The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (11 page)

Connaughton hadn’t heard of the Kinnock speech or how Biden was using it. Honestly,
he didn’t care much for Biden’s stump speech, which always brought the house down
with the line, “Just because our political heroes were murdered does not mean that
the dream does not still live, buried deep in our broken hearts.” Connaughton revered
the Kennedys as much as anyone, but that line left him flat—it was overwrought, and
pitched at Americans a decade or more older. Why couldn’t Biden give substantive speeches,
with issues and facts and solutions, like the one on SALT II in Tuscaloosa? He seemed
to be running for president on his ability to move people—to make the young Jeff Connaughtons
wait six years to join his campaign. Move them to do what? He was trying to sound
like the murdered heroes themselves. The Kennedys quoted the Greeks, pundits said,
and Biden quoted the Kennedys. Sometimes without attribution.

The rules of the ultimate game had been changing. In 1968, George Romney said on TV
that he’d been brainwashed by the generals in Vietnam, and his presidential campaign
was finished. In 1972, Ed Muskie stood on a flatbed truck in the falling snow outside
William Loeb’s
Union Leader
in Manchester, New Hampshire, as the cameras rolled and wept tears of rage at the
editor who had slandered his wife, Jane—and that was the end of Ed Muskie. In 1980,
Ronald Reagan cocked his head and chuckled, “There you go again,” and Jimmy Carter
shrank into a one-term president. In 1984, Walter Mondale asked, “Where’s the beef?”
and Gary Hart suddenly looked like a slick young man with a full head of hair. Ten
seconds on TV could frame a character forever, could crown or end a campaign. Presidents
and contenders could commit assisted suicide with the eager help of the media.

But the new rules of the ultimate game only came into focus the year Jeff Connaughton
attached his aspirations to Joe Biden’s. In 1987, what had once been the dramatic
sideshows of politics became the main event: the candidate and his humiliated wife
under the hot lights, the nominee at the televised hearing table talking through and
around and against his own past, the ideologues and interest groups on each side of
every question large and small mobilizing for total war, the daily excavation of old
and recent sins in the life of a politician, the momentum building to a crescendo,
the reporters a pack of wild dogs outracing one another on the blood scent of some
powerful but wounded quarry. In 1987, there was Gary Hart, there was Robert Bork,
and there was Joe Biden—the last two happening at the same moment.

Inside the campaign, the two weeks after the Kinnock story were a frantic nightmare,
every day a new shock. But in retrospect, the dénouement looked as mechanical and
inevitable as an ancient sacrificial rite at the center of a tribal culture. The candidate
vows to carry on and tries to ignore the baying of the hounds. The media keep drawing
more blood. The candidate receives expressions of support from his colleagues. But
the stories are creating an overwhelming and awful impression, one that may never
be lifted. The candidate gathers his family and inner circle around him and, one by
one, asks their advice. They want him to stay in so he can defend his honor; they
want him to get out so he can defend his honor. Amid tears, the candidate decides
to stand down. He faces the cameras chin up, in a contained rage.

On the morning of September 23, Kaufman told Connaughton to notify the fundraising
captains across the country that Biden would announce his withdrawal at noon. Two
minutes before the press conference, Connaughton called his parents in Alabama, and
all he could say was “Turn on the TV.” He wept in the bathroom while the rest of the
staff listened to Biden’s statement in the Russell Building. “I’m angry with myself
for having been put in this position—for having put
myself
in this position,” Biden announced to the firing squad of cameras. “And, lest I say
something that might be somewhat sarcastic, I should go to the Bork hearings.” With
that, Biden went to the Senate Caucus Room on the third floor and took his seat as
chairman of the Judiciary Committee hearings that would lead to the defeat of Judge
Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court and begin Biden’s political rehabilitation.

Connaughton was shell-shocked. His hero had been exposed as a phony, reduced from
White House material to national joke in two weeks. “His strength, he claimed, was
his ability to speak and move people,” Connaughton said. “Then, when it appeared he
was borrowing other people’s words, that completely undermined it.” Now Connaughton
didn’t know what to do: his life was suddenly directionless. When Kaufman asked him
to stick around Wilmington for a couple of months and help close down the campaign,
he said yes. It made him seem like a good soldier, but the truth was that he was too
paralyzed to look for a better option. He now had the worst job in politics—spending
hours on the phone with angry supporters who wanted their money back, or with furious
staffers in Iowa and New Hampshire who had taken campaign computers hostage until
they got their last paycheck. Everyone who’d ever given the campaign a ham sandwich
sent a bill. And it fell on Connaughton to help archive every step of Biden’s disgrace,
every anti-Biden news story and op-ed that might be used against him in his next Senate
race, in 1990. There were hundreds of them, and by the end of the ordeal they left
no aspect of Biden unexamined—even his hair plugs. It was like cleaning up body parts
after a grisly accident and preserving bits and pieces as evidence in case of a lawsuit.

At the end of 1987, Connaughton was offered a job as a fundraiser for the Democratic
Senatorial Campaign Committee. He said no—he didn’t want to spend his career keeping
track of checks and lapel pins. He still wanted to be involved in the substance of
politics, the issues. Then Kaufman told him of an opening on the staff of the Judiciary
Committee; the salary, forty-eight thousand a year, was that of a first-year Wall
Street associate. But there would be interesting work on antitrust law, intellectual
property, civil justice reform. Connaughton felt a strong bond with Kaufman, and he
hadn’t given up on Biden. In any case, Wall Street wasn’t likely to hire him: the
stock market had crashed on October 19, the biggest one-day drop in history, and the
1986 tax reform act had shut down many of the arbitrage tricks that had kept public
finance departments thriving. He decided to stay in Washington.

Everyone in D.C. was someone’s guy. Connaughton was a Biden guy.

1987

The shouts, the imprecations, the gesticulations, the fucking fear and greed, enveloped
him, and he loved it. He was the number one bond salesman, “the biggest producer,”
as the phrase went, in the bond trading room …
PROSECUTOR IN BOESKY SCANDAL PREDICTS A CHANGE IN WALL STREET’S ETHICS
 …
DONNA RICE—WHAT REALLY HAPPENED
Gary Hart Asked Me to Marry Him; Exclusive Photos of Fun-Filled Weekend in the Bahamas
 … I believe that the demise of the liberal perspective on the ghetto underclass has
made the intellectual discourse on this topic too one-sided. It has made it more difficult
to achieve …
SHOCKING NEW TREND—AMERICANS AFRAID TO LEAVE THEIR HOMES
 …
Well, you’re fucked up, you look like shit, but hey no problem, all you need is a
better cut of cocaine.
… Relativism succeeds in destroying the West’s universal or intellectually imperialistic
claims, leaving it to just be another culture …
Gravity Will Never Be the Same. The Air Revolution from Nike.
…
GREENSPAN CALLS WIDENING OF TRADE GAP “AN ABERRATION,” PREDICTS IMPROVEMENT
 …
Over the next 14 months, bidders seeking to build Florida’s visionary bullet train
will get serious. They will start negotiating big land deals with developers interested
in building stations from Tampa to
 … General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate!…
PRESIDENT ASSUMES RESPONSIBILITY FOR IRAN-CONTRA AFFAIR
 … Many employees share Gates’s young-techie vocabulary. “Randomness” applies to any
confused or haphazard situation. “Bandwidth” means the amount of information one can
absorb. Things that go right are “radical,” “cool,” or, Gates’s favorite, “super.” …
Biden, fighting to salvage his presidential campaign, today acknowledged “a mistake”
in his youth, when he plagiarized
 …
PANIC! DOW PLUNGES THROUGH FLOOR—508 PTS

CRAFTSMAN: RAYMOND CARVER

Ray was a drinker. He picked it up from C.R., his father. C.R. was a saw filer at
a lumber mill in the Yakima Valley and a good storyteller. Ray picked that up, too.
C.R. could go for months without sipping a beer, then he would disappear from home
for a while, and Ray and his mother and younger brother would sit down to dinner with
a sense of doom. That was how Ray drank: once he started, he couldn’t stop.

Ray grew up in the 1940s and ’50s. He was a tall, fat boy. He stood hunched over,
with an arm or leg bent at a bad angle, and his eyes had a fat boy’s hooded squint
even after he lost the weight. His pants and shirts looked like gabardine, what an
unemployed forty-year-old would wear. He spoke in a faint mumble so you had to listen
close, but it often turned out that he had said something funny or sharp.

The Carvers lived in four rooms in a seven-hundred-square-foot box of a house on a
concrete slab. There was nowhere to be alone and they lived together like strangers.

Ray loved to shoot geese and fish for trout along the Columbia River. He liked to
read the pulps and outdoor magazines. One day, he told the man who took him along
hunting that he had sent a story to one of the magazines and it had come back. That
was why Ray had looked nervous all morning.

“Well, what did you write?” the man said.

“I wrote a story about this wild country,” Ray said, “the flight of the wild geese
and hunting the geese and everything in this remote country down here. It’s not what
appeals to the public, they said.”

But he didn’t give up.

Ray saw an ad in
Writer’s Digest
for the Palmer Institute of Authorship in Hollywood. It was a correspondence course.
C.R. paid the twenty-five-dollar enrollment fee and Ray started doing the sixteen
installments, but he ran out of money for the monthly payments. After he received
his high school diploma, his parents expected him to go to work in the sawmill. That
wasn’t how things went.

Ray got a pretty girl named Maryann pregnant. She was going to study at the University
of Washington, but Ray and Maryann were crazy about each other, so they got married
instead. In 1957 their daughter was born in a hospital two floors below the psychiatric
ward where C.R. was being treated for a nervous breakdown. A year later a baby boy
arrived. Ray was twenty and Maryann was eighteen, and that was their youth.

They began to wander. They had great dreams and believed that hard work would make
those dreams come true. Ray was going to be a writer. Everything else would come after
that.

They moved around the West and they never stopped. They lived in Chico and Paradise
and Eureka and Arcata and Sacramento and Palo Alto and Missoula and Santa Cruz and
Cupertino. Every time they started to settle in, Ray would get restless and they would
move on to somewhere else. The family’s main support was Maryann. She packed fruit,
waited tables, sold encyclopedias door-to-door. Ray worked at a drugstore, a sawmill,
a service station, and a stockroom, and as a night janitor at a hospital. The work
was not ennobling. He would come home too wiped out to do anything.

Ray wanted to write a novel. But a man who was trying to wash six loads of clothes
in a Laundromat while his wife was serving food somewhere and the kids were waiting
for him to come pick them up somewhere else and it was getting late and the woman
ahead of him kept putting more dimes in her dryer—that man could never write a novel.
To do that, he would need to be living in a world that made sense, a world that stayed
fixed in one place so that he could describe it accurately. That wasn’t Ray’s world.

In Ray’s world the rules changed every day, and he couldn’t see past the first of
next month, when he would have to find money for rent and school clothes. The most
important fact of his life was that he had two children, and he would never get out
from under the baleful responsibility of having them. Hard work, good intentions,
doing the right things—these would not be enough, things would not get better. He
and Maryann would never get their reward. That was the other thing he understood in
the Laundromat. And somewhere along the way, his dreams started to go bust.

Without the heart to write anything long, which might have brought in real money,
and with the deep frustration of seeing no way out, Ray could write only poems, and
very short stories. Then he rewrote them, again and again, sometimes over many years.

The stories were about people who did not succeed. That had been Ray’s experience,
and those were his people. His characters were unemployed salesmen, waitresses, mill
hands. They lived nowhere in particular, in bedrooms and living rooms and front yards
where they couldn’t get away from one another or themselves and everyone was alone
and adrift. Their names weren’t fancy—Earl, Arlene, L.D., Rae—and they seldom had
more than one, if that. Nothing like religion or politics or community surrounded
them, except the Safeway and the bingo hall. Nothing was happening anywhere in the
world, there was only a boy fighting a fish, a wife selling a used car, two couples
talking themselves into paralysis. Ray left almost everything out.

In one story, a wife learns that her husband, just back from a fishing trip with his
buddies, left the brutalized corpse of a girl lying in the river for three days before
reporting it.