What It Takes (120 page)

It was strange how it worked out, like it always did, like it was, you know ... all figured out. He’d cursed the day he ever took the chairmanship. Didn’t want the job, didn’t want the mess. ... He’d cursed the day he got the Bork nomination—God, he thought his career was over! He’d never pull it off!

But what it was, was destiny. Someone up there had a plan for Joey Biden ... he
needed
Bork, to get back, through all the bullshit, to the bottom, to the grit ... to what Joe Biden believed.

And now he would say it, in the moment—the perfect moment—when the lights and the eyes of the nation were upon him, in the first day of hearings on the nomination of Robert Bork as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. All three networks, and PBS, CNN, and C-Span ... just about every TV screen in the
country
would flash Biden’s opening statement ... and then the cameras would linger, as Biden locked horns with Robert Bork, to discuss what each man thought must be
the nature and direction of the United States
. That was the moment. That would be the first speech—the first real speech—of the Biden campaign.

So the Bork campaign had become the Biden campaign, or vice versa. And the Biden campaign, which had seemed so muscle-bound as it herniated itself over speeches in Iowa coffee shops, suddenly straightened out with something big to push against—something that mattered. This Bork fight took everything a campaign had—a winning campaign. And the Biden campaign, suddenly, could win.

There was a message—all locked in now—not only for Joe, but for staff, and gurus, who could retail the thing to press and pols. For a few weeks, all the gurus were singing from the same page—they left off trying to kill each other.

And the staff—in mid-Bork, Ridley announced he was going to “unify the campaign,” move
everybody
to Wilmington (that’s the way Joe wanted it). So he gave the word: they’d close the D.C. office, and all Biden staff would pick up their lives a hundred miles north, in Delaware. It was a measure of just how gorgeous was the prospect of a win that the campaign didn’t lose a soul.

Then, too—just as suddenly—there was a nationwide field operation. The biggest and best grassroots organization any candidate had in 1987 was the anti-Bork network run by the liberal interest groups—ACLU, NAACP, NOW, NARAL, and a cupful of lesser-known alphabet soup, all working together now on the Biden team.

There was the nationwide polling apparatus, led by Caddell, who did not stop at finding the magic brick for Joe. No, Pat put all his ferocious analysis into a memo, which he then personally took to the offices of undecided Senators (he could still open doors in Washington—they were flattered: Hey! Pat Caddell!) ... where he explained why
their voters
were going to turn against Bork.

Suddenly, the press was all over Joe—
BIDEN’S FIRST PRIMARY
...
SHOWDOWN FOR THE SHOW HORSE
—they wanted interviews, they wrote features ... the editorial boards opened their doors. That was a moment, sure enough, when Biden, Donilon, and Rasky walked into the boardroom of
The New York Times
—two poor Irishmen and a Jew, walking into the Bastion of Established Opinion, the richest bottomland of the River of Power, with the original portrait of George Washington on the wall ... to talk about the Constitution, and the Court. That was rich!

And Biden did fine. In fact, he did great—as he did, too, at
The Washington Post
,
The Boston Globe
, the
L.A. Times
,
U.S. News
,
Newsweek
,
Time
... hell,
Time
was fantastic! Dinner in the private dining room, top of the Time-Life skyscraper in New York, thirty River-of-Power types in gray suits and rep ties, down a table that would have bridged the Brandywine River in Wilmington. And Joe Biden, Syracuse, ’68, took the place over, talked for five hours straight. After hour three, he had his jacket off, his ass perched on top of his chair back—so he could see them all—while he made sure these white men
understood
where
Joe Biden
was coming from, on every Constitutional issue of the day. About midnight, maybe after, they were shifting in their chairs, trying to say how
interesting
it had been ... but Biden was just warming up.

“Hey! We haven’t talked about foreign policy! Can I come back?”

The pieces were locking into place ... he could
feel
it. He could see the thing—how it had to look, every detail: just a few days before the hearings, he decided that the dais for the committee had to come down. He had the same hearing room they’d used for Iran-contra ... but he didn’t want the Senators up on a platform, staring down at the witness—making a martyr, like Ollie North. Hell, no!

And there wasn’t going to be any camera in the well between the committee and the witness, locked onto Bork’s dewy eyes ... no way. Cameras to the side, and in the back, where they could focus over Bork’s head, onto the committee ... and the backdrop. They’d have to get the backdrop right. And no staff whispering into Biden’s ear. Keep it clean: Bork and Biden ... toe-to-toe.

He had a run-through, with Larry Tribe playing Bork. They set it up in Joe’s ballroom ... chairs in an arc for the committee, Joe in the center, the witness table right across from him. Tribe was a terrific Bork. They set up video-cams so Joe could take a look, run through his moves, over and over. Joe brought in Jill, and Hunt, to see if they could follow every point.

It was planned as carefully, as ably, as a convention speech, a Labor Day rally. It was the biggest and best Democratic event since Ronald Reagan appeared on the scene. It was, well, it was so
right
... this was just the black Irish that came up in him, he understood ... but it was so
perfect,
something had to happen.

H
E KNEW WHAT A
perfect campaign was. In ’72, Joe came from nowhere—no one knew him, he was a
kid
. But something told Joe—like he
knew
it—J. Caleb Boggs, the beloved two-term Senator, twenty-five-year veteran of statewide office, a man with no enemies, a Republican with labor support ... something told Joe he could beat Cale Boggs.

“Boggs! Joe, you’re fuckin’ crazy,” pals told him.

“He’s tired,” Joe said.

Joe knew—hell, it was no secret—Boggs, already in his sixties, didn’t really want a third term. It was Nixon who talked him into running. Still, when Boggs filed, no big-name Democrat wanted to run against him. So Joe could walk into the nomination. He’d run statewide, at age twenty-nine. Even if he lost, he’d make his name ... but Joe didn’t think he’d lose.

Neilia believed ... she knew Joe could do it—they’d do it together, door-to-door, like they did the Council race. Mom-Mom would do the coffees—hundreds, before it was over. Brother Jimmy—he was twenty-four—he’d do finance. And sister Val, twenty-seven—she’d run the campaign, like she’d always run Joe’s campaigns, since he ran for class president in high school.

That was about it, at the start: family, and a couple of friends who couldn’t bet against Joe. Joe’s pal from Syracuse, Roger Harrison, dropped his business career and came to help out—he did ads. Joe put the Biden rush on a lawyer in town, Roy Wentz, and he signed on. Wentz was tax counsel at du Pont, had a world of connections. But Joe’s needs were basic: first thing Wentz did was buy up all of du Pont’s secondhand office salvage—battered old steel desks and chairs. The campaign was working out of Mom-Mom’s basement.

Joe knew he needed more than desks, more than volunteer kids from the Friends’ School, where Val taught (she told them she’d flunk them if they didn’t help). He’d seen this thing so many times in his head—he knew how it had to be.

For one thing, he needed experts. He had to know his stuff, better than anyone. He wouldn’t even turn thirty (as the Constitution required for Senators) until two weeks
after
the vote. He was asking voters to make a hell of a leap. He had to show he could handle the job. So he’d spend all day talking with professors, days at a time with a guy named Dolan, a foreign relations specialist from the University of Delaware. Joe probably should have been knocking on doors, but he had to feel on top of his game.

The other thing he needed was money. Of course, Jimmy had the Biden brass balls. He’d knock on doors all over the country ... but big givers didn’t want to hear from the twenty-four-year-old brother of a twenty-nine-year-old hopeful, making his first run against Cale Boggs ... Joe who?

So they raised money in dribs and drabs—crab feasts and backyard picnics. Then they’d spend days arguing how to use it. They must have drawn up five hundred budgets—still didn’t have any money. A hundred dollars was a big deal. There was only one thousand-dollar contribution, and that had to be funneled secretly through the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee—it came from a partner at Cale Boggs’s law firm.

Bobbie Greene, Neilia’s college friend, was in Washington as a researcher for the Kennedy Library, and she introduced Joe to a few liberal thinkers and doers in the capital. They were the ones who saw what he could become. There was something about the kid, something fresh and clean, and sure about the way he handled himself. So he started getting money from national do-good groups, the Council for a Livable This, the Committee for Responsible That. And they put Joe with some campaign ops—a young guru from Boston named Marttila; a kid still at Harvard, but a hell of a pollster, named Caddell ... see, they weren’t going to give to a campaign that didn’t have
professionals
.

But it was Joe who called the shots—Joe and Neilia. She was still the only one who could slow him down, or shut him up. He’d get all hot and bothered ... something someone said ... and Neilia’d tell him: “Joe, you don’t say
anything
about that. That will pass. Don’t make an enemy of him.” Neilia now had their one-year-old, Amy, besides the boys. (“I’m not a keep-’em-barefoot-and-pregnant man,” Joe had told the local paper. “But I’m all for keeping ’em pregnant until I have a little girl. The only good thing in the
world
is kids. ...”) Still, Neilia spoke at coffees, worked with the volunteers. She was out there, day after day.

Joe was the one who kept the campaign from sliding into liberal orthodoxy. He did raise his voice against the Vietnam War, but he never would make it the centerpiece of his campaign. He never went for busing, either—that didn’t make sense to him, or to his friends, or to Mom-Mom’s friends. Gun control—why the hell would he bring
that
up? There were two farm counties downstate where everybody had guns ... Joe meant to listen to those folks.

He was so sure he knew where the people stood. They were like him, he was like them. That’s what he had to show—that he wasn’t some millionaire from Brandywine Hundred, or a whiz kid from Harvard, come to straighten them out. No, he’d be
their
voice ... he’d stand up for them. Even if it meant picking a fight. You know, Cale Boggs, sweet old man—“He really is a nice guy,” Joe would say—but could you see him picking a fight? Standing up to Nixon? Forget it!

The people had been failed by their leaders, their government—that’s what Joe said in his speech at the state convention. He didn’t have to say they’d been failed by Boggs. When Joe’s literature promised an activist Senator ... he didn’t have to say Boggs seldom sponsored a bill. When Joe talked about government letting corporations get away with no taxes, or government that hadn’t got serious about pollution, or government that failed to manage the war, the budget, drugs, crime ... he didn’t have to say Boggs failed. If Joe could just get Boggs on stage, he wouldn’t have to say anything about him: there they’d be, in the glare, Joe and old Cale, and Joe was twenty-nine, graceful, eager and strong, friendly, funny, smart, well dressed, well groomed, well versed ... people would
see.

Problem was, why would Boggs engage? Only twenty percent of the voters knew Biden’s name. Joe was working animal days—door-to-door in the suburbs, the beaches at the shore. But, hell, it was summertime—what did people care? The good news was, when people knew Joe, eighty percent were for him.

That’s when they started singing that song, that summer, at headquarters:

To know know knooow him ...

Is to love love luh-uhve him ...

That was Val and the kids—the volunteers. Val had hundreds now. It was a children’s crusade. Of course, in ’72, when the young were taking over the earth, that’s how a lot of campaigns ran, but with Biden, it was like Beatle-mania. Those kids adored him, and Val, and handsome Jimmy and Frankie. They’d do anything for the Bidens.

That’s what made it destiny. That was the first year the eighteen-year-olds could vote ... it was
important
. And after Labor Day, when school was back in, and the kids started talking to their friends, and their parents, it wasn’t a campaign, it was a movement.

That’s when everybody started to pay attention. Biden had these tabloids—sharp stuff, well designed, black-and-white: they told his story. And to save money, they never hit the mail. Every piece, to every house, was hand-delivered by those kids—
every door in the state
, all at once ... a new piece, without fail, every weekend.

Then Joe was on the radio—all over the radio. They didn’t have the money for Philadelphia TV, but Joe had a great radio voice—clear and calm, not too fast. He’d go to a shopping center and ask the people—man on the street—was it fair when millionaires paid no taxes? Well, Joe didn’t think so, either. “I’m Joe Biden,” he’d tell the folks at the mall. “Would you give me a chance?”

Then he started showing up in newspaper ads, on billboards ... bus signs. The kid was everywhere! With that beautiful shining smile! ... By the time Boggs woke up, it was late in the game—Joe was on a roll. You could see the sureness settling on him, like a blessing, the way he’d talk to folks—not about Washington mumbo-jumbo—about their lives, and his. They wanted to be with him. They were sure he could do it.