What It Takes (60 page)

But on the schedule, it’s one morning speech (a poli-sci class at Daniel Webster College—twenty sleepy, vacant-eyed kids and two Minicams—with Dick pounding the lectern and decrying the problems, like it’s a hall packed with five thousand union men ...) and then mostly private meetings: lunch with the Mayor of Nashua, kiss-ass at the statehouse in Concord. ... What happened to the famous door-to-door Dick? (“He’ll do it,” his press guy, Foley, insists. “That’s how he
really is.
Do you know that in his first Congress campaign, ’76, he hit thirty thousand doors?”)

Well, the day holds promise of one such event, a visit to Jean Wallin, ice-cream parlor proprietress, a “Democratic activist,” the kind of woman around whom campaigns in New Hampshire are built. She’s only had the ice-cream shop for the last six months, but she’s had winners for the last twenty years: McCarthy in ’68, then McGovern, Carter in ’76, Carter again, and then Mondale. She has a nose for nominees, and Dick is coming to ask for her support.

In the Chevrolet, Jim Demers, a local pol, is driving, and Dick is riding shotgun. Jane is hunched in the back, just behind Dick, and next to her rides the new body man, Brad Harris. Brad, a Georgian, about twenty-two, with razor-cut hair and premature jowls, with the standard Washington aluminum-siding suit and a quiet, responsible, striped rep tie, is the first bit of bubble that Dick has accreted for his new road show. The body man holds the briefcase, writes down the names of people who’ll help, holds the notecards or the text of the speech, sees to the phone calls and messages, gets water to the podium and snacks to the car, lines up the plane tickets and hotel rooms ... he is a man of all work, an indispensable man, and of this last fact, Brad is aware. “Dick, this is
people-to-people
,” Brad says now, with the air of a major explaining a mission to a young lieutenant. “
Jean ... Wallin
...”

In the parking lot, someone says to Jane: Hey, this is more like it! Pretty soon, Jane and Dick would be peddling brochures on doorsteps in the Manchester suburbs. “Well,” Jane says brightly, “door-to-door is something we can really do! You should
see
us go door-to-door! In 1976, we hit fifty thousand doors, you know. And Dick’s mother! She won’t leave the porch until she gets a commitment. She won’t leave!” It is the most voluble speech from Jane all day. Here is something she
knows
. Meanwhile, Dick is still in the car, fidgeting with his shirt. Turns out CBS has him miked up for this homey little people-to-people. ... Later, it emerges that Jean, the ice-cream lady, is miked up, too. God bless America!

Dick walks into the ice-cream store and seven cameras swing around. The anchormen-to-be are yelling questions into their own microphones:

“
What are you going to do about being an asterisk in the polls
?”

“
Congressman! Are you counting on your trade bill to raise your polls?”

Dick tries to answer, as he edges through the Minicams, toward the counter, to meet Jean and get some ice cream. Jane is in already, carrying the freight with Jean ... “Mmmm, good! That’s great! Our kids’ll love this! ...” Dick fishes in his pocket for two dollars. The TV lenses are whirring in full zoom for this picture of democracy at work. Jane asks for coffee. She got to sleep at 1:00
A.M.
and they woke her again at 4:30.

Finally, one of the TVs shouts at Dick:

“
How much help can Jean be
?”

“Well, she can be of immense help,” Dick says, forbearing. “But we’ve got to sit down and
ask
her if she’s
willing
to help.”

So they sit: Dick, Jean, Jane, and Jim Demers, hemmed in with their knees together like people in a crowded bus, all on one side of a tiny ice-cream table; they have to stay in camera frame. Dick tells Jean that he loves this kind of campaigning. “You know, we hit sixty thousand doors in ’76, when I ran for Congress ...”

“Well, that’s good,” Jean says. “If you’re not out there meeting the voters, you can’t go from Jimmy Who in 1975 to a winner. And frankly, I’m looking for a winner.”

“Well, you should be,” Dick says. “And I am one. I, uh, am the winner. Um. I’m going to win it ...”

Jean stares at him, waiting. Dick adds lamely: “See, I believe in talking to people one-on-one.”

“Well, uh ...” Jean is trying to help, prompting: “What do you tell them when you sit down?”

“Well, you tell them why you’re running. I tell them we can do better than a deficit of two hundred billion, and we have to get a policy that makes this country Number One again in trade. You know, there’s no reason why this country ...”

Dick is rolling now. Through trade, to retraining, education, our schools, our kids, our values. ... He’s got the baby blues locked onto her face and he’s telling her, quietly, firmly, what he tries to tell people in his stump speech, while he’s busy pounding the lectern. And all of a sudden, it starts to click. The private foreign policy, Iran-contra, is lawless, and lawlessness is seeping out of the Reagan White House, into the country at large. It’s greed that’s the message when Deaver and his ilk leave government to cash in as lobbyists. It’s lawless greed that’s the ethic now, and that’s what Dick wants to change. And she looks into his boy face (he’s got her eyes now, she couldn’t turn if she tried) and she can see that he means it, that everything he is to his marrow is a good boy, clean of heart, so different from the hard-eyed men in the White House, and that’s what he’s saying:
Put me in and it’ll be different. It has to be me because I am the policy, myself, the embodiment, the difference, look! Here in my eyes. Don’t you want it to be different? Can’t we be better?

Sweet Jesus, he is terrific. There aren’t ten voters in the country who’d work against him, once he’s had them face-to-face. And Jean is catching it, too. She’s lost that studied helpful air of the prompter for the cameras. Now she’s just watching, and her mouth is parted, and her head bobs accord with his words. He’s slow now, just explaining, like the words echo in his own head. “And a House member can
do
it,” he says. “Mo Udall proved that a House member
can
do well in New Hampshire. And a House member is the one who can work
with
the Congress. I think that
I
could work with the Congress to get us moving, which is what we
need
...”

She’s nodding as he finishes. He’s talked for maybe ten minutes straight. She sits back and she wants to gush, but it takes her a moment to shake off his eyes. “Really,” she says, “you have more ideas! I mean ... I feel I’ve gotten an education in fifteen minutes, and, really, I have
never
... well, you’re great!”

Dick is still locked on her, taking this in, unblinking, unblushing. A little smile is his only acknowledgment of her words. He’s watching to see the hook set.

“And another thing,” Jean is saying, her eyes taking in the room now, conscious once again of the cameras. “I’ve heard answers from people ... but I feel like it’s coming from a computer. With you, I feel like it’s coming from a person.” ... Yes, the hook is set.

“Well, I’ve been studying this for a long time,” Dick says, a modest merit-badge winner.

“Well, I’ve just never had anybody sit down and tell me, like that, exactly what they want to do ...”

“Oh,” Dick says, and it just pops out, the most honest thing he’ll say all day: “Oh, I know what I want to do!”

“I think you can do it,” Jean replies. “I really do.”

“Can we count on your help?”

“I’d love to. I’d really love to. I really ...” She hasn’t words. She shrugs and says to Gephardt: “You’re great!”

There is a small scraping sound as Dick’s feet gather under his chair. He bends, suddenly, to his ice cream, gooey now, almost untouched. He says to the dish of chocolatey mung: “We’re gonna have to go.”

Jean is saying to a local Minicam: “I’ve never seen such a depth of knowledge along with a vision of what he wants to do. And in a way where he’s not really criticizing the American people, but telling them what to do ...”

The furrowed brow behind the camera asks: “And you didn’t have your mind made up before?”

“No, uh, no. Absolutely.”

“Isn’t she a nice person?” Jane says, as she and Dick, Demers and the body-Brad get back to the Chevrolet. “So genuine!” Jane’s step is light; there’s no sign now of her protective hunch. Dick has brought his ice cream along. He turns on the all-news radio and opens the
Globe
as the car starts to move. He’s scraping the dish. He loves ice cream. For the first time all day, the car feels right.

“Uhh
Dick
? ...” This from Brad, in the backseat.

Gephardt doesn’t turn around. He’s got his face in the
Globe
, his mouth around the spoon. “Hmm?” he murmurs. He doesn’t sound eager. “Never get to eat on this job,” he mumbles.

“Uh,
Dick
? One thing.” Brad is insistent. He knows campaigns. He helped Hamilton Jordan lose a Senate race in Georgia. His voice is hectoring over the radio and road noise, and lands with a slap on the back of Dick’s neck. “On an event like that, uh, that one. That was s’posed to be a people-to-people event. Now, uh, the thing we wanted to do there was to show you sitting there talking to that woman and, if you noticed, most of the cameras were packing up after you answered their questions ...”

“Mmm ...” Gephardt is trying to ignore him. Dick still won’t turn around, but from the back, you can see his head sinking bit by bit between his shoulders.

“So, uh,
Dick
. On an event like that, when you come in, uh, don’t answer any questions. We have to control, uh, we have to dictate the uh, media, uh,
hit
. So, when you go in, just, um, do what you’re s’posed to do. All right?”

Gephardt’s head is now thrust forward into his paper. The exposed back of his neck is pink. All the good feeling in the car is gone. Gephardt says into the folds of his
Globe
:

“Mmm hmm, I understand.”

T
HE MUD IN DELEWARE
stinks. It’s clay, really, and you get used to it—it’s not bad unless you dig it up wet. But when you get a whole soggy swampful dug, it smells like someone died in there ... and that was the smell, the day they got to the new place, the day they were going to start their new lives: Joe, Sr., Jean and Val and the boys, the Bidens, of Wilmington, Delaware.

Actually, it wasn’t even Wilmington, but Claymont, a steelworking suburb to the north, near the river, where in the fifties they were putting up ticky-tack houses, and garden apartments (except there were no gardens, just this malodorous mud), and when the Bidens drove in that day, to Brookview Apartments—they were among the first tenants—the place was a bulldozed moonscape, a stinking mess. Brookview would never be beautiful: strings of one-story yellow stucco boxes—efficiencies—appended to larger, two-story units at mid-horseshoe ... so there were these horseshoes of stucco marching across the gray mud with the promise of eventual, unlovely overcrowding: an instant slum. You could see it at one glance, through the windshield, as you drove up. ... And from the backseat, where he sat with his sister and brother, Joe Biden looked at his mother, and she was crying.

“
Mom
, what’sa matter?”

There was an instant’s pause, as Jean Biden tried to make her face a smile. “I’m just so happy,” she said.

“Honey,” Joe, Sr., said from the driver’s seat, “it’s gonna be okay. It’s gonna ... it’s just to start ...”

Now, from Joey in the back: “What’s
wrong
?”

Jean Biden turned quickly and said: “Nothing’s wrong, honey.” And then she turned back—must have taken all the will she had—turned back to Joe, Sr., and hugged him:

“It’s wonderful—thanks ...” Jean said. “I’m just so happy ... I can’t stop crying.”

Joe, Sr., just couldn’t hack it anymore in Scranton—not with the old man, Jean’s father, silent in his armchair, and Gertie in the attic, and Boo-Boo all over the house (
his
house, the
Finnegan
house). When brother Frank Biden called from Wilmington and said he knew of a job there ... well, it didn’t matter what the job was, it would be easier than swallowing another day in Scranton.

So, Joe, Sr., started driving back and forth, each week, started cleaning out boilers—that was his work in Wilmington. And then he landed a job at Kyle Motors, in sales, and they liked the way he carried himself, the air of distinction he lent to the place, so right away they made him manager of sales ... and that’s when he moved the family, to Claymont.

It was still a far cry from the big place outside Boston, the beautiful house in Garden City, Long Island—wasn’t half as nice as the place they left in Scranton. But at least they’d be on their own. And Joseph was going to get back, see: he never liked that used-car job, never—it was only a start. And the house, well ... there’d be a better house. After a year, he moved Jean and the kids to a real house in Arden, a rental place, but better ... and after another year, they moved to the house on Wilson Road. For nineteen years, they lived on Wilson, but to Joseph, it was always temporary. He was going to get back to a
really good
house, he was going to make it again,
every day
... he’d get up, and he’d say: Today, I’m going to turn that corner, get the big break, today. ... That was the great thing about him: he would never, never quit.

And to Joey, who watched this ... every day ... that was the difference between balls and courage. That was better than daring ... that was guts. And Joey meant to have guts. He would never,
never
quit.

A stutter is a cruel affliction for a kid, because no one, not even he, can see anything wrong. It’s not like a club foot, or a missing finger—where there’s something physically, visibly wrong, and you have simply to shrug and do the best you can. No, a stutter is more insidious: it attacks directly a child’s ability to make himself known and felt in the world. But indirectly—because there’s nothing wrong—it attacks his own idea of himself, his self-esteem, his confidence: Why can’t he talk right?