“That’s the point,” the chief of staff noted. “We’re doing this for apolitical reasons, to serve the interests of the country. Ed knows he’s committing political suicide.” To be followed by instant and glorious resurrection, live on CNN.
Kealty stood and started walking around the room, gesturing as he spoke. “Take politics out of this, damn it! The government’s been destroyed! Who’s going to put it back together? Ryan’s a goddamned CIA spook. He knows nothing about government operations. We have a Supreme Court to appoint, policy to carry out. We have to get Congress put back together. The country needs leadership, and he doesn’t have a clue on how to do that. I may be digging my own political grave, but somebody has to step up and protect our country.”
Nobody laughed. The odd thing was that it never occurred to them to do so. The staffers, both of whom had been with EJK for twenty years or more, had so lashed themselves to this particular political mast that they had no choice in the matter. This bit of theater was as necessary as the passage of the chorus in Sophocles, or Homer’s invocation of the Muse. The poetics of politics had to be observed. It was about the country, and the country’s needs, and Ed’s duty to the country over a generation and a half, because he’d been there and done it for all that time, knew how the system worked, and when it all came down, only a person like he could save it. The government was the country, after all. He’d spent fits professional lifetime devoted to that proposition.
They actually believed all that, and no less than the two
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staffers, Kealty was lashed to the same mast. How much he was responding to his own ambition even he could no longer say, because belief becomes fact after a lifetime of professing it. The country occasionally showed signs of drifting away from his beliefs, but as an evangelist has no choice but to entreat people back to the True Faith, so Kealty had a duty to bring the country back to its philosophical roots, which he’d espoused for five terms in the Senate, and a briefer time as Vice President. He’d been called the Conscience of the Senate for more than fifteen years, so named by the media, which loved him for his views and his faith and his political family.
It would have been well for him to consult the media on this call, as he’d done often enough in the past, briefing them on a bill or amendment, asking their views–the media loved for people to ask their opinion on things–or just making sure they came to all the right parties. But not in this case. No, he couldn’t do that. He had to play everything straight. The appearance of currying favor could not be risked, whereas the deliberate avoidance of that maneuver would give the patina of legitimacy to his actions. High-minded. That was the image to project. He’d forgo all of the political tapestry for the first time in his life, and in so doing embroider a new segment. The only thing to consider now was timing. And that was something his media contacts could help with.
“WHAT TIME?” RYAN asked.
“Eight-thirty Eastern,” van Damm replied. “There are a couple of specials tonight, sweeps week, and they’ve asked us to accommodate them.”
Ryan might have growled about that, but didn’t. His thoughts showed clearly on his face anyway.
“It means you get a lot of West Coast people on their car radios,” Arnie explained. “We have all five networks, plus CNN and C-SPAN. That’s not a given, you know. It’s a courtesy. They don’t have to let you on at all. They play that card for political speeches–”
“Damn it, Arnie, this isn’t political, it’s–”
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“Mr. President, get used to it, okay? Every time you take a leak, it’s political. You can’t escape that. Even the absence of politics is a political statement.” Arnie was working very hard to educate his new boss. He listened well, but he didn’t always hear.
“Okay. The FBI says I can release all of this?” “I talked to Murray twenty minutes ago. It’s okay with him. I have Gallic incorporating that in the speech right now.”
SHE COULD HAVE had a better office. As the number-one presidential speechwriter, she could have asked for and gotten a gold-plated personal computer sitting on a desk of Carrara marble. Instead she used a ten-year-old Apple Macintosh Classic, because it was lucky and she didn’t mind the small screen. Her office might have been a closet or storeroom once upon a time, back when the Indian Treaty Room had really been used for Indian treaties. The desk had been made at a federal prison, and while the chair was comfortable, it was thirty years old. The room had high ceilings. That made it easier for her to smoke, in violation of federal and White House rules, which were in her case not enforced. The last time someone had tried to muscle her, a Secret Service agent really had been forced to pull her off the male staffer lest she scratch his eyes out. That she had not been terminated at once was a sign to the rest of the personnel in the Old Executive Office Building. Some staff people could not be touched. Callie Wes-ton was one of those.
There were no windows in her room. She didn’t want them. For her, reality was her computer and the photographs on her walls. One was of her dog, an aging English sheepdog named Holmes (Oliver Wendell, not Sherlock; she admired the prose of the Yankee from Olympus, an accolade she accorded few others). The rest were of political figures, friends and enemies, and she studied them constantly. Behind her was a small TV and VCR, the former usually tuned to C-SPAN-1 and -2 or CNN, and the latter used to review tapes of speeches written by others and delivered in all manner of places. The political
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speech, she thought, was the highest form of communication. Shakespeare might have had two or three hours in one of his plays to get his idea across. Hollywood tried the same thing in much the same time. Not her. She had fifteen minutes at the bottom end, and maybe forty-five at the top, and her ideas had to count. They had to sway the average citizen, the seasoned pol, and the most cynical reporter. She studied her subject, and she was studying Ryan now, playing and replaying the few words he’d said on the night of his accession, then the TV spots the next morning. She watched his eyes and his gestures, his tension and intensity, his posture and body language. She liked what she saw in the abstract sense. Ryan was a man she’d trust as an investment adviser, for example. But he had a lot to learn about being a politician, and somebody had to teach him–or maybe not? She wondered. Maybe … by not being a politician . . .
Win or lose, it would be fun. For the first time, fun, not work.
Nobody wanted to admit it, but she was one of the most perceptive of the people working here. Fowler had known that, and so had Durling, which was why they put up with her eccentricities. The senior political staff hated her, treated her as a useful but minor functionary, and seethed at how she could stroll across the street and go right into the Oval Office, because the President trusted her as he trusted few others. That had finally occasioned a comment suggesting that the President had a rather special reason for calling her over, and, after all, people from her part of the country were known to be a little loose when it came to … She wondered if he’d managed to get it up lately. The agent had pulled her hands off the little prick’s face, but he’d been too slow to contain her knee. It hadn’t even made the papers. Arnie had explained to him that a return to the Center of Power would be impeded by a charge of sexual misconduct–and then blacklisted him anyway. She liked Arnie.
She liked the speech, too. Four hours instead of the three she’d promised, a lot of effort for twelve minutes and thirty seconds–she tended to write them a little short because presidents had a way of speaking slowly. Most did.
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Ryan would have to learn that. She typed CONTROL P to print up the speech in Helvetica 14-point, three copies. Some political pukes would look things over and try to make corrections. That wasn’t as much a problem now as it had been. When the printer stopped, she collated the pages, stapled them together, and lifted her phone. The topmost speed-dial button went to the proper desk across the street.
“Weston to see the Boss,” she told the appointments secretary.