What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  “Mr. Reagan intends to continue with his Star Wars program ...”

  It was a good speech—an interesting point: a President had twenty minutes now, to react, if missiles were fired into the air. But with Star Wars, Reagan’s crowd would cut that to five minutes: man-the-scientist was going to outrun man-the-negotiator. Well, okay. ... But it seemed, suddenly, academic. The Boston TVs wanted to know: Was this Biden the orator?

  Joe couldn’t even hear himself reading—that word, next word ... what the hell was it about? He clamped both hands on the sides of the podium. He never looked up. All he knew was, his head hurt like hell.

  In the dining room, all the Rotarians knew was, there wasn’t any magic to this guy—none at all. Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr.—just a tall, skinny, balding man ... reading a speech.

  His gurus used to say there were moments in campaigns—the big debate, the acceptance speech, or just some serendipitous collision of fate with publicity along the trail—moments of decision, maybe even truth, when the halogen lights and the eyes of the nation snapped to shining focus on a campaign and candidate ... and that’s when it counted. If they could just get Joe and his magic, intact, to one of those moments, then millions would see, in a flash, his brilliance, his balls ... and they would make a President.

  And Joe believed them. That’s why his effort, his every day and night, was bent to straining, ever, to make something happen. Make the magic now—something ... the feeling, the connect. Who knew? This could be the time. And so, where his instinct drove him to share some bit of his life, he’d strew the gaudiest, shiniest trim that fell to his gaze ... right now. “Folks, when I was seventeen years old, I took part in demonstrations to desegregate restaurants ...” Somehow, it was easier to show the tinsel than the tree.

  Lost, alas, was the solider stuff: the way he fiercely, doggedly, held his family together through loss; the way everybody he touched that day—every day—felt more like his better self than he did before Joe showed up; the relentless way he drove himself to be always the one they could count on. This was the common grit at the bed of his life—family, loyalty, humor, guts—that was ever there.

  See, he thought they’d have to get that stuff—that’s character, right? ... One look at his kids, Jill, his home, his life—they’d pick it up, right?

  But it’s hard to show the grit underneath the bits of glitter—hard for Joe, took time ... and never hit with the hot splash he craved. Anyway, the big-feet, the pundits—it was not their business: they were writing about politics, not life. Not even the near end of life.

  What did they know about bleeding in the skull? ...

  What did Joe know, for that matter?

  So no one wrote about the moment Joe lost the magic, or the common guts it took to finish the day.

  Oh, he did finish—and not just the speech. He did the press conference after, announced his committee, and flew down to Washington, cast his vote against the contras, and decided to fly back. He might still make the dinner in New Hampshire—late, but hell ...

  And the plane was small—no room for press—so he only took Paul Taylor, and Joe made sure they had a chance to talk. Taylor was important, see, and Joe wanted Paul to know him. And Joe talked about his life, what it felt like now, with everything in the air at once. And the great thing was, Paul talked about his life, too ... and the most amazing thing—he was talking about ... their generation, just like Joe had been saying out there!

  Joe didn’t know about the plan for the book, the way Paul was thinking ... but he knew this was important, him and Paul—if Taylor could really know him, his character ... the real stuff! And Joe got pumped up—he did feel better. If only he could shake this goddam headache!

  He got to the dinner, and Tribe was at the podium ... but Joe got on after him, and did his speech anyway. It was late, but he gave it what he had.

  It was after midnight when his plane was in the air again, heading south to Delaware—Joe insisted on getting home. And when they climbed down onto the tarmac at the Wilmington airport, about 2:00 A.M., Joe asked Taylor to come home with him, stay with the Bidens for the night.

  Taylor looked uneasy. No, he said. He could go to a motel ...

  Joe wouldn’t hear of it. “Plenty of room!”

  So he took Paul home, and walked him through the silent, stately house, took him to a guest room ... but a nanny was asleep there. So he led Paul upstairs to his son’s room—Beau was asleep, too—and Joe laid a hand on his son’s shoulder for just an instant, to tell him: “Beau-y, this is Paul ... he’s gonna sleep in the other bed.”

  “Hnnuh! ... okay, Dad ...” And Beau was asleep again.

  So Taylor slept that night with the Bidens, en famille, and woke the next day among the family ... but he never did write about it for the Post.

  Taylor did write his book, about him in the campaign and all ... and in the book, he explained his technique:

  “I’m a ‘good cop’ interviewer. I try to ease, tease, coax and wheedle information from sources. With body language, facial expression, tone of voice and other verbal and nonverbal cues, I hope to let them know that I see the same world they see; that I empathize with them; that, beneath my aloof reporter’s exterior, I may even secretly admire them.”

  In fact, Taylor noted, he does admire them. But he will not write that.

  “Once a reporter ventures beyond the neutral zone of objectivity into the netherworld of approbation, he makes an almost tactile investment in the subject of his praise. By morning, tons of newsprint (seventy-five tons in the case of The Washington Post) will convey his judgment to millions of readers. It’s risky. Suppose the ingrate embezzles the orphans’ fund next Tuesday. Then who looks like a fool?”

  Taylor was not going to look like a fool ... no. So there was nothing in the book, either, about that night with Biden, the speeches, the flights, the talk about life, the house in its stillness, the practiced hand with which Joe brought his son to the edge of waking, so he would not be alarmed in the morning ... no.

  Paul was asked about that night, one time, long after, when Joe’s campaign was history:

  “That kind of thing ...” Paul said, and he squinched his face briefly and blinked a couple of times. “It was like a scene that he liked to show. ... He thought it showed him to advantage.”

  26

  The Steaming Bouillabaisse

  HART NEVER EXPECTED REPORTERS to admire him, just to do their job—was that too much to ask? Of course, he didn’t understand their job. He couldn’t understand why they wrote the same things, over and over ... it wasn’t anything he’d said to them. Who were they talking to?

  E.J. Dionne, in The New York Times, began his dispatch from Ottawa: “Gary Hart came home and, for a moment, he did not live up to his reputation. He nearly cried.”

  Time magazine crammed the visit into two paragraphs in “American Notes,” and dispensed with any facts about the trip till the latter paragraph. The lead paragraph began: “In his quest for the Presidency, Gary Hart is plagued by two troublesome perceptions: that he is cold and aloof, and that he has tried to reinvent or run away from his roots.”

  Paul Taylor, in The Washington Post, led with The Ottawa Herald’s report about the Hartpences’ sixteen houses. Then he brought the reader up to speed on the trip with a paragraph that began: “It was but one of many morsels of biographical detail to emerge from a campaign visit that seemed programmed to unearth nostalgia and emotion in a frontrunner sometimes accused of being too icy to be elected President.”

  Three reporters, three big publications ... but one common element in all the stories: Dionne’s “his reputation” ... or Time’s “troubling perceptions” ... or Taylor’s “sometimes accused.” Hart could do nothing without reporters reminding us: they thought Hart was weird.

  Note that Dionne adduced no imputers, Taylor named no accusers, and Time had room for no troubled perceivers. This was such standard Washington poop, so well known by people well known to be in the know,
that they didn’t even need to trot out the garbage source-codes (“political observers,” or “campaign staffers,” or “Capitol Hill sources,” or other lunch-buddies) that pass for attribution in the daily political smegma.

  No, everybody knew Hart was weird.

  Wait—who was everybody?

  Well, when you talk about the pack, you first have to mention the Leader of the Pack, David Broder, who had attained that status by thirty years’ work as a Washington reporter, and lately as a columnist for the Post. He was the biggest of the big-feet ... balding, bespectacled, soft-spoken, kindly, a thoroughgoing gentleman, well informed, hardworking, fair-minded, and, in general, exemplary—which is exactly the point.

  Because that was the year Broder wrote the book Behind the Front Page, and the very first story in that book was about campaigns—how mistakes in coverage are made. Specifically, the story was about 1972, when Ed Muskie cried (or didn’t cry) one day in Manchester, New Hampshire, and his campaign slid straight into the shithouse after that. Part of the story was missed, Broder said, because no one knew until the next year that the whole scenario was launched by a Nixon campaign “dirty trick.” But at the same time, Broder defended his coverage (and that of his friends), which concentrated on the crying, the way Muskie came apart at the seams. Why was it right? Why was Broder so sure? Because everybody (secretly) knew that Muskie was wound too tight—the guy was weird!

  “All of us suspected that under the calm, placid, reflective face that Muskie liked to show the world, there was a volcano waiting to erupt. And so we treated Manchester as a political Mt. St. Helens explosion, and, in our perception, an event that would permanently alter the shape of Mt. Muskie.” (Alter it they did—they took the sorry sonofabitch down!)

  One of the reporters whom Broder commended, in that instance, was Jack Germond, who then worked for Gannett, but who now wrote a syndicated column with his partner, Jules Witcover—and those two were the only other snowshoe-size big-feet who actually worked on the trail. On some trips, you’d see Germond, reclined, as was his wont, in a bar chair or an airplane seat, wisecracking with those in the know, smiling, bald, round with a firm and blessed roundness—Buddha with an attitude. Or sometimes, Jules would appear behind some candidate on some Iowa Main Street, wearing an overcoat and a patiently mournful look on his long face, walking his practiced and careworn walk—the walk of a policeman who has ever walked, ever mindful these days that there are two years (still!) to retirement. Their column ran in hundreds of papers, and was read religiously by the wise-guy community. And where Broder would stray, at times, into the thin air of government, Germond and Witcover wrote pure politics—a column you could count on. And with their book, every four years, settling the record and the scores on the last race, they, too, were exemplary—the ranking diarists of Presidential politics.

  The way they cranked out books, see, you didn’t have to wait fifteen years to find out you’d better save string on this weirdness. It was all in their ’84 book, the candidly titled Wake Us When It’s Over. The name thing ... the age thing ... the signature thing. (Hart changed his penmanship! ... Jeezus!)

  And you didn’t even have to wait for the new book, because Jules would tell you! They had this dinner with Hart, see, in Boston ... and it was going great until they asked about the name thing ... or the age thing ... or some goddam thing. And Hart just stood up and walked out. The guy is ... a weird duck.

  Anyway, you didn’t have to scale snowshoe Olympus to get the poop: younger big-feet, big-feet-to-be, and wannabe-big-feet were all aware of Hart’s weirdness, and being younger, perhaps more eager—each with his way to make in the world, each eyeing the other, elbowing by on the path to greatness—they were going to expose the weirdness.

  Taylor was right about one thing—it was a new generation trying on the big shoes, a generation that learned its craft (in journalism schools, or in first jobs) just as Woodward and Bernstein were taking a President down. So, among the shared attitudes of these big-feet-to-be was an abiding cynicism about the process they were sent out to cover. Oh, they’d read the books, they’d been around: they’d all smelled the elephant shit behind this big top ... yes. Sharp-eyed they were, every man and woman aboard, long on suspicion. A serious-minded pack it was, too, and abstemious in personal habits. They’d work the hotel bars with Perriers in hand. They’d vote campaign planes smoke-free zones. They made their deadlines, and got up extra-early to run. ...

  Of course, each had his own style, his own view of himself. Just by way of example: Taylor, who was cool, handsome, and detached, was by his own lights a man who “saw nuance” and “took a fair-minded approach.” ... E.J. Dionne, from the Times, was short, quick, awfully busy, harried like a border collie with a bad herd. Like so many Times-men, he was an expert—a Ph.D. historian from Oxford, no less—and he’d learned his politics at the knee of guru-columnist William Schneider, so he could seek from the latest polls the undertow in the great sea of voters. ... Smooth Howard Fineman from Newsweek, with the soft hands and bottom-line eye of an up-and-coming junk-bond salesman, just meant to hit with a thump—wherever, however. (Howard, it should be noted, was the first of his generation to earn a panelist’s chair on the Hour of the Living Dead, Washington Week in Review.)

  Yet different as they were (and as many as they were—for these were but three conspicuous flowers on a stalk that bore profusely), none got to this campaign, or got through it, by being shy of reputation. (Being well known was their bankable asset.) And although they could emerge better-known by any of a half-dozen routes—by the grace of their prose, their consistent good judgment, their steadiness through a campaign’s sharp turns, perhaps by spotting early some lesser-known candidate with a spark of greatness—those were, well, mild ... much too easily lost in the shuffle. The only sure route to celebrity, and beyond, into history—to their own index entry in the next Germond and Witcover epic—was to take somebody down.

  Of course, best of all, a front-runner ... hell, they didn’t have to be ambitious to want to knock Hart off his horse. Not only was he weird, he was four-to-one over the next guy in the polls—and the next guy was black! It’s a year to the first convention and there’s no horse race! This thing—their thing—could be over!

  Unless they could ... somehow! ... write the weirdness.

  But they couldn’t, you see—couldn’t just come out and say, this guy makes me uneasy. There’s a standard of conduct in the trade, and the standard requires some evidence, preferably public evidence, that there is reason for uneasiness. Even pundits—columnists, editorialists, commentators, and like pooh-bahs—who are mostly relieved of the strain of actual reporting, feel comfier if they can adduce some “objective” evidence of the character flaw they purport to discern.

  So what they’d do, they’d take a wise guy to lunch, and quote him on why Hart was weird. But by April ’87, with Hart at fifty-five percent in Iowa, it was hard to find a wise guy who’d let his name appear with the quote. Anyway, even if they could use the name, and the guy stuck Hart until he bled all over the page ... even if they could do some damage with the quote ... well, the wise guy would get the index entry with Germond and Witcover—not the writer.

  It was very frustrating.

  So what happened was, the stuff would seep into stories as code, phrases that attached to Hart, whatever he did, wherever he went—because everybody knew them. True, the code words might have meant different things to different writers (God only knows what they meant to readers), but they gave the illusion of knowledge of the man ... and they were safe. There was more than a grain of truth to them—everybody knew that—and even if they explained ... well, actually, nothing ... no one felt out on a limb, calling Gary Hart “cool and aloof.”

  That was number one, the hoary “cool and aloof.” The standard evidence was the way Hart would stand in a corner in a room full of people he didn’t know—wouldn’t act like a pol, would not press the flesh ... no. Hart would not small-talk. Nor would he sl
ap backs—not even big-feet backs—and he could not, or did not, hide his contempt for their questions. In fact, he thought they were stupid. Worse still, he made the interviewers feel stupid.

  One time—this was late ’83—Hart was flying back from a candidates’ forum in upstate New York. He was sitting with Senator Patrick Moynihan. From one row behind, Dan Balz, from The Washington Post, kept poking his face between the airplane seats, asking Hart about the horse race. Balz was working the then-common wisdom that Hart was going nowhere in ’84 (everybody knew that). “Gary,” he said, “you’ve got no money, you’ve got no endorsements, you’re a no-show in the polls—why don’t you just give it up? ...”

  Well, it was the end of a long day, at the end of a long year, during which Hart had explained a million times that money, polls, and the nod from big pols was not what his campaign was about, and so ... Hart went ballistic. He hiked one arm over the back of his seat and started pointing it in Balz’s face. “Your reporting,” he said, “is so shallow, it’s ... it’s ...” Hart had no words for this. His face was shaking. “You always ... miss ... the point!”

  Of course, that wasn’t exactly “cool and aloof.” More like its evil twin, “icy and contemptuous.”

  Number two was “outsider,” or “loner.” This was a satisfying piece of code because it seemed to haul the reader from politics (where Hart would actually admit to insurgency) ... straight into the dark and twisty corridors of psyche, which everybody knew was the locus of the weirdness. And “loner” had such a beautifully desperate air ... it brought a whiff of the front page the day after some sicko shoots up a shopping mall with his Uzi: those dim and doleful stories wherein the sicko’s neighbors say, “I dunno, I din’ really know’m—he was quiet—kep’ to hisself, pretty much. ...” The one-column headline:

  KILLER

  WAS A