What It Takes (32 page)

God rest ye merry gentlemen,

Let nothing ye dismay ...

In the foyer, the Air Force Choir was in song, but there was no rest for a man with thirty thousand friends—certainly not at Christmastime. There were the hundreds of cards sent to Washington, still waiting for his personal P.S. And then the hundreds of pictures, each to get an inscription, personal, jovial, sometimes intimate. Bush could knock them out, one after the other. And, meanwhile, the parties, night after night, and Bush telling stories, teasing, pointing, punching shoulders, introducing, pollinating his garden of friends in a buzz of happy talk and laughter. But now, for the moment, the buzz died away, the choir was silent, and a rustle of whispers swept the ground floor of the Residence.

“Isn’t that? ...”

“Where? It sure is ...”

And Bush called out across the foyer (as he called whenever he spotted a new guest), called through the sudden silence ... “Ollie!”

Of course, they were all stunned: Ollie North was too hot to touch now. The hottest! A pariah! Jeez, and the house held a half-dozen reporters! What was Bush
thinking
? Didn’t he, uh, talk this out? Couldn’t the staff head this off?

The short answer was, not many of the staff knew. Fuller heard about it, but he knew better than to say a word. The PAC, the political guys ... why would Bush bring it up with them? This wasn’t politics. A personal thing. His own guest list. Christmas! His own house. Friends! If they couldn’t understand that, well ... That stuff about Ollie lying to Congress, shredding papers—nothing proved yet! Anyway, it wasn’t
about
that. Ollie was a guy he knew, he’d worked with. (And not just Ollie: Poindexter showed up that night. And Bud McFarlane made the list for another party.) The point was, that was all politics. Bush couldn’t let it change the way he was. They were friends. Shouldn’t be shunned.

Instantly, Bar was there at his side in the foyer, to greet Ollie. ... How about a drink? Eggnog? ... Of course, Bar wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t that George Bush discussed it with her. Didn’t need to. ... Thirty years before, back in West Texas, where deals were done on a handshake between men, there was one fellow who didn’t play the game right. Soon enough, of course, everybody in town knew. And no one would touch him with a ten-foot pipe. That year, George and Bar had a party, and Bar was surprised to see this man appear. She said to George: “I thought we weren’t going to have anything to do with him.” And Bush said: “Just because I’m not gonna ever do business with him doesn’t mean he can’t be a friend.”

The funny thing was, everybody heard Bush use that word, “friend,” a hundred times a day, but they never could see what it meant to him.

By what extravagance of need and will did a man try to make thirty thousand friends?

By what steely discipline did he strive to keep them—with notes, cards, letters, gifts, invitations, visits, calls, and silent kindnesses, hundreds every week, every one demanding some measure of his energy and attention?

And by what catholicity (or absence) of taste could he think well of every one of them?

He could not.

But they would never know that.

The funny thing was, the friendship depended not on what Bush thought of them, but what they thought of him, or what he wanted them to think. If they thought well of him, then, they were friends.

And he would try to the point of contortion not to lose them. On the altar of what idea would he sacrifice a friendship? For a
speech
? For that show-biz? For some brainy-boy staff guy’s idea of
self-definition
?

He
was
defining himself, as he had for sixty years: eleven parties, a thousand pictures, thirty thousand Christmas cards, to
friends
. It was by their fond gaze that George Bush saw himself. By them was his fortune counted. By them was his progress marked in the world. Only by their loss would he be diminished. And George Bush could not afford that loss now. It was by their number and approbation that he measured himself the size of a President.

The great thing about Christmas was, it gave Dole a chance to catch up on work. Interview requests that stacked up while things were hopping, while the Senate was in—Dole would take the list and mark them off: 10:00, 10:30, 10:45, 11:15 ... bingo, a half-dozen profiles in the works. (They were all trying to write up Bob Dole now, to “explain” how he took the lead away from Bush.) Or something would happen, and the networks would phone to ask where Dole was vacationing: Could they get a call to him?

“He’s right here.”

“
Really
?”

“Sittin’ at his desk.”

They’d send a crew right over.

And there they’d find the Bobster, friendly, relaxed, charming ... they were amazed. He sat and
talked
—asked them what they’d heard in New Hampshire, let slip a knowing aside on Regan (“Gaghh! Guy’s hangin’ on f’dear life!”) ... didn’t even seem to mind the stupid profile questions:

“How about hobbies?”

“Well, agh, kinda don’t ... I mean, politics ...”

“No
hobbies
?”

Lord, what did they want him to do? Play golf?

The point was, this
was
relaxation: no one around, nothing stirring on the Hill except Dole’s office. It wasn’t that he didn’t pay attention to the holiday. Half the staff was gone the week before Christmas. Half took off the week after that. Dole meant to get away, two or three days, to the condo in Florida, but then, Elizabeth was tied up with
her
job. Still, Dole came in late most mornings, nine or nine-thirty, sat down at his desk and had his oatmeal. Sometimes, he wouldn’t even wear a suit, just slip a sweater over his tie. This year, he wore his new Christmas sweater, a hand-knit beauty, white cardigan with clasps down the front and bright green and red snowflake patterns across the chest. He looked terrific: white shirt crisp under the sweater, flipping the fingers of his left hand idly on the smooth gray flannel of his pants-leg, occasionally emitting a tuneless whistle as he padded around the office in his black tassel loafers.

“Agh, anythin’ new?”

Sometimes he’d pull his chair up to an empty desk, next to some staffer. “D’you see the figures for those car comp’nies? Makin’ out like
bann-
dits! ...” (That was from a story in the Bobster’s clip file, waiting for him next to the oatmeal that morning.) It was almost like Dole was trying to chat! Thing was, most of them couldn’t think what to say back to him. So he’d get up and whistle around some more.

He made a point of remembering the staff at Christmas. Always had a party in the office—last a couple of hours. And he gave the staff all the gifts that piled up under and around Betty’s desk, from lobbyists, constituents, admirers of all kinds: cases of wine, whiskey, cigars, clocks, cameras ... and weird stuff, Kansas figurines, sampler flags, paintings of Dole. Fruit baskets, things like that, he’d send off to hospitals. Popcorn and candy he’d open right there and grab a handful each time he padded by.

Then, too, for the women in the office, he’d send Betty out to buy scarves or bracelets, or something. For men, he’d send Dean out to buy twenty-five ties. Dole wouldn’t pick them out himself, he was color-blind. (For his own ties, Tito, his Brooks Brothers salesman, sewed numbers on the back so Dole could match them. One time, at dinner in Kansas City, Dole’s tie flopped over to reveal a big 4. Max Klein, the drawly old Southwestern Bell lobbyist, remarked: “Senator, you ought have ’em number it 104 or something, so people’ll think you have more ties.”) Then, too, Betty had to go out to buy extravagant gifts for all the family back in Kansas. And Dole would get something really expensive for his daughter, Robin, and Elizabeth. And then, at his desk, he’d make out his list of checks—for the barbers in the Senate shop, the cooks, waiters, and hostesses in the Senate Dining Room, the shoeshine guy, the parking guys, and the Watergate doormen and janitors ... they all got generous checks from Dole.

And, somehow, the Christmas cards had to get out. Betty and Jo-Anne Coe would honcho the job, but what they’d end up doing was plopping a hundred, two hundred names and envelopes on an intern’s desk ... in fact, the desks of all interns and some of the Kansas and legislative staff—everyone would have to crash those addresses out
right away
: it was usually down to the wire. People Dole actually thought of got calls. That’s what he did with most of those easy days: he fired out calls to Kansas; hundreds to Iowa and New Hampshire, South Dakota, Minnesota, and the other early primary states. Then he’d call his big guys and smart guys, political sages and men in the know, in and out of office or retirement, men like Alf Landon, and Richard Nixon, and the thousand-dollar-suit lobbyist crowd, the boys at Gray & Co., Timmons & Co. Christmas was a perfect chance to check in, wish them well, find out what they’d been hearing.

Dole paid attention to those big guys, mostly because, in one way or another, they had been, or had made, or had served a President. In the Dole map of the universe, that placed them in a special galaxy. (“Agh, guy worked in the White House, oughta know
some
thing ...”) Yet, in some corner of consciousness, Dole could not be unaware that he seldom mentioned a
current
crowd in the White House without, in the same breath, complaining that they were out of touch, wanting in tact or political awareness, mistaken on some policy, or, generally speaking, out to lunch. This Dole-forged alloy of reverent contempt was familiar, comfortable to him. It was the same combination he reserved for other attainments, including:

“Agh, guy’s a Ph.
Dee ...
”

Or, “Lotta moneyy ...”

Or, any connection to the Ivy League. (If Dole had a staff assistant with a degree from Harvard or Yale, he could not introduce that person without mentioning the school. And just as often, he’d remark privately, almost to himself, that he knew ten times as much as that guy.)

Anyway, this Christmas, the big guys, the car-phone-in-the-Jag crowd, the former White House Special Assistants, now lobbyists for McDonnell Douglas, consultants to the Republic of South Korea, were telling him he was doing fine, but he needed to build an organization: he couldn’t try to do it himself this time. He had to get someone to run the campaign, someone who knew the ropes, who could keep the operation on track (they meant: keep Dole on track), someone who commanded respect, who could speak for the campaign, who could take the heat, someone with national standing. ... In other words, he needed ... a real Big Guy.

Thing was, Dole knew that: he’d been hearing that for months; he was trying! Nothing wrong with Don Devine, of course. Nice guy ... a professor, got a Ph.D.! ... but who was listening to him anymore? Not Dole. Dole got new advisers like Christmas sweaters ... liked ’em for a while, then got tired of them. Got tired of anyone who kept telling him the same thing, like he didn’t get it the first time. Lately, he’d been talking to John Sears ... the guy who put Reagan on the path in ’76, then in ’80, till Reagan fired him when he lost Iowa. Sears was a Big Guy. Big ideas: how to structure the campaign staff, set up machinery in the early states, how he’d take care of the whole campaign while Dole went out and made speeches, got a
vision
—you know, Presidential. But Dole would have to let go of the rest, the money, the ads, the schedule, everything. ...

O-kayy! Dole knew he had to give it all up—or at least look like he did. That’s what the press was writing: Dole’s big problem was organization, flyin’ around with the map on his knees, making up a campaign as he went along. Maybe they were right. Let someone else sit in the office, chair the meetings—near as Dole could figure, that’s all they did in the campaign: everyone was always in a
meeting
... for what? Is that what the press wanted to see? But the Bobster was going to show them now—sign on a Big Guy, even before the
exploratory campaign
. Sign him on and
announce it
. Raise a million dollars a month, and announce that, too. That’d wake them up. Ring Bush’s chimes. Show the world that Dole was going to play this one like a Big Guy.

So right around Christmas, Dole arranged a secret meeting in the Maryland hills, at his friend Bob Ellsworth’s country place—not too far from Camp David, matter of fact! Ellsworth was all class, possessed of the attributes that registered with Dole. Came from Kansas, but
eastern
Kansas, Snob Hill, fine family ... in fact, there was a county, Ellsworth, and a town, Ellsworth, Kansas ... and Ellsworth’s dad had been alumni director of KU, a position of such clout in the state that, during the thirties, he took on the Ku Klux Klan—single-handed—and won, faced them down! ... And Ellsworth the younger went to Congress with Dole, freshmen together in 1961, and by ’68 he was Nixon’s Political Director, working the country with the Big Guys, for the White House ... and then Ambassador to NATO—people still called him Ambassador, though he had his own consulting firm now—lotta moneyy! ... Perfect host for the meeting! And Sears drove out, of course; and Don Devine refused to come at first, but then he showed up; and David Keene, a consultant to Dole and a friend to Devine. ...

And Ellsworth, with his wife, Vivian, went up to the big new Giant Food in Frederick, and laid in a small fortune in deli stuff, and chocolate cake, and a fine new Silex coffeemaker. (They weren’t much for coffee themselves, but they were hosting a political meeting!) And they set out this feast in the old farmhouse, and everybody dug in, while Sears started talking about what ought to be done three months from now, and what ought to be done six months from now ... and Dole sat in Ellsworth’s rocker, in his Christmas cardigan, listening and nodding, eyes drifting from Sears to Devine, to Keene going back for more chocolate cake, to the windows overlooking the pond and pasture, while the scenario of his White House win hummed in his ears. This was it: the Big Guys, The Plan ... the kind of meeting Teddy White used to sit in on in Hyannisport!

But Keene was cold (Ellsworth couldn’t get the goddam wood stove lit) and laying into the coffee and cake, and pretty soon he was working on the sort of sugar-caffeine frenzy that crops up occasionally as a defense in murder trials. He said to Sears: