So Shrum broke in again. Now he was trying to back Dick off: “Uh, Congressman? I hate to say this, ’cause, you know, I always ... but that seemed, uh, a little harsh. Maybe we could try something like Dukakis does, where you say, ‘You don’t understand ...’or ‘Those are not the facts ...’ ”
Dick cocked his head, said he understood ... but behind his eyes, that just turned the screws tighter. Why were they now telling him not to kill? They didn’t think he could do it? They were giving up on him! ... Or they were wrong? They changed their minds? ... They didn’t know!
And from that point, Gephardt knew, he was alone. He’d always wanted their help. He’d always been good at asking for help. But this was the big one—and he was out there ... naked. They wanted him to kill, but be himself, but show some balls, but Presidential ... and there were no answers. He was going to have to get it from himself, and he didn’t know anymore where it was ... with all of them working on him, to rev him up, back him down—calm, it had to be calm, they said ... but as he left the room, there was Carrick, pounding his fist into his palm.
Ethel Klein, who always talked like a shrink, called it a “generalized web of anxiety.” And it only tightened on the big night. First, there was Ethel, driving him through D.C. to the Kennedy Center. God knows why they wanted her to bring him. Maybe they thought she’d calm him down. But how could she? She didn’t even know how to get to the place! She was a New Yorker ... she wasn’t the body man, couldn’t answer his questions: Where do we go when we come in? Where do we sit while the Republicans are on? ... She knew what he wanted: some piece of certainty—just logistics!—but she was helpless, her hands white on the wheel.
Then they got to the holding room, and there were Doak and Shrum. That was another signal. Shrum hated debates, never came. He was like a playwright who can’t stand opening night—his beautiful lines get all screwed up, and people hate it ... but Carrick insisted. Shrum was trying to make jokes—that’s what Carrick told him: Lighten it up! But Shrum was a mess, and nobody laughed ... so pretty soon Shrummy didn’t have any jokes. He paced the room, chafing his neck with his Italian scarf, fiddling with the fringe on the end, like a hungry Jew waiting for Yom Kippur to end. “Dick,” he said, “you’re just gonna have to get me through this.”
Doak was calmer—outwardly. He slipped into country-lawyer mode, like he used to when he had a big murder case, as a Public Defender in rural Missouri. Doak always tried to keep it simple—one truth for the jury to hang on to. Tonight, his one message for Dick was: Don’t ask a question if you don’t know the answer. And just to drive that home, fill the air, he told a story—one of his old murder trials. Doak had his client off, the case was going great, but the cop was on the stand ... and Doak asked a question when he didn’t know the answer: How did the cop know what happened in the house? So the cop went into forensics, how he pieced it together ... how this elderly lady, in her own home, was hit in the head, but then she ran through the house, and the guy hit her again, and she fought, and he hit her again where there was blood on the wall, and again, he bludgeoned her, where they found part of her scalp, and again, and he hit her, and hit her, until ... heh heh ... the jury saw that old lady’s brains and blood all over the walls ... heh heh—that case went down the drain.
Dick was staring at Doak, like this was a bad dream: her brains on the wall? ... It was time to go. All the candidates had to meet backstage for their pictures, smile for the cameras. ... Jesse Jackson took the occasion to rally the Democrats. He wanted them to remember: Party unity. They didn’t want to give the Republicans ammunition. ... Of course, Jesse couldn’t know, but he was only turning the screws on Gephardt—like Bonnie Campbell, before the Duke-Dick debate! ... Well, Gephardt wouldn’t pussy out this time.
So they got on stage, and it happened: Gephardt looked edgy, white under his makeup, bloodless, angry, wooden. He screwed up his first answer (though it was one they’d rehearsed forty times). In the audience, Shrum was looking through his fingers, like you do at a horror movie when you can’t bear to watch ... as Simon said something ... and Dick turned slowly ... and he hit him:
“Paul, you’re not a pay-as-you-go-Democrat ... you’re a promise-as-you-go Democrat.”
There was a moment’s hush in the hall—the attack had come out of nowhere ... and Simon, with his lips parted, just stared at Dick in quizzical paralysis—he looked stunned, almost sad ... oh, God! ... Bambi caught in the headlights.
But Dick couldn’t stop: he hit him again—Simonomics is the flip side ... Reaganomics with a bow tie ...
And no one knew how to stop the thing—least of all, Simon ... or Dick.
So he hit Paul again: “Where’s the dough? ...”
It was just like Doak’s hoary ax-murder, where the killer couldn’t stop. And even the knowing Washington crowd was sending up a low, rustling murmur of incredulous revulsion ...
Until, mercifully, Gephardt was out of lines.
In the holding room, while the Republicans were on stage, no one had the guts to bring it up with Dick. They talked about Gore (Dick had called him a back-bencher).
“Well, he deserved it,” the killers said. They were trying to sound hearty. Dick was staring ahead, looking at no one.
He had to bring up Simon himself:
“I hated that,” he said.
The killers had nothing to say. Ethel tried, but she was so panicky, she was squeaking. She wanted Dick to explain to her why it was all right: “I don’t know, I really felt, I mean, God, you know, you have to give people some access, some way to like you, and ...”
Dick turned on her—screaming at her face:
“SOMEBODY HAD TO DO IT! ... HE HAD TO TAKE THE HIT, AND SOMEBODY ... HAD TO DO IT.”
That night the killers sent Dick home, went out and got drunk. What else could they do? It was over.
Some unemployed pollsters had a people-meter operation rigged up in Iowa during the debate. The Iowans had dials with which to register their likes and dislikes. When Dick blew Bambi’s head off, the Iowans were so unhappy they dialed Gephardt’s graph off the bottom of the charts. When they walked out, Dick was at zero—not one person said they’d vote for him.
Shrummy took to his bed, convinced he’d ruined the campaign—too many lines. The gloom filtered down through the Washington office. RoboCandidate had gone haywire—green slime was oozing out.
And that was just Washington. The road show went to Iowa, 6:00 A.M. the following day. Dick looked terrible. The rest looked worse. They landed in Des Moines, and there was ... Ken Bode, NBC, full crew. Bode was full of beans and news of the people-meter disaster: Well, how does it feel to be the most hated man in Iowa?
That’s all Dick got, all day, as he slogged east across the state:
How do you explain your campaign falling apart?
Looking back, how did you lose your lead?
Would you say attacking Paul Simon was your last chance?
No, he would not say ... but what could he say? He got to his last event, late ... and it was Waterloo.
Waterloo, Iowa, was supposed to be his stronghold, a blue-collar town that had lost its jobs, UAW country. Gephardt had a big rally scheduled. Dick got to a holding room in the basement of a church: he had ten or fifteen calls, people to sign on. The local field man dialed, and Dick came on: “We need your help. ... You’re the kind of people who make things happen here ...”
Not one signed on—he lost them all.
He walked down the hall to his rally, and there was no one—well, twenty or thirty old folks, just the faithful. The UAW was supposed to bring in busloads ... no bus. No show. He started his speech, the stump speech, same speech ... but it was not the same.
He started telling stories in the middle, talking about the people he’d met. And they weren’t polished stories, for effect. He was just talking. Like he meant to tell them what it meant to him, all those months—now that he’d got to the bottom. “You know, I took a meal to this lady—she was ninety-four
years old, she came to the door on her walker ...”
In the back of the room, the regional field man, Don Miller, whispered to the road show crew: “We’re in trouble ...”
“Did you tell Dick?”
Miller shook his head. It was the moment when the guys in suits stop telling the candidate the truth.
Ethel Klein told Miller: “You have to do something. You have to make him feel good, tonight. You get somebody to call this guy!” Then she went to a phone and tracked down Carrick. Half a dozen calls. “You’ve got to call him,” Ethel said. “You have got to call this guy, tonight.”
Dick was still telling stories:
“This man said, ‘How’m I gonna send my daughter to college?’ And I saw the daughter ...” Dick stopped, looked away, like he could see the girl, still ...
It was late. They needed sleep. But Dick needed this more. He had to draw these people to him—not to his candidacy, to him.
At the end, he did his pitch for precinct captains ... but he did not leave. He thanked every one of them for coming ... went around the room, shook hands with everyone. Still, he stayed.
Then a farmer, Carroll Hayes, a thick guy with sideburns, in a jacket and cap, said to Dick, to everyone: “You don’t just need precinct captains. I’m a captain. Been with you a long time. You need money, too.” He put his ankle up on his knee, took out a checkbook, and wrote Dick a hundred dollars, right there.
Dick said quietly, he’d never forget that.
Then Hal Lennox walked up with a check. He was an IBEW man, and there were only a couple of dozen IBEW men with jobs in Waterloo. Hal wasn’t one of them. He hadn’t worked for a while. But he handed Dick a check for twenty dollars.
It was almost midnight when they finally left—night-silence in Waterloo, and a sudden, soft snow. Ethel said to Dick at the car: “That was wonderful ...” She got his eyes, like Loreen used to do, and she told him: “You were so ... great.”
In the hotel that night, Carrick called. He talked about the ads. This month, they’d be on. The ads were gonna be killers.
Then the Iowa Field Director, Jim Cunningham, called: “Dick, there ain’t no quit in any of us. Only thing means a damn here is my Number Ones, and we’re up this month, thirteen hundred ...”
Dick was played out. His voice was small. But he took the calls. ... At last, he called Jane. He always finished with a call to Jane.
She could hear it in an instant. She always knew. The words were the same, but there was no air in him.
“Bug-man, you’re the best,” she told him.
Over and over: “You’re the best ... you’ll make it. You just have to believe you can do it. That’s what I learned from you, Bug-man. You can’t go by the polls. Believe in you! You’re the best ...”
89
God Is Doing It
DICK WOULD GET DOWNSTAIRS early in the mornings. He’d have the paper read, front to back, by 7:00 A.M. On March 9, 1976, he never got past the front page:
REP. LEONOR SULLIVAN TO RETIRE ...
Dick had just committed to his Young Turk friends to run for Mayor. Well, actually, they’d talked to him about it ... and Dick agreed.
But by 6:45 that morning, Loreen was on the phone—just to make sure: “Dick, did you see the paper?”
By 7:00 A.M., Dick was on the phone with cousin Joe Kochanski. (Joe never liked that Mayor idea ...)
“D’you see? ...”
“I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”
Before the morning rush hour, they were out of St. Louis, on their way to Jefferson City, to file Dick as a candidate for the Congress of the United States.
In fact, they spent the whole morning in Jeff City while Dick worked the Capitol ... introducing himself, passing out cards, telling everybody he saw that he was running. He had to make as much noise as he could—scare as many people out of the race as he could.
That’s what they talked about on the way home: old Leonor had an heir apparent, a State Senator and IBEW union official named Don Gralike. Gralike would have Sullivan’s troops, the unions, Democratic clubs, committeemen, and captains—all the machinable vote. If Dick had to split the rest with a crowd of eager hopefuls, well ... he might as well save his filing fee.
“We gotta show something on the ground, right now ...”
“Yeah, we gotta get a printer—brochures, lawn signs ...”
“Somebody’s gonna have to write some positions.”
“Have to get something down on paper.”
“Who’s gonna run it?”
“We can get Carol Higgins ...”
“Vicki can help ...”
Vicki was Dick’s secretary at the law firm, wonderful woman ...
But what kind of noise could they make with a campaign of Vicki and one typewriter?
That night, Dick went to the Morganford Avenue storefront of his own club, the Fourteenth Ward Democratic Organization. There was a meeting in progress, and the captains cheered as he walked in.
“Hey, Congressman!”
“Count on me, Dick ...”
But that was the only ward club he could count on.
That night, he called Don Foley, the young political op—Dick had met him while Foley was still in college. By that time, Foley was in Chicago, working for Governor Walker, of Illinois.
“Did you hear about Leonor? She’s gonna retire.”
Foley said: “What’re you gonna do?”
“I already did,” Dick said. And he asked: Would Don come back and run this thing?
That night, too, he gathered the family—Cousin Joe, Lou, Loreen, Jane, even little Matt, in the house on Fairview ... and he told them they had to commit. Unless they all helped, he couldn’t do it ... but if they all worked, if they believed ...
“Oh, I know you’ll do wonderfully.”
That was Loreen. She was committed, but much more than that: she’d been thinking all day how perfect it was, the way Mrs. Sullivan said she’d step aside, just at the moment ... how Lowell Jackson, her old boss at International Shoe, had told her, when Dick was sixteen years old, “That boy is going to be President” ... how every year, Loreen would think she could not be prouder of Dick—how could she be?—and then, every year, her hopes were exceeded ... and now, the path cleared, just at the moment ...
Loreen said: “God is doing it.”
And Dick agreed.
He had five months till the primary—no time to wonder who was going to do this or that. He’d just start doing it ... if someone came to help, that’d be great.
Gralike was the heavy favorite with the unions—but Dick went straight to the unions: that was his first instinctive Gephardt move. He asked for their support. He knew he wouldn’t get it ... but he wanted them to know him. He wanted them to know, here was a guy who’d play ball.
“Well, if I win the primary, do you think you could support me?”
Sure, Dick—no problem! (What did they have to lose? Gralike was a shoo-in!)
Meanwhile, Gephardt went right around them. He was out the next day, and the day after that, and after that ... door to door: “Hi, I’m Dick Gephardt, and I’m running for Congress. Everything okay in the neighborhood?”
He’d do it all day ... he’d spend two minutes at a door, or an hour, depending on what they wanted to say ... how the city didn’t do nuthin’ about that tree that’s got a limb right over the house ... or the way the trucks make the house shake when they hit that hole at the end of the block ... or the way the colored act in the city, it’s no wonder nobody goes downtown. ... Gephardt nodded, listened. He never argued, never fogged over. His blue eyes were clear, locked on their faces.
Issues, position papers, he farmed out. He’d read them over when they came in—but quick, like he’d scan an associate’s legal brief ... just to see if it would pass muster. (One woman to whom he’d assigned a paper was so rattled by his unconcern that she started screaming at him in the Bevo Mill—a public restaurant! She shouted that he had no business in Congress.
Dick asked someone else to do the paper.)
The contacts with community groups, the neighborhood stuff, he left to a fellow Alderman, Jim Komorek. Komorek was another Young Turk, an advertising man. He helped with the signs, too. Dick was fanatic about signs.
The money, the books, the thickets of post-Watergate election law—Joe Kochanski took care of that. (Joe had the files and forms stacked all over the office of his heating and air-conditioning business.) They didn’t have much money ... didn’t matter.
“How many doors did we hit today?”
That’s all Dick wanted to know.
There wasn’t a day off. There wasn’t an hour off. If he had thirty minutes between appointments—well, he might get one side of a block. They had the blocks numbered, and they’d hit them one by one ... every house ... hundreds every day. Dick would call in from someone’s kitchen—did Jane get all of thirteen and fourteen? ... Well, he’d go over there tonight, when he finished.
Gephardt tried to make it look like he was everywhere at once—out on the fringe of the countryside, Tuesday; Wednesday, up the tight streets of South St. Louis. ... Gralike mailed into all of those houses. But Dick showed up on their porches.
By summertime, the Gephardts were a drill team. They’d pull up at the foot of some street, in Kochanski’s heating-supply panel truck, and Dick would work one side, Jane the other—or Jane and Loreen together. If someone insisted on talking to Dick, Jane would stand on the lawn, waving her arms. Dick would trot across the street, or down the block, in 105-degree heat. But he’d never sweat.
By that time, they had a schedule of neighborhood picnics, church fairs, block parties ... they’d roll up in Joe’s truck, tank of helium in the back ... every kid got a Gephardt balloon, a leaflet for every voter—bang, bang, bye-bye, back in the truck ... next block.
By that time, too, Gralike had to debate ... and that’s where it showed—before one word was spoken. Gralike was an old-fashioned pol, a dark and serious-looking man ... and there was Dick, across the stage: young, blond, eager ... with his beautiful family in the front row ... well, it did your heart good. You could see that young Gephardt was honest, decent, smart ... and he cared so much.
What It Takes Page 111
