What It Takes

Home > Other > What It Takes > Page 40
What It Takes Page 40

by Richard Ben Cramer


  In ’72, when he was twenty-nine, and a County Councilman, working and voting, like any Councilman, on planning and zoning, sewer bonds, paving contracts, and stop lights ... no one in Delaware could see Joe Biden moving, by one giant leap of imagination, into the United States Senate. Hell, no! Not against Cale Boggs—an institution, a man beloved in Delaware, a man who had won seven straight elections, who had held statewide office for twenty-five years. There was no Democrat who even wanted to run against Boggs. But Joe could see it—had seen it already, a thousand times in his head—how Boggs would wake up one morning and find Joe Biden breathing down his neck. And most important, how Joe would be, how he’d look: young, handsome, smart, self-assured. And the way he’d act, toward Senator Boggs: respectful, friendly, fond, like a grandson ... who knew the old man wasn’t quite up to it anymore. ...

  Joe could see the thing whole in his head, and what’s more, he could talk it. Not too often—he didn’t let most people in on a vision, but family ... Neilia, of course: he joked that his wife was the brains of the family, but it wasn’t all joke. And Val, his sister, twenty-seven, who was the manager of his campaign. And Jimmy, his brother, who was twenty-four—he was the fund-raiser. Of course, in that family, no one ever doubted Joe. But then, too, every once in a while, Joe would let in people from the outside, people he needed, people who had to believe. And then Joe would get to talking fast, with conviction—something near joy in his voice—and he’d haul them along, until they could feel his belief like a hand on their backs, until they could see it as he could, until the thing was shining in the air ... and they only hoped they were good enough to be with him, there, at the end. ... You could feel the thing happen in the room—the “connect.” People called it the Biden Rush.

  The funny part was, the people who saw him—the press, the political pros—only talked about the last stop of the train: they praised his “oratory,” but wondered whether there was any thought behind the waves of stirring words. Even his own guys—the experts and consultants buzzing around this honeypot—talked about him like a wild stallion who’d never felt the bridle. They said they were with Biden because he could “connect,” he could “move the people.” Of course, now that they’d signed on, he’d also have some direction, some savvy. ... That only fed the common wisdom that Biden was an unguided missile. Every week or so, his experts were quoted (“Don’t use my name, huh? ...”), analyzing his appeal under headlines like: THE POLITICS OF PASSION. ... But it didn’t feel like passion to Joe. Not the way they meant it. Not when it was working. What he wanted it to feel like was the organized emotion of a football play—practiced for months, until it was clockwork—where he knew, where he saw in his mind, before the snap of the ball, how he’d run, exactly twenty yards down the field, where he’d feint for the goalpost and cut to the sideline ... like it already happened, he saw how he’d plant his left foot ... saw the tuft of grass that his cleats would dig into ... the look on the cornerback’s face ... as he left (as he would leave) that sonofabitch in the dust!

  In the end, when you took it apart, it all rested on Joe’s certainty. He tried to tell his experts and gurus: he had to see the moves. He wanted to play them out in his head, with scenes, with dialogue ... until he had worked them, refined them, rehearsed every line ... until he was sure what would happen. Joe called that process “gaming it out”—and it went on continuously in his head. Then, once he’d seen ... he could do anything, he could stoke the fire hot enough to get the “connect,” he could swing out to the end of that rope. That was his view of his history, even the stuff that looked so ballsy: never had a doubt in his head that he could wiggle under the bumper of that truck, get to the top of that culm dump ... that he could fly over the earth from those girders (he’d been looking at those hemp ropes for weeks) ... that the owner of that house would take a half-million pullback (he knew what the sonofabitch paid for the place) ... that Cale Boggs could not react in time (Biden was at three percent in the polls when he rented the best and biggest ballroom in the state for his “victory celebration”).

  Once he’d seen ... then it was singing in his head, and he didn’t have to think ... he just did. He knew what was supposed to happen. Hell, it was a done deal ... and then it wasn’t imagination, or even balls. Not to Joe Biden. It was destiny.

  That was the problem. So, Ridley and Donilon came up to Wilmington that night, one week into 1987, to tell Joe he couldn’t buy the new house. Actually, they had a few things to straighten out. For instance, was Joe going to run? (They couldn’t seem to get a clear answer.) If so, what was he doing for the last two weeks on vacation in Hawaii with Pat Caddell? And if he meant to run, what the hell was he trying to pull with a one-point-one-million-dollar house?

  It was an odd summit on the shape of Joe’s life. Tim Ridley was thirty-one years old and had worked with Biden for about three months—signed on last October as Joe’s new Administrative Assistant, after a four-hour Biden Rush—and now he was supposed to manage the Presidential campaign that Joe wasn’t sure he was going to make ... and supposed to make peace among a half-dozen experts, gurus, and self-appointed Rasputins, who all wanted to run the campaign that might not happen ... who all loved Joe, and all mistrusted each other, and Joe wasn’t sure about any of them ... and now Ridley had a U.S. Senator in rut for a real estate deal that would sink the whole ship anyway.

  “Look, Senator,” Ridley said, earnestly. “In the mind of a voter, there’s no way you get from a Senator’s seventy-five thousand a year ... to a million-and-a-half-dollar estate.”

  “One-point-one ...” Joe said absently. “I said I could sell it for a million-and-a-half.” He was in his big chair, listening. Ridley and Donilon were on the couch in Joe’s study. Joe had offices, three or four of them, but the serious stuff happened at his home, in the study during the colder months, on the side porch during the summer.

  “One-point-one, one-point-five, whatever you say ... it doesn’t matter.” Donilon had his face set in its grimmest lines—which were not too grim, when you looked at his baby cheeks and the friendly half-smile that always played on his mouth. Donilon knew about campaigns. He was also thirty-one, but he’d started as a Carter field man at age twenty-three. He lived with Mondale on the road for years, shared the same hotel suite, watched the guy walk around in his underpants, chomping a cigar and fuming about his campaign. Donilon was a lawyer, smart, and tough enough. But you didn’t see it right away because of that baby face ... no matter what he said. It was like getting a lecture from the Pillsbury Doughboy.

  “You can’t run as a Democrat, a guy who’s in touch with middle-class values, when you’re on TV in your indoor tennis court. How the hell do we explain it to Brooks Jackson?”

  Brooks Jackson was The Wall Street Journal guy who made a specialty of candidates’ finances. Joe seemed to brighten at the name. Brooks Jackson was the one guy who would understand. “C’mere, I’ll show you how we tell him. C’mere!”

  And he took the boys over to a table, where he had the plans of the place, and the numbers, and he started talking deal. This house was going to make Joe rich! ... “See, with a four-hundred-fifty-thousand pullback, and the fifty up front—that’s all up front—that means, with the interest and all, and the balloon, in ’91, I’m only paying, cash, five hundred thousand. I got this place listed for seven-ninety-five! And for the rest, I sell two pieces, I already got ’em sold, see—here, and here; I sell this, that’s gone—and that’s three hundred fifty thousand right there, so ...”

  Ridley was looking at the plans while Joe kept moving money in his head. Ridley stared at the block marked “Tennis House,” thinking, “Oh, my God, migod, migod ...” and he thought of the headlines, like he always did when there was trouble coming: JOE BIDEN’S NET GAME ... DOWN AND OUT WITH BIDEN ... because in his right ear Ridley could hear the high ground creeping into Biden’s voice: Hey, it’s a righteous deal!

  Tom started again: “Senator, I know you can buy it. The point I’m tryin
g to make ...” But Joe had moved beyond talk. He wanted to show them. So they could see it like he did, see it whole ... Life magazine! “C’mon,” he said. And he dragged them out to his car, or his truck, to be precise, a four-wheel-drive thing. It’s actually a Wagoneer, but Washington guys don’t know about trucks, so the night has gone down in history as The Night of the Bronco. And Joe rode them all around Wilmington—hell, they covered half of Delaware, for hours, driving to different properties, which Joe pulled into in the darkness, and raked the houses, the land, with his headlights, and showed them the features, the problems, and told them what it went for in ’76, and what this sold for last year ... and what that said about the value of his house, his new house, seventeen acres! ... which he could get, with the pullback, the balloon, and everything ... “in Greenville, ninth most expensive real estate in the country ... and it’s perfect. All brick! Perfect shape. Wait. We’re right near it ...”

  Thing was, both of them had already seen the compound. Like all decisions in the Biden campaign, this thing had been hanging fire for months, while Joe sifted out his moves. The staff in Delaware had named the place “The North Forty.” And Joe had shown them everything, taken everybody out there, walked them through the tennis house, to make them see ... and it was splendid, there was the sauna, the indoor pool. Ridley had taken one quick look and was sure the campaign was over. “Oh, God,” he murmured, looking up, into the vast, airy hall of the tennis court. “We’re fucked. Completely. Oh, my God ...”

  But this was the night they would not quit, and they were after Joe. “You’re not going to take every goddam reporter in the country out in your truck. You can’t. You don’t know what this is like. You can’t explain to everybody. Things just come out. Everything comes out, and everything looks ... worse than you can think. Joe, if you run, your life is going to change. It’s got to change ...”

  They were back in the Bronco, and the boys were pressing: “Look, if you think you can live your life like you been living, like you want, in the middle of this, you’ve got it wrong. If you do this thing, you’ve got to want it more than you want anything else in the world. You’re going to give up ... everything.”

  And then, they were back in Joe’s old house, with takeout Chinese, and Ted Kaufman was there, who was Biden’s old Chief of Staff, who these days was running around the country, raising money for the campaign that might not be. And Joe was trying to tell them he had to do it his way, there wasn’t any point in running if he had to twist into some new shape. And he didn’t just mean the house ... he meant everything, his work in the Senate, the Judiciary Committee, his home, his family ... weekends—he had to have weekends home.

  Weekends!

  “Look, Joe ... it’s not going to happen. That shit you been telling Jill—weekends home, campaigning together, she won’t have to go out alone ... that’s bullshit ...”

  “If you guys don’t think I can do it ...”

  “It’s not that ... you can do it!”

  And Joe knew he could do it—not a doubt in his head, honest to God, his word as a Biden—it was destiny ... if he could see the moves. He had to figure out ...

  Joe was thinking of Jill, what she said on the plane, coming home from Hawaii, just a few days before. They’d done a round of fund-raisers on the Islands (turns out that’s where the Jews from L.A. spend their Christmas) ... and they’d stayed with Pat Caddell, who had the use of a house there. Joe and Pat went back a long way, to the start, to ’72, when Joe made his first Senate race and signed on a brilliant twenty-two-year-old pollster from Harvard—that was Caddell ... before McGovern, before Carter, before the White House and all that bullshit ... hell, Joe knew Pat before Caddell had any enemies, and that was going back some. They were like brothers. They’d helped to create one another.

  Anyway, the strange thing was, this time, they almost didn’t talk about the campaign. After so much talk before. After Pat tried so hard to get Joe to make the race, in ’83 ... they’d talked forever about that. But now, this time, when they both knew it was Joe’s time, neither wanted to bring it up. And the conversation Joe remembered from that trip took place on the plane, coming home from Honolulu. The airline pulled one of those stunts where they get you in the plane, and then it sits on the tarmac, for hours, waiting for something ... and Jill was staring out the window, they were quiet, until a sigh of such concentrated sadness escaped her that he turned to ask: “What? ...”

  “Nothing ... just ... it’s never going to be the same—is it?”

  Joe asked, gently: “Don’t you want to run?”

  “It’s not that, it’s just ... everything’s so perfect now.”

  Even Joe, who was always looking to move up, had to admit ... the kids were doing great, Jill was going back to school ... Joe was forty-four, had a lock on his seat, on his state, just became chairman of one of the Senate’s most powerful, visible committees. And he could do that job, he could be ... a force. It was perfect. But Joe was not a man to let perfect alone.

  This could be his time ... he had seen the way he would be, a thousand times ... back in college, ’63, ’64, when he was driving back and forth to Syracuse to see Neilia, every weekend, he went over and over his statewide race—Governor, or Senator—he knew how that would be, every move ... and after that, there was President. Like night followed day. He would make that move, that race, and in his mind’s eye, his race looked like John Kennedy’s ... a young man’s race, an excitement in the nation, a call to get America moving again, after a sleepy two Republican terms, against an unpopular Vice President—and Kennedy was forty-three years old, and not well known in the nation, but the time was right to move the spirit of the country ... and it looked ... just like this. Hell, Pat could see it in the numbers—Pat was a prophet with a poll—and he told Joe, must have told him a hundred times, that a new generation was ready, now, to shove the country toward its ideals. This time, ’88, would be the first election when more than half the voters would come from the postwar baby boom ... the bulge in the bell curve would inherit the earth. But Joe didn’t need numbers: he could see it himself, when he spoke, when he seized a room, a campus hall, or a roomful of Democrats, and the feeling, the “connect,” rushed back at him, and he could see the faces, the women in tears, when he talked about the dream they’d all shared, twenty years ago. ... He remembered the first time it happened, Atlantic City, the convention hall, three years ago, a room full of regulars, sixty-year-olds, party pros ... a thousand muldoons and the smell of cigar smoke, and perfumed women stiff with makeup, and still, even so ... when he got to the end, where he spoke of the dream and the dreamers, John Kennedy, and Bobby, and Martin Luther King: Just because our heroes were murdered, does not mean that the dream does not still live ... buried deep ... in our broken hearts ... he saw it happen, saw it that day as he would see it again in his mind, another thousand times ... that crowd of party hacks, who’d heard a million speeches, who didn’t give a shit ... did not know what to do. There was silence. Then they stood. And then, only then, they began to cheer ... and some of them wept. And they did not talk to one another, or pick up their coats, or look for the exit. They stood, looking up at him, and clapped and cheered, for ... must have been five minutes. Joe knew, his time was coming.

  Joe found Ridley’s face talking to him in the kitchen. “... No way Pat can be any part of this campaign. When The Washington Post reports you and Pat lounging on a beach in Hawaii, it’s a red flag, and they’re gonna do anything to get Caddell ... they’ll kill you, just to nick him, make him bleed, and you’re on the beach with him. Taking a condo he arranged! You know whose condo? For your information—this must be Pat’s idea of, like, a neat move, right?—the condo belongs to the manager of Alice Cooper.”

  Joe met this information with a blank stare. He didn’t know any such woman. He had not a clue about rock ’n’ roll stars who performed in drag, who assaulted live chickens on stage, who spat on the audience or performed strange acts on inflatable toys. Bid
en was still a bit hazy on the Beatles. Alice Cooper? ...

  Ridley lapsed into a painful, tuneless rendition of “School’s Out for Summer” ... while Donilon told Joe, that’s what they meant: borrowed condos, real estate deals ... things had to change; the bullshit had to stop; if Joe meant to run, this was serious, total.

  “You give up everything ... give up your life. It’s gone. Home, friends, you’re not there. And you’re all alone. Completely alone. Your relationship with your wife, your whole family, is going to suffer. ... You know why? Because you’re going to want this worse than anything, and it’s going to take over. And there’ll be weeks when you’re not even gonna see home, whatever house ...”

  And it dawned on Joe that these sonsabitches were still beating on him about the house ... and he made a move, he planted and wheeled for the sideline ... he held up a hand in the kitchen and told Donilon, and Ridley, and Ted, that he had news for them. They could shut up ... because what they didn’t know, what he hadn’t said, was, he’d already decided ... he didn’t have to buy the house.

  No, he said, with a dazzling Biden smile, into the sudden silence ... there was another house. (“Believe it or not ... this other thing happened ...”) And this time he got all three of them into the Bronco for the trip to the city, while Joe explained, it was in the city, but you’d never know, with the green around, in a cul-de-sac, but it wasn’t big, the kind of house no one would even notice, if they were driving by, like this, see—see, where the headlights ... see there? ... “Wait, I’ll show you next door—know what it went for, last year, this time last year? Guy bought it, moved in last spring—look at this!” ... It was after midnight now, as Joe stabbed the houses with his Bronco lights ... and he already talked to the guy, there was a deal ... (in fact, he’d talked to the guy yesterday, when he knew Ridley and Donilon were on their way up, to talk about the big house).

 

‹ Prev