What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  Now, he’d spent that hope. This budget would be different. The mood was ugly. They said he should have started cutting earlier, to avoid the crisis—but no, his campaign came first.

  Well, he’d dragged them all down.

  What a loser.

  On Boston talk-radio, they started calling him Pee Wee.

  Michael would have to ask for new taxes. But things were so vicious. The legislature would vote to rip up all the triumphs of his past two terms—money for day care, retraining for workers, in-home care for the elderly. They’d take a knife (might be a meat-ax) to his government-that-worked ... just to cut him up! The bold new plans he brought home from his campaign were dead—not just because of their cost, but because they came from him. People said they’d paid enough for his ambitions. There was talk about repealing his universal health-care law—before it ever took effect.

  Michael was heartsick. And weary—though he’d never confess it. (He insisted, he was fine!) ... But what happened to these people? Where was their faith? Things would turn around—steady as she goes! He would show he was right.

  In December, Michael took his bride to their special place, Tyke and Viv’s, in Fort Lauderdale. It wasn’t much of a break, just four or five days. It was cold, and Michael was not in high spirits. But when he came back to Boston, after Christmas, he knew what he had to do.

  He announced: he would not seek reelection. He was renouncing the job he loved, the Governorship of Massachusetts, to rid the Commonwealth of its greatest distraction: him.

  Then he asked for new taxes. As a lame duck. And they tore him to shreds.

  That was the same month Kitty called a couple of close friends to tell them: “I’m an alcoholic.” They couldn’t believe it, they tried to argue. But she insisted. “No! I have to face it.” There was an odd excitement in her voice—vindication. There was something wrong, there was a name for what she felt. “I’m Kitty. I’m an alcoholic.” That was the first step toward a new life, or a step she required, when the old life was gone.

  Gary Hart was free to have his life outside the bubble—then he had to live with it. Andrea took an apartment in Denver, and John moved out to Boulder—he was in school there. Still, Gary and Lee were in close quarters in their mountain cabin. They were building a new kitchen and an addition on the back. But by ’89, they started planning to supplant the house of their old dreams with a new structure—a great log thing set into the hill.

  Lee would superintend the building. Gary was on the road, restlessly, under the aegis of his law firm; he traveled Europe and Asia, putting people of ideas and influence together with people of business. He was making more money than the people he once wouldn’t talk to (they were fat-cats). But it wasn’t money that drove him—hopscotching, say, Eastern Europe for a week, lighting in Moscow for the next four days, flying through London, New York, to Denver ... then heading back to the airport, with fresh shirts, after a day and a half. The spur was inside him.

  He was probing with that diamond bit for something—anything—that was interesting. He wasn’t going to shrivel, sitting months at a time in an office in Denver—or anywhere else. What was interesting was the wider world he’d once planned to remake. Overseas, people weren’t hung up on his past—those parts of it that made his countrymen so teen-giggly. In Europe and Asia, people could not understand what had happened to him in American politics (no more could he). They judged his ideas, they treated him as a statesman. The business part he made up as fortune and wile dictated. He created a job for himself where none existed—by the same kind of self-creation that fueled a hundred streak-of-danger profiles, written by Kops who could never reason to the truth that a shot of supercharged self-envisioning was the necessary first act-of-campaign for any poor boy who would be President.

  The Soviets were wonderful, warm to him—and such a source of excitement. They were changing the world—by imagination. Gorbachev was drawing forth the greatest minds, to think anew. Hart began to nurture the germ of a book—an anatomy of that great new revolution. With his contacts among the Soviet elite, with his background in U.S.-Soviet relations, with his lifelong love for the Russia of Tolstoy and Dostoyevski ... perhaps Gary Hart was the man to make the Soviets’ spiritual upheaval come alive on the page. At least, to make it clear. Hart was sure the Soviets would help. Maybe Mikhail Gorbachev would help! It was that important: if the world were to change, America would also have to think anew. And even in those first months of Bush’s term, Hart could see—it was so apparent to him—Bush was stuck in the old rules. Gorbachev was trying to pull walls down in Eastern Europe, right now—and Bush wouldn’t help. Bush hadn’t budged on arms control—on anything. He kept waiting for some stupid committee to “review the policy.” Bush couldn’t feel the rock shifting below the soil. ... Hart thought, maybe he could make the people see—and they would lead their leaders. Hart thought—he hardly dared say—this book might lead him back into his own country’s policy debate. That was the part of his dream that lingered: he wanted to put forth his ideas—let them rise or fall by their own power. He still believed, had to believe, ideas had power. Over drinks or dinner, he’d sometimes ask friends: “Do you see any way ... I could come back?”

  Not for public office—nor even national politics—he’d given up that hope, perforce. ... It was in July ’88, at the Democratic convention, that they shot him up with poison enough to kill that dream—even in his stubborn soul. The world was celebrating how cleverly Dr. Dukakis had staved off infection by Jesse Jackson’s genius. God knows why Gary showed up. ... Why wouldn’t he show up, when he’d given his adulthood to that Party, trying to make the country better? He showed up because that was his life. ... But even before he got to Atlanta, he heard dark rumors he was not to be seen—not by the populace, surely. The Party powers scheduled speech slots for former candidates—except for Gary Hart. Then the wires hooted to the world that Gary Hart had been issued a press pass! (He’d agreed to write a column for a Denver paper.) So a thousand desperate mediapersons all had one piss-and-giggle feature to file—and Hart was assaulted as he tried to drop off his column.

  How’s it feel to be on the other side?

  “I’m not on the other side.”

  Then what’re you doing here?

  Y’ask people questions ’n’ y’write it down?

  Have ya got a little PRESS sign to put in your hat?

  Hey, Gary! Hey! Gary! Hey! Y’gonna write f’The Miami Herald?

  When he walked onto the floor of the Omni, to visit the Colorado delegation, young men in the employ of Party Chairman Paul Kirk blocked off the aisles—so no one could get to Hart, no delegates, no camera crews. It got a bit rough—Kirk’s goons had to use a little goon-force—but the nation was spared reminder that Gary Hart was a Democrat. After one day, Hart got the message: “I’ve become a nonperson.” They couldn’t make him leave. They didn’t have to. By the second day, he was on his way back to the airport, and home. He never should have come. His kids told him, he never should have come. But he hadn’t known how it would be. ... “I’m an undigestible—what is it? In Dickens? I’m an undigested piece of gristle,” he said. “That’s not what I want to be in life.”

  After that he knew enough to stay out of the line of fire. But well into the Age of Bush, you’d see his name in boldface, in leering People-column squibs—this, for instance, from The Washington Post:

  “Yes, that friendly couple sitting in the lounge of the Jefferson Hotel Monday evening did look familiar. It was none other than the man who once wanted to be President, Gary Hart, and he was having drinks with an attractive dark-haired young woman. They came and left separately and Hart paid for his vodka and her scotch with his American Express Card. The Jefferson always has been one of those dark intimate spots where meetings take place ...”

  Occasionally, some thinker of the press would solicit a quote, or more rarely, a column, about an actual issue—say, the disintegration of Soviet empire, or the twenty-first-century needs
of the Pentagon. More rarely still, some large-bore thinker would note that every Democrat well known to be knowledgeable was using issues brought forth by Gary Hart: the death of the New Deal, the concern (as Democrats) for economic expansion, tough talk for unions and interest groups, worker retraining, reinvestment in infrastructure, military reform, postcontainment foreign policy. ... New Ideas became Big Buzzwords.

  Mostly, they’d call Hart when the capital was seized by a Karacter convulsion. The Bush administration went into spasm in the starting gate when John Tower, the Secretary of Defense nominee, was depicted as a weasely foul-breathed little sot near whom no decent woman was safe. Hart got hundreds of press calls and invitations to discourse on TV. What were they thinking? ... And speaking of peccadillos, we’re joined now in our Denver studio by former Senator Gary Hart ... Fat chance! What Hart found out was, it did not matter if he said anything or not. Wannabe-big-feet (a new crop rising) had a responsibility to analyze the similarities between the Donna Rice Scandal and the current, lamentable Tower Affair. Then, as the Tower story dragged on (alas, with nothing new and juicy), there were analyses of the differences between Tower and Hart. (Hart, for instance, had a well-known death wish.)

  Once, on the phone, Hart asked what I thought about the “business with Tower.” I answered with my newest, hottest, wise-guy whispers about two Senators, two votes, that Bush could turn around—just a phone call ... but he wouldn’t play hardball!

  There was silence on the phone, until Hart said, in a tone reserved for worms: “You gave me a Washington answer.” Of course, it came clear instantly: Hart saw the Tower mess as the government’s, the nation’s, bitter harvest ... poisoned ... by the same blight that ruined him. Hart thought the sickness stemmed from a dangerous fallacy—Americans think they can know (have a right to know!) everything about their leaders. But that certainty of knowledge is not available. People can’t be tied down, reduced to facts. More dangerous still, politicians try to toe the line. Hart quoted, from his friend Warren Beatty: “When forced to show all, people become all show.”

  Months later—the Tower imbroglio was history, though the postmortems and press-apologia were still extant—I saw Hart and noted that the wheel was turning. Maybe the country would scare itself and think twice about Karacter. Maybe Hart would come out a winner.

  Hart smiled and looked down. Too late for him. “I’m a failure.”

  But everybody was out there, still using his stuff—couldn’t he see any victory there?

  “With Mondale and Dukakis as the nominees of my Party? No ... I wasted my time. I should never have gone into politics.”

  It was after the Tower fight, little hints started to leak from the Bobster ... maybe life in the Senate wasn’t all the life he cared to live. While the fight was on, he was fine—mile-a-minute quotes, jokes, ideas: he tried to get Tower onto the Senate floor to answer his accusers; he brought Tower to a weird press conference wherein Tower took the pledge—he wouldn’t touch a drink whilst he serve in the Pentagon; in the end, when the Democrats had the votes, Dole tried another tack—put Tower in the Pentagon for six months—a trial subscription! Dole offered everything but free storm windows.

  Of course, he lost.

  Only three Democrats voted aye—and that left Tower three votes short. Tower was finished. (He died in a plane crash, two years later.)

  George Bush got a sharp demonstration of what those White House tours were worth: a picture on the Lincoln Bed—plus a quarter, you know. Bush had pals. Votes were something else. (Of course, it never occurred to Bush that this showed the limits of friendship. Bush just concluded, Tower didn’t have enough friends.)

  Meanwhile, the lunch-buddies concluded that Bob Dole was back—he proved he would carry the ball for Bush. Flat-out for the White House!

  Yes, Dole would carry the ball. But that wasn’t what the fight showed him. “The bottom line in this place,” he said, “is how many votes do you have.” The answer was, only forty-four Republicans—Bush got his win in ’88, but the GOP lost two seats in the Senate ... and Dole saw no prospect that Bush would spend one minute, lose one friend, or one percent in a poll, to change the lineup. What Dole saw were years ahead where he’d have to sweat and scrape for fifty-one votes to declare National Peach Week!

  He wasn’t going to give up—Dole didn’t know how to give up. That came clear in New Orleans, at the Republican convention. Dole was in a foul mood all week, complaining about being held up for inspection, like a beef carcass at sale, while Bush made up his mind about his Vice President. People kept asking Dole: What had he heard? What could he do to make himself more attractive to Bush? Dole wasn’t going to do a thing! He never campaigned for the job, never asked to be considered ... never wanted anything from George Bush! That’s what he said—especially after Dan Quayle was named. (What had that guy ever done?) ... None of it mattered to Dole. That’s what he said. He and Elizabeth left town, as soon as they could. Then we got to tour their suite. It was glorious—best hotel in New Orleans—four rooms, all connected, a piano in Elizabeth’s wing. But what I noticed were the wires, thick cables, running past the piano, into Bob’s room, ten extra phone lines: if Bob got the VP nod from Bush ... he wanted to be ready.

  For forty years, Dole had worked flat-out to make a difference. That’s what his first campaign was about, in 1950. That’s what all the moving up was about. That’s what the Other Thing was for—bottom line: he had to make a difference, or what was his life about?

  What was it about now? The climbing, planning, scrambling, all the up-and-up-and-up—was over. The Other Thing was gone. Dole’s majority in the Senate was gone. No way to control the agenda. Forty-four votes, plus Bush, was not the same as forty-four, plus Reagan. Dole would lead the fight for the White House program. But what program? Darman came to the Capitol talking up a five-year budget deal—but Bush wouldn’t pull the trigger. Maybe next year, or next, or next. Why wait? Without a deal on the deficit, no one would start anything new—how could they? No money. Democrats would pass the programs—no way for Dole to shape the bills. If the GOP lost another seat or two in ’90, Dole wouldn’t even have influence. He’d just be in the business of obstruction. Of course, Bush would veto all the spending bills. And Dole would have to work—flat-out—just to enforce paralysis.

  Dole got to see Camp David again—first time in sixteen years, since Nixon flew him out there to give him his jacket, and the rope. This time, Dole said, he only got invited ’cause Elizabeth was Secretary of Labor. Bob was a Cabinet spouse. He left before the weekend was through. When he got back to the Capitol, some eager reporter asked breathlessly: “Senator! How was Camp David? Was it beautiful?”

  “Woulda been,” Dole said, and strode on, toward his office.

  Of course, there was ’92. Reporters asked, did he think he’d ever run for President again?

  “Aghh, wait a minute. Haven’t even said I’ll run for reelection.”

  What?

  “Might not.”

  Dole was thinking ... he could get on some boards. Make a little money. Bob Strauss heard whispers, and called to say there was always a place in his Big Guy law firm. Warren Rudman talked to Dole about both of them leaving—they could start a firm and (Believe me, Bob!) write their own ticket! ... For that matter, the Cabinet table ceased to hold its former fascination for Elizabeth. She had to think of some life beyond her old life. Maybe she could run for Governor in North Carolina—or take on Terry Sanford for Senate, in 1992. (Bob could be a Senate spouse.)

  When he went back to Kansas, the old Dole-watchers in the press asked him, point-blank: “Senator, you serious y’might not run?”

  “Aghh, don’t knoww!” Dole would answer. “Gotta look at it, one of these days.”

  At first, no one made much of it—he’d said the same in 1980, the last time he lost for President. ... But then they saw the Democrats lining up, for ’92. (Dan Glickman, Rep from Wichita, stood at the head of the line.) ... Then they heard Dole had talked to
Kim Wells, about running on the GOP side.

  Dole told one group of reporters, “Have to look it over, look at my options. I wanta make certain I’m in good health.” Dole was sixty-six. Wasn’t gonna live forever. Sister Gloria’s cancer had come back, and brother Kenny had to sit with an oxygen tank, fighting emphysema. How long did Bob have?

  Word started to ricochet around the Big Guy circuit in Washington. The staff was on the phones, all day, whispering: It’s serious.

  Serious? Gaggh! It was horrible—Dole was locked away in his inner office ... with carpet samples!

  The Bobster was going to redecorate his apartment.

  Every once in a while, Biden would catch Bush on TV, greeting a foreign visitor, talking at some ceremony ... and just for an instant, Joe would get that sinking anxiety for the guy, like when you see a comedian and no one’s laughing—“Oh, God, he’s gonna screw this up.”

  And then Joe would wait for the other shoe to drop: the thought that he ought to be the guy up there ... but that seldom happened anymore.

  It wasn’t that Biden’s politics, or his vision for the country, had changed—they were the same, maybe more important to him now. What changed somehow was the notion that Joe Biden was the one guy who could step into the breach. Maybe it was less ego ... though Joe felt he was paying more attention to himself now. Maybe he was just paying less attention to what people expected of him.

  He really didn’t know why he’d changed—what to call it—but he knew when it happened, or when he felt it ...

  It was May ’88. Biden was still in the hospital after his second operation. Doctors often find a “mirror aneurism” on the other side of the skull, and that’s what they found in Joe—along with a vicious blood clot that almost croaked him, actually required a third operation, set him back in his schedule, and gave everybody the shakes again. Anyway ... Joe was finally recuperating, after months of concentrating strictly on the basics—eat, sleep, get some strength. He was lying on his hospital bed, staring up idly at the TV, and he saw: Bush and Reagan on stage, in black tie, in front of a huge model White House, with a fancy crowd and cameras, lights shining in the Gipper’s old eyes as he gave Bush his endorsement, or whatever—a big White House do. ... And Joe was on his way back, gaining strength, he knew, and he clenched his teeth, lifted his jaw, and thought, “I oughta be up there.”