Free What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer

authorization bill for the Federal Maritime Commission, and maybe a dozen other bills, along with forty-two minor nominations, and he got them all out by 8:15, after eleven hours on the floor, whereupon Dole hustled back down the grand hall, back toward his office: he had work to do.
    The strange thing was, he looked just the same as he had that morning—just as good: there was no sign he’d been on the job thirteen hours; not a wrinkle in the soft, dark wool of his Brooks Brothers suit; his striped silk tie was knotted tight against the smooth collar of his white shirt; his face showed not a hint of sag, it was tight and handsome with perpetual tan. With an hour in the sun once a week, or every two weeks, Dole could keep a tan forever. And with a couple hours’ sleep, and maybe a nap in an airplane seat, Dole could go forever. He was never more cheerful, more at peace, than he was in the wee hours, when a deal was going down and he was waiting for someone to crack, while he drank a milkshake and told old stories in the Senate dining room.
    Now, on his way off the Senate floor, he was picking up speed. He had his right arm bent in front of his midriff, as he always carried it before him in the world. A lot of people knew that arm was useless, almost paralyzed, but even those who’d watched him for twenty-five years thought all the operations must have cocked the arm in front of him, fused the bones so the arm bent from the elbow to look almost like a working arm. In fact, it was Bob Dole who made it look like a working arm. If Dole ever let himself rest, that arm would hang straight down, like the arm of a quadriplegic. It would fall, visibly shorter than his left arm, with the palm of his bent right hand twisted toward the back. But Dole never let anyone see that—his problem. No matter how many hours he’d been up, or how long he stayed out, no matter how it ached, for hours, or a whole day, without rest, he kept that arm hiked up in front of him. He kept a rolled-up memo, or a plastic pen, in the crooked right fist to round its shape. If he ever let that memo go, or the pen, the hand would splay, with the forefinger pointing and the others cramped in toward the palm, the back of the hand painfully hollow where doctors had failed to graft in tendons. But Dole never let anybody see that. Now, as he barreled down the Capitol hallway (trailed by an aide who had to run a few steps to catch up, then tried to walk, then had to run again), Dole was canted forward, his perfect head of hair slightly atilt, his jaw set, lips pursed, his sharp black eyes in a pensive squint, like he was concentrating on something else, while his left hand, the better one, unobtrusively swung up to cup his spasming fist with its memo, and he squeezed the right fist to stop the cramping, to get some feeling back in the bad hand after so many hours of holding, holding against its rigid ache ... but, of course, nobody saw that. What they saw was a man who moved through the idling crowd like a fullback through the line, who seemed to grow larger as he blew by, pushing forward on the balls of his feet, brushing past a question from a young man (maybe staff, press, or a junior lobbyist) with a curt, snarling “M’in a hurry !” that lingered in the air, as the noise of a chainsaw does when it stops, echoing off the statues and the tile floor of the grand arched hallway, as Dole disappeared into his suite.
    He didn’t mean to stop there for more than a minute. “Gotta gooo!” he announced to the office in general—to the press staff, which was always staying late, on the alert with Dole; to the ladies-of-all-work, who took his calls and typed his words, waited on him and lived their lives in his great whirling orbit, as stead for their own narrower tracks. He didn’t have to speak to anyone in particular: they all waited for him, watched his every move, listening for the bursts of speech that leaked from him, reading in the signs of his mood