What It Takes (51 page)

What he was, was tough from the neck up. He knew what he wanted to do and he did it. That’s why he was the center of the wheel with the guys in Green Ridge, even with the stutter—might have beaten another kid down ... not Joe. Even after he left, after Mr. Biden got the job selling cars in Wilmington and moved the family away, Charlie Roth would still (in moments of duress) tell guys that his friend Joey Biden would come back and beat them up, if they didn’t watch out. (When Joe did come back, Charlie always had a list.) But it wasn’t just fights: if you could run, Charlie, or Larry Orr, or someone, would say Joe Biden could run faster. If you had a dog, they’d say Joe’s dog, King, could murder your dog. Joe was the guy they turned to when the question arose: What are we gonna do? Joe always had an answer.

Sometimes, Saturdays, they’d go to the Roosevelt Theater, where the matinee, a double feature with a serial adventure, cost twelve cents—but they’d try to sneak in, anyway. When the villain was creeping up in evil ambush on the rocks behind Hopalong Cassidy, Joe was the one who’d stand in the darkened theater to yell: “LOOKOUT HOPPIE! HERE HE COMES!” But the best part was coming back from the Roosie: with the route Joe led them on, it always took hours. If they’d managed to sneak in and still had their money, it could take an hour just to get to the corner: stops at the Grace Farms Dairy for milkshakes, and Mueller’s Drug Store for candy, and the Big Chief Market, just to raise hell. Then they’d head off, reenacting the movie on the way home, through the alleys, over lawns; they never used the streets, never touched a sidewalk. They climbed all the fences, cut through the backyards ... if it was a western, they were the posse ... up on garage roofs, along the top of the wall at Marywood College ... after war movies, they were up against the Nazis ... climbed a tree here, to get over the fence, or used the latch on a gate, or the garbage cans, for a boost (knocked one over back there, too), down past Joey’s house into the woods, and back across Maloney Field, where sometimes they played Little League ball ... and today, staged the final shootout: the bad guy dead in the dust on Main Street ... High Noon ... but actually, it was almost dark when they got home.

Here is another game Joey devised: the sisters at Marywood College were building a new arts building, with a big theater, and at one end, behind the stage, where the sets and scenery would hoist up out of sight, the building would rise to a height of six stories. The builders were raising the steel beams with thick hemp ropes that held them in place until the riveters could secure the steel. Joe’s game was to climb the superstructure to the top, where you could edge out on a girder eighteen inches wide, maybe fifty or sixty feet in the air, and then you’d grab the rope and swing out over the stones and cinderblock, out over where the seating would be, screaming through the air, to the end of the rope’s reach, after which you’d come flying back toward the steel beams. Of course, Biden was the first to do it. He was ten. But he’d seen a Tarzan movie ... anyway, Joey had imagination.

That was the imagination that went into the real estate deal, or this President deal—same thing. Imagination was the essence of his method, the first and most crucial step: Joe got the picture in his head, like he was already there, and he knew how it was going to be ... and most important,
how he would be
. Joe was continually creating himself. This was how he made things happen. ... Then, once he made that imagination into fact, once he made his move ... BANGO—that defined the game. Others could only react. Same in fights, games, politics, real estate, love—imagination.

In ’72, when he was twenty-nine, and a County Councilman, working and voting, like any Councilman, on planning and zoning, sewer bonds, paving contracts, and stop lights ... no one in Delaware could see Joe Biden moving, by one giant leap of imagination, into the United States Senate. Hell, no! Not against Cale Boggs—an institution, a man beloved in Delaware, a man who had won seven straight elections, who had held statewide office for
twenty-five years
. There was no Democrat who even wanted to run against Boggs. But Joe could see it—had seen it already, a thousand times in his head—how Boggs would wake up one morning and find Joe Biden breathing down his neck. And most important, how Joe would be, how he’d look: young, handsome, smart, self-assured. And the way he’d act, toward Senator Boggs: respectful, friendly, fond, like a grandson ...
who knew the old man wasn’t quite up to it anymore
. ...

Joe could see the thing whole in his head, and what’s more, he could talk it. Not too often—he didn’t let most people in on a vision, but family ... Neilia, of course: he joked that his wife was the brains of the family, but it wasn’t all joke. And Val, his sister, twenty-seven, who was the manager of his campaign. And Jimmy, his brother, who was twenty-four—he was the fund-raiser. Of course, in that family, no one ever doubted Joe. But then, too, every once in a while, Joe would let in people from the outside, people he needed, people who had to believe. And then Joe would get to talking fast, with conviction—something near joy in his voice—and he’d haul them along, until they could feel his belief like a hand on their backs, until they could see it as he could, until the thing was shining in the air ... and they only hoped they were good enough to be with him, there, at the end. ... You could feel the thing happen in the room—the “connect.” People called it the Biden Rush.

The funny part was, the people who saw him—the press, the political pros—only talked about the last stop of the train: they praised his “oratory,” but wondered whether there was any thought behind the waves of stirring words. Even his own guys—the experts and consultants buzzing around this honeypot—talked about him like a wild stallion who’d never felt the bridle. They said they were with Biden because he could “connect,” he could “move the people.” Of course, now that they’d signed on, he’d also have some direction, some savvy. ... That only fed the common wisdom that Biden was an unguided missile. Every week or so, his experts were quoted (“Don’t use my name, huh? ...”), analyzing his appeal under headlines like:
THE POLITICS OF PASSION. ...
But it didn’t feel like passion to Joe. Not the way they meant it. Not when it was working. What he wanted it to feel like was the organized emotion of a football play—practiced for months, until it was clockwork—where he knew, where he
saw
in his mind, before the snap of the ball, how he’d run, exactly twenty yards down the field, where he’d feint for the goalpost and cut to the sideline ... like it already
happened,
he saw how he’d plant his left foot ... saw the tuft of grass that his cleats would dig into ... the look on the cornerback’s face ... as he left (as he would leave) that sonofabitch
in the dust
!

In the end, when you took it apart, it all rested on Joe’s certainty. He tried to tell his experts and gurus: he had to see the moves. He wanted to play them out in his head, with scenes, with dialogue ... until he had worked them, refined them, rehearsed every line ... until he was sure what would happen. Joe called that process “gaming it out”—and it went on continuously in his head. Then, once he’d seen ... he could do anything, he could stoke the fire hot enough to get the “connect,” he could swing out to the end of that rope. That was his view of his history, even the stuff that looked so ballsy: never had a doubt in his head that he could wiggle under the bumper of that truck, get to the top of that culm dump ... that he could fly over the earth from those girders (he’d been looking at those hemp ropes for weeks) ... that the owner of that house would take a half-million pullback (he knew what the sonofabitch paid for the place) ... that Cale Boggs could not react in time (Biden was at three percent in the polls when he rented the best and biggest ballroom in the state for his “victory celebration”).

Once he’d seen ... then it was singing in his head, and he didn’t have to think ... he just did. He knew what was supposed to happen. Hell, it was a
done deal
... and then it wasn’t imagination, or even balls. Not to Joe Biden. It was destiny.

That was the problem. So, Ridley and Donilon came up to Wilmington that night, one week into 1987, to tell Joe he couldn’t buy the new house. Actually, they had a few things to straighten out. For instance, was Joe going to run? (They couldn’t seem to get a clear answer.) If so, what was he doing for the last two weeks on vacation in Hawaii with Pat Caddell? And if he meant to run, what the hell was he trying to pull with a one-point-one-million-dollar house?

It was an odd summit on the shape of Joe’s life. Tim Ridley was thirty-one years old and had worked with Biden for about three months—signed on last October as Joe’s new Administrative Assistant, after a four-hour Biden Rush—and now he was supposed to manage the Presidential campaign that Joe wasn’t sure he was going to make ... and supposed to make peace among a half-dozen experts, gurus, and self-appointed Rasputins, who all wanted to run the campaign that might not happen ... who all loved Joe, and all mistrusted each other, and Joe wasn’t sure about any of them ... and now Ridley had a U.S. Senator in rut for a real estate deal that would sink the whole ship anyway.

“Look, Senator,” Ridley said, earnestly. “In the mind of a voter, there’s
no way
you get from a Senator’s seventy-five thousand a year ... to a million-and-a-half-dollar
estate
.”

“One-point-one ...” Joe said absently. “I said I could
sell
it for a million-and-a-half.” He was in his big chair, listening. Ridley and Donilon were on the couch in Joe’s study. Joe had offices, three or four of them, but the serious stuff happened at his home, in the study during the colder months, on the side porch during the summer.

“One-point-one, one-point-five, whatever you say ... it
doesn’t matter
.” Donilon had his face set in its grimmest lines—which were not too grim, when you looked at his baby cheeks and the friendly half-smile that always played on his mouth. Donilon knew about campaigns. He was also thirty-one, but he’d started as a Carter field man at age twenty-three. He lived with Mondale on the road for years, shared the same hotel suite, watched the guy walk around in his underpants, chomping a cigar and fuming about his campaign. Donilon was a lawyer, smart, and tough enough. But you didn’t see it right away because of that baby face ... no matter what he said. It was like getting a lecture from the Pillsbury Doughboy.

“You can’t run as a Democrat, a guy who’s in touch with middle-class values, when you’re on TV in your
indoor tennis court
. How the hell do we explain it to Brooks Jackson?”

Brooks Jackson was
The Wall Street Journal
guy who made a specialty of candidates’ finances. Joe seemed to brighten at the name. Brooks Jackson was the one guy who
would
understand. “C’mere, I’ll show you how we tell him. C’mere!”

And he took the boys over to a table, where he had the plans of the place, and the numbers, and he started talking deal. This house was going to make Joe rich! ... “See, with a four-hundred-fifty-thousand pullback, and the fifty up front—that’s all up front—that means, with the interest and all, and the balloon, in ’91, I’m only paying, cash, five hundred thousand. I got this place listed for seven-ninety-five! And for the rest, I sell two pieces, I already got ’em sold, see—here, and here; I sell this, that’s gone—and that’s three hundred fifty thousand right there, so ...”

Ridley was looking at the plans while Joe kept moving money in his head. Ridley stared at the block marked “Tennis House,” thinking, “Oh, my God, migod, migod ...” and he thought of the headlines, like he always did when there was trouble coming:
JOE BIDEN’S NET GAME
...
DOWN AND OUT WITH BIDEN
... because in his right ear Ridley could hear the high ground creeping into Biden’s voice: Hey, it’s a righteous deal!

Tom started again: “Senator, I know you can buy it. The point I’m trying to make ...” But Joe had moved beyond talk. He wanted to show them. So they could see it like he did, see it whole ...
Life
magazine! “C’mon,” he said. And he dragged them out to his car, or his truck, to be precise, a four-wheel-drive thing. It’s actually a Wagoneer, but Washington guys don’t know about trucks, so the night has gone down in history as The Night of the Bronco. And Joe rode them all around Wilmington—hell, they covered half of Delaware, for hours, driving to different properties, which Joe pulled into in the darkness, and raked the houses, the land, with his headlights, and showed them the features, the problems, and told them what it went for in ’76, and what this sold for last year ... and what that said about the value of
his
house, his new house, seventeen acres! ... which he could get, with the pullback, the balloon, and everything ... “in
Greenville,
ninth most expensive real estate in the
country
... and it’s perfect. All brick! Perfect shape. Wait. We’re right near it ...”

Thing was, both of them had already seen the compound. Like all decisions in the Biden campaign, this thing had been hanging fire for months, while Joe sifted out his moves. The staff in Delaware had named the place “The North Forty.” And Joe had shown them everything, taken everybody out there, walked them through the tennis house, to make them see ... and it was splendid, there was the sauna, the indoor pool. Ridley had taken one quick look and was sure the campaign was over. “Oh, God,” he murmured, looking up, into the vast, airy hall of the tennis court. “We’re fucked. Completely. Oh, my God ...”

But this was the night they would not quit, and they were after Joe. “You’re not going to take every goddam reporter in the country out in your truck. You can’t. You don’t know what this is like. You can’t explain to everybody. Things just come out. Everything comes out, and everything looks ... worse than you can think. Joe, if you run, your life is going to change. It’s got to change ...”

They were back in the Bronco, and the boys were pressing: “Look, if you think you can live your life like you been living, like you want, in the middle of this, you’ve got it wrong. If you do this thing, you’ve got to want it more than you want
anything else in the world
. You’re going to give up ...
everything
.”