What It Takes (150 page)

But Dick didn’t need that. His voice raspy from strain, he demanded of Brad: “What’s next?” He could hardly sit still.

Problem was, there was Brad, and Ethel, Debra Johns, sometimes Trippi, or Murphy—Dick, and a driver, of course—and they still only needed one van. There wasn’t enough press for two. The big-feet weren’t going to screw around with a candidate at six percent. ... So there wasn’t any way to tell the world: Gephardt was fighting back.

Every morning, at Loreen’s apartment, or a motel in some corner of the state, Dick would rip through the
Register
... in vain. They just wouldn’t
get
it! At a press conference that December, David Yepsen asked Gephardt (rather, told him): “You sound horrible. You look tired. Do you really think you’re getting any votes here?”

Then came Chickengate. It wasn’t much of a story. God knows who fed it to the
Register
. It was about some vote in Congress—a procedural vote on a poultry bill—and Dick had voted no (couldn’t even remember what the vote
was
; it was chickenshit). But the
Register
was going to prove with this vote that Gephardt was really
against the farmers
.

Well, the story never caught on ... no one could understand it. But it did wonders for Dick. Because, finally, he realized:
they didn’t like him
. He wasn’t going to make a friend of Yepsen. He wasn’t going to get a good story from the
Register
. It wasn’t that he hadn’t got to them yet, hadn’t worked hard enough to get to know them. They didn’t
want
to be got to—didn’t
want
to know him.

Can you beat that!

It occurred to Gephardt that the message wasn’t getting through because they didn’t want it to get through! ... It made him angry.

And that anger fed back into the ads, into the final scripts, and the shoot. They filmed about ten days before Christmas, and Dick poured his outrage and resolve into those ads. It wasn’t just the words, it was him and the camera—he could just
do
that: show that camera exactly what he meant. And what he meant to show was a steely indignation ... at the
unfairness
.

Of course, the words were about unfairness to the workers, the farmers, the seniors ... to voters.

But the anger was his.

“You got any Contac or anything?” he croaked in the dark, aboard his puddle-jumper, heading east—his last stop in Iowa before Christmas. “I think I’m gettin’ a cold. ... At least it’s the end. Be home tomorrow night.”

They had him scheduled the next day in New Hampshire—one last effort before decency required that he look like he was relaxing. One of the Iowa crew asked what he was going to do in New Hampshire. Gephardt shrugged.

“I don’t know ... walk around.”

He shook his head. Now that he was saying what he meant to say, it just didn’t make any sense to be doing ... well, half of what they asked him to do.

Brad said: “Did you talk to Jane yet about that
USA Today
?”

Gephardt slumped five degrees in his seat. “Not yet.”

USA Today
wanted to shoot a family picture at his home—the day after Christmas. Dick hadn’t had the guts to tell Jane.

Brad said: “So you’ll talk to her?”

“Yeah ...”

Brad started laughing. “When?”

“Okay, I will ...”

“Yeah, and, uh, we want a media hit in New Hampshire tomorrow ... so they want you to shop.”

The look on Gephardt’s face was as close to disgust as he could manage. “What am I gonna shop for?” he said. “A seed hat?”

“I think they want you to shop, uh, for Jane ...”

Gephardt wasn’t paying attention. He liked that seed-company jacket—first time he’d been warm in a week. “It was lined, inside, like a sweatshirt. I wanna wear it ... I got to get out of this monkey suit. You know, when I go home tomorrow, I’m not gonna wear a suit. Blue jeans ... I HATE suits. When I was in Congress, I
never
wore my jacket. Got into a meeting, and right away, just threw it in a corner.”

Gephardt was talking about Congress in past tense.

“You know, I saw it on TV, the other night. Got in late, and I turned on the TV, and they had the House ... I saw it, like a
citizen
. The budget resolution. I mean, for
hours
...” (He started waving his arms in a parody of an earnest solon.) “Mister SPEAKER! ...
Heh heh hackhackhack
.”

The new Gephardt was molting before their eyes. And the road crew didn’t know what to make of it. He was good, loose, but ... maybe the guy
was
getting sick.

“So, uh, Dick ...”

Gephardt announced he was giving up ties!

“I HATE ties. Always worried to death I’m gonna get something on it.”

Brad pointed out it was his tie, not Dick’s.

“Well, I’m giving it back.”

“It’s up to you, boss,” Brad said. He looked worried, prim, in his own gray suit.

“That’s what I’ll do,” Gephardt said. “I’ll shop for a tie for you.
You’re
the suit. Brad is the suit!
Hackhackhack ...
”

Brad said: “I always feel I have to be dressed ... to meet the President.”

There were three beats of silence in the plane. Brad was
serious
.

President Dick said: “Yeah, but the President’s wearin’ a
seed jacket hackhackhackheeheee
... I’m gonna, too. I’m gonna do it. This is it ...”

Brad said: “Uh, so you’ll shop?”

“Yeah, okay ... I’ll shop.”

Which he did, the next day, at the Mall of New Hampshire. He did exactly what they told him: walked into a store, straight to the sweater (the Advance man had it all picked out), held it up while he smiled for the camera, took it to the register, and bought it for Jane.

Which was great, except the Advance man forgot to check—the sweater was made in China ... which didn’t really bother Dick ... but it made for a snide little wire story (Mr. America First!) ... which
The Des Moines Register
ran the next day.

I
T WAS SO MUCH NICER
to be with Michael, once he’d settled his stomach, once he’d started to try again. It was like something loosed in him. Even the air in the plane felt ... well, it wasn’t light—it was somehow more solid. It was sensible, purposeful ... but an enjoyment: like the feeling you might have after one of Michael’s meals. This was his favorite meal:

“Soup, salad ... and a hearty piece of bread.”

Michael had taken a day off. He felt so much better after he got a day off, after he got with his staff and
demanded
one day in fourteen, just to stay home, take a walk, cook ... he cooked a soup, his chowder. The way he did it was, he’d cook enough so he could eat, then he’d put up leftovers in the freezer. Clam chowder, Bermuda fish chowder ... he could freeze four containers after a
feast
of turkey soup—after he used the turkey. “I make turkey tetrazzini,” he said.

And he’d demanded more time with Kitty. “I told Nick, what we gotta do is give her a separate schedule. But we could kinda connect in the evenings, and then, during the day, go our separate ways.” Michael shrugged his mystification: Why should he have to tell his staff simple stuff like that?

How was Kitty?

“Just ... terrific. We’re having so much fun together.”

Maybe everyone in the family did feel better when Michael felt better ... or maybe he was the sort of husband and father who makes everyone put on a sweater when he’s cold. Anyway, he was certain, they were flourishing. “Two weeks ago, Kara put together
seven hundred people
at Brown ...” (her university, in Providence, Rhode Island). “Here was my baby, looking around, moving like a seasoned Advance man. I was so proud of her. Kara might have a future in politics yet. She’s got the talent. John, almost certainly. Andrea, no.”

Andrea, his twenty-two-year-old, who’d been working in the Des Moines office since June, since her graduation from Princeton, was sitting across the airplane table. It wasn’t clear if she’d heard this judgment upon her ... though she wouldn’t have disagreed. She’d always been the nonpolitical one who suffered for her father through the public slights, attacks in the press ... he’d been campaigning ever since she was alive. Anyway, she hadn’t spoken till he brought up her name. The day was wet and raw, on the ground—above, in that prop plane, bucking the stratus clouds, it was wild. Andrea looked pale, and tight around her dark eyes—Kitty’s eyes.

“Dad, it’s the Maytag
repairman
.” (Now, it was clear, she’d been waiting to correct the errors in his new stump speech.) “You always say the Maytag salesman. It’s supposed to be the Maytag repairman.”

Michael’s head immediately bent to her. Eyes down, his face softened to an uncharacteristic expression—absolute attention. “And I say salesman?”

“Yeah,” she said. “And precinct
captains
.”

“What do I say?” His eyes looked up at hers submissively from his half-bowed head, like a communicant at the altar.

“You always say
chairmen
. But it’s
captains
—women, too. You should say captains.”

“Okay.”

He’d fought off fifteen drafts of that new speech for two months, but clearly: he’d try his best to say the lines exactly as suggested by his nonpolitical daughter.

The new speech was meant to be inspirational, Kennedyesque—that was the new vision. “Twenty-eight years ago, another son of Massachusetts ...” Michael called this reheated soup “The
Next
Frontier.”

Underneath, it was his same cautious program—good-jobs-at-good-wages ... to be achieved by means of “a strong, vibrant public-private partnership.” These words meant something to Dukakis, but to his listeners they remained opaque.

The difference the crowd could sense was Dukakis’s own confidence, and his obvious attempt to show them how
he felt
. He had two new TV ads (from a new adman, Ken Swope, a friend of Kiley’s) that showed his
outrage
at the U.S.-backed contra war in Nicaragua and, at home, the plight of the homeless. They were striking ads, grainy black-and-white photos of destruction and deprivation, backed by creepy music and Michael’s voice, squibs from his speeches: it was time to stop the killing—start the war on poverty and injustice. ... But the best by-product of the ads was, Dukakis had to take on the Reagan ethic in his speech. He had to perform his anger.

It wasn’t easy.

“Folks, I don’t
comprehend
what’s been going on in this country for the last seven years ...”

That was as close as he’d come to taking on the Gipper by name. But, clearly, Michael was reaching for the common tongue.

“... They gave it a name—supply-side economics. It was
wacko
economics!”

This key word he pronounced with such precision, it sounded like the syllables had never before escaped his lips. He called to mind that boy in Brookline who practiced new words in front of the mirror.

“
Whack—oh
...”

Well, it was a start.

The confidence, of course, had its root in organization. The Dukakis campaign was growing—Michael was going to field-organize his way to the White House. But at the same time, the way Dukakis worked, part of his old staff spent its days ferrying new staff all over the state ... so the Governor could interview each new hire.

Today, in Council Bluffs, it was a kid named David Behar—a New Yorker who’d recently spent time in California and landed somehow in the middle of the nation to apply for a dweeb job organizing for Dukakis. Michael bearded the boy in a small room that fairly vibrated with poor Behar’s anxiety.

Dukakis asked a couple of quick questions, didn’t wait for answers. “Didja? Whadja do out there? Oh, yeah. Whadja thinka that?”

Behar hadn’t yet got to the point where he could form a coherent sentence. But Dukakis didn’t have much time. He cut him off:

“Look, David, three things I say to everybody who comes aboard on this campaign. One, is your personal standards. Your personal conduct and ethics and standing—very important to us. Very important. People are looking very closely at us. And at you. And that goes for everything. Your own morality, conduct, ethics ... I don’t have to tell you more than that.

“Second, I’m not kidding when I talk about a positive campaign. I mean it. We’re running for the Presidency. We’re not running against anybody. I don’t want it. It doesn’t help us. It doesn’t achieve anything. That goes for Hart, too.”

Behar tried to speak. Michael didn’t stop.

“If he wants to run, he’s welcome to it.”

“But it’s ...”

“Look. The way to beat Gary Hart is to beat Gary Hart. So, in the meantime ...”

“But ... I just want to give back to people what they’re giving me ... which is ... it’s just ridiculous!”

Michael held up a palm. “I know. But hold it back. I don’t do it. I don’t want it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And third is memo. There’ve been more campaigns sunk by people who feel they’ve gotta write a memo ... so when you put anything on paper, just assume it’s gonna be on the front page the next day. If it can’t be—don’t write it. Okay?”

Behar was nodding, eyes down.

“Good to have ya aboard.” Michael stuck out a hand, and departed.

Why wouldn’t he be pleased? Just a few days until Christmas, and then the home stretch ... at last! If Michael could finish well in Iowa—above Hart, clearly—it would give his people in New Hampshire all the confidence they required. No one had an outfit like Michael’s. Not Paul Simon, his closest rival ... and Gephardt, Babbitt, Jackson—they were too far behind. Michael had taken their measure.

In fact—this was the swelling secret in his breast—Michael had decided he could
win
Iowa. He didn’t have to attack, flail around, making promises, mouthing themes ... no! The
basic economic message
... was going to win Iowa. He’d been correct, all along!

Of course, he wouldn’t say that aloud—the winning part—that was for family. Back on his plane, bouncing toward Waterloo, there was a writer who’d wormed his way aboard. He was asking questions. Michael grudgingly conceded, things were going well, he was more comfortable, sure. But that didn’t mean anything had changed—he’d been doing this kinda thing for twenty-five years!