What It Takes (57 page)

There was no way to set an agenda, and make the system work. Not for Gephardt ... unless he did it from one special chair ... and that was in the Oval Office.

So he set out to run for President. Sure, it’d be hard to make the jump from the House (hadn’t been done in this century). But there had to be a system, right? He’d learn the system, and he’d get out there early, work longer and harder than
anyone. ...
So Gephardt set out to learn what it took. He asked around, and when people told him, he listened. Here is what they said:

They told him he’d have to raise a hell of a lot of money, maybe five million to start, just to get him through Iowa and New Hampshire, just to the first primaries. Gephardt hadn’t raised five million dollars in his whole career. So he said, “Yup, okay, I hear you ... five million, good. We’ll do it.” And he got himself a Finance Chairman, who started giving Dick names to call. There were hundreds of names—fat cats and do-goods—none of whom knew Dick from a hole in the ground. And Gephardt made those calls—called them cold, if he had to—and then called some names he heard from other people, and called back the ones he missed, and made visits with anyone who said yes, and called back anyone who said maybe ... until his finance guy, a St. Louis banker named Lee Kling, who was the Party Finance Chairman under Jimmy Carter, finally figured out: “You got to fight not to give Dick too
many
calls. ... He’ll make as many as you want.”

They told him he’d have to jump-start a national organization. With Gephardt, it had always been just him. He was the organization. But not this time, not in this league. The wise men gave him lectures: he’d have to be
just the candidate
. He couldn’t think anymore about his own schedule, his own ads, his own speeches: he’d have to sign on professionals for those. He’d have to sign on gurus, and a pollster, a Campaign Manager. He’d have to start a PAC. So Dick took some of the money he’d pried out of folks with his fingernails, and set up a PAC, a political action committee, and he got a smart guy to run it, Steve Murphy, who was a thoroughbred political hit man, and Murphy daubed Gephardt’s money onto dozens of deserving Democrats, who were running deserving local races, in deserving states such as Iowa ... and things went fine. Dick even bought a few friends. And so pleased was he with the progress that he talked to Murphy about becoming the Campaign Manager ... or, to be precise, Murphy talked ... and Dick agreed! And then he started looking for a polling firm, and he got a hot outfit from New York, Kennan Research, which would cost another fortune, but provided not only a young killer pollster, Ed Reilly, but offered the services of Ned Kennan himself, who talked like a Viennese shrink, except much louder, whose part in the drama it was to sit Dick down (along with his wife, Jane, and his mother, Loreen, who flew in from St. Louis for this), and to scream at him: “DEY VILL ATTACK YOU! DEY VILL TRY TO KILL YOU! DE PEHRSONL LIFE DE FEMMLY LIFE VILL BE
RUINNN
! YOU
VANT
DIS?” ... which performance Dick greeted with his eager-dog stare, and an occasional murmured: “Okay ... yup, I can handle that. Fine. It’ll be fine.”

Above all, they told him, he’d have to win Iowa. That was the old Carter ’76 scenario ... guy sneaks up out of nowhere in Iowa, by working every chicken dinner and corn boil in the state ... and once he wins the caucus—he’s a
star
... got
momentum
... the polls shoot up, the money rolls in ... it’s a
lock
. So Dick thought: Hey, perfect! Door-to-door! And he went to Iowa, to present himself, as he had on so many St. Louis stoops. He started in 1984, and after Mondale went down the tubes, Dick started working Iowa in earnest: made a dozen trips into the state in ’85. He went to Des Moines in the center of the state, and Sioux City in the west, and Waterloo, Cedar Rapids, Davenport in the east, until someone asked why he was spending all his time in such big cities, and then he went to places you never heard of. For the PAC, he hired a couple of big names who’d worked Iowa for Carter and Hart. By ’86, any Democrat who was running for Sheriff or better got more than a check in the mail from Dick’s PAC. They got Dick, who’d show up at their twenty-five-dollar fund-raiser, happy to make a few remarks, to help out.

And there he’d tell the faithful—whoever showed up—how fortunate they were to have this fine candidate ... for the sake of their Party, their state, this whole country ... because, ladies and gentlemen, this country has problems. And then he’d set out explaining the problems (“I see an America beginning to decline ...”) and how the system could be brought to bear on the problems. And he’d work through it patiently, lucidly, explaining his bills and how they would address the nation’s ills ... until his wise guys told him that
explaining wasn’t enough
. He had to
move
the voters, inspire them, scare them ... something. So, Dick would show up in Iowa and
decry
the problems, with
heat
, with passion (or maybe strain) constricting his throat ... and he’d chop the air and whack on the podium (“It’s not morning, Mr. Reagan ... It’s MIDNIGHT IN AMERICA! ...”) and
then
he’d explain the problems ... until his wise guys started whining that his whole speech was, you know, a downer. So then, back in Iowa, Gephardt would decry the problems, chop the air, and smack the podium, then explain the problems, how the system could be brought to bear ... and then, when the audience was totally becalmed, he’d tack on this strange and churchly breeze: “Now wait ... lemme tell you how
good
it’s gonna be, when we solve these problems. This country is gonna be soooo great! ...” And he’d go on like that for maybe two or three minutes. The close had to be upbeat, see, so he got this long quote to use, some blather about “I see America ... not in the blah blah light of a setting sun but in the blah blah blah of a rising sun ...” It was a Carl Sandburg quote, supposed to be inspiring ... except, for months, Dick went around, introducing it as a Steinbeck quote (“I think John Steinbeck said it best, when he wrote ...”) or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe it
was
a Steinbeck quote. Didn’t matter: no one cared who said it. It was like the rest of the speech: paint-by-numbers ... he was doing everything they told him. It’s just that he wasn’t
doing
anything.

Which, of course, started to eat at the wise guys he’d hired. Gephardt was only months from his announcement, he’d been running in and out of Iowa like a drug courier for two years ... and the polls there put him at one percent! (By late ’86, Gary Hart was at
fifty
percent.) So they decided what wise guys always decide: they had a problem, and the problem was ... the candidate. The hot pollster, Reilly, ran a series of focus groups. That was the latest wheeze in the pollster game. You got a group of voters in a room, showed them things, and then, while they talked, you taped them and watched them through a one-way mirror. It was supposed to tell you
attitudes
... to unlock their wallets, or their votes. So Reilly showed these Iowans tapes of Mondale, Ferraro, Reagan, Hart ... and Gephardt. And what the people said was ...
he looks too good
. Too smooth: this guy’s just rattling off answers ... like it’s rehearsed. So the wise guys came back to Gephardt and they said: too smooth ... too lucid. What people want to see is passion, commitment, they want a window
into your soul
. “You’ve got it, Dick ... your life
is this commitment
... what you’ve got to do now is ... just, you know,
let it out
!”

“Okay, good. Very good. I hear you. Let it out ... okay, very helpful.”

Let
what
out?

“You’ve got to have a message,” Don Foley said. Foley was Dick’s press guy—went back with him all the way to St. Louis, to the first campaign for Congress. Just about the only guy left in Dick’s office who knew anything about Gephardt ...
last
year. “And it’s got to come from you,” Foley said. “So, Dick, what you have to do, is take a weekend, or a
week
, and don’t go to Iowa. Go off somewhere, by yourself, with Jane, and just write down what you really want to do, just write why you think you ought to be President.” So Dick said he understood, but it took months before he could get away, and when he did, it was only a weekend, but still ... he sat down and he thought to himself why he really wanted to be President. But it was obvious. There were problems ... and the system ... and he wrote that down, and brought it back, but it ended up like a laundry list, like the roster of bills at the start of any Congress.

Meanwhile, the chief of Gephardt’s wise men, Richard Moe, another graduate of Mondale U, told Dick that his campaign wasn’t
big league
: here they were, heading for announcement, and the message wasn’t getting through. Gephardt for President needed a Campaign Manager with national experience ... no, Steve Murphy was a fine, good man ... but Moe knew that true professional killers are quiet, heady guys in suits, who leave no fingerprints. Only two fellows who could run this thing, Moe said, were that guy in Boston, John Sasso ... or a fellow from Teddy Kennedy’s staff, a murmurous South Carolinian named Bill Carrick. “Okay. Got it,” said Gephardt. But Sasso was otherwise engaged, so Dick started talking to Carrick. Talked for months ... well, Carrick talked, and he sketched out the way a campaign should go: most important, there would be discipline, focus ... while the manager
ran things
, and the candidate would be ... just the candidate. Dick agreed! And when Carrick finally said yes, just at the New Year, 1987—only two months to announcement, time to get
moving
—Dick dropped Murphy like a sweaty gym suit (put him in another job, director of the Democratic Caucus, after Foley reminded Dick that he had to do
something
for Murphy), and named his new manager, Bill Carrick.

And Carrick got in, looked the thing over, and discovered there was no message. ...
Who’s doing message?
... And Carrick said, there’s only one guy to do message: guy’s a genius—Bob Shrum. They’d worked together for Teddy Kennedy—Shrummy and Bill, pals, you see ... so Carrick told Dick he
had to get Shrum
. So Dick called Shrum, and called him, and called him back, and finally invited him to dinner ... out to the
house
to dinner. So they made a date, and Jane cooked, and everything was ready, out in the woods in Virginia, where Dick and Jane had their lovely, airy house ... except that day, Shrum was meeting about Cuomo. Had an appointment with Mario’s son, Andrew—supposed to talk for an hour or so. But Shrummy and Andrew got to talking and the time ... well, it just went! ... and it got to be awfully late. And there were Dick and Jane, in the woods in Virginia, and no Shrum, and the dinner was drying out in the oven by the time Shrum finished talking up Cuomo ... and that was in
Washington
, forty-five minutes, at least, from Dick’s house, and Shrum would have to find someone to drive him (Shrum’s a genius and does not have to drive himself—he once took a cab in Washington ... to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania), so Shrum had to go back to his office and get a colleague to drive him out to Dick’s, and by the time they got there, even Shrum thought Dick might be, well, a little pissed off ... but no.

“Good to see youuu ...” Dick said at the door. Jane was in the kitchen, taking the supper off life-support. And Shrum and Dick started talking ... about the campaign, the nation’s ills, the Congress, the White House, the field for ’88 ... and it was great. Shrummy talked a lot ... but the amazing thing was, how well they agreed! And by the time Dick jumped into his own car, to spend an hour and a half driving Shrum back to Washington (Hey, no problem—after midnight there’s hardly any traffic at all!), Shrum forgot all about Cuomo. He wanted to talk about Gephardt to his partner, Doak. They’d have to be together on this, Shrum and Doak, but Doak was still sniffing around Biden. ... So, it was hung up while Shrum tried to work it out with Doak, and it was coming up on February ’87, Dick’s time to announce—Dick wanted to get out there early, earlier, harder, longer, than
anyone
—when Shrum finally signed on to help ... at least he’d write the announcement speech. And Dick kept talking to Shrum and Doak ... must have called back a dozen times ... and finally, he got them—Doak and Shrum—signed them on, as a firm, his
media consultants
. (That meant they’d buy the TV time.) Now Gephardt had gurus, too.

And then, all the new hired killers got busy: announcement had to be right. Had to set out themes that Gephardt could ride to the White House. Had to look right, too—big, professional. ... And Carrick sat down with Shrum and Doak to bring them up to speed ... after all, Carrick had worked with Dick for
weeks
now. And he told them straight out, what he’d learned in that time ... reviewed the campaign that Dick had created—by white-fisted will and his own febrile effort, made from thin air—and Carrick warned Doak and Shrum what the real problem was: this guy might not be hungry enough ... too polite, too nice ... might not go for the kill.

“You don’t wanna let up on this guy,” Carrick murmured. “You can’t push hard
enough
on this sumbitch ... you let up, he’ll pussy out on you.”

And in the middle of this, thumped and prodded from every side, Dick was ... just fine. See, he
didn’t mind.
All he wanted to do was to climb into that bubble ... he’d find out how to be, and then just
do
it—he’d be the best darned Just The Candidate anyone ever saw.

When he’d show up on the floor of the House (less and less—he was on the road four days a week), his friends, fellow members, would ask, “How
are
ya?” And Dick would croon, “Fiiine, greeaaat...” Sometimes, with solemn eyes, they’d try to talk to him about how it really was: Wasn’t it ... crazy? Impossible? And Dick would agree: “Yeah ...” and maybe laugh with them for a minute. But it wasn’t his real laugh—the cackle, where his cheeks get pink and sit up like a couple of chipmunks on their hind legs, the laugh that offers a flash of the freckle-faced boy underneath Dick’s system, the unbridled, shockingly loud, hacking laugh that his kids hear in tickle wars. Most of his member-friends never heard that laugh.