They beat up Dukakis all day, all night.
He didn’t give an inch. “You guys ... we did fine. We’re on track. Let’s not get down on ourselves. I told you ...”
Actually, what he’d told them was that the “basic economic message”—good-jobs-at-good-wages—could win. But he forgot that now. ... He had the bronze!
After midnight, after the speech, after his live shots with the networks, and a few for the diddybop TVs, Michael was back in his suite at the Savery. He had to sleep. He’d be up before six to do the A.M. shows, then fly to New Hampshire.
In the adjoining hospitality suite, there were a couple of slack-jawed staff and a stray writer, come to cadge a beer. They were picking at dry broccoli on the food trays, when ... in walked Dukakis.
He couldn’t sleep. Or maybe Kitty was beating him up, too. He asked how they thought it came out. No one answered.
They were gawking at Dukakis in an undershirt—hairy arms sticking out from floppy short sleeves, his thin neck protruding from the white V-neck, which sloped halfway down his slight shoulders. Even his physical self was pure economy.
Then, they talked all at once, tried to buck him up, with borrowed wise-guy patter:
No problem!
Third place was the best thing that could have happened!
Now the campaign would move to his turf, New Hampshire, with two kamikazes splitting the vote against him—instead of one strong Gephardt. If Simon had finished third, he couldn’t go on. Now Gephardt would have to fight a rearguard action against Simon ...
Michael said: “You really think so?” He was nodding with his eyes half-closed, as if he’d already thought that out, but the eagerness in his voice gave him away.
They could see, in an instant, poor Michael was making this up as he went—just like everybody else. He really didn’t know whether he was still breathing ... didn’t have a clue.
They warmed to the task of cheering him up, told him he was in perfect position ...
Michael nodded. He ought to sleep. But he stayed, asking more questions—actually, it was the same question: Was he okay?
They told him he’d done a great job, come from nowhere in this state, on issues he knew nothing about less than a year before. “I had a lot of help,” Michael said, with his tone of automatic denial. And that was his cue. He rose to go. “It’s a marathon,” he said. “We’re just at the start—long way to go.” He meant the words to sound determined, but what they heard was sadness. They watched his little back through the door. There was hardly any body to him, just a spare, hairy machine to house that schtarker of a brain.
107
President Bobster
DOLE WAS STILL ON TV. ... For hours, he marched the Hotel Fort Des Moines—second floor, tenth floor, third floor, ballroom, up and down the stairways with the TV cables—from Jennings and Brinkley on ABC, to Dan Rather on CBS, to Bernie Shaw on CNN, back to CBS for Nightwatch ... putting out the message: “Well”—smile—“I think the voters saw sharp differences between me and the Vice President. I think voters want someone who can make the tough choices ...” Dole was drubbing George Bush, thirty-seven percent to nineteen, and he was working the global village like a Kansas Main Street, hitting every storefront, every hand ... and meanwhile—as they fiddled with a new plug for his ear, or the halogen lights on the interview chair, or the cables that would link him to Peter, David, or Dan—the Bobster kept dribbling: “No, I can’t hear Dan ... got my Dan Rather sweater on ... that’s all I could get—couldn’t get an interview ... yeah! ... Yeah, Dan! ... Aaghh, well, you really know how to finish ’em off hegh-hegh-hegh ... o-kayyy—we ready?”
The rooms were small, stacked with equipment and tense with technicians who had to get it right, first time, every time—live TV. And then the Dole entourage—Elizabeth and her body man; Kenny and Anita Dole from Russell (“Told’ya I’d win,” Kenny said); Bill Brock and one besuited flunky; Tom Synhorst, Dole’s triumphant Iowa chief; Mari Maseng (“Smile, Senator”); Kim Wells (Dole might need something written); and Mike Glassner, with his leather folder—would fill the place to bursting, the hindmost peering in from the hallway. But Dole was never crowded. They’d sit him in a chair; the mess of machinery and mankind would bump and stumble into array around the walls, into corners—out of camera frame, of course ... the holy-white circle of light fell only on the Bobster. In one of his first interviews—CNN, Bernie Shaw—Dole tried to move the halo, broaden it, share it: “Bernie, before I forget, there’s somebody on my left here who’s been a tremendous help in this campaign ...” But the lens would not move—Elizabeth wasn’t lit correctly, or something, so she was left, standing, chin up, smiling her most brilliant smile at no one. Bernie just asked Bob another question, and Elizabeth said she had an awful headache.
The strange thing was, it was the same away from the cameras—in the hall, on the stairway. No one got too close to Dole. No one touched him. (Save for one time, when Dole began to fiddle one-handed with his tie. “Z’at straight, Mari?” She hopped up. “Yes, Senator.” But he could tell the knot wasn’t perfect. “Why’nch you go ahead, Mike.” So Glassner came, half-leaping on tiptoe, over equipment, to kneel before the Bobster and straighten the red power tie.) ... No one spoke unless spoken to—or invited by his eyes—and then they mostly scrambled to offer some information. “Senator,” Synhorst ventured, “did you hear what Bush said?”
“Yeah. He said he didn’t know what, aghh, mis-stakes he made to get this result.” Dole’s eyebrows dipped, he lifted a little shrug. All the courtiers broke up laughing. He said to Synhorst: “You talk to Wittgraf?” Synhorst’s brow furrowed—was he supposed to? But Dole was rasping his prairie cackle. “Hegh-hegh-hegh, send him a bo-kayyy.”
There was no discussion of what to say to the cameras, to the voters—or how. (Dole would say whatever he thought best.) There was no political talk (save with anchormen)—what this meant to Iowa, to New Hampshire, to the country, to Dole for President ... nor certainly any personal talk—what this meant to Dole, to Bob and Elizabeth, or to all of them, together. In the end, they were not together. In the end, it was Bob, alone. And despite the jokes he dropped behind him, the trail of breadcrumbs ... in the end, that trail led back to an opaque curtain of reserve—Bob alone. You could just about see the curtain fall, when he got to another network room, and he had to wait, and his darting gaze found no work to do. Then his eyes would roll up to where ceiling met wall, where there was no one smiling at him, no one to greet ... and he could think: this thing was happening!
Things were happening for him—different things—he was making them happen. That’s what he meant when one TV man suggested that Iowans had responded to Dole as a neighbor. “Well, I was out here as a neighbor in 1980, too—no one noticed.” They weren’t going to take this away by discussing the factors ... no.
“It’s still up to Bob Dole to deliver the message, to attract the votes.” That’s what Dole said.
“It’s up to Bob Dole ...”
The way people looked at him now, the way they cheered him, the hope in their eyes when they listened to him ... the way he stood, without a doubt, to meet that—that’s what was different, that was the excitement. It was no dream, no pipe dream, it was a plan, a work of will: that’s what he meant at his announcement, when he tried to tell that freezing crowd how he’d sat in the sun, on the balcony of his office, and he’d looked out at the Mall, the White House, the monuments—and he had to think: Could he do it? Could he meet that? Could he, by the same will that had kept him alive when he was nothing, garbage, could he meet hope of that size now, make that kind of difference? Was that in him? ... And he’d answered: Yes! He could make that difference—he ...
“Senator? ...”
They moved him to the ballroom floor. NBC had rented a corner of the big room where Dole’s faithful had gathered. And they’d built a platform between their space and the Dole-crowd, so Brokaw could interview the Senator with the Iowa folk going nuts behind Dole�
�for effect, you know, good TV. And you could see, when Dole arrived at the head of his train (longer now: they were joined by Bob’s nephew, Jeff Nelson, and his wife and daughter—they lived in Des Moines), it was going to work like a charm. ... Dole went straight to the platform and stood, and the techies fired up the lights on the Bobster, and the crowd caught a look at him—and even before Elizabeth struggled up, in her tight skirt, to stand next to him, the crowd was yelling: “Go GET’EM BOB! ... DOLE! DOLE! DOLE! ...” And the Bobster was crooning: “HowweDOOOnn? ... How’DOOOOnnn?” ... with his thumb poking the air, fist pumping—he was bouncing on the balls of his feet. And then ... NBC was not ready. They were okay in Des Moines, but they didn’t have the network, or Brokaw was busy, or it was time for local commercials—something ... they told Dole it would be a few minutes, so he climbed down, and Elizabeth after ... and then, everybody was standing around.
Jeff Nelson offered to get Cokes ... and the rest just stood, all but silent in a semicircle around Bob Dole. He was still half-bouncing, looking around, all dressed up and nowhere to go—everybody else staring at him, with pleasant party faces, searching themselves for something to say to him.
At last, Jeff’s daughter, Kristen, said to the circle at large:
“You should have seen Dad’s precinct! Where’s Dad? Show him Dad’s precinct.”
And everybody perked up: they were going to engage the Bobster. They, too, had a piece of this night-of-nights to show him. So Jeff was summoned, and he went into a paroxysm of patting—his jacket, his shirt, his pants—trying to find the slip of paper where he’d written the numbers from his precinct caucus. All eyes bounced from Jeff, to the Bobster, back to Jeff, and all his pockets ... until he found the numbers!
By that time, Dole was half-turned, back toward his ballroom crowd, the platform, the camera, the bright lights—he had the print press to do after this, then tape for the overnights, the morning shows—Let’s gooo! ... Jeff was holding the numbers in midcircle, midair—but no one would touch the Bobster, or say, “Hey, Bob! Here’s the damn numbers! Turn around!” ... Jeff held his little paper up for four or five seconds—it was getting embarrassing—while everybody stared at the back of the Bobster’s head, shining in the halogen corona of the platform lights behind him ... and, then, too, at six-foot-two, they were staring up at Dole, and the lights shining down from NBC glistened in their eyes ... till Mari finally plucked the paper offering, tapped the Senator, and handed him the numbers. They stared up. There was an instant, it was clear, where the Bobster did not know what the hell they had stuck in his hand ... there was the heart-stopping chance he would conclude this was trash—some mistake—and wad it up, and that would have made everything so awkward. But someone said, “It’s Jeff’s!” and the Bobster understood, this was a gift of a sort, and ... he popped his eyebrows up in a show of interest and pleasure. The scary thing was the look on their faces—Jeff, Karen, and Kristen Nelson, Mari Maseng, Bill Brock, Kenny, Anita, Elizabeth Dole—the upturned smiles that erupted, with the holy-white network light in their eyes ... it was a look from Renaissance paintings, Adorations, when the faithful gaze upon the Body, the figure at the center, with the golden light around His head—a look of awe, love, and fear.
It was rock ’n’ roll on the Dole plane, after three or four hours’ sleep, flying east—big plane, a Bahamas Air 727, and not a spare seat from the cockpit to the narrow tail. Anyway, no one stayed in a seat. In mid-takeoff, the Dole staff was perched, smiling, on the arms of the chairs. One Advance man gave Mari a high-five as he passed in the aisle. Chuckie Grassley, Bill Brock, and the pollster, Dick Wirthlin, were dispatched to the back of the plane to spin. Wirthlin was saying:
“The political world has been changed. The mountain moved.”
The press was crowded around these Big Guys, standing in the aisle and on the seats. Boom mikes raked the ceiling of the cabin. The pack mushed and trampled the neat breakfasts in neat plasti-packs. One of the stewardesses of Bahamas Air said, “I’ve done a political charter, but it was ... more, uh ... contained.”
Wirthlin was saying to the L.A. Times: “Absolutely, if there is no Robertson, there would’ve been only one headline—DOLE BEATS BUSH. AS it is, there’s two headlines—both of them bad for Bush.”
In the front, Brock was rocking on his heels and toes in the aisle next to Dole’s chair. He said something to Dole and then threw his whole torso back, laughing. Everybody was back and forth, from the press section to the staff in front. They were yukking it up about George Bush, quoted from New Hampshire—it was on the wire: “Iowa is Iowa,” he’d said, “and New Hampshire is New Hampshire.” Yuhhhh! That was rich! Next, they’ll teach him how to spell O-hio!
On the tarmac in New Hampshire it was a mob scene. Now the camera jockeys had aluminum ladders, so they wouldn’t have to shoot through a swarm of shoulders and heads. Between the plane and a long motorcade. Dole was surrounded by the iron ring of cameras and tapes—ten to twelve bodies deep. Advance men tried to keep the herd from crushing the Bobster flat. Dole was President that morning. He was on his way to the statehouse to address a joint session of the New Hampshire legislature. The topic of the speech was national security. It was a Presidential speech.
Meanwhile, the staff was handing out Xeroxes of a letter from Ronald Reagan. It was dated February 5, 1988—four days before—and it said:
Dear Bob:
I want to express my personal gratitude to you for your support of my request for assistance to the Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance. I particularly appreciate your sponsorship of the resolution to approve my request, and your leadership in achieving a successful vote in the Senate. ...
Sincerely,
Ronald Reagan
It was the sort of roto-pen “courtesy letter” that Presidents send out routinely. If it showed anything, it showed that Dole’s friend Howard Baker was still in control, as Chief of Staff. But it looked like more—looked like Reagan was hedging his bets ... or, at the very least, like Dole was welcome to ride shotgun on the Gipper’s old mule train ... as it rolled in a cloud of golden dust toward greater national security.
Who could ask for a warier shotgun man?
The speech text handed out on his four press buses, pitching and rocking toward the statehouse in Concord, was true troglodyte target-practice: Bob Dole trusted Russk—uh, you know, Soviets ... ’bout as far as he could throw ’em. And let no one forget it! Especially not the right-wing, white-flight, tax-flight droolers who had overrun the southern tier of New Hampshire (“Live Free or Move!”) ... and now voted in overwhelming numbers in the Republican primary.
Here he came, through the grand white doors of the old House chamber, with his beautiful wife ... both of them glowed. (Where’d he get that tan?) The legislators on the aisles leapt up—and took a step back. Everybody was standing ... and cheering. The Doles sat down, but the cheers went on, for two minutes more.
At last, a minister at the rostrum intoned:
“O God of all ... winners and runners-up ...”
The business at hand, you know—a blessing for the political show that arrived with Bob Dole. When Dole stood to speak, the assembled legislators gave him another standing ovation. Doug Scamman, Speaker of the House, had arranged this for Dole—this session. Couldn’t be better timing—couldn’t be better anything.
Poor Gephardt was, at that moment, yelling his speech in a shopping mall. Dukakis had to rent a theater. Jack Kemp, God bless him, was freezing his buns at a spare press conference on the steps of that very statehouse. But Bob Dole was warm, bathed in white light, anointed with the cheers of the suits in joint session ... to whom he said, before his discourse on strategy vis-à-vis the Soviets ...
“Thank you ...
“It’s good to be here.
“Good to be awake.
“Good to feel good.”
And then, President Bobster went to text—he actually read out a speech—had to get it right. He knew Gorbachev was listening.
All his New Hampshire Bigs said, “It’s winnable.” Dole asked Wirthlin. And Wirthlin, without benefit of any new numbers since the previous night, sketched a scenario of a Dole win. They would overtake Bush that weekend. They would win New Hampshire February 16, the following Tuesday. “And then,” Wirthlin said, “it’s a roll.”
He was looking at Dole to see if Dole was pleased.
Dole looked back without expression, and in the voice designed to cut through wind, he said: “Wait a minute. Back up a minute. What if we don’t win?”
Everyone was silent. Everybody figured, Win! Win! We’re winning! But Dole had enough Russell, Kansas, left in him to wonder. ... He’d been saying for months that he couldn’t feel things building in New Hampshire. He got a big boost a few months back when Senator Warren Rudman signed on, and Rudman’s people took over the Dole operation. (Actually, they were the Dole operation. There was nothing before.) Then Dole started hearing that Rudman’s “organization” was a paper tiger. (Rudman himself said organization didn’t count in New Hampshire.) In mid-January, a poll showed Dole almost in third place (even with Jack Kemp!) ... and Dole about hit the roof. Wirthlin told him not to worry: that would all change, once he won Iowa. Bob would be on a roll! ...
“If we don’t win?” Dole said in the statehouse. “What happens?”
Wirthlin bestirred himself anew, and said: “Well, it’s less rosy, but, uh ... we can do it. You come out of here, you go down south, our numbers show ...” He ended up again with a Dole win—at the wire.
So Dole nodded, then fell silent. They could see him turning it over in his head: Maybe this thing was on the downhill ... these guys were pros—maybe they’re right! Maybe he was just ultra-sensitive because he did so badly in New Hampshire last time, still didn’t trust the people’s smiles. Maybe he oughta just ... accept—people prob’ly weren’t any different here than they were in Iowa, or Kansas ... pretty much the same!
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