What It Takes (75 page)

So he took Paul home, and walked him through the silent, stately house, took him to a guest room ... but a nanny was asleep there. So he led Paul upstairs to his son’s room—Beau was asleep, too—and Joe laid a hand on his son’s shoulder for just an instant, to tell him: “Beau-y, this is Paul ... he’s gonna sleep in the other bed.”

“Hnnuh! ... okay, Dad ...” And Beau was asleep again.

So Taylor slept that night with the Bidens,
en famille
, and woke the next day among the family ... but he never did write about it for the
Post
.

Taylor did write his book, about him in the campaign and all ... and in the book, he explained his technique:

“I’m a ‘good cop’ interviewer. I try to ease, tease, coax and wheedle information from sources. With body language, facial expression, tone of voice and other verbal and nonverbal cues, I hope to let them know that I see the same world they see; that I empathize with them; that, beneath my aloof reporter’s exterior, I may even secretly admire them.”

In fact, Taylor noted, he does admire them. But he will not write that.

“Once a reporter ventures beyond the neutral zone of objectivity into the netherworld of approbation, he makes an almost tactile investment in the subject of his praise. By morning, tons of newsprint (seventy-five tons in the case of
The Washington Post
) will convey his judgment to millions of readers. It’s risky. Suppose the ingrate embezzles the orphans’ fund next Tuesday. Then who looks like a fool?”

Taylor was not going to look like a fool ... no. So there was nothing in the book, either, about that night with Biden, the speeches, the flights, the talk about life, the house in its stillness, the practiced hand with which Joe brought his son to the edge of waking, so he would not be alarmed in the morning ... no.

Paul was asked about that night, one time, long after, when Joe’s campaign was history:

“That kind of thing ...” Paul said, and he squinched his face briefly and blinked a couple of times. “It was like a scene that he liked to show. ... He thought it showed him to advantage.”

H
ART NEVER EXPECTED REPORTERS
to admire him, just to do their job—was that too much to ask? Of course, he didn’t understand their job. He couldn’t understand why they wrote the
same things
, over and over ... it wasn’t anything he’d said to them. Who were they talking to?

E.J. Dionne, in
The New York Times
, began his dispatch from Ottawa: “Gary Hart came home and, for a moment, he did not live up to his reputation. He nearly cried.”

Time
magazine crammed the visit into two paragraphs in “American Notes,” and dispensed with any facts about the trip till the latter paragraph. The lead paragraph began: “In his quest for the Presidency, Gary Hart is plagued by two troublesome perceptions: that he is cold and aloof, and that he has tried to reinvent or run away from his roots.”

Paul Taylor, in
The Washington Post
, led with
The Ottawa Herald
’s report about the Hartpences’ sixteen houses. Then he brought the reader up to speed on the trip with a paragraph that began: “It was but one of many morsels of biographical detail to emerge from a campaign visit that seemed programmed to unearth nostalgia and emotion in a frontrunner sometimes accused of being too icy to be elected President.”

Three reporters, three big publications ... but one common element in all the stories: Dionne’s “his reputation” ... or
Time
’s
“
troubling perceptions” ... or Taylor’s “sometimes accused.” Hart could do nothing without reporters reminding us: they thought Hart was weird.

Note that Dionne adduced no imputers, Taylor named no accusers, and
Time
had room for no troubled perceivers. This was such standard Washington poop, so well known by people well known to be in the know, that they didn’t even need to trot out the garbage source-codes (“political observers,” or “campaign staffers,” or “Capitol Hill sources,” or other lunch-buddies) that pass for attribution in the daily political smegma.

No,
everybody knew
Hart was weird.

Wait—who was everybody?

Well, when you talk about the pack, you first have to mention the Leader of the Pack, David Broder, who had attained that status by thirty years’ work as a Washington reporter, and lately as a columnist for the
Post
. He was the biggest of the big-feet ... balding, bespectacled, soft-spoken, kindly, a thoroughgoing gentleman, well informed, hardworking, fair-minded, and, in general, exemplary—which is exactly the point.

Because that was the year Broder wrote the book
Behind the Front Page
, and the very first story in that book was about campaigns—how mistakes in coverage are made. Specifically, the story was about 1972, when Ed Muskie cried (or didn’t cry) one day in Manchester, New Hampshire, and his campaign slid straight into the shithouse after that. Part of the story was missed, Broder said, because no one knew until the next year that the whole scenario was launched by a Nixon campaign “dirty trick.” But at the same time, Broder defended his coverage (and that of his friends), which concentrated on the crying, the way Muskie came apart at the seams. Why was it right? Why was Broder so sure? Because everybody (secretly) knew that Muskie was wound too tight—
the guy was weird
!

“All of us suspected that under the calm, placid, reflective face that Muskie liked to show the world, there was a volcano waiting to erupt. And so we treated Manchester as a political Mt. St. Helens explosion, and, in our perception, an event that would permanently alter the shape of Mt. Muskie.” (Alter it they did—they took the sorry sonofabitch
down
!)

One of the reporters whom Broder commended, in that instance, was Jack Germond, who then worked for Gannett, but who now wrote a syndicated column with his partner, Jules Witcover—and those two were the only other snowshoe-size big-feet who actually worked on the trail. On some trips, you’d see Germond, reclined, as was his wont, in a bar chair or an airplane seat, wisecracking with those in the know, smiling, bald, round with a firm and blessed roundness—Buddha with an attitude. Or sometimes, Jules would appear behind some candidate on some Iowa Main Street, wearing an overcoat and a patiently mournful look on his long face, walking his practiced and careworn walk—the walk of a policeman who has ever walked, ever mindful these days that there are two years (still!) to retirement. Their column ran in hundreds of papers, and was read religiously by the wise-guy community. And where Broder would stray, at times, into the thin air of government, Germond and Witcover wrote pure politics—a column you could count on. And with their book, every four years, settling the record and the scores on the last race, they, too, were exemplary—the ranking diarists of Presidential politics.

The way they cranked out books, see, you didn’t have to wait fifteen years to find out you’d better save string on this weirdness. It was all in their ’84 book, the candidly titled
Wake Us When It’s Over
. The name thing ... the age thing ... the
signature
thing. (Hart changed his penmanship! ... Jeezus!)

And you didn’t even have to wait for the new book, because Jules would tell you! They had this dinner with Hart, see, in Boston ... and it was going great until they asked about the name thing ... or the age thing ... or some goddam thing. And Hart just stood up and walked out. The guy is ... a weird duck.

Anyway, you didn’t have to scale snowshoe Olympus to get the poop: younger big-feet, big-feet-to-be, and wannabe-big-feet were all aware of Hart’s weirdness, and being younger, perhaps more eager—each with his way to make in the world, each eyeing the other, elbowing by on the path to greatness—they were going to
expose
the weirdness.

Taylor was right about one thing—it was a new generation trying on the big shoes, a generation that learned its craft (in journalism schools, or in first jobs) just as Woodward and Bernstein were taking a President down. So, among the shared attitudes of these big-feet-to-be was an abiding cynicism about the process they were sent out to cover. Oh, they’d read the books, they’d been around: they’d all smelled the elephant shit behind this big top ... yes. Sharp-eyed they were, every man and woman aboard, long on suspicion. A serious-minded pack it was, too, and abstemious in personal habits. They’d work the hotel bars with Perriers in hand. They’d vote campaign planes smoke-free zones. They made their deadlines, and got up extra-early to run. ...

Of course, each had his own style, his own view of himself. Just by way of example: Taylor, who was cool, handsome, and detached, was by his own lights a man who “saw nuance” and “took a fair-minded approach.” ... E.J. Dionne, from the
Times
, was short, quick, awfully busy, harried like a border collie with a bad herd. Like so many
Times
-men, he was an expert—a Ph.D. historian from Oxford, no less—and he’d learned his politics at the knee of guru-columnist William Schneider, so he could seek from the latest polls the undertow in the great sea of voters. ... Smooth Howard Fineman from
Newsweek
, with the soft hands and bottom-line eye of an up-and-coming junk-bond salesman, just meant to hit with a thump—wherever, however. (Howard, it should be noted, was the first of his generation to earn a panelist’s chair on the Hour of the Living Dead,
Washington Week in Review
.)

Yet different as they were (and as many as they were—for these were but three conspicuous flowers on a stalk that bore profusely), none got to this campaign, or got through it, by being shy of reputation. (Being well known was their bankable asset.) And although they could emerge better-known by any of a half-dozen routes—by the grace of their prose, their consistent good judgment, their steadiness through a campaign’s sharp turns, perhaps by spotting early some lesser-known candidate with a spark of greatness—those were, well, mild ... much too easily lost in the shuffle. The only sure route to celebrity, and beyond, into
history
—to their own index entry in the next Germond and Witcover epic—was to take somebody down.

Of course, best of all, a front-runner ... hell, they didn’t have to be ambitious to want to knock Hart off his horse. Not only was he weird, he was four-to-one over the next guy in the polls—and the next guy was black! It’s a year to the first convention and there’s no horse race! This thing—
their
thing—could be over!

Unless they could ... somehow! ... write the weirdness.

But they couldn’t, you see—couldn’t just come out and say,
this guy makes me uneasy
. There’s a standard of conduct in the trade, and the standard requires some evidence, preferably public evidence, that there is
reason
for uneasiness. Even pundits—columnists, editorialists, commentators, and like pooh-bahs—who are mostly relieved of the strain of actual reporting, feel
comfier
if they can adduce some “objective” evidence of the character flaw they purport to discern.

So what they’d do, they’d take a wise guy to lunch, and quote
him
on why Hart was weird. But by April ’87, with Hart at fifty-five percent in Iowa, it was hard to find a wise guy who’d let his name appear with the quote. Anyway, even if they could use the name, and the guy stuck Hart until he bled all over the page ... even if they could do some
damage
with the quote ... well, the wise guy would get the index entry with Germond and Witcover—not the writer.

It was very frustrating.

So what happened was, the stuff would seep into stories as code, phrases that attached to Hart, whatever he did, wherever he went—because everybody knew them. True, the code words might have meant different things to different writers (God only knows what they meant to readers), but they gave the illusion of knowledge of the man ... and they were safe. There was more than a grain of truth to them—
everybody knew
that—and even if they explained ... well, actually, nothing ... no one felt out on a limb, calling Gary Hart “cool and aloof.”

That was number one, the hoary “cool and aloof.” The standard evidence was the way Hart would stand in a corner in a room full of people he didn’t know—wouldn’t act like a pol, would not press the flesh ... no. Hart would not small-talk. Nor would he slap backs—not even
big-feet
backs—and he could not, or did not, hide his contempt for their questions. In fact, he thought they were stupid. Worse still, he made the interviewers
feel
stupid.

One time—this was late ’83—Hart was flying back from a candidates’ forum in upstate New York. He was sitting with Senator Patrick Moynihan. From one row behind, Dan Balz, from
The Washington Post
, kept poking his face between the airplane seats, asking Hart about the horse race. Balz was working the then-common wisdom that Hart was going nowhere in ’84 (
everybody knew
that). “Gary,” he said, “you’ve got no money, you’ve got no endorsements, you’re a no-show in the polls—why don’t you just give it up? ...”

Well, it was the end of a long day, at the end of a long year, during which Hart had explained
a million times
that money, polls, and the nod from big pols was not what his campaign was about, and so ... Hart went ballistic. He hiked one arm over the back of his seat and started pointing it in Balz’s face. “Your reporting,” he said, “is so shallow, it’s ... it’s ...” Hart had no words for this. His face was shaking. “You
always
...
miss
...
the point
!”

Of course, that wasn’t exactly “cool and aloof.” More like its evil twin, “icy and contemptuous.”

Number two was “outsider,” or “loner.” This was a satisfying piece of code because it seemed to haul the reader from politics (where Hart would actually
admit
to insurgency) ... straight into the dark and twisty corridors of psyche, which
everybody knew
was the locus of the weirdness. And “loner” had such a beautifully desperate air ... it brought a whiff of the front page the day after some sicko shoots up a shopping mall with his Uzi: those dim and doleful stories wherein the sicko’s neighbors say, “I dunno, I din’ really know’m—he was quiet—kep’ to hisself, pretty much. ...” The one-column headline: