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attended a fundraiser at Hickory Hill for Kathleen Kennedy Townsend,
     with Ethel and other Kennedys graciously welcoming every guest on the front lawn of
     the manor. Connaughton slipped off into the study, where he wasn’t supposed to go,
     and took from the shelf a bound volume of Robert F. Kennedy’s speeches—the original
     manuscripts, with handwritten notes. Connaughton’s eyes fell on a sentence that read,
     “We should do better.” Kennedy had crossed out “should” and replaced it with “must.”
     Connaughton was holding holy scripture. That was his first idea of politics: great
     speeches, historic events (the assassinations), black-and-white portraits of JFK in
     the Oval Office and the Rose Garden. He was that overlooked and necessary thing in
     the annals of Washington, not Hamlet but Rosencrantz, not a principal but a follower—years
     later he would say, “I am the perfect number two guy”—drawn to the romance of public
     service and to power, which eventually became inextricable.
    In early 1979, when Connaughton was a sophomore, a friend at the University of Pennsylvania
     asked him to be Alabama’s delegate to the annual meeting of the National Student Congress,
     in Philadelphia. The plane ticket would cost a hundred fifty dollars. Connaughton
     was granted twenty-five bucks from the student government’s budget, and The Tuscaloosa News offered to give him seventy-five dollars for a story based on the experience. The
     last fifty dollars came out of the cash register at a Wendy’s where Connaughton ate
     a couple of meals a week—the manager was touched by the story of a college student
     trying to pay his way to a national assembly whose purpose was to combat apathy on
     campus and restore faith in politics a few years after Watergate and Vietnam.
    The first speaker at the meeting in Philadelphia was an ultraconservative Republican
     congressman from Illinois named Dan Crane, one of the many thousands of men and women
     who go to Washington as the elected representatives of the American people and serve
     out their time in the halls of Congress without leaving a trace. The second was Joe
     Biden. He began by saying, “If Representative Crane had just given you the liberal
     point of view, this would be the conservative view: You’re all under arrest.” The
     line brought down the house. The rest of the speech didn’t leave a mark on Connaughton’s
     memory, but the speaker did. Biden was youthful, he was witty, he knew how to talk
     to college students. Connaughton never forgot the moment.
    Back in Tuscaloosa, he started the Alabama Political Union, and for its first event
     in the fall he invited Biden and Senator Jake Garn, a Republican from Utah, to debate
     the SALT II arms control treaty. Both senators accepted (in 1979 there was no ban
     on accepting the five-hundred-dollar honorarium the university was offering—just a
     restriction limiting outside income to 15 percent of a senator’s $57,500 salary, which
     had taken effect on January 1), but then Garn backed out. The debate threatened to
     be reduced to a mere speech.
    Connaughton got in his Chevy Nova with a friend who was visiting from Brigham Young
     University and who, like Garn, was a Mormon. They drove fourteen hours to the nation’s
     capital to change Senator Garn’s mind. Connaughton had never been to Washington, and
     the Beltway offered no obvious exits into the city—it was more of a moat than a conduit—and
     the Capitol dome kept appearing in the distance and then disappearing. Finally they
     found their way onto backstreets that led toward Capitol Hill. This was poor, black
     Washington, blighted Washington, the Washington of the district’s 80 percent, neighborhoods
     that Connaughton would rarely see again in the two decades he would live and work
     in the city.
    In the morning, they found Garn’s office in the Russell Senate Office Building, along
     one of the lofty and immensely long corridors,