What It Takes (73 page)

(But there was one teammate, a black guy, and one day they all went to the Charcoal Pit for french fries, and the counterman was not going to serve the black kid—so Joe walked out ... and so did the rest of the guys, they
walked out
... and that was the same feeling in the marches, right? And that was the feeling Joe wanted to share, see? ... The gurus would shake their heads. “That’s
not marching
.” And Joe would say, “I know. Okay.” But then, a week later, another crowd ... and Joe would do it again.)

Still, this was also the reason they were working for Biden: for the abandon with which he stretched himself (and not just by exaggeration) to touch a thousand lives in a day ... for the talent, extravagant effort, the generosity of spirit that made every event with Biden a festival of inclusion ... for the death-defying-Evel-Knievel-eighty-miles-an-hour-over-twenty-five-buses
leap
he would make to get the connect—if that’s what it took—before he had to land, dust himself off, bow to the crowd, and leave that room. The gurus would come back from trips with him, rolling their eyes, telling stories. ...

One time, an Iowa room, Joe was in mid-monologue, and there was a woman at a table, facing away, who would
not turn around
. Joe didn’t break stride in his talk ... (“Folks, think of it! We have the chance now to make that difference. I’m absolutely convinced ...”) or his walk—he was always moving, fixing one with his eyes, then another. And he got to this woman, came up from behind ... (“So, folks, look me over. If you like what you see ...”) and gently, but decidedly, he put his hands on her. In Council Bluffs, Iowa! He got both hands onto her shoulders, while he talked to the crowd over her head, like it was her and him, through thick and thin. The woman looked like she’d swallowed her tongue.

And the gurus would shrug, and say, in wonder: “You can’t teach that ...” Hell, they couldn’t even gauge it, it was off their charts! What was the effect in that room ... or on that woman? Who knows? Maybe she became his voter. Maybe she was offended. But one goddam thing was no longer in doubt: she heard him, she felt him. At that moment, for good or ill, she was at that here-and-now, with Joey Biden.

They didn’t want to clip him back—you don’t fool with magic, and when Biden was on, well, that was the only word. (That room in Council Bluffs—seventy people, and they signed up more than fifty that morning.) And Joe sure as hell wasn’t trying to hold himself in check. His effort, the labor of his days and nights, was to get himself up, stoke the heat, do the next room, the next hit. With everything clawing at him—the family, the Senate, the committee, the interminable message meetings with the gurus—it was a wonder he stayed clear enough to make any sense, much less move a crowd.

His days were a dance, which he could not slow down—if he let that energy slip from his grasp, then he couldn’t get it back for the next room, or the next ... sure, he could fly over twenty-five buses (absolutely convinced, not a doubt in his mind ...), but
it had to be done at speed
. So many times, in the office, in meetings, in a plane or van between events, Joe was just spinning, talking a streak, going too fast to listen. If he asked a question, he wanted the answer
now
. When he snapped about arrangements, Advance or staff work, it was always about delay—they were
slowing him down
! ... That spring, Tommy Donilon, senior guru, was trying to explain to a friend what Joe was like in a meeting. “Did you see
Beverly Hills Cop II
?” (Of course, it had to be movie-talk.) “You remember the scene where Eddie Murphy goes deep undercover to buy the stolen goods? He walks into this bar, right? And the guy doesn’t know if he should do it, so Eddie’s like this ...” (Now Donilon was snapping his fingers, fast, both hands, in front of his face.)

“
Hey! I’m a bidnessman ... I got to make MOVES!
...”

In Washington, in the life he knew, Joe had a vent for his steam—the Senate gym ... you could find him there for hours each day. Well, actually, you couldn’t find him—that was the point. No staff, no outsiders allowed. Joe’s schedule would say “staff time” at least once a day, usually twice, and what that meant was
gym time
. Somehow, he had to blow it off. ... But on the road, there was nowhere to vent, save public events. If he got through talking and wouldn’t leave, if he kept working harder till the whole room was sweaty, if he had them all ... and then
lost them
because he couldn’t stop ... well, you had to understand that these were his workouts.

Now, at the close of his ski-trip weekend, he has to check in on a funder for Paul McEachern, the Democrat who lost to Sununu in the last New Hampshire gubernatorial election. So Joe shows up with the whole family: Jill (who’s still not happy—she and the kids have to get to the airport—but Joe said they’d just stop in) and the boys. Beau and Hunter, and little Ashley ... and a couple of staff, and the CBS crew, and three or four reporters ... and every eye in the banquet hall is on the Bidens as they file in ... late ... but what a beautiful family! Joe is lithe, balding, rich with charm: light on his feet, suddenly eye-locked with the ladies, full of good-humored candor with the men. He has a woman’s hand in one of his own, and he raises his other hand to greet her whole table, “Hi, how’re y’all doin’?” while he keeps his gaggle together, through the crowd, with asides, jokes, confiding patter. ... “Hi, uh, oh, we met at the door ...” (Aside: “I always watch for my reporter friends with their notebooks to see, uh ...”) “Can we all fit here, honey?” “Hi! How are you?” (“... see that I don’t wear out my welcome.”) “Hi! Good to see you!”

Of course, they bring him right on stage to say hello, and he doesn’t mean to talk, so he just says what a fine man Paul McEachern is, and what a fine campaign ... which reminds Joe of an Irish joke, an old Father Ryan joke ... and after they all have a laugh, he really doesn’t want to take their time, so he just thanks them for the invitation, urges the crowd to look him over ... and he really has to go ... but McEachern gets up to speak, and Joe can’t say what a sterling and important guy Paul is and then leave at the start of his talk, so he sits back down with the family, but it’s a hell of a place to ask the kids to sit still, especially a six-year-old, so while he whispers something to Jill, he sweeps Ashley onto his lap, where she stands on his knees, facing his face, which he tries to keep smiling toward McEachern, who’s thanking supporters, a list as long as his arm ... while Ashley strips from her wrist her colored plastic bracelets, and piles them (as the TV lights flash onto Joe—CBS
has
to have this) ... on top of daddy’s head, on the bald part, where Joe has the transplant hairs raked across the scalp ... a yellow bracelet, then a red one, and a green one, until they cascade onto daddy’s nose, and Ashley is giggling with delight.

And by the time Jill and the kids get to the airport, Joe is late for the next thing, a coffee-chat with a houseful of folks, so he’s urgent once he gets them into the living room and starts to talk—he’s hot tonight—but there are folks in the dining room who might not hear ... anyway, he can’t see them to make sure he’s got them ... so in mid-breath he’s asking the folks in the living room to squeeze in this way, “so we can all see ...” and then in the middle of his next riff, he sees that he’s jammed CBS into a corner—and Christ! That’s a million people!—so he adds, as aside, just to them: “I don’t mean to back you in like that. I’ll move over here ...” which means the young woman from the local radio has to stretch her arm to get her microphone closer, so Joe says, in the middle of his thing about how this people, this generation, hasn’t lost its idealism, no, not at all—“You want me to hold that, dear? Your arm’ll be killing you ...” and Joe holds her mike in front of his chest, as he singles out the hostess with his eyes, and he says, to close his message, “Bev, I
know
we can do better ... I am absolutely convinced ...” Yes, he’s on tonight, he’s got them, you can feel it in the room, and they can feel his conviction, or at least his need, and they’re itching to applaud him, but he’s taking questions, and the answers are twenty minutes long, because he wants them to
know
him: “Folks, when I started in public life, in the civil rights movement, we marched to change attitudes. ... I remember what
galvanized
me. ... Bull Connor and his dogs ... I’m serious. In Selma.” Joe’s voice drops to an urgent whisper. “Absolutely ... made ... my ... blood ... run ...
cold
. Remember? ...”

Yes, they remember ... but Joe is an hour and a half late to his last event, in the basement of a restaurant. It’s after ten when he gets to the place, through sleet and snow, and he’s tired. There are only twenty people left, but still, he’s got to get up to full steam for them, about eleven o’clock, and when he starts to take questions ... well, he’s still talking an hour later, and people are almost forced to walk out on him. But the staff always lets him run, on his last event. There’s no way they can stand at the back and say, “Uh, Senator? Last question. We really have to go ...” Go where? For what—sleep? There are people here! ... So Joe calls his own last question, and then another, and another, and it’s after midnight when he says goodbye to the last hardy dozen, and he wants pizza with the staff, but Ruth says no—he has to sleep—a big speech at lunch tomorrow, another at dinner, and four events besides ... so she gets him to the motel and gets him squared away, but how is he supposed to just
shut down
? He’ll be up for
hours
... Ruth will know in the morning, when she calls—the moment he says two words ... she always knows.

“I’ll call back in fifteen minutes,” she says. She can hear the woozy fatigue in his voice. They’ll start late that morning, again. ... But just to be sure, when she checks him out of the motel, she’ll ask to see the bill: Was it a two-night, a three-night? ...

How many of the pay-per-view movies did he have to watch before he could crash?

The funny part was how normal it seemed to Joe. He’d always loped with a smile on this raggedy precipice of excess. Of course, he would explain, afterward, that he knew
all along
how it would come out. He had the whole thing gamed out ... see?

Well, mostly, it was hard to see. It felt to the others, who were with him on the edge, like they were making it up
right now
... that’s why they were jumpy. But Joe wasn’t uncomfortable at all. Tell the truth, he liked it when there was no more time to think—High Noon on Main Street, Joey and the other guy in the sun ... when you had to just
do
, or shut up and walk. That was Joe’s time—game day ... BANGO!

Sometimes, in the Senate, Joe would push away his briefing books and walk into a hearing with just one question—something Mom-Mom asked him on the phone twenty minutes before. And there were all those times Joe would hunch at the head table, writing notes for his speech, while they were introducing him. He courted that showdown in the sun—it made his motor run.

That’s why they had to charter a plane to Iowa, that day in March ...
right now ... a jet
. Joe had to get to Des Moines! The UAW was holding its state convention, three days in the ballroom of the beautiful Best Western Starlite Village. Of course, Joe knew about the convention ... knew also that the union’s head of politics, Chuck Gifford, was just about working for Gephardt (Gephardt just about moved into Gifford’s house, didn’t he?) ... and some of the members were already leaning to Gephardt (Why not? That’s what Dick’s trade bill was
for
—for the auto workers who’d been whining about the import cars) ... and Joe knew, too, that Gephardt was scheduled for the keynote address. ...

But then Joe got a call—his guys in Iowa, they were frenzied! The convention was a Gephardt jamboree! Chuck Gifford and his wife were greasing the skids—the whole damn UAW was sliding into Gephardt’s lap!

So Joe had to go. Had to turn it around!

But wait—was he invited?

Even better! He’d storm the place, crash the party!

So he called a couple of his UAW guys from the Delaware council, got them to come along (“No, today ... yeah, now!”) ... no way the Iowa men could freeze out their own union brothers, right? And then, just to be sure, Joe called up Owen Bieber, the National High-Cheese-Maximum-Muckety-Muck-Auto-Worker-Wallah,
himself
. Joe wanted Bieber to tell that asshole Gifford to
back off
—what the hell was he trying to pull? Bieber said he’d look into the thing ... and Joe rode off to the airport.

Well, by the time they came steaming into the Starlite room—Joe, the Delaware union men, and Ridley, puffing and jiggling and talking a mile a minute from adrenaline and coffee in the plane—Gifford had got a call from Bieber, see ... so he said:
Of course
Joe Biden can come. He can speak! I will
personally
introduce him ... right
after
these three union men, who, of course, were
scheduled
to speak, and who would rumble on for
more than two hours
... while Joe steamed and fretted and bounced his knee, while he shifted on a chair and tried to look like he was listening. And just when Gifford judged there was
no one
in that room who wanted to hear another word ... when it was obvious it was time to head for the bar ... he stood up and, coolly, introduced Joe Biden.

But Gifford and his guys didn’t know about Joey on game day ... how could they know? The guys in that room had never seen him until he walked in—just another Senator, running for President ... until Joe started to tell them about his life. In fact, he started with the UAW and his life—because it meant something to him—that was the first union to break away and support him in ’72. He never forgot that—never. ... And he introduced the two fellows who’d come with him from Delaware, left their families and homes, on awfully short notice, to be with him tonight—and that meant something to Joe, too ... as it did to the union men and women in the hall.

And then he told them why
he
was there, tonight ... about the outright war that Reagan and his pals had declared upon the working man, and the way the nation slept while its factories slumped and its jobs went overseas ... and he asked if they wanted America to be something more than the biggest McDonald’s outlet in the world. ... Well,
he
did ... and
now
...
was the time
.