What It Takes (130 page)

“Deal with them.”

Of course, by that time, his mood was different. He and his bright generalist counselors had been reasoning together, reforming, cleaning, cutting—administering the physic of honest government for more than three months ... to an anguished crescendo of protest from welfare-rights groups, mental health groups, the elderly, the disabled, the medically afflicted, veterans, and a half-dozen other interests—not to mention a threatened strike by fifty thousand state employees, a rumble of disaffection from the leaders and their myrmidons in Senate and House, and a rataplan of angst from the state’s newspapers ...

And the deficit was climbing toward $500 million.

They begged him! From the minute he got into office, the sachems of the State House—the Senate President, the Speaker, the chairmen—all urged the Governor to bite the bullet: send down a tax plan!
Now
... while the next election was still more than three years away, while the deficit could still be labeled as Sargent’s red ink ... while they could still make the case that there’d been no way to know the size of the mess until Michael got in to set matters aright.

It was mostly true ... and it was the only way to shield the new administration (and the legislators) from blame: delay would help no one—least of all, Dukakis.

But he didn’t want to hear it. What kinda talk was that? He wasn’t going back on a commitment! That’s not the kinda guy he was! No, he was going to manage the problem.
Ekonomia!

So he didn’t stop with his own car—he took away the state cars from cabinet secretaries and commissioners. Of course, people weren’t happy. But it must have saved ... well,
thousands
. And he wouldn’t buy stationery. No! He had his staff use
existing
stationery, crossing out Frank Sargent’s name. There was no telling how much he could save.

He set out to abolish all jobs in the Fraudulent Claims Bureau of the Insurance Department. His own no-fault law had made those people superfluous. Problem was, those people were friends of the Speaker and Majority Leader, so Dukakis’s bill got abolished in the House. Same with his bill to kill the Governor’s Council: he got hammered on the vote.

That didn’t mean he’d listen to the sachems. Why should he? ... A reporter asked Dukakis if he might have to take his scalpel to the state’s human services programs. Dukakis replied: “It might be a meat cleaver.” That’s when the public protests found their symbol.

One problem was, Michael didn’t know diddly about the budget. Another problem was, he didn’t want to know.

His own top man, Chief Secretary David Liederman, was dedicated to clean government. He was smart, independent, a thoroughgoing public servant—even by Michael’s standards. Liederman had served with Michael in the House, but in contrast to Michael’s fascination with pure government, David’s interest lay in specific state services—housing, community development, children’s programs. In other words, he had to know where the money came from, and where it went. Now he told Dukakis: “Michael, you’re not gonna squeeze it out. You can squeeze ten million, twenty ... maybe fifty. You can play with fifty million. But not two hundred.
Not three hundred
.”

“Steady as she goes!”

Michael announced he would not release the (contractually required) cost-of-living raises for state workers. (That’s when the unions passed their strike vote). He ruled out the (legally required) cost-of-living raise for welfare. Michael froze the accounts by which services were purchased for the mentally retarded, the disabled, all the state’s poorest and most helpless. He held up thousands of welfare checks to ram temporary month-to-month “budgets” through the legislature. He announced that human services would have to take twenty million in immediate cuts ... and next year (’76 looked even worse than ’75), he would cut welfare alone by $300 million.

He insisted he wasn’t cutting people’s only income ... no! “In human services, for example,” he said, “we may cut back on some consulting contracts. We may stop publishing brochures and bulletins at the rate they’ve been rolling off the presses.”

Three hundred million in brochures?

“All of us,” said Michael, “are going to have to make sacrifices.”

But even his longtime supporters (all those liberals who thought he was one of them) pointed out with obvious justice that Michael’s choice—his instinctive choice—was to balance the budget by cutting benefits and services to the poorest people, to save the middle- and upper-income brackets from the burden of further taxes.

That was another part of the problem: Michael didn’t know anyone who couldn’t find a job. No one on welfare. Like Panos before him, he couldn’t understand why these people shouldn’t
work!
Thirty-five-year-old people! Men! Taking money from the state? What got
into
them? ... Where was their
discipline
?

That’s what he wanted in his Commonwealth: discipline ... for the public weal. He’d hector his cabinet in their (now private) meetings:

“You guys don’t wanna do it! We can do it! It’s not a lotta money—we can get it!”

See, it wasn’t just his public commitment—no new taxes. It was his private compact: no one could tell Dukakis he wasn’t smart enough.

“You guys just don’t wanna do it! ... I don’t wanna hear that!”

So, after a while, he did not.

No one wanted to get in his face. Not even when they were poking around in the Welfare Department—cleaning, literally—and came across
shoe boxes
full of unpaid bills ... they went back years! Tens of millions of dollars in back bills!

Don’t tell Michael!

Nor even when his finance guys, Jack Buckley and his deputy, Tex McClain, got the latest revenue estimates, and thereby arrived at a new figure for the deficit—the amount of money coming in, compared to the totals going out.

They called Liederman.

“David, you better get down here.”

There they were, Jack and Tex, with their faces hanging halfway to the floor.

Liederman said: “What’s the number?”

“Six hundred and twenty million.”

In the end, he had to raise taxes. But by the time he did, he could never raise enough to close the gap for the current year. So he had to borrow almost five hundred million, and then raise taxes—more than a hundred million a year—to pay back the bonds at nine percent.

That still didn’t take care of the next year. So Michael would have to raise taxes again.

The legislators
begged
him (well, actually they begged Liederman) to roll all the taxes into one revenue bill. Don’t make them vote for two hikes in one year!

Michael would hear of no such thing. They were separate issues!

So, one week after he signed his first tax hike, he asked the legislators—rather, he told them—to raise $687 million in new annual taxes. That was the steepest tax bill in the history of the state.

He would still cut thousands of people from the welfare rolls, diminish benefits and services for everybody else, stiff sixty thousand state employees on cost-of-living raises, and lay off at least a thousand workers more.

That’s when it came clear the legislature might not be in a mood to hand him two-thirds of a billion dollars. Six months into his term, he had become the enemy of the poor
and
the middle class. He had become the target for every cartoonist in the state. (Michael-with-his-meat-ax was too good to pass up.) And he had managed to alienate a solid majority (of Democrats!) in the legislature. Maybe they’d give him his budget—maybe not.

Of course, Michael was furious.

Was he, or was he not,
Governor
?

What it was, of course, he felt betrayed.

S
ASSO GAVE MICHAEL HIS
resignation, the next morning, at the State House. Michael didn’t look well. He hadn’t slept much. But he was brisk, managing the problem.

Nope ... no resignation.

Michael had his press conference already scheduled. He would announce: John would take a forced two-week leave, an exile. Michael, of course, would take full responsibility.

The politics were tricky, they both knew that. This would draw exhaustive and negative attention while people were forming their first opinions of Michael. Iowans were famous for the gentle orderliness of their politics. And now Michael’s campaign would admit to hitting Joe Biden, just as he was to lead the Democratic
jihad
against Bork.

But Michael wasn’t talking politics. “I don’t have to tell you,” he said, in his chief-executive tone, “that’s not the kinda campaign I wanna run.”

No, he didn’t have to tell John.

Any other time, Sasso might have told
him
:
“
Mike ... is this room bugged? Is anybody listening? ... Mike! This is just us!”

(Any other time, John surely would have told him: what he did, he did for Mike—this was no betrayal—John did nothing for himself. John had no way to know his tweak on Biden would start an avalanche. The tapes were the truth. He’d added nothing, taken away nothing. And he never lied about them afterward. (Tully denied the story in the press. Just yesterday, Paul had denied it again—at a contributors’ luncheon. Tully would have to go.) Of course, John didn’t step up and volunteer that he was the source of those tapes. And he waited way too long to tell Michael. But he
never lied
.

It was important to Sasso that Mike realize that. But there was no way to tell Michael that morning, with Michael in his hunch.
Monos mou
... he didn’t want to talk.

Michael called Paul Brountas to tell him the decision: John would be spared ... after an exile. Brountas wasn’t happy, Michael knew. But Michael didn’t want to talk.

See, to fire John, to cut him off ... that would be the
old
Dukakis. Michael meant to show he had learned ... as he’d said in ’82, he could listen now, he could bend ... he was flexible, more humane. In other words, this was about Michael’s own idea of himself.

“John offered to resign,” Dukakis said at his press conference. “I considered it seriously, but rejected it. I did so, even though what he did was a very, very serious error in judgment, a very serious mistake.”

Dukakis apologized to Biden.

He took full responsibility.

He took questions, and dismissed them, one by one.

Then he walked off stage ... and the heat began.

Kitty soon joined Michael at the State House. She’d already gotten calls at home—Michael should know. Brountas was reporting calls stacked up at his law firm. People thought John had to go. Was Michael condoning this attack on Biden?

Michael took the calls from Senators, Joe’s colleagues ... Teddy Kennedy, John Kerry, Michael’s old law school pal and fellow Greek, Paul Sarbanes. Congressmen were Calling, Democratic Committeemen ... Biden had friends!

And they all said, John had to go,
now
. This couldn’t wait for another news cycle. Mike had to realize. The networks would kill him!

“I don’t understand why John did it,” Michael kept saying. “I think you know, this is not the kinda campaign I run ...”

They told him it didn’t matter what they knew, or what kinda guy he was—it was what people saw. And Michael had to act—now.

Of course, it was terrible for Michael. That’s why Kitty said, more than once, how
outrageous
it was, what John had done ... how he’d put Michael into this ...
position
!

And at some point, near noon, Michael stopped answering into the telephone, “I think you know ...”

Now he just said, “I know ...”

No one could remember, at the campaign loft on Chauncy Street, when it came clear ... this was not over: it didn’t matter what Michael had said. He was still taking heat, and he was wilting.

Maybe it was a phone call from the State House (there were scores that day—staff swapping rumors).

Maybe it was the questions still aswirl in the press pack. The diddybops were camped in the hallways, waiting for Sasso ... trading the story up to spine-tingling scandal: Sasso did the tape—Michael hadda know! ... Michael must’ve known—Kitty hadda know! ... Tully knew—Vilmain in Iowa hadda know. ... Who knew? Farmer? Corrigan? Edley? Estrich? Patricia O’Brien? ... What did they know ... and when did they know it?

Or maybe it was John, who was sure: this wasn’t over ... no, not the way Michael was treating this—as a moral question. Once it got to that, there was only one place Michael could come down.

Sasso was closeted in a hideaway office, upstairs, with his wise guys and a few staff. John was going to do his own press conference that afternoon—three o’clock. They had to get this thing square, to bed, in time for the TV news. If they couldn’t kill the questions, this would slop into another day’s news, and another, then another. They could bleed to death like Biden.

But all the talk was strange, strained. They talked about Tully! Did Tully have to go? How should Tully go? ... As if no one thought that Michael would—that he could—let John go. They were Sasso’s people, after all—not Michael’s. Michael was a weight they bore.

It was afternoon when it sank in ... still, no one could quite believe ... Michael
couldn’t
... he had to
think
... God, they had to stop him!

Dan Payne, the ad man, called the Governor at the State House. Michael took the call, but that was it. He didn’t want to talk.

“Look,” Payne said, “can’t this wait, hold on, like,
one day
? You’re under a lot of stress. John is ... I mean ...”

“No—you should be here,” Michael told him. “The calls are coming in, it’s unbelievable. Everybody says ...”

Payne tried to break in, to say what Sasso would not say: “You guys haven’t even really
talked
...”

“There’s no time,” Michael snapped. “Gotta do this.” He took a call on another phone and, for some reason, handed Payne off to Kitty.

Jack Corrigan, Sasso’s right hand, told the Governor he was making a mistake. Corrigan was a man of few words—mutters, actually—not the kind to make speeches. But that day, he got in Michael’s face, and told him: “Governor, you have
no idea
how hard this campaign is going to be ... you’re going to need John.”