What It Takes (8 page)

The strange thing was, he looked just the same as he had that morning—just as good: there was no sign he’d been on the job thirteen hours; not a wrinkle in the soft, dark wool of his Brooks Brothers suit; his striped silk tie was knotted tight against the smooth collar of his white shirt; his face showed not a hint of sag, it was tight and handsome with perpetual tan. With an hour in the sun once a week, or every two weeks, Dole could keep a tan forever. And with a couple hours’ sleep, and maybe a nap in an airplane seat, Dole could go forever. He was never more cheerful, more at peace, than he was in the wee hours, when a deal was going down and he was waiting for someone to crack, while he drank a milkshake and told old stories in the Senate dining room.

Now, on his way off the Senate floor, he was picking up speed. He had his right arm bent in front of his midriff, as he always carried it before him in the world. A lot of people knew that arm was useless, almost paralyzed, but even those who’d watched him for twenty-five years thought all the operations must have cocked the arm in front of him, fused the bones so the arm bent from the elbow to look almost like a working arm. In fact, it was Bob Dole who made it look like a working arm. If Dole ever let himself rest, that arm would hang straight down, like the arm of a quadriplegic. It would fall, visibly shorter than his left arm, with the palm of his bent right hand twisted toward the back. But Dole never let anyone see that—his problem. No matter how many hours he’d been up, or how long he stayed out, no matter how it ached, for hours, or a whole day, without rest, he kept that arm hiked up in front of him. He kept a rolled-up memo, or a plastic pen, in the crooked right fist to round its shape. If he ever let that memo go, or the pen, the hand would splay, with the forefinger pointing and the others cramped in toward the palm, the back of the hand painfully hollow where doctors had failed to graft in tendons. But Dole never let anybody see that. Now, as he barreled down the Capitol hallway (trailed by an aide who had to run a few steps to catch up, then tried to walk, then had to run again), Dole was canted forward, his perfect head of hair slightly atilt, his jaw set, lips pursed, his sharp black eyes in a pensive squint, like he was concentrating on something else, while his left hand, the better one, unobtrusively swung up to cup his spasming fist with its memo, and he squeezed the right fist to stop the cramping, to get some feeling back in the bad hand after so many hours of holding, holding against its rigid ache ... but, of course, nobody saw that. What they saw was a man who moved through the idling crowd like a fullback through the line, who seemed to grow larger as he blew by, pushing forward on the balls of his feet, brushing past a question from a young man (maybe staff, press, or a junior lobbyist) with a curt, snarling “M’in a
hurry
!” that lingered in the air, as the noise of a chainsaw does when it stops, echoing off the statues and the tile floor of the grand arched hallway, as Dole disappeared into his suite.

He didn’t mean to stop there for more than a minute. “Gotta gooo!” he announced to the office in general—to the press staff, which was always staying late, on the alert with Dole; to the ladies-of-all-work, who took his calls and typed his words, waited on him and lived their lives in his great whirling orbit, as stead for their own narrower tracks. He didn’t have to speak to anyone in particular: they all waited for him, watched his every move, listening for the bursts of speech that leaked from him, reading in the signs of his mood their success, or lack, for the day.

But there were no bad signs that night. Only thirteen hours on the job so far, and already it was a good day. See, somewhere near the midpoint, between the closed session on impeachment and the arrival of the first CR from the House, Dole had tucked in a lunch with Howard Baker, the retired Senator from Tennessee, the former Republican Leader who stepped out of the job to run for President.

Baker and Dole stayed in touch, former colleagues who tried to keep each other apprised of their plans. That’s why Baker came by today: to say he might not run, after all. He thought Dole would want to know.

Augghh!
You bet Dole wanted to know! Both he and Baker had been running for the White House for the last eight years, since they started the cycle for 1980, the year both men finished as also-rans. No, for Dole it was ten years, if you started, as he did, from the day he lost the Vice Presidency, in 1976. It was ten long years ... for the Presidency. That was “the other thing.” That’s what he’d call it when he told the Schedulers to put on an extra flight somewhere, a thousand miles into the country, to speak for some candidate for Congress, or Lieutenant Governor, or State Treasurer who didn’t have a chance of ever getting to the Senate.

“Might be good, get his help ... for the other thing.”

It wasn’t so much that he feared Howard Baker: poor Howard didn’t have much taste for a fight. But it straightened his own path—after all, how many Senate Leaders could a voter keep track of? How many Senators? In the Dole cosmology, Senators occupied a special sphere. Now, in the GOP, apart from Dole, only Paul Laxalt was running. And he, too, was leaving the Senate, running not really as a Senator, but as Ronald Reagan’s friend. Anyway, Laxalt had problems in his home state, Nevada: political troubles, and an investigation that threatened to drag his name down. That was all summed up in the few words, as spare and evocative as a Japanese poem, a political haiku on Laxalt, that issued in Dole’s flattest prairie voice:

“Agh, got a friend ... Nevada ... might need a friend.”

The way was now clear for Dole ... for the other thing. He knew what he had to do. He had to get past one man: George Bush. But that meant fighting off the whole White House, all the machinery and all the goodies that incumbency could command. It meant Dole would have to work harder, hit and move with guerrilla speed, travel light.

Now he blew into his inner salon, an elegant room with painted ceilings thirty feet high, graced by two-hundred-year-old chandeliers and the fireplace the British used to start the blaze that wrecked the Capitol in the War of 1812. He strode past Dean Burridge, the former Capitol policeman who traveled with him in Washington, who now sat with his leather folder at a graceful table-desk, the kind of gleaming curvy-leg affair used by assistant managers in a fancy hotel lobby. Dole said to the air: “Car ready?”

Of course the car was ready. Dean and the driver, Wilbert Jones, had been ready for hours. Three times Dean had called ahead with updates on Dole’s arrival. He’d checked the route with Wilbert. He’d checked to make sure the crowd was still there, he’d checked a half-dozen times to make sure he had any paper or files that Dole might conceivably ask for. He was ready if Dole was hungry, wanted to stop for a milkshake. ... But he didn’t say any of that. What he said was, “Yes, sir.”

By that time, Dole was in his office, taking off his jacket, draping it carefully over the back of a chair. His voice cut through the stillness of his sanctum, through the doorway—maybe trying to cheer up Dean. He was not unaware of the hour, or the waiting. “Agh, Betty still at her
post
?” This was an office joke. Betty Meyer was one of the ladies who devoted her life to Dole. She’d been with the Senator nearly twenty years, almost never leaving the place, which she monitored with breathless anxiety and henlike devotion day and night. And although no one could see him, as he sat down at his desk, Dole lifted his left hand to his ear as if he were on the telephone, and with his eyebrows raised to lend his face a look of terror, he forced his prairie voice up into Betty-like squeaks: “Yip yip-yeep yeep-yeep-yeep-yeep.”

Dole used his left hand to lift his right fist onto his desk and to remove the rolled-up memo from it. Then his left hand lifted his right hand again and set it on a crumpled corner of the memo like a paperweight, so he could smooth it out with the left hand. He pushed the flattened pages toward the three neat piles of paper on the desk, and picked up the phone to call Betty.

“What’s
cookin
’?” he asked without greeting. And he rolled his eyes to the ceiling as he listened to the yips on the other end.

“Agh, gotta
gooo
!” he said after a minute. He bent forward to look over the piles of paper on the desk. All the memos, drafts, and requests had been stacked, each a little lower than the next, so the top of each was visible. There were three piles. The right-hand stack was for things he was saving: the new proposed tax tables, a detailed poll from California, a few memos he wanted to look over again, and two thank-you letters from Senators (he always kept those for a while). Most of these sheets already bore a few felt-tip scratchings in his painstaking lefty script. It was forty years since he started to write with his left hand, but he’d never gotten good at it. Partly, that was because the left hand worked, but he didn’t have much feeling in it. So Dole had to guide his black felt-tip by watching his left hand form the letters. It could take a whole minute to write a few words. But he still tried to write some response or instruction on each of the hundreds of memos he got. At times, the comments were hard to read, intelligible only to staffers who knew how he talked. For example, these thick black squiggles next to an interview request:

Writing a book?

That meant Dole had talked to the guy once last month, and never saw a story. Why should he talk to the guy again? Find out what the hell he was doing!

The middle pile was for papers he was still working on. Maybe he hadn’t decided whether to give them to Sheila Burke or Mike Pettit. Maybe they awaited five minutes when he could make a phone call. Or a night when he could sit alone in the quiet of an empty Capitol, when everybody else had long since gone. Sometimes it was an angry letter from someone he knew, someone he’d worked with, taking him to task on a vote, a bill, a speech he’d made that got into the papers. Dole liked to handle those himself:

“Warren? Bob
Dohhll! ...
Listen, some damn fool sent a letter in here and signed
your name
on it. I thought you’d wanta
know
...”

But there was no time for that now, so Dole carefully licked his left thumb and forefinger, and used them to slide a couple of pages out of the middle stack. It was a movement surprising in its delicacy. After he set the papers aside for Dean (they’d ride in Dean’s folder tonight), the desk looked like he’d never been there. It was still in perfect order, with its three stacks and one book, a biography of Thomas E. Dewey, written by a former Dole staffer, Rick Smith. No one knew if Dole ever read the book, but it had been on the desk for months.

For ten seconds, Dole glanced at the left-hand pile, the new business, things people wanted him to see. His staff was encouraged, almost required, to put their memos, ideas, drafts, directly into Dole’s hands. There was no chain of command in the office. Everybody in his orbit worked directly for Dole. So senior staff people could drop a paper onto Dole’s desk, along with the rest of Dole’s matters pending. Of course, that meant they could see everything on the desk. Sensitive matters, too. That didn’t seem to bother Dole. Anyway, the important facts were in his head. It also meant that Dole got a lot of paper he didn’t care about. Sometimes a long memo (especially a long one) would come back to its author without a word of comment. Then the poor staff guy would have to ask Dole about it. And Dole would drop one eyebrow and fix the guy with a forehead-furrowing squint:

“Don’t have
time
t’discuss your political
ph’losophy
.”

That generally kept the next memo shorter.

Now Dole stood and cranked his left arm around his back, stretching to his right-rear pants pocket, and pulled out his barber’s comb. He always had the long black comb. He’d never be able to get a short one out of his pocket. Anyway, the barber’s comb did a better job, and Dole’s hair, like his suit, his shirt, like his bills, his press releases, his letters, like everything that came from his office or reflected upon him, had to be perfect. Four strokes with the comb through the thick black hair—a bit long in the back, have to get that cut—and it lay down, like a barber had worked it over. He twisted to replace the comb, and as his left arm came around front again, he bent from the waist, almost doubled over, and the arm shot out ahead of him in a strange, twisting, lunge. It was a strain, full of effort, almost scary to people who never saw it before. (One new staff guy jumped out of his chair and leapt for Dole, when he first saw it. He thought the Senator was going to keel over!) But Dole did it just to straighten the arm. At the full extension of his reach, he bent the elbow and brought his hand back for one final smoothing pat of his hair. Then, with the left hand, he hiked up his right arm again, into its carrying position. He reached for his jacket on the chair, draped it over the bent right arm, and his prairie voice scraped through the doorway to the salon.

“Agh, Wilbert know where we’re goin’?”

“Yes, sir,” Dean said, as he came into the room. It was Dole’s way of telling him to come get the papers. Meanwhile, Dole poked his head out the other door of the office, the one that led to the warren where the press staff worked on three crowded desks, clustered around a wire-service ticker and a console TV. With the Senate out for the evening, the staff had changed the channel, turned off C-Span, and switched back to commercial TV.

...
so the crowd is now filling the Astrodome ...

It was Keith Jackson’s syrupy voice from the booth in Houston.

...
and we’ll be back with Game One of the National League Championship Series, after this word ...

Bob Dole couldn’t wait around for the first pitch. He had work to do ... on the other thing. He was off to another hotel meeting room, this one rented for the benefit of Ben Blaz, the delegate to Congress from the territory of Guam. He paused to listen to the top story of the Ted Koppel news-brief: something about an American pilot—Hasenfus was the name—shot down over Nicaragua, said he was working for the CIA. ... Dole rolled his eyes to the ceiling: the whole thing was screwy.