New Political Journalism

Tom Benson

Pennsylvania State University
t3b@psuvm.psu.edu

 

Cramer, Richard Ben. What It Takes: The Way to the White House. New York: Random House, 1992.

 

Richard Ben Cramer’s stated aim is to write an account of the 1988 presidential campaign that answers the questions of

 

What kind of life would lead a man (in my lifetime all have been men) to think he ought to be President. . . . What in their backgrounds could give them that huge ambition, that kind of motor, that will and discipline, that faith in themselves? . . . What happened to those lives, to their wives, to their families, to the lives they shared? What happened to their ideas of themselves? What did we do to them, on the way to the White House? (vii-viii)

 

Cramer follows the fortunes of six of the 1988 candidates–Republicans George Bush and Bob Dole, and Democrats Joe Biden, Michael Dukakis, Dick Gephardt, and Gary Hart. The book’s 1047 pages are divided into 130 chapters (and an epilogue) wherein Cramer constructs an elaborate collage modeled on Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. Cramer tells the story of each man’s childhood, family, upbringing, career, and participation in the campaign of 1988 (apart from the epilogue, the story ends with the 1988 conventions, omitting most of the story of the fall campaign itself). In every case, these men are portrayed as the product of habits formed in childhood and youth, and in every case their virtues are shown to be–in the tragic genre–inseparably linked to the flaws that bring five of them to bitter defeat and leave the eventual winner a caretaker president (“the fact was, he wanted to be President. He didn’t want to be President to do this or that. He’d do . . . what was sound” [797]). Cramer, in layer after layer of storytelling, with a narrative voice granted the privileged knowledge and intimacy of fiction and the texture of Elmore Leonard dialogue, invites us to like and admire each of these men, invites us to see the world from each of six extremely different points of view, and then he throws them into the arena, along with their handlers, their wives, the press, and each other–and shows us that what we thought happened in the 1988 campaign was, in multiple, deeply ironic ways, a misrepresentation.

 

Cramer argues that the press got it wrong. He most deeply admires Gary Hart and Joe Biden, who were driven from the race by scandals arising from charges of adultery (Hart) and plagiarism (Biden). In Cramer’s view, both were blackmailed by an arrogant press. Cramer’s Bob Dole is a fascinating reconstruction of a man stereotypically dismissed by the press as the attack dog of the Republican party. Dick Gephardt is portrayed as a tough and deeply spiritual man whose gift for compromise is important to the function of Congress. George Bush is depicted as a decent and self-disciplined man who is utterly sincere in his commitment to personal friendship and honor as the basis for politics and government. Cramer is most hostile, in my reading of the book, to Michael Dukakis, and his portrait of Dukakis, though adding considerable detail and nuance, is in many ways close to the view offered by the press and the Republicans in the 1988 campaign–an honest but out-of-it good-government governor who had no message about why he should be president and who wouldn’t listen, hence bringing his troubles on himself.

 

The strengths and weaknesses of this epic book are embedded in two paradoxical rhetorical choices that are central to the work–they have to do with Cramer’s decision to focus on the “personal” side of the personal/political axis, and with the narrative technique of the book.

 

Cramer begins from the widely shared complaint that the media coverage of campaigns, in interaction with the techniques of modern presidential campaigning, has thrown the focus of campaigning from issues to personality. But, argues Cramer, the focus on personality has led the press and media into a corruption of their traditional and useful skepticism, resulting in a kind of pack journalism that takes as its role the day-to-day diminishment of candidates and, at opportune moments, the destruction of candidates in the feeding frenzy of rumored scandal. At the same time, the techniques of modern campaigning put the candidate into a “bubble” of press attention and Secret-Service isolation wherein a candidate, closeted with self-interested campaign gurus and hired guns, loses track of his real sources of personal strength. This is a story that needs to be told, and Cramer tells it well, but at the cost of furthering the shift of public attention to private life as the source of what it takes to be president. Hence, Cramer condemns the shallowness of policy making in the context of the permanent campaign, where position papers are churned out as demonstrations of seriousness (and as bids for the allegiance of the policy wonks from whom advice is solicited), rather than as acts of genuine leadership. But Cramer himself is so little interested in those policies that his complaint risks becoming self-contradictory, as when Michael Dukakis’s pursuit of good government in Massachusetts or Joe Biden’s self-education in the Bork hearings are framed not as policy issues but as demonstrations of the paradoxes of character. Cramer in effect claims to long for a restoration of the public sphere, but he does so in a book that endlessly asserts the seamless dependence of the public on the private. Part of his complaint about the public sphere is that, under present conditions, it distorts the reality of the private persons who are the candidates. This may well be true, but it fails to consider that a successful public sphere may depend on separation of public and private, and the cultivation of specifically public virtues.

 

Cramer’s preference for the private as the ground for the public has deep roots in tacit understandings of contemporary Americans. Such understandings, especially as they relate to politics, have been cultivated by high- and lowbrow media at least since Theodore White’s The Making of the Presidency (1961) and the Leacock-Pennebaker documentary Primary, a behind-the-scenes account of the 1960 primary contest between Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy. Cramer’s book is consistent with the genre started by White and Leacock-Pennebaker, proposing to reveal the truth about politics by looking behind the public facade at the private actors. The doctrine of such a claim is strikingly confident that it knows how to discover reality, but the experience of reading Cramer’s text often induces a postmodern suspicion that the public role of the politicians in this book embodies not so much a distinction, however distorted, between public and private realms as a detachment of the political from any actual referent or subject. Cramer argues for the stability and centrality of the private subject, but he sings a song of de-centered panic to seem to be someone, a song of simulation and simulacra.

 

A related paradox bedevils the narrative technique of What It Takes. Cramer’s implicit argument is that, for all their faults, each of these men is a person of enormous strength, integrity, intelligence, and character, a man of “size,” but that the Karacter Kops have diminished them in the versions we see in the newspapers and on television. Further, even what we have been taught to see as transgressions are not, when the whole story is known, either very serious (if they happened at all) or particularly symptomatic of the true character of these men. To make this case, which he does with great success, in my view, Cramer turns to the techniques of contemporary fiction and new journalism, and the rhetorical strategies of defense lawyers elaborated from the time of the ancient Greeks, wherein admitted weaknesses are shown to be inseparable from more important strengths and, in any case, incompatible with the crime alleged (which, if the truth be known, was either an act different from the one charged, or was not committed by the accused, or did not happen at all).

 

Cramer is excellent at reconstructing scenes and creating a nonlinear collage of episodes (the episodes are out of chronological order, but are clearly patterned to build the case for the defense), and he has a good ear for dialogue. His narrative voice employs a technique of reported inner monologue or snatches of speech reported without quotation marks or specific attribution, accompanied by frequent and complex shifts in narrative point of view. It is impossible to divine from the text where the racy diction is drawn from the speech of the participants and where it is simply the invention of a hip narrator in his Rolling Stone mode. The narrative consciousness of the tale is presented as reliable and as privileged with access to the speech and thoughts reported or attributed. The effect is absorbing and convincing. Cramer achieves coherence through thickly textured narration accompanied by repeated scorn at the pretensions of the press pack. But though it is all believable, it is nowhere documented. It is not even possible, given this technique, to determine which scenes Cramer himself observed and which were reported to him by informants, or who those informants were. No doubt full documentation would have diminished the cumulative narrative effect and the text’s seeming transparency, and no doubt it would have scared off some of the informants. Hence, a reviewer cannot reasonably claim that Cramer should have done it differently, but merely offer a note of caution (to which must be added the lament that instead of depositing his documentation, say, with a presidential library for eventual scrutiny by scholars, Cramer ceremonially destroyed all of his files, notebooks, and interview tapes upon publication of the book). Cramer repeatedly excoriates the press for following the wrong story, misreporting facts, and, most of all, presenting diminished and distorted stereotypes of political candidates (all of it premised on the inside dopester slogan that “everyone knows”–the security blanket of the press pack). In trying to redirect our understanding of these candidates, Cramer offers a more deeply informed biographical account and a more richly textured psychological understanding, which are the achievements of his narrative method. But his implicit appeal to his reader to regard the press with increased skepticism surely invites an equal skepticism toward his own claims when he simply asks us to accept his unverifiable account.