What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  Reilly was sure there would be. His numbers showed the flip-flop tag had stuck like tar—get out now, and history would conclude that Dick’s own record drove him from the race. Gephardt had traveled forty-eight states, asking people to stand up and fight. ... How could he quit now, first time he got a bloody nose?

  Donna Brazile said the field staff could do Michigan—they’d own the place! Precinct by precinct, just like Iowa ... and they’d do it all in two weeks.

  Murphy said: “You’re not gonna win Michigan.”

  Doak had the quaver back in his voice: “Look, it’s been a crazy fuckin’ year ... who knows? I think you could win! If Duke finishes third in Illinois, how’s he gonna get the delegates? It’s a brokered convention! ... Let’s mix it up, let it happen!”

  Trippi said maybe it was time to let Dick unite the Party. Get out now, endorse Dukakis ... go to the Hill, get those guys behind Duke ... back to Iowa, urge those delegates to unite behind Dukakis. The goal was a Democratic President: if Dick got out, he could un-broker the convention, unite the Party ... and Dukakis would know, it was Dick who made him king.

  Reilly said he knew Dukakis, they didn’t. If they thought for a minute that little shit would be grateful ... well, forget it.

  It was Debra Johns, who’d been so quiet, who finally turned to Dick: “What do you think, Dick? Everybody’s talking ... what do you want to do?”

  They all turned, and Dick dropped his RCA-dog look. He didn’t even pause: “I’ve been doing this two and a half years now. I’m not getting out until they cut my head off and hand it to me.”

  There was silence. Everybody staring ... Dick was so fierce. They hadn’t realized, the want had always come from him.

  So, Michigan became the next hope.

  People started getting up. Shrum said he never really thought Dick should quit. Trippi said he just thought the idea had to be considered. “Yeah,” Coelho said, “and dismissed out of hand ...

  “So ...” Coelho turned to Dick. “So, if you don’t win Michigan, we’re gonna file for Congress?”

  Dick hadn’t moved. His eyes were locked on a corner of the room. He wasn’t seeing them.

  He was thinking back ... how he started, after ’82, because he had to—someone had to—get control ...

  And he was thinking ahead—how would he get the money? Money for Michigan ... money for the debt ... money for college.

  March 29th was his filing deadline.

  Michigan would vote March 26th.

  He was going back to the House. He had no more control ...

  “Yeah,” he told Tony, absently.

  No one in that room knew he’d charged up a hundred thousand dollars on his personal Amex Gold Card. No one knew.

  “God,” Dick said, as he stood. “Who’s gonna tell Jane?”

  121

  The Secret Plan

  DOLE FOUND OUT THEY’D taken a million dollars from his Senate reelection fund—that could have been his retirement money!—and spent it on ads all over the South ... states they never had a prayer of winning. They threw it away! (Gyagghh! They ran the Footprints-in-the-Snow Ad in Florida—people never seen snow ... not to mention, Bush was forty points ahead there.)

  The Big Guys promised Dole they’d pay it back. Then the smart-guy lawyers figured out—a week too late—the campaign laws wouldn’t let them pay it back. That money was history.

  That’s when Dole pulled his ads off the air in Illinois.

  Then the press found out, and the Friday papers (four days before the Illinois vote) were filled with speculation:

  Dole was going to call it quits (sources said ... observers said).

  Dole denied he was quitting.

  Of course, they didn’t believe that crap for a minute!

  And Dole did not, could not, tell them about the TV time he was trying to buy—the Saturday special, the half-hour statewide.

  That was the whole point: he wanted to spring that, make it a big deal—couldn’t give Bush time to get ready! That was Dole’s secret plan.

  Then, too, the Dole campaign still had to tie down a few, uh ... loose ends.

  Dole had in mind a TV show ... but live TV—he would make something happen. He picked a little town, Galesburg, near the Iowa border, 185 miles west and south of Chicago, the site of Knox College, host to a Lincoln–Douglas debate in 1858—that’s where Dole would challenge George Bush to meet him, one-on-one. Bush was going to be in Galesburg Saturday night for the Lincoln Day Dinner ... so Dole would show up in Galesburg, too ... crowd the VP, get in his face, make him react, on the spot ... just like Nashua, in 1980—while the whole state watched, live, on TV.

  So they flew in the video wizards, Murphy and Castellanos, to Chicago—that was Friday. Brock had a limo waiting at the airport to whisk them into the bunker at the Hyatt. The smart guys were already calling all over the state, trying to buy a half-hour time block. Hot-shot Washington communications lawyers were threatening million-dollar lawsuits if the Illinois stations wouldn’t sell the time. Dole-folk were on the phones to Galesburg, trying to map a battle plan: We could crash the Bush event—just buy a ticket! Y’know, we’d challenge him right there: C’mon, you wimp! ... Dole’s Illinois chairman, Lee Daniels, came in with some of his Chicago mob—guys with pinky rings and broken teeth. Daniels was throwing a fit over the stories that Dole would quit. Henry Hyde, the smarmy Rep from the Sixth District, was going to endorse Dole—now that was in jeopardy. Daniels demanded that Brock call Hyde. One of Daniels’s mob, a guy named Paulie—who had not only the ring and the teeth, but shades and a shoulder holster—was informing the Dole-folk: “We’re gettin’ focked! In Du Page County. You got that? Focked over!” ... Then the phone rang in the staff room. It was the Bobster, from his suite: What about his TV show?

  “Impossible,” Murphy said.

  They only had twenty-eight hours! They hadn’t even bought the time. They couldn’t hire a crew until they got the time. Dole wanted remote TV—no studio, they’d need a camera truck. He wanted live TV in a small town 185 miles away—that’s satellite time. Where would they get the trucks? St. Louis? Would the stations in Illinois take a live feed? ... Why not tape? Why not Chicago? Guys ... Guys! ... What was the show?

  Wasn’t ten minutes later, an Advance man strode in, told Murphy: “Room 320, five minutes.” When Murphy got there, the phone rang.

  “Whah, hah, Mike!”

  Mrs. Dole was just thinking how great that Bob Dole video was, how it touched her hort ... and ... by the way: Bob really wanted his show from Galesburg.

  “Well ... there’s problems ...”

  “Let’s trah to do it.”

  “Uhnn ...” Murphy said.

  Mrs. Dole was relentlessly, sugar-sweetly implacable. “Mike, it’s awfully important to him.”

  “Uhnn ... alrighty ...” he said. “We’ll do our best.”

  After that, she called again—for Castellanos: same message.

  Then her staff called: the speechwriter, Aram Bakshian, had a half-hour speech, already written—wasn’t that great? (Actually, it wasn’t great. It was just a half-hour speech. Aram had in mind that Dole would read this thing, staring, full-face, into the camera. Murphy started calling it the People of Earth speech. ATTENTION, PEOPLE OF EARTH!)

  Another Advance man grabbed Murphy: “Come with me.” He pulled him down the hall to the staff suite. Bernie Windon said to a phone: “Here he is, Senator ...” He handed Murphy the phone.

  “Agghh! What’sa problem?”

  “Well,” Murphy said, “there’s four problems. Number one, we need a satellite truck, and there’s NCAA basketball all over the country Friday night, so all the trucks are out on the road. Number two, we’ll need a camera truck with switching—right now we’re looking in Milwaukee for one. Number three, we’re going to need a lighting truck so it doesn’t look like a home movie. I think we can get one. Number four, if we get the time, we’re not sure the station’ll take a live feed, and we’d have to get satellite ti
me, and all that.”

  As usual, Dole was surprisingly hip:

  “Aghh, have you tried Conus?”

  “I’m sure we have,” Murphy said.

  “Well, check with Walt Riker in Washington. He’s working on this, too.”

  “Okay, I will, Senator.”

  Dole wanted Murphy to know he was not unaware. ... “I think we’ve got to do this live. Not in a sterile situation,” he said. His voice was soft, almost pleading. “We wanna get Bush in there. If he walks in, you can’t tell him, no, it’s already taped. It’s got to be interesting—big event for the press—build it up ...”

  Murphy said: “Well, Senator, we’re trying to put it together.”

  “I know it’s not easy,” Dole said, “not an easy situation. We’re twenty-five points down. It’s gonna be hard to win. But we gotta try.”

  Murphy said nothing—he didn’t know what to say.

  Dole’s voice was even softer, a bit husky—he said: “If we can’t do it right ... if I’m just going down the tubes, we could save the money—not do it ...”

  There was silence. He was breaking Murphy’s heart. “Senator, I’ll find a truck if I have to steal one. We’ll do everything we can.”

  “O-kayy!” The Bobster’s voice was back. “Don’t wanna keep you. Get to it!”

  Friday afternoon, they bought the time, 6:30 P.M., Saturday, on WGN, Chicago’s Channel Nine, and on smaller stations downstate. They bought the satellite time for the feed through the heavens, they found a satellite truck, a lighting semi, and a case-portable control room—no truck, alas, for the switching equipment, so they’d have to hand-carry twenty-five metal trunks and thirty smaller cases and build a control room on the spot. They had to bring in thirty guys from Chicago for the crew—along with four cameras, wireless microphones, a TelePrompTer, makeup. ... The satellite truck was a big C-system rig—the pro kind—but there was a glitch in the equipment, so they had to scramble and all they could find was a smaller KU-band truck, in Little Rock, Arkansas. That crew would have to drive all night. WGN couldn’t take a KU transmission, so they scrambled and lined up a KU earth-receiving station in Chicago, which would take down the feed from the Dole extravaganza and pipe it, underground, to WGN, which would air it, live, and feed it back to the satellite for the other local stations, and to cable nationwide. There were scores of people and a couple of million dollars in equipment heading for Galesburg, which was overwhelmed already by Bush. The Knox College pooh-bahs agreed to give Dole the historic room with the Lincoln chair, but they were finicky: Please, don’t move the table ... and don’t park on the grass. They had no clue about the army of TV Vandals bearing down on them in eighteen-wheel trucks.

  In Chicago, Mrs. Dole called all the smart guys again, and brought them into one suite to announce: this had to be organahzed. She didn’t want fifty people telling Bob what to do. Murphy and Castellanos wanted Bakshian’s speech boiled down to seven minutes. Then, Mrs. Dole would talk. Then, they’d cue WGN to run the video of the Bob Dole story. Then, the Bobster would come on live again, to close. (Then again, all this planning would be scrapped in an instant if Bush could be lured near their cameras.) Wellborn went to work on Mrs. Dole’s remarks. Bakshian was set to cutting his text. Murphy and Castellanos were finishing a last-minute Dole ad about the Chicago Tribune’s endorsement—by now it was 1:00 A.M.—and then they found out the truck from Little Rock had broken down en route. So at 2:00 A.M., they tracked down a Conus truck in Minneapolis, but that was a fourteen-hour drive and there was a snowstorm—that crew would have to start now. At 3:00 A.M., the Dole-folk chartered a plane to Galesburg, arrived at the college before dawn, and set to trashing the precious Lincoln room. They built their control panels behind the room where Dole would speak and started taping cables everywhere—across the ceiling, down the walls, up Abe’s desk leg. Dole Press Advance arrived in time to mention there would be a hundred national press—where were they gonna watch?—so they ran cables down the hall, to monitors in the gym, and then, too, they had to run cables to line-feeds, because the networks were coming with their own trucks. There was only one phone line to the gym, so the phone company had to chopper in a hundred phones. One piece of the portable control room went flooey, so by mid-morning the video wizards had a new box on its way from Chicago. An ABC crew was filming the set-up when they broke a piece of the Lincoln Chandelier. Mari Maseng and Kim Wells arrived for a meeting with Wellborn and Bakshian, to polish the speeches—but there was no speech for the Bobster: Aram still had his thirty-page tome. They got him a room at the Galesburg Howard Johnson’s, but Aram turned out to be a real stonecutter: click ... click ... they could hear him pecking deliberately at his typewriter—click ... at midafternoon! The truck from Minneapolis arrived. The technical trunks and gee-gaw boxes were piling up in the college hallways, and the Dole-folk took over the Dean’s Office. At 3:00 P.M., the control-room boys fired up the power, and ... they got a test pattern in Chicago! ... Hurrah! We’re on the air!

  Auughh! Four-thirty, two hours before airtime, there was still no speech for the Bobster! Kim and Mari were locked up with Bakshian, all typing, trying to get pieces of the text hammered down. Dole still hadn’t seen word one. ... Five-thirty: still nothing to show the Senator. The video wizards let the lights burn for three hours straight—better safe than sorry—and tested what they could on their rig. Dole didn’t like his makeup. He was having it redone. He was asking if there was any sign of Bush—Dole hadn’t given up his dream that somehow he would dare Bush into that Lincoln room and expose him in the hot white light as a loser, a choke when the going got rough. Kim and Mari and Aram were writing transitions for Dole’s speech in longhand—handwritten bridges that Dole was supposed to puzzle out. Brock was in there, trying to gather the pages in order—this stuff had to get to Dole! It was twenty-one minutes to airtime when the power failed in the control room—so they grabbed an extra cable, strung it around the circuit box (to hell with fuses!) and got the power back six minutes later. No one could tell whether anything was damaged. Nobody told Dole about the power failure—no sense promoting a panic. Dole got his speech eight minutes before his broadcast. He showed up in the Lincoln room, two minutes to air.

  “Aghh, we ready? Hear me o-kayy?”

  And they rolled.

  Ladies and gentlemen, good evening, and welcome ...

  The intro went fine: half the Lincoln room held a small crowd to clap for Dole, and those folks did their part; the Bobster came in right on cue, started talking. There were three cameras in front of him, a wall behind, with a door over his left shoulder—the fourth camera was hidden back there. Behind that wall, the control room was crowded with eight monitors, instrument panels, a jungle of wire.

  Six and a half minutes into the show ... Dole was talking about drugs: “So, we’ve got a problem! ...“Pow!—all eight monitors went to black. The Bobster was still talking—they’d just flashed him the five-minute card—the holy-white light was upon him ... but the control room went dark—no power—and there was nothing on the screen. Behind the wall, there was an instant of silence, then a frantic scraping of the wizards’ chairs being shoved back, amid a whispery hiss of oaths. In opaque darkness, they tore at the floor to get to cables. Chicago was on the phone with Castellanos: “You just went bad—what happened? You’re a freeze-frame. You got nothing! What happened? Dead air! Dead air! ...”

  Alex was yelling into the phone, “Fire the tape!”

  “Dead air! ...”

  “Go with tape! Fuckin’firethetapeTAPE!NOW!”

  A minute fifty-five into the disaster, the Dole video rolled in Chicago. No one knew if they could get the power fixed in Galesburg. If so, how much time would they have left? They’d have to switch out of the video on the fly. How long would Dole have to speak? What would he say? What would he have time to say?

  In the Lincoln room. Bob had finished his speech. Elizabeth was talking, introducing the video—she thought she was introducing the video. Then th
e Doles walked back to the control room, and Brock said to Murphy: “Tell him. You have to tell him. Tell him.”

  Murphy said: “We lost power in the middle.”

  Dole looked stricken: “Where’d you lose me?”

  “You were in the drug thing.”

  “You didn’t get any Elizabeth?”

  “None.”

  Dole sagged. “What’ll we do now?”

  “Well, we’re gonna try to get this fixed and go to a live close after the video. If we can’t get it fixed, we’ll let the video run out, and that’ll be the end.”

  Dole nodded.

  The power came up about five minutes later. But they had no feed from WGN—they didn’t know what was on the air at that moment. Castellanos had to dope out a transition point, kill the tape, and go to Dole. The technicians in Chicago were holding a phone up to a speaker in their studio so Castellanos could hear the sound track. They’d have to cut it off at the cornfield ...

  “Okay, Senator. Stand by.”

  Castellanos was counting down. Two or three people fired orders at Dole:

  “Twenty seconds ...”

  “Two-and-a-half-minute close, okay?”

  “No, wait Senator ...”

  “TEN seconds ...”

  “Maybe three minutes.”

  “SIX, FIVE ...”

  “Just watch the time cards.”

  The audience started clapping. The video wizards threw the switch to feed from Galesburg again. There was Dole, scowling in the Lincoln chair. He started talking. He watched the time cards. He talked about education—that was two sentences in his script. He talked for two minutes straight. His eyes darted from the cameras to the cards. He segued into child care, day care ... whatever ... animal rights.

  Then it was over.

  His chance.

  They were going to do it again, for tape, for a few local stations that would broadcast tomorrow—might as well get it right once. Bob still had in mind to get over to the big Bush dinner, crash the place, make something happen ... but Elizabeth insisted: they did it all again. The tape went without a hitch—save for one tiny moment, when Bob said the Lincoln–Douglas debate was in 1958. So everyone stayed fifteen minutes longer while Dole recorded that sentence, over and over, so the video boys could dub in 1858. The Lincoln room was now an oven. Bob and Elizabeth waited in a hallway. Bob sat on a corner of a desk, with his coat on, slumped amid the dislocated furniture and stacks of video detritus. Elizabeth came and sat on the side of the desk, and leaned her head against his left shoulder. With their legs hanging down, they looked like a couple of kids on a dock—sad kids at summer’s end. Mari snapped a photo—she knew Mrs. Dole would love that picture. Dole kept telling people to call the Lincoln Day Dinner—see if they could still catch Bush, see if they could hold the crowd ... maybe Bob could get up and talk, at least say hello. But the organizers were all Bushies. They wouldn’t lift a finger to help.