What It Takes (81 page)

But when Kitty returned, that August, when she came back to him (she looked, well, just terrific!) without the pills—yes, she’d beaten those pills ... she also had the answer for Michael: there was no way he could have known. She was taking pills before he ever met her ... her behavior never changed ... and pills are easy to hide. Hell, the way she’d sneaked those pills, Sherlock Holmes couldn’t have found them!

And that was the answer she had ready for the day when she finally would, finally could ... tell the world. She had to tell the truth, now, yes ...

And sure enough, when she did tell all, that was the question everybody asked—how could he not have
known
?

Oh, she always knew what they were doing—trying to pin Michael for inattention, insensitivity ... trying to beat up on Michael, for
her lie
.

But she wouldn’t let them—not for an instant.

He couldn’t have known ...

I was using when he met me ...

Pills are just too easy to hide ...

She’d shut them down, in half a minute ... with a smile.

But no one asked, or no one got a real answer (save for a shrug, and a flip “addicts lie”) to the more interesting question:

Okay, it was her lie ...

Okay, he couldn’t have figured ...

Okay, it started before, but ... why, in a twenty-year “partnership,” could she never let him see her failure, or her fear?

It was just the bare facts she told to Patricia O’Brien, but that was enough.

We’ve got a problem, Pat thought. She saw what they were doing to Hart, the way the whole pack was now Karacter Kops. She’d been on the job for less than two weeks ... this was her first big—God, this had to be handled right!

“This is very big,” she said quietly.

And Kitty looked better, right away: “It is?”

Pat said, of course ... it had to come out. She wanted it to come out right, for Kitty’s sake.

Kitty was a new woman, lighter, younger, excited again. She was so relieved ... she’d told someone ... who paid attention, who thought it was important.

She’d told Sasso, see, told him right away when Michael decided to get into the race. She’d gone to John and she told him about the pills, the treatment, her anguish ...

And nothing happened.

“Lemme think about that,” John said.

And nothing happened!

Of course, that was annoying to Kitty—confusing and hurtful ...

Truth be told, Sasso had worked with Michael for more than five years now ... and he wasn’t going to get into Kitty-business. Not willingly, anyway. That was Michael’s affair. Somewhere, Sasso had to draw the line ... more and more, the line fell just this side of Kitty.

He wasn’t confused about the politics, no: it had to come out, and they’d have to
put
it out. Sasso managed Geraldine Ferraro’s campaign for the Vice Presidency: he knew what a spouse’s woes could do to a candidate. But this wasn’t going to hurt Michael—not if they brought it out themselves. And Dukakis hadn’t even announced yet. He could still barely say out loud that he wanted to be President. He needed an emotional crisis right now like a hole in the head.

So, when Pat O’Brien came marching to John with the stuff about Kitty, when Pat said it had to come out, had to be
handled right
, it had to
be planned
, this had to be
thought through
... Sasso said, with a shrug:

“I don’t know if Mike’ll go for it ...”

That meant John didn’t know when, or whether, he’d talk to Michael about it.

So Kitty brought it up with Michael ... who didn’t see why it had to come out.
His
health, sure, a clear issue. People had to know. But his wife’s health? ... Did anyone—did the public—have a right to poke into his bride’s life?

Where would this kind of thing stop?

So it ended up, again, at the kitchen table on Perry Street. The four of them gathered on a Sunday morning. Pat and Kitty were pushing to have the thing out ... but Kitty wouldn’t push hard—this was Michael’s campaign ...

And John’s. But Sasso was quiet that day, sitting back—let the others thrash this out. He was adviser to Michael—that’s all.

So it was Pat who carried the mail. She wanted this to be handled right, for Kitty ... and for herself. Pat had just left the newspaper trade, and was prickly about her integrity. She was not going to get into a position where she had to cover up for anyone, on anything.

She’d been carrying the notes from her talk with Kitty about the drugs ... she’d had the notes, for weeks, in her purse. And she’d told herself:
first reporter who asks ... gets this story, gets it all
.

So she had to get the green light from Michael. Without it, she was going to lose her new job, or her fondest idea of herself.

“Governor,” she said, “this could be terrible if it comes out any other way. It’s a lot better for Kitty, if we do it now ... it’s the only way to keep control of the story, if we do it right ... do a full press conference. Then it’s
over
...”

Michael was already shaking his head. His wife’s problems? No one had proved to
him
they had any bearing on the office he sought.

Pat tried to explain: it wasn’t about the job, it was about the campaign, the pack on the plane. If this dribbled out uncontrolled, then BOOM, everything would go nuclear. “Governor, you don’t know how bad this can be ...”

But it was always a mistake to tell Michael he didn’t know. She should have realized that, should have figured. ... She was asking him to throw his wife—his bride!—to the pack. Not even asking—telling!

“Look,” he said, in his laying-down-the-law voice. “If Kitty wants to share her ... experience, that’s fine. I think you know, I’m the kinda guy ...”

He didn’t have to finish that thought ... Michael, the great allower. “But I wanna make sure no one thinks the campaign, this campaign, requires her to do it ... because it doesn’t.”

You could just about hear his feet digging in, under the kitchen table. So Sasso said quietly, “Mike, you have to do it.”

“Well,” Michael said, “well ... it’s not gonna be a press conference.”

At that point, they could almost see the ugly vision behind his eyes: Kitty being grilled by the pack on her woes. Twenty-five years he’d taken care of Kitty. She was high-strung, emotional ...
they didn’t understand
. ... No one was going to put his wife through that.

“... maybe the speech, at the drug event ...”

Pat and John were already planning. There was a drug event for Kitty on the schedule. She could put her confession into the speech. No questions—not at that event, anyway.

Sasso had his eyes on Michael. Poor bastard didn’t need this, didn’t deserve ... John said quietly, with sadness, like it was just the two of them: “No choice, Mike.”

And Michael said to John: “I don’t think she can do it.”

Kitty said: “Michael! I can do it.”

Michael turned to her, said nothing, just looked, with his dark, sad eyes ... then got up. He went around the table, stopped behind Kitty, and, hand on her shoulder, slowly, delicately, lowered his face to hers—put his cheek next to her cheek. Just a touch—faces together, Michael’s eyes were down. “Babe ...”

It was almost too soft for anyone else to hear. “Babe ... I just don’t know if you can handle it.”

And Kitty’s throaty voice was as soft as his.

“I can, Michael ... I know I can.”

G
EORGE BUSH WAS STILL
in Midland, in the big house on Sentinel, the last of George and Bar’s homes in West Texas, when he first mentioned to a friend what he meant to do with his life.

It was George and C. Fred Chambers in the kitchen ... the kids and wives were at the pool ... no one else in the house that day. Bush said: “You ever had any sake?”

“No, let’s try it,” Chambers said. “Looks like a warm beer can to me.”

“Well, that’s how you drink it, I guess.”

So they popped open this rice wine, and started feeling warm, pretty good ... sitting at the kitchen table, talking oil, like they always did—Bush and Chambers were in deals together—when Bush said: “Fred, what do you wanna do? ... I mean, for the rest of your life.”

“Well, I’m here ...” Fred said. “Oil bidness, I guess ...”

Tell the truth, it caught him off guard. He never expected the question, not from Bush. He always figured George was like him—like everybody—just meant to hit the biggest field
ever
... pile it up ... find the next one.

“You know what I think,” Bush said. That wasn’t a question. “I think I want to be in politics, serving, you know, public office.”

Fred took that in, nodded: “Well, I think that’s great,” he said. “I thought of being a teacher or something, where you do something for people ...”

But Fred could tell, as he said it, Bush wasn’t just thinking about it. Bush had thought. Fred didn’t ask him how, or when ... it just seemed settled. Bush’d do it, somehow. Fred didn’t have to ask him why. He knew why. George had always felt that way about his dad.

Prescott Bush had the old-fashioned idea that a man who’d been blessed had a duty to serve. He’d always had public office somewhere in his mind. But what Pres saw was the service, the office. He did not take easily or quickly to the politics required to get there.

He first considered a run for Congress in ’46, while Poppy was at Yale ... but his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman took a dim view of the crowded House chamber. “Well, Pres,” one of the Harrimans said, “if it were the Senate, we’d surely back you ... but the House? We need you here more than the House needs you.” And that was the end of that notion: there were no disputes among partners in the Brown Brothers’ paneled boardroom.

So it wasn’t till 1950 that he filed for office, and then for the Senate, and he ran nose to nose with a Democrat incumbent. But the Sunday before the vote, Drew Pearson predicted on his network radio show that Prescott Bush would lose the Connecticut Senate race ...
because it had just been revealed that Bush was president of the Birth Control League
. Well, it didn’t happen to be true, but more than half the voters in Connecticut were Catholics (state law actually prohibited the use of contraceptives), and Pres was denounced at every mass—it must have cost him ten thousand votes ... anyway, just enough votes: he lost by eleven hundred, and his dream of service in the nation’s best club was dashed. Two years later, he filed for the Senate again, but this time he narrowly lost the nomination to an upstate businessman named Bill Purtell, and Pres had to give up his dream: he’d run twice, he’d lost. He was finished.

But then—a Great and Godly Good stroke of fortune, or rather several, a Blessed Confluence: that same June, 1952, the senior Senator, Brien McMahon, died in office. Pres was handed the nomination ... he had to campaign only two months in a special election ... and, in the Eisenhower landslide, he beat young Congressman Abe Ribicoff by almost thirty thousand votes. At last, he would take up residence and the duties of a statesman in Washington. Moreover, as he’d won a special election, to replace a Senator deceased, he could take up his duties the day after the vote: he did not have to wait for the new Congress (unlike Purtell, who had knocked Pres out of the
regular
election), and became, instantly, the
senior Senator
from Connecticut, a man of standing in the Capitol.

In fact, by Blessed Confluence, Prescott Bush found life in the capital almost unimaginably congenial. There was the fact that he’d backed the Eisenhower wing in the late Republican political wars, and so found friends in the White House—like Sherman Adams, the President’s right-hand man. Then, too, Pres was one of the few golfers among GOP Senators—surely, the best golfer—and so he was often Ike’s playing partner: that was most congenial. And then, too, Pres had been friends forever with Bob Taft—met him years ago, as sons of good family will, in Cincinnati (served on Yale’s board with him, since ’44)—and as the GOP had taken back the Senate in Ike’s landslide, well, Pres’s friend Bob Taft was the Leader of the Senate. And it did not hurt that Taft’s son, Bill, was a professor at Yale in those years, and so a constituent of Pres Bush, and when Bill Taft decided he’d like to be Ambassador to Ireland, it was Pres Bush who called his friend Sherm Adams, and pushed the nomination through the White House. And surely that was easier because Foster Dulles, at State, was a friend (lawyer to Brown Brothers Harriman, for quite a while) ... as were the men at Treasury, and Commerce, of course—men of business whom Pres had known for years, and very congenial fellows all. And when there was friction between the Republican Senate and the Eisenhower administration (a good deal of friction—Ike was not really a pol, and notwithstanding his golf, not really a clubable man), it was Pres who hosted a dinner at the Burning Tree Country Club, to get all the fellows together—brought a wonderful quartet down from Yale to sing (Ike never forgot that, nor that Pres’s son Johnny sang bass)—and things went along much better after that.

In all, it was a splendid time for a gentleman of business and grand personal qualities to serve in the Senate. And though he did not leave a long list of laws that bore his name, Pres was welcomed in the capital’s councils of power, to have a look (perhaps a quiet word, here and there) on the most important and interesting matters in the Eisenhower years. He was such a sure-footed man, so impressive, so steady in his personal code ... that people listened to Pres, though he was new in the Senate. He was a good ally—his word was his bond—and a good friend: they all noticed that. When Sherman Adams ran into such trouble with that Goldfine, and the vicuna coat ... well, for a while, Pres and Dottie were the only ones who’d still have Adams to dinner. Pres took a leading role in the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy—alas, that fellow did step over the line ... but when McCarthy fell sick, in 1955, Pres was the last (maybe the only) member of the Senate to stop by the hospital and wish Joe well.

In general, Pres took to the job with grace, and assiduity. He traveled the world for a blue-ribbon commission for international trade. Later, as a member of the Armed Services Committee, he’d descend in a small plane onto the deck of some U.S. carrier, where he’d spend a few days with the officers, at sea. That was always most interesting. Meanwhile, each week, from the Senate studio, he’d make a TV broadcast for distribution in his state. (As a banker, in the thirties, Pres had helped launch CBS, and his friends there, Bill Paley and Frank Stanton, counseled him to do all the TV he could.) At the same time, he was a stickler for responding, personally, to every letter or telegram. Most weeks, he’d sign a thousand letters. He acknowledged every invitation, every contribution. His office worked six days a week, and Pres did, too. He spoke at a hundred public schools in the state, kept in touch with town officials, state officials, labor unions, the insurance companies of Hartford, the manufacturers of Bridgeport ... he meant to show that they were his interest, that he was, as he put it, “a lift-up and bear-down sort of Senator.” And though he had a bitter reelection campaign against the well-known Thomas Dodd, Pres made splendid use of TV—he was quite good with that camera now—and won by the largest plurality ever attained in Connecticut.