weight they bore.

  It was afternoon when it sank in ... still, no one could quite believe ... Michael couldn’t ... he had to think ... God, they had to stop him!

  Dan Payne, the ad man, called the Governor at the State House. Michael took the call, but that was it. He didn’t want to talk.

  “Look,” Payne said, “can’t this wait, hold on, like, one day? You’re under a lot of stress. John is ... I mean ...”

  “No—you should be here,” Michael told him. “The calls are coming in, it’s unbelievable. Everybody says ...”

  Payne tried to break in, to say what Sasso would not say: “You guys haven’t even really talked ...”

  “There’s no time,” Michael snapped. “Gotta do this.” He took a call on another phone and, for some reason, handed Payne off to Kitty.

  Jack Corrigan, Sasso’s right hand, told the Governor he was making a mistake. Corrigan was a man of few words—mutters, actually—not the kind to make speeches. But that day, he got in Michael’s face, and told him: “Governor, you have no idea how hard this campaign is going to be ... you’re going to need John.”

  But Michael acted like it was Corrigan who needed John: “Look, I know how close you two are ... but it’s gotta be done.”

  Susan Estrich made her first call ever, directly to Dukakis. She’d always dealt through John. But she felt she had to tell Michael that John would stay. She knew John would stay. If they could only talk—they had to talk. ... But she knew, John would not call.

  No, John would not call. So Michael called John, at Chauncy Street. Michael’s voice was clipped.

  “You’re gonna have to go. You’re gonna have to do it, make the announcement ...”

  And, after an instant’s silence ... at last, John tried:

  “Do you want to talk about this for a few minutes? ... Later this afternoon? ... You wanna talk, tonight?”

  “No,” Michael said. “You gotta do it, at your three-o’clock.”

  John didn’t say more. Was he worth twenty-four hours? Apparently not. Was he worth one face-to-face discussion?

  Michael would not look John in the face for the next three months.

  At his press conference, Sasso announced he had resigned.

  75

  Old Friends

  IN THAT FIRST TERM, as the Governor took his meat-ax to the budget, there was no use coming at Michael with threats to resign. Abandonment seemed to hold no terror for him. Isolation in his correctness only made that correctness more splendid—and more dogged. People used to say he couldn’t hear criticism, but that wasn’t true. He heard, he understood the words (he wasn’t stupid!) ... that’s why he acted ever more sure that he was right.

  And not just right ... but sure, all the while, that he’d be proven right, and soon! Reason and decency (he) would prevail. And not just sure ... but eager, optimistic, every day, as he marched the wing tips into the corner office, shrugged off his boxy suitcoat, rolled his shirtsleeves a couple of times, and sat down to govern. ... This was the life!

  Sure, the press and pols might be fixated on welfare cuts, taxes ... but Michael took great satisfaction from his reform of the Public Utility Commission, the Outdoor Advertising Board, the Insurance Commissioner’s Office, the Banking Commissioner’s Office. Michael could talk for hours about resuscitating the state’s decaying mill towns. (He’d found a sharp young planner in Lowell, Frank Keefe, and he was working on some Urban Heritage Parks that were, well, just terrific!) ... Salvucci and the neighborhood do-goods had managed to oust that idiot, Eddie King, who ran the port and the airport, and Michael was pressing ahead with a full reform and reorganization of the Port Authority! ... These were great doings, to Dukakis—the stuff of his dreams.

  So what if demonstrators were shouting obloquy from the curb on Perry Street? He was elected to govern—not to give away the store. In the end, the static only sharpened Michael’s sense of all he had to bear, to be right. His children were upset and confused. Kitty thought the attacks were an outrage. And her mother (who called Michael “the Saint”) told him he was too good for this job! She could hardly believe how well he bore such wickedness and idiocy.

  So what if his erstwhile liberal supporters were conniving and combining to oppose him—somehow—in the next election? Their desertion only showed he’d been correct in his mistrust of them. (And Kitty, for one, knew that most of them—oh, she could name names at the dinner table!—were in the pockets of the interest groups.) Anyway, Michael was sure, in the end, they would have to see, he was right. Anyone who knew would have to admit, he was right.

  In the old days, from time to time, some friend (a Brookline veteran or an old compadre from the reform wars) might find a chance to talk with Michael—some evening, some Sunday—make him think twice, or at least make him listen. ... But Michael had so little time now. He was so wrapped up—and so excited—in the corner office.

  And the old friends ... well, it was strange, how it happened.

  The toughest for Michael was Allan Sidd, the Treasurer of Brookline, a friend since Michael’s first campaigns. Allan loved politics, understood politicians, and relished the game—as much as he loved food, drink, and smoke. Allan died of a heart attack—he was only fifty-three—just two years into Michael’s term.

  By that time, Carl Sapers and his brother, Bill, had split with Michael—they’d been allies since Town Meeting days, since “Vote Group Two!” ... but after Michael started running statewide, they’d had it with his attitude. He didn’t seem to know who his friends were. (He wouldn’t help Carl in a race for Brookline Board of Selectmen!) Anyway, the Saperses were gone.

  Maybe Michael’s oldest friend in politics was Sumner Kaplan, the Prometheus of reform, Dukakis’s first political model, the first Brookline Democrat to break into office, the man whose House seat Michael had stepped into. In 1977, Kaplan wanted to become a judge—Brookline District Court. But Governor Dukakis wouldn’t appoint him. Why? Because everybody knew how close Michael was to Sumner Kaplan! Michael had to be correct! ... So, Sumner Kaplan was no longer talking to Michael.

  Then, too, Fran Meaney, Michael’s closest political ally—his partner in COD, his companion on countless drives through the dark in service of reform, his manager in ’66 and ’70, and his chairman in ’74, the campaign that put him into the corner office ... Fran Meaney’s law firm got a bond counsel contract with the state!

  Lord help us!

  It did not matter to Michael that Fran
had not got the contract by his influence (or by any other means—he hadn’t been involved) ... it did not matter to Michael that the State Treasurer (a man named Crane) was not part of the Dukakis administration, but an independent elected officeholder who ran his own shop, picked his own counsel ... it did not matter to Michael that Fran’s firm—Mintz, Levin—was in every way competent and eligible for this contract. It certainly did not matter that Fran had worked with Michael Dukakis for fifteen years, without taint of compensation, or any accusation of self-interest ...

  No.

  People might think that Michael was, in some way, not correct! So Michael wanted Fran to force his firm to give up the contract.

  No way.

  Fran announced: “I am not a satellite to Michael Dukakis.” Then, he resigned all volunteer jobs that Michael had loaded upon him.

  Michael said: “If that’s the way he wants it, so be it.” Then, he went back to work.

  The important thing was, Michael was correct ... the more (and more) splendid in his isolation.

  76

  Apology Weekend

  EVERYONE COULD SEE, THAT weekend in Iowa, what this meant to Dukakis, what it took. He marched around the state—twenty-four stops in three days—apologizing, taking the blame ... insisting on the blame.

  “We’ve had six wonderful months in Iowa,” he’d tell each little crowd in each little town. “Something unfortunate happened this week, as you know. Maybe there are bumps in the road to the Presidency. I guess there are. But I apologize for ... what happened.”

  This was grim work, and Michael’s mien matched the chore at hand. He looked gray and weary. His eyes were sunken in a protective wince. In front of the crowds he’d stand up straight, but between stops, or back and forth to the van, his eyes sought the ground, his shoulders would hunch toward his ears. He’d called Andrea, his daughter who was working in the Des Moines office, to ride with him that weekend. He kept her at his side every minute, for three days.

  He was hauling a Greyhound full of diddybops and national press, and between stops, he made time for everyone who wanted a shot at him. Not that they’d get a different answer to The Question (Did he know about the tape? How could he not know?) ... but he meant to tell every reporter who would listen:

  “I’m a guy who’s been involved in public life for twenty-five years. I’m the kinda guy who’s always believed very strongly that the only way to campaign and the only way to be a political leader, is to campaign positively ...”

  Then he’d get out at the next backyard, the next high school, or coffee shop, and apologize again, try to tell another forty or fifty voters the kinda guy he was.

  From the first, it was apparent that most Iowans didn’t quite get what was so awful. How could they understand Michael astride his moral axis? They thought this was just a campaign.

  No one was going to rob Dukakis of his opportunity to disown this, this ... this ... behavior.

  Michael was riding in a plushy van, owned by his volunteer driver, Steve Lynch, who’d dolled up the truck, named it Van Force One, when he drove for Gary Hart, his first love in politics. For each ride, Michael would climb into the back, to an armchair on a swivel, just behind the shotgun seat. Patricia O’Brien would put a new reporter on the bench, facing Dukakis. And Michael would have at apology again. Or, to be precise, Michael worked at disassociation.

  To Germond and Witcover, he called John’s act “incomprehensible.”

  To the Globe: he “never imagined.”

  For the Boston Herald: he “couldn’t conceive” of John’s being involved.

  To The Washington Post: it was “inconceivable.”

  If the reporter in his van didn’t have the good sense to ask, Michael would bring up his “incomprehension” himself.

  With Newsweek as witness, he stared off (unseeing in his misery, so Newsweek supposed) at the fields of brown autumn cornstalks, and sighed aloud (twice): “Why did he do it?”

  No member of the pack could remain insensible to Michael’s blamelessness, his victimhood, or his loss (he and John were “like brothers,” Michael said).

  Many of the interviews in the van harkened back to Michael’s defeat in 1978. That was the accepted “crisis of his life” ... when he learned loss ... and learned apology. Michael was perfectly willing to run through the lessons. He’d start nodding before the question was through, and recall the history:

  “I hadn’t failed at very much politically to that point. I worked so hard in those first two years. Late 1977, early ’78, things had turned. The best year, economically, in the state since World War II. ... I really didn’t understand a lot about campaigning. And the polls had me forty points up ...”

  Then, the shrug—incomprehension, loss remembered, the “public death”—it was neat. ... Thirty column inches—no loose ends.

  But when some woolly writer suggested that wasn’t the same kind of loss ... when it was suggested to Michael, instead, that the analogue occurred before ’78—when he dismissed Fran Meaney from his life, Michael snapped:

  “It’s not the time to talk about that!”

  There was silence for a mile or two, before Michael swiveled toward the windows, and returned to the accepted text:

  “I just don’t understand why John did it.”

  The writer suggested it wasn’t so hard to understand. The Campaign Manager spends twenty hours a day thinking how to get Michael past the other guys ... how to bring Michael up, bring the other guys down. ... “It’s not a personal thing against the other guys. They’re just the targets.”

  And Michael’s face went dark, as he wheeled in his little captain’s chair and his fist came crashing down on the arm:

  “NOT in this campaign. They are NOT TARGETS!”

  Well, that shut everybody up.

  And with that smashing fist came the answer to the only hard question: Why couldn’t Sasso tell his “brother” Mike?

  The public contrition was over in a week. Michael stopped apologizing. The big-feet had spent themselves of features and analysis ... they stopped asking Dukakis if he knew about the tapes. Michael stopped saying how sad he was.

  It was Kitty, as usual, who summed up the emotional truth. “I think that we have a sense of sadness, and that’s appropriate, under the circumstances,” she said while on damage patrol in New Hampshire. “But my husband’s competency and his integrity are what matter. We will go on with another Campaign Manager, and things will go on as before.”

  So Michael appointed his new Campaign Manager, Susan Estrich. She came from within Sasso’s executive cadre. She would provide continuity, calm his organization. Michael didn’t know her well, wasn’t sure if he could rely on her judgment. But that suited him. He and Brountas had discussed this: Michael had relied too much on John Sasso.

  Now Michael would take charge. He called every member of the staff who might have dealings with the press, to tell them:

  “I don’t want any disparaging of any opponents. I don’t want any leaking. I absolutely won’t tolerate it. I don’t like it, and I’m telling you, we’re not going to have it. Republicans, Democrats, I don’t care. I’m talking about everything. Not just the little stuff on the edges. I’m talking about everything. I don’t want any of it ... you got it?”

  They got it ... and lest they did not, there was a lawyer, a Hill & Barlow man named Dan Taylor, acting for Brountas, scouting around the loft on Chauncy Street, building files for an internal purge, asking disingenuous questions like: “Tell me ... is it usual to make tapes of things and hand them to reporters?”

  Susan Estrich soon canceled that investigation. She’d inherited an organization that was already shaky in its shoes. She needed more pointing fingers like she needed a skin rash. The Boston Herald was still poking around Corrigan’s involvement in the tapes episode. Susan managed to stonewall that question—Corrigan stayed.

  The Globe still had a “spotlight team” grunting up a mega-turd on the Biden tapes. Patricia O’Brien favore
d that team with a long, anguished interview about how she should have known there was bad fish in the soup. Patricia was soon gone.

  As for Sasso, Michael said a dozen times that he would have no role in the campaign, now or in the future. Yet the first time Estrich brought up a question of political strategy, Michael asked:

  “What does John think?”

  What he wanted, of course, was a campaign that took full advantage of Sasso’s wisdom, and his wiles. ... Just don’t tell Michael.

  He would not see John, no.

  That’s what he assured Joe Biden, when he called him, to explain: he’d had no knowledge of this whole affair. He’d been shocked, stunned, when he found out it was Sasso. And he’d acted ... to cut that kinda thing out.

  Biden, of course, didn’t believe him. Biden would have known. Hell, yes—if it was his campaign! No one could convince Biden that Michael was not involved—or that Dukakis and his minions hadn’t deliberately hit him, just at the start of the hearings on Bork ... just when he couldn’t hit back.

  That’s what galled Joe—the worst: they hit him just when he was saving the country from Bork! ... Biden didn’t want to talk to Dukakis. He didn’t want a lot of holy explanations. He had only one point to make to the Governor:

  “Don’t you assholes understand? This shit is important!”

  77

  It’s Hard to Smile

  THE WIN ON BORK turned out to be—as Caddell had insisted—the swish of the guillotine on Reagan’s “revolution.” Biden carried his committee with an extra vote to spare—didn’t know about that till the last day, when Heflin came off the fence.

  Armed with a nine-five negative recommendation, Biden took the Bork nomination to the Senate floor in early October. Outgunned, outnumbered, the judge’s supporters tried to make the confirmation process the issue. But Biden would not give them the satisfaction.

  “Forty million people watched him,” Joe insisted. “He spoke. I, time and again, raised the gavel and said, ‘Are you certain, Judge, you’ve had enough time to respond to questions?’