What It Takes (173 page)

Murphy said: “Well, Senator, we’re trying to put it together.”

“I know it’s not easy,” Dole said, “not an easy situation. We’re twenty-five points down. It’s gonna be hard to win. But we gotta try.”

Murphy said nothing—he didn’t know what to say.

Dole’s voice was even softer, a bit husky—he said: “If we can’t do it right ... if I’m just going down the tubes, we could save the money—not do it ...”

There was silence. He was breaking Murphy’s heart. “Senator, I’ll find a truck if I have to steal one. We’ll do everything we can.”

“O-
kayy
!” The Bobster’s voice was back. “Don’t wanna
keep
you.
Get to it
!”

Friday afternoon, they bought the time, 6:30
P.M.,
Saturday, on WGN, Chicago’s Channel Nine, and on smaller stations downstate. They bought the satellite time for the feed through the heavens, they found a satellite truck, a lighting semi, and a case-portable control room—no truck, alas, for the switching equipment, so they’d have to hand-carry twenty-five metal trunks and thirty smaller cases and build a control room on the spot. They had to bring in thirty guys from Chicago for the crew—along with four cameras, wireless microphones, a TelePrompTer, makeup. ... The satellite truck was a big C-system rig—the pro kind—but there was a glitch in the equipment, so they had to scramble and all they could find was a smaller KU-band truck, in Little Rock, Arkansas. That crew would have to drive all night. WGN couldn’t take a KU transmission, so they scrambled and lined up a KU earth-receiving station in Chicago, which would take down the feed from the Dole extravaganza and pipe it, underground, to WGN, which would air it, live, and feed it back to the satellite for the other local stations, and to cable nationwide. There were scores of people and a couple of million dollars in equipment heading for Galesburg, which was overwhelmed already by Bush. The Knox College pooh-bahs agreed to give Dole the historic room with the Lincoln chair, but they were finicky:
Please, don’t move the table ... and don’t park on the grass
. They had no
clue
about the army of TV Vandals bearing down on them in eighteen-wheel trucks.

In Chicago, Mrs. Dole called all the smart guys again, and brought them into one suite to announce: this had to be
organahzed
. She didn’t want fifty people telling Bob what to do. Murphy and Castellanos wanted Bakshian’s speech boiled down to seven minutes. Then, Mrs. Dole would talk. Then, they’d cue WGN to run the video of the Bob Dole story. Then, the Bobster would come on live again, to close. (Then again, all this planning would be scrapped in an instant if Bush could be lured near their cameras.) Wellborn went to work on Mrs. Dole’s remarks. Bakshian was set to cutting his text. Murphy and Castellanos were finishing a last-minute Dole ad about the
Chicago Tribune
’s endorsement—by now it was 1:00
A.M.
—and then they found out the truck from Little Rock had broken down en route. So at 2:00
A.M.,
they tracked down a Conus truck in Minneapolis, but that was a fourteen-hour drive and there was a snowstorm—that crew would have to start now. At 3:00
A.M.,
the Dole-folk chartered a plane to Galesburg, arrived at the college before dawn, and set to trashing the precious Lincoln room. They built their control panels behind the room where Dole would speak and started taping cables everywhere—across the ceiling, down the walls, up Abe’s desk leg. Dole Press Advance arrived in time to mention there would be a hundred national press—where were they gonna watch?—so they ran cables down the hall, to monitors in the gym, and then, too, they had to run cables to line-feeds, because the networks were coming with their own trucks. There was only one phone line to the gym, so the phone company had to chopper in a hundred phones. One piece of the portable control room went flooey, so by mid-morning the video wizards had a new box on its way from Chicago. An ABC crew was filming the set-up when they broke a piece of the Lincoln Chandelier. Mari Maseng and Kim Wells arrived for a meeting with Wellborn and Bakshian, to polish the speeches—but there was no speech for the Bobster: Aram still had his thirty-page tome. They got him a room at the Galesburg Howard Johnson’s, but Aram turned out to be a real stonecutter:
click ... click
... they could hear him pecking deliberately at his typewriter—
click
... at midafternoon! The truck from Minneapolis arrived. The technical trunks and gee-gaw boxes were piling up in the college hallways, and the Dole-folk took over the Dean’s Office. At 3:00
P.M.,
the control-room boys fired up the power, and ... they got a test pattern in Chicago! ...
Hurrah! We’re on the air!

Auughh!
Four-thirty, two hours before airtime, there was still no speech for the Bobster! Kim and Mari were locked up with Bakshian,
all
typing, trying to get pieces of the text hammered down. Dole still hadn’t seen word one. ... Five-thirty: still nothing to show the Senator. The video wizards let the lights burn for three hours straight—better safe than sorry—and tested what they could on their rig. Dole didn’t like his makeup. He was having it redone. He was asking if there was any sign of Bush—Dole hadn’t given up his dream that somehow he would dare Bush into that Lincoln room and expose him in the hot white light as a loser, a choke when the going got rough. Kim and Mari and Aram were writing transitions for Dole’s speech in longhand—handwritten bridges that Dole was supposed to puzzle out. Brock was in there, trying to gather the pages in order—this stuff had to get to Dole! It was twenty-one minutes to airtime when the power failed in the control room—so they grabbed an extra cable, strung it around the circuit box (to hell with fuses!) and got the power back six minutes later. No one could tell whether anything was damaged. Nobody told Dole about the power failure—no sense promoting a panic. Dole got his speech eight minutes before his broadcast. He showed up in the Lincoln room, two minutes to air.

“Aghh, we ready? Hear me o-kayy?”

And they rolled.

Ladies and gentlemen, good evening, and welcome ...

The intro went fine: half the Lincoln room held a small crowd to clap for Dole, and those folks did their part; the Bobster came in right on cue, started talking. There were three cameras in front of him, a wall behind, with a door over his left shoulder—the fourth camera was hidden back there. Behind that wall, the control room was crowded with eight monitors, instrument panels, a jungle of wire.

Six and a half minutes into the show ... Dole was talking about drugs: “So, we’ve got a problem! ...“
Pow!
—all eight monitors went to black. The Bobster was still talking—they’d just flashed him the five-minute card—the holy-white light was upon him ... but the control room went dark—no power—and there was nothing on the
screen
. Behind the wall, there was an instant of silence, then a frantic scraping of the wizards’ chairs being shoved back, amid a whispery hiss of oaths. In opaque darkness, they tore at the floor to get to cables. Chicago was on the phone with Castellanos: “You just went bad—what happened? You’re a freeze-frame. You got nothing! What happened? Dead air! Dead air! ...”

Alex was yelling into the phone, “Fire the tape!”

“Dead air! ...”

“Go with tape!
Fuckin’firethetapeTAPE!NOW!
”

A minute fifty-five into the disaster, the Dole video rolled in Chicago. No one knew if they could get the power fixed in Galesburg. If so, how much time would they have left? They’d have to switch out of the video on the fly. How long would Dole have to speak? What would he say? What would he have time to say?

In the Lincoln room. Bob had finished his speech. Elizabeth was talking, introducing the video—she
thought
she was introducing the video. Then the Doles walked back to the control room, and Brock said to Murphy: “Tell him. You have to tell him. Tell him.”

Murphy said: “We lost power in the middle.”

Dole looked stricken: “Where’d you lose me?”

“You were in the drug thing.”

“You didn’t get any Elizabeth?”

“None.”

Dole sagged. “What’ll we do now?”

“Well, we’re gonna try to get this fixed and go to a live close after the video. If we can’t get it fixed, we’ll let the video run out, and that’ll be the end.”

Dole nodded.

The power came up about five minutes later. But they had no feed from WGN—they didn’t know what was on the air at that moment. Castellanos had to dope out a transition point, kill the tape, and go to Dole. The technicians in Chicago were holding a phone up to a speaker in their studio so Castellanos could hear the sound track. They’d have to cut it off at the cornfield ...

“Okay, Senator. Stand by.”

Castellanos was counting down. Two or three people fired orders at Dole:

“Twenty seconds ...”

“Two-and-a-half-minute close, okay?”

“No, wait Senator ...”

“TEN seconds ...”

“Maybe three minutes.”

“SIX, FIVE ...”

“Just watch the time cards.”

The audience started clapping. The video wizards threw the switch to feed from Galesburg again. There was Dole, scowling in the Lincoln chair. He started talking. He watched the time cards. He talked about education—that was two sentences in his script. He talked for two minutes straight. His eyes darted from the cameras to the cards. He segued into child care, day care ... whatever ... animal rights.

Then it was over.

His chance.

They were going to do it again, for tape, for a few local stations that would broadcast tomorrow—might as well get it right once. Bob still had in mind to get over to the big Bush dinner, crash the place,
make something happen
... but Elizabeth insisted: they did it all again. The tape went without a hitch—save for one tiny moment, when Bob said the Lincoln–Douglas debate was in 1958. So everyone stayed fifteen minutes longer while Dole recorded that sentence, over and over, so the video boys could dub in 1858. The Lincoln room was now an oven. Bob and Elizabeth waited in a hallway. Bob sat on a corner of a desk, with his coat on, slumped amid the dislocated furniture and stacks of video detritus. Elizabeth came and sat on the side of the desk, and leaned her head against his left shoulder. With their legs hanging down, they looked like a couple of kids on a dock—sad kids at summer’s end. Mari snapped a photo—she knew Mrs. Dole would love that picture. Dole kept telling people to call the Lincoln Day Dinner—see if they could still catch Bush, see if they could hold the crowd ... maybe Bob could get up and talk, at least say hello. But the organizers were all Bushies. They wouldn’t lift a finger to help.

Worse still, they passed the word to Bush—Dole was on his way! So by the time the Doles packed into three freezing cars and drove to the dinner ... they were just in time to be pinned, helpless, ordered to a stop by police, while they witnessed the departure of Bush’s fifty-vehicle motorcade—cop cars, blue lights, the lead limo, the Bush-limo, VIP cars, staff vans, press buses—the incumbent magnificence arrayed against Dole.

Bush had gone, and the crowd was on its way out. Dole jumped out of his car as if he meant to stop them, but it was like trying to stop a river with your body—you’re lucky just to stand your ground. The press was set up outside in respectful ranks for Bush’s departure, and now they came, six-legged, snapping their tripods shut as they ran after Dole. Mari had her head in her hands, moaning: “This is disaster. I can’t believe we’re doing this ...”

But she thought Dole was too exhausted and stressed out to see how helpless he looked. He was trying to grab hands, say hello, fight his way into the hall. People were streaming out, bumping into him, trying to get past him. When he finally burst into the hall, there were only a few waiters and a couple of hundred people. He might as well have just sat down. It was ... gone.

When they got all the Dole-folk onto the plane—Dole had his big plane, the one the press now called the Sky Pig—the staff drifted toward the back. They left a lot of room for Dole. No one had any idea what to say to him. ... Everyone knew—thought they knew—how Dole would be.

Murphy would have liked to crawl under the seats ... especially when Bob Dole came down the aisle and dropped into the seat next to him.

“Aghh, howsa
goinn
’?”

Murphy loosed a flood of apology. He felt so awful, things were so fucked up, he couldn’t even tell the Senator, at that moment, what had really
happened
—he’d tried to look into it, just to know—maybe sabotage. “But I, uh ... technically, we just don’t know what the line filter—if it was the line filter, it would ...”

And in the middle of this heartfelt technoblather, Dole dropped one eyebrow as he glanced for an instant into Murphy’s eyes, and said:

“Agh, really liked that video. Good music!”

And above the whine of the Sky Pig’s engines, Dole’s prairie voice scraped the air, as he began to hum ...
Hnnghhh gnngh hnnnnnggh
... the music from the beautiful cornfield scene:

Dut dut duunnnnghhh dghn-dughhnnnnnn!

Even true Dole-folk turned to stare in shock and fascination.

Illinois was lost.

Yut dut dut dunggghhhh
...

The Other Thing was gone.

Yut tuughh tugh tunggghhhhhh
.

J
ANE WAS WITH DICK
for the day of the Michigan vote. In fact, that day the schedule moved them on to Milwaukee ... the Wisconsin vote, April 5, was the next hope—though not for Gephardt.

They were in a cinderblock holding room at the Mecca, Milwaukee’s big basketball arena. All the candidates would show up for a Democratic dinner. Murphy and Carrick worked pay phones in the hallway for the first news from Michigan. The holding room was horrible. Some public works genius had the thing painted smile-face yellow ...
cheerful
cinderblock ... and wake-the-dead fluorescent light, two hard plastic chairs, and one window that looked not onto the world, but the gray arena floor, two stories below.

“Got numbers,” Murphy said. He shut the door softly.