The 45th, page 11
“Glad that it…? You mean you’re glad that you’re here only to help Louis Matson with his speech, and not as a candidate for the nomination?”
A smile started onto his mouth, at first distant and remote, and then, suddenly, close and almost intimate. “Can you keep a secret? I’d rather not be here at all.”
Rachel thought she understood. “But you thought you owed Louis a favor. I’ve known Louis a very long time,” she explained when Julian gave her a puzzled look. “He has told me a few things…about what happened, twelve years ago.”
With a look of sympathy and disapproval, Julian let her know that what had passed between him and Louis Matson was, and would always be, a private matter, and that he had no wish to hear whatever Louis may have told her.
“But you were asking me whom I favored for the nomination.” Pausing, as if the question were more complicated than it seemed, he folded his arms over his chest, crossed his legs and began to study the movement of his foot as he swung it back and forth to some short rhythm in his mind. After a few moments, he gave it up and looked at Rachel Good with a teasing grin, the only answer he was willing to give. She understood immediately what he meant.
“It isn’t that you don’t want to say, that there is someone you support but want to keep it private,” she said, just to be sure. “The truth is that you don’t think either of them - or anyone else who has been mentioned, all those dozens of would be third candidates - ought to be the nominee.”
Tilting his head, he fixed her with a sidelong glance. A faint smile played on his mouth, again the only answer he would give. He seemed to be enjoying this. Perhaps, she thought, because he had not talked to a reporter for so long that it had at least the interest, if not the charm, of nostalgia.
“I don’t remember you being so reticent,” she said, smiling back. “As I recall, you were one of the few people in politics who never refused to answer a question, however stupid or beside the point it might have been.”
The smile on his mouth grew broader, the look in his eyes more eager, and more alive.
“And never, as I remember, quite honestly,” he replied, daring her, as it seemed, to challenge what he said.
“More honestly than most. The problem with most of them,” she added, confidentially, “is that they don’t even know when they’re lying. They only repeat what they have been told everyone wants to hear and never bother to ask themselves if what they’re saying makes sense. How else would you describe what you just heard in there, what the governor - who thinks he has an inside track to the nomination - and what those two - Cruz and Trump, who think the nomination is already theirs - said to the delegation? They have been saying the same thing, over and over again, for years, like wind up dolls you just set in motion.” She stopped, suddenly, and gave Julian a searching glance. “You wouldn’t vote for any of them, would you? Then what kind of speech have you written that makes Louis so excited? It can’t be anything anyone who has a chance at the nomination wants to hear. What in the world is Louis going to do? What is it that after twelve years away from all this - twelve years in exile, if I can put it like that - you thought you could write that would be so much different from what all these people now seem to believe? Is that the reason no one has been given a copy of it, why no one has been allowed to see it - because of the reaction, because if anyone knew what Louis is going to do, what he is going to say this evening, they would not let him do it?” she asked, becoming more intrigued, more excited, with every word.
Excited is not too strong a word. Rachel Good had covered Washington and national politics almost as long as Louis Matson had held office. She had become not just disenchanted, but seriously depressed, by the changes she had witnessed: the almost violent hatreds with which political opponents viewed each other, the shameless disregard for what others thought important, the absence of intelligence, the almost total lack of learning, the growing admiration for those who showed their disdain for any serious studies or any serious works of art or history. We had become barbarians and thought ourselves the most civilized people who had ever lived. And now Julian Drake, whom she remembered as one of the few with the sensibilities of an earlier age, a time when members of Congress had respect for, and even friendship with , members on the other side, had written a speech that Louis Matson could not wait to give. She had to know what was in it.
Julian would not tell her.
“I can’t; it isn’t my speech, remember. I’m just a poor scribbler, an unpaid one time assistant, a senate staffer who, like every staffer should, understands that my main purpose in life is to remain anonymous,” he said, as he stood up. Ismael Cooper had just signaled that Louis Matson was waiting for him. “I have to go. If I don’t see you again - I’m leaving, going home, as soon as the speech is over. It was good to see you after all this time. If you ever come out to California, come by. I’ll show you what the tourists never see in Big Sur. It’s worth doing,” he added with an insistence she found almost moving. “It puts things in perspective, lets you see the difference between what is worth knowing and all this…, this noise,” he said with a quick, dismissive glance at the ballroom still crowded with eager, ambitious men and women whom, it is safe to say, would not at the moment have been much interested in nature’s solitude or things that never change.
Rachel Good watched him go, watched the way he walked, the apparent indifference to what was going on around him, the easy way he talked with Ismael Cooper, like two old friends that no matter how much time has passed could always pick up a conversation as if, instead of years, it had only been a few hours since they had last talked before. She did not know why, she could not have given a reason, but she was almost certain that something was going to happen, something no one had anticipated, something no one could have foreseen, something that, once it happened, would change everything. She could not wait to hear what Louis Matson was going to say.
Chapter Nine
Everyone knew something was about to happen; no one knew what it was. After all the primaries, after all the debates, all the money raised, all the money spent, it had come down to the question what Louis Matson was going to do. Thousands of people had gathered together in the massive arena, the office holders who were concerned less for who might win the nomination than how it might affect their own careers, the true believers drawn to politics and a candidate because of what they thought a principle worth the sacrifice of time and money, the reporters ready to make a story out of any unsubstantiated rumor that came their way, all of them waiting, breathless, for the convention to open.
Julian Drake sat on a folding chair at the very back of the platform. Louis Matson sat next to him, going through the speech Julian had written, pronouncing each word in a slow, whispered voice, trying to get the cadence, the rhythm, just right. He held it in both hands, his head bent over it, stopping to look up whenever he wanted to make sure he was doing it the way Julian thought he should. Too late to make any changes, it was a last rehearsal. Julian nodded his encouragement and told him he would do fine.
Watching the crowd, the delegates sitting in their respective delegations, each delegation separate and apart from the others like the units in a military parade, all the cameras, all the noise, Julian had a strange sense of something missed, the chance he might once have had to be here on his own, a candidate himself. He could have done it, run for the presidency, if only out of a kind of curiosity to see what would happen. That was what he could ever explain to anyone: that it was curiosity, more than ambition, the desire to know what would happen if he let himself be involved. People who run for office may believe in nothing else, but they believe in themselves. Julian Drake believed in fate. He thought himself an actor playing a part in a play in which he, and all the other actors, were given the pages only one at a time, a play in which neither the actors nor the audience knew how it would end.
An anonymous voice on the public address system announced the opening of the convention. The senate majority leader was introduced. Louis Matson looked at Julian for a brief moment, a look that conveyed a kind of fatality, the knowledge that there was now no turning back, that what he was about to do, whatever the consequences, would be the last thing of importance he would ever do. He rose from his chair, lifted his arm in acknowledgement of the applause, respectful, expectant, and uncertain, and with the speech in his left hand, started toward the podium. He placed the ten page speech on the lectern, reached inside his jacket pocket for his glasses and smiled as he put them on.
“Even without glasses,” he laughed, “I daresay I’m more clear sighted than some of my Democratic friends who think that….”
The laughter died on his lips, the words seemed to echo lifeless in the air. Gripping the lectern, he stared straight ahead, and then, suddenly, his legs gave way and he started to fall
“Julian!” he gasped.
Julian was there in an instant, holding him up, helping him to the nearest chair. Everyone was on their feet, waiting to see what would happen, wondering whether Matson was in danger, seriously ill, whether he would be able to go on. In politics, as in war, casualties become the basis for a new set of calculations. If Matson was disabled, if he could not give his speech, if he could not dictate what the Michigan delegation would do, what would happen to the chances of the candidates, and not just the two leading contenders, but all of them? That was the question, unspoken and unspeakable, that dominated the minds of nearly everyone there, the thousands of delegates and spectators who stood watching as Louis Matson was half carried to a chair.
“You give the speech,” whispered Matson as Julian lowered him into the chair. “No one else can do it.”
Julian looked at him with a question in his eyes.
“Don’t worry about me; I’ll be fine. Give the speech; everything else will follow from that.”
“Everything else…?”
“Go!” insisted Matson, patting the hand with which Julian still gripped his shoulder. “Give the speech, give it as if you were the candidate, the one everyone has come to hear.”
A half dozen others had rushed over to see what they could do to help. As Julian turned and started toward the front of the stage, Matson gave them a searching glance that froze them in place and focused their attention on what he wanted them to do. He brought his hands together, slowly and, as it were, with an effort, the way an invalid, someone suddenly stricken, might make the attempt, and began to clap. Without quite knowing why, they began to clap as well. Turning away from them, Matson followed Julian with his eyes, and their eyes followed as well. With the instinct of the crowd, all the delegates were on their feet, clapping their hands, a show of sympathy for Louis Matson and encouragement for the unannounced speaker who had suddenly been thrust into the spotlight, forced on the instant to give a speech for which he had not been given so much as a moment to prepare. What no one realized, what only Louis Matson understood, was that Julian Drake had been preparing all his life.
Julian stood at the glass lectern, waiting as the applause died away. And then he waited some more. The arena, that enormous auditorium, was now still as a church, and Julian just stood there, ten seconds, twenty seconds, and did not speak. He placed his left hand on the edge of the lectern and stepped back an arm’s length away. His head bent, staring down at the floor, he gripped the right lapel of his dark blue suit coat. His lips began to move, but no sound came out of his mouth. He seemed lost in a trance, and then, suddenly, his head came up and his eyes were ablaze and he swept his right arm out to the side.
“We have spent months, years, talking about everything that is wrong with the present administration!” he cried in a voice that by its richness and strength seemed to come from everywhere at once. “It is time we started talking about what is wrong with us.” He paused, giving his audience, the twenty-thousand in the hall and the millions more watching on television time to make certain that they had heard him right. “We have, some of us, done nothing but criticize everything the president has tried to do; we have not yet put together three consecutive sentences explaining how, if we are elected, we would govern better. We have lost our way and, worse than that, do not even know it. Think what we have done. When anyone suggests that the rich should ay more in taxes, we call it class warfare, which more than implies, insists, that those who suggest it are somehow unAmerican. And what do we offer as the best way to provide the money we need to pay for the kind of schools we want and the military we need? - To have the rich pay even less, because with more money to spend on themselves, more people will be employed and more revenue will result. We have put ourselves in the strange position, without precedent in history, of saying that we can meet our responsibilities at home and our obligations abroad, that we can - as we all say we want to be - the greatest nation on earth, by doing nothing more than encouraging the self-indulgence of the rich!
“We talk about the constitution, but we have forgotten what it means to be a citizen and think only of the right to do whatever we wish. We call ourselves conservatives and without realizing we are doing it act like the most radical liberal, eager to get rid of everything we have built through two centuries of effort and sacrifice, two centuries of war and triumph, two centuries in which our parents and grandparents, and their parents and grandparents, gave their treasure and their lives so that their children and their children’s children could live in freedom. We call ourselves conservatives and demand that we throw everything aside and start all over, as if it were for this generation alone to know what is best for the country.”
High up in the gallery, in a section reserved for the press, Rachel Good watched the reaction of the vast audience to everything Julian Drake was saying. She could also look down and watch the way everything he did, every gesture, seemed to fit flawlessly with what he said. Or so she had thought when he first started to speak, because three sentences into it, she found herself so swept up in what he was saying that she had to force herself to pull away, to remember that she was there to report on what she saw. It was mesmerizing, that was all she could think, this strange power that let him teach these people, most of them as fanatical in their beliefs as any political convention in recent memory, that everything they believed, everything they thought they believed, was wrong. A power, but what kind and where did it come from and what did it mean? It was more than the speech, more than the words, words which if spoken by anyone else she could think of would have been treated with angry derision and righteous contempt. It was not because the speaker, Julian Drake, had a call on their loyalty; there were not more than a dozen people there who remembered who he was. It was not what he was saying, and it was not who was saying it; it was how he was saying it that allowed him to do what he did. He spoke with a force built out of speed, the words coming with the kind of velocity that it seemed nothing could stop, coming, as it were, out of some necessity that nothing, no reasoned argument, no settled opinion, could resist. And more than that, there was his voice, a voice that seemed to come from everywhere at once, wrapping you up in it, enveloping you as if, instead of coming from somewhere outside, it was your own voice, the one that came from deep inside yourself. It was a voice that, though you have never known it, you had wanted all your life to hear, a voice of such confidence and self-assurance, that just listening to it you knew that, finally, there was someone who understood what you had always wanted to say. It was hypnotic. Everywhere Rachel Good looked, the same thing, every face filled with astonishment and wonder as they listened to Julian Drake take apart the basic principles by which the leading contenders for the nomination had sought to establish their conservative credentials.
“If there is any conservative principle to which we should all be committed, whether we are Republicans or not, it is that we should not tax unless there is a need, and that when we tax we should so far as possible raise the revenue we need without taking money from those who need every dollar they have to feed and house themselves and their children. If there is any conservative principle worth fighting for it is that the country always comes first, and we would do well to remember - those of us who talk about taxing everyone, rich and poor alike, at the same rate - that there has never been in the history of the world a country that for long survived divided against itself. We have a choice to make: either to go back to what made us a great country, the light, the hope, of the world; or to keep pretending that because we are Americans we don’t have to do anything because things will somehow always turn out for the best. American exceptionalism means nothing unless it means that what set us apart from every other country is our willingness to sacrifice for others, our determination to place the public interest above what we think our own private advantage. What kind of people are we - what kind of people do we want to be? - Eager, all of us, to spend our lives trying to make more money than we need, or the kind of people who never hesitate to give their lives in the cause of freedom? What kind of children do we want to raise - what kind of citizens do we want to have - the kind who dream of all the things they can acquire, or the kind who dream of one day deserving the honor that comes with service to their country? What do we want to show by our example - that we honor athletes by paying millions, tens of millions, to grown ups who play the games of children - or those who risk their lives on the battlefield and then, when they come back with missing limbs and broken bodies, are not given the kind of medical they deserve and too many of us seem to think this country cannot afford?”
Julian Drake raised his chin a defiant half-inch as if he were about to challenge that vast, silent audience to think again about what they really believed.
“No one should be nominated for the presidency, not by a party that claims it wants to restore the greatness of the country, who is not willing to change all this. No one should be elected to the presidency who is not prepared to promise that those who risk their lives to defend us are guaranteed the best medical care this country can provide. Let us be clear about this. No one should leave this convention with the nomination who doesn’t swear an oath to provide state of the art hospitals for the men and women on active duty, and free, quality health care for veterans and their families. There is more. When a member of the armed forces is killed in the line of duty, it should be considered an obligation of the government - it should be an obligation of all of us - to provide for the care of his or her children until they have completed their education and can take care of themselves. If it it be objected that this will cost money, it costs more than that: it costs lives. If anyone think it unfair that some of us will have to pay more in taxes, you may wish to remember that without men and women willing to sacrifice their lives, you would not have to worry about taxes because you would not have a country left to defend. The question, the only question, is what price freedom. What are we willing to do. Are we to be the first generation unwilling to sacrifice, to do what is necessary, for the next? Are we so devoted to our own ease and comfort, so convinced that what happens to us as individuals is more important than what happens to us as a country, more interested in the speed of communication, the latest technology, than in the study, the serious study of our responsibilities to one another, more concerned with what is on television than in learning about the world and how to live a decent life? Or is there some part of us that still remembers what it was like to be an American when we looked on each other as fellow citizens instead of competitors for the tarnished glow of the proverbial brass ring?”
