The book What It Takes: The Way to the White House, by Richard Ben Cramer, came out in 1992, and I originally read it not too long after - somewhere around, in other words, 30 years ago. For various reasons it seemed a good idea to give it another spin, and it was. Would be for you, too.
I don't say that lightly, because the book sure isn't light either, running well over 1,000 pages. But it has resonance today, both directly and because the backboard for thought it offers.
The context is the presidential campaign, underway now; and the presidential campaign of 1988, which is the subject of the book as seen through the eyes and lives of six of its participants. The idea here was to work out what it takes to run for president - or at least, that's how most of it reads: What it takes to actually do the job of president as opposed to campaign for it is, of course, a very different story.
All of these candidates were well-known at the time, and all were major contenders, but two probably have the most connection to Americans now. One was the candidate who went all the way and became president, for one term, George H.W. Bush. The other is our president as of 2024: Joseph R. Biden.
The book is structured as a loose interior group biography, shifting from one candidate to another, sometimes comparing and contrasting, sometimes simply bouncing around, but written in a style neither academic nor journalistic but instead intended to reflect the different mindset and personalities of the candidates. You can quickly tell, for example, if you're reading about Robert Dole as opposed Dick Gephardt just from the tone and the word choices. For Bush, for example, while there are scary and even near-death experiences (when his plane was shot down in the Pacific) and tragedy (the death of his infant daughter), much of the sensibility reflects a take on the world that things come together as they should, and things just wonderfully fit together. Most of the time.
The Biden story is almost a variation on that, but a distinct variation. Unlike Bush, Biden came from a background much closer to hard-scrabble, but his sense of confidence and optimism suffuses, most of the time, everything else. The shattering tragedy he faced in the book's narrative - the death in a traffic accident of his first wife and daughter, shortly after his first election to the U.S. Senate - does not seem to have changed his fundamental stance toward life: He knew where he was supposed to go, what he was supposed to do, and what it would look like and feel like when he got there. He envisioned himself from an early age as becoming president, and simply never let anything get in the way.
(That was not true only about the presidency. A revealing and even hilarious section concerned a house he bought around the time of his Senate election and the almost wild lengths he went to to get it the way he wanted it. Or somewhere close ...)
What It Takes isn't a true bio of any of the six candidates (the others I haven't mentioned was Gary Hart, who had his own spectacular collapse story in that election cycle, and Michael Dukakis, who won the Democratic nomination but lost the general election to Bush) it does get inside their heads enough to press a reader into considering, at length: What makes a person do this? Why run? What's the motivation, what keeps it going, and what does it take to prosper in such a difficult environment in which there can be, after all, only one winner?
The Biden sections (certainly nowhere near a hagiography but not terribly critical either) are worth a fresh review, in the context of that long-ago election, today because of this election year. But it's also worth using what that 1988 campaign has to suggest abut Biden's Republican opponent today, and what it takes to run for the presidency ... and fulfill the responsibility, once won.