What It Takes (160 page)

Jeff Nelson offered to get Cokes ... and the rest just stood, all but silent in a semicircle around Bob Dole. He was still half-bouncing, looking around, all dressed up and nowhere to go—everybody else staring at him, with pleasant party faces, searching themselves for something to say to him.

At last, Jeff’s daughter, Kristen, said to the circle at large:

“You should have seen Dad’s precinct! Where’s Dad? Show him Dad’s precinct.”

And everybody perked up: they were going to engage the Bobster. They, too, had a piece of this night-of-nights to show him. So Jeff was summoned, and he went into a paroxysm of patting—his jacket, his shirt, his pants—trying to find the slip of paper where he’d written the numbers from his precinct caucus. All eyes bounced from Jeff, to the Bobster, back to Jeff, and all his pockets ... until
he found the numbers
!

By that time, Dole was half-turned, back toward his ballroom crowd, the platform, the camera, the bright lights—he had the print press to do after this, then tape for the overnights, the morning shows—
Let’s gooo!
... Jeff was holding the numbers in midcircle, midair—but no one would touch the Bobster, or say, “Hey, Bob! Here’s the damn numbers! Turn around!” ... Jeff held his little paper up for four or five seconds—it was getting embarrassing—while everybody stared at the back of the Bobster’s head, shining in the halogen corona of the platform lights behind him ... and, then, too, at six-foot-two, they were staring
up
at Dole, and the lights shining down from NBC glistened in their eyes ... till Mari finally plucked the paper offering, tapped the Senator, and handed him the numbers. They stared up. There was an instant, it was clear, where the Bobster did not know what the hell they had stuck in his hand ... there was the heart-stopping chance he would conclude this was trash—some mistake—and wad it up, and that would have made everything so awkward. But someone said, “It’s Jeff’s!” and the Bobster understood, this was a gift of a sort, and ... he popped his eyebrows up in a show of interest and pleasure. The scary thing was the look on
their
faces—Jeff, Karen, and Kristen Nelson, Mari Maseng, Bill Brock, Kenny, Anita, Elizabeth Dole—the upturned smiles that
erupted
, with the holy-white network light in their eyes ... it was a look from Renaissance paintings, Adorations, when the faithful gaze upon the Body, the figure at the center, with the golden light around His head—a look of awe, love, and fear.

It was rock ’n’ roll on the Dole plane, after three or four hours’ sleep, flying east—big plane, a Bahamas Air 727, and not a spare seat from the cockpit to the narrow tail. Anyway, no one stayed in a seat. In mid-takeoff, the Dole staff was perched, smiling, on the arms of the chairs. One Advance man gave Mari a high-five as he passed in the aisle. Chuckie Grassley, Bill Brock, and the pollster, Dick Wirthlin, were dispatched to the back of the plane to spin. Wirthlin was saying:

“The political world has been changed. The mountain moved.”

The press was crowded around these Big Guys, standing in the aisle and on the seats. Boom mikes raked the ceiling of the cabin. The pack mushed and trampled the neat breakfasts in neat plasti-packs. One of the stewardesses of Bahamas Air said, “I’ve done a political charter, but it was ... more, uh ... contained.”

Wirthlin was saying to the
L.A. Times
: “Absolutely, if there is no Robertson, there would’ve been only one headline—
DOLE BEATS BUSH. AS
it is, there’s two headlines—both of them bad for Bush.”

In the front, Brock was rocking on his heels and toes in the aisle next to Dole’s chair. He said something to Dole and then threw his whole torso back, laughing. Everybody was back and forth, from the press section to the staff in front. They were yukking it up about George Bush, quoted from New Hampshire—it was on the wire: “Iowa is Iowa,” he’d said, “and New Hampshire is New Hampshire.” Yuhhhh! That was rich! Next, they’ll teach him how to spell O-hio!

On the tarmac in New Hampshire it was a mob scene. Now the camera jockeys had aluminum ladders, so they wouldn’t have to shoot through a swarm of shoulders and heads. Between the plane and a long motorcade. Dole was surrounded by the iron ring of cameras and tapes—ten to twelve bodies deep. Advance men tried to keep the herd from crushing the Bobster flat. Dole
was
President that morning. He was on his way to the statehouse to address a joint session of the New Hampshire legislature. The topic of the speech was
national security
. It was a Presidential speech.

Meanwhile, the staff was handing out Xeroxes of a letter from Ronald Reagan. It was dated February 5, 1988—four days before—and it said:

Dear Bob:

I want to express my personal gratitude to you for your support of my request for assistance to the Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance. I particularly appreciate your sponsorship of the resolution to approve my request, and your leadership in achieving a successful vote in the Senate. ...

Sincerely,

Ronald Reagan

It was the sort of roto-pen “courtesy letter” that Presidents send out routinely. If it showed anything, it showed that Dole’s friend Howard Baker was still in control, as Chief of Staff. But it looked like more—looked like Reagan was hedging his bets ... or, at the very least, like Dole was welcome to ride shotgun on the Gipper’s old mule train ... as it rolled in a cloud of golden dust toward greater
national security
.

Who could ask for a warier shotgun man?

The speech text handed out on his four press buses, pitching and rocking toward the statehouse in Concord, was true troglodyte target-practice: Bob Dole trusted
Russk
—uh, you know,
Soviets
... ’bout as far as he could
throw ’em
. And let no one forget it! Especially not the right-wing, white-flight, tax-flight droolers who had overrun the southern tier of New Hampshire (“Live Free or Move!”) ... and now voted in overwhelming numbers in the Republican primary.

Here he came, through the grand white doors of the old House chamber, with his beautiful wife ... both of them
glowed
. (Where’d he get that
tan
?) The legislators on the aisles leapt up—and took a step back. Everybody was standing ... and cheering. The Doles sat down, but the cheers went on, for two minutes more.

At last, a minister at the rostrum intoned:

“O God of all ... winners and runners-up ...”

The business at hand, you know—a blessing for the political show that arrived with Bob Dole. When Dole stood to speak, the assembled legislators gave him another standing ovation. Doug Scamman, Speaker of the House, had arranged this for Dole—this session. Couldn’t
be
better timing—couldn’t be better anything.

Poor Gephardt was, at that moment, yelling his speech in a shopping mall. Dukakis had to rent a theater. Jack Kemp, God bless him, was freezing his buns at a spare press conference on the steps of that very statehouse. But Bob Dole was warm, bathed in white light, anointed with the cheers of the suits in joint session ... to whom he said, before his discourse on strategy vis-à-vis the Soviets ...

“Thank you ...

“It’s good to be here.

“Good to be awake.

“Good to feel good.”

And then, President Bobster went to text—he actually
read out
a speech—had to get it right. He knew Gorbachev was listening.

He had a meeting, after his speech, in the Speaker’s office—a ten-minute sit-down with the Big Guys: Where do we stand?

All his New Hampshire Bigs said, “It’s winnable.” Dole asked Wirthlin. And Wirthlin, without benefit of any new numbers since the previous night, sketched a scenario of a Dole win. They would overtake Bush that weekend. They would win New Hampshire February 16, the following Tuesday. “And then,” Wirthlin said, “it’s a roll.”

He was looking at Dole to see if Dole was pleased.

Dole looked back without expression, and in the voice designed to cut through wind, he said: “Wait a minute. Back up a minute. What if we don’t win?”

Everyone was silent. Everybody figured,
Win! Win! We’re winning!
But Dole had enough Russell, Kansas, left in him to wonder. ... He’d been saying for months that he couldn’t feel things building in New Hampshire. He got a big boost a few months back when Senator Warren Rudman signed on, and Rudman’s people took over the Dole operation. (Actually, they
were
the Dole operation. There was nothing before.) Then Dole started hearing that Rudman’s “organization” was a paper tiger. (Rudman himself said organization didn’t count in New Hampshire.) In mid-January, a poll showed Dole almost in
third place
(even with Jack Kemp!) ... and Dole about hit the roof. Wirthlin told him not to worry: that would all change, once he won Iowa. Bob would be on a roll! ...

“If we don’t win?” Dole said in the statehouse. “What happens?”

Wirthlin bestirred himself anew, and said: “Well, it’s less rosy, but, uh ... we can do it. You come out of here, you go down south, our numbers show ...” He ended up again with a Dole win—at the wire.

So Dole nodded, then fell silent. They could see him turning it over in his head: Maybe this thing was on the downhill ... these guys were pros—maybe they’re right! Maybe he was just ultra-sensitive because he did so badly in New Hampshire last time, still didn’t trust the people’s smiles. Maybe he oughta just ... accept—people prob’ly weren’t any different here than they were in Iowa, or Kansas ... pretty much the same!

So it was President Bobster, still, who boarded his motorcade for a date at Chubb Insurance, out in the woods, miles from any town. It was a tanned, handsome, and confident candidate who marched through the snow, into the low brick building, straight to the cafeteria where a crowd of employees waited. The cafeteria (in fact, the whole excessive exurban brick fort) bespoke the easy money of the Reagan recovery. It was a long room, hung with corporate philodendrons, kept alive on a service contract with the Corporate Philodendron Company. Fake butcher-block tables made things homey. There were Chubb employees at the tables ... clapping, kind of.

In streamed Dole’s entourage, and Dole’s herd, smiling and bouncy. They were riding with a winner, making the big turn. They were showing a new state what they’d seen
for months
, in Iowa ... yes, they still had a bit of Iowa about them: it was that frank, friendly, mannerly air that went so well with Dole’s midwest verities—like mashed potatoes with fried chicken.

There was a thick woman in a brown pants suit leaning on one of the faux-maple tables near the aisle. One of the Dole-herd, a particularly friendly and polite writer, proffered her a grin, and said:

“How you doin’, ma’am?”

This flower of New Hampshire looked him full in the face, and said: “We don’t need people like you around here.”

T
UESDAY MORNING, AFTER THE
Iowa caucus, Bush was already in New Hampshire. (No use lingering at the site of a massacre—Bush left Iowa before the vote began.) He and the white men were walled away in the newest, most futilely fancy motel in New Hampshire, the Clarion, near Nashua, a box of white cement rising eight stories tall in the middle of a deserted snow-covered bog, a half-mile distant from the nearest road, miles away from anything else. It was the hotel embodiment of the oversized and isolated Bush campaign ... more perfect as symbol, still, because inside, amid the pink marble and olde-Englishy prints, there was ...
red alert
!

Bush was up before first light. Tell the truth, he hadn’t slept much. He was out at a factory gate, shaking hands in the numbing cold ... cold to make the pain creep from the feet up, from the hands in, from the back of the neck ... who cared? Bush was newly, nervily aware: he could lose! (
That
was pain.) He could lose New Hampshire, then Minnesota and South Dakota ... he could lose every state until South Carolina—or Super Tuesday! ... and that would be the end: the South would crumble. He would lose everything.

The white men were abustle in the hotel hallway. They looked bad, ill-rested, unshaven, no ties ... there was, on the Hall of Power, a bad smell of stress and failure. “Ah knew it,” Atwater was claiming. “Ah kin feel the wind! Ah
tol’
him it was a hunnert percent he was gonna lose, and Ah said it was fifty-fifty he was gonna run
thirrrd
!” ... What did it matter what Lee knew? They didn’t just run third—Dole beat them two-to-one! Bush did not win a single county in Iowa.

Teeter looked like an actuary whose years of patient calculation had just revealed the median death age ... was
his
age. Overnight polls in New Hampshire showed Dole cutting Bush’s lead to eight or nine points—
before
the news from Iowa. God only knew what the swing would be after that humiliation. The problem was, voters couldn’t see any
political
difference between Bush and Dole. And Dole was trouncing them with his man-of-the-people work boots. Half the Bush vote came from people who just thought Bush was going to win. Well, Iowa would take care of
that
—Dole looked plenty big-league now. ... Somehow, they had to show those voters that Bush and Dole were not the same—they’d make different leaders. “We gotta show, they’re different guys!” But that meant showing who George Bush was, and they hadn’t been able to pull that off for two years. How could they start now?

Ailes looked even worse than usual—he had pneumonia. He was fevered, full of antibiotics. But he said he could tape an “Ask George Bush”—a half-hour, statewide TV ... fill the audience with Bushies who’d lob softball questions and let the man stand up and talk. That’s what Ailes did for Nixon in ’68, when they had to
show
the New Nixon! ... Goddammit, it was time to
show George Bush
! ... Not Bush’s plane, Bush’s cars, Bush’s staff—that’s all people ever saw! ... “We gotta get rid of this VP shit!”

“Goddam, Ah’m with ya!” Lee said.

This was another thing Atwater said he
always
knew ... all that motorcade shit’s jussa pain inna ass! ... He
tol’
’em, said Lee, back in, uh, September:
We gotta git close to the GROUN’ in this thing
. ... Tol’ that asshole Fuller that Sununu was complainin’ ’bout the motorcades, uh, blockin’ the traffic, an’, uh,
pissin’ people off
!