Campaign 2000: Bradley's Twilight Cruise

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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.