What It Takes (169 page)

They were strange and fascinating dinners—a dozen people, or fifteen, at a table thrown together by a flustered restaurateur ... with Gary in the center, recalling the doings of the day, theorizing, answering questions, telling stories, feeding the gathering from his faith and experience, that inexhaustible store.

He’d start with a drink, one of his white lightning specials—Stolichnaya vodka on the rocks—and that would loosen the tongue. Someone might mention the Secret Service ... which would remind Hart of a story—had they ever heard about the time the Service and the California Highway Patrol closed the San Diego Freeway for him?

“It was
4:30
... on a
Friday
... in
May. Everybody
was trying to get out of town. I was coming in—Friday before the primary ... and the Highway Patrol had the freeway blocked for
ten miles
—all the entrances. ...”

Hart’s eyebrows danced with droll horror.

“And we’re going TWENTY-SEVEN MILES AN HOUR! ... I see guys out on the ramps, shaking their
fists
at me as we go by—at FUNERAL SPEED! ... I’m literally beating on the shoulders of the shift commander, yelling: ‘
GET GOING!
’ ...

“So, we get in. The Secret Service guy is hanging his head—like this. I said: ‘NEVER ... do that again. NEVER ...DO THAT! You just lost me a quarter-million votes. Do you understand? NEVER!’ ”

Then Hart would lean back and laugh, softly. No one ever mentioned how the Service had now departed Hart’s side—they left after he finished under four percent in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Over dinner, or after, there might be another Stoly ... and Hart’s remarks would grow sharper, more topical and telling. He talked about Dukakis, piling up delegates, step by cautious step. Dukakis never got more than thirty-five or forty percent
anywhere
—he had a ceiling, he couldn’t win—why didn’t anybody write that? It reminded Hart of Mondale, in ’84, plodding on with that same stupid inevitability ... reminded him of Barbara Tuchman’s book
The March of Folly
, in which the Great Powers lurched to war—“like this ...”

And Hart’s hand darted toward the edge of the table, then disappeared below.

“... like watching someone go over a cliff.”

The other night, in debate, after Hart brought up an idea, said he hadn’t heard it from the other candidates, Dukakis swiveled in his chair, and with an edge of contempt in his voice, reminded Hart (and the audience): “You’d have heard it ... if you’d been
around
for the last six months ...”

That was when Jesse Jackson reached over, patted Hart’s hand, and whispered: “I don’t like that guy ... he’s
mean
.”

It was a good word, Hart thought.
Mean
was the word they used in Ireland for small, ignoble ... they used it for cheap, or stingy, narrow ... a
mean
understanding was not much understanding.

That was one reason Hart couldn’t get out of the race—why his gut wouldn’t let him get out. All the others (save for Jesse) were playing traditional
old-line politics
—pleasing the interests. Every day, Hart would comfort his crowds (and himself) about the polls, or his own dismal results in the first primaries: the rest of the field, he’d say, was contesting only for the mantle of old Mondale-style politics ... then the winner would have to face Gary and his New Ideas. Sooner or later, Hart would not be ignored—or ignorable—if he could just stick it out. And he would, he vowed. He knew he was right—right about Mondale, right about Dukakis.
He’s for good jobs at good wages
. ...
I’m waiting for the candidate who’s for bad jobs at low wages.

That always got a laugh on the stump. Hart’s crowds laughed at all the right places, they cheered the right lines, they were impressed, informed, swayed ... but he could see this
thing
behind their smiles: they were listening, they liked what they heard—but the doubt and derision, that
thing
was tugging at them, pulling them away from him. That’s why he told his Advance kids: no podiums. Hart could not afford to put anything between himself and the voters. He had to get so close, they
could not pull away
. ... “The closer I can stay—
physically closer
—somehow, I need that. It’s very curious. ...”          Still, he couldn’t get the people to articulate their doubt about him, so he could
answer
, he could make them see him again—he’d make the
press
see ... if there were press.

The CBS crew had stopped trailing Hart after he finished as an asterisk in Minnesota and South Dakota. Now, before Super Tuesday, the whole traveling corps consisted of Judy Penniman from ABC. But she had to scramble at every stop to get a crew from the local affiliate, if she wanted any chance of getting a story on the air. Most days, there was no chance. Hart had become a nonstory, or at best,
a feature
, an “On the Road” piece: it was Gary Hart and his daughter, campaigning through the South ... or some guy who’d built a four-story castle out of tin cans in his backyard. Hart was a curiosity.

And that’s what got to him, late at night—say, with the third Stolichnaya, on the backside of the White Lightning Curve. You could hear the sadness creep into his voice, it got smaller ... you could just about see the lights go out, behind his eyes. He was wracking his brain for some way to beat the dread and fatal affliction ... but there was no answer. He had to stop thinking, sometime. The Stoly helped, it sent him to sleep. “I’m hacking a path through the wilderness,” he’d say, “with no map and no compass. Sometimes, true north is hard to find.”

He was better off in daylight, in better command. He was never at a loss with an audience—he was of size, and absolutely sure. He was at his best on a campus—he’d ask for a blackboard on stage ... then he’d strip off his beat-up brown herringbone sport coat, and with his issues book in his left hand, a piece of chalk swooping like a baton in his right, he would begin to inform the room.

Four days before Super Tuesday, he took as his text the job of President. He asked the audience: What is it?

“Make the budget,” someone offered from the seats. Hart turned to the blackboard and wrote:
Head of Government
.

“He has to meet Gorbachev ...”

Hart’s chalk baton pointed in approval, and he turned to write:
Head of State. “
What else?” he demanded. “One more!”

People called out answers tentatively ... Hart’s eyes peered through the stage lights to locate the voice that had said “Defense.”

“Who said that? Defense—who was that? What’s your name?”

Students were embarrassed to name themselves in front of a crowd. The answer—Sandra McDowell—echoed back timidly. So while he wrote on the blackboard.
Commander in Chief
, Hart boomed out:

“VICE PRESIDENT McDOWELL SAYS DEFENSE! AND SHE’S RIGHT!”

Then they were laughing, and he had them ... as that answer led to military reform, a concept he’d helped to invent, a subject he’d worked on since 1978. It was a topic much misunderstood ... but not with Hart at the blackboard.

“Now, I want to ask another. Which of you brilliant people can tell me: What wins wars? ... What is the one essential element of combat that’s going to make the difference between victory and defeat? ...

“... SECRETARY OF DEFENSE GOLDSTEIN SAYS
PEOPLE
! Exactly right! ... Now, most of the generals and Defense Department bureaucrats would have said weapons. The whole defense debate in this country has been about weapons and spending—do we buy more, or do we buy less? But think about it ...” And he was on another dive back to Hart-fact, bearing down for a moment into the battle deployment of NATO forces, the folly of naval power based on thirteen gigantic aircraft carriers. ...

He’d turned out to be a hell of a teacher, or a preacher, after all. There was in his “chalk talk,” as he came to call it, the kind of detail that demystified the job, and that detail built back to the fundamental question—what the nation would require from its President.

“The economy of a country is like a house. ... What Reagan did—he put a coat of paint on, no scraping, nothing repaired—put a coat of paint on, put glass in the windows, and the house looked a lot better, for a while.”

Hart drew a house on his blackboard—too near the top of the board, and out of kilter. He drew like a child.

“But what he did that was worse—he did not repair the foundation! Now, what are the pillars of our national house’s foundation? They are: manufacturing—we’ve lost three million jobs!” (Hart now started to fill in the board with fat foundation pilings.)

“... Agriculture and energy, that’s another. ... Infrastructure—now what is that? That’s our roads and harbors, and public works, our sewer systems, transit systems, and bridges—there’s bridges falling down in this country in every state of the union! That’s how to put our people back to work! ...

“Now let’s look: what would happen with the HART BUDGET ...”

By this time, Hart’s voice had risen to a messianic contralto. He’d wave his budget and slap the air with his black-and-white brochure, and in those moments, he was riveting—and convincing: there
was
a better way ...
this could be done
! This was the optimism that wins elections. This was an effort to
empower
... and it was without effect.

Because the underlying premise—the required leap of faith—was that
they and he
would do it ... and they’d all seen on TV, of course, that Hart couldn’t really do
anything
... he was a flake, and a fuck-up. He was out there alone. What kind of candidacy was that?

Three nights before Super Tuesday, there was a J-J dinner in Raleigh, North Carolina, in a cinderblock shed about the size of a football field. It was an unprepossessing place to make a speech. Hundreds of people stood in long, noisy lines for chicken, iced tea, and shiny, gelatinous pecan pie. Wizened salads in soldierly ranks had sat out on tables since the afternoon.

Now, at 8:00
P.M.,
here was Al Gore, screaming about Working Men and Women. Gore discovered Working Men and Women after Dick Gephardt won Iowa. Actually, what Gore discovered was that phrase, which was rebounding off the concrete floor and cinderblock walls once every ninety seconds or so, whenever Al finished up another of his daddy’s ol’ country stories.

Vying with Gore’s grits-and-gravy scream was the din of people howdying, talking at the tables, the scraping of a thousand folding chairs on concrete. Hart was busily writing at the head table, head down.

“... changing and growing and learning, ladies and gentlemen!” Gore was wrapping up. He had two more events that would land him in Tampa that night. “One trillion dollars a year!... We can do it, ladies and gentlemen! I want you to dream with me!”

Al got half a standing ovation, and he started working the front of the room, tending generally out the door and south, to Florida. But he was busy about it—he couldn’t seem to get gone. He kept acting surprised and tickled to see the next person who wanted his hand.
Why, gosh! It’s good to see you!

Meanwhile, Hart was introduced, and he got a quarter of a standing O. Only half the folks were clapping at all. The rest were talking.

“It is with a note of sadness,” Hart began, “that we must acknowledge that our Party has won only one national election since 1964. ... Will we win this time?”

The believers, people who were listening, readied their tribal affirmative cheer.

“The answer is
no
,” Hart said. “We will not win this election ... with slogans and platitudes.”

The noise in the place dropped a notch, probably from shock: Hey! They hadn’t come to hear any downers!

“We will inherit the Republican legacy of debt and deficit ... we are going to have to pay taxes on luxuries. We are going to have to put a ten-dollar-a-barrel tax on imported oil, to avoid losing lives unnecessarily in the Persian Gulf...

“We must reform our military to a true national security force that can fight, if called upon, in a Third World arena ...

“... and that is why, at the University of North Carolina, I proposed a voluntary national service, so young people, and all people, can give something back to this country.”

They started to applaud him. Not all, to be sure. But it shut some more people up. There were actually hundreds of people trying to listen. Hart was telling them that he knew it was harder to vote for him now. ... “But I stay on because I love this country. And I believe that the Democratic Party represents the best hope for our nation.”

With his chin out and his voice high and clear, he quoted Winston Churchill: “Never give up. Never give up. Never ... never ...
never
give up ...”

The applause started again, and this time it didn’t stop, but built unaccountably—now people were standing. From the podium, Hart stared out over the hall, startled and pleased. Then he saw that the people standing were faced not toward him, but toward the corner, where the former Governor, Terry Sanford, had entered.

Hart stood waiting while Sanford climbed to the head table and acknowledged the applause. Sanford raised his arms above his head, and the cheering swelled. Then he reached down and grabbed the right arm of Al Gore. (He was still there!) He raised Gore’s arm up with his.

On the other side of Gore, Hart reached down and grabbed for Al’s left hand, so the three could stand with arms raised in tableau. But Gore yanked his left arm down and pulled his hand away. Hart flushed red, smiled shyly, and turned away.

Two nights before Super Tuesday, from his hotel room, Hart returned a call from Roy Romer, his home-state Governor in Colorado. Romer told him he was going to endorse Dukakis—within twelve hours, 7:00
A.M.,
Monday ...
the day before Super Tuesday
.

Hart’s face fell. He was stricken. He said nothing at first. Then, stiffly, “ ’Preciate the call, Roy.”

One day before Super Tuesday—his home state! It was a personal embarrassment. The Colorado primary was almost a month away! Why now? Because Hart was still in the race? ... Romer said Dukakis wanted it now.