What It Takes (93 page)

Sweeney was surprised to hear the resentment in his own voice. “Well,” he said, “you’d know better than I.”

And that was it. Hart was alone.

Hart said: “Well, let’s go home.”

Stratton got the little plane Lee had flown to New Hampshire ... got them in the air about dawn. No one was to know. They had to give Hart a head start, try to keep this mum till the Learjet got to Denver—till Gary and Lee could retreat behind their barbed wire.

No one had got much sleep. Stratton hadn’t slept since the weekend. It was one of those mornings when the nerves are so close to the surface, your skin hurts; the light in the Lear’s windows, from the early red sun, was like an assault. On the plane, there were only six: Stratton, Sue Casey, Billy Shore, Linda Spangler ... Gary and Lee Hart, side by side, in the back seats. No one tried to talk above the whine of the engines. Gary was reading Tolstoy’s
Resurrection
.

Sweeney and Trippi stayed behind to lead the press pack round the mulberry bush. They formed a motorcade outside the hotel. They loaded up the press. They set off for the first event on the schedule.

They got near the place for the first event, and the lead car started making turns, driving in circles—killing time. When they did stop, that was the end. The motorcade pulled up ...
and no one was in Gary’s car
.

What the hell?

Where’s Hart?

Sweeney stood on a bench and announced: Hart was, at that moment, in the air, on his way to Denver. Campaign travel was suspended ... as of now.

Of course, the press went ripshit! They’d been had!

Half of them were shouting at Sweeney. Half rushed for phones.

Paul Taylor didn’t get caught in the morning’s press ruse. He was on his way to Sweeney’s hotel room shortly after 7:00
A.M.
(What about
his interview
?) ... when he ran into Trippi, who gave him the news: Hart was on his way to Denver, and the end of his campaign.

As Paul recalled in his book, he was
speechless
! ... But Trippi filled in the blanks.

It was important that Taylor—the
Post
—get the message: Hart was
suspending his campaign
. Hal Haddon, Hart’s old friend and counsel, would deliver the message, by phone, to Ben Bradlee. Taylor wrote that Haddon meant to offer a bribe, an
exclusive
on the end of the campaign ... if the
Post
wouldn’t run its story.

Not to worry! Paul’s work was done.

“I gave him Bradlee’s phone number,” Paul wrote in his book, “but an exclusive was the furthest thing from my mind. I was too busy feeling relieved, then triumphant.

“The interview I never got had worked out fine. Just fine.”

The
Post
wouldn’t run its “other woman” story. That’s what Bradlee told Haddon: “I don’t see any reason why we should.”

There never was an offer of any exclusive story on Hart.

This wasn’t about a story.

As Bradlee explained it, he just heard Hart was going home—and out of public life.

“Suddenly, the chase is over,” Ben recalled. “Ya got him! ... The coon is up the tree!”

As the Learjet neared Denver, Hart didn’t know whether it was over or not. He knew it couldn’t go on—not like that. He’d go home. He’d stop campaigning for a while, and ... maybe he hadn’t thought past getting home.

At the last minute, they switched the flight plan. The press was all over Stapleton Airport, the big field in Denver. Hart’s plane veered toward a little airport in Jefferson County.

But that little field was staked out, too. And NBC had a chopper to track Hart, like a perp who’d shot the clerk at a 7-Eleven. Three cars waited at the airport. Hart took the wheel of the lead car and he gunned it, through the mountains—eighty miles an hour—he was trying to lose the chopper ... hopeless, of course. The noon news showed a helicopter shot of the cabin, and the dirt road—the ABC semi, and the satellite trucks, vans, rent-a-cars—a solid line, almost a mile, down to the blacktop. There were Minicam shots of the house, with the cameraman running, and the picture bouncing—like Vietnam. Reporters climbed the barbed wire; they were perched on boulders on the slope, over the house—vultures on the roof.

When Gary and Lee got inside, he nailed a blanket over the kitchen window to block the cameras. Then it was dark inside, and strangely quiet. John was at school—at least, he had been at school: Gary’s old campaign friend, Paul Giorgio, had dived into a stakeout and pulled the Harts’ son out of Worcester, Massachusetts. Andrea was no longer at the cabin. She’d fled her parents’ home. She’d left town. She’d watched TV. If he’d been there, Gary could have warned her not to watch TV.

He thought—he had thought—he’d get home and, somehow, he’d go on with his life. But he was not going to have his life back.

The phrase occurred to him:
to the death
. He learned in the car ... when he felt it rock with the impact of bodies, and a bare hand hit with a smack on his windshield, and there were people yelling and pounding on the car, with cameras in front, and he couldn’t see to drive, and Lee was beside him, fragile he thought, as he gunned the engine, trying to
make them move
... and he
jumped
when a lens with a rubber sleeve hit—
THUNCK
—against his window and stuck there, filming him, shooting at him, and he couldn’t see the human on the other side—but he learned ... something new:

If he could have, he’d have jumped out and beaten them with his bare hands.

J
OE TRIED EVERYTHING TO
make it feel right—endless meetings with the gurus ... all their messages, songs, and movies, which Joe tried on in rambling monologue, one after the other, like shoes in a store. Nothing fit. He could not see the moves. He could not find that overriding
reason
why he should be President, why he was
going
to be President, what he was going to be President
for
.

He tried to write university lectures—he’d do it better than Hart! People said Biden didn’t have substance? Well, BANGO, he’d put out more goddam substance than they could swallow. (“Governance!” he’d grit out—his buzzword that spring of ’87. He’d say it with his chin out, jaw locked, so his teeth showed in front, like
fightin’
word ... “Gvrnnce!”) But he had to scrap for every hour on those speeches (some of his gurus couldn’t see the point), had to fight through every text (Pat Caddell thought the country was gone to hell, melted to a stinking ooze—dammit, he should have fired them all!), while he flew around the country, built a campaign staff in Washington and Wilmington, worked in the Senate, planned Beau’s graduation ...

And every weekend, he went back to Iowa. Lowell Junkins, the guy who lost for Governor last time, had signed on with Biden and was crying wolf—like the state would go Gephardt
tomorrow ... today
! ... if Joe didn’t get his ass out there. Joe had new guys in Iowa—David Wilhelm was the chief, hell of a good guy ... but it took time, and Joe didn’t have time. Joe used to say, for every ten days the other guys spent in Iowa, Joe could spend one ... but that was bravado, Biden bullshit, and he knew it. What’s worse, he was pressing ... and that was no good. Couple of weeks back, he was up in New Hampshire—nighttime, a living room, late already and it wasn’t the last event—and some guy stood up and asked Joe about his education. Not his education
plan
... his own goddam education, like he wanted to make sure Biden went to college. Anyway, that’s how Joe heard it ... and he blew: he started yelling how he’d graduated with three degrees, went to law school on scholarship, clawed his way up from the bottom of his class—or some bullshit—he offered to compare IQs ... all with the chin out, the hectoring voice, like ...
I may be stupid, but I’m Einstein next to you!
... And Ruthie Berry and Jill, who were sitting, resting, in the next room, had to scurry in and steer Joe out of there. He coulda punched the guy out! Joe was always sensitive about his intellect ... then, too, that was the day Joe found out he was
one percent
in the new Iowa poll—but, hell, the guy in New Hampshire didn’t know that.

Then Joe gave the university lectures—the foreign policy speech, Harvard, the Kennedy School ... and, of course, Joe and the boys had rewritten it, on planes, in cars, till the night before, and Joe tried to deliver the thing word-for-word ... but the podium was low, the lights weren’t right (Biden never could read aloud) ... so it sounded like he was reading a speech he’d never seen. Then David Broder, Leader of the Pack, got hold of the text and
ripped
Biden in his column: What is
this
?
You call this a foreign policy?

So the speech didn’t quite work out ... but that was no surprise: nothing was working out. The gurus were at each other’s throats—and a couple had doubts about this
whole thing
... which, of course, got back to Joe. But that was no surprise, either:
Biden
had doubts. Just a week before announcement, he started to mutter aloud about “the timing” ... “the feel.” Then Joe mentioned to the new press guy, Larry Rasky, that he thought, well, maybe ... he didn’t want to run.

Then everything went nuclear: gurus in an uproar! Rasky had left his wife and home and a job he loved in Boston to live in a hotel and do this campaign for Biden. Debbie Katz, the new deputy to Ridley, had just left her job as John Kerry’s AA. Vallely had fucked his own Governor and left Massachusetts to travel with Joe. For that matter, Marttila, too, was a Boston guru for Biden. They were all invested. Announcement, for Chrissake, was
next Tuesday
! So now Biden thinks maybe—
sorry, it was all a mistake
? ... There was tremendous frothing on the phones, hourly bulletins from the plane, or from Wilmington ... a cabal formed to coup Ridley (Joe would settle down if this campaign were
organized
), some people wanted to coup Caddell (he was making Joe
nuts
—everybody saw that), and, in general, the long knives came out. Which, of course, only made Joe shakier:
four days from announcement
, there’s no speech because there’s no message, the campaign’s a zoo, and his merry men are amok in the forest, disemboweling each other.

So the Friday night before announcement, they all descended upon Wilmington, and Jill fed them dinner from a buffet on the side porch ... and then, from an armchair in the grand living room, Joe made a little speech: he’d crossed the Rubicon ... he was fine now, they shouldn’t be alarmed ... it was just the black Irish that came up in him every once in a while. He shrugged and smiled. He thanked them for their work, for bending their lives to his. He was gracious, all charm—and it almost ended there.

But then, from Joe’s right, Rasky decided to get down and dirty: that speech was all very nice (“With all due respect, Senator ...”), but if Joe didn’t
feel
this, what the hell was he doing with his life—and
theirs
? And from the next chair, Billy Daley said his piece, and Vallely, and Marttila, right across from Joe’s face, about how Joe had to make a goddam
commitment
, this wasn’t a halfway kinda deal! ... In fact, Marttila went weird altogether and turned the thing into group therapy, talking about how Joe had to
love
these people, LOVE THEM! He challenged Joe to tell each one, around the room, WHY HE LOVED THEM—GO AHEAD, RIGHT NOW! ... and a few new people who didn’t know Biden—never had a serious moment with the man—started looking at each other just to check if this was as nutso as it seemed ... while a couple of the old guard—Kaufman, Gitenstein—took off after the gurus: they were outta line, this was
Joe’s life
... the staff guys could see Joe getting pissed off in his chair, they’d
never
beat up on Biden like this. ... And Ridley was bouncing off the walls: he had a $300,000 announcement, ninety hours away, five states, two hundred press, a plane, a special goddam
train
(he could see the headline:
BIDEN CAN’T MAKE THE TRAINS RUN ON TIME
...), and what are they gonna say now? Sure, uh, we said all this stuff, we raised all this money, but we
really thought it over this weekend
, see, and, uh, well ...
come on!
It was time to stop this weirdness! ... But it was out of the bottle now, it did not stop. It went around the room, twenty people had their say about Biden, how he had to stop screwing around with their lives—
his own life
... until Joe’s jaw was working under his taut cheek, and his smile was showing just a ridge of bottom teeth. And Ted Kaufman jumped back in and said, of
course
Joe Biden was gonna run: it was just like Bill Russell, the great Celtics center—used to puke into a wastebasket before every game ... “Hey! Relax! Joe’s just pukin’ in the basket!” ... And Caddell meant to help, so when it got to him, he said, of
course
Joe’s gonna run ... Pat said: “I’ve been waiting to be President since I was twenty-two!” ... Then everybody knew it was the Twilight Zone ... with Caddell hallucinating to these people sprawled over the couches and the floor, cross-legged, in cutoffs, the new leadership of the Free World—whom Pat, without pause, without notice of their staggered stares, now lectured about “the best message ... the best campaign ... the best candidate ...”

And Jill Biden, who was sitting on the arm of the best candidate’s chair, her right arm draped across his shoulders, could feel Joe’s spine going stiffer with every lecture. She could just about feel the heat rising off Joe’s head, and she heard his breathing go shallow, like it did in a fight, and she knew he was going to blow them all off, shut those bastards up ... for
good
! ... And before he could speak, she brought her left hand across and laid it on his arm and she said, loud enough for most of them to hear:

“Joe ... Joe ...
don’t
lose every friend you have in the world.”

So they were running for President, Joe and his friends, and they’d have a big announcement—the finest: Joe’s taste in political theater ran with his taste in houses. They’d rent the train station in Wilmington (that was the symbol, see, for the way Joe took the train home, every night), and they’d run a special train from Washington to Wilmington, with VIPs and plenty of press, and they’d have drivers bring in the notables from Delaware, and stretch limousines to deliver Joe and the family to the station, and every member of the family would have his own body man—there were, in all, a hundred professional Advance, led by the chief of Carter White House Advance, who had the thing timed to the minute, with poster-sized charts of the schedule, a six-foot-long map of the motorcade, a wall-sized plat of the station grounds ... all of which were unfurled that weekend in the living room of Joe’s house, and explained, point by point, to the Bidens, who sat in a row of chairs facing these grand schemata and stared ahead with frozen grins of foreboding—the look of folks in the front car of the roller coaster.