The 45th, page 17
“Studying? Some of the stuff you brought for him to read?”
“No; he was reading Plato, trying, as he put it, to learn the secret.” “The secret?” asked Matson, leaning forward, more amused than surprised at what Ismael was reporting.
“The order of the world, and man’s place in it.”
“Did you really think Julian would be reading some mystery novel?”
“It isn’t that. It isn’t even that he was reading Plato. But here you have someone who has just been nominated for the most powerful office in the world, and he still thinks nothing more important than what he can learn from ancient dialogues written twenty-five hundred years ago. He said he first learned it from his father, and that it was the reason why his father gave him the name he had.”
“His father named him Julian because of something Plato wrote?”
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t say more than that, and he seemed a little upset with himself for telling me even that much. It’s strange, though, when you think about it. We’ve had presidents who have gotten in trouble because of women, and because of money, some have been guilty of crime and corruption, but we have never had one raise suspicion because he thinks studying the classics as important as affairs of state.”
Matson started to acknowledge the point, but laughed instead.
“I just remembered something Kennedy said. He wrote it in his own hand on the typed text of the remarks he made at a White House dinner for all the living American Nobel Prize winners: ‘There hasn’t been this much intelligence gathered in a single room of the White House since Thomas Jefferson dined here alone.’ And now, with any luck, we’ll have Julian.” He glanced at his watch. “Let’s have dinner together. Then you can get over to the hotel to get ready for the press conference. I’ll go home and watch it on television. Whose idea was it - yours or his - to hold it live?”
Ismael was on his feet. His gaze wandered to the white marble fireplace and the painting of the White House on fire in the War of 1812.
“Who else? Who but Julian would have insisted on that; who else but Julian would have thought it through, understood that if just one network agreed, all the others would have to go along?”
“Who did he talk to about it?”
“No one. He just put out a statement that he was going into seclusion for a few days and that he would be available for a live press conference at the Hay-Adams Hotel at six p.m. Everyone in America wants to see him; what reporter, what network, isn’t going to show up?”
“It will be interesting to see who asks the toughest questions,” remarked Maton, “the liberals who don’t know what to make of him, or the conservatives, most of whom still can’t believe he’s the nominee.” His expression became grim, defiant, and close to anger as he thought about what he had just said. “Damn it all to hell, do whatever you have to do, play ever card we have. Don’t let anything get started; don’t let anyone start taking shots at Julian. Put the word out. Make all those know-nothings understand that Julian is no newcomer to the game, that he won’t forget anything . Make it simple: those who help will be glad they did; those who don’t will be destroyed. That should give the bastards pause.”
Ismael remembered this last remark later that evening outside the entrance to the Hay-Adams Hotel when he suddenly found himself face to face with Conrad Wilson. Wilson was not happy.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” announced Wilson with the impatience of someone used to having people wait for him. “I’ve called every day, I….”
“I’ve been out of town,” Ismael started to explain. He looked around, worried that among the crush of reporters going inside he might be recognized and forced to answer some questions on his own. “And I can’t talk right now. Julian is….”
“I know why everyone is here,” replied Wilson irritably as they were both swept inside by the crowd surging through the open doors.
Ismael tried to be civil as Wilson insisted on following him down a side corridor that led to the front of the ballroom where the press conference was being held. When they reached the entrance, Wilson slammed his hand on the door.
“Just wait a goddamn minute!”
“Look, Mr. Wilson, I have things I have to do. I’m sorry I wasn’t available to take your calls. I wasn’t available to take calls from anyone. Why don’t we get together in the morning; we can talk then.”
“This can’t wait. It’s too important!” He looked both ways down the narrow empty hallway. “We’ve made certain decisions, the group of us, the ones - you were there the first time - that met with Matson, and then, later, after he had the nomination, with Drake. We just want him to know that we didn’t mean anything by it. Some of what got said - some of what I said - was just our frustration, our surprise, that we didn’t know anything about what was going on. We came there with certain expectations, and then we end up with a candidate about whom we didn’t know anything. We didn’t -”
“It’s all right,” said Ismael. “Don’t give it another thought. Julian didn’t take it personally. I’ve just spent the last four days with him. The subject never came up.”
There was a double meaning in this, neither of which was lost on Wilson. He took a step back, studying Ismael with the kind of quiet anger that gives a real, if a transitive, pleasure to the one feeling it.
“It’s up to him if he wants to ignore us; it’s up to him if he wants to lose.” The anger, once given expression, vanished from his face. He shook his head, not so much to apologize as to condemn the failure to control his own emotions. “That wasn’t fair; it wasn’t what I came to say. We’ve known each other for a long time. You know how much respect I have for Louis. We don’t always agree, but he’s never lied to me, and I’ve never lied to him. What Louis needs to know - what the candidate needs to know - is that I managed to keep them all together. Rufus Chambers was the toughest to convince - he still thinks Drake’s speech represents a direct attack on what we stand for - but everyone agrees that Drake is better than the alternative, that woman they have on the other side. We’ll agree to spend whatever it takes - the independent organizations are already in place. All we need are some assurances.”
“Assurances?” asked Ismael, his hand on the door. “I can’t speak for Julian.”
“All he has to do is give us some assurance that whatever changes he wants to make - whatever he says in public - he won’t make any drastic changes in tax rates, he won’t make it any more difficult for us to do business than it already is.”
“I can’t speak for Julian, but I know what he would say, the same thing I think he told you before, that -”
“I know what he said before!” Wilson fairly shouted. He grabbed Ismael by the arm. “But you tell him from us that he can’t get elected without our help, and that even if he could he never could get anything through Congress if we oppose it. Tell him we can be the best allies he could ever have, or the worst….” The warning in his eyes finished the sentence. “Call me when you want to talk,” he added cooly, and then turned and walked away.
The press conference began right on time, the exact moment the major news networks came on the air. Julian moved quickly from a side door, bounded up two steps to the raised platform and asked for questions while he was still adjusting the microphone on the podium.
“You won the Republican nomination, the convention chose the governor of Ohio as your running mate, and then you disappeared. Where have you been, what have you been doing, for the last week?”
“Sleeping,” Julian shot back with a quick, irreverent grin that on the instant created a mood, an understanding, as it were, that nothing was off limits..
“Sleeping?” a voice yelled from somewhere in the back. “With who?”
“With whom!” Julian corrected to the delighted roar of hundreds of reporters. He pointed to a woman wearing thick glasses in the third row, a print journalist whom he remembered from his years in Congress. He glanced past her. “I won’t have to worry about Jean McGregor’s grammar,” he explained.
She was on her feet, with a rakish smile all her own.
“With whom have you spent the better part of the last week? Was it, as we heard, Louis Matson’s chief of staff, Ismael Cooper, planning the campaign?”
“Yes. Ismael and I spent a quiet few days at my home in California. And, yes, part of the time we discussed the campaign, although more about what we were not going to do than what we were.”
Every hand in the room shot up; everyone wanted to know what he meant. Julian kept his eyes on Jean McGregor. He shoved his hands into the coat pockets of his dark blue striped suit, and bent his head slightly to the side the way he often did when he was about to say something he considered especially important.
“There isn’t going to be a campaign in what has become the usual sense of the word. The party organization, under Reece Davis - whom I have asked to continue as chairman - will register voters, get voters to the polls, the sort of thing political parties have always done. But we’re not going to do television and radio commercials, we’re not going to advertise on the internet. I am not going to insult the American public by a thirty-second appeal to what they might feel. I am going to give speeches, and, if you like, I will have a press conference each week, conducted live, with no limit on the kind of questions you ask, and,” he added with a significant glance, “no limit on the answers I give.”
The press did not quite understand, or rather, they did not think he understood what he was saying.
“You’re going to buy large blocks of time - ten, fifteen, minutes - and try to speak directly to the American people?” asked a television reporter who could barely keep from laughing.
“We’re not buying any time, none whatsoever. I’ll let all of you decide if the speech I am giving, or the press conference, is as much worth covering as a traffic accident somewhere.”
“But the Democrats are already running commercials. How do you expect to compete - how do you expect to reply - if you don’t run any of your own? Julian nodded that he grasped the significance of what she said, grasped it and rejected it.
“It seems to me that a candidate for the presidency has an obligation to let everyone know what he, or she, thinks important; not just what position he has on various issues, but the governing principle that guides his conduct and his thought. One of the greatest dangers we face is something that most of us think not a danger, but a privilege and even a right: the way we entertain ourselves, the way others entertain us, with short, abbreviated images on electronic media that have taken the place of the written word. We don’t read anymore; we watch, we listen, to a thousand different statements and think we have listened to everything there is to say on a subject. We have forgotten what it means to read and reason. Let me give you just one example: what we now call presidential debates. What are they but two hours of what to all intents and purposes are press conferences for two candidates. What are the rules? - Each candidate gets two minutes to answer a question about what should be the foreign policy of the United States toward China, toward Russia, toward the Middle East. The other candidate gets sixty seconds to reply. If that is a debate, what would you call what Lincoln and Douglas were doing in 1858 when they met seven times, each time in front of several thousand people who somehow managed to pay attention when the first candidate spoke for an hour, the other one spoke for an hour and a half, and the first one then had half an hour for rebuttal? We can now communicate instantaneously with anyone anyplace in the world. The price we have paid for this, for the technology that makes it possible, is that we have forgotten how to speak, or even how to listen. And so we watch the thirty-second commercials of candidates and think they have told us all we need to know. If the other side wants to keep doing this, that is their affair; but if that is the only way you can win, it is a little difficult to see why anyone would want you to.”
There was a stunned silence. For a moment, no one knew what to ask. Finally, a network commentator, known to millions for his investigative reporting, stepped forward.
“You say you’re not going to spend money on television commercials; you talk about the need to discuss things at greater length and in greater detail. Isn’t it a fact, Congressman Drake, that the night after you won the nomination you met privately with some of the biggest contributors to conservative causes, a group that included Rufus Chambers and Conrad Wilson, both of whom just a few months ago were talking about spending more than a billion dollars if they had to, to elect a Republican?”
Everyone with a notebook began to scribble. The television cameras bore in for what seemed certain to be a pivotal moment. The candidate who had just announced a new kind of campaign had now been accused of still playing by the old rules, and, as a result, something worse: rank hypocrisy.
Julian did not hesitate, and in fact seemed to welcome it.
“Yes, I did. They wanted certain assurances; they wanted, if I understood what they were saying, an agreement that I would not really pursue what I said ought to be done in the speech I gave. I told them that the great advantage in getting the nomination the way I did was that I did not owe anything to anyone, and that whatever they thought they would be doing in the general election they would not be doing it for me. They did not all seem terribly happy about this. One of them even suggested he might just as well become a Democrat. I suggested he probably should. Next question?”
He started to call on someone else, but changed his mind and turned back to the reporter he had just answered.
“What you would really like to know is whether, despite that, those same people are going to help me; what you would really like to know is whether, operating as an independent political action committee, they will be attacking the opposition and telling everyone why they should vote for me instead. I have no way of stopping them, or anyone else, from doing whatever they want to do. All I can tell you is that anyone who does anything like that will never have a chance to talk to me if I’m elected. This has all gone too far; it has to stop. I’m not asking for financial contributions and anyone who sends one will have it returned - or better yet, donated to a good cause: the Red Cross, or a home for retired journalists - I don’t care.”
“Then you’re taking public financing? You’ll be the only one to do so.”
Julian’s blue eyes flashed with the knowing confidence of the future foretold, the reaction he was sure to get with the single sentence he was about to utter.
“I’m not taking any money, public or private. Why do I need money?” he asked to their complete confusion. “Ismael Cooper over there,” he said, point to Louis Matson’s well-known chief of staff leaning against the wall on the far side of the room, “can arrange everything that is needed, and he doesn’t seem to mind that he isn’t going to get paid.”
Aware that every eye was on him, Ismael raised his hands in mock protest. Julian had said nothing to him about this, but Julian was right: he not only did not mind, he felt strangely liberated.
“Politics,” continued Julian with a chuckle, “like poverty, can be honorable, as long as you don’t let it become a permanent condition. What do we need money for?” he asked, daring a response. “Are you going to stop reporting, stop asking questions, because the only time you’ll see me on television is when I am giving a speech somewhere or when, like this evening, we share the stage together? But enough about how someone campaigns for the presidency. What do you want to know about how, if I am elected, I intend to govern?”
He searched the crowd as if he were looking for someone in particular, a suspicion that seemed confirmed when he settled on a young woman, one of the most liberal voices on cable television. Tall, thin, with boyish short hair and a ready smile, she had covered the Republican convention with a growing sense of astonishment. She liked Julian Drake more than she had liked any candidate in years, but she could not free herself from the nagging doubt that despite all his talk about a different, and older, kind of conservatism, he had some of the same backward beliefs as the reactionaries who would have burned her, a lesbian, at the stake.
“In your speech at the convention you made your opposition to gay marriage quite clear. Two questions: Do you still stand by those remarks? I ask this because, as we all know, you wrote that speech for the majority leader, not for yourself. And do you agree with the Republican platform in its opposition to abortion without exception, even the life of the mother?”
Nodding, Julian pursed his lips and looked straight at her.
“Fair question. You’re right: I did write that speech for the majority leader, but I wrote it as if I were writing a speech for myself. I wrote it as a draft, a draft I assumed would probably go through a number of different revisions. I had been asked to write a speech; I had not been told what should be in it. As to your first question, I think I have just answered it. I know you disagree. I don’t mind that,” he said in a kind, thoughtful voice; “I hope you don’t mind it, either. We disagree. I gave my reasons. There is a difference, it seems to me, between private conduct and public custom. And while there are exceptions, it is generally a good rule that we not encourage what we could not possibly want everyone to do.”
“I’m not sure I …?” she asked, seriously interested.
“If everyone engaged in same sex marriage, there wouldn’t be anyone left to complain about it; there wouldn’t be anyone left at all. There would not be a new generation to take the place of the old. But you also asked about abortion.”
Julian looked around the room, wondering, as it seemed, how far he should go. But he was not wondering about that at all; he was thinking instead how much time had been wasted on an issue no one really understood.
