What It Takes (35 page)

But at the last minute, as a last mark of esteem for Hart, the Soviets decided to send on his plane (in fact, in his care) one of the refuseniks whose case Hart had brought up with Gorbachev—Rimma Brave, a Soviet Jew who needed cancer treatment in the West. Actually, she was kind of a pet case of Al D’Amato, the Senator from New York.

So Hart escorted her out of the plane in Vienna, and someone from the embassy took them both to the VIP lounge, where there were cameras waiting ... along with
Al D’Amato
, who was looking a bit sour about Hart horning in on
his refusenik
. Unhappily for Al, the pic in
The New York Times,
the next day, showed Rimma Brave with Hart.

Unluckily for Gary, the business with Al took some time, and when he got to the Imperial, breakfast was out of the question. Hart was still up for a whipped-cream treat, but Andrea and Doug had spotted a McDonald’s across the street. So they snuck over for a Big Mac, despite a look of unalloyed scorn from Hart, and when they got back, it was almost time for Gary’s stand-up on
Good Morning America.
This was something arranged by his staff in the U.S., a live satellite feed back to Joan and David and the whole of the U.S.A., just then waking up to a grisly gray working Thursday. So Gary had to leave the white-on-white suite to go to a rooftop somewhere in Vienna, to stand under a dripping tarp (it was fairly grisly in Vienna that day, too), chatting brightly with the anchor-humans.

Thence he scooted right into his walk, and then to Warren’s for a talk about Gorbachev—had to cut that short—and back to the hotel, where he called Billy Shore, his number-one aide, who’d just moved to Denver, along with the rest of the Hart campaign crew. Billy was full of good news and arrangements: good press in Boston and New York, “Hart, Gorbachev Exchange New Ideas” ... That was the wire copy in other papers, too, and a new poll from
U.S. News
showed Hart well ahead of the Democratic pack; Hart at thirty-one percent, to Cuomo at nineteen, tied with “don’t know.” Nobody else was even close. ... And another poll from
The Des Moines Register
, arbiter of the nation’s first caucus, showed Hart in a cross-party race beating Bush—sixty-five to twenty-nine. ... And then there was the schedule for the weekend, as a matter of fact, day after tomorrow, when Hart, back in Washington (after another eight hours in the air), would make the radio response for the Democrats after Reagan’s weekly chat—Hart would have to get something written, maybe tomorrow, could they fax it? ... And day after that,
Face the Nation
, and Billy wanted to set up a conference call with Hart and the campaign brain trust on that: just the standard stuff—what’s our message, what’s the headline, what’s the sound-bite ... just had to be arranged.

As always, Billy was quick and precise, calm, good-natured. Billy Shore, who’d worked with Hart since ’78, was a neat man, with thin blond hair and a round, boyish face that always seemed to look upon the world with quiet, self-sufficient pleasure. Shore was Hart’s point man, his gatekeeper and usual traveling companion. If you wanted to tell Hart anything, you could tell Billy, and he’d write it down in two or three neat words, on one side of his Hart-sheet, always an accordion-folded page from a yellow legal pad, which he kept in the same suit pocket, one sheet a day, every day. And when the time came, he would rattle them past Hart, and write the responses, in two or three neat words, which he’d then relay from the next stop, the next pay phone, the hotel that night ... Nothing got lost. Shore was impeccable. And the best part was, he was a man of sweet juices, which he used to lubricate Hart’s path through the world, or patch things up in his wake.

Now, in the grand white suite, Hart was perched uneasily on the edge of a white chair, closer each minute to the front edge of the cushion, and his answers to Billy grew steadily shorter as Billy ran down another half-dozen notes—all arrangements. Billy could hear the growing edge in Hart’s voice—he knew his man. Mostly, it seemed to Hart, his life was consumed by schedules, arrangements, things he had to do before he could do what he meant to do ... like a man who lived in too small a house, who always had to move three things to get to the thing he wanted. (In fact, at that moment, Lee
was
moving them into a too-small house, their log cabin in the mountains outside of Denver, whose three rooms she’d already filled with stuff, while sixty-three cartons from Washington waited, stacked on the porch. ... That was another thing, he had to call Lee back: their friend Terry Tydings had called Lee from D.C., where she had ten copies of Hart’s book for him to sign. Should she take them to the office, or the Washington town house? It had to be arranged. ...) Mostly, it seemed to Hart, he never got a day to think—or even not to think—just to live, be himself, read, go to a bookstore, see friends, a movie ... to feed the individual mind, which, after all, was what he had to offer.

Instead, what he got was arrangements—sixteen hours a day of arrangements. Things had to be done
now
, or yesterday, by the time he got to them. That’s what the staff in Denver was supposed to take care of—this time, he’d have a real campaign staff, not like ’84. No, this time, the machinery would all be in place. The First Circle was already moving, hauling lives, homes, and families out to Denver, where offices were already assembling ... 1600 Downing Street, a propitious address—and cheap rent. But somehow, it didn’t lighten the load on Hart. It was just more people for him to teach that it
wasn’t about arrangements ...
that he wasn’t going to stop, today, now—this minute!—to call the Democratic Chairman of Cumquat County,
who was so pissed off
... not even if Hart’s own county coordinator, Mary Makeadeal, said he
had to call the Cumquat County Chairman, NOW ... or she’d walk
! No, that’s not how it was going to be ... not this time.

“You feel good about it?”

Billy’s voice in the phone—he wanted to know about Gorbachev.

Hart said: “It was ... incredible.” And he gave Billy the outline of the meeting, its length, its sweep. He did, he told Billy, what he’d come to do: he had opened a relationship ... it was important.

“Yeah, that’s great. I talked to Hal and Dixon”—two of Hart’s senior campaign staff—“and everybody said it was, you know, a really good move. Politically, it played really well, people were just really proud of you, you know, dealing with another world leader. It’s perfect, in terms of what it does to your stature, you know, fits perfectly with that strategy, and
Face the Nation
, Sunday ...”

Hart cut in: “No.”

Hart’s voice had that clipped tone.

“... No, Billy. This was
important
.”

He shouldn’t have to tell Billy that it wasn’t about talk shows, or polls, stature gaps, strategy, not even about becoming President. This was about
being
President.

That was the Hart-fact underneath: Hart was getting ready to be President. Not because he thought he had the race won—just the reverse. He knew, somehow, in that extrarational way that led him to most of his truths, that this would be a difficult campaign—vicious, more like it—that’s what he feared. That’s why he had to be ready, now. He had to decide, to know, where he wanted to lead the country. There would be no time to do the work, no time to think, in the campaign. Hart knew what the campaign could do to a man, the constant, restless, know-nothing drive that the system now demanded. Save for Jesse Jackson, who’d run in ’84, Hart was the only Democrat who knew about the bubble. Hart remembered ’84, after New Hampshire, when he touched down at a hundred airports in the space of twenty days, screaming out his New Ideas into the wind on the tarmacs until he was hoarse, weary, shrunken inside around a kernel of himself that he had to protect ... or lose himself altogether. He knew he made mistakes in exhaustion. He knew exhaustion would come again. Hart knew the American campaign system like no one else: he’d helped to invent the long march with McGovern in the run-up to ’72.

And he knew, they’d have to come
at him
. They’d try to make him the issue. Like Mondale did in ’84, when Hart had him down on the mat: “Where’s the beef?” Mondale said. That wasn’t about issue papers, Hart had spoken on the issues for two years. What Mondale was saying was:
Who is this guy? Where’d he come from?
... And it worked, God knows. This time, they’d come at him harder. And the only thing Hart could do was to get his ideas out there
now
, to make his ideas the issues. They were his only protection. That’s why he’d spent the last two years, since ’84, building his program, like a brick wall: the book on military reform, the comprehensive trade bill, his own version of the federal budget, the Georgetown lectures on foreign policy, and, soon, the education speech ...Where is that speech? What are they doing with the time? ... That speech would be another brick. That wall had to get built.

And people would see. He trusted that much. That’s what he kept trying to tell the staff about the “stature strategy.” It wasn’t just a trick to make him stand above the others. It had to be based on a rock-solid fact: he knew what he wanted to do, when the others were just peddling sound-bites. And he knew, now ... much better since the morning with Mikhail Gorbachev. He knew it like he knew every grand Hart-fact, knew it whole and instantly, without a train of reason ... It was the same feeling, the same rush of glorious certainty he’d had six months before, in the Middle East, with King Hussein, and Shimon Peres, and Hosni Mubarak. The old formulas were dead. That’s what Gorbachev was saying to him in a dozen different ways: something great, and new, could occur.

And it
fit
. It made perfect sense with the first year in the White House, the agenda that Hart had, even now, running through his head. He hadn’t told anyone, not even Lee. ... But he knew: Gorbachev would be first. Hart would send an emissary to Moscow, even before he took office, to plan an early summit
with the Reykjavík agenda
: the zero option—no more missiles. They could make it
happen
. Within ten years, there would be no arms race.
He’d invite Gorbachev to his inauguration
. Hart knew it whole: Gorbachev would come ... and that would wake the world to the change within its reach. And after that summit—as early as February ’89—Hart would set the Secretary of State to detailed negotiations to make real the end of the Cold War. And when those talks were under way, then ... he would go to the Middle East. Himself,
he
would do it, and in a room with Hussein and Peres and Mubarak, he would work out an end to those wars, that madness. He had already talked to them all, and he
knew
, there was basis for an agreement. Real peace would take years. But the framework could be set up now,
had
to be set up now. ... And by the summer of ’89, he’d be back in the U.S., where he’d set in motion a reform of the nation’s basic institutions: military reform—only from the White House could America change
how it thought about defense
, and then work out what that meant for weapons, basic equipment, training, troops. And education: a total overhaul, freeing up new ways in which people could study, but all based on conservative
subjects
—languages, classics, more science, mathematics. It
had
to be done from the White House. ... And there was more: industrial policy, trade, energy, environment—fundamental changes. He saw it whole. And he could do it.

But he could not do it without a campaign to match that boldness. He could not get there by cutting deals with the politics-as-usual pros who signed on because they liked his chances. It was not going to be that way—could not be. And he couldn’t get there if the campaign was about him, even if magically he could transform himself to the perfect pitch of slogan and slow grin—it would not work. Unless he was hauled into office by his ideas, there would be no mandate, no way to govern. And there’d be no point: Why would he give his life over to this, if it were not for the notion that he could do something great? He didn’t have to be President, not for him—maybe for the kids; he could see it that way, sometimes, for their future—but for him, he could live without. He could write books. He could have ... a life of his own. That was the other truth: he could not do it by losing every shred of himself in ninety-nine Iowa counties, by shaking every hand at every steak fry, press conferences at every airport in every state. What was that for? Ideas did not come from meetings of consultants thinking up slogans, certainly not from press conferences. Ideas came from something deeper, from the life that underlay the candidacy. If there was no life, no time to think, what was the point? That’s what he kept telling the Schedulers: he had to have time, somewhere—anywhere—a day to live, to graze on the world. It wasn’t because he was lazy, God knows. He’d work like a beast, a wiry old donkey. But what was the point, if there was no life inside him? What use would he be then?

It was, for Hart, a matter of simple independence. If he lost that, he was lost—and they might as well fold up shop. Independence was, for him, in equation with individuality. And it was his individual thought—the power of one man’s ideas—on which the whole edifice stood. Just a day, just once in a while ... to read, have a drink, talk about ideas, or not talk at all, see a city, go to the beach ... or the
opera
!

So, they dressed, he and Andrea, dressed for the evening in their splendid suite, and stepped down to the lobby and asked for a cab. ...
Staatsoper!
the cabbie confirmed with a nod, and they drove through the capital of the Hapsburgs, to the glorious theater. ... No matter their seats were not too good, stuck up in nosebleed city, third balcony—Boy! Wish we had glasses!—no matter: they were at the opera! And the glittering chandeliers dimmed and died, the orchestra began to play, the audience settled with a susurrus sigh, the curtain rose, and ... Gary and Andrea Hart fell quickly, blissfully asleep in their seats.

In Ottawa, there was always time. Sometimes it seemed like time didn’t pass at all, in the dreamy wait for sleep in the front bedroom on Mulberry. The sounds of the house were always the same, reassuring. There was hardly sound at all from his parents’ room; his dad had already turned in. Carl Hartpence was still a farmer in his rhythms, early to bed, up about dawn, though he’d worked in town for years now. Nina was the night bird. Even after he put down his own book, Gary could hear her in the living room chair, where she read—probably her Bible, or church magazines—though lately, since the new thing, television, she kept that on, too, with its murmurous song or riffling laughter in the background.