Free What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer Page A

their success, or lack, for the day.
    But there were no bad signs that night. Only thirteen hours on the job so far, and already it was a good day. See, somewhere near the midpoint, between the closed session on impeachment and the arrival of the first CR from the House, Dole had tucked in a lunch with Howard Baker, the retired Senator from Tennessee, the former Republican Leader who stepped out of the job to run for President.
    Baker and Dole stayed in touch, former colleagues who tried to keep each other apprised of their plans. That’s why Baker came by today: to say he might not run, after all. He thought Dole would want to know.
    Augghh! You bet Dole wanted to know! Both he and Baker had been running for the White House for the last eight years, since they started the cycle for 1980, the year both men finished as also-rans. No, for Dole it was ten years, if you started, as he did, from the day he lost the Vice Presidency, in 1976. It was ten long years ... for the Presidency. That was “the other thing.” That’s what he’d call it when he told the Schedulers to put on an extra flight somewhere, a thousand miles into the country, to speak for some candidate for Congress, or Lieutenant Governor, or State Treasurer who didn’t have a chance of ever getting to the Senate.
    “Might be good, get his help ... for the other thing.”
    It wasn’t so much that he feared Howard Baker: poor Howard didn’t have much taste for a fight. But it straightened his own path—after all, how many Senate Leaders could a voter keep track of? How many Senators? In the Dole cosmology, Senators occupied a special sphere. Now, in the GOP, apart from Dole, only Paul Laxalt was running. And he, too, was leaving the Senate, running not really as a Senator, but as Ronald Reagan’s friend. Anyway, Laxalt had problems in his home state, Nevada: political troubles, and an investigation that threatened to drag his name down. That was all summed up in the few words, as spare and evocative as a Japanese poem, a political haiku on Laxalt, that issued in Dole’s flattest prairie voice:
    “Agh, got a friend ... Nevada ... might need a friend.”
    The way was now clear for Dole ... for the other thing. He knew what he had to do. He had to get past one man: George Bush. But that meant fighting off the whole White House, all the machinery and all the goodies that incumbency could command. It meant Dole would have to work harder, hit and move with guerrilla speed, travel light.
    Now he blew into his inner salon, an elegant room with painted ceilings thirty feet high, graced by two-hundred-year-old chandeliers and the fireplace the British used to start the blaze that wrecked the Capitol in the War of 1812. He strode past Dean Burridge, the former Capitol policeman who traveled with him in Washington, who now sat with his leather folder at a graceful table-desk, the kind of gleaming curvy-leg affair used by assistant managers in a fancy hotel lobby. Dole said to the air: “Car ready?”
    Of course the car was ready. Dean and the driver, Wilbert Jones, had been ready for hours. Three times Dean had called ahead with updates on Dole’s arrival. He’d checked the route with Wilbert. He’d checked to make sure the crowd was still there, he’d checked a half-dozen times to make sure he had any paper or files that Dole might conceivably ask for. He was ready if Dole was hungry, wanted to stop for a milkshake. ... But he didn’t say any of that. What he said was, “Yes, sir.”
    By that time, Dole was in his office, taking off his jacket, draping it carefully over the back of a chair. His voice cut through the stillness of his sanctum, through the doorway—maybe trying to cheer up Dean. He was not unaware of the hour, or the waiting. “Agh, Betty still at her post ?” This was an office joke. Betty Meyer was one of the ladies who devoted her life to Dole. She’d been with the Senator nearly twenty years, almost never leaving the place, which she