The 45th, page 16
Chapter Twelve
Julian held his jacket tight around his throat and pointed to a gnarled wind bent cypress at the edge of the rocky cliff where a gray eagle had just swooped down to rest its wings from the harsh, snapping wind. A hundred feet below, the white surf beat with deafening repetitive noise against the steep-sided cove.
“Be grateful, the sun is out. It’s the wind here doesn’t let you forget the sea, that you have come to the end of the country and there isn’t anywhere left to go.” He turned to Ismael Cooper who was holding his hand on his forehead to keep his hair from lashing his eyes. “Too loud to talk, isn’t it?” he shouted with an easy, careless laugh. He looked up at the high arching sky and then out to the thin flat line that divided the earth from the heavens in two only slightly different shades of blue. “I know,” he said in a voice tinged with regret, “we have to get back.”
They walked along a narrow footpath through the deep red ice plants that covered the sloping hillside, back up to Julian Drake’s Big Sur home. Ismael waited in the living room, glancing idly at the bookshelves towering up to the two story ceiling and the thick glass windows on the other side with their endless view of the Pacific. He had been here, along with Julian, for three days, three days in which they were supposed to be planning the fall campaign. It seemed now, as he ran his hand along a long row of books, the collected works of an author whose name seemed vaguely familiar but he had never read, that they had talked about almost everything else. Every time tried to raise the issue, to ask what Julian thought they should do, Julian would say something about how that was no doubt important, and then start talking about something else.
“You don’t seem to think this is real,” he remarked when Julian came into the room carrying two cups of hot coffee.
“Real?” he asked, with a slightly puzzled expression. He sat down in the chair he always used, heavily cushioned with thick round arms, and threw his legs up on the ottoman in front. There were three or four dog eared books on the lamp table next to him.
“That you’re a candidate, that you’re running for president, that you don’t have a campaign, that you haven’t even decided who you want to run it!”
Julian held the cup of coffee in both hands, just below his mouth, warming himself from its heat. His eyes brightened and danced with amusement.
“We’re not going to have a campaign. We don’t need one,” he said before Ismael could object. “We already have one.”
“We already have…?”
“Our good and loyal friend, Reece Davis. What is his job supposed to be, if it isn’t to elect Republicans to office?”
“There is a difference between a party organization and a candidate’s own campaign,” explained Ismael, wondering why he had to.
“I know that, but Davis doesn’t. It’s all taken care of. I talked to him before we left Cleveland.”
“You didn’t tell me you had talked to him,” said Ismael, and then immediately began to apologize. “I”m sorry; it’s really not my place to….”
“But it is…your place. Listen to me. You’re the only person I can really talk to. Louis has other things to do. He’s majority leader. He is going to have enough on his hands. And he won’t have you to help him anymore. If I win this thing, I’ll need you to be chief of staff. You wouldn’t mind doing that, would you?”
“No, of course I wouldn’t mind. I’d be honored,” replied Ismael, with a sense of gratitude, but also a kind of foreboding. He knew enough about politics and government, enough about the way Washington worked, not to think that the presidency of Julian Drake would represent anything other than a seismic shift of power, a change of values that however much some might applaud, other would consider an attack on everything they believed.
“What usually happens after someone gets the nomination? - He replaces the party chairman with someone who will be loyal only to him. I told Davis I wanted him to stay on.” Julian bent his head to the side and with his index finger began to trace a circle in the air. “He tried to hide his surprise, his astonishment. He was certain it was the end of his career, that everyone hated him and would never trust him again. He was the one who made the decision to ask Louis to chair the convention and give the keynote address. I thanked him for it, told him that even if the nomination had gone to one of those who came into the convention favored to win, it had taken courage to invite Louis, that it showed a real determination to broaden the appeal of the party; that he understood, as not many others did, that you can’t win the presidency if you ignore everyone except a small minority that think you can solve all our problems by refusing to do anything about them. I told him that I was not about to run the same kind of campaign that everyone else had run, that I would decide myself what I was going to say and where I was going to say it, but that for the rest of it, I didn’t think there should be two separate organizations. I told him,” he added with one last circle of his finger, “that it was his campaign, that he was in charge.”
Julian looked at Ismael for a long moment. A thin smile slid along his lips.
“He thinks he owes me everything now. He thought he had come to witness his own execution; he left thinking that if he did everything right he might just live forever. All I have to do is think about what needs to be said and the best way to do it. If you haven’t noticed, that is what we have been doing for the last three days, going over all these position papers you brought from Washington, tearing them all apart, going back to basics, trying to figure out where things started to go wrong. That’s what I meant when I said you’re the only one I can talk to - everyone else would think I was crazy, jumping around the way I do from one thing to another without any obvious connection between them. It’s the way I work, the way things move through my head. It’s only when I have to write things down on paper - that speech, for example - that everything starts to fall into place.”
Julian put the cup of coffee on the table next to him and got up from the chair. He walked to the far end of the room and with his back to Ismael pulled down a thick book from a set of twenty maroon leather volumes from the second shelf from the top. Thumbing the pages until he found what he was looking for, he turned halfway round to look at Ismael and then read a few lines, but silently, to himself.
“Macaulay,” he explained; “the speech he gave in the British parliament on the last reading of the Reform Bill of 1832. No one reads Macaulay anymore; no one reads anything worth reading anymore. But Macaulay taught me how to speak. Why not? It’s how Churchill learned. The reason I looked at it just now was to remind myself how much I had stolen, what I had taken from his peroration, when I was writing the close of the speech I wrote for Louis, the one I gave, the one that seems to have caused me all this trouble,” he added with a glance full of guile and mischief. “Not the words; I didn’t borrow any of them. No, the rhythm, the pace, the way that several phrases, several sentences, each begin the same way, the rhythmic repetition that, if you do it right, do it with the breathless speed with which Macaulay is supposed to have spoken, you turn prose into poetry, the kind of poetry that not only makes you listen, but makes it almost impossible to forget. Macaulay’s speech, the way he ended it, those last few paragraphs - every time I read it my pulse begins to race. It becomes a part of you, something that reminds you what speech, human speech, can do.”
Putting the volume back in its place, Julian began to pace back and forth, talking to himself in short bursts of incoherence, words that were not words at all, sounds that had no meaning. The quick abbreviations of thought followed so fast upon one another that the words by which to express them seemed to give only partial voice to what had already been relegated to an already forgotten past. He suddenly stopped in his tracks and stared at Ismael with such a terrific sense of accomplishment that Ismael was too embarrassed to even start to think of a reply had he thought something in Julian’s strange, disordered look required one.
“I used to talk to Louis about this. He’s old enough to remember when speech was a power. He once told me, and I never forgot it, that the Second World War never would have been won without the ability Churchill and FDR had to speak. There was a difference between them and it fascinated Louis. It seemed to explain the decline he saw happening. Churchill started out before the radio, before your voice could be broadcast into millions of homes, before you had to make everything simple and easy to understand. He began speaking in parliament when most members were educated in the classics and had time to read, when a major speech might last for three or four hours, when no one read the speech they were giving but had to speak spontaneously, or, as in Churchill’s case, from memory. FDR, on the other hand, used the radio, spoke into a microphone from a room somewhere, talking as if he were having a conversation at the dinner table. He could give a speech in front of a large audience, or deliver a message to congress, as he did that day the United States declared war on Japan, but they were all, by an earlier standard, short performances. And now, with television and the internet, three straight sentences are considered too long to cover on the news.”
Julian stopped talking. Watching out the window the ocean shimmer bright silver in the long light of the afternoon, he became pensive and withdrawn. His mood changed from the bright excitement of the eager recitation of what he had once learned to a solemn sense of responsibility, the sudden awareness of a burden he could not longer ignore. He looked at Ismael as if he were sure he understood.
“What we do the next two and a half months will allow us to govern because there won’t be any mistake about what it is I mean to achieve.”
Julian stared into the middle distance, trying to capture and clarify the thought racing through his mind. He rolled his shoulders forward, crossed his arms and for a moment looked down at his shoes.
“You can’t always tell the truth,” he said, looking up; “not the whole truth, anyway. I said that everyone should be allowed to serve their country. I said it, and I believe it, and I am going to repeat it so often there won’t be any doubt that, if I am elected, it is exactly what I am going to do. But it isn’t because we need a larger army, and it isn’t because it is a way to make it possible for more people to go to college. That is what everyone will concentrate on: how we are going to trade four years of service for four years of college. The truth is we would be better off if there were fewer people going to college. You know what I mean,” he said when Ismael looked startled. “A kid who graduates from high school in France or Germany knows more, is taught more, than most of the kids who graduate from college here. Look at what used to be the high school curriculum a hundred years ago. My point is that we ought to be doing something about high school education; my point,” he went on in a quieter, more reflective voice, “is that we are wasting too much time; that instead of four years of college, two years of technical training would be better for those who want to acquire the specific skills they need for the kind of jobs they want. In Italy, if you want to be a doctor or a lawyer, you go to medical school or law school right out of high school. College isn’t the reason I want to bring into the armed forces as many children of the poor and disadvantaged as we can. If we have them for four years, they can be given the kind of education everyone should have: four years of discipline and training, four years part of an organization that teaches that nothing is more important then the country they are sworn to defend. And they will be better at it the more they know about the history and the form of government they are honor bound to protect. Four years to teach them that what they do is a lot more important than mindless pleasures and making money. And when they do go to college, they won’t be going to have a good time; they will, at least some of them, go to improve their minds. It is the only chance we have.”
“The only chance? I’m not sure I…?”
“To change what we have done to ourselves, become addicts to the need for constant contact, constant attention, the need to have something new to see or hear every few seconds, prisoners to the shifting images on a screen. Slavery used to mean forcible compulsion, physical constraint, something done against our will. Slavery now comes through our own choice, slaves to what everyone around us, all those voices on television and in cyberspace are constantly telling us what we want and what we should believe. But four years without that kind of self-indulgence, four years of what we used to understand by education, and we might have a generation that starts to remember what freedom was supposed to mean. But that is a reason that has to stay hidden. It is enough to talk about the need to give everyone, the children of the poor equally with the children of the rich, something like an equal chance,” remarked Julian, pausing as if to consider the sound of a phrase he might later want to use.
“We have to go back tomorrow,” Ismael reminded him. “We’ve spent three days here. Everyone is expecting some kind of announcement, what you intend to do, what kind of campaign there is going to be, who is going to run it - that kind of thing.”
“I don’t suppose we could just say I’ve decided to campaign the old-fashioned way, when presidential candidates sat on their front porch at home and talked to any reporter who happened to come by?”
“You could try that, but there would be at least a thousand trucks and cars blocking Highway 1 all the way back to Carmel, and probably a few dozen helicopters flying by to get pictures.”
“I know,” said Julian, glancing at the bookshelves and the glass walls and the two story stone fireplace. “If I’m elected, I’ll never see this place again.”
“You can always come out whenever….”
“What you said just now: the place would be overrun. It isn’t as private, as secluded as it used to be, with all the tourists who think they have to see Big Sur, but….No, I couldn’t do that. And besides, there wouldn’t be time. There is too much to do, and I’ve never really liked vacations. But your question was what should we announce. Nothing. Just say we’re ready. Let everyone figure out for themselves what we’re doing, find out on their own that this isn’t going to be like anything they have seen before. We have a press conference in D.C. day after tomorrow. That will give everyone a start.”
When they arrived in Washington late the next afternoon, Ismael went directly to Capitol Hill. Louis Matson wanted to know everything that had happened.
“Happened?” laughed Ismael. “Nothing happened. We didn’t go anywhere; we didn’t do anything. The only people we ever saw were the secret service agents who were up on the road covering the place. Happened? Nothing at all, except a one man tutorial on American history and politics that I could have spent three years in graduate school and never learned. I went out there to brief him, bring him up to date on the major issues in front of Congress. He doesn’t have a television set, he doesn’t own a computer, and as I told you the first time I went out there, he reads the papers - the Sunday Times - maybe once a month. And every time, as soon as I started talking, before I had two sentences out of my mouth, he would stop me with a wave of his hand, a look, and then proceed to give me his own analysis, the way he saw both sides of the question, whatever the question was. And each time he did it, I suddenly understood that I had not understood anything about it before.”
Matson clasped his hands together behind his neck and with a knowing smile said he was not the least surprised.
“But what you did was still important. Even if he only listened to a few sentences, that would have given him everything he needed to grasp the thinking, the nature of the disagreement, of what has been going on here. What else? What else did he say? What decisions has he made. I know he wants you to be his chief of staff. I hope you said you’d do it.”
“He talked to you about that?”
“Julian may be a lot younger, but if anything he’s more old school than I am. He would not have asked you without first asking me if I would agree to let you go. Hell, I told him he’d be doing me a favor; I’d been trying to get rid of you for years,” he growled, his chest heaving with laughter. “And then I had to admit - reluctantly, you understand - that I could not think of anyone better suited for the job. You did say yes, didn’t you?” he asked, suddenly aware of the troubled look on Ismael’s round, smooth face.
“I couldn’t say no,” replied Ismael, with a vanishing smile of no apparent enthusiasm. “How could I? I wanted to say yes, and I said yes, but the moment I said it I began to wonder, not if I would come to regret it, but if I would survive it. Chief of Staff? I’m not even sure there will be a staff. He doesn’t seem to think he really needs one. He has the idea that the White House is just another out of control bureaucracy, too many people doing too many things that aren’t necessary. He likes to talk about Lincoln, how he fought and won the Civil War with two assistants and a half dozen cabinet secretaries. He talks about -”
“How Churchill wrote every word he ever spoke, and almost every directive issued under his own name. He’s right. Hell, Harry Truman had a staff you could count on your fingers.” Matson became serious. “With you as chief of staff, Julian just might be able to do it, have a White House that really works, instead of creating more problems than it solves. There is something else, though, isn’t there, something that is bothering you? It isn’t because you think there would be too much work; you’ve never been afraid of that.”
Ismael slouched cross-legged in the upholstered chair, looking straight at Louis Matson. “It isn’t that I’m envious; it isn’t that I wonder what might have happened if I had not lost my seat in congress and had one day been elected to the senate. It is none of that. It is like trying to train with a runner no one can beat: you know you will never be able to keep up. The first night I was there, I could not sleep. After everything that had happened at the convention, all the excitement, all the running around, all the last minute arrangements that had to be made, I thought I would sleep like a dead man, but I just lay there, everything that had happened running through my mind. Finally, about three o’clock in the morning I got up. I thought I might as well get something to read. Julian was already up. He had gone to sleep a little after midnight, and now, three hours later, he was at his desk, studying.”
