Primary Colors

by Joe Klein

  "I just wish we knew what the fuck we're dealing with."

  "Daisy's right," I said. "We know what we're dealing with tomorrow. We're going back to New Hampshire. We're probably going into the Cashmere McLeod story. The immediate thing is to get him to stop acting like an ax-murderer. He didn't do anything wrong in Chicago. Cashmere McLeod is telling a story for money. If Susan isn't concerned-Daisy?-then the governor shouldn't be."

  "She's not concerned," Daisy said.

  "Then he should act pissed," Richard said.

  "But not too pissed," I said. "He's running for president. It's more 'Well, we expected this kind of crap to happen. It's too bad, but we don't take it seriously.' "

  "Yeah, but he doesn't have to say that," Daisy said. "He just knows it-right, Henry?"

  "Right."

  "And you're going with him? You'll work this on the plane?" "I'll try," I said.

  We hung up. I immediately called Daisy back. "She called you?" I asked. "What's going on?"

  My call-waiting clicked. "That'll be Richard," Daisy said. "You talk to him."

  Right. "What the fuck's going on with Daisy?" he asked. "What is it-we got the boys' team and the girls' team in this campaign?" "I don't know," I said. "I'm kind of blown away by the whole thing. I gotta be up in three hours for Manchester. We'll just have to see." "Listen," Richard said. "He's gotta find a way to get it out that, this ain't nothing-ain't nearly as frightening as things that happen to real people, losin' your job, gettin' foreclosed. We can turn it to our advantage, y'know? Shit happens. He's calm in a shitstorm. Use that in our ads, y'know? Jack Stanton: A Man You Can Trust in a Shitstorm." He was giggling now. "Y'knowhattamean?"

  I wanted to say, But what if they don't want a candidate who seems to carry his own portable shitstorm along with him? But I didn't want to break Richard's mood: he had made his own little visceral decision. He was on board. He was sticking. We were stuck with this thing.

  "Henry, they are going to kill me with trash," Stanton said the next morning, his face blotchy and reddening, about to blow. "We gotta stop this."

  He looked at me as if it were an assignment: Stop this. Turn back the tide. He looked awful, as if he'd been up all night. He had a cup of coffee in one hand and a doughnut in the other. He inhaled the doughnut. Two bites. Reached for another from the box, which was vibrating on the fold-down table between us as the plane rattled down the runway. Gone. A third.

  "Sir, we were talking . . ." He looked as if he were about to pounce on me, devour me like a doughnut, but he didn't say anything. "Daisy watched the tape of what happened outside the church."

  "Sunday morning. Outside a church. Can you imagine? I'm trying to do something, and all they care about is this crap."

  "Anyway, Daisy's feeling was that you, uh, looked guilty," I said, then, realizing that I had laid it on her, quickly added: "Richard and I think she's right. Libby says there's nothing there."

  His head was down. "I am guilty. It's my fault. It's my own goddamn fault."

  What was? No matter. "Listen, sir. We're gonna win this. We have to get over this rough patch. You can't be defensive. You didn't do anything wrong. Richard says at some point you should toss in that the hits you're taking are nothing compared to what average folks are going through." He looked up. I had his attention now. "Gotta be the right spot. Not as soon as we get off the plane. But keep it in your mind. Keep the folks in your mind."

  "It is about them, isn't it?" he said, brightening. "You're a good man, Henry. By the way, you see what Charlie Martin said about Chicago?" "What?"

  "He said the only thing he held against the war protesters was all the fun they had." Stanton laughed. "He said we were right about the damn war. Can you imagine? I could grow to love Charlie Martin."

  Actually, we were wrong about New Hampshire. It had stopped being about the folks; it was now about the scorps. That was the new reality, and it sucked--but there it was. We still went about, covering the same bases, going to coffees and town meetings, to the seacoast and the southern tier of Boston suburbs. The same questions were asked; he was still fabulous with civilians, still seemed able to connect and win them over. But the real campaign was what happened between those events now. It was about whatever Jack Stanton chose to say in response to the fusillade from the sullen throng that began to follow us around; it was about the logistics of ferrying these people--who had suddenly materialized from nowhere, gulls following a garbage barge--frosts place to place, and providing the facilities, molt-boxes and risers and all the rest, so that they could hound us and pound us and send the message forth: The unexpected front-runner was, suddenly, "in trouble." We had been presumed victorious and were now presumed comatose before most Americans even heard of us. Internally, the campaign was a never-ending series of frenzied phone calls. Immediately, there was news that the Cashmere story would break on Thursday, and we had to figure out how to handle that. Chicago suddenly faded as a story--there was no paper trail, no way to prove that Stanton had gotten Senator Dawson to make the call, no place for the press to go with it. It didn't fade entirely, of course: it became part of a litany, part of the governor's portable shitstorm.

  I never actually got to see Jack Stanton speak anymore; none of us did. I worked the phone in the back of the room, talking to bigfoot scorps back in Washington and New York. Telling them: "The campaign isn't about this garbage. You should come up and see what the folks really care about." (And hoping they wouldn't take me up on it.) The tangled skein of phone calls--I'd call Richard, Richard would call Leon, Leon would call Daisy (who was, rapidly, replacing Arlen as the person we called on media stuff), Daisy would call me--would continue long after the day was done, building to a climax at midnight, when we'd conference for several hours. And then between two and three, after that call, I'd deal with the governor, who prowled the halls of the Hampton Inn, where we'd planted ourselves in Manchester.

  Often I'd find him across the frigid, brutally plowed parking lot, at the Dunkin' Donuts. A crippled kid worked the overnight shift and Stanton had latched onto him earlier in the month. Now he was there most nights--the combination of sugar and sympathy was overpowering. He had made Danny Scanlon his lodestar. Danny was what the election was all about. He had a shriveled leg, slurred speech, and who knew what else, but he was endlessly cheerful, always had a lopsided smile for the governor. He worked hard and never complained; he served apple fritters, hot out of the oven, and deserved a better country--and that was what this election had to be about. He and the governor would talk sports, college hoops (it was that time of year). Stanton would try things out on him--political riffs. If it worked with Danny, it was good. Sometimes, when we'd be walking out of a town meeting, about to be set upon by the scorps yet again, the governor would say to me, "We gotta keep it together now for Danny. That's what this is about."

  For Henry Burton, the election was about rousting Jack Stanton from Dunkin' Donuts at two in the morning and talking him down for an hour, then fidgeting through a couple of hours of fretful sleep, then getting up at six. And then the scorps. We had hired--immediately, after the church debacle--a press deputy for Laurene: Marry Muscavich, an ancient, who had worked New Hampshire primaries for various Kennedys and knew the shape and feel of the place, and had been through too much to be flustered--even by the cataclysmic zoo that we soon became. The Chicago arrest had made our candidate a national story; Cashmere would make us a national scandal. Our opponents were still wandering about New Hampshire in a van or two; we had press buses now. We had to change a lot of things. A new class of journalists appeared that week: the snuff specialists, there to watch us writhe and die. People who did not have the vaguest clue of who Jack Stanton was or what he stood for suddenly were following us around with a simple assignment: Get it on tape if he breaks down, watch if he loses his temper or cries.

  We moved into all this so quickly that it was difficult to comprehend. It was as if we were being borne, actually propelled, through our schedule by a lunatic
tide--we were socked out of high school auditoriums, Kiwanis club luncheons, all the other stations of the cross, sucked into this narrow vortex, a combination of gauntlet and undertow. He would be smiling, waving, denying--but moving faster than in the old days, when he could linger and bestow meaningful handshakes; if he stopped now, they were all over him. So we whooshed through the vacuum tube, propelled by media force, and no longer in control of the pace of the campaign.

  It reminded me of a time at the beach when I was very young. I was with my father; it must have been the ocean side of the Vineyard. He had me in the waves; he was behind me, holding me by the shoulders, walking me--pushing me--out, deeper, chuckling, "C'mon, boy, don't be afraid." Calm, casual, sort of mocking--as if my fear were a silly thing, a kid thing. But the waves that capped his knees crashed my chest; to me they were scary, brute explosions, a buckshot of sand and shell fragments. And then, from nowhere, a much larger one came, and he lost his hold on me, and I was picked up and tossed backward, overwhelmed by green water and tumultuous silence. It was suddenly, eerily, not noisy. I was spun about, gulping, then thrown backward and washed up in a shallower place, behind my father. He had assumed I'd been carried out to sea, and he lunged out deeper, hunched over, searching for me, terrified. He turned toward shore to call for help, eyes huge, mouth agape--and saw me, and dived for me, scooping me up in his arms. His panic allowed me to cry; I'd been too stunned before that. "Oh, God, Henry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm sorry." He held me out, looked at me: "Are you okay? Forgive me. Okay? Okay? All right now." And then, when I'd calmed, "Good thing you're your mama's child," he said. "A full-blooded nigger probably would've drowned."

  And now I felt I was back inside that wave, hurtling backward, overwhelmed and disoriented but in a noiseless world: the story had broken, it was real--there was a woman--but it wasn't quite real yet either. We hadn't seen the woman, except for pictures, which were sort of hilarious: truck-stop pinups. Daisy had been wrong. This woman would have given her soul to look like Farrah Fawcett with thirty pounds. She had dark, curly hair--a bit of Loretta Lynn--and a pug nose, and lips that seemed cartoony. Curled, snarly lips, as if she had bitten into a lemon while having an orgasm. She had breasts, that was clear enough. But the rest of her body remained a mystery, as did the quality of her mind. On Thursday the National Flash issued a press release and started distributing advance copies: the thing would be smeared across checkout lines all over the country on Monday. On Friday we were the talk of the New York tabloids--the Post's headline: READY CASH; the Daily News: THE HAPPY HAIRDRESSER-which meant we'd soon become the stuff of Eyewitless News everywhere. But the classier media, the big city papers and the networks, had taken a pass. Their silence added to the weirdness. We did not know where this would take us yet.

  On Friday morning, Stanton was out on the stump; we were back at the hotel--Susan, Richard, Daisy, Sporken, Howard Ferguson, Lucille, Leon and Marty Muscavich, whom we'd asked to sit in with the core group because he seemed an adult, and we needed a few of those. There was a lot of business. There would be a debate that night. And Koppel wanted someone for Nightline. And we had to decide, finally, how we were going to deal with Cashmere McLeod. 60 Minutes wanted us for Sunday night, after the Super Bowl; Brinkley wanted us for Sunday morning. The decision to do one, the other, both, neither, had fractured us. Everyone had a theory. (Except me: not only did I not have a clue, I was in heavy denial mode--I didn't want any of this to be happening.)

  The Stanton suite, where we met, was something of a mess now. The whole sixth floor of the Hampton Inn, where we had camped out, was beginning to take on the musky odor--sweat, dirty laundry, stale pizza--of a college dorm. We each had our rooms. There were piles of garbage everywhere--newspapers, faxes, campaign literature, street signs, empty Diet Cokes, half-eaten sandwiches, empty Dunkin' Donuts boxes, spoiled fruit. There was an actual campaign office in downtown Manchester; but more and more, as we hunkered down, the sixth floor became the nerve center of the campaign. Brad had moved in Xerox machines, faxes and computers. There was a press office; there were muffins--and bustle. I was relieved by the bustle: we still seemed a normal campaign.

  Susan floated above the mayhem. When we met that Friday morning, she sat at the head of the table in the suite, carefully put together in a blue Armani blazer and gray slacks, with a very cool lime silk blouse, drinking tea. Her hair was gathered, severely, under a hairband. Her eyes were clear, the least bloodshot of anyone's in the mom; she was wearing mascara--and lipstick. She was making a statement. The rest of us were a mess. "Leon, when do you think we'll have some sense of how this is playing?" Susan asked.

  "Well, we know this much already: We were moving and Chicago stopped us. We didn't lose anything, but we stalled out at thirty-five. No one else is moving either." Leon was sitting but moving; his leg was jiggling, which caused his tight blond curls to shudder slightly--a human hummingbird. "It's as if this whole thing is frozen. The folks want to see what happens next. Now, I'm sure a lot of the others will be in the field tonight, but Ins gonna hold off. Friday nights are lousy." "But won't this be different," Susan asked, "with the debate and all?"

  "Let the debate settle in," Leon said. "Immediate reactions don't mean much there, either."

  "But we gotta have some sense of where it's goin'," Richard said. He was jiggling, too. Then he was up and pacing. "And we gotta start preparing for what happens if we start to lose ground. Like what do we put on the air? Do we confront this stuff directly? Y'know they mighta given him Chicago--twenty-five years ago and all--and they mighta given him Cashmere, she's sellin' a story, right? But the two, right on top of each other. Y'knowhattamean? Y'know, do we really want a former revolutionary who messes around with hairdr--" Richard stopped in his tracks. All eyes turned to Susan, who was flushed and furious. She launched herself into Richard's face: "He didn't fuck Cashmere McLeod," she said with a vehemence that was impenetrable and startling. The mom was silent. Susan was standing, leaning, hands planted on the table, staring us down; no one, so far as I could see, had the courage to stare back. "If you can't handle that simple fact, you can leave right now," she said.

  No one knew what to say. I didn't know what to think, and I didn't dare look around the table--not even just across it, at Daisy--because I was afraid that it would convey something less than total devotion. "All right, then," Susan said. "Let us think this through."

  So much for that: there would be no debate on how we'd "handle" Cashmere McLeod. The campaign would proceed under the assumption that the story was trash. The official posture would be outrage: who could take such garbage, sold to a supermarket sheet for money, seriously? "Who has thoughts about Sunday?" Susan asked.

  "You do Sixty Minutes, you have a national audience," Arlen said. I looked at Daisy now: she was deferring to her boss, but she had her doubts. She glanced back at me: it was an I-need-a-hug glance. She had a wad of Kleenex in her hand; her nose was red and running; her eyes were watery, feverish; she coughed. Sporken continued, bubbly: "You and the governor will be able to put this thing down, show who you are, what this campaign is really all about, and you'll do it before the largest possible audience."

  "They gonna let you show what this campaign's all about?" Richard asked. "Who's been dealing with them?"

  "Howard?" Susan asked.

  "They will give you twenty minutes, immediately after the postgame Super Bowl show," Howard said dryly, precisely. "It will be Lesley Stahl or Steve Kroft. They didn't even propose Wallace--I guess they figured we'd never say yes. I said you'd only be interested if you and the governor could talk about the real issues in the campaign, why you're running. We didn't want the piece to be a high-toned National Flash. They said they understood that."

  "This would be live?" Marty Muscavich asked.

  "I don't know," Howard said.

  "Does it matter?" Susan asked.

  "Of course," Muscavich said. He had a kindly, rubbery face, dominated by a large mouth with thick lips. His hair wa
s white, what was left of it. I remembered seeing pictures of him, from the sixties--black and whites, White House photos; he was never one of the group inthe Oval Office, but you'd see him in the campaign shots, one of the bright young men in thin, dark, loosened ties and slope-shouldered Ivy League suits surrounding the young president as he made his way through a crowd. He'd never been a real player, but he'd been there. And now he was here, with us, wearing a dullish paisley tie and a PT-109 tie clasp. (He was the only man in the room wearing a tie, I realized.) "If it's live, you can control it better," he said. "You can tell your story, use the tension of the moment to embarrass whoever's interviewing you. Y'know: Why on earth is a nice fella like you so interested in this trash? Why would you dignify such accusations? This is a presidential campaign; let's talk about the economy. If you pretape, they have control: even if you get the upper hand on their interviewer, the audience will never know that. Your great moments'll wind up on the cutting-room floor."

  "I don't know why we have to do any of this," Lucille said. Marry ignored her and went on: "There's a famous story about Menachem Begin and Sixty Minutes. Who knows? It might even be true. Anyway, Mike Wallace-I think it was Wallace-wants to interview Begin. He calls up and flatters him, and says he'll need two hours to do the interview. 'Two hours, Mr. Wallace?' Begin says. 'You are going to use two hours of Menachem Begin on American television?' Wallace said no. They would edit the piece down to eighteen minutes. 'Then, Mr. Wallace, I will give you eighteen minutes,' Begin said."

  "Howard, why don't you go into the other room and call them?" Susan said. "We'll talk about Nightline."

  "Do we have to do it?" Lucille asked. "And why do we have to do it tonight? Why can't Koppel wait till Monday or something? It's gonna step all over the debate."

  "We asked the Stanton campaign to par-ti-ci-ate in this broadcast," Richard said, doing an awful Ted Koppel, "but they refused. So they must be guilty as fucking sin, right?"