The Right Stuff About The Oval Office

By WALTER SHAPIRO

TITLE: WHAT IT TAKES

AUTHOR: RICHARD BEN CRAMER

PUBLISHER: RANDOM HOUSE; 1,047 PAGES; $28

THE BOTTOM LINE: The best look at presidential politics since Dan Quayle was in the National Guard.

For once the dust jacket gets it right: What It Takes "does for politicians what Tom Wolfe did for astronauts in The Right Stuff." Left unsaid -- and in this 1,047-page doorstop of an epic only the dust jacket is terse -- was precisely Wolfe's accomplishment in The Right Stuff. Wolfe took an event we all were certain we knew so well that it bored us to tears and convinced us that The Whole Thing Was a Lie. We had so internalized the public relations myths of the original Mercury astronauts that we had missed the real story.

So too with Richard Ben Cramer's artful reworking of the too-dispiriting- for- words 1988 presidential campaign. He achieves the near impossible by making us care -- and vicariously relive -- the failed and half-forgotten presidential quests of Bob Dole, Dick Gephardt, Joe Biden and Gary Hart. He even mines a few fresh nuggets of insight about the oft-ridiculed campaign styles of George Bush and Michael Dukakis.

Cramer, once a Pulitzer-Prizewinning foreign correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer, had the chutzpah to attempt the ultimate look-Ma-no- hands high-wire act as he searched for a fresh vantage point from which to look down on presidential politics. Though there are backstage meetings and tense strategic debates, What It Takes is not Theodore White's Making of the President series revisited. For one thing, Cramer views the overpaid and overpraised parade of pollsters and media advisers as a comic chorus to be irreverently dismissed as "wise guys," "Big Guys," "killers" and (his sobriquet for the Bush team) "White Guys." Unlike the sainted Teddy White and the current crop of political reporters who grew up on his mythmaking, Cramer loathes, not loves, the modern political process.

Both the anger and the human sympathy that animate What It Takes are rooted in this perception. Cramer believes with some justice that the rituals of presidential politics (the sound-bite speeches, the handlers, the mind-numbing travel and the press claque with its self-aggrandizing agenda) end up blinding us to who the candidates actually are and what their life histories represent. "I wanted to know not about the campaign, but about the campaigners," Cramer explains in his introduction. For what fascinates him is "how people like us -- with dreams and doubts, great talents and ordinary frailties -- get to be people like them." That is, what does it take to create a candidate so driven in his pursuit of the White House that he jettisons family, friends, any semblance of privacy or normal human existence on the altar of naked ambition?

The sensitively wrought and, yes, controversial sections of the book are Cramer's loving portraits of Hart and Biden, the two Big Losers, the twin sinners driven from the fold by both their own folly and the blood lust of gotcha! journalism. As someone who covered Hart, I do not fully share Cramer's unalloyed admiration for the former Colorado Senator's cool intellect and fabled New Ideas. As a typical voyeur, I was a tad disappointed by Cramer's tentative conclusion that maybe, just maybe, Hart was not guilty of anything more with Donna Rice than very heavy flirting. But as a reporter I winced with embarrassment over the accuracy of Cramer's fevered portrayal of the press pack during the final days: "Every incident of Hart-chase got hotter . . . blood pounding in the temples, bodies banging, elbows flying . . . and every instant increased the visceral certainty that something huge, historic, horrible . . . was happening! They had to do something! They have to have at least a part . . . if not, what were they doing? Who were they?"

Biden, the accused plagiarist, the Delaware Senator who loved Neil Kinnock's oratory neither wisely nor well, comes alive as the most vivid and perhaps most unfairly wronged of the candidates. The opening Biden scene is a classic: the would-be candidate and a pair of advisers from his stable of "experts, gurus and self-appointed Rasputins" driving manically around Wilmington in the darkness looking at dream houses, for Biden is as obsessed with real estate as he is with the presidency. When things turn sour for Biden, when the bleats of the non-stop news cycle suggest that his entire life is a lie, he still finds time to do something touching and human by visiting his high school alma mater to watch his son play football. At the game, Biden takes his old teachers aside, one by one, mostly priests, to tell them, "I want you to know I didn't cheat . . . I mean I didn't forget what you taught me . . ." The book ends with Biden, who nearly died of a brain aneurysm in early 1988, looking hopefully toward the future and musing, "If he lived long enough . . . people would know, he never cheated in law school."

What about Bush, the ultimate survivor, the single candidate who never questions the instructions of his handlers, the White Guys? Cramer's portrait is adroit, detailed but, ultimately, not terribly surprising: Bush is the friendliest man in America, untroubled by ideas, motivated by a keen sense of duty and patrician noblesse oblige. There are telling details: Bush's first written act as President-elect is to compose "the message for the annual Christmas card." Where Cramer excels is in portraying Bush's sterile life inside the bubble -- the Secret-Service-secure world of motorcades, advancemen, rope lines and step-by-step schedules that allowed the Vice President to travel halfway across the country and "never see one person who was not a friend or someone whose sole purpose it was to serve or protect him." To Cramer, the bubble and all the trappings that come with it have left Bush an empty shell, a man you could look square in the eye and discover that "there was . . . no one home."

It is tempting to conclude that What It Takes should be read -- and despite its heft, the prose is a joyous journey -- as a primer for the 1992 campaign. But Ross Perot, win or lose, has changed all that; the rise of easy access talk TV is likely to curtail permanently the madcap media-market frenzy of campaign travel. So, in a sense, Cramer has created a monument to a world that no longer exists -- a perfect-pitch rendering of the emotions, the intensity, the anguish and the emptiness of what may have been the last normal two-party campaign in American history.