What It Takes (34 page)

Hart knew that. It wasn’t that
he
wasn’t grateful ... but as a father he wanted that trip for her. He knew how she felt about the campaign. They’d always had that understanding, an identity of feeling that didn’t need explaining. His daughter was, in Lee’s homely phrase, the apple of his eye. Hart didn’t permit himself that kind of cliché. He’d say it was just ... easier with her.

John was the hard one, his son, now twenty. Hart worried about him. Sometimes he seemed so bitter! And Hart had asked himself a thousand times if he was being unfair, twisting John’s life for the sake of his own. John didn’t want much part of the campaign—not the last one, anyway. He took off to Europe, in the winter of ’83, got the hell out. He didn’t want to be a spectacle, to be interviewed, and watched, and filmed. Hart knew how that was. He’d talk to John—next week, home, Christmas—to tell him he understood ... really.

Words never came easily between them. They were freighted with too much meaning. Hart had to make John see it was all right: if John didn’t want a campaign,
there would be no campaign
. Hart told himself, as he had so often: No campaign. No interviews. No Secret Service. No White House. None of it. Not if John didn’t want it. He’d tell John, next week ... if they could talk. Hart didn’t know. He’d talk to Wilson first.

John talked to Wilson more than his father. It was strange, but Hart had come to depend on Doug. One time, a couple of months back, on another trip, Doug and Hart had a walk through London, after dinner at the Wilton Inn. They talked for hours, through lanes and mews, in the misted lamplight. Hart was so worried about John. He’d gotten into a scrape in Washington, got mad, punched a dent in the side of his own car. Hart couldn’t understand that, John’s streak of violence, that temper!

“Don’t worry,” Doug said. “John’s headstrong. He has a temper. But he’ll never hurt anyone.”

“How do you know?” Hart said.

“Because he’s just like you. What provokes his anger is injustice ... like you.”

Hart stopped and peered, eyebrows up, at Doug’s face.

Doug said: “You two are more alike than anybody I know ... even more than Andrea.” They passed another few houses, silent, Hart looking down.

“You really think so?”

He sounded relieved—but puzzled, too: he never thought of himself as angry.

That’s what Lee tried to tell him—must have told him a half-dozen times over the years, when things were difficult, when they had to talk: It’s
okay
to be angry.

But words were hard with them, too. Sometimes what one of them said just sailed past the other. Lee would tell him: “It’s okay! You don’t have to like everything about me. It’s all right to be angry with parts of me ...”

But Gary would give her that blank look, or stiffen at the edge of annoyance, and insist, like she didn’t
get
it: “Babe, I’m
not... angry
.”

And she knew (she’d grown up in the church, too, wrapped even tighter in it than he) that he could not allow that. Frustration, yes, but anger was ... unworthy, like swearing, or the sin of pride. And you could not push Gary—not into something he considered unworthy. She could not.

But she knew. ... Funny, on a lot of things she was smarter than he, though you’d never know it to hear her talk. Ten times a day, she’d break off, amid something she was saying, and skitter, breathless, into explanation that, of course, she didn’t learn all this herself, but
Gary
always said ... You had to be a very good friend indeed before Lee would let an hour pass without reminding you who was the intellect in that household. When he was around, she’d do it every ten minutes, sometimes with every sentence, like a nervous tic, a dripping faucet. Of course, it drove him nuts.

But she believed it: look what he’d done! He’d been right from the start, on all the big things: when Gary said George McGovern could win the nomination; when Gary said he, Hart, could come from
nowhere
(against three people well known in the state!) to win the Senate seat from Colorado; when he said the race in ’84 would come down to him and Mondale—Glenn wasn’t a factor, Glenn was no choice—forget the polls, endorsements, forget the money (he mortgaged their house!) ... the choice would be between the old way ... and him. How could she not believe in him? She guessed (this was
not
something Gary said) that they were all smart, all the men who got to run, who got to that level. But Gary was different, she knew that.

And she was right. They were all smart, but Hart’s mind was of another order. If, say, George Bush’s intelligence was a silken windsock, so supple, so brightly sensitive to the currents of air around him, Hart’s was something harder, unyielding—industrial-grade, a diamond-pointed tool on the landscape. It was proof not only to shifting air, but to layers of surface “fact,” the lava-crust from Washington’s eternal volcano, this year’s, this month’s every-body-knows it-goes-without-saying op-ed magma.

“I don’t understand why ...” he’d start, and the staff would brace in their seats, knowing they were in for a trip to the center of the earth ... or at least to the nearest stratum of rock, the first available Hart-fact. Sometimes, in a rush toward some bold idea, which captivated him just by its boldness, he’d auger and slice, kick up only ash and dust. But he never stopped bearing down on that diamond bit, weighted as it was with his will. In fact, it was that process of continuous cutting, always against the grain of common wisdom (Mondale had that nomination
all locked up
... Reagan wins elections
’cause he’s good on TV
) that kept Hart’s edge so sharp.

But who would turn that vicious tool inward, into his own soft center? The answer was:
he
would not, no matter how many profile writers and armchair political shrinks wanted to see him sliced open like a mango. He kept telling them: it wasn’t about him. That’s not what people wanted to know. They had to know where he stood, that he stood for
something
, something that made
sense
. He had a long public record. He’d given half his life to building that record, and it was out there. He’d never tried to hide. He’d gone against the grain, tried to change the Party, the country. And he’d been right.

That must be what threatened them: if he’d been right—every step of the way—then all the big-feet, the consultants, the Party pros, the inside players, had been wrong, from the start. That’s why they had to come
at him
, to make
him
the issue: Who
is
this guy? ...

It was different with Hart and the voters. He couldn’t stomach a profile interview of fifteen minutes, wouldn’t sit for a picture for thirty seconds. But he’d stand for an hour in a Legion Hall, trying to explain military reform to a guy who thought Hart must be antidefense. That man wanted to know what he thought! Hart had the greatest respect for the citizenry. He thought they were like him.

That’s what he’d tried to tell Gorbachev: the American people were not confused. They understood the need for arms control, an end to the crazy spiral. They were not distracted by the Iran scandal. There was no point in Gorbachev’s waiting for an end to all that hubbub, or waiting two years for a new administration, to try to get an arms deal.

Actually, it was Gorbachev who bore down on the subject: he couldn’t understand Reykjavík, why Ronald Reagan kept retreating to the same stupid formulas—wouldn’t try to make the world new with a bold stroke. Reagan
wanted
to—Gorbachev knew that, he could
feel
it. He and Reagan had talked well together, they
agreed
... as long as they were alone. Then they’d break, go back to their own delegations, and when Reagan returned, everything had changed! Reagan couldn’t deliver! Gorbachev would say something they’d agreed upon two hours before, and Reagan’s old head would begin to shake, and he’d say: “Well, uh, no ... no, we, uh, don’t accept that.”

Gorbachev ran through every talk in Reykjavík, for an hour and a half, glancing down from time to time to his little leather book with handwritten notes. Hart was fascinated by the man’s mimicry, his recall, but he could not take up the invitation to dump on Reagan: Hart was here to advance, not undermine, American policy.

Still, Gorbachev kept asking, demanding: Why? Why could Reagan not come up to it, when the moment was so right? His hands were tied! Reagan’s hands were tied! ... Gorbachev was like a guy on a barstool, poking a finger into Hart’s chest: Why? You tell me.
You’re
from that country.
You
explain it. ... And with every question, it was clearer: Gorbachev was looking for someone to ride the ripples with him. And with every question, Hart’s excitement grew. There would be someone, there
is
someone. ... But he could not say that.

All he could do was try to keep Gorbachev from retreating to
his
old formulas. At one point, Gorbachev suggested that Reagan was captive to the
military-industrial complex
. It struck Hart false, tinny, like a phrase from the old Gromyko textbook. (Hart had met, two years before, with Gromyko; that day Hart said two things: “Good morning ...” and “Thank you very much for your time.” In between, Gromyko ranted and pounded the table.) Now Hart told Gorbachev: there was no monolithic “military-industrial complex” that had to make puppets of American politicians.

The phrase was not
his
, Gorbachev objected. “That is from one of your Presidents.”

True enough, Eisenhower said it. But that did not tell the whole story, Hart said. He, for example, was a Senator from Colorado, where the MX missile system was made—and yet, he voted against the MX. There were subtleties to the United States system that, perhaps, the General Secretary had yet to learn.

No, Gorbachev said, his research was good, his advisers well informed. ... Here, he gestured with a courtly nod to his left, to Dobrynin. ... Anatoli Fyodorovich Dobrynin was newly back in Moscow, to serve at Gorbachev’s elbow, after more than twenty-four years as Ambassador in Washington. He’d observed American government under six Presidents, back to JFK. Now Hart, in turn, glanced at Dobrynin with the hint of a smile. He and the old Ambassador went back a few years, too.

Yes, it’s true the Ambassador is well informed about American politics, Hart allowed. Indeed, the Ambassador is probably better informed than most American citizens. ... Of course, that did not stop the Ambassador from maintaining at lunch three years ago that John Glenn was a
sure thing
for the Democratic nomination for President; did not stop the Ambassador, in fact, from suggesting to his friend, Senator Hart, that he
give up the race
—Glenn was just too popular!

Hart sat back and allowed himself a small chuckle (no more than Gorbachev allowed himself at that moment) and noted with satisfaction a becoming tide of pink that rose from the ancient Ambassador’s neckline, toward his snowy brow.

Days later, in Vienna, the memory of that blush still drew a bark of laughter from Hart, as he retold the story. Of course, he hadn’t breathed a word of the joke in Russia. In fact, to the reporters in the National Hotel, he’d held himself to general, positive comments: Gorbachev was open, and interesting ... the meeting had been long, informative ... the General Secretary and he had agreed on the need for arms control progress with the current U.S. administration. ...

It was left to Tass, the Soviet wire, to let the world know the important fact. The meeting with Senator Hart, Tass said, was “friendly and relaxed,” That was standard Soviet code for the essence of the matter: they’d hit it off fine.

Vienna was celebration, and a day of decompression. The staff knew Hart had to have a day somewhere to rest and think. (This trip had started with a conference in Korea and a stop in Japan—Hart had flown around the world in a week.) And there were arms talks in Vienna that Hart could check in on: Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction talks—right up Hart’s alley. Warren Zimmerman, the chief U.S. negotiator, was a friend. His son, Tim, had worked on Hart’s New Hampshire campaign. And Zimmerman
père
was a pro on East–West relations: knowledgeable, experienced, but without a vested interest in the wisdom of the moment. Hart could run the Gorbachev meeting past Warren; it would be useful. ...

Anyway, there had to be a stopover somewhere, and Vienna was the perfect middle ground between East and West. It was old, cultured, suffused with the half-decomposed air of empire, Hapsburgs, Mitteleuropa, of spies and assignations, of plots whispered over café tables ... the kind of place Hart liked to set scenes in his novels. (His second novel,
Strategies of Zeus
, had just been published in the United States. It was the story of a U.S. arms control negotiator, a quiet, raw-boned man from the Rockies whose life was caught up in a desperate struggle to save the world—a goal that came clearest to him whenever he gazed at his beloved daughter. ... Hart, of course, insisted it was not, in any way, autobiographical.)

Withal, there was another reason for Vienna: Hart was determined to take Andrea to the opera, and when he got an idea like that, he was seldom brooked.

No matter he was not a big opera fan, no matter the tickets would cost a fortune; the
Staatsoper
, the state opera house, was one of the world’s grandest, most sublime sites for music. Hart was resolved (as his parents had been on an education for
him
) that Andrea would have the advantages
he never had
... the familiarity, the ease with the world ... and with the worldly: in Ottawa, young Gary Hartpence never even went to the
movies
.

So he had the day all planned: they’d fly in from Moscow early, check into the Imperial ... the hotel manager had figured out
who he was
(as so many hoteliers had, since ’84) and had bumped them up to a two-bedroom suite, all white-on-white, with huge bathrooms of gleaming white marble, towels as thick as a carpet, bathrobes even thicker, white linens, white upholstery, and ivory-intricate carpets: the perfect hotel antidote to Moscow’s grubby National ... like diving into an ocean of
Schlag
. Then off for a late breakfast, or at least one of those wicked Austrian treats, a ten-thousand-calorie orgy of hot chocolate and whipped cream. And then a walk around the city, Hart-style, into every old bookshop and twisty street that held mystery, promise. And then, perhaps, lunch, and a stop for a talk at Warren Zimmerman’s apartment, and then to the hotel, to rest, to make a few phone calls, and dress ... and on to the opera, and a glorious supper, and a fine night of sleep in a room constructed a hundred years before ... built for the Duke of Württemberg. It would be exquisite.