What It Takes (64 page)

“I don’t know ...” Sue Casey, the Scheduler, would say. She was the one who’d have to run it past Hart.

“Casey, those people can kill us. He’s got to talk to them. He doesn’t have to agree with them. He’s just got to
show up
.”

So Casey would take the block schedule into Hart’s law office, where he held court in Denver, and she’d try to scoot it past him:

“Absolutely not.”

“They think you have to just ...”

“No.”

“What if it’s just ...”

“No.”

The awful thing was the look he’d give her—it was scorn, and hurt. And Casey loved Hart ... she did understand him. She knew he meant to create his own campaign events. And she knew why. Casey was one of the women who engineered the win in New Hampshire, in ’84. She knew the concentric circles, all the theories—she
believed
. ... And here was Hart, staring at her with that
look
on his face:
Don’t tell me YOU’RE gonna be an asshole, too!

When Hart would give that look ... it was over. You couldn’t stay in his face. You couldn’t bear to be one of
them
in his mind. It was the same look he’d flash at the guys—Dixon, Hal Haddon, John Emerson—who tried to talk to him about women, about the way things
appeared
, how Hart had to watch himself. ... These guys were supposed to be
friends
. They were supposed to know him! And he’d told them—told them
all
—that was
not
going to be a problem.

So they backed off, never brought it up anymore ... you couldn’t push Hart. And he wasn’t stupid. If you could show him why something made sense ... well, he’d do it. Might not like it. Might go stiff in the middle of it ... but he’d do it. That was how he was about the big stuff, anyway, like the date of announcement. ...

Hart didn’t want to declare his candidacy early. He didn’t see the advantage to inviting that kind of scrutiny
now.
... “I don’t understand why ...”

But they convinced him: Dixon, Haddon, Emerson, Paul Tully ... hell, no one was more of a political pro than Tully. He’d been in the business twenty years—with the sole aim of electing a progressive Democrat. Tully had no ax to grind. He wasn’t trying to change Gary Hart—didn’t want to mess with the man, at all. And Tully was convinced: it was just good politics. It would highlight the hollowness of Cuomo’s posture (still on the mountaintop, waiting for God to speak to him) and Senator Sam Nunn’s calculation (could he make it? could he make it? could he make it?). Anyway, you get out there early, flatten the grass, none of the little guys can sneak up. Tully had argued the same strategy for Mondale four years before—and Mondale ended up the nominee. ...

So they convinced him—they’d schedule announcement for April ... and with a sigh, Hart acceded. It
was
good politics. It
would
flatten the landscape. It’s just that Hart knew: the only man with his head above the grass would be ... Gary Hart. For Tully, Haddon, Emerson, Dixon, it would straighten the road: it was the start of their campaign. But Hart knew: it was the end of life, as he chose to live it.

They all said, the gurus and political hit men: an early announcement, earlier than anyone ... and Dick agreed!

Of course, before that, he had to hit the statehouses, the courthouses, the activists—give them a chance to feel they were in on the ground floor. And Dick agreed! He was hitting doors as fast as he could. Big doors, little doors ... he didn’t just hit the big union meeting at Bal Harbour, like the other candidates. Dick hit the Machinists’ Midwest Regional Leadership Conference. He showed up when the chieftains of the bricklayer locals gathered in Washington. He must have made a half-dozen personal calls to Chuck Gifford, the head of the United Auto Workers in Iowa. Another half-dozen to
Mrs.
Gifford ... you couldn’t give him too many calls.

That’s the way he always did it ... since ’76, every campaign for Congress: “How many doors did we hit today?” That’s all Dick wanted to know. Of course, it wasn’t Dick alone: Jane could work one side of a block, or Jane and Loreen ... and there was Dick’s cousin, Joe Kochanski, who’d bring a van with the helium tanks, balloons for the kids ... and Dick’s campaign coordinator, the large and hyperactive Joyce Aboussie, who’d organize the thing, run the phones and volunteers. Even Joyce, who’d made a career helping Dick, had to wonder about him sometimes—Saturday night, when she and Jane would finish, they’d wait hours for Dick to quit. He’d get that weird focus, and he wasn’t going to stop for something stupid like dinner.

“Jane,” Joyce said on one such night, “you married a dork.”

And Jane, who’d made a life loving Dick, said, “I know. He is a dork.”

This time, Joyce was still in St. Louis, and the new people couldn’t figure Dick, at all. Most of them had worked campaigns before, but they’d never seen a guy who’d just
do
it. They’d get around a big table for a schedule meeting, and they’d throw together whatever invitations they had: two states a thousand miles distant, the same weekend, flying coach, night flight through Chicago, on to Des Moines, and
then
a two-hour drive in a van ... and Dick would just
do
it.

One time, the Scheduler lady said in the meeting: “Lemme ask you guys something ... does Dick always agree with you?”

Don Foley, the press guy, the only one who went back with Dick, smiled as if to himself, and said: “As a matter of fact ... yes.”

And they all started giggling at the table.

But announcement was different. You couldn’t just toss it together—even with Dick, who could make up for a lot of sloppy work ... no. Announcement was big, had to be right. That would be the tape clip that would run for the next year and a half. That day would define the theme, the melody of the whole campaign.

That’s why the speech was so important—but a week before the announcement, they still didn’t have the speech. See, Shrum was a genius ... genius needed time.

So they worked around the speech. They had the site: Union Station, St. Louis. It was perfect: there was the echo of Harry Truman, the underdog from Missouri, who got the ’48 election-night papers on that Union Station concourse, and gleefully held up the headline from Chicago:
DEWEY BEATS TRUMAN.
Harry had the last laugh. ... There were echoes there of Dick’s own career: Union Station was the city’s most conspicuous renovation, the emblem of its downtown renewal, a renaissance begun by Dick Gephardt and his fellow Young Turks on the Board of Aldermen fifteen years before. ... And there were echoes of Dick’s own family, of King St. Clair Cassell, Loreen’s dad, who worked the Pullmans from that station, so many years, so many years ago. ...

Problem was, the Advance staff couldn’t hear the echoes, didn’t know Dick’s history. They were pros, and proud of it. Carrick had gone out and bought the best: Barry Wyatt, from California. He’d done White House Advance, done Kennedy Advance all over the country. Wyatt and the boys—there were twenty-four deputies by the day of announcement—knew how to treat a man in the bubble. (That’s what the campaign wanted, right? A
professional
operation.)

So they flew in a week before, rented a room in Union Station (The Cannonball Express Room), and sat down with the locals. But the locals didn’t have much to say, once the pros started putting together a bible:

10:08 A.M. RAG to holding room, Union Station.

Dick didn’t have a truly biblical title yet, so they just used his initials. Loreen was upset: “It just makes him sound, well ... like a
rag
.” But they didn’t ask Loreen, didn’t even know her. They did know about her: she was on the list ...

“We move the family on stage with him?”

“Move ’em before. Let people see him come up alone.”

“Okay, we move the candidate’s wife ... kids—what is it, four? ... three, okay ... candidate’s mother. Is the mother with the wife?”

“Who’s gonna move the candidate’s wife?”

“I got the brother, brother’s wife ...”

“Who’s got the candidate’s wife?”

Finally, someone who knew Dick and Jane interrupted. It was just ...
wrong,
somehow. She had to say something. JoJo Crosby, the wife of Dick’s old friend John Crosby, broke in to say: “Her name is Jane.”

“Who?”

“Dick’s wife. Her name is
Jane
.”

They looked at JoJo like she’d landed from Mars. What the hell difference did that make?

He was in this to listen, but listen to what? Michael had scores of meetings about this campaign question ... but it was he who asked the questions, so he got the answers he wanted. Michael was enough of a lawyer for that.

What he wanted were the mechanics, tactics, politics:

How does a Dukakis sell in the South?

Would I have a chance to finish well
—
well enough
—
in Iowa?

What is it like? Say, an average week
—
what would I have to do?

What he didn’t ask was about the job, save in the broadest terms: Could he do it? Of course, they said he could. They were all politicians. What was their percentage in telling him anything different?

Anyway, he was sure he could do it. Michael did not have a small opinion of his mind. Governing was what the job entailed. Governing was what he knew. For the rest, the
scientia
, the programs, the federal system, the foreign arcana, the bureaucratic lingo ... well, he’d pick that up as he went along. He was a superior student.

So they told him all kinds of wonderful stuff:

There’s a New South, where Democrats get elected on a biracial base of blacks and white liberals ...

The Iowa race was still wide open—people there wait till they get to know the candidates ...

Michael was already a hero to New Hampshire Democrats, since he stopped the Seabrook nuclear reactor, just over the border. (Michael had refused to file the required evacuation plans.)

Michael took all this into his head, with quick nods, like little check marks: he was in his professional listening mode. Since his loss, in ’78—as he said, so many times—he’d become quite the determined listener. The signature of this new style (what the press liked to call “Duke II”) was always the last question: an open-ended invitation for anyone in the room to talk. “Well, any questions, any comments? ...” That showed he was listening—didn’t it?

What it usually showed was he thought he’d got it. It was up to them now to show him something he’d missed.

Thing was, his method hadn’t changed. Why should it? He had an unshakable faith in his power to arrive at a rational decision. He’d get the facts, he’d make the
correct
decision—simple as that. It’s the same process he went through deciding whether to go to Harvard Law straight out of college, or do the Army first, and
then
go to Harvard. He asked people who thought they knew him. He asked people who’d been to the Army. He asked people who’d been to law school. Then, on a timetable previously determined, he made a considered and rational judgment.

Of course, he hated the Army. Most useless two years he ever spent. But that did not shake his faith in the process.

So he filled up his checklist ... anything missing? And he was so much master of this game that no one stopped to ask
him
, what was it about? Why did he want to be President? What did he mean to do with the job? What was the inarguable base of mission that would drive him on when the taste of his own words was shit in his mouth?

There was that one time, when Ira asked ... but Ira had to write the New Hampshire speech, so that was practical. And there was one time, when Michael brought in his ad guy, Dan Payne, brought him into the State House office for a sitdown at the table, where Michael held most of these matter-of-fact meetings ... that familiar room, with the cool blue carpet bearing the Great Seal of Massachusetts, and the portrait of Samuel Adams, and Michael’s straight-back chair, behind the big desk, with his Styrofoam cup ... the room where Michael was so much at home, where he could solicit efficiently the facts he sought, the facts required for a reasoned conclusion ... in this case, from his adman, some notion of how his campaign would look and sound. What would the words be? ... What look, what themes, would a Dukakis campaign present to the voters?

And, as much as Payne wanted to help, wanted at least to be perceived as a player, he just stared at Dukakis like Michael was talking Greek.

“Governor, it’s not the kind of ... you know, I don’t have a kind of one-size-fits-all
thing
that I can do ... I mean ...”

But Michael was insistent. Payne had worked on his ’82 comeback, and in ’86. Michael knew he was a charter wise guy at Sasso’s Thursday night sessions. “What would you do?” Michael said. “I mean, what would, what would the themes, you ... I think you know as well as anybody what a Presidential campaign for me would be like. ...”

But Payne didn’t know—thought he could not know until Dukakis came up with something
that mattered to Dukakis
. That’s what he tried to say, politely. But Dukakis kept looking at him like he was holding out: Come on! Let’s think up the words!

Kitty was there, next to Michael, and looking at Payne like he was a traitor to the cause. Finally Michael said to her: “Katharine, what do you think? Any questions? Any thoughts? ...” But Kitty had nothing to add, so that’s where it ended.

And Sasso was there, of course, but John wasn’t asking anything. He figured the mission would come, in time. There had to be—there would be—a process of growth. Sasso had no small opinion of his own abilities, either. He would manage this process. He would lead his horse to water. ... Meanwhile, they had something to say: the story of the comeback, the Massachusetts Miracle. That was enough, for the moment. Meanwhile, they had money to get. They had staff to line up. They had press to massage.

Sasso still worried about the field: Biden was in now, and Biden had talent. Gephardt was announcing, and he’d
live
in Iowa. Hart was doing everything right this time. ... And Cuomo: John worried about Cuomo, the one man who shared their natural advantages, and had some others uniquely his own—the man they could not get by. But John had talked to Cuomo just the week before (Mario loved Sasso—they talked very well), and Sasso took one comfort from that talk. Cuomo had asked him, twice:
When
is Dukakis’s date of decision? (Middle of March, middle of March, Sasso said.) So John knew Cuomo would not play it cute—he would make his move, he would let Michael know before Michael had to decide.