What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  He could not understand—he would not—that life, as he knew it, was over. He wasn’t gonna lose ... anything. No! He was winning! He was right! He was doing everything right! He could feel it turning—that was good, wasn’t it? This was what he’d been working for—this moment!—when he knew ... and everybody conceded, he was going to be the nominee. The chosen. Him!

  On the last night, he went to Brooklyn—a gym in a beat-up school. Charles Schumer, the Congressman, made Michael come. For what? For basketball! Anyway, that’s what they promised the press bus—film of Michael, playing ball. So they got to the gym, and the place was a madhouse. There wasn’t any basketball game. A few huge guys, on the court, shooting, and the bleachers full of Puerto Ricans—God knows what Schumer promised them ... and in the middle of the gym floor, politicians, the school principal, a hundred and fifty pissed-off reporters and cameramen, and sound men, auteurs. ... Marie Cocco, Newsday, was screaming at Jack Weeks, the Trip Director, near mid-court. “You assholes said a basketball game! There isn’t any fucking basketball game!” Weeks just shrugged. What the hell could he do ... what could anyone do, with this? They put Michael into an orange T-shirt with a big number 8 on the front, and on the back the words: “Street Corner Stuff.” Michael got onto the floor—set shots. Fifteen feet, twenty feet—a miss, another miss. Then he hit. He was such a cocky little bastard, he clapped his hands for the ball. Hey! C’mon! I hit my shot. Gimme the ball! ... Schumer was screaming at the crowd through a cheap P.A. “On the last night before the New York primary, we have the next President of the United States. He’s come to Midwood to do us proud...” All of a sudden, the three huge guys on the court had ahold of Michael, and had lifted him up like a beachball, in front of the basket, with the ball in his two hands like a kid would hold it, in his stupid T-shirt, his wing tips kicking little spasmic kicks with the effort ... WHAM ... he stuffed the ball. Greek Thunder! So everybody with a camera was enraged because Schumer was screaming they’d missed it, so up Michael went again, with the “Street Corner Stuff,” and the wing tips wiggling ... and he almost missed. They were filming. He looked ... well, not to put too fine a point on it: he looked ridiculous, undersized, out of place.

  How could he have known how he looked? He never worried about that. They were happy, right? He did his basketball thing—right? It’s over? Good. Let’s go.

  And they were happy—the wise guys, the press. It was over, this mess of New York ... their man was winning. They were going on to Pennsylvania, Ohio, all the way to California—L.A., the pool at the Century Plaza! And beyond, to the convention ... the White House! Jesus! ... They all felt the turn. In the press bus. Jack Weeks barked at the driver, in Southie patois: “Awright, Fred. Fastasyacan! Everybody get yer seats! Wahp speed.” So the diddybops were yelling at Weeks: “What’s a Wahp? Whadd’yahave against Wops?” Weeks was yelling back at them: “What’s the headline? What’s the HEADLINE? Duke slam-dunks New Yawk? ...” And from the back of the bus, catcalls: “WHADDABOUT IRAN, JACK?” ... “WHADDABOUT AIDS?” ... Phil Lintz, from the Chicago Tribune, had an electronic keyboard he was hauling home, a gift for his kid. So now he started picking out the tune the Puerto Ricans sang ... a catchy Latin thing:

  “Mike Du-ka-kee ...

  “El Presidente ...

  “Mike Du-ka-kee ...

  “El Presidente ...”

  The bus was pitching and rolling—sixty miles an hour on the humps and ruts of a Brooklyn street, while they sang ...

  “Mike Du-ka-kee ...” Stomping the floor, banging the windows. “Presi-dente ...”

  And in his quiet car, Michael turned against his belt in the front seat and arched his eyebrows: “So, gentlemen,” he said. “A year later, wiser ... but still standing. Taking nourishment. And it’s nice to be escorted by New York’s finest.” That was for the cop at the wheel. Michael was expansive, inclusive ... he’d made it through.

  He wasn’t counting chickens—but he could read a poll. He was beating George Bush—ten points ... “Not too bad for a guy from Massachusetts whom thirty percent of the people don’t know.” Michael said everybody assumed the GOP had some kind of lock—a built-in advantage. He couldn’t see it. “The country is coming offa that.” He was out there! He saw the way people responded to him—especially now, when it was coming down to Bush ... and him.

  Who would have thought?

  All the rest had fallen away—Hart, Biden, Gephardt ... Gore, too, after this ... just Jackson and him. He would go on and beat Jesse in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia ... that would be different—him and Jesse. It was always the other guys who helped Michael to define himself. Not that he hauled them down.

  “Nick, you remember that black guy in the little restaurant? You know, before the Wall Street rally? ...” They’d used a small Greek restaurant as a holding room. A black lawyer there said to Michael: Thank you for running a real Presidential campaign. ... “Ya know what he meant, don’t you?” Mitropoulos knew. Michael was the one who wouldn’t hit Jesse. That was a great satisfaction.

  God, he loved New York ... he loved his life ... he loved ...

  “Kitty has been wonderful. Down here, she’s been using Yiddish—I couldn’t believe! ... Nick, what was it she pulled out the other day? ‘Why does a duck have webbed feet?’ ... in Yiddish? I couldn’t believe it! There was a terrific story in the Globe today, her with these old Jewish people, using Yiddish ... and they’re sitting back there, whispering, ‘I didn’t know she was Jewish!’ ”

  Michael threw his head back and laughed.

  Someone suggested there were times Kitty wasn’t sure she wanted Michael to win. “Not anymore,” he said. Now she was more determined than he was.

  “This is serious now,” Michael said. “This ain’t beanbag, as Dooley said. Kitty is a hundred percent. The whole family. ... This is for all the marbles. This ...” Michael said, so vehemently he forgot his accent, “... is the Big Enchilada.”

  The night of the vote, Michael and Kitty stayed in New York. Kitty insisted they stay in New York. The campaign rented a ballroom at the Omni Hotel—terrible room, hot, smelly, packed with money and machers of all description who thought they had a right to be there ... very important people, and too many. That was the idea. TV doesn’t show the size of a room. The one thing you don’t want is empty spots—looks like you can’t draw a crowd. So the wise guys made sure there’d be a fight for space, and air—the heat of a mob.

  Then, at 10:35—perfect for live shots at the top of the late news—Michael and Kitty appeared on a balcony that ran around the mezzanine. The cops had closed that level. Michael and Kitty emerged in regal isolation. From the right rear corner, they walked the length of the room while the crowd cheered and five thousand eyes tracked their progress. From that sweaty floor, they looked ... well, splendid, distant ... perfect. They stopped in mid-progress, to smile, and wave—the kind of thing Presidents do. Then, invisibly, they descended, and reappeared from the back of the stage ... to the front, where they stood, each with an arm around the other (perfect—someone taught them how), each with one open palm raised, smiling and waving, while the band struck up “New York, New York,” to a frantic percussion of motor drives, and the mob on the floor yelled “Let’s go Mike!” ... and for the first time, he looked the part.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you very much,” his mouth was saying. But no one could hear. The band stopped. The crowd was yelling: “Beat Bush! Beat Bush! Beat Bush!”

  Michael finally bent toward his microphone:

  “My friends, we won the bronze in Iowa. In New Hampshire, we won a gold. ... And tonight ... tonight, in New York, we won the Oscar!”

  The crowd stopped him with cheers again, while Michael hugged his cousin, Olympia—fresh from her Moonstruck triumph. It was, as Michael liked to say, “the year of the Dukaki.”

  “... And all it took ... was a strong message ... a lot of hard work ... and a lot of charisma!”

  And as he said the word “charisma,” he s
tarted to laugh. Michael Dukakis was laughing, in front of a microphone. And the crowd started yelling again—no way he was going to talk. “Beat Bush! ... Beat Bush!”

  So Michael stood back, grinning, put his arm around Kitty. She looked wonderful, joyous. Her smile was huge. She put her hand up behind him, lightly fondled his back. The crowd was still screaming, “Beat Bush! ... Beat Bush! ... Beat Bush!” and stomping the floor, clapping in rhythm. Kitty’s head nodded time. But Michael didn’t mark the beat. His face was a small smile. He was looking at his bride.

  How could he have known, just a few days later, he’d get home to Brookline, to Perry Street, his prize ... and find his bride on their bed, drunk, passed out—poisoned insensate by vodka. He would not be able to rouse her. He’d have to call for help. And he would stand over the bed, eyes half-closed, speaking to no one:

  “Kitty, Kitty, why? ... Why do you do this?”

  126

  Mercury in Retrograde

  GEORGE BUSH DID NOT KNOW why he couldn’t feel it. He’d won ... he’d wiped the field clean! He’d won every state in Super Tuesday—a shutout ... and never had to break a sweat in Illinois. ... Wisconsin—no contest—Dole just hung in for one more week, to make a speech, have his say ... Bush could understand that. He understood too well. “Dole must be tired,” he said. “It’s hard to snap back ... feels like a death in the family.”

  It was hard for Bush to snap back ... or snap to the fact that he’d won. This course he’d been running for ten years was at an end—he was the nominee. Let go that baton! Take a bow!

  Friends told him. Super Tuesday night: Hey! It’s over—done deal!

  “I just don’t see that,” Bush said. “I don’t feel that. I don’t want to feel that. If I felt that, I’d do something wrong, or I’d react in a bad way ... not working hard, or whatever it is.”

  So he went on to Illinois and vowed that no one would work harder. He acted like he was holding on for dear life—in a way, he was. And he wouldn’t give up on Wisconsin—didn’t want to hear that it really didn’t matter.

  It was like a muscle that he couldn’t unclench. He won and he won and he won ... and, at last, he flew back to Washington. They were on the ground at Andrews Air Force Base, and Bush wandered back from the Power Cabin—he came to wish the staff Happy Easter. They wished him congratulations on his victory.

  “Somehow,” Bush said, “I don’t have that ... exhilaration.”

  For one thing, there wasn’t much to do. Back in Washington, Dole hosted a “reception” for Bush: he invited all the Republican Senators to affirm fealty. It was a nice gesture—Dole, trying to go that extra mile ... but Bush seemed oddly disengaged. Either all that heat he’d directed at the figure of Bob Dole, now standing next to him in that Capitol office, was somehow out of scale—or this was ... this piece of theater: everybody smiling, acting like all those words, those months, those years, did not matter anymore. It robbed purpose from the past—made it empty, like this present.

  Bush meant to thank his family for their efforts, the way they’d all bent their lives ... but they were so spread out, all over the country, the best he could do was a conference call. That wasn’t really what he had in mind—staring at a box on his desktop while they all tried to talk through the White House switchboard. It didn’t have the feeling of getting them together, like in Maine. He just didn’t feel it, that sense of completion he craved.

  Bush was ever a man of missions: a mission isn’t over till all planes are on deck, debriefing’s done, the forms are filed. ... Pat Robertson hadn’t given up. Word came from the Reverend’s campaign that he wasn’t trying to beat Bush—just keep his troops in shape, win some votes, restore some lustre lost.

  Tough noogies.

  Bush sent word back: Get on board—ship is pulling out! It wasn’t said exactly that way. It was more like: if you want to be mainstream ... then act mainstream. The Reverend got the message, no one got hurt.

  And that was the last plane on deck—Bush had no more opponents. He had the delegates to make him the nominee. The white men scheduled a rally—in Washington, a full tribal salute. They called it the Over-the-Top Rally ... it was going to be big.

  Of course, it wasn’t really for Washington—real Washington was twenty-to-one for Jesse Jackson. This was for official Washington, a town where Bushies, suddenly, were legion. (You could get almost a thousand young folk at the Fifteenth Street warren of GBFP ... and a few hundred more from the OEOB ... and you could pack a rally full with staff from the offices of consultants and smart guys—the car-phone-in-the-Beemer crowd was so eager to help now—their people would all be in from Virginia, you know, on a work day.) ... So they’d get all these folks to wave signs and scream for Bush—cheer him on toward the Oval Office. And then ... then! ... from the Oval itself, they would march in the Big Brush-Chopper—the Gip!—who would finally be free to drop his pose of disinterest, end his official, statesmanlike neutrality ... and at last ... for the good of the Party, and in tribute to the loyalty of seven years ... put his shoulder to the wheel for the one man he trusted to stand beside him ... at last! ... Ronald Reagan would endorse George Bush.

  So GBFP and the OVP set to work on a Reagan speech about their man ... beautiful stuff about Bush at the President’s elbow, a force for calm, for strength, for decency, for true conservatism! ... They had pages of praise, all typed up, sent in to the White House writers.

  And they held the rally: first week in April, weather just right, crowd big enough—noisy, too—and Bush made a speech, said they were going to win in November ... and he looked like a winner, or deserved to, with all those delegates in his column, the nomination locked up, the Party united, everybody behind him ... almost.

  Bush finished speaking, the crowd finished cheering and ... no Gip-

  Where’s the President?

  No President.

  No explanation.

  Mercury in retrograde?

  Luckily, it didn’t make news—the Reagan nonappearance at the big Bush rally. The stuff about Mercury, Uranus, and all ... that was front-page. Don Regan’s book was seeping into the papers, newsmagazines, and TV—TV loved that book! Nancy and the astrologer—too delicious! ... Bush started getting questions on astrology: What did he know and when did he know it ... about Sagittarius rising.

  Then, too, there was Attorney General Meese, whose top staff resigned, and he couldn’t hire replacements. No one wanted to play in the slush with Ed. It was only a matter of time before they’d have to throw Meese off the sleigh, to the wolves. (Actually, Meese was sliding off, on his own lubricious conflicts of interest.) Now Reagan had to act deaf every time he left the White House. Bush couldn’t show up anywhere without being asked if Meese should be fired. What was he gonna do about Meese?

  Meanwhile, there was a steady drip, drip, drip ... from Panama and General Noriega. The Reagan White House wanted Noriega out... then it turned out that U.S. intelligence (the CIA, for example, under Director George Bush) had been paying Noriega as a stoolie for years. The Reaganauts contended Noriega was a drug kingpin (Bush insisted, he only just found out) ... then it turned out the Drug Enforcement boys had been awarding Noriega citations of merit! The Reagan Justice Department indicted Noriega in a South Florida court ... then the Reagan State Department sent legations to tell him: the indictments would be dropped only if he’d take his dirty money, and go.

  Noriega wouldn’t leave Panama.

  Meese wouldn’t leave the Justice Department.

  Don Regan was on every talk show in the country.

  Dukakis was hopping from state to state, beating Jesse Jackson every Tuesday and beating up on Bush with “White House astrology” ... “the sleaze factor” ... “deals with drug-running Panamanian dictators.” Late April, a Time magazine poll had Bush eleven points behind Dukakis in a head-to-head race. Early May, Gallup had Bush thirteen down.

  Which, of course, made the white men very nervous. Teeter’s private numbers were worse—not just the head
-to-head—Bush had problems: a majority of Americans thought he hadn’t told the truth about Iran-contra. (That was the only Bush-news in the papers—new dribble on Iranamok—unless they were running that picture of Bush chatting with Manuel Noriega.) Forty percent had a negative opinion of Bush as a leader. (That was worse than Jesse Jackson.) And women! God! They hated Bush! “Big gender gap,” Teeter said. “Lot of bad numbers.” That was strong talk from Teeter. His solution, of course, was to moderate Bush, or decorate him with an applique of “good words” that might push the button with women—“day care,” “college tuition credits.” ... Teeter took over the issues groups—which meant they were packed with quiet, solid professor-types from Michigan State, Purdue, or other places that rang no Bush-bells. The Veep didn’t want new programs. Bush thought the issues groups were weak.

  Which made Atwater very nervous. Lee could feel: he was losing control. All this bad news was leaking into the papers, stuff about the campaign clueless, and he knew how the VP hated leaks! ... Lee was sure his enemies were floating bad balloons ... so the campaign would look chaotic ... so they’d bring in Jimmy Baker ... and Lee would lose his job! ... He’d be on the phone before seven, calling staff—“D’ja read th’ Post?” ... (No, they hadn’t read the Post! It was six-thirty in the morning!) ... “Well lookit page five, call-me-back!” ... Lee thought he was going to have to quit—this was gonna set back his career! He’d have to get something like Chairman of the RNC—just to save face. But he wouldn’t dare bring that up with the Veep. So he’d wander across the Wing of Power and mention the RNC in Junior’s office.

  Junior wanted Baker in—now! The Vice was in trouble! What the hell are friends for? ... Get Baker in to run the campaign, let him convince George Bush to save himself ... act like a candidate! Move his whole office out of the White House and into campaign HQ—get him out of asshole-Fuller’s clutches, that’d solve half the problems right there! Teeley, the Press Secretary, was in Junior’s office every day, complaining how Fuller cut him out of the loop. Teeley wanted to be Gee-Six ... and Fuller wouldn’t even take his damn calls! Teeley was going to quit. What the hell was he Press Secretary for ... if no one but reporters would talk to him? Junior said to Teeley: “Talk to Baker. We gotta get him over here.”