What It Takes (33 page)

“You can’t manage a thing! When my people came back to me in Iowa, told me what you were doing for Reagan, I told ’em I ought to fire ’em if they couldn’t collect intelligence better than that. I thought you
had
to be doing more than that. But you weren’t. And you lost. So, don’t start telling us now what
we
ought to be doing ...”

And then Sears was off again, explaining why he was right seven years ago, in Iowa. And Keene started shouting back at him, and Devine let everybody know that if they thought he’d take the number-two job under Sears, well, forget it. It was only Dole talked him into running this campaign—never wanted it, wasn’t doing it for his pleasure ... and Ellsworth sat near the buffet counter, waiting for Dole to call a halt to this drivel ... but Dole never said a thing. This was Dole’s nightmare—trapped in a room with a vicious interpersonal quarrel to sort out. And it went on for
hours. ...
Aagh! Meetings!

So finally, they all just drove away. And Dole didn’t have his Big Guy to announce. Didn’t matter. There was time. Anyway, it wasn’t going to change what he did. “You know,” Dole used to say, “I came to Congress, I answered every letter, answered it by hand. I was my own AA, my own Press Secretary, my own Advance man, my own office manager, my own political adviser. Funny thing: we kept winning.”

He had work to do. Do it himself, if he had to. Wherever he was, that
was
the campaign. Elizabeth was ready to head down to Florida December 24. That was all right with Bob. Of course, by that time, there was no one around for him to call. Unless he had their home numbers.

His Midwest coordinator, Floyd Brown—best guy Dole had in the field—took off the day before Christmas, too, and flew to Olympia, Washington, to his parents’ home. It was Christmas Eve, and not too early—must have been eight or nine at night, back East—when the phone rang in Olympia, and Floyd’s dad picked it up.

“How’s it
lookinnnn
’? ... What’s
cookinnn
’?”

Floyd’s dad almost hung up. Thought it had to be a crank call.

I
N THE TINY ELEVATOR
, after the meeting, no one said a word. No one wanted to spoil the moment. Anyway, together with the two Kremlinoids who rode along and pressed the buttons, there was hardly room for the three of them to face one another. They grinned straight ahead.

Kind of funny, this narrow old elevator, in the grand Seat of Empire. He had seen things like that everywhere in Russia: deficiency, a want of resource, of precision ... things that didn’t match the image of Soviet superpower. Less than a day in the country this time and Hart already took it for granted: the Soviet system was decayed from within, deficient economically, industrially, in investment in the lives of its people. ... That was the enormous fact that underlay all the new buzzwords: “glasnost,” “perestroika,” “the Crisis of Communism” ... and made possible the brave new world-without-warheads that Ronald Reagan flirted with, then kicked away, at the summit in Iceland.

The Soviet Union was rotting from within.

It was the kind of defining fact-on-the-ground that made opportunity, new rules of the game. It was the kind of fact that Hart never missed, and never forgot, the kind he’d built his career on: simple, fundamental, so
apparent
... why didn’t others see it? They never seemed to catch on. But once weighed for the ripples it would launch as it hit home, such a plain, radical truth could change ... everything. From that kind of fact, a Gary Hart fact, he could reckon out to the ends of the earth.

That was the joy of being with Hart: the shared, secret knowledge. Once you saw one of those Hart-facts, saw it as he did, started riding the ripples, you belonged. Not that you could keep the secret to yourself: it was the ethic of his life, and of those in his orbit, to build the power of those truths by sharing them, spreading them, if need be, by forcing them upon the world.

But the awareness was the fun. It was like seeing the world (watching even yourself!) with a second set of eyes, more knowledgeable, privileged, as if removed to a hillside above the action. ... And always, with Hart,
you knew he knew
! That was shared, even without words: by a lungful of laugh that burst from Hart, like a bark, when some absurd detail caught his eye. Or he could include you without a sound: with his lips pursed, he’d just toss you a look, and a slight, intimate shrug of his eyebrows, with the joke—
he knew you knew
—lurking in his eyes beneath ... like the look he flashed for a half-second now to Doug Wilson, his foreign policy staffer, as the elevator lurched and sighed to a halt at the ground floor.

Everything made such delicious sense, once you knew ... and Wilson knew. He’d worked with Hart for five years now, worked his way into the First Circle, worked for two years on this meeting: researching, scouting expert help, writing letters, nudging the Soviets toward a face-to-face, visiting the embassy with articles and opinion polls:
HART URGES SHIFT IN U.S. POLICY...HART FRONT-RUNNER AMONG DEMOCRATS ...
No one knew better how hard Hart had worked for this, his elation now, his relief... what it
meant
. Wilson looked at his watch: three—no, three and a half hours! His mind flashed back through the meeting: it was amazing, in its sweep—and rich with ironic detail. For Wilson, the detail was the pastry, that blueberry pastry, so delicate, finely wrought, so unlike
anything
any normal Soviet citizen would ever see ... the pastries, on two little plates, which rested for four hours, on the green felt of the table, in front of Mikhail Gorbachev.

God, Wilson wanted one of those pastries! Gorbachev even offered—urged Doug to leave his notes and eat! But, no, he bent to his frantic scrawl, like the Soviet notetaker, across the green baize. And Hart, of course, didn’t touch them. Probably never
looked
at them, he was so intent, so on his game, so ... excited. He was right! What he’d said about this new Soviet leader, what he’d seen, that new and enormous Hart-fact, it was ...
so apparent
: Mikhail Gorbachev was riding the ripples, too, reckoning out to a new world order. The old Cold War rules
did not have to apply
.

Of course, you had to know Hart: you couldn’t
see
his excitement. Hart was especially still in his moments of apotheosis—the ’72 convention when he watched George McGovern go over the top, the night in ’84 when Hart won New Hampshire. ... It was as if the new certainty that he was right—from the start—gave him ease instead of adrenaline. There was excitement, yes, but he did not permit himself amazement.

That was left to his daughter, Andrea, who was twenty-two, and had just spent three and a half hours with the leader of the Soviet Union and her father, who had sat down across from each other and discussed the world,
the planet
, with no apparent discomfort, but with intensity, understanding, and such a calm, shared sense of future and purpose—like two guys getting together to build a boat. In many ways, Andrea was like her father: there wasn’t much gee-whiz about her. In fact, her usual gaze on the world gave even less away than his. But every once in a while, she was suddenly shocked: that guy on TV, the man at the podium in front of thousands, was her father!

She always remembered the first time it happened, that dizzying hour on the platform of the Moscone Center in San Francisco. It was the night of Hart’s speech to the Democratic Party, to a convention that should have been his. It was the night of the eighteenth of June, 1984. She’d asked him if it was going to be, you know ... was she going to be in tears? And he’d said, well, yeah, perhaps. So she brought a wad of Kleenex, and she thought she was ready, as she sat down just behind the podium, a little to the right, with her mother and brother. And all the delegates were before her, thousands, and the alternates stretched off to both sides, and the guests in back, farther than she could see, as if the people of a nation were massed in the hall, and rising from their midst, two great black towers, where the networks, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, had their studios and signs, and light poured down on them all. And then, he passed in front of her, to the podium, and the ocean of people rose and began to roar, and the great force and heat and noise rushed up and struck her ... and she knew somewhere in her head that their staff had passed the word to the floor to scream and shout just as long as they could, but these
people
—this had been their life for a year and a half, and it had been her life for a year and a half, and she looked at him at the podium, and it was so strange ... all the months, the days and nights, the frustration, joy, the fear, hope, hate, came through her, welled up in a jumble-rush like the signs
HART HART HART HART HART HART HART HART HART
leaping red everywhere in front of her eyes, and she looked over and she
saw
him ... Dad! ... It was like she realized for the first time. He’d come from
Ottawa, Kansas
... to this ... from parents who never finished high school ... to
this
. ... And she must have looked like a raccoon, with her eye makeup streaming down, as she searched her hands for Kleenex, but it was gone, and she looked down and there it was, on the floor in twisted shreds, and she bent to pick it up, she’d clean it up ... but the people were screaming and she looked up at him, and he was saying softly, thank you, thank you ... trying to calm them.

She guessed another man might have pinched himself, just to know it was real, when it was so ...
amazing
like that, like it was now, this morning. ... But it wasn’t another man, it was Dad, who wasn’t like that, usually. No ... then again, this wasn’t usual, was it? Hart did the next best thing to squeezing himself. Without looking down, he reached out and grasped his daughter’s hand, held on to her, as they walked to their car through the Kremlin.

The surprise for Hart was how easy it was, how natural, right from the start. Of course, by the end of the meeting, he’d come to expect that from Gorbachev. But it was like every step Hart had taken: he never really knew until it happened, couldn’t be
sure
how it would be. This was just as much an act of bold and blessed faith as the first step, from Ottawa out to the wide world. He couldn’t be sure when he went off to college that he even belonged out there—maybe they were all geniuses ... how could he know? ... until he made that push and the door swung open ... just as Yale’s door did afterward, and Washington’s, the McGovern campaign, the Senate. ... There it was, every time, the opportunity, just like he’d imagined.

That’s what he never could make them see—the writers, the Washington big-feet, the pols (what Gary Hart, front-runner, at the doorstep of the White House, still was pleased to call the Establishment). He never could make them understand that he was not a plotter. He didn’t have any grand strategy to advance himself. He had ideas. He put them forth. And people accepted them ... or they didn’t. What had to happen, happened. But they always wrote about it like it was some kind of trick, a tactic, like he was some master schemer.

He’d try to explain: “I’m very existential.”

Of course, that only made it worse.

But it wasn’t like that today—not at all. (Funny, it never was overseas.) Gorbachev was so ready. From the moment that door swung open, and there he was—no fanfare, entourage, announcement, just him and Dobrynin, and a guy to take notes—it was natural, obvious, that they met to discuss important matters at the highest level of engagement. The only moment of uncertainty, the only stutter-step, was at the beginning, when Hart introduced Andrea. He said he’d brought his daughter so she could meet the General Secretary, get a chance to shake his hand. The implication was, she’d wait in an anteroom—if there were somewhere she could go, if the General Secretary could suggest ... but Gorbachev couldn’t have been nicer: she should stay ... he insisted! Sit! Sit!

And then Hart started, by way of introduction, to tell the General Secretary something about himself. He meant to do all that in a minute (he thought he’d only have a half-hour, tops): two terms in the Senate from Colorado, the run for President in ’84, a voting record that differed ...

But Gorbachev waved him off.

“No, I know about you,” Gorbachev said. “They call me the Soviet Gary Hart. They say I have New Ideas ...”

Back at the hotel, there was a gaggle of press: cameras and correspondents in the lobby of the National; lights came bobbing at him like an attack of killer fireflies. It was an onslaught of the eighties in this perfect 1930s lobby: the heavy curvilinear chairs with their standard Stalinist upholstery that looked exactly like the carpet; the smell that hung in all Soviet lobbies, stale black tobacco smoke atop oily fumes from the heaters ... and here were the halogen fireflies, and the Minicams, and cameramen with vests of ripstop nylon, and battery belts, and Velcro pockets, and the questions:

“How would you characterize the meeting?”

“Senator! What did you think of Gorbachev?”

Hart’s eyebrows leapt again: surprise mingled with amusement. To the cameras he said only: “I’ll be back ...” and he strode past to the elevators. He had to have a minute to collect himself, throw some water on his face: What was he going to say? With the Kremlinoid driver at the wheel, he hadn’t even had a chance to talk to Wilson or Andrea. Not even: “What did you think? ...” which was always his first question, open-ended, a challenge for them to put words on it.

“Well,” Wilson answered with a happy shrug. “I mean ... what can I say?” That was the confirmation, the assurance that it was as it seemed ... extraordinary. Andrea was surprised at Gorbachev’s warmth. He’d been charmed by her greeting in Russian—Russian Language 101, from the University of Denver. He’d invited her back to the Soviet Union,
as his guest
, whenever she wanted. She was so surprised, she told him she’d have to think about it.

Hart’s voice held a fond, fatherly needle as he said to her now, up in the suite: “Well, I guess that’s the nicest way to kiss off one of the most powerful men in the world.” And Andrea was stunned, suddenly fretful: Did it sound like that? She’d just told him what came into her head: her father’s campaign was starting, and that was her priority for the next two years. ... It wasn’t that she wasn’t grateful, but it was true!