He was not a bully, as some reporters tend to be, or a blowhard, as others like to pretend to inflate their importance. It was precisely the schmoozing that made Cramer a stand-apart threat to the pack journalism of the era. “I do remember Ben well and what a dogged reporter he was, but also how great he was schmoozing with sources,” recalls Tom Stuckey, the long-time Associated Press State House bureau chief. The hat prompted me to nickname Ben Jean-Paul Belmondo, after the lead actor in the 60s French gangster film, Borsalino, the famed Italianate hat favored by mobsters and aristocrats the world over. He was a deceptively disarming fellow, like some celestial pixie disguised in a red beard, tinted glasses and a Panama hat. Richard Ben Cramer-Ben-as he was known, died last week at 62 of lung cancer, induced, no doubt, by the endless chain of Gauloises cigarettes that he sucked down in his early years as a key nutrient in his daily fuel of nicotine and caffeine, the twin legal addictions of many reporters of his era.īen was a fey spirit who prowled the Maryland State House as a reporter for The Sun in the 1970s when I was press secretary to Gov. Even Witcover praised Cramer in a recent column as “arguably the best writer of a presidential campaign chronicle ever.” White, Jack Germond and Jules Witcover and all the others who’ve chronicled presidential campaigns, only his outshines theirs, according to the pile-on of belated assessments. My personal favorite writing on politics is Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (which outweighs Cramer’s doorstop at 1162 pages.)Ĭramer now shares the library shelf with the likes of Theodore R.

The tome is now regarded by political reporters and obituary writers as one of the finest books on campaign politics, an instruction manual for aspiring political reporters. I neglected it for no other reason than I’d always considered it too heavy to lift, kind of in the weight class with War and Peace, if not heftier.Īnd now, as is often the case, What It Takes is finally getting its posthumous due, a little more than 20 years after its publication and review as frivolous, overblown and stuffed with too much meretricious and irrelevant fluff. I confess to a sin of omission, slightly short of mortal, of being among the few, if not the only, political reporters in the Western World who has never read What It Takes, the behemoth of a book at 1047 pages by Richard Ben Cramer.

What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer