Primary Colors

by Joe Klein

  I was, in truth, having some doubts about the entire Stanton enterprise that Thanksgiving. I had defended the governor on the phone with Richard after the Ozio whiff "He had his reasons," I said. "He may be right."

  "Or Ile may be a chickenshit," Richard said. "My perfect candidate, my wet dream, is warm and strong, fucking warm without being squishy-shit and quiet, Clint Eastwood strong. Don't need a rocket scientist to figure that one out. Always wonder why more of these overgrown student-body presidents don't get it. Our boy's got the warm part knocked. I'd be feeling just a little bit more comfortable about this if we had some sense of the strong."

  "I saw him in that room with Ozio," I said. "He was fine. He didn't get pushed around."

  "Maybe." Richard was bored. "Where are you, anyway? Pit Falls? You bakin' any muffins?" Then, "Henri, look--don't worry 'bout it. We're in this now. It works or it don't. It don't work, you got a gig with me. You got the makins of a serious rainmaker, Henri--bring me all the black caucus business. You'd be a monster with suburban housewife candidates, too, I'd reckon. We'll make a fortune. But, Henry"--his voice turned serious--"you don't need to go getting TB on me now, y'hear? It ain't worth it. Life goes on."

  TB: True Believerism. It was part of the code, consultant duende. It was what separated the men from the boys, staff from pols, servants from operators. You wanted to keep perspective. You wanted to see the horse as a horse and not Pegasus. But I couldn't. I remembered Stanton, glowing, coming back from delivering the Thanksgiving turkeys, his arm draped over little Jackie--and I knew it was hopeless. I was caught up in this thing. I had no perspective. I was a staffer in my soul. Different code.

  Later, after we'd fed the multitudes--Jack, Susan, Momma, Uncle Charlie, several state commissioners and I made for a very high-profile cafeteria line (and it looked real good on the evening news that night)--after the governor had led the homeless, the meek and the halt in a sing-along, after he had repaired to the study with Jackie to watch Texas play A&M, Susan snagged !Pe at the door.

  "You're down," she said.

  "I'm okay."

  "Come here--talk," she said. Momma and Uncle Charlie were sitting in rockers on the broad front porch, Momma yammering about this and that, smoking one of her too-long-to-be-reals; Charlie, perpetually bemused, comforted her with an occasional "Uh-huh" or "Ain't that the truth." Momma shot Susan a glance as we came out, just about missing a beat in her Grace Junction elegy, then continuing on--relieved--as it became clear we weren't going to join them. We took two rockers on the other side of the porch.

  "You're down," Susan said again. "Ozio's got you down." "He outthought us," I said. "He made us look slow."

  "We are slow," she said. "And anyway, you can never be fast enough for Ozio."

  "You think he's that good?"

  She laughed. "Nawwww," she reached over, tousled my hair like I was a little kid. "You don't get this, Henry? Ozio says it all the time, the line he stole from Sam Rayburn--`Any jackass can knock down a barn.' That's all lie ever does, sitting up there, leaking lies to this one and that one, taking potshots. And Jack has always been vulnerable to that, 'cause he's a believer."

  "That could be a problem," I said, stupidly.

  She ignored me, and went on. "You should have seen him back in the war days. 01' Jack seemed like a real wimp back then. You always had the guys who got up there and called the president a babykiller--it was real easy to be extreme. You were more credible if you were extreme. Jack wouldn't play that. The radicals made fun of him.

  He kept his hair relatively short, for those days. He wore a jacket and tie. When we were in law school, he was always down in Washington working, working the state delegation, trying to get them to oppose the war.

  "I'll never forget. There was a senator, real redneck hardball jerk, LaMott Dawson. Always going on about the 'commonists.' He found commonists all over the place, in Washington--and especially back home, especially when he was running for reelection. LaMott came from a little town northwest of Grace Junction named Anderson or Henderson--something like that. And a boy from there died. Now Jack had this thing--it was a grisly, self-flagellating kind of thing--but he'd always go visit the families of the people in the state who lost boys. I mean, he was just in school, right? What business did he have? No one else but Jack could get away with this. The obvious question would be 'Why ain't you over there in 'Nam, sonny?' And Jack would have to answer, seriously, 'Trick knee, ma'am.' He was so embarrassed about that--don't know what he hated more, the war or his excuse for getting out of it. But he'd go as often as he could, visiting the families. And he'd always find a way to get through to them, to comfort them. And the hard work paid off. He caught a break--up in Henderson, of all places, LaMott's hometown. He found Mrs. Ida Willie West, who said she had half a mind to go up to Washington and tell them what a waste she thought this whole business was.

  "Well, Jack supplied the other half a mind. He raised the money from some antiwar sources. He brought her up to LaMott, who didn't want any part of Jack, of course. Everyone knew what Jack was about. But Ida Willie wouldn't go in to see hint without Jack, and Jack told Sherman Presley--you know that sonofabitch was working for LaMott back then--that it would be unfortunate if the Mammoth Falls News-Tribune found out that Senator Dawson was refusing to meet a Gold Star Mother who wanted to meet with him. So they met. And Ida Willie just came out and asked, 'Why'd my boy die?' And LaMott goes on about commonists. And Ida Willie said, 'Now, LaMott, didn't we always take care of you?' And she talked about all the things the community had done to get LaMott ahead over the years--you know, they spot the smart ones like Jack and LaMott, and, in a lot of towns, they'd only get to college--good Eastern schools--because the Rotary took up a collection and they called it a scholarship fund.

  "Anyway, Ida Willie West. She reminded LaMott of every bake sale and scholarship drive the town ever did for him, and she said, 'We took care of you. And now I come to ask you why my boy died, and you trot out that same bull-rinky about commonists you always trot out at election time. This is more important than an election, LaMott. My boy's dead. Now, why'd he die?' LaMott didn't have shit to say for himself. And Jack--our Jack--let him stew in it for a moment, and then he bailed him ow. Can you imagine? He said, 'Now, Mrs. West, you know public officials like Senator Dawson have a lot of tough decisions to make. They have to try to look at the big picture, as well as the individual hves. And sometimes they get lost in the big picture. Maybe it's come time for the senator to reconsider his position on the war. You know he wouldn't want to feel responsible for any more boys like yours dying. Isn't that right, Senator?' Well, of course, LaMott was too proud to change right then and there. He promised to consider it. And give him credit: within a month, he was out on the floor, making a speech. It was a tough thing to do if you were from the South back then, unless you were an intellect like Fulbright. And, believe me, LaMott Dawson was no genius. But he turned around. We had his vote after that. And Jack did it."

  It had turned dark and colder. A light breeze raided the last of the brown leaves lingering in the seasonal trees. "So how'd you get me started on that?" she asked.

  "Ozio."

  "A grown boy," she said. "A yakker. He isn't half the man Jack Stanton is. So, Henry, don't be a jerk about this. Jack knew what he was doing."

  "Why'd he let us get out there, public and all?"

  "'Cause sometimes"--she laughed--"it takes a while for Jack to know what he's doing. But don't worry about this."

  "We look bad with the scorps."

  "When it starts, it won't mean anything."

  "When will it, you think--start?"

  "When Ozio decides." "What do you think?" "Oh, he won't go," she said. "And it's too bad."

  "Why?" I asked.

  Susan stood, ready to go back in. "Because," she said, "I would just love to have had the opportunity to crush that scumbag."

  Chapter III

  Thirty of us were in the back room at Slim's after the final New Ha
mpshire war party, the weekend between Christmas and New Year's. The campaign was down; the Stantons were off in Florida. "Well, we sure as hell planned the shit out of the next few months," Richard muttered. "Except for the woman thing."

  "WHAT woman thing?" Lucille Kauffman asked, too loud, too sharp; the entire table went quiet. Lucille was an old Susan friend with a disconcerting sense of ownership about the campaign. She assumed herself part of the inner circle, and the Stantons never said otherwise, and so she was-when she was around. Most of the time she was lawyering in New York. She kibitzed by phone. Tiny things: She didn't like Jack's ties. She didn't like the color of the campaign posters. And larger things: the staff was stupid; disloyal; uncomprehending. She was an antic conspirer; she was out for blood. She wanted a friend of hers, Laurene Robinson, hired as press secretary. She wanted Sporken replaced. (We wouldn't have minded that.) She threatened to take a leave and join the campaign full time. All Mammoth Falls quaked at the thought.

  Richard would have despised her even if she weren't dowdy and awful, even if she didn't always wear power suits and running shoes and Gloria Steinem aviators, even if she wasn't always rousting around in her purse for her compact, fussing with her hair, pulling out lipstick and applying it in the most ridiculous manner, squeezing her puckered lips around it, rolling it once, twice, then saying--always"There!" No, even if she'd been benign, Richard would have hated her because she was an amateur. "Lord save me from friends and amateurs," he would say.

  This was a basic Stanton problem. He had been collecting friends since kindergarten, with the intention of bringing them on board when it was showtime. Some were very good; others were okay; others, long defeated by the world, were testaments to the utter unpredictability of life--knowing Jack Stanton "back when" was the most notable thing they had ever done with themselves. Lucille was in a category all her own. She was awful beyond imagining. She was one of those people with no sense of human spatial dynamics--always a step too close--and no sense of propriety. She would say whatever came to mind: the mere fact that she had thought it made it significant, she believed. Indeed, the campaign had exacerbated this: Since she was Susan's best friend from college--since she knew Susan better than anyone--people actually acted as if the things she said were important.

  She was very dangerous. She scared me to death. She raised questions about Susan I didn't want to consider.

  "What woman thing?" she asked Richard. "You put ketchup on your steak? God."

  She was picking at a salad. Everyone else was eating steak--which was, indeed, the only dish on the menu at Slim's. Obscene, steaming piles of beef were stacked on platters along the tables, interspersed with piles of fried onions and potatoes. It was all very excessive and primal. "This ain't Noo Yawk, honey"--Richard dismissed her. "You gonna play politics in America, you can't be put off by the customs of the natives. Americans eat steak with sauce." Then, to me: "Say a woman conies forward and says--"

  "Bullshit!" Lucille said. "It's not going to happen."

  "Maybe someone classy," Richard went on, "like a Democratic Party activist."

  "No!"

  "Someone he popped at the 1984 convention."

  "Never!"

  "Right," Richard said. "I don't think so either. I'm just trying to figure out how it would work. You gotta figure he ain't gonna get trapped, like Hart. He knows the rules. Some bimbo from a former life comes forward, and we just say--Bullshit."

  "Bullshit is right," Lucille said. "I don't know why you're even talking about this."

  Interesting. Lucille seemed frightened. She averted her eyes when I looked at her instead of staring back and saying, "What? What?" as she normally would. What was it? Did she know something? Or was it, perhaps, that she so completely imagined herself the voice of Susan Stanton in the campaign that she was reacting now as she imagined Susan might?

  The other thing was: I felt the same way. This was something I didn't really want to think about. But that, I knew, was bad staff work: Richard was doing his job--and, as always, saying aloud something we all thought about but were too embarrassed to say. We had just finished two days of meetings, going through the calendar, coordinating it all--paid media, fund-raising, debate schedule. We had spent an entire afternoon meticulously figuring out the opposition--not just our three opponents, but the media as well. Brad Lieberman, a gift from the mayor of Chicago, had made the trains run on time--a brisk coordination of schedule, fund-raising, advertising, message. Brad had made it all seem controllable, a rational process, and everyone was feeling very up.

  The money had been rolling in since Ozio folded his hand. He had gone out in a lather, furiously, defensively, ridiculously, trying to make up his mind until the New Hampshire deadline passed, then announcing that his state's perpetual urban crisis prevented him from running, for the moment, but that he might reconsider later, if none of the candidates addressed the issues raised by his blather about the need for a New American Community. It was a total flameout. Manhattan magazine ran an Ozio cover with the headline "Zero for 0.0." Wall Street cracked open like a pinata; we'd been pulling in bundles from the big houses, pledges averaging $175,000 per day for the past two weeks. And so, this dinner, all of us arrayed at two long tables in the back room at Slim's, had a celebratory air: We were about to launch ourselves into battle--and we had the hot candidate.

  The last few weeks in New Hampshire had been very encouraging; Stanton had been awesome on the stump; we were picking up endorsements from key activists. The word was spreading. Various bigfeet from the papers, even some columnists, were beginning to come out--Ozio's departure meant that it was time for them to pay attention to the rest of the field. They'd been impressed by Stanton, for the most part. We were, suddenly, plausible in New York and Washington--the days when Jack Stanton was seen as a possible vice president were over. We would have forty-eight hours off now--New Year's Eve and New Year's Day--and then the war would begin. And we were up for it.

  "I'm talking about this," Richard said, relentless, unable to give up the woman thing, "because all that planning ain't gonna be worth shit when it happens. Because if we can't know what it's gonna be, we gotta sense what it might be. And you know it's gonna be something. Right, Henri?"

  I didn't know. I was glad the conversation had contracted againsomehow--after Lucille's initial outburst. There was laughter down the other end of the table, Lieberman telling Chicago stories. Richard was freight-training, somewhere between a whisper and a mumble, swallowing half of it; I was sitting next to him and it was hard to keep up. He was rattling through the possibilities.

  "Say a woman, a plausible woman, comes forward--but, then, you figure, if she's plausible, why'd she come forward? Act of coming out undercuts her credibility, y'knowhattamean? And why? Revenge? Politics? Money? Money, we're okay. Money, she has no credibility. 'Less she conies in quiet, hits on Stanton quiet--and he, jerk, pays off." "Richard!" Lucille again.

  "Outta guilt or somethin'. But that ain't a problem. The problem is a serious woman conies forward. But a serious woman, by definition, wouldn't. 'Less . . . Y'think he ever porked a Republican? But even with that, say he was doing a serious Republican woman and she comes out."

  "It's not pos--"

  "Shut up, Lucille," he said. "Y'think, maybe, we can just admit it--I mean. if it's someone plausible? Say, yeah, it happened, the flesh is weak, the sexual revolution. Didn't everyone fuck up sometime, the last twenty-five years?"

  "Richard, I don't want to-"

  "Lucille, why cain't you be true?"

  "It's Maybelline." Another county heard from: Daisy Green, Sporken's junior partner. She was sitting next to Lucille (on assignment from Sporken, no doubt-he knew Lucille was looking to coup him).

  "Saywhut?"

  " 'Maybelline, why can't you be true?' You're mixing it up with B. B. King's guitar. That's Lucille," Daisy said. She was mortally thin and poky. She had the look of someone who'd spent far too much time indoors-which she did, cutting and mixing spots for
Sporken. She was wearing a hooded sweatshirt with nothing written on it, and jeans. She was very New York; outer boroughs, clearly. Her mother's generation, it might have been CCNY or Hunter, and left-wing politics. She was more polished-Ivy League, probably-but still, a touch of the accent, a roughness: she hadn't worked overtime assimilating. She smoked cigarettes.

  "Who give. fuck?" Richard said.

  "Just if you're gonna be authentic, Richard."

  "Awww." But she had managed to move him off the woman stuff-a move she may have immediately regretted.

  "Hey, are you sure about no plaid?" Lucille asked, turning on Daisy now. "You know, Pendleton? It's New Hampshire. He looks stiff in the suit."

  "He's running for president. We shot the ad with him sitting on the desk, instead of behind it-that's informal enough."

  "You want to get their attention," Lucille said. "You don't want him to look like just another politician. You want something like Gary Hart with the ax."

  "Right-that's exactly what we want," Daisy snorted. "How about this for a tag line: Jack Stanton-A Gary Hart Democrat." Very nice: she wasn't intimidated by Lucille. "Every other fucking politician in the race is wearing a plaid shirt, or a ski outfit or some flicking thing. People understand bullshit this year. We have to establish: no bullshit."

  "Harris did skiing," Lucille said. "Nobody thinks he's a bullshitter." "He had a heart attack. He needs to establish he's still alive." "You have to smoke those things? You'll have a heart attack yourself."

  That stopped Daisy.

  "You don't want to do that in public, either," Lucille said, pressing her advantage. "We don't want people to think Jack Stanton's people are--s(okers, right? I mean, if they can't run their own lives, how do they run the country?"

  "Like five-hundred-dollars-an-hour New York fucking lawyers," Richard said. "Whaddya do for five hundred dollars an hour, Lucille? And who do you do it to?"

  "Very funny. You're another one: we really want the public to see Jack Stanton has sonic hillbilly who looks like he was sired during the love scene from Deliverance running his campaign."