What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  What did it prove? What did any of it prove? All the work, all the people who helped him—little people who never took a dime, didn’t want anything—they’re the ones who got shafted for trying, against the odds. Dole thought he should have known. He blamed himself. There were a hundred things he could have done, could have tried. God knows, he tried, but ...

  He couldn’t sleep—couldn’t sleep at all, lay there all night, tried to lie still ... until he couldn’t try anymore and it was five o’clock and there was no reason to lie in bed. That’s when Dole came down to the lobby of the hotel and sat—no one around, he just sat. Pen in his hand. Careful suit. Perfect shirt, tie. And no one around. What would he have said, anyway? He was sorry? ... He was sorry. He didn’t say that often ... but that’s what it was, this time.

  This was his time. And now, it was over.

  He’d lost it, lost the feeling—and the hope. It was always going to be tough in the South, even if he’d won New Hampshire. Bush had been making friends in the South for ... well, ten years, probably more. People would say to Dole: “Well, we like you. Bob. But this is George’s time ...”

  When was Bob Dole’s time?

  This was his time. And they took it away! ... He’d lost before. He wasn’t going to whine. But this time was different. This time, he couldn’t sleep at all, couldn’t stop his head: things that could have been different ... all the things he’d done ... probably wrong—half the things, anyway.

  But the worst part wasn’t things he’d done. It was the pictures of Bush—that’s what he couldn’t stop—pictures of Bush! In his head! Bush throwing snowballs, driving trucks, forklifts ... unwrapping his Big Mac. Dole never wanted to see that in his head. And he never wanted to say—even in his head ...

  It would not leave him alone ... five in the morning! Had to come down to the lobby ... but he couldn’t get away from it. For the first time in his career—first time in thirty years, anyway—Bob Dole said to himself:

  “Maybe I could have done that ... if I was whole.”

  112

  What Joe Biden Knew

  BY THE TIME BIDEN got to the motel, his headache was picking up steam. He probably should eat—had to eat! Christ—he did the forty-five-minute speech at the University of Rochester, then stood and answered questions for four and a half hours.

  What happened was, he did the INF speech—a new era dawning with the Soviets on arms control. But the first question was about plagiarism. So Biden answered for twenty-five minutes straight ... after that, his motor was racing.

  Bob Cunningham, from the Delaware staff, was traveling with Joe on this run—first time Biden had got moving since the Bork, Ginsburg, and Kennedy nominations; first time he’d hit the campuses since his own campaign fell to shreds. After an hour and a half of questions, Cunningham gave the signal—held up his watch, so Joe could see. Biden nodded, but he just kept talking. So after another hour, Cunningham cut off the audience mikes. That just made Biden come down, offstage, so the kids wouldn’t have to shout their questions. After four hours, Cunningham went to the lobby, got his coat, Biden’s coat, the briefcase ... then walked back into the hall and stood next to Joe, with coats and all ... but Biden just threw an arm around him and kept on for forty minutes more.

  “Hey!” Joe said, on the way to the motel. “You think we can still get a pizza?”

  But this was Rochester, near the airport, one A.M. Nothing was open. Biden went to his room, sat down on the bed and ... WHAM.

  It hit in his head like a brick. He must have blacked out. He didn’t know how long. It was like that time in New Hampshire—but worse. He couldn’t move. His legs wouldn’t move ...

  He had to move. He had to prove he could move. He forced himself off the bed, to be sure his legs would do ... he stared at his hands, and they moved. He couldn’t think ...

  It couldn’t be a heart attack. He wouldn’t be standing, thinking, talking ... he talked out loud in the empty room. His voice. It sounded right, his voice. But his head!

  God, there was never pain like this. Not in Joe’s life. What the hell was happening, GOD! He felt sick, dizzy ... the pain. ... He tried to throw up. He had nothing to throw up. It couldn’t be food. He’d had no food.

  He had to lie down. He’d be better, sure, if he just got down and kept still. He gingerly laid himself flat, on the bed, in his clothes.

  He did not move all night, save to the sink, the toilet, to try to throw up. He thought if he could just stick it out through the night, get to the plane ... if he could just get home.

  Tommy Lewis met the plane in Philadelphia. Cunningham came off.

  “Hey. Where’s Joe?”

  Cunningham had the briefcase. Joe asked him to carry his case. That’s how he knew it was bad. He’d been with Joe since they’d served together on the County Council ... Joe never wanted people toting for him. He’d rather lose an arm.

  “He’s coming. He’s sick.”

  “Bad?”

  “He had his face in the bag the whole way.”

  Then Joe came. He was gray. He looked like death. He said he’d be all right. Just get him home.

  Tommy got him home, but it took a half-hour to get him out of the car, and up to his room. Tommy half-carried him up the stairs. He got Joe onto the bed. Tommy had to take Biden’s shoes off for him.

  Joe thought if he closed his eyes, he could will the pain away, control it. But he could not.

  Jimmy Biden called. Tommy gave him the news.

  “D’you call a doctor?”

  “Joe said just let him rest. He’s got a plane again, two-thirty ...”

  “Bullshit. Get a doctor.”

  Tommy called Joe’s local doctor, the same guy who’d diagnosed Joe’s pain as a degenerated spinal disk, a couple of weeks before. Tommy was trying to figure out how to call Jill at her school without scaring her to death.

  But Jimmy called Jill: no more screwing around. Hospital for Joe—right now.

  Jimmy was in Washington, he was the one who fixed it up at Walter Reed—the Army Medical Center, on the Beltway around the capital. He went to the boss. That’s how Jimmy worked. “Will you take my brother?”

  “Of course, Mr. Biden.”

  They were going to fly Joe down in a chopper, but it was snowing like hell that day, February 11. Anyway, Joe was too fragile to fly. The doctors at St. Francis in Wilmington had found blood in his spinal fluid—they were pretty sure that Biden had an aneurism in the brain. If it blew—change of pressure, a jolt in the air—it was curtains.

  So they’d have to ride him down in an ambulance, through the storm. Police from Delaware would ride escort. The family piled into cars. Beau would ride up front with the cops. Jill would ride in the ambulance with Joe.

  She stood by the back door of the truck while they lifted him in on a stretcher. “You know,” she said, bending over him, “you really screwed up Valentine’s Day.”

  Maryland cops were supposed to meet them, but they never showed. Deep into Maryland, the Delaware cop turned to Beau: “Where we goin’?” Beau had a windbreaker on, and a ballcap—must have looked like a federal SWAT guy. So he had to explain, he was Biden’s son ... he had no clue where they were going.

  So they stopped by the side of the road, tried to radio. Five minutes, ten minutes, by the side of the road, until Jill started hammering on the back wall of the ambulance: “Get going! I don’t care what you don’t know ... get this goddam thing going.”

  Dawn came at Walter Reed, while the family hung in the hallway outside Intensive Care.

  An aneurism is a weak spot in the wall of an artery. Like a thin spot in an innertube, it balloons with the pressure. To be sure of what they had, doctors had to take an angiogram, which was a delicate procedure in itself. They fiddled a catheter into an artery in Biden’s neck, whereupon they loosed a dye that would show up on a scan, to outline the arteries climbing Biden’s brain.

  Dr. Eugene George was the surgeon in charge. A top man ... but Jimmy Biden was
working the phone. He wanted to know the top five guys in the world. Who were they? Where? Would they come? Jimmy didn’t know a lot about surgeons. He guessed they had egos like everybody else. But he looked Dr. George in the face, and said: “Doctor, I hope you don’t take this the wrong way ...” (He really didn’t give a shit how he took it.) “I want a second opinion.”

  “Good. That’s fine,” George said. Jimmy liked that.

  He narrowed it down to four, apart from George: one guy in Switzerland, one in Toronto, one in Texas, and Virginia. Joel Boyarsky, a big fund-raiser in the campaign, now a family friend, had a team ready to come from New York—the surgeon who did the work on James Brady after he was shot with Reagan. Jimmy was going to hire a jet for the doctor in Texas. He could be in D.C. by late afternoon.

  Too late, said Dr. George. He gathered the family in the hallway that morning. He showed them the scan. There was the balloon in Joe’s head. Doctors were sure it had bled—that was the pain. If it blew now, it would kill him: not the blood loss, but the jolt from the blood on the brain—there’s no protection for the brain—it’s like a riot hose that blows the tissue away.

  There weren’t many options. There wasn’t any talk of waiting. They’d wheel Joe in, by 3:00 P.M. Mom-Mom tried to play nurse, asking questions, but Jimmy and Val jumped on her. George was trying to tell them the chances, complications: if he lived, yes, there might be impairment ... left side of the brain ... he could be paralyzed ... he could lose his speech. Mom-Mom turned away then, couldn’t listen. Joe, Sr., thought of his dad, died of a stroke. Dr. George was telling Jimmy that the Virginia surgeon was in town. He’d assist, if that was all right with Jim. ... Then there was silence in the hallway for an instant—until there was a nod from Jill. It had to come from Jill. Then, everything started whirring again.

  They gave Joe a paper to sign.

  “What does this mean?”

  “It means you understand the risks.”

  “The ... what kind of chance do I have?”

  “Pretty good chance.”

  “Fifty-fifty?”

  “Just about fifty-fifty. That doesn’t count morbidity.”

  Joe didn’t even know the word. But he understood “just about” ... they were going to cut open his skull; he was less than fifty-fifty. He didn’t want to know about the other stuff, the loss of speech, of movement, of sense—morbidity. He signed.

  A priest came in to give him last rites.

  Joe asked to see the Bidens—one at a time ... Jill, Val, Jimmy, the boys. It wasn’t like the movies—there wasn’t big stuff he had to fix. He didn’t have to tell them he loved them, after all, or adjure them to take care of each other. They knew that stuff. ... But he wanted them to know what he’d found out fifteen years before: they would go on.

  When the boys came in, he told them he knew—whether or not he lived, he knew—they would be great men. Not a doubt in his mind.

  “And I guarantee you,” Joe said, “that any ... every single time you have a problem, when you got a tough decision to make, you look: I’ll be there with you. Every time.”

  In the VIP wing, where they moved the family, the Bidens settled in; it was like an Irish wake ... except there was no body. That was downstairs.

  Ted Kaufman was the only guy from the staff. He was like family. Anyway, Ted was the kind who’d always see the silver lining. During the campaign, Ted was the designated optimist.

  “Okay, Ted,” Valerie said. “Tell me something good about this.”

  Ted tried, fumbled around, and they laughed at him.

  It was like the campaign, with everyone there, and disaster a cloud outside the room. Someone said: “We gotta stop meeting like this.”

  Ted and Jimmy went out and got pizza. The Bidens told old stories.

  “God, remember when he jumped off that cliff?”

  “Oh, God ...”

  “Then he got pissed off at me!”

  “You let him.”

  “I dared him. He’s screamin’ at me: ‘I coulda broken my leg!’ ”

  “He could’ve broken his head.”

  “That’s good, Mom.”

  “Oh ...”

  “Aw, don’t start now ...”

  They’d told these stories so many times, but there was a tricky edge to the punch lines now ... they weren’t funny unless they all lived to tell. There were too many things they thought of that caught on their tongues.

  Mom-Mom whispered to Val—no one else—“Oh, God, if he lost his speech ...”

  Michele, Jimmy’s wife, had an uncle—he was up in a cabin, with his wife and one other guy. They had to haul him off that mountain: aneurism. Michele told Jimmy—no one else—her uncle was a vegetable.

  Jill was thinking the whole time: thank God he wasn’t campaigning ... New Hampshire. He never would’ve stopped. Up in the snow. They never would’ve got him down here. Not in time. He would have died. Joe would have been dead ... already.

  My God, what’s happening down there?

  Nobody wanted to ask out loud.

  Dr. George said four hours, four and a half ... that meant 7:00 P.M., it ought to be over.

  “Time is it now?”

  “Ten of ten.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

  Biden would be on that table for nine hours.

  It was midnight when George finally told them: it went well, in a technical sense. Of course, they couldn’t know the result until Joe woke up—that would be hours more. But George, for all his careful Army-doctor words, had the look of a trapeze man who’d just done the triple—backward, no net.

  “The timing, I think, was appropriate,” he said. What he meant was, they weren’t a minute too soon. In fact, the moment they cut into Biden’s head—maybe it was the disturbance of the surgery, maybe just a godly coincidence—the aneurism burst like a gusher.

  Dr. George called it “friable matter.” He meant blood and tissue, everywhere. “There was quite a bit of friable ...”

  Biden was lucky. His artery burst outward, toward the wall of his skull. As far as George knew, the brain tissue had not been disturbed. Dr. George got a clip on the wall of the artery, through all the mess. That much was fixed. As to the rest ... time would tell.

  It was dawn again before Biden was lucid enough to know he’d been lucky. Jill came into Intensive Care, told him he was going to be fine. But Biden had to prove to himself he was there—all there.

  He worked his fingers and toes under the sheet. Brought a hand up to touch his nose. Blinked his eyes. Saw the clock. Told himself the time, and figured the duration of his unconsciousness. He estimated the square footage of the ceiling by multiplying the tiles. He could think. He could move. He could talk. Thank God.

  Thank God ... he would’ve been dead ... in New Hampshire, he would have been dead.

  That was the luck that descended like blessed peace on Biden in his hospital bed. It wasn’t just the fact of survival, no. There was a plan for Joey Biden, after all. There was a reason ... there was destiny.

  Ted Kaufman was the first man from the staff to see Joe that morning. Joe’s head was a swollen swaddle of bandage. Tubes ran in and out of him everywhere. His voice was small, but he said to Ted:

  “I’m gonna be all right.”

  “I’m sure of that,” Ted said. “It’s a much better story if you live. It’s gonna increase the legend.”

  Biden managed a smile. But this wasn’t a joke.

  “No, now I know,” he said, “why the campaign ended like it did.”

  113

  Dangerous Magic

  IT’S ALWAYS DANGEROUS WHEN you start to believe in magic ... the hand of God propelling you by the small of your back, smiting your enemies a shot to the chops. The pros warn against it. But when it’s the pros who are God’s Own Agents ... well, then, look out—there’s no one to warn you.

  When Dick Gephardt escaped New Hampshire with second place, he knew it had to be God’s work—because Dick hadn’t had a good week, on h
is own. It started well enough—he came steaming in from Des Moines Tuesday morning (eight planes full of press, crew, and hangers-on). He was ready to ride the famous Iowa bump, close the gap on Dukakis, and raise hell about the Establishment ... but the Establishment, turned out, had gotten tired of taxes and poor people in Boston and moved, en masse—to southern New Hampshire.

  By Wednesday, the press herd had digested the Iowa results and moved on to the serious business of destroying the new front-runner, Congressman Gephardt. There was the flip-flop analysis, the insider-outsider analysis, the Doak-and-Shrum-as-Mephisto analysis, and one heady new entry: Gephardt-as-candidate-of-regional-discontent.

  Thursday, Simon went nuclear, put ads on TV just ripping Gephardt—by name—for his tax votes, his weapons votes, his everything-Simon-could-think-of votes. Turned out, Bambi knew how to hold a grudge, and now he was dripping foam from the mouth!

  Friday, Dick actually saw a Simon ad, and it put him into a rage. That night, at a candidates’ forum, Dick was the only Democrat who did not get a standing ovation. He was flat, angry, stiff. After his speech, he held an ugly press conference, tried to slash at Simon, but all he could manage was: “He ought to take off that bow tie, because he’s just another politician.”

  That night, Dick woke Jane with a call. She could hear—his first four words—he’d sunk to the bottom again. “He lied to me. ... Paul promised me he wouldn’t do that.”

  She tried to buck him up, but the good words didn’t get through. Dick asked about the kids, but she knew he didn’t hear the answers.

  “You’re really down, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, I guess I am. I oughta get some sleep.”

  But she knew this would be one of those nights when he’d wake with a start, at three or four ... and never get to sleep again.

  So Dick spent the weekend fighting off Bambi, fighting with the press, making money calls to fat cats who were, uh ... out of town, in a meeting, or indisposed ... and by the day of the primary, Tuesday, eight days after his apotheosis in Des Moines, Dick had ceased to wonder what had happened to his Iowa bump and was wondering instead if it’d be him, or Simon, who would squeak through in second place, and leave New Hampshire alive.