What It Takes (103 page)

They brought Dick behind the other podium, so he could see the little step stool the Dukakis wise guys had built for their man. Reilly was in an ecstasy of Mordor-derision. “Remember how you’d sit on the telephone book—when you were
so little
? ...”

“Well, I’m going home,” Dick said, “stick pins in my Duke doll ...
heh heh hackhackhack
...”

The killers fell in behind him. You could hear them trading lines through the hall, to the door, to the streets of Des Moines.

“Yeah.
S’more
pins ...”

“Got some holes in it already!”

“Heh heh, you get done with it, bring it over ...”

“Prob’ly can’t figure out—OW—what’s that
pain
? ...”

“YOWWCH! Ooops! Sorry, Mike!”

“Yeah, sorry, Mike ...
hackhackhack ...
Shit Happens!
Hackhackhack-heeheehee
.”

“First, Mike, if you’re the Democratic nominee, I’m going to work eighteen hours a day to help you get elected ...
” That was Gephardt’s opening salvo.

What happened to the Killer Teuton?

Alas, shit happened ... mostly to Dick. On the way to the showdown, he was already in the zombie-zone, trying to remember twenty lines at once, his opening, the way to turn ... trying just to keep it together, when he got to the hall and ran into ... Bonnie Campbell.

“Heyyy, great to see youuuu,” he said. Bonnie was a friend. Her husband, Ed, former Iowa Party Chairman, was signed on with Gephardt, helping out with more or less constant advice. But now Bonnie was
chairperson
of the Iowa Democrats ... and in her official high-cheese capacity, she had words for Dick Gephardt that morning.

“You started this!” she said. Bonnie’s chosen mission was Party unity. Dick Gephardt had picked a knife fight with a fellow Democrat, and brought his gore-stained blade back to
Iowa
!

“I don’t see why you can’t let us get through this without giving the Republicans all the ammunition ...”

“Uh, really, Bonnie, I ...”

“I don’t appreciate it! Don’t you come in here and leave
me
with blood and guts all over the streets!”

Well, the minute he got on stage, you could tell he’d lost it. Dick looked so clean, so young, so fair, so ...
reasonable
, the way he stood, mannerly, looking down at the papers on his lectern—never turned on Dukakis, never
looked
at Dukakis, save with that Gephardt sympathy-of-listening, for God’s sake, like he was trying to learn how Mike felt ... so they could, you know, come to an understanding!

“
There’s a lot we agree on, Mike, and we’re on the same team
.”

Gephardt did mention the Massachusetts Miracle (on the way to saying, “You’ve been an excellent Governor ...”) but he never called it a mirage. Never held up the report. Never read out any quotes. Never even
asked
Dukakis to defend his record in any regard. Instead, he led off with a cantaloupe of a question about the Harkin-Gephardt farm bill—could Mike support it? ... It was just an invitation for Dukakis to do his sound-bite on the family farm.

Which Michael did. And along the way, he managed to stick it to Dick on his vote for the grain embargo of 1980 ... and Dick’s support of an import-oil tariff (that would cost the average farmer, Michael claimed, $400 a year) ... then he fired off a nasty question on Dick’s vote in 1981 for the Reagan tax cut. Did Gephardt think Michael would meet him halfway, in the Alley of Process, to shake hands? ... Forget it!

Fifteen minutes into the thing, Michael was hectoring Gephardt:

“Well, I don’t know how you can be proud of a tax bill that ran up the biggest deficit in history, and has about as much to do with destroying our international position in the world economy as anything I know ...”

Michael delivered this tattoo with an eloquent shrug that told the world:
Anyone can see this
—
right? Am I right?

“A hundred and six Democrats, Dick—a hundred and six of your colleagues—voted against that tax bill. And, look: I’ve been a legislator ...”

Michael was nodding to himself now, as if we
all
knew the kinda crap
legislators
get away with.

“You’re a [shrug] legislator ...”

Fifteen minutes later, he was back on that theme (on the way to slamming Gephardt’s votes for big-ticket weaponry). He was beating Dick black-and-blue with jabs:

“Well, that’s the problem, Dick. You can’t have it on-the-one-hand-on-the-other, in defense policy. That’s part of the problem. You start with weapons systems, and then you stop. You move forward, and then you move back. I’ve been a legislator, and I’ve been a chief executive. The difference between being a legislator and a chief executive is that you can bounce around a little bit when you’re a legislator. You have to make
decisions
when you’re a chief executive ...”

And through all this dismissive rat-a-tat-tat from Dukakis, Dick stared ahead, smiling, or busied himself at his lectern ... and never once turned to Michael and asked: What damned decision have you
ever
made on a weapon?

And so, a half-hour after that, Gephardt was back in his holding room, staring at the floor again, while they swabbed him off with cold cream.

“Damn ...”

I
T WASN’T THAT
Joe really had a plan. What he had was a speech, and he always felt better when he knew what he was going to say. “Biden is
speech-driven
,” his guys would explain. But that was just guru-talk for the fact that Joe often didn’t know what he thought until he had to say it. Then, too, there was the sorry corollary: sometimes Biden spoke before he thought.

But not this time. He wanted a speech for the Senate floor, and he couldn’t afford to screw around. He had to make his case to the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body that Senators must look at Robert Bork’s philosophy—hell, say it plain—Bork’s politics ... to decide whether he should sit on the Court.

“A really
serious
speech,” Joe said, when he talked to the staff. Which was not to say he didn’t take other speeches seriously ... but they knew what he meant: no rhetoric, no poetry for the crowd. In fact, it wasn’t a Biden speech at all. It was more like a law school paper—the kind he’d never done.

Joe could not resist a tiny flourish here and there: the second time he mentioned Justice John Rutledge, for instance, that jurist became, for Biden, “Old John.” When he quoted a 1972 paper from his favorite conservative scholar, Philip Kurland, Joe stopped after the quote, as if he’d just heard it for the first time, and said: “Lemme repeat that... this is not repeated in the quote, but let me repeat that part of the quote.” Then he hammered Kurland’s point home again.

But the big point was, he had the quotes ... and not just from Kurland, but from Senators (some still in the chamber) who had spoken in the Carswell and Haynesworth nomination lights, during Nixon’s time ... from debates on John J. Parker, a Hoover nominee in 1930 ... quotes from Judge Learned Hand, Justice Felix Frankfurter ... from the Senate speeches on Roger Taney, Andrew Jackson’s choice for Chief Justice ... and back to 1795—Old John—Justice Rutledge, a nominee of George Washington, whom the Senate rejected because it didn’t like his views on the treaty with England.

Biden didn’t have just the facts from the Senate and the nominees rejected (a list of which, lawyer-like, Biden inserted in the record) ... no, he went back to Hamilton in the Federalist Papers, and beyond, to the draft language proposed at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

The fact was, the Senate’s “advise and consent” was intended, from the start, to forestall the President from remaking the Court in his image. The Senate had, for most of its two hundred years, scrutinized the philosophy and politics of nominees—not just their competence, or honesty. And when a President picked a justice for
reasons of ideology
, it was the Senate’s
duty
to examine that ideology.

Biden spoke for an hour straight, and at the end, no one could lay a glove on him. Mitch McConnell, GOP from Kentucky, actually
had
written on this subject at law school ... but when he came at Biden, Joe hammered him with history.

And Dole, who had to carry the flag across the aisle, had a little speech ready, with a couple of zingers about “constituent groups” and “campaign promises.” But he couldn’t really knock down Biden’s point ... so he ended up just insisting that Bob Bork wasn’t such a bad guy.

Biden said not a word about Bork (save to note his nomination, in the first sentence of his speech). He was arguing high principle. Tell the truth, he liked the view from high ground—Joe Biden, Defender of the Constitution! Anyway, if he could set the ground rules, he could take the fight to Bork. Through the millions of words that Bork had written or said, Joe Biden would paint a picture of the judge for the American people. That was how he could win the fight.

Problem was, he didn’t know how he could paint the judge, or paint him into a corner, intelligibly. Joe had to make it connect.

And he would not know ... till he had to make another speech.

The staff made him dozens of fat briefing books: antitrust, privacy,
stare decisis
, civil rights, First Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment ... everything Bork had said on the subjects. Joe could almost recite chunks of Bork’s 1963
New Republic
article, where he blasted the Kennedy civil rights bill ... Bork’s 1968
Fortune
piece, in which he defended the Supreme Court’s
Griswold
v.
Connecticut
... Bork’s 1971 article in the
Indiana Law Review,
wherein he changed his mind and attacked the
Griswold
decision.

That was the key, Biden was convinced:
Griswold v. Connecticut.
That was the 1965 case in which the Court threw out the old Connecticut law that banned the use of contraceptives (even by married couples under the advice of their physicians). A majority of the Court found that the Constitution guarantees a
right to privacy
... though those words do not appear in the document of the Constitution, the majority opinion called privacy “an unenumerated right.”

Robert Bork’s problem was, he could not stomach the concept of “unenumerated rights.” In Bork’s view, once a judge started stretching the Constitution to cover some notion—however desirable—which did not appear in the document itself ... where would it stop? Would some latter-day judge find a Constitutional right to recycling?

But
Griswold
was now important law: when the Court took the states out of the business of regulating abortions in
Roe
v.
Wade
, the majority upheld a woman’s right to abortion
based on the unenumerated right of privacy
. If
Griswold
fell,
Roe
would surely be the next shoe to drop.

That’s what Joe’s adviser, Larry Tribe, meant when he said on the telephone, the day Bork was named:

“Bork’s problem isn’t just
Roe
, it’s
Griswold
.”

That was the truth at the bottom of the polls (the Biden campaign took its own quickie poll in Iowa, when Bork was named, and later got national numbers from a poll commissioned by the AFSCME union). The country was deeply split on abortion, but an overwhelming majority thought the government should stay out of their private lives.

Hell, Joe didn’t need a poll to tell him people thought they had a right to privacy. You stand up on a chair in Pala’s Pizzeria and ask the guys
there
: Does the government have a right to make laws about what you can do in your bed ... with your wife? Well, they’d knock over tables to punch your teeth out.

So now, when he worked through the case law with the experts, Joe kept bringing the sessions back to the ground floor:

“How’re we gonna talk about
Griswold
... how do we tell people the story?”

Sometimes it was Tribe, from Harvard, or Kurland, from the University of Chicago. Joe went through the cases with them until he could render the law in the common tongue. Kurland and Tribe were an odd couple. Kurland was a conservative—roly-poly, he looked like Santa in a suit and tie ... you could hear him breathe. Tribe was the liberal—svelte, tanned, worldly ... likely to show up at Biden’s house in an open-necked sport shirt, might catch a set of tennis between sessions. But they both hated Bork, so they kept coming to Wilmington. In August, when Joe took the family to Bethany Beach, Kurland or Tribe would show up. They were Biden’s sounding boards ... and his teachers.

In effect, Biden went to law school that summer, paced off the ground that he’d only hip-hopped at Syracuse. But this was the best law school in America. And Biden loved it. He had the kind of August he used to have before a football season—working on his moves, every day, all day.

“Tell me about the history of the Ninth Amendment. Why’s it in there? ...”

Campaigning was just a distraction now. He’d do it, if he had to—some event he couldn’t miss. Biden had a new stump speech, mostly about foreign policy. It worked better than “my generation,” but it still didn’t give him the tingle. One day that August, Bill Schneider, the columnist-pundit-pilgarlic-pollster-guru, showed up with a tape of a long, lovely TV ad for Neil Kinnock, the British Labour Party leader who was running against Margaret Thatcher. Kinnock had some beautiful stuff about what the Labour Party meant to working folk. To Joe, that was exactly why
he
was running: to give people a platform on which to build their futures. He grabbed that tape and took it home; he inhaled the thing. It was like when Barbra Streisand came on the radio—Kinnock was singing Joe’s song!

He couldn’t talk about Bork yet, couldn’t do it piecemeal. He knew, when he laid out his case, it had to hit with a thump.

He had a speech scheduled that August at the ABA, the American Bar Association convention in San Francisco—another “serious” speech. He was going to give them a souped-up version of his Senate speech: advise and consent. That was scholarly ground he could stand on. But then he got to talking at his house one day—side porch again, another Bork meeting. The experts had left for the day, but Gitenstein was still there, and Donilon, and Vince D’Anna. Vince was from the Delaware staff, a “real guy,” as Joe understood the term: smart as hell, sure, with tremendous political instinct, but not a Washington-head, not a suit, not a lawyer.