Sweeney and Trippi stayed behind to lead the press pack round the mulberry bush. They formed a motorcade outside the hotel. They loaded up the press. They set off for the first event on the schedule.
They got near the place for the first event, and the lead car started making turns, driving in circles—killing time. When they did stop, that was the end. The motorcade pulled up ... and no one was in Gary’s car.
What the hell?
Where’s Hart?
Sweeney stood on a bench and announced: Hart was, at that moment, in the air, on his way to Denver. Campaign travel was suspended ... as of now.
Of course, the press went ripshit! They’d been had!
Half of them were shouting at Sweeney. Half rushed for phones.
Paul Taylor didn’t get caught in the morning’s press ruse. He was on his way to Sweeney’s hotel room shortly after 7:00 A.M. (What about his interview?) ... when he ran into Trippi, who gave him the news: Hart was on his way to Denver, and the end of his campaign.
As Paul recalled in his book, he was speechless! ... But Trippi filled in the blanks.
It was important that Taylor—the Post—get the message: Hart was suspending his campaign. Hal Haddon, Hart’s old friend and counsel, would deliver the message, by phone, to Ben Bradlee. Taylor wrote that Haddon meant to offer a bribe, an exclusive on the end of the campaign ... if the Post wouldn’t run its story.
Not to worry! Paul’s work was done.
“I gave him Bradlee’s phone number,” Paul wrote in his book, “but an exclusive was the furthest thing from my mind. I was too busy feeling relieved, then triumphant.
“The interview I never got had worked out fine. Just fine.”
The Post wouldn’t run its “other woman” story. That’s what Bradlee told Haddon: “I don’t see any reason why we should.”
There never was an offer of any exclusive story on Hart.
This wasn’t about a story.
As Bradlee explained it, he just heard Hart was going home—and out of public life.
“Suddenly, the chase is over,” Ben recalled. “Ya got him! ... The coon is up the tree!”
As the Learjet neared Denver, Hart didn’t know whether it was over or not. He knew it couldn’t go on—not like that. He’d go home. He’d stop campaigning for a while, and ... maybe he hadn’t thought past getting home.
At the last minute, they switched the flight plan. The press was all over Stapleton Airport, the big field in Denver. Hart’s plane veered toward a little airport in Jefferson County.
But that little field was staked out, too. And NBC had a chopper to track Hart, like a perp who’d shot the clerk at a 7-Eleven. Three cars waited at the airport. Hart took the wheel of the lead car and he gunned it, through the mountains—eighty miles an hour—he was trying to lose the chopper ... hopeless, of course. The noon news showed a helicopter shot of the cabin, and the dirt road—the ABC semi, and the satellite trucks, vans, rent-a-cars—a solid line, almost a mile, down to the blacktop. There were Minicam shots of the house, with the cameraman running, and the picture bouncing—like Vietnam. Reporters climbed the barbed wire; they were perched on boulders on the slope, over the house—vultures on the roof.
When Gary and Lee got inside, he nailed a blanket over the kitchen window to block the cameras. Then it was dark inside, and strangely quiet. John was at school—at least, he had been at school: Gary’s old campaign friend, Paul Giorgio, had dived into a stakeout and pulled the Harts’ son out of Worcester, Massachusetts. Andrea was no longer at the cabin. She’d fled her parents’ home. She’d left town. She’d watched TV. If he’d been there, Gary could have warned her not to watch TV.
He thought—he had thought—he’d get home and, somehow, he’d go on with his life. But he was not going to have his life back.
The phrase occurred to him: to the death. He learned in the car ... when he felt it rock with the impact of bodies, and a bare hand hit with a smack on his windshield, and there were people yelling and pounding on the car, with cameras in front, and he couldn’t see to drive, and Lee was beside him, fragile he thought, as he gunned the engine, trying to make them move ... and he jumped when a lens with a rubber sleeve hit—THUNCK—against his window and stuck there, filming him, shooting at him, and he couldn’t see the human on the other side—but he learned ... something new:
If he could have, he’d have jumped out and beaten them with his bare hands.
BOOK III
38
Pukin’ in the Basket
JOE TRIED EVERYTHING TO make it feel right—endless meetings with the gurus ... all their messages, songs, and movies, which Joe tried on in rambling monologue, one after the other, like shoes in a store. Nothing fit. He could not see the moves. He could not find that overriding reason why he should be President, why he was going to be President, what he was going to be President for.
He tried to write university lectures—he’d do it better than Hart! People said Biden didn’t have substance? Well, BANGO, he’d put out more goddam substance than they could swallow. (“Governance!” he’d grit out—his buzzword that spring of ’87. He’d say it with his chin out, jaw locked, so his teeth showed in front, like fightin’ word ... “Gvrnnce!”) But he had to scrap for every hour on those speeches (some of his gurus couldn’t see the point), had to fight through every text (Pat Caddell thought the country was gone to hell, melted to a stinking ooze—dammit, he should have fired them all!), while he flew around the country, built a campaign staff in Washington and Wilmington, worked in the Senate, planned Beau’s graduation ...
And every weekend, he went back to Iowa. Lowell Junkins, the guy who lost for Governor last time, had signed on with Biden and was crying wolf—like the state would go Gephardt tomorrow ... today! ... if Joe didn’t get his ass out there. Joe had new guys in Iowa—David Wilhelm was the chief, hell of a good guy ... but it took time, and Joe didn’t have time. Joe used to say, for every ten days the other guys spent in Iowa, Joe could spend one ... but that was bravado, Biden bullshit, and he knew it. What’s worse, he was pressing ... and that was no good. Couple of weeks back, he was up in New Hampshire—nighttime, a living room, late already and it wasn’t the last event—and some guy stood up and asked Joe about his education. Not his education plan ... his own goddam education, like he wanted to make sure Biden went to college. Anyway, that’s how Joe heard it ... and he blew: he started yelling how he’d graduated with three degrees, went to law school on scholarship, clawed his way up from the bottom of his class—or some bullshit—he offered to compare IQs ... all with the chin out, the hectoring voice, like ... I may be stupid, but I’m Einstein next to you! ... And Ruthie Berry and Jill, who were sitting, resting, in the next room, had to scurry in and steer Joe out of there. He coulda punched the guy out! Joe was always sensitive about his intellect ... then, too, that was the day Joe found out he was one percent in the new Iowa poll—but, hell, the guy in New Hampshire didn’t know that.
Then Joe gave the university lectures—the foreign policy speech, Harvard, the Kennedy School ... and, of course, Joe and the boys had rewritten it, on planes, in cars, till the night before, and Joe tried to deliver the thing word-for-word ... but the podium was low, the lights weren’t right (Biden never could read aloud) ... so it sounded like he was reading a speech he’d never seen. Then David Broder, Leader of the Pack, got hold of the text and ripped Biden in his column: What is this? You call this a foreign policy?
So the speech didn’t quite work out ... but that was no surprise: nothing was working out. The gurus were at each other’s throats—and a couple had doubts about this whole thing ... which, of course, got back to Joe. But that was no surprise, either: Biden had doubts. Just a week before announcement, he started to mutter aloud about “the timing” ... “the feel.” Then Joe mentioned to the new press guy, Larry Rasky, that he thought, well, maybe ... he didn’t want to run.
Then everything went nuclear: gurus in an uproar! Rasky had left his wife and home and
a job he loved in Boston to live in a hotel and do this campaign for Biden. Debbie Katz, the new deputy to Ridley, had just left her job as John Kerry’s AA. Vallely had fucked his own Governor and left Massachusetts to travel with Joe. For that matter, Marttila, too, was a Boston guru for Biden. They were all invested. Announcement, for Chrissake, was next Tuesday! So now Biden thinks maybe—sorry, it was all a mistake? ... There was tremendous frothing on the phones, hourly bulletins from the plane, or from Wilmington ... a cabal formed to coup Ridley (Joe would settle down if this campaign were organized), some people wanted to coup Caddell (he was making Joe nuts—everybody saw that), and, in general, the long knives came out. Which, of course, only made Joe shakier: four days from announcement, there’s no speech because there’s no message, the campaign’s a zoo, and his merry men are amok in the forest, disemboweling each other.
So the Friday night before announcement, they all descended upon Wilmington, and Jill fed them dinner from a buffet on the side porch ... and then, from an armchair in the grand living room, Joe made a little speech: he’d crossed the Rubicon ... he was fine now, they shouldn’t be alarmed ... it was just the black Irish that came up in him every once in a while. He shrugged and smiled. He thanked them for their work, for bending their lives to his. He was gracious, all charm—and it almost ended there.
But then, from Joe’s right, Rasky decided to get down and dirty: that speech was all very nice (“With all due respect, Senator ...”), but if Joe didn’t feel this, what the hell was he doing with his life—and theirs? And from the next chair, Billy Daley said his piece, and Vallely, and Marttila, right across from Joe’s face, about how Joe had to make a goddam commitment, this wasn’t a halfway kinda deal! ... In fact, Marttila went weird altogether and turned the thing into group therapy, talking about how Joe had to love these people, LOVE THEM! He challenged Joe to tell each one, around the room, WHY HE LOVED THEM—GO AHEAD, RIGHT NOW! ... and a few new people who didn’t know Biden—never had a serious moment with the man—started looking at each other just to check if this was as nutso as it seemed ... while a couple of the old guard—Kaufman, Gitenstein—took off after the gurus: they were outta line, this was Joe’s life ... the staff guys could see Joe getting pissed off in his chair, they’d never beat up on Biden like this. ... And Ridley was bouncing off the walls: he had a $300,000 announcement, ninety hours away, five states, two hundred press, a plane, a special goddam train (he could see the headline: BIDEN CAN’T MAKE THE TRAINS RUN ON TIME ...), and what are they gonna say now? Sure, uh, we said all this stuff, we raised all this money, but we really thought it over this weekend, see, and, uh, well ... come on! It was time to stop this weirdness! ... But it was out of the bottle now, it did not stop. It went around the room, twenty people had their say about Biden, how he had to stop screwing around with their lives—his own life ... until Joe’s jaw was working under his taut cheek, and his smile was showing just a ridge of bottom teeth. And Ted Kaufman jumped back in and said, of course Joe Biden was gonna run: it was just like Bill Russell, the great Celtics center—used to puke into a wastebasket before every game ... “Hey! Relax! Joe’s just pukin’ in the basket!” ... And Caddell meant to help, so when it got to him, he said, of course Joe’s gonna run ... Pat said: “I’ve been waiting to be President since I was twenty-two!” ... Then everybody knew it was the Twilight Zone ... with Caddell hallucinating to these people sprawled over the couches and the floor, cross-legged, in cutoffs, the new leadership of the Free World—whom Pat, without pause, without notice of their staggered stares, now lectured about “the best message ... the best campaign ... the best candidate ...”
And Jill Biden, who was sitting on the arm of the best candidate’s chair, her right arm draped across his shoulders, could feel Joe’s spine going stiffer with every lecture. She could just about feel the heat rising off Joe’s head, and she heard his breathing go shallow, like it did in a fight, and she knew he was going to blow them all off, shut those bastards up ... for good! ... And before he could speak, she brought her left hand across and laid it on his arm and she said, loud enough for most of them to hear:
“Joe ... Joe ... don’t lose every friend you have in the world.”
So they were running for President, Joe and his friends, and they’d have a big announcement—the finest: Joe’s taste in political theater ran with his taste in houses. They’d rent the train station in Wilmington (that was the symbol, see, for the way Joe took the train home, every night), and they’d run a special train from Washington to Wilmington, with VIPs and plenty of press, and they’d have drivers bring in the notables from Delaware, and stretch limousines to deliver Joe and the family to the station, and every member of the family would have his own body man—there were, in all, a hundred professional Advance, led by the chief of Carter White House Advance, who had the thing timed to the minute, with poster-sized charts of the schedule, a six-foot-long map of the motorcade, a wall-sized plat of the station grounds ... all of which were unfurled that weekend in the living room of Joe’s house, and explained, point by point, to the Bidens, who sat in a row of chairs facing these grand schemata and stared ahead with frozen grins of foreboding—the look of folks in the front car of the roller coaster.
But that was only the start: then, everyone would board the special train, which would carry them back to Washington, where Joe would repeat the announcement in the rotunda of the Russell Senate Office Building, with more press and more VIPs, after which the show would board a chartered airplane, which would transport all supporting Senators, Congressmen, Governors, notable pols, political press, distinguished Delawareans, Joe’s brain trust, support staff, assorted hangers-on, and the Bidens, and the Bidens’ friends ... onward to Des Moines, then Cedar Rapids ... thence to Boston ... and New Hampshire ... and, finally, to Atlanta, where the troupe would be met by Jimmy Carter. The logistics were something like a space probe to Venus.
The payoff was, at every stop, Biden would give The Speech.
But there was no speech.
Pat was working on the speech, but when he flew in from California, what he had was a forty-five-page exegesis of the nation’s ills: the raveling of America’s moral fabric, the cancer in the body politic ... that kind of thing. So Gitenstein and another able writer, Ron Klain, started whacking through the kudzu, but Pat was there in valiant defense, and there was only one man to fight with Pat.
But Joe was busy. That was the weekend of Beau’s high school graduation: that’s the way Joe planned it, see ... family first, the Biden way.
It was always Joe at the center of the family Biden—Joe and Neilia, from ’68, when they got back from law school: they were the ones who knew where they were going. They could have stayed in Syracuse. Neilia would have liked that. But she was willing to move for Joe. She became a Biden, and was devoted to Joe’s dreams. They lived first in a farmhouse, off Marsh Road, north of Wilmington, but then Neilia got pregnant with Beau, so Joe did a deal with this guy who had a swim club. The pool had a tenant house—a cottage, really, but cute, stuck off in the woods—and Joe didn’t have two bucks in his pocket, so he told the guy he and Neilia would live in the bungalow (free, of course) and watch the pool.
Actually, Neilia would watch the pool. Joe had to make his way in the world. He passed his bar exam as an intern at a blue-blood firm in Wilmington, but that didn’t last ... he switched over to a firm with connections to the state’s Democratic pols. He wasn’t much for slaving over a legal brief, but he was hell on wheels in front of a jury—Biden for the defense!
The next year, he started his own firm. He was the only young lawyer in Wilmington to set out on his own, certainly the only one to guarantee salaries for two other lawyers. His first move was to purchase an enormous Queen Anne desk—the finest—he knew it was his the moment he saw it. His partners thought he was nuts. He’s living in a tenant house, he’s got a law firm with three lawyers, no clients, and Joe drops a couple of thousand on this desk. It was huge! He put it in his office�
�he had to walk in sideways to sit down. Then he insisted on a blue leather couch, all tufted with blue leather buttons, for the front room—another fortune. Joe had to have it. “Look,” he told his partners, “we’re trying to act like an establishment law firm. People don’t want to sit on wicker chairs.” If he’d had the money, he would have paneled the whole place. “You know how important image is.”
See, his major client was always Joe Biden. He had to spread himself around, get to know the players, make his name—in a hurry. Just months after he started his firm, in 1970, he was running for County Council. That would give him exposure for the big statewide race he’d always planned. And New Castle County was the power in the state. If he could win there, he could win it all. So, right away, he started with night meetings, too. Sometimes Neilia would drop off the baby with Mom-Mom, and go with Joe. He was better that way.
Sometimes, it seemed Joe was in such a hurry that he had to make you like him ... now. But Neilia could slow him down; she made him easier, as she made him believe he could do it, Joe always knew what he wanted from people. But Neilia knew what they wanted.
One time, when her friend Bobbie called, Neilia said she couldn’t stop to talk. “I’ve got to go over to Mrs. Baldicelli’s—she’s going to teach me to make spaghetti sauce.”
“Spaghetti! Neilia, come on!” (Spaghetti was just about all Joe ate. Neilia would cook spaghetti ten, twelve days in a row, just to see how long it would take him to notice.) Bobbie said: “You know how to make sauce.”
“I know,” Neilia said. “But Mrs. Baldicelli really wants to teach me.”
What she lent to Joe was the grace of effortlessness. Neilia never showed ambition. It was like she already had hers—whatever it was, a bungalow or a mansion. Of course, she knew Joe would go for the mansion—he did the wanting for two. But she understood what it was—the Biden way—the striving and the stretch required, for family, for friends, for the public. “You have to understand,” she told a guest one day, when Joe was running late, running crazy, trying to do ten things ... “Joe wants to be so much for people.”
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