Bradley's twilight cruiseWith his presidential bid picking up steam, "Dollar Bill" leads a mythopoeic tour of his old hometownBy ERIC POOLEY/CRYSTAL CITY
September 13, 1999
Web posted at: 3:42 p.m. EDT (1942 GMT)
"ERN-ESSSSS-TEEEEEEN!"
Bill Bradley has lost his wife. He calls her name while charging
toward the church across the street from his childhood home in
Crystal City, Mo., but Ernestine Schlant has vanished. She is
trapped somewhere behind the electronic thicket--a mad bristling
of boom mikes and long lenses, tape recorders and power packs, TV
cameras shouldered by guys who look like defensive linemen gone
to seed, all of them barreling hell-bent for Bradley.
Welcome to the official walking tour of Bradley's old hometown,
where this morning he announced (again) what everyone already
knew: that he is trying to snatch the Democratic nomination from
Al Gore. Bradley should have called this the speed-walking tour.
The lapsed Senator is really working those long, NBA-tested legs,
partly because he feels good--his kickoff speech went well, close
to 100 media types are covering him, and the latest polls put him
just a few points behind Gore in New Hampshire--and partly because
he has only half an hour before sunset, and he wants to lead us
to the banks of the Mississippi before then. "I want you all to
see the riv-er the way I see the riv-er," he says, letting the
word roll out slowly, a promise of ineffable revelations to come.
Events such as this, designed to show off a candidate's
small-town heart, tend to feel like Hollywood location
shoots--superimposed on a place. Bradley wants to prove he has a
real connection to this one. But first he has to find his wife.
"Ernestine!"
With her pixieish smile intact, Ernestine manages to dart out of
the thicket and rejoin her husband. Now he can play tour guide--a
mordant commentator who wants us to know he finds this ritual,
like so many other campaign rituals, faintly ridiculous. "All
right, well, this is the church," he says. "These trees are tulip
trees. And as you can see, it's one of those great stone
churches." He tells us how his father, a bank president who
suffered from calcified arthritis of the spine, used to "sit and
look out at this churchyard, and it gave him a sense of peace,
because it was always green, and it was always peaceful, and it
was, um, a wonderful place." He pauses for a beat. "O.K., that's
the church. Now we'll see the bank."
And he's off, power walking across the churchyard with the
cameramen jousting and stumbling behind. After a brief stop at
the bank, he leads us to the edge of a vast, weed-choked parcel
that for 100 years was home to a plate glass factory, Crystal
City's economic raison d'etre. The plant's 1990 closing sapped
the town's strength, so another politician might use the moment
to rail against Corporations That Turn Their Backs on Our
Communities. Bradley looks for poetry instead. The missing
landmark "tells me life has unknown terms and change is all
around us," he says, "and some things are not retrievable. They
become memories."
With shadows deepening, we pile into tour buses and drive to the
Little League field, where Bradley again breaks the rules of
presidential horn blowing. Eddie Evans, a black player from his
childhood team, is by his side, but Bradley doesn't talk about
the times the team traveled to play-off games and he fought to
get Evans served in segregated restaurants and hotels. Instead he
tells about getting picked off first base during a play-off in
Ottumwa, Iowa. His team was eliminated, "and ever since then," he
says with a smirk, "I've dreamed of going back to Iowa and
winning one."
The buses cruise past a field of beans--Bradley's farm--and pull
into a lot beside the Mississippi. With the sun setting, the sky
is etched with a calligraphy of pink clouds, their reflection a
soft wash on the river surface. "Well, here it is," Bradley says
with satisfaction. He describes boyhood rituals, times when he
would "be still and listen to the wind in the cottonwood trees
and watch the current carry what it had scoured from half a
continent." He calls the river "a metaphor for democracy" and
talks about the peace he finds here. We do our best to look
meditative. "If you're quiet," he says, "even with this crowd,
you can get a sense of the solitude." For Bradley, a reluctant
celebrity since the age of 16, the river can be about connection
one minute, blessed aloneness the next. He marches onto a
floating dock and we follow, threatening to swamp the old planks.
Ernestine panics: "Bill! I'll go with you! If we drown, we drown
together!" To avert disaster, Bradley's people tell the media to
go out in mini packs. An aide complains, "It's just a bunch of
pencils"--reporters, not the cameras they want. This is, after
all, about pretty pictures.
And pretty it is. Out on the dock, Ernestine shucks off her heels
and dangles her feet in the water. Cameras click and whir;
Bradley's people smile and nod. "It's just one of those places
that touch me deeply," Bradley says. When the last mini-pack
clambers off the dock, he turns to an aide and asks, "Is that
it?"
That's it--we've seen everything except the shrine: the basketball
hoop in Bradley's backyard, where young Bill worked on his shots
until all hours. At the beginning of the tour, he mentioned it
and said, "I'm sure you don't need to see that." He wouldn't want
to be accused of exploiting his myth. Besides, in the morning
he'll be holding a press conference underneath the basket.
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Cover Date: September 20, 1999
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