What It Takes (165 page)

So they’d have to ride him down in an ambulance, through the storm. Police from Delaware would ride escort. The family piled into cars. Beau would ride up front with the cops. Jill would ride in the ambulance with Joe.

She stood by the back door of the truck while they lifted him in on a stretcher. “You know,” she said, bending over him, “you really screwed up Valentine’s Day.”

Maryland cops were supposed to meet them, but they never showed. Deep into Maryland, the Delaware cop turned to Beau: “Where we goin’?” Beau had a windbreaker on, and a ballcap—must have looked like a federal SWAT guy. So he had to explain, he was Biden’s son ... he had no clue where they were going.

So they stopped by the side of the road, tried to radio. Five minutes, ten minutes, by the side of the road, until Jill started hammering on the back wall of the ambulance: “Get going! I don’t care what you don’t know ... get this goddam thing
going
.”

Dawn came at Walter Reed, while the family hung in the hallway outside Intensive Care.

An aneurism is a weak spot in the wall of an artery. Like a thin spot in an innertube, it balloons with the pressure. To be sure of what they had, doctors had to take an angiogram, which was a delicate procedure in itself. They fiddled a catheter into an artery in Biden’s neck, whereupon they loosed a dye that would show up on a scan, to outline the arteries climbing Biden’s brain.

Dr. Eugene George was the surgeon in charge. A top man ... but Jimmy Biden was working the phone. He wanted to know the top five guys in the world. Who were they? Where? Would they come? Jimmy didn’t know a lot about surgeons. He guessed they had egos like everybody else. But he looked Dr. George in the face, and said: “Doctor, I hope you don’t take this the wrong way ...” (He really didn’t give a shit how he took it.) “I want a second opinion.”

“Good. That’s fine,” George said. Jimmy liked that.

He narrowed it down to four, apart from George: one guy in Switzerland, one in Toronto, one in Texas, and Virginia. Joel Boyarsky, a big fund-raiser in the campaign, now a family friend, had a team ready to come from New York—the surgeon who did the work on James Brady after he was shot with Reagan. Jimmy was going to hire a jet for the doctor in Texas. He could be in D.C. by late afternoon.

Too late, said Dr. George. He gathered the family in the hallway that morning. He showed them the scan. There was the balloon in Joe’s head. Doctors were sure it had bled—that was the pain. If it blew now, it would kill him: not the blood loss, but the jolt from the blood on the brain—there’s no protection for the brain—it’s like a riot hose that blows the tissue away.

There weren’t many options. There wasn’t any talk of waiting. They’d wheel Joe in, by 3:00
P.M.
Mom-Mom tried to play nurse, asking questions, but Jimmy and Val jumped on her. George was trying to tell them the chances, complications: if he lived, yes, there might be impairment ... left side of the brain ... he could be paralyzed ... he could lose his speech. Mom-Mom turned away then, couldn’t listen. Joe, Sr., thought of his dad, died of a stroke. Dr. George was telling Jimmy that the Virginia surgeon was in town. He’d assist, if that was all right with Jim. ... Then there was silence in the hallway for an instant—until there was a nod from Jill. It had to come from Jill. Then, everything started whirring again.

They gave Joe a paper to sign.

“What does this mean?”

“It means you understand the risks.”

“The ... what kind of chance do I have?”

“Pretty good chance.”

“Fifty-fifty?”

“Just about fifty-fifty. That doesn’t count morbidity.”

Joe didn’t even know the word. But he understood “just about” ... they were going to cut open his skull; he was less than fifty-fifty. He didn’t want to know about the other stuff, the loss of speech, of movement, of sense—morbidity. He signed.

A priest came in to give him last rites.

Joe asked to see the Bidens—one at a time ... Jill, Val, Jimmy, the boys. It wasn’t like the movies—there wasn’t big stuff he had to fix. He didn’t have to tell them he loved them, after all, or adjure them to take care of each other. They knew that stuff. ... But he wanted them to know what he’d found out fifteen years before: they would go on.

When the boys came in, he told them he knew—whether or not he lived, he knew—they would be great men. Not a doubt in his mind.

“And I guarantee you,” Joe said, “that any ... every single time you have a problem, when you got a tough decision to make, you look: I’ll be there with you. Every time.”

In the VIP wing, where they moved the family, the Bidens settled in; it was like an Irish wake ... except there was no body. That was downstairs.

Ted Kaufman was the only guy from the staff. He was like family. Anyway, Ted was the kind who’d always see the silver lining. During the campaign, Ted was the designated optimist.

“Okay, Ted,” Valerie said. “Tell me something good about
this
.”

Ted tried, fumbled around, and they laughed at him.

It was like the campaign, with everyone there, and disaster a cloud outside the room. Someone said: “We gotta stop meeting like this.”

Ted and Jimmy went out and got pizza. The Bidens told old stories.

“God, remember when he jumped off that cliff?”

“Oh, God ...”

“Then he got pissed off at
me
!”

“You let him.”

“I dared him. He’s screamin’ at me: ‘I coulda broken my leg!’ ”

“He could’ve broken his head.”

“That’s good, Mom.”

“Oh ...”

“Aw, don’t start now ...”

They’d told these stories so many times, but there was a tricky edge to the punch lines now ... they weren’t funny unless they all lived to tell. There were too many things they thought of that caught on their tongues.

Mom-Mom whispered to Val—no one else—“Oh, God, if he lost his speech ...”

Michele, Jimmy’s wife, had an uncle—he was up in a cabin, with his wife and one other guy. They had to haul him off that mountain: aneurism. Michele told Jimmy—no one else—her uncle was a vegetable.

Jill was thinking the whole time: thank God he wasn’t campaigning ... New Hampshire. He never would’ve stopped. Up in the snow. They never would’ve got him down here. Not in time. He would have died. Joe would have been dead ... already.

My God, what’s happening down there?

Nobody wanted to ask out loud.

Dr. George said four hours, four and a half ... that meant 7:00
P.M.,
it ought to be over.

“Time is it now?”

“Ten of ten.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

Biden would be on that table for nine hours.

It was midnight when George finally told them: it went well, in a technical sense. Of course, they couldn’t know the result until Joe woke up—that would be hours more. But George, for all his careful Army-doctor words, had the look of a trapeze man who’d just done the triple—backward, no net.

“The timing, I think, was appropriate,” he said. What he meant was, they weren’t a minute too soon. In fact, the moment they cut into Biden’s head—maybe it was the disturbance of the surgery, maybe just a godly coincidence—the aneurism burst like a gusher.

Dr. George called it “friable matter.” He meant blood and tissue, everywhere. “There was quite a bit of friable ...”

Biden was lucky. His artery burst outward, toward the wall of his skull. As far as George knew, the brain tissue had not been disturbed. Dr. George got a clip on the wall of the artery, through all the mess. That much was fixed. As to the rest ... time would tell.

It was dawn again before Biden was lucid enough to know he’d been lucky. Jill came into Intensive Care, told him he was going to be fine. But Biden had to prove to himself he was there—all there.

He worked his fingers and toes under the sheet. Brought a hand up to touch his nose. Blinked his eyes. Saw the clock. Told himself the time, and figured the duration of his unconsciousness. He estimated the square footage of the ceiling by multiplying the tiles. He could think. He could move. He could talk. Thank God.

Thank God ... he would’ve been dead ... in New Hampshire, he would have been dead.

That was the luck that descended like blessed peace on Biden in his hospital bed. It wasn’t just the fact of survival, no. There was a plan for Joey Biden, after all. There was a reason ... there was destiny.

Ted Kaufman was the first man from the staff to see Joe that morning. Joe’s head was a swollen swaddle of bandage. Tubes ran in and out of him everywhere. His voice was small, but he said to Ted:

“I’m gonna be all right.”

“I’m sure of that,” Ted said. “It’s a much better story if you live. It’s gonna increase the legend.”

Biden managed a smile. But this wasn’t a joke.

“No, now I know,” he said, “why the campaign ended like it did.”

I
T’S ALWAYS DANGEROUS WHEN
you start to believe in magic ... the hand of God propelling you by the small of your back, smiting your enemies a shot to the chops. The pros warn against it. But when it’s the pros who are God’s Own Agents ... well, then, look out—there’s no one to warn you.

When Dick Gephardt escaped New Hampshire with second place, he knew it had to be God’s work—because Dick hadn’t had a good week, on his own. It started well enough—he came steaming in from Des Moines Tuesday morning (
eight planes
full of press, crew, and hangers-on). He was ready to ride the famous Iowa bump, close the gap on Dukakis, and raise hell about the Establishment ... but the Establishment, turned out, had gotten tired of taxes and poor people in Boston and moved, en masse—to southern New Hampshire.

By Wednesday, the press herd had digested the Iowa results and moved on to the serious business of destroying the new front-runner, Congressman Gephardt. There was the flip-flop analysis, the insider-outsider analysis, the Doak-and-Shrum-as-Mephisto analysis, and one heady new entry: Gephardt-as-candidate-of-regional-discontent.

Thursday, Simon went nuclear, put ads on TV just
ripping
Gephardt—by name—for his tax votes, his weapons votes, his everything-Simon-could-think-of votes. Turned out, Bambi knew how to hold a grudge, and now he was dripping foam from the mouth!

Friday, Dick actually saw a Simon ad, and it put him into a rage. That night, at a candidates’ forum, Dick was the only Democrat who did not get a standing ovation. He was flat, angry, stiff. After his speech, he held an ugly press conference, tried to slash at Simon, but all he could manage was: “He ought to take off that bow tie, because he’s just another politician.”

That night, Dick woke Jane with a call. She could hear—his first four words—he’d sunk to the bottom again. “He lied to me. ... Paul promised me he wouldn’t do that.”

She tried to buck him up, but the good words didn’t get through. Dick asked about the kids, but she knew he didn’t hear the answers.

“You’re really down, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess I am. I oughta get some sleep.”

But she knew this would be one of those nights when he’d wake with a start, at three or four ... and never get to sleep again.

So Dick spent the weekend fighting off Bambi, fighting with the press, making money calls to fat cats who were, uh ... out of town, in a meeting, or indisposed ... and by the day of the primary, Tuesday, eight days after his apotheosis in Des Moines, Dick had ceased to wonder what had happened to his Iowa bump and was wondering instead if it’d be him, or Simon, who would squeak through in second place, and leave New Hampshire alive.

That Tuesday, when there was no more schedule, and darkness fell, and the killers gathered in another motel—this time a Howard Johnson’s, no food, no couch, no Loreen, and not a suite, just a row of rooms along a dim hallway—no one could tell Dick he would survive the night. They told him it was too close to call ... and sent him out again, to stand in the snow and dark, outside polling places—who could tell? Maybe he’d change a few votes. Then, they were so frantic, they sent Jane to other polls—“Now! Y’gotta get out there now!” ... She had to tell them to wait
five minutes
! Could she go to a bathroom? Could she get some gloves?

That evening, when the polls closed, Dick came back, and the killers tried to leave him alone with Jane—private time, they called it. But Dick just sat on the bed, flipping channels—why didn’t anyone have any damn
news
! She tried to talk about the day, but he didn’t want to talk. (“Fine ... no, it was fine.”) So she shut up, and hunched back against the pillows with a sick, empty feeling inside. What would this do to him? Would he always regret? How would he get past this sadness? He kept flipping channels, and no one was telling him ...
anything.
She could see from his back how alone he was. So she walked down the hall, and she brought the killers back to him.

They came in like angels of death. Even Carrick was accepting blame that night, for getting so panicky during the week—that had thrown Dick off his game. Doak and Shrum had spent most of the week fighting with Trippi over who was the genius behind the magic-bullet Hyundai ad. Ethel Klein was in her last night—the white boys had driven her off the plane when it looked like they were headed for the White House. So all they could offer Dick now was a chance to polish his third-place speech, a “fight-on-to-change-this-country” speech ... and after Dick had worked that over, at his narrow motel desk ... after the TVs had started scrolling some numbers ... and a couple of the dim rooms filled with suits and smoke and spin ... after Reilly had read his tea leaves, and punched up his friends at the networks, and as he was pouring into Dick’s ear the news, but only the good news, or the maybe-at-least-okay news, while Dick studied the carpet in the drab HoJo hall ... then Tony Coelho burst out of Dick’s room, calling into the hallway, as he came:

“
CBS just projected you got SECOND!
”

And Dick lifted his eyes from the rug and looked up at the cheap ceiling tiles, two feet above his head, as if they were Uncle Bob’s azure heavens, and he grabbed Coelho with a hand behind Tony’s neck and pulled him closer, till their foreheads were touching and Dick saw Coelho’s eyes as one, and he said, grinning, giggling: “This thing just might
happen
!”