What It Takes (104 page)

And that made all the difference.

Because Joe just started talking the stuff to Vince—like he would at Pala’s—just shooting the shit about this privacy business ...

“I mean, I’m serious! You know, you’re in your bed, and a cop comes in, says, ‘What do you think you’re ...’ No!
Bork comes in!
I mean, can you see ... wait! No! Here’s the ad—here’s the ad we oughta run, right? ... There’s this couple in bed, and the guy hears something, straightens up ... it’s dark, there’s music, right?
DUM dum dum dum DUHHNN! ...
And it’s BORK! ...”

They’re giggling on the porch.

“That’d do it.”

“Hell, yeah.”

“Glad that sonofabitch wasn’t around when I got married. Jesus!”

“Jail time!”

“Yeah, whole different ball game ...”

“That’s it, if he’s the law ...”

“Yeah, woulda been ...”

“No, wait! I mean it. That’s it! If he had been the law ... that’s how we show it.”

“If Robert Bork had been on the Court ...”

“If Robert Bork had been
Justice
Bork ...”

“If ...
Judge
Bork had been
Justice
Bork for the past twenty years, and he had
prevailed
... this would be a very different country.”

“Thirty years ...
Baker v. Carr
.”

“Forty years. If Judge Bork had been Justice Bork for the last forty years, we would have a very different—poorer ...”

“No, let people decide that. We’ll just tell them the cases—the things that wouldn’t have happened.”

“That’s it. That’s what we’ll do for the ABA. We just lay it out:
These are the cases that Robert Bork would have reversed
. Let them imagine what it would be, without ...”

“That’s it.”

“Let’s do it ...”

That was Joe, of course. He was revved up. He wanted to do it ... now.

But it couldn’t be now: it had to be careful, scholarly ...
serious
.

He wouldn’t get the speech for three or four days, but that same night—late that night—he could already hear it in his head. He could
see
it ... the ABA, the Senate floor, the hearings ... like stripes on the field to the end zone. He could see ...
exactly
... how he was going to be.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, if Judge Bork ...”

He was pacing in the night silence of his home.

“... had been Justice Bork ...”

H
E ALMOST LOST THEM
at the ABA—a huge hotel ballroom, a thousand prosperous, comfortable suits, come to enjoy their week in San Francisco before returning to their life’s labor, the protection of corporate America from a predatory government and citizenry. This was not an easy group to rally to the barricades. Then, too, Biden talked for an hour before he got to the point.

He’d left in a lot of “advise and consent,” the whole nine
serious
yards. Joe’s voice sounded reedy and dry as he backhoed the history. There were no applause lines. You could hear wool pants rustling on Naugahyde banquet chairs. A few folks stood up, all too visibly, and walked out of the hall ... watched out the door by Joe’s son Beau, who’d come to San Francisco, who was dying a slow death for Dad, in the back of the room, while Joe droned on ... till Beau, toward the end, was staring at his shoes, murmuring, “Dad ... finish.”

But then Joe got to Bork, and the cases ... not an attack—not obviously. He just laid out the facts at law, and Bork’s opinions on the opinions.

First was
Griswold
: Bork not only called the decision “unprincipled,” but he stated there was no difference—at law—between a husband and wife who wished to be relieved of regulation in their bedroom, and a utility company that wished to be free of smoke-pollution laws.

Then there was
Skinner v. Oklahoma
, where the Court struck down a state law permitting the sterilization of criminals. Bork called the majority opinion “intellectually empty.”

There were cases where the Court struck down restrictive racial covenants, a case on poll taxes, the Voting Rights Act, affirmative action, a sixty-year-old decision allowing parents to send their kids to private schools, a case that overturned a state law forbidding the teaching of German ... there was
Roe v. Wade
... there were two cases from the sixties, in which the Warren Court erected the doctrine of one man, one vote ...

Bork had said of one man, one vote: “On no reputable theory of Constitutional adjudication was there an excuse for the doctrine. ...”

By this point, the rustling in the hall had changed to silence, and then to whispered exclamations, as Biden hammered home seventeen cases. Most of these lawyers had had no
idea
... Bork was a flaming
radical
. Jesus! He meant to push down the pillars of
their temple
!

“We cannot be certain,” Biden said, at the close—his voice rang through the ballroom—“that these are among the dozens of precedents that Judge Bork might vote to overturn. But we can be certain that if Judge Bork has meant what he’s written for the past thirty years ... that had he been
Justice Bork
during the past thirty years, and had his view prevailed ... America would be a fundamentally different place than it is today. ...”

When his voice died away, the suits jumped up and gave him a standing ovation. They came at Joe by the dozens, to shake his hand. The press in the hall badgered Rasky for a text—of course, Joe had screwed around with the text till way too late. Rasky snapped at the pack: “Why’n’cha learn to take notes?”

But it didn’t matter. This was front-page, anyway—Biden Makes His Case.

Even Joe was amazed at the good press ... they actually
got
it! And they wrote it! ... Unbelievable.

Now he had to find a way to make the message clear in living rooms, and barrooms. Biden v. Bork ... High Noon, Main Street ... he had to get ready.

That’s all he wanted to do—run through the moves, game it out:

“So then, if he comes back with Harlan, I’m gonna use that Harlan dissent. I’m gonna read the thing, right? That piece at the end—and then I’ll say: ‘Judge, do you agree with that?’

“So he can’t, right? So I’m gonna read in the White House thing, saying he’s in the tradition of Harlan ...”

“What if he just says he changed his mind?”

“He can’t change his mind on everything.”

“What if he does?”

“I got his article. When’s it from—’86?”

“Listen to this ... listen to what he says ...”

“Shit, this guy’s completely out on the edge.”

“Why don’t you just use this?”

“Too legalistic—people gotta understand. Look, let’s do it again—if I say ...”

Of course, Biden wouldn’t admit he was going to win—never. But you could see it sinking in.

He’d go down to Washington, Senators were coming to
him
... they’d read that stuff he sent over ... you know, the civil rights cases—very disturbing ... people aren’t going to like that. The southerners were key—most of them won with black votes.

One offered advice: “Y’know this fella’s
weeird
... Joe, y’jus’ put a camm’ra off’ta
sahhhd
... y’show that
sahhd shot,
with the
beeard
...”

“Good idea,” Joe’d say. He’d guarantee one thing: it wasn’t going to be an Ollie North deal—the Senators on TV, creating an instant American hero—no way!

But, in truth, he didn’t want to win with camera angles, Q-factors ... or even personal stuff on Bork. He’d already told the committee: he’d get the FBI report—and that was it. Nobody else would even see it. He couldn’t win by tearing down Bork, the man. Biden had to win on the cases ...
Defender of the Constitution
... otherwise, it wasn’t a win for him.

“Tom,” he’d say to Donilon, “tell me again what’s gonna happen.”

“Look, Joe, these are the numbers ...” Donilon would start again. He’d run through it a half-dozen times already. “Iowa is three-to-one against Bork ...”

“Okay ...” Joe would look down, concentrating on the words.

“Right now, your name recognition is ten percent—on its way to fifteen, twenty. That’s up from three—and that’s before the hearings. Your approval is up from one percent to five, maybe six—I don’t know. But look: it’s TV—not bites—it’s hours of TV, day, after day, after day ... you’re the only candidate who’s doing anything real. Your name recognition alone is gonna go to fifty, sixty, seventy percent. Some of those people are going to be for you—that’s guaranteed, right? And since you’re doing something they
approve
(it’s three-to-one against this guy), your approvals go up
faster
—by a higher rate—than your name recognition. So that means you’re gonna be at ten percent, and then you’re gonna be at twenty percent, and then you’re gonna win Iowa. Then, you’re gonna win New Hampshire. Then, you’re gonna be President.”

Joe would nod at the floor ... not agreeing, just nodding it into his head. Then, he’d look up at Donilon, and say:

“Go through that again.”

In Iowa, he could feel it turning—he could see it: he’s supposed to have thirty people at a coffee shop, a hundred show up. That packs the place, changes the feel ... changed Joe’s feel. But he still couldn’t figure, exactly,
why?
... He couldn’t feel the connect, the thump in his gut, the way he had to have it.

The Iowa guys were after him every week—how about next weekend? ... How about a day and a half? ... But Biden would get his chin out and insist he couldn’t cut a day from Bork—not an hour. Even events he couldn’t blow off—he’d be doing Bork in the plane.

That’s how he was with the Iowa State Fair debate—it was a big deal, a Sunday, late August, Des Moines ... if he missed it, he’d be explaining for months. And he still didn’t know what he’d say: the staff had written a close for the debate, but it wasn’t any good. Joe knew he had to redo it. But that weekend, he had Bork meetings at the beach house—Larry Tribe was flying in from Boston, with Marttila. There were a dozen guys driving up from Washington. And Caddell was flying in from his California exile, making his bid to come back ... which meant, of course, he was coming back to take over.

They went at Bork all day. Joe ran through the moves, to Tribe, for hours, while the rest of the staff and gurus just hung around the deck and listened. All except Caddell, who was in there, pitching. Hell, he’d argue law with Tribe!

But you had to hand it to Caddell—guy was a genius with a poll. The AFSCME pollsters had concluded that the best chance on Bork was to prove he was “insensitive to certain groups”—in other words, a bigot. But Pat knew Biden would never do that ... and now that Pat had the cross-tabs from that poll, he picked them apart with ferocious precision—Biden wouldn’t
have
to do that.

See, when people found out about Bork, they turned against him—fifty-one percent by the end of the polling ... but why? That’s where Caddell was a genius: he could find that single brick in the wall—pull it, the whole thing comes down in a heap.

“Lookit this: white southerners—that’s the key, what every southern Senator has gotta watch. Look:
seventy-one percent
of white southerners are less inclined to support Bork when they find out he does not believe the Constitution guarantees a right to privacy.

“Who do moderate Republicans watch? Women under forty. ... Privacy is the second most powerful argument against Bork for women under forty. For southern whites, it’s
Number One
...”

That was the first day anybody heard Joe say, aloud, he might win this Bork thing. He just mentioned to Tribe, in passing, that if they could show this stuff, well ... people wouldn’t be for this guy.

For Caddell, Bork was
history
:

“Oh, we’re gonna win
this
. I’m past that. That’s done! I’m talking about taking back the
country
. This nomination is the end of the Reagan revolution. Don’t you understand? This is the end of conservative intimidation! Over—
gone
! This is the end for them!”

The way Pat saw it—Chrissake, he’d been saying this since
’84
—if you push the right-wing social agenda hard enough, the whole Reagan coalition falls apart. There’s no way all those Reagan Democrats want the Moral Majority fucking around with
their
lives. And Bork was just the maul to split the tree trunk—if Joe hit it hard.

That’s why Biden was climbing in Iowa. They had the link now ... lookit
this
:

Mike Donilon, Tom’s brother, worked for Caddell, and he had a new poll from Iowa: Biden in double digits! Before the hearings!

Marttila said: “You’re going to be the front-runner by October. ... If you win Bork, you’ve got the nomination.”

Joe wasn’t so sure. He didn’t know what moved the numbers in Iowa ... didn’t know what message they had that was working. Chrissake, he didn’t know what he was going to say
tomorrow
.

That debate! Shit! He’d have to write on the plane.

But he got off the plane without a closing statement. David Wilhelm, his Iowa man, met him at the airport. “How you doin’, boss?”

“Doin’ great,” Joe said, “but I don’t have a close.”

“Why’n’cha use the platform stuff? It’s working great.”

“Yeah, that’s a good idea.”

Joe asked Ruthie for paper the minute he got into the van. He knew that stuff from the Kinnock tape like a song in his head ... he started writing it down, without hitch or pause:

Why is it that I am the first in my family ever to go to a university?

He’d done it four or five times: “You know, I saw a speech by the British Labour Party leader, Neil Kinnock, and he said something that I think is important ...”

It worked great for Biden—without fail—because he felt it.

Why is my wife, Jill, the first of her family ever to go to college? Is it because our fathers and our mothers were not BRIGHT? ...

He’d almost written it through by the time they got to the Savery Hotel—fifteen minutes for makeup. This debate would be on TV—PBS, all over the country ... the big-foot press in Des Moines for the day. This could be big—this could be the moment. Joe kept running through the lines in his head, reading through the close, fiddling a word out, here and there, to make the words dance on the ear. He was acutely aware, he only had two minutes.