What It Takes (185 page)

She knew, they were not going to be twenty points ahead. She knew, they were not even going to catch up. Those were the weeks—the proud weeks of Michael’s “surge”—when Kitty’s staff started stocking her suite with a bottle of Stoly. They were going to lose. Kitty knew. But she also knew she couldn’t face that knowing, couldn’t dwell on that fact—and get up the next day, to do it again. The Stoly helped. She’d have one drink, or two. She never lost it on the road. She did spectacularly well. She was a star.

It never occurred to her what
she
would lose—until it was over. There was suddenly nothing, back in that house with the Formica table and the Danish-modern chairs, and the phone wasn’t ringing, there was no schedule, no cars waiting, no Secret Service, no local cops to thank, no newsmen to dodge, no interviews, no TV shows, no friends trying to find her, no one to greet, grace, praise, or bawl out, nothing she had to tell Michael, no menu, no manifest, no guest list to finalize, no posing for pictures, no Greeks sending food, no day-care center, no high school, no campus, no women’s refuge, no hospital, no homeless shelter, no soup kitchen, no seniors’ center she had to visit, no issue she had to learn, no speech to work over, no speechwriter, no body woman, no Chief of Staff, no Press Secretary, no Advance, no airport, no plane, no pilots, no Marlene, no makeup artist, no hairdresser, nothing to buy or pack, no itinerary—she wasn’t going anywhere today, this week, or next, or next. She’d get up and there was nowhere she had to go.

There were her issues. She thought she might go back to her work at the Harvard Open Space program—but she didn’t: it was too small, too hard, to make the kind of difference she craved. She signed up with an agent for speeches, and a literary agent—she was going to write a book. She got a splendid advance, $175,000. But she wondered, did she have anything to say for herself? For Kitty? ... Mrs. Candidate Dukakis was gone. She didn’t want to be Mrs. Governor. She was
Kitty Dukakis
—what did that mean now?

Her friend Sandy Bakalar came by and asked, “All right, Katharine, what’s our next project?”

Kitty said: AIDS. She wanted to establish a Boston support center and food bank for AIDS patients—like the one she’d visited in San Francisco.

“Good!” Sandy said. Then she got her friend’s eyes. “Katharine. You are incredible.”

But Kitty didn’t feel incredible. She got together one meeting on AIDS, but it was mostly people from the campaign; it felt like they were trying to hang on to old times. Then, too, things didn’t get
done
. She’d pick up the phone to call her big-money supporters: “Tell him it’s Kitty Dukakis ...” It was strange how many were out of town, tied up with business, or working on something else. Everything seemed strange—she had to drive herself around, she had to
think
how to pull into a station and fill her tank. It was so slow, so ... well, she blamed herself for feeling things were so hard. Just because she had to go to a beauty salon:
it shouldn’t make any difference
—but it did. She couldn’t put a dime in a meter without thinking: How long had it been since she had to fish out a dime to park?

More and more, things just seemed too hard. When Michael would leave, she’d cancel any dates she had, and get drunk. Looking back, Kitty would mark those weeks after the election as the time she became a “binge drinker.” But those words don’t convey her purposeful efficiency. For her, binge had nothing to do with spree. She didn’t sit around with a glass, on the phone, or in front of the TV. She’d pour out the booze, down it, and pass out. When she woke, she’d do it again. She’d stop before Michael got home—to get herself together—he shouldn’t know.

Of course, he knew. He tried to help. He reasoned, he explained away. He blamed the stress, exhaustion, sadness. He blamed himself. His campaign had brought her to this. She’d counted on him, and he blew it. He bore the sadness, too. The loss was with him every day. He worked, thank God. She should come to the State House. She had her office at the State House, down the hall from his. But Kitty didn’t want to show up at the State House. She didn’t want the dirty looks from people who blamed her—she got him into this. She didn’t want to hear the ugly things people said about Michael.

Michael was finding no ease in his State House. The money was drying up. They’d rip open the tax envelopes—no checks—refund, refund, refund. Massachusetts wasn’t alone—California, New York, same story, big shortfalls. But that was meagre consolation. Michael’s budget was out of line, getting worse. Who could tell how many millions he’d have to find?

He fumed aloud: Why wasn’t he told?

He blamed himself—he should have known.

The last budget, six months before, he’d balanced only by his own clout and guile—with a pencil, literally, writing in the margins, nickel-and-diming the local aid grants, writing in new numbers for each city and town, line-item vetoes at night in his office, hours before he had to leave for Atlanta, his convention, where the whole country would hail his Massachusetts Miracle.

He was brilliant on that budget—everybody said so. (And that was when Michael declared to the nation:
This election is about competence!
) ... Maybe too brilliant—a bit too quick. Those were the days when no one wanted to get in his way. He was the favorite son, the hope of the Party.

Now, he’d spent that hope. This budget would be different. The mood was ugly. They said he should have started cutting earlier, to avoid the crisis—but no, his
campaign
came first.

Well, he’d dragged them all down.

What a loser.

On Boston talk-radio, they started calling him Pee Wee.

Michael would have to ask for new taxes. But things were so vicious. The legislature would vote to rip up all the triumphs of his past two terms—money for day care, retraining for workers, in-home care for the elderly. They’d take a knife (might be a meat-ax) to his government-that-worked ... just to cut him up! The bold new plans he brought home from his campaign were
dead
—not just because of their cost, but because they came from him. People said they’d paid enough for his ambitions. There was talk about
repealing
his universal health-care law—before it ever took effect.

Michael was heartsick. And weary—though he’d never confess it. (He insisted, he was fine!) ... But what happened to these people? Where was their faith? Things would turn around—steady as she goes! He would show he was right.

In December, Michael took his bride to their special place, Tyke and Viv’s, in Fort Lauderdale. It wasn’t much of a break, just four or five days. It was cold, and Michael was not in high spirits. But when he came back to Boston, after Christmas, he knew what he had to do.

He announced: he would not seek reelection. He was renouncing the job he loved, the Governorship of Massachusetts, to rid the Commonwealth of its greatest distraction: him.

Then
he asked for new taxes. As a lame duck. And they tore him to shreds.

That was the same month Kitty called a couple of close friends to tell them: “I’m an alcoholic.” They couldn’t believe it, they tried to argue. But she insisted. “No! I have to face it.” There was an odd excitement in her voice—vindication. There
was
something wrong, there was a
name
for what she felt. “I’m Kitty. I’m an alcoholic.” That was the first step toward a new life, or a step she required, when the old life was gone.

Gary Hart was free to have his life outside the bubble—then he had to live with it. Andrea took an apartment in Denver, and John moved out to Boulder—he was in school there. Still, Gary and Lee were in close quarters in their mountain cabin. They were building a new kitchen and an addition on the back. But by ’89, they started planning to supplant the house of their old dreams with a new structure—a great log thing set into the hill.

Lee would superintend the building. Gary was on the road, restlessly, under the aegis of his law firm; he traveled Europe and Asia, putting people of ideas and influence together with people of business. He was making more money than the people he once wouldn’t
talk to
(they
were fat-cats
). But it wasn’t money that drove him—hopscotching, say, Eastern Europe for a week, lighting in Moscow for the next four days, flying through London, New York, to Denver ... then heading back to the airport, with fresh shirts, after a day and a half. The spur was inside him.

He was probing with that diamond bit for something—anything—that was interesting. He wasn’t going to shrivel, sitting months at a time in an office in Denver—or anywhere else. What was interesting was the wider world he’d once planned to remake. Overseas, people weren’t hung up on his past—those parts of it that made his countrymen so teen-giggly. In Europe and Asia, people could not understand what had happened to him in American politics (no more could he). They judged his ideas, they treated him as a statesman. The business part he made up as fortune and wile dictated. He created a job for himself where none existed—by the same kind of self-creation that fueled a hundred streak-of-danger profiles, written by Kops who could never reason to the truth that a shot of supercharged self-envisioning was the necessary first act-of-campaign for any poor boy who would be President.

The Soviets were wonderful, warm to him—and such a source of excitement.
They
were changing the world—by imagination. Gorbachev was drawing forth the greatest minds, to think anew. Hart began to nurture the germ of a book—an anatomy of that great new revolution. With his contacts among the Soviet elite, with his background in U.S.-Soviet relations, with his lifelong love for the Russia of Tolstoy and Dostoyevski ... perhaps Gary Hart was the man to make the Soviets’ spiritual upheaval come alive on the page. At least, to make it clear. Hart was sure the Soviets would help. Maybe
Mikhail Gorbachev
would help! It was that important: if the world were to change, America would also have to think anew. And even in those first months of Bush’s term, Hart could see—it was so
apparent
to him—Bush was stuck in the old rules. Gorbachev was trying to pull walls down in Eastern Europe,
right now
—and Bush wouldn’t help. Bush hadn’t budged on arms control—on
anything
. He kept waiting for some stupid
committee
to “review the policy.” Bush couldn’t feel the rock shifting below the soil. ... Hart thought, maybe
he
could make the people see—and they would lead their leaders. Hart thought—he hardly dared say—this book might lead
him
back into his own country’s policy debate. That was the part of his dream that lingered: he wanted to put forth his ideas—let them rise or fall by their own power. He still believed, had to believe, ideas had power. Over drinks or dinner, he’d sometimes ask friends: “Do
you
see any way ... I could come back?”

Not for public office—nor even national politics—he’d given up that hope, perforce. ... It was in July ’88, at the Democratic convention, that they shot him up with poison enough to kill that dream—even in his stubborn soul. The world was celebrating how cleverly Dr. Dukakis had staved off infection by Jesse Jackson’s genius. God knows why Gary showed up. ... Why wouldn’t he show up, when he’d given his adulthood to that Party, trying to make the country better? He showed up because that was his life. ... But even before he got to Atlanta, he heard dark rumors he was not to be seen—not by the populace, surely. The Party powers scheduled speech slots for former candidates—except for Gary Hart. Then the wires hooted to the world that Gary Hart had been issued a
press pass
! (He’d agreed to write a column for a Denver paper.) So a thousand desperate mediapersons all had one piss-and-giggle feature to file—and Hart was assaulted as he tried to drop off his column.

How’s it feel to be on the other side?

“I’m not on the other side.”

Then what’re you doing here?

Y’ask people questions ’n’ y’write it down?

Have ya got a little PRESS sign to put in your hat?

Hey, Gary! Hey! Gary! Hey! Y’gonna write f’
The Miami Herald?

When he walked onto the floor of the Omni, to visit the Colorado delegation, young men in the employ of Party Chairman Paul Kirk blocked off the aisles—so no one could get to Hart, no delegates, no camera crews. It got a bit rough—Kirk’s goons had to use a little goon-force—but the nation was spared reminder that Gary Hart was a Democrat. After one day, Hart got the message: “I’ve become a nonperson.” They couldn’t make him leave. They didn’t have to. By the second day, he was on his way back to the airport, and home. He never should have come. His kids told him, he never should have come. But he hadn’t known how it would be. ... “I’m an undigestible—what is it? In Dickens? I’m an undigested piece of gristle,” he said. “That’s not what I want to be in life.”

After that he knew enough to stay out of the line of fire. But well into the Age of Bush, you’d see his name in boldface, in leering People-column squibs—this, for instance, from
The Washington Post
:

“
Yes, that friendly couple sitting in the lounge of the Jefferson Hotel Monday evening did look familiar. It was none other than the man who once wanted to be President, Gary Hart, and he was having drinks with an attractive dark-haired young woman. They came and left separately and Hart paid for his vodka and her scotch with his American Express Card. The Jefferson always has been one of those dark intimate spots where meetings take place
...”

Occasionally, some thinker of the press would solicit a quote, or more rarely, a column, about an actual issue—say, the disintegration of Soviet empire, or the twenty-first-century needs of the Pentagon. More rarely still, some large-bore thinker would note that every Democrat well known to be knowledgeable was using issues brought forth by Gary Hart: the death of the New Deal, the concern (as Democrats) for economic expansion, tough talk for unions and interest groups, worker retraining, reinvestment in infrastructure, military reform, postcontainment foreign policy. ... New Ideas became Big Buzzwords.