We had been invited to meet Cramer by a young writer he'd befriended, Jack Bohrer, who was on a mission to persuade Richard of something he had never quite grasped: That "What It Takes," a book he thought of as a disastrous commercial failure, had stood the test of time. That was true even 20 years later, even when four younger political reporters (Chris Cillizza, Jonathan Martin, and Sasha Issenberg were also on that pilgrimage) were sitting at his feet marveling at him, and at the honor of spending time with him. Harsh reviews and weak sales left him "dismayed, bereft, maybe clinically depressed," he said. Richard was a writer to whom that kind of criticism stung. "What It Takes" was dismissed, on publication, as too big, too self-indulgent, and not relevant enough. But Richard seemed to enjoy its decrepit grandeur, enjoyed railing against the nearby subdivision developers of "Moron Acres." He lived like some sort of exiled royalty, with his wife Joan. Biden, in fact, had big dreams for improving the house he helped pick. He didn't particularly share the improving impulse of his friend Joe Biden. Richard wanted to understand things above all.
discussed a book that would have had the writer sitting in the West Wing through the year 2001, a vetoed project that must be the best unwritten book in the history of American politics. Bush, who had been a great source of his on the 1988 campaign. In fact, he unabashedly loved many of the people he wrote about, perhaps because he had worked so hard to understand them: The crooked Maryland politicians he came up with the misunderstood Ted Williams, whose secret kindness he exposed in an Esquire piece you should read immediately Bob Dole! and George W. Richard cared far more about the people he wrote about than about party or policy.
He had a beard and a gravely voice and wore absurd, baggy gardening pants he lived in a big house on Maryland's Eastern Shore that Joe Biden had helped him select. Richard was a character as large as the politicians and ballplayers he wrote about or at least, as large as he made those men, some of them superficially fairly dull, seem - once he had climbed into their heads and learned to speak their voices.
The writer Richard Ben Cramer, who died Monday at the age of 62 at Johns Hopkins, wrote one of the very few enduring books about presidential politics, "What It Takes." Published during the 1992 campaign, far too late, the book sank like a stone (in his recollection at least), only to rise slowly until it became a model and a talisman for a new generation of political writers.
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