What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  It was strange without staff—inconvenient, tiring ... but it was easier to stay clear, on the things that mattered. Big ideas did not come from staff.

  That was Hart’s strategy, as far as it went—big ideas. He knew the other candidates would try to nickel-and-dime him with detail. It was Hart’s job to show that niggling would not suffice. “That’s not the issue,” he would say. “There are broader questions that have to be addressed ...” Hart would have to haul the discussion up to the level where a President must operate. He would steer the talk to foreign affairs—that was his strong suit, a weakness for the rest. He knew he would have to be forceful. But he was ready, confident ... cocky, more like it.

  Backstage, the candidates held last-minute huddles. Billy Shore whispered to Hart: every one of those staffers had worked for Gary. They were all his people! ... Hart nodded, lips pursed. He’d insisted they must move on ... now he felt they’d abandoned him.

  Well, he would show, the issues were his, still. ... He took his seat on stage, between Dukakis and Jackson.

  First question, from the editor of the Register, Jim Gannon:

  Last week, in his interview, Hart said he wouldn’t be the first adulterer in the White House. ... Did that mean voters should just ignore questions of character and trust?

  Before Gannon finished, Hart’s head was twitching—probably meant to be a nod. He looked grim as he tried to respond. “I’ve made mistakes. I probably should have said in that interview that I’m a sinner. My religion tells me, all of us are sinners. I think the question is whether our sins prohibit us, or prevent us, from providing strong leadership. ...

  “I think there’s another level of morality at stake here, and that’s the morality of an administration which is really bankrupt in terms of its commitment to public ethics. ...

  “I would never lie to the Congress or the American people. ... I would never shred documents. I would never sell arms to terrorists. And I would never condone anyone in my administration who breached the highest standard of the sacred trust of the public duty.”

  As Hart concluded, there was only a scatter of applause from the crowd. Hart settled back into his seat, trying to look unconcerned, trying not to stick out. ... And that was the problem. After Gannon finished with him, Hart didn’t look oversized, at all.

  The awful part was, Hart knew what he had to do. And he knew—probably better than anyone there—what a President had to do. He had the same ideas and proposals that had attracted such praise eight months before ... in fact, now they were better refined, they fit together like a Lego set. He’d been thinking hard, for eight months.

  What he hadn’t been doing was debating every week, or twice a week, like the rest of those fellows. Once Hart got himself together after Gannon’s question, he had still to get up to speed on the picky stuff. It’d been a long time since he’d formed his two sentences on rural telephone policy or Medicaid extension for catastrophic care.

  So he’d take a second or two to think about his answers, then he’d say his piece—he did nicely—and then he was supposed to say: But the broader issue that has to be addressed is ...

  Meanwhile, the yellow light would flash on, which meant he had ten seconds. It happened three times in a row. ... Hart would settle back again. ... Well, I missed that question.

  Second and third time, he started to remind himself he wasn’t doing what he had to do! ... He started pressing himself to be faster, more forceful ... he couldn’t take time to consider an answer. Then he couldn’t clean the question with a couple of sentences. He had to add another ... and then—time’s up! ... Dukakis and Simon had to ask him questions, and they both pinned him with detail on health-care costs—same stupid question! What about America’s place in the world? Her promise to a new generation of citizens? ... Hart’s cheeks were showing an unhealthy flush—he looked too pink, hot, as he edged forward on his chair, and his hand jerked up a couple of times, like he wanted to break into the discussion ... but he couldn’t—he just ... didn’t have the moves.

  By the end, Hart’s mien was grim ... as Jesse Jackson reached over and touched Gary’s arm, whispered to him—consolation ... everybody could see.

  And when everybody stood for pictures, then walked off the stage, Hart was shaking his head, looking down. He didn’t want anyone to tell him he’d done fine—he knew he hadn’t done anything. ... Lee was in the holding room, and she was saying—No! It really went fine! ... But Shore and Casey were silent, trying to keep disappointment from their faces—little smiles.

  Hey, it’s just ... no big deal.

  Of course, it was a big deal, as the spin doctors insisted, in the pressroom gang-bangs after the debate. Hart didn’t have any spinners. He went to dinner.

  “Big loser’s Hart ...” breathed Simon’s Iowa Campaign Manager.

  “He didn’t do anything,” said one of Gephardt’s road crew.

  “Six guys tied and one guy lost,” said Dave Nagle, an Iowa Rep who cast himself as neutral. “The candidate of New Ideas might have shared just one of them tonight.”

  That comment took prominent place in The Washington Post analysis, next day, under the headline:

  HART FAILS TO DOMINATE IOWA DEBATE

  Hart, meanwhile, had moved on to Kansas—Ottawa, to be precise—where he once again returned to his roots, and made a speech to a Chamber of Commerce dinner, to reveal for the first time his federal budget.

  This was a document that would reorder the entire federal government: it covered every subject—defense, space and technology, agriculture, energy, natural resources and environment, infrastructure, housing, education, health, welfare reform. ... Hart would propose major new investments ($67 billion over five years) in research and development, new technologies, education, retraining, and social services. He would cut several defense programs (which he named) to save $45 billion, rebase Medicare payments to hospitals (to save another $28 billion); he would retain the thirty-three percent income-tax bracket for the highest earners (which would bring in $57 billion); he would tax capital gains at death (which would bring another $22 billion); he would tax Social Security payments for families with incomes over thirty-two thousand dollars a year (which would yield another $21 billion); and he would institute or increase taxes on major polluters, on imported oil, on cigarettes and liquor (which would yield another $150 billion, over five years) ... and with those new sources of revenue, Hart’s budget projected a deficit of $41.5 billion, instead of the $150 billion predicted by the feds for fiscal ’93 (which would actually turn out to be more than $300 billion), which meant a savings on federal interest payments of at least $66 billion, all of which would be available for investment in the economy.

  Hart, in other words, proposed a plan for the nation. But it didn’t get much coverage. Hey, the big-feet had been to Ottawa with Hart—last year! Why go back?

  Anyway, after that debate, everybody knew: Hart didn’t have New Ideas—not really. Hart had nothing to say.

  102

  Thermonuclear

  HE’D SAID ALL HE had to say on that subject—answered the questions a million times ... Jeezus! What did they want?

  They wanted an answer on Iran-contra: What did Bush know ... and when did he know it?

  For more than a year, ever since late ’86, Bush had been holding the line:

  I did what I did ...

  I told the President what I told the President ...

  And honor forbids me to say more.

  Bush had said that so many times, he was frustrated. He thought he had answered every conceivable nuance. Of course, he never actually said anything.

  But once he’d made his point ... well, anyone who insisted on bringing it up was just rehashing ... try’na make him look bad. They were, you know, acting like bullies. And the old school code treats a bully with ... contempt.

  That’s why he couldn’t believe—wouldn’t hear it!—when his white men warned that Dan Rather was going to jump him. ... “No,” said the Veep
. “Dan’s a friend.” (He’d known Rather since Texas—Dan was just a local newsman. Bush was in the oil bidness ... Jeez, it’d been more than twenty years!)

  But Fuller got tipped off that CBS News was trying to make the scandal stick to Bush. Teeter got tipped off. Teeley called a friend to confirm. Ailes said he knew exactly what those shitheads were planning. Atwater said he could feel they were up to no good. ... Everybody knew—or said they knew—except Bush, who insisted to Fuller, in New Hampshire:

  “Dan’s been over to the house ...” (They played tennis!)

  On the plane back to Washington, Fuller was trying to write out answers to questions Rather might ask.

  “This is much too tough,” Bush said. “Why are you so uptight about this? Are the others worried?”

  “Yes, sir, they are.”

  “Well, you see, I’m okay with this.”

  It was in the car at Andrews Air Force Base—Ailes had come out to meet them—Fuller said: “Look, if he really just trashes you on Iran-contra, why don’t you tell him, ‘How would you like to be judged, your whole career, on the seven minutes you walked off the set?’ ...”

  Fuller was referring to the semi-famous incident in which Rather went ballistic because a tennis match delayed his newscast, and while he was on a phone, bitching to the powers-that-be, the tennis match ended, CBS had no anchor on the set, everybody panicked, and the network went to black. It was an incident much retailed by the pink-jowled lunchers—in other words, inside baseball.

  But Ailes loved the line. He went crazy—repeated it about six times. Fuller knew, from that moment, it would be Ailes’s idea ... but Bush insisted: “It isn’t going to be that way. Dan’s a friend.”

  And that’s why Bush played such a rabid net game, on the CBS Evening News, the night of January 25, after he sat there, and watched that ... that ... crap Rather put on the air, before the interview: it was all Iran-contra, it was all rehash, it was ...

  How could Rather understand he wasn’t just conducting a tough interview? ... He was proving George Bush wrong in front of his friends, he was violating Bush’s trust! ... It was betrayal!

  The short answer was, Rather had no clue.

  “Mr. Vice President, we want to talk about the record on this because ...”

  “Let’s talk about the whole record ...”

  “The framework here is that ...”

  “That’s what I want to talk about, Dan.”

  “One-third of the Republicans in this poll, one-third of the Republicans and one-fourth of the people who say that, you know, they rather like you, believe you’re hiding something.”

  “I am hiding something.”

  “Here’s a chance to get it out.”

  “You know what I’m hiding? What I told the President—that’s the only thing. And I’ve answered every question put before me. Now, if you have a question ...”

  “I do have one.”

  “Please.”

  “I have one.”

  “Please, go ahead.”

  “You have said that if you had known, you said, if you had known this was an arms-for-hostages swap ...”

  “Yes.”

  “That you would have opposed it.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You also said that you did not know ...”

  “May I answer that?”

  “That wasn’t a question, it was a statement.”

  “It was a statement, and I’ll answer it.”

  “Let me ask the question, if I may, first.”

  “The President created this program, as testified or stated publicly, he did not think it was arms for hostages.”

  “That’s the President, Mr. Vice President.”

  “And that’s me. Because I went along with it because—you know why, Dan?—because ...”

  “That wasn’t a question, Mr. Vice President.”

  “I saw Mr. Buckley, heard about Mr. Buckley, being tortured to death—later admitted as a CIA chief—so if I erred, I erred on the side of trying to get those hostages out of there and the whole story has been told to the Congress.”

  “Mr. Vice President, you set the rules for this talk here. I didn’t mean to step on your line there, but you insisted that this be live and you know that we have a limited amount of time ...”

  “That’s why I want to get my share in here on something other than what you want to talk about. ...”

  The fact was, Bush wouldn’t listen to a question ... much less answer anything. Meanwhile, million-dollar minutes were bleeding away, the producers were yelling into Rather’s ear to wrap it up! CUT ... DAN! WRAP IT UP! ... And Rather was still trying to get his first clear answer.

  “I don’t want to be argumentative, Mr. Vice President, bu ...”

  “You do. Dan, this is not a great night, because I want to talk about why I want to be President, why those forty-one percent of the people are supporting me, and ...”

  “And, Mr. Vice President, these questions are ...”

  “I don’t think it’s fair to judge a whole career, it’s not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran. How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York? Would you like that?”

  Turned out, Rather didn’t much like it. Nor was Bush, at that moment, his most sanguine self. After nine minutes of Bush stonewalling, taunting ... after Rather finally cut him off and went to commercial ... after CBS switchboards lit up with calls of protest (how could Dan treat the VP that way?) ... Bush was still so fired up in his Capitol office that he ripped out his earpiece and announced, with a sneer:

  “Well, I had my say ... Dan.”

  Ailes tried to tell him: his mike was still live. Bush didn’t care.

  “He makes Lesley Stahl look like a pussy,” Bush said. The CBS crew tried to get Bush to take off his microphone. But Bush was like a warrior with his foot on his enemy’s neck, whooping to the heavens.

  “... But it’s going to help me. Because that bastard didn’t lay a glove on me.

  “... And you can tell your God damn network that if they want to talk to me, they can raise their hands at a press conference! No more ‘Mr. Insider’ stuff.”

  The next day, Pete Teeley tried to tell the press pack: Bush meant Lesley Stahl was, you know ... a pussycat. Bush apologized for his language, insisted he never would have taken the Lord’s name in vain if he’d known people could hear him. (As if the commandment read: Thou Shalt Check Thy Mike.)

  But the interesting thing was how everybody around Bush, Inc., loved it ... the Killer Veep!

  Atwater was spinning a cloud of sparkling dust about “defining events”—one or two such moments would make a President—and the Bush-Rather face-off was, in Lee’s terms, “the defining event.” Teeley said the “debate” would put an end to all “the wimp bullshit.” Bush had gone toe-to-toe with the toughest! Rich Bond insisted Rather had tried to “bully George Bush”—that would help Bush in Iowa. George Wittgraf, Iowa chairman, showed himself an attentive Atwater acolyte when he talked about the dust-up as the ... “shaping event.”

  Bush was so pleased: couldn’t believe all the nice things people said, all the calls of congratulation, the way people cheered at his events. Publicly, he went into Audie Murphy mode—he conceded it was “tension city” in the studio, joked about deserving “combat pay.” But he also said Rather was just doing his job. (You see, he wasn’t wrong, after all—Dan was a friend.) ... Everybody came out fine, as far as Bush could see: his press pack was delighted, writing “defining event” analyses, thumb-suckers on the Age of TV Politics, delicious Karacter studies on the virile New Bush, or even-more-delicious behind-the-scenes blow-by-blow on how Ailes had planned the whole showdown ... you know, who sandbagged whom?

  Wasn’t it great how it worked out?

  It was left to Bob Dole to point out: Bush never answered anything.

  And how would Bush deal with Mikhail Gorbachev ... if he got so riled up by Dan Rather?

/>   That was the problem: Bush couldn’t run a nice, clean campaign against Dan Rather without Dole spoiling everything—pointing out he was still in the race ... still ahead, where it mattered, in Iowa, where polls showed a jagged post-Rather blip for Bush ... for about four days ... after which Bush’s numbers settled back to nowheresville.

  It was so frustrating.

  And there was Dole, sailing around the state, talking farm, talking Midwest-neighbor, talking “One of Us” ... the man had the nerve to stick to that poor-boy-from-Kansas routine (when Bush-for-President had gone to such lengths to prove that Dole was rich) ... he had the gall to announce he was organized in every Iowa precinct (when everybody knew Dole could not organize) ... he had the cheek to conduct himself like a statesman, a man with a mission—like a winner!

  This was not the Bob Dole the Bushies were counting on. They never bargained for efficient good humor.

  These were the worries of George Wittgraf, Bush’s Iowa chairman, as he made his familiar drive, three hours east and south from his hometown, Cherokee, to the capital, Des Moines.

  Wittgraf had been working Iowa for George Bush for nine years—almost a quarter of his time on the planet ... and now Bush was stuck (forever, it seemed) in second place ... and all of Wittgraf’s efforts were headed for the thirsty drainpipe of history (he wasn’t going to make a footnote for Germond and Witcover) ... unless, somehow ...

  He had to get under Bob Dole’s skin—show him up! Show him to the voters of Iowa as the volcanically nasty, shifty-eyed, razor-tongued, dark-hearted, mean-minded, bile-besotted snarler ... that Wittgraf (and all good Bushies) knew him to be.

  And Bush, Inc., had one week to pull it off.

  Actually, Wittgraf started typing the minute he got to the office, at the start of that last week before the caucus:

  “Iowa Republicans must weigh Bob Dole’s record of cronyism and his history of mean-spiritedness carefully, before they decide whom to support as our Party’s nominee for President. ...”