Free What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer Page B

monitored with breathless anxiety and henlike devotion day and night. And although no one could see him, as he sat down at his desk, Dole lifted his left hand to his ear as if he were on the telephone, and with his eyebrows raised to lend his face a look of terror, he forced his prairie voice up into Betty-like squeaks: “Yip yip-yeep yeep-yeep-yeep-yeep.”
    Dole used his left hand to lift his right fist onto his desk and to remove the rolled-up memo from it. Then his left hand lifted his right hand again and set it on a crumpled corner of the memo like a paperweight, so he could smooth it out with the left hand. He pushed the flattened pages toward the three neat piles of paper on the desk, and picked up the phone to call Betty.
    “What’s cookin ’?” he asked without greeting. And he rolled his eyes to the ceiling as he listened to the yips on the other end.
    “Agh, gotta gooo !” he said after a minute. He bent forward to look over the piles of paper on the desk. All the memos, drafts, and requests had been stacked, each a little lower than the next, so the top of each was visible. There were three piles. The right-hand stack was for things he was saving: the new proposed tax tables, a detailed poll from California, a few memos he wanted to look over again, and two thank-you letters from Senators (he always kept those for a while). Most of these sheets already bore a few felt-tip scratchings in his painstaking lefty script. It was forty years since he started to write with his left hand, but he’d never gotten good at it. Partly, that was because the left hand worked, but he didn’t have much feeling in it. So Dole had to guide his black felt-tip by watching his left hand form the letters. It could take a whole minute to write a few words. But he still tried to write some response or instruction on each of the hundreds of memos he got. At times, the comments were hard to read, intelligible only to staffers who knew how he talked. For example, these thick black squiggles next to an interview request:
    Writing a book?
    That meant Dole had talked to the guy once last month, and never saw a story. Why should he talk to the guy again? Find out what the hell he was doing!
    The middle pile was for papers he was still working on. Maybe he hadn’t decided whether to give them to Sheila Burke or Mike Pettit. Maybe they awaited five minutes when he could make a phone call. Or a night when he could sit alone in the quiet of an empty Capitol, when everybody else had long since gone. Sometimes it was an angry letter from someone he knew, someone he’d worked with, taking him to task on a vote, a bill, a speech he’d made that got into the papers. Dole liked to handle those himself:
    “Warren? Bob Dohhll! ... Listen, some damn fool sent a letter in here and signed your name on it. I thought you’d wanta know ...”
    But there was no time for that now, so Dole carefully licked his left thumb and forefinger, and used them to slide a couple of pages out of the middle stack. It was a movement surprising in its delicacy. After he set the papers aside for Dean (they’d ride in Dean’s folder tonight), the desk looked like he’d never been there. It was still in perfect order, with its three stacks and one book, a biography of Thomas E. Dewey, written by a former Dole staffer, Rick Smith. No one knew if Dole ever read the book, but it had been on the desk for months.
    For ten seconds, Dole glanced at the left-hand pile, the new business, things people wanted him to see. His staff was encouraged, almost required, to put their memos, ideas, drafts, directly into Dole’s hands. There was no chain of command in the office. Everybody in his orbit worked directly for Dole. So senior staff people could drop a paper onto Dole’s desk, along with the rest of Dole’s matters pending. Of course, that meant they could see everything on the desk. Sensitive matters, too. That didn’t seem to bother Dole. Anyway, the important facts were