What It Takes (69 page)

Anyway, the money would be there: that was obvious now. The campaign had scheduled a fund-raiser dinner for the night of announcement at the Adam’s Mark Hotel, sent out invitations ... and money
poured
in. They banked a quarter-million in two weeks! (There were some
years
Gephardt hadn’t raised a quarter-million.) They had a hundred takers on the predinner cocktails-with-Dick ... at a thousand dollars a pop! By the weekend before announcement, there was more than a half-million committed. No one had ever bled St. Louis like that. The campaign reserved a second banquet room with TV monitors, so people could watch Dick’s thank-you speech. And still, Loreen was working the phones, calling the members of Third Baptist Church, and the Cub Scout moms, to make sure they were coming—how about the dinner? (“If there’s one empty seat,” Loreen explained, “that’s what the cameras will show.” Dick’s mom was a woman of faith—not naïveté.)

And that was just part of the hubbub: there was
Meet the Press
the Sunday before, and
Today
and
Good Morning America
on announcement day, and a segment on
MacNeil/Lehrer
, not to mention the St. Louis shows. And Sunday night, the bunting went up in Union Station, and the high school bands came out for practice, and there were volunteers hanging signs in the rafters, crawling over the stage, taping wires, mult-boxes, and microphones. The volunteers were coming out of the woodwork at Joyce Aboussie, who was the honcho of announcement day. She’d expected twenty-five—if they got lucky—and by that last weekend she was trying to find work for a hundred. And these were not high school kids. She had $300-an-hour lawyers driving Ford sedans around town, seeing to the fruit baskets in the Presidential Suite, or on call for last-minute shopping.

They all had the feeling this was big—once in a lifetime. They could make history. Hell, look at the Sunday papers! Nothing on the front page but Iran-contra, the Reagan revolution falling apart. Dick could make it! And they wanted to be a part, to be inside. They had to help Dick! This was their chance to show the guy they were
for
him. And there were more than a few who brought along ideas—campaign themes and issues, lists of names for Dick to call, zingers for speeches, slogans for ads ... hell, they had whole ad
campaigns
... (just for him to look at, you know—maybe at the house, they’d stop by his house ... they’d give them to Dick, when they sat down to talk).

Of course, they never did talk with Dick. Never even saw Dick, except on stage that Monday. By the time Gephardt flew in Sunday afternoon, the bubble was in place to receive him. He couldn’t stay in his St. Louis home (where Loreen lived full-time, amid pictures of Dick and Jane). Didn’t see any friends. Talked mostly to anchormen. His professional Advance team whisked him from the airport to the Presidential Suite of the station hotel. He had a schedule to keep, and a run-through—the speech!

It was eighteen hours till announcement when Gephardt saw the speech for the first time, in his hotel suite, on a TelePrompTer flown in from California. See, Shrummy was a genius, and the speech wasn’t done until Saturday. And by the time Dick got there, and got a look—well, delivery was the thing. He had to work on the timing:
Look out at the crowd when you talk about St. Louis ... slow up, there
...
don’t step on that next line!

“Okay, good ... let’s do it again,” Dick said. He was better each time he read it through. Everybody said his problem was he looked wooden, like he didn’t care. So Dick was working on emotion—that’s when he’d hammer the podium, to show how deeply he felt, about that last applause line.

The speech had lots of applause lines. The theme was
Make America First Again
... and it worked great, with his trade amendment, his farm bill, and his line about wiping out illiteracy by the year 2000. There were plenty of Dick’s ideas in the speech, because he and Shrum had had a breakfast—three
hours
—and Shrum, as Dick knew, was big-time, the guy who wrote for Ted Kennedy! So Dick didn’t have any problem with the speech itself—for instance, what was in it.

He just had to hit the lines, one by one—loud and clear. He had to look at the crowd, look at the prompter, remember where the cameras were, where he was in the speech, and just ... keep it together. As it turned out, that was hard enough, when he finally did get introduced, and the bands were playing and the crowd was cheering, and he got up there on the station stage and kissed his mom, and she whispered to him: “I wish your father could see you now.” And he looked out over that concourse, with the skylight streaks shining down on the crowd, and
everyone
was there—friends from school ... kids from camp ... lawyers from his firm ... fellow Aldermen ... fellow Cub Scouts! ... And the cheering wound down, and he was supposed to start, but it was like his life was there, assembled for him, in
support
of him, and for a moment, he felt he couldn’t talk.

But he did. He delivered the speech word for word, didn’t change a line. And everyone said it was great. He hit the gong for his trade bill, and then education, then the zingers on Iran and contra aid ... and with each, he slowed, and stopped, and just like they’d planned, the crowd filled the air with cheers. And that was great TV, in the packed station hall, with the camera angles just right, and the cutaway shot from behind Dick to show the hometown crowd approving, urging, like the Cardinals had a rally in the ninth. ... It was beautiful, it was professional. Not one foul-up, not a hair out of place! (How could anything fall awry? Once she got the hall set up, Joyce never let it out of her sight. Sunday night, she brought a pillow and slept on stage.)

Dick couldn’t tell how it looked on TV, but he knew he was exactly where he wanted to be. He was so happy that day. There were so many friends, and his fellow House members—even they thought this was a hell of a show—and the family, all together. ... That’s what made it so special, when he got to the end of the speech, the part about his family, Lou and Loreen and the brick bungalow on Reber Place. ...

It was all about family values, see. And Shrummy wrote that beautiful ending about how Dick and brother Don would sit with their parents, summer nights, on the front porch, listening to their lessons of hard work and high aims:

“The air was hot and muggy,” Dick said, “but it was full of dreams.”

And Dick read out, with evident emotion, how Lou’s dreams were shattered when the Gephardt farm was lost in the Great Depression. But still, Lou worked and saved to make sure his sons would have the college training he never had.

And it didn’t matter that Lou wasn’t much for inspirational speeches on the front porch (the Cardinals game was the more likely soundtrack), or that Lou’s farm was not lost in the Depression (in fact, Lou left that farm at a trot, but there were Gephardts, still, on that land today), or that Lou was never quite convinced about the value of college for the boys (“I made it without college!” he used to grouse to Loreen).

The point was family values, see ... and Dick was so eager to do this thing right ...

Anyway, who was going to argue? The two-score national press in attendance knew even less about Gephardt than Shrum did. They were here to see if he could pull off a big-time announcement, Presidential grade. And he did. There was not one glitch to write up. The crowd was big enough, loud enough. The rhetoric—well, it was just what they’d come for. ... “God!” Peg Simpson from Hearst newspapers said to Don Foley in the press pen. “He’s good! He sounds like Ted Kennedy!”

And who could miss the subtext of family values when Dick finished his speech, hugged his mom and kissed his lovely wife, Jane, and his two pretty daughters, then wrapped his son in a bear hug that lasted until Matt woke up to all those eyes upon him, and started in his father’s embrace, and stepped back a couple of paces ... and then Dick swooped up his youngest, Katie, and held her aloft with one arm while they waved to the crowd ... and that was the picture in
The New York Times
, where E.J. Dionne reported: “... the family presented a striking tableau before the crowds and television cameras this morning.”

Of course, the national press left town the next day, when Dick flew off to points west and south to continue his announcement barrage, and Jane was left in St. Louis, calling around to friends, trying to find a ride to get Matt to his appointment at Barnes Hospital, trying to figure a way to get herself and three kids to the airport thereafter, for the flight back to Washington ... whither she arrived in the snow, late that day, and got the three kids off the plane, through the airport and into the car, and got them back home, sent them into the house, while she parked on the street, so she could shovel out the driveway.

Ski trip was Family Time—been on Joe’s schedule for weeks: third weekend in March, northern New Hampshire, just the kids and Jill. Of course, the campaign had to coordinate, because after that weekend, Joe would do politics up there, and anyway, they’d arranged for a condo on loan from New Hampshire’s Senate Democratic Leader. But they kept it simple: just the New Hampshire Scheduler (who drove the family to the condo), and Ruth Berry, who’d signed on as the traveling aide, the body woman—Trip Director, she preferred to call the job. Whatever ... the work was the same: she had to take care of Joe, make sure he got his plane, and his rest, had a clean shirt and food in his belly, a copy of his speech, a ride to the next event, a rundown on who’d be there ... and why. Ruthie was a pro: a young woman still, but she’d served in her twenties in the Carter White House, and before, with the venerable Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Ruth had been with Biden only a few weeks, but already she knew Joe’s acid test: love him, love his family—in fact, take care of the family first!

So they got to the Leader’s condo—North Conway, New Hampshire—and Ruth got the family in, she was about to disappear ... when lo, came a knock at the door and who should appear but the Leader, and Mrs. Leader, and the Neighbor, and Mrs. Neighbor ... and they had an idea: How about
dinner
—all together, the Bidens, the Leaders, and the Neighbors? So, Ruthie asked Jill, who said absolutely not—
This is Family Time ... please pass on regrets.
This Ruth did, and proceeded to disappear.

It was only the next morning, on the way to the ski slope, when Jill was so pissed off in the van, that anyone found out that Joe had gone to dinner. In fact, Joe and the kids had gone, and Jill stayed home, or almost home, at the condo. And that was the weekend Jill found out there wasn’t going to be any Family Time, or private time, or whatever Joe called it. It didn’t matter what was on the schedule ... that’s what she figured out. Because there wasn’t any life outside this thing. They could go to dinner with their oldest friends—what did those folks want to know? How’s the campaign? ... They could go out together, just Joe and Jill, and she’d still have to think, look over her shoulder, before she touched his cheek, or kissed him. Every move, any move, was now a public event—she could face it, or she could stay home. If she went out, even to the Pathmark, there was the campaign. The checkout girls were for Joe—
knew
he was going to win—and Jill would have to smile and say, “Hope so ...” Where was private time? Some sun-stunned one-street gila-monster town in New Mexico ... you think they don’t get CBS News?

CBS News was with them on the slopes—by prearrangement—taping a story about Joe, for
West 57th Street
... a nice producer and his crew. Jill couldn’t be mad about that: they were so polite ... and it was good for Joe, wasn’t it? That was the funny thing: there was nobody to be mad at. Everybody was trying to help. It’s just ... their life was gone. The way Joe got in, the campaign just came at them: no time to think. It was pulling
them
. And Joe had to do everything at once. She couldn’t even stay mad at Joe—dinner with the Leader, that was just Joe. Politics was so much a part of him that she never expected him to be another way. It was like breathing for him, part of life, like family, or home. When she married him—in fact, when she met him—he was already in the Senate. It wasn’t like politics snuck up on her. She’d always helped—and not just with the public parts. She got the mail at the house. It was a point of particular pride with Jill that Joe never saw one piece of hate-mail. All the vicious anti-Catholic stuff, the threats from the sickos. She took them to the FBI, or she trashed the stuff. He never even knew. She’d always helped in the campaigns, too. But before, she’d always had the choice.

She could go along if she wanted ... what she didn’t want, she could leave alone. Now it wouldn’t leave her alone.

She would not be the one to tell him no. This was his dream. He would never have said no to her dream. And she would never be the wife who kept him from his destiny. That would ... destroy his soul. She would keep what she could of her life—at least, her life alone. She had her work—teaching disturbed kids at a hospital in Wilmington. And her graduate English course at Villanova. (She’d registered under her maiden name, but even so, people in her Faulkner class recognized her from TV.) She was not going to give up grad school. Joe said she had to do what she wanted. And they’d get through the campaign—a year, eighteen months at the max. Unless he won ... God, what if he won?

That was the weekend Jill started asking what it would be like ... if they won ... the White House. Ruthie had been in the White House with the Carters. It was in the plane, flying south that Sunday—Joe was catching a nap, he had three political events to hit that night—when Jill asked Ruth Berry what would it be like. What could she do? What would she have to do?

And Ruth started to tell her about the life: she could do ... anything she chose to do. She could help Joe in a hundred ways. Or she could work on her own issues—things that mattered to her—education, family services, better day care ...

That’s when Joe woke up, and the only part he heard was Ruth telling Jill how she could work on those issues. And he jerked into instant fury. He was not in this goddam thing to have his family bossed around. His jaw started working and his teeth clenched in that killer grin. No one was going to tell his wife what to do!