What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  You could see it starting to sink in, in those living rooms, in the faces locked onto his. It wasn’t so much they agreed ... but this guy was the size of a President. That was the measure people were taking, a year before the voting started: Hart was of size. People asked him questions they would ask a President. People told him they wanted to help. People signed the sheet in the back of the living room, and Hart knew the follow-up would be there: those people would be brought into the circle; the machinery was in place.

  Was he more at peace? Well, yes. ... He still had debt from the last campaign—a million and a half—but the money would be there. The debt was down from almost five million—of course, nobody wrote that. He still didn’t have many endorsements. (He only had one elected official in Iowa, and that guy just got caught getting a blow-job from his secretary in a car, so the Hart campaign wasn’t using his name.) But elected officials could read the polls. The point was, Hart was winning.

  Now he’d wind up a day of campaigning with a dinner for the staff, the local drivers, all the reporters, an easy, off-the-record talk about anything. He’d even talk a bit about himself. He let a photographer take his picture, with his family ... watching football ... at his cabin! He’d never let them near the place before.

  He even sat down with Us magazine ... and had a good time, mugging in his mirrored shades, jumping up to turn up the Mozart on the radio ... “Gary Hart is relaxed today,” Us averred in surprise. “He is funny, charismatic, witty—even a bit goofy. He is startlingly unlike the Gary Hart a good portion of the public sees as aloof, too intellectual and boring.... Why aren’t you like this all the time?”

  “But I am like this all the time!”

  The Us lady was in New Hampshire on one of those great campaign days, along with a few of the national big-feet, Bob Healy from the Globe, and Jules Witcover, the columnist. It was Healy and Jules who had the idea—hey, they were all going down to Boston to get their planes the following day: why didn’t Hart and Billy Shore join them for dinner in Boston tonight? They’d do Pier Four, have a couple of pops, kick back ... have a talk.

  So they did. They were a half-dozen at table, Hart and Shore, Bob and Mary Healy, Jules and the Us lady, and it was fun! ... especially after a couple of pops. Hart had his white lightning special—vodka on the rocks—only a couple. He was telling wickedly funny stories: Jacob Javits’s funeral, when Hart was sitting in one of the front rows, and plop, into an open seat drops ... Richard M. Nixon!

  “So the organ music is playing, and Nixon says, ‘What is it? BACH? ... or Brahms?’ ”

  Hart is a splendid mimic, and with Nixon, he had it all: the furrowed brow, the shaking scowl, the deep voice from the stiff thorax ... “ ‘BACH? ... or Brahms?’ ...

  “Then he sees Kissinger in the row ahead, but Kissinger won’t turn around. ‘Should I say hello to Hank? You think I should say hello? ... BACH, or Brahms? ... I ought to say hello to Hank’...”

  They were giggling at the table. It was a wonderful dinner. Of course, those guys went back a long way—at least to ’71, with McGovern. And Jules was out there writing when Bobby Kennedy, Hart’s hero, ran in ’68. They were all big-feet now. They ought to understand each other.

  “You know, Gary ...” Jules said, as he rattle-slapped his glass down onto the table. “One thing. ... I never did understand all that shit you said about why you changed your name ...”

  Hart stiffened in his chair, and the pleasant pink began to drain from his face. These people had known him for fifteen years—why were they doubting him now?

  Jules didn’t see. He was just talking about something that bothered him ... like a New Yorker on the subway platform: Why don’t they clean up the spit on the floor?

  “I mean, seems to me, you gave about five different stories ...”

  Hart could not believe they were doing this to him. Fifteen years! They knew his record—or, by God, they ought to—fifteen years they never doubted his veracity ... not once. What was it about him now? Who did they think they were, to pick at his life? Hart was pale, holding a single trembling finger in front of his face: “One story, Jules ... one.”

  “I mean, I don’t give a shit ...” Jules was rattling on, like the ice in his glass. “I mean, whatever the story is, you know ...”

  So Hart told him the story: the same story he’d told for the last three years: his family had always talked about changing their name from Hartpence, to what they thought it was, used to be ... and when he was home from Yale, his father had taken them down to the courthouse, and ...

  “Yeah, I know, but then you said some kinda thing about your mother, and ...”

  “And we changed it to what we thought it must have been originally ...” Hart was now enunciating every word. He was not going to talk about his mother. Nor were these self-appointed psycho-police going to talk about his mother. He bored on, with the tone of a man saying something for the last time. His lips were thinner and thinner. No, you couldn’t see his lips anymore.

  “... we changed it to Hart ... and that is all.”

  That was all. Within minutes. Hart rose, dropped his napkin on the table and, without another word, walked out of the restaurant.

  This is the speech? Eight months on the education speech—and this is what he gets? Maybe they thought this was just an exercise, some kind of fun and games. It was not. He was running for President of the United States—and this is the speech he gets?

  As usual, Hart started editing, then rewriting, before he got off the first page. He crossed out lines, then whole paragraphs, noting in the margin: rhetoric. There was no one who went after a speech like Hart. He was relentless, vicious. And this was after months of work: the labor involved was on the scale of a pharaoh’s pyramid. Like Cheops, Hart wanted it to stand forever.

  First, his two issues chiefs, David Dreyer and Mark Steitz, had to empty their own files, the Library of Congress, Lexis-Nexis ... a total data-dump. Then, working on an outline from Hart (“It has to step on a lot of toes,” he warned), they farmed their questions out to experts—a hundred famous and near-famous thinkers. Hart insisted on rattling the experts’ cages. Of course, half of them wouldn’t respond, and maybe another twenty-five would answer with a copy of their latest speech ... canned stuff—Dreyer and Steitz could always tell. But then there would be twenty, or twenty-five, who actually tried to think up answers ... and those were the ones Hart wanted. It wasn’t just their ideas—though they had to be considered. This was another way to build from the ground up: if—when—he became President, he would have a constituency, all over the country, to carry the mail for his education program. He was getting ready to govern—not just make speeches.

  So the boys got all this stuff together, working back-to-back in a single office, and rammed it into computers (they called it “feeding the beast”), then knocked out a first cut of a speech, which they sent to Hart’s desk ... whence it came back. There wasn’t a mark on it—just a note from Billy Shore: Returned by GWH.

  That meant try again. But there wasn’t a whiff of evidence that Hart’d even looked at the thing ... until six months later, when they were trying to get the latest draft approved, and Hart leaned back in his chair and said, “Yeah, but you’ve totally omitted Sizer’s argument that the seven-period day is now obsolete.”

  Oh, so he’d read it. ...

  Yes, he’d read it, and complained about it, and wondered what the hell they were doing all those months ... while he simultaneously asked them for stuff he wanted against the Gramm-Rudman bill, and for the drug bill ... and while the speechwriter quit, and they had to find another, who didn’t really work out, and then Hart left the Senate and they had to pack up their stuff, box it for shipment to Denver ... not to mention move their own households, drive their cars out to the Rockies, set up a new office ... and Hart wanted to know ... where is his education speech?

  So, by New Year’s, Dreyer and Steitz were back-to-back at new computers, folding in more stuff from the experts, fee
ding the beast ... with Hart demanding something tougher, something more: more school days, more hours each day, competency tests for teachers. ... “There is a price for the generosity of the Hart education plan,” he said with an evil-scientist grin. “We’re going to spend a little money here. But we’re also going to make demands ... teachers, parents, students ...” Hart wanted to shake them all by the neck. Meanwhile, he’d inquire, every few days: Where was his speech? So, finally, Dreyer and Steitz had to crank it out themselves. They still didn’t have a writer who could work with Hart for ten minutes. They gave him a draft, and he hit the roof: This is the speech?

  Now he was working on page twelve, halfway through. The pages looked like subway art. His block-letter print filled the margins:

  Why all these words to make simple points?

  What’s this?

  Awful.

  Awful.

  Then spell it out.

  Awful grammar. D–

  They were wasting his time! It was 1987. His two years for issue preparation were gone. He was three months from announcement! He had Iowa to work on, New Hampshire, the South. Millions of dollars had to be raised, now. He had speeches to make for money, too, money of his own—he had to make the mortgage for the land around the cabin. (He was not going to give up the grounds of his castle!) He had his law firm in Denver, and they wanted hours from him—billable hours! He didn’t have time to screw around with bad work.

  So he tore up the speech and they wrote it again. And he tore it up again, and they wrote it again. And this time, he did the rest with a pen. The packets for the press had to go out. None of it would make any difference if no one heard about the speech. There was a crack Advance man dispatched to the University of Virginia—Hart would issue his call for a new American Revolution in Education at the seat of learning founded by his idol, Thomas Jefferson. It was the last week of January when everything was ready.

  And then it snowed.

  It snowed all day, and the next day: it broke records. And Washington shut down, and Virginia shut down, and roads were closed, and there was ... no way. The Hart campaign was up and running now, in Denver, and people there did the best they could. They called around the Southeast for a campus that would, at least, offer a hall. There was no question of delaying for a week: the speech was ready, the packets were out ... the brick was baked—it had to go in the wall.

  They booked him into Duke—good weather there—for the next day. Of course, none of the big-feet came. Hart was let down. It just was not how he’d imagined. ... Duke was ... well, it was just a speech. The ideas were there. The statement was made. He’d repeat his call throughout the next week in California, and Iowa. Meanwhile, the press packets did their work: the leader of the pack, David Broder, wrote under the headline A NEW GARY HART:

  “In the midst of the East Coast blizzard last week, former Senator Gary Hart of Colorado went college shopping for a campus that was clear enough to provide him a lecture hall. He wound up at Duke. And what he said there about the education challenge facing the nation was another indication that the early front-runner for the 1988 Democratic Presidential nomination is ready to meet the test in the issues area. ...”

  Yes, that eased the sting. And Hart was ready with his most characteristic compliment: “Where do we stand,” he wanted to know, “on the economics speech?”

  “I agree, it’s gone fine, but this is different. This is you. They have to feel you. This has got to come from you!”

  In the kitchen, Ira Jackson was prodding, insistent. Michael was going to have to do better for this, the first big speech, the New Hampshire Democratic Party. But Dukakis was shaking his head, between his shoulders, like he always did when he dug in ... what the hell were they beating on him for? This was not the first speech he ever made.

  Across the table, Ira read the head-shake, the shoulders. “Michael, it’s not just a speech. This has gotta be Presidential league. This is New Hampshire. This is where you say what it’s all about. It’s Broder, Healy, every columnist in the whole goddam country, watching to see if you make it over the bar. You know what it is? This is your bar mitzvah ...”

  Ira had a talent for hyperbole, and no fear of Dukakis’s scorn. Ira was the State Revenue Commissioner, the man who invented REAP: he was thirty-eight years old, dark-haired, slender, smart as hell—one of the most visible stars in the State House. But that wasn’t how he got to Michael’s kitchen table. Ira was a Brookline boy, he used to baby-sit Michael and Kitty’s kids ... almost family. That’s why Michael picked him to write the speech. He had confidence in Ira. That’s why Michael thought he could give him one line—“Opportunity ... for every American”—and know Ira would surface in a week, with a speech in his mouth.

  But not this time. No goddam way! Ira wrote the whole inaugural speech in ’82—six days to write the thing, and not much guidance. Not this time. It’s only the most important speech of your whole goddam life. ... Ira had asked him point-blank in the office last week: Why are you running for President? And Dukakis just stared him down and said: “You tell me. ... Why would you think I’m running?” Like some kind of stupid riddle game! And when Ira started to mumble some crap, Dukakis got pissed off ... at him! No, that’s not it, he says. ... “It’s opportunity ... for every American. That is my ideology.”

  Okay ... opportunity, fine, the American dream, the immigrant story ... Ira could do that. But not if he didn’t know the story! And Michael had never told the story. Never! That’s why Ira was back in the kitchen on Perry Street. That was where you had to go, to get down with Michael.

  “You know what this is?” Ira insisted. “This is: ‘Tonight, I am a man.’ You either do it here ... or you forget it!”

  “Mike ... Ira, wait a minute! ... Mike, listen ...”

  This was Sasso. He was the only one to call Michael “Mike.” It was the name that went with Dukakis, the persona, which was Sasso’s doing, and which he reinforced constantly. Now he broke in, an octave lower, and half as loud as Ira. “Mike, there’s an intimacy about a candidacy for President. There’s an intimacy with the voter, the most personal vote anyone ever makes ... and there’s got to be something shared, a personal, intimate connection, or it doesn’t fly.”

  “Exactly!” Ira crowed across the table. “It’s you, your story, you. You!”

  “All right, guys, knock it off,” Michael said, in his parent voice. This was business. “What’re we doin’ here? What do you want to know?”

  “The immigrant story is powerful, Mike ...” Sasso was still talking low and calm, like this was the Economic Development Council. But Ira didn’t wait for Sasso to jolly Michael along.

  “When did your father come?” he demanded.

  “How old was he? ...

  “How much money did he have with him? ...

  “Did he know any English?”

  Michael had to think about the answers. It was incredible: he’d never told the story. The fact was, Michael had never spoken of himself as a Greek American till just the last few years. He only talked about what he knew: insurance, or welfare programs, housing, or transportation ... a disembodied brain ... who should be Governor because he knew more than any other brain. It was only in ’82, when he made his comeback, that he let his adman, Dan Payne, make a couple of spots about his “roots.” And there was Michael, in front of the house in Lowell, where the Dukakis clan had settled, talking about his run in the marathon, and his days in the Army, in Korea ... and people loved it! They never knew!

  But this was different. He’d always stopped short of this, his family.

  “Where did he land in this country?” Ira demanded.

  “In New Hampshire, in ...” Michael had to think. “Manchester.”

  “You’re kidding!” Ira said. New Hampshire! There was the connection.

  “How’d he learn English? ...

  “The Y taught English? ...

  “He ran there? ...

  “At night?”

  The stuff wa
s incredible! Eight years after his arrival, Michael’s father entered Harvard—the Medical School. The American Dream: there it was, in Michael’s life.

  Ira took away his notes and wrote that night. He didn’t need a week: he was back in the kitchen the next day, with a draft. It had everything: the link to New Hampshire, lines from Robert Frost ... Ira even put stuff in about the Russians: he called for an era of “peaceful competition with the Soviets.” It sounded good! And there, throughout, was the theme for a campaign: opportunity for all, the American Dream ... the story of Panos and Euterpe Dukakis and their Greek American son ... who stands before you tonight ...

  Michael took the draft, and read it through. Ira knew he’d hit something ... but he didn’t know what.

  Maybe it was Michael seeing his parents’ life in black and white. Or maybe it was just, he’d never told the story, and there it was now, for the whole world to hear. Or maybe, as Ira came to suspect, there were feelings in that story that Michael never shared with his father, never had a chance to say ... maybe this was Michael’s way of saying to Panos: I love you ... a way for Panos, dead these seven years, to say, at last, to Michael: I am proud of you.

  There was no way to know. Michael finished the speech, said nothing. He pushed back his chair and left the kitchen. Ira saw the tears in his eyes, but all he heard now was Michael’s tread on the stairs, and his footfalls in the hall, to the study he kept up there. Then Ira waited. But after a while, there was no point. Michael had gone. He was not coming back. Without goodbye, Ira packed up his papers, and left the house on Perry Street.