Kaufman and Connaughton hit it off. They were both MBAs and decided to run the fundraising operation like a company. Connaughton helped draft the strategic plan, constructing an organizational pyramid of captains and subcaptains. The more money the subcaptains raised, the more access to Biden their captain received. Connaughton kept track of the contest and decided who got a lapel pin, who got dinner with the candidate. He also set up a system for contributors. If one of them wanted to see Biden, he needed to donate at least a thousand dollars. Connaughton would tell big-time donors, “For fifty thousand dollars I can get you dinner with the senator at his house. For twenty-five thousand I can get you dinner with the senator, but not at his house.” And some of the check writers would cough up the extra twenty-five just to be able to tell their friends, “I had dinner with Joe at his house in Wilmington.”
After Gary Hart was caught fooling around with Donna Rice on board the Monkey Business and became the year’s first victim of scandal and media frenzy, Biden became a strong contender for the nomination. Connaughton worked all day at his desk in the giant blue-carpeted room, took no breaks, drove back to Alexandria at midnight, fell into bed exhausted, then woke up in the morning and headed back to Wilmington to do it again, thinking: “I am living my purpose right now.”
One day that spring, Biden showed up at the Wilmington office, looking great in a turtleneck and aviator sunglasses. He greeted the campaign workers—many of whom had been with him since he was first elected to the Senate at the age of twenty-nine, in 1972—and gave them a brief pep talk about the progress of the campaign. It was six years since Connaughton had last seen Biden in Alabama, all those unanswered letters ago. If Biden recognized him, he gave no indication. As the senator turned to go, Connaughton imagined running to catch up, standing in his path, declaring: “I invited you down to the University of Alabama three times. The last time, I promised you I’d help you become president. Here I am.” Instead, he went back to his desk.
Connaughton rose in the ranks, putting together fifty-thousand-dollar fundraisers with trial lawyers and the Jewish community in southern cities. He started traveling with the candidate, and if the plane was delayed, or if on arrival Biden talked too long or not long enough, Connaughton caught the flak from donors. He and Biden never spoke.
One day, on a flight to a fundraiser in Houston, Connaughton was told to brief Biden about the event. He carried the briefing book up the aisle to the first-class cabin where Biden was sitting with his wife, Jill.
“Senator, can I speak with you for a minute?” Connaughton asked.
“Just gimme what you got,” Biden said, hardly looking up.
Biden apparently didn’t remember Alabama. Long after Connaughton went to work for him, his boss would butcher the original connection, saying, “I’m glad I met you when you were in law school all those years ago.” Biden always had time for strangers, especially if they bore any relation to Delaware. If you were family, or part of a small circle of long-serving aides, like Kaufman, and you “bled Biden blue,” as the senator liked to say, then he was intensely loyal. But if you just worked your ass off for him for a few years, he ignored you, intimidated you, sometimes humiliated you, took no interest in your advancement, and never learned your name. “Hey, Chief,” he’d say, or “How’s it going, Cap’n,” unless he was ticked off at you, in which case he’d employ one of his favorite terms for male underlings: “dumb fuck.” “Dumb fuck over here didn’t get me the briefing materials I needed.” It was both noun and adjective: “Is the event leader a Democrat or a Republican? Or are you too dumb fuck to know?”
Connaughton was doing the hard, thankless, essential work of soliciting money, and for this he was forever stigmatized, because Biden hated fundraising, the drudgery and compromises it entailed. Some of his colleagues seemed to spend half their lives dialing for dollars—Alan Cranston, the California senator, made call after call soliciting five hundred bucks while pedaling an Exercycle at the gym—but Biden hardly ever called anyone. As a senator from a state the size of some counties, he’d never had to raise much money, and he didn’t adjust well to the financial pressures of a presidential campaign. He resented any demands placed on him by the people who helped him raise money and the people who wrote checks, as if he couldn’t stand owing them. He didn’t hang out with the permanent class in Washington, but left his Capitol office every evening, walked across Massachusetts Avenue to Union Station, and took Amtrak home to his family in Wilmington. Remaining Ordinary Joe became a point of aggressive pride. He was as incorruptible as he was ungrateful.
In Washington, elected officials considered themselves a higher breed. They were “principals,” had shown the moxie and endured the humiliation of standing before the public, and in their eyes, staff were a lower form of human beings—parasites that attached themselves to the front man for the ride. Connaughton knew that he had nothing to teach Joe Biden, a political natural who had been doing this for almost two decades, with a fingertip feel for what the American people wanted. Connaughton was thoroughly expendable, unless he could prove himself a workhorse.
“He saw the uncertainty in my eyes,” Connaughton later said. “I was so new to it. I had been trained on Wall Street and I was coming into a completely different world. I had an outsized view of our relationship because I’d waited so long to join him. From his perspective, I was just one more guy who’d shown up to work on his campaign. I was attracted to power. There were not a whole lot of issues in the forefront of my mind. I wanted to be part of a small group of people that moves into the West Wing on Inauguration Day to run the country. That’s the ultimate game in Washington. And after his campaign failed, I was lost.”
In early September, Connaughton took a break from the campaign to attend the Alabama–Penn State game. He was driving through the Pennsylvania countryside when a news bulletin came on the radio station: Biden, at a debate in Iowa, had plagiarized a speech by a British Labour politician named Neil Kinnock, even stealing Kinnock’s identity as a descendant of coal miners.
As an isolated case it would have been a story without legs. But having already brought down Hart, the media—Maureen Dowd and E. J. Dionne in the Times, Eleanor Clift in Newsweek—smelled another scandal and they competed to dig up other Biden faults: lines lifted from Hubert Humphrey and RFK; a badly footnoted law school essay that resulted in a failing grade; exaggerated claims about his past. Then an incident recorded by C-SPAN in a New Hampshire resident’s kitchen surfaced. Biden had agreed to wear a mike for an entire, unedited campaign event—a first in political history. He was brilliant for eighty-nine of the ninety minutes, but he had spent his whole career saying too much, and just before the end, a voter asked him about his law school grades. Biden snapped, “I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do,” then made at least three false statements about his education while taking the guy’s head off.
Connaughton hadn’t heard of the Kinnock speech or how Biden was using it. Honestly, he didn’t care much for Biden’s stump speech, which always brought the house down with the line, “Just because our political heroes were murdered does not mean that the dream does not still live, buried deep in our broken hearts.” Connaughton revered the Kennedys as much as anyone, but that line left him flat—it was overwrought, and pitched at Americans a decade or more older. Why couldn’t Biden give substantive speeches, with issues and facts and solutions, like the one on SALT II in Tuscaloosa? He seemed to be running for president on his ability to move people—to make the young Jeff Connaughtons wait six years to join his campaign. Move them to do what? He was trying to sound like the murdered heroes themselves. The Kennedys quoted the Greeks, pundits said, and Biden quoted the Kennedys. Sometimes without attribution.
The rules of the ultimate game had been changing. In 1968, George Romney said on TV that he’d been brainwashed by the generals in Vietnam, and his presidential campaign was finished. In 1972, Ed Muskie stood on a flatbed truck in the falling snow outside William Loeb�
�s Union Leader in Manchester, New Hampshire, as the cameras rolled and wept tears of rage at the editor who had slandered his wife, Jane—and that was the end of Ed Muskie. In 1980, Ronald Reagan cocked his head and chuckled, “There you go again,” and Jimmy Carter shrank into a one-term president. In 1984, Walter Mondale asked, “Where’s the beef?” and Gary Hart suddenly looked like a slick young man with a full head of hair. Ten seconds on TV could frame a character forever, could crown or end a campaign. Presidents and contenders could commit assisted suicide with the eager help of the media.
But the new rules of the ultimate game only came into focus the year Jeff Connaughton attached his aspirations to Joe Biden’s. In 1987, what had once been the dramatic sideshows of politics became the main event: the candidate and his humiliated wife under the hot lights, the nominee at the televised hearing table talking through and around and against his own past, the ideologues and interest groups on each side of every question large and small mobilizing for total war, the daily excavation of old and recent sins in the life of a politician, the momentum building to a crescendo, the reporters a pack of wild dogs outracing one another on the blood scent of some powerful but wounded quarry. In 1987, there was Gary Hart, there was Robert Bork, and there was Joe Biden—the last two happening at the same moment.
Inside the campaign, the two weeks after the Kinnock story were a frantic nightmare, every day a new shock. But in retrospect, the dénouement looked as mechanical and inevitable as an ancient sacrificial rite at the center of a tribal culture. The candidate vows to carry on and tries to ignore the baying of the hounds. The media keep drawing more blood. The candidate receives expressions of support from his colleagues. But the stories are creating an overwhelming and awful impression, one that may never be lifted. The candidate gathers his family and inner circle around him and, one by one, asks their advice. They want him to stay in so he can defend his honor; they want him to get out so he can defend his honor. Amid tears, the candidate decides to stand down. He faces the cameras chin up, in a contained rage.
On the morning of September 23, Kaufman told Connaughton to notify the fundraising captains across the country that Biden would announce his withdrawal at noon. Two minutes before the press conference, Connaughton called his parents in Alabama, and all he could say was “Turn on the TV.” He wept in the bathroom while the rest of the staff listened to Biden’s statement in the Russell Building. “I’m angry with myself for having been put in this position—for having put myself in this position,” Biden announced to the firing squad of cameras. “And, lest I say something that might be somewhat sarcastic, I should go to the Bork hearings.” With that, Biden went to the Senate Caucus Room on the third floor and took his seat as chairman of the Judiciary Committee hearings that would lead to the defeat of Judge Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court and begin Biden’s political rehabilitation.
Connaughton was shell-shocked. His hero had been exposed as a phony, reduced from White House material to national joke in two weeks. “His strength, he claimed, was his ability to speak and move people,” Connaughton said. “Then, when it appeared he was borrowing other people’s words, that completely undermined it.” Now Connaughton didn’t know what to do: his life was suddenly directionless. When Kaufman asked him to stick around Wilmington for a couple of months and help close down the campaign, he said yes. It made him seem like a good soldier, but the truth was that he was too paralyzed to look for a better option. He now had the worst job in politics—spending hours on the phone with angry supporters who wanted their money back, or with furious staffers in Iowa and New Hampshire who had taken campaign computers hostage until they got their last paycheck. Everyone who’d ever given the campaign a ham sandwich sent a bill. And it fell on Connaughton to help archive every step of Biden’s disgrace, every anti-Biden news story and op-ed that might be used against him in his next Senate race, in 1990. There were hundreds of them, and by the end of the ordeal they left no aspect of Biden unexamined—even his hair plugs. It was like cleaning up body parts after a grisly accident and preserving bits and pieces as evidence in case of a lawsuit.
At the end of 1987, Connaughton was offered a job as a fundraiser for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. He said no—he didn’t want to spend his career keeping track of checks and lapel pins. He still wanted to be involved in the substance of politics, the issues. Then Kaufman told him of an opening on the staff of the Judiciary Committee; the salary, forty-eight thousand a year, was that of a first-year Wall Street associate. But there would be interesting work on antitrust law, intellectual property, civil justice reform. Connaughton felt a strong bond with Kaufman, and he hadn’t given up on Biden. In any case, Wall Street wasn’t likely to hire him: the stock market had crashed on October 19, the biggest one-day drop in history, and the 1986 tax reform act had shut down many of the arbitrage tricks that had kept public finance departments thriving. He decided to stay in Washington.
Everyone in D.C. was someone’s guy. Connaughton was a Biden guy.
1987
The shouts, the imprecations, the gesticulations, the fucking fear and greed, enveloped him, and he loved it. He was the number one bond salesman, “the biggest producer,” as the phrase went, in the bond trading room … PROSECUTOR IN BOESKY SCANDAL PREDICTS A CHANGE IN WALL STREET’S ETHICS … DONNA RICE—WHAT REALLY HAPPENED Gary Hart Asked Me to Marry Him; Exclusive Photos of Fun-Filled Weekend in the Bahamas … I believe that the demise of the liberal perspective on the ghetto underclass has made the intellectual discourse on this topic too one-sided. It has made it more difficult to achieve … SHOCKING NEW TREND—AMERICANS AFRAID TO LEAVE THEIR HOMES … Well, you’re fucked up, you look like shit, but hey no problem, all you need is a better cut of cocaine.… Relativism succeeds in destroying the West’s universal or intellectually imperialistic claims, leaving it to just be another culture … Gravity Will Never Be the Same. The Air Revolution from Nike.… GREENSPAN CALLS WIDENING OF TRADE GAP “AN ABERRATION,” PREDICTS IMPROVEMENT … Over the next 14 months, bidders seeking to build Florida’s visionary bullet train will get serious. They will start negotiating big land deals with developers interested in building stations from Tampa to … General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate!… PRESIDENT ASSUMES RESPONSIBILITY FOR IRAN-CONTRA AFFAIR … Many employees share Gates’s young-techie vocabulary. “Randomness” applies to any confused or haphazard situation. “Bandwidth” means the amount of information one can absorb. Things that go right are “radical,” “cool,” or, Gates’s favorite, “super.” … Biden, fighting to salvage his presidential campaign, today acknowledged “a mistake” in his youth, when he plagiarized … PANIC! DOW PLUNGES THROUGH FLOOR—508 PTS
CRAFTSMAN: RAYMOND CARVER
Ray was a drinker. He picked it up from C.R., his father. C.R. was a saw filer at a lumber mill in the Yakima Valley and a good storyteller. Ray picked that up, too. C.R. could go for months without sipping a beer, then he would disappear from home for a while, and Ray and his mother and younger brother would sit down to dinner with a sense of doom. That was how Ray drank: once he started, he couldn’t stop.
Ray grew up in the 1940s and ’50s. He was a tall, fat boy. He stood hunched over, with an arm or leg bent at a bad angle, and his eyes had a fat boy’s hooded squint even after he lost the weight. His pants and shirts looked like gabardine, what an unemployed forty-year-old would wear. He spoke in a faint mumble so you had to listen close, but it often turned out that he had said something funny or sharp.
The Carvers lived in four rooms in a seven-hundred-square-foot box of a house on a concrete slab. There was nowhere to be alone and they lived together like strangers.
Ray loved to shoot geese and fish for trout along the Columbia River. He liked to read the pulps and outdoor magazines. One day, he told the man who took him along hunting that he had sent a story to one of the magazines an
d it had come back. That was why Ray had looked nervous all morning.
“Well, what did you write?” the man said.
“I wrote a story about this wild country,” Ray said, “the flight of the wild geese and hunting the geese and everything in this remote country down here. It’s not what appeals to the public, they said.”
But he didn’t give up.
Ray saw an ad in Writer’s Digest for the Palmer Institute of Authorship in Hollywood. It was a correspondence course. C.R. paid the twenty-five-dollar enrollment fee and Ray started doing the sixteen installments, but he ran out of money for the monthly payments. After he received his high school diploma, his parents expected him to go to work in the sawmill. That wasn’t how things went.
Ray got a pretty girl named Maryann pregnant. She was going to study at the University of Washington, but Ray and Maryann were crazy about each other, so they got married instead. In 1957 their daughter was born in a hospital two floors below the psychiatric ward where C.R. was being treated for a nervous breakdown. A year later a baby boy arrived. Ray was twenty and Maryann was eighteen, and that was their youth.
They began to wander. They had great dreams and believed that hard work would make those dreams come true. Ray was going to be a writer. Everything else would come after that.
They moved around the West and they never stopped. They lived in Chico and Paradise and Eureka and Arcata and Sacramento and Palo Alto and Missoula and Santa Cruz and Cupertino. Every time they started to settle in, Ray would get restless and they would move on to somewhere else. The family’s main support was Maryann. She packed fruit, waited tables, sold encyclopedias door-to-door. Ray worked at a drugstore, a sawmill, a service station, and a stockroom, and as a night janitor at a hospital. The work was not ennobling. He would come home too wiped out to do anything.
The Unwinding Page 8
