The 45th, page 20
“Massive fraud?” asked Rachel. She was not surprised that Hobart was raising the possibility. It was his willingness to look at a story from every angle, especially if it was an angle no one else had thought of, that had made him a great journalist.
“Sure. Why not? Look at what he’s done, look at the effect. Why does everyone think he’s different, better than anyone they’ve seen, the great new hope? Sure, he can give a speech, and he has the kind of charisma that works on television. People love to watch him, love to see the way he handles questions, the humor, the wit, the intelligence. But it is this refusal to take money from anyone, public or private, that has made him seem unbeatable. It makes him seen untouchable, someone who will never owe anything to anyone, someone who - and this is what a lot of people don’t yet seem to understand - is willing to serve, but doesn’t really want the office. He is the perfect reluctant candidate, willing to win or lose as the people decide, and - this is really priceless - almost, as it applies to him, indifferent as to the result. It must just kill those other bastards who tried to get the nomination, how much they wanted it, all the things they would have given up to get it, including whatever integrity they still had left, and this guy doesn’t even steal if from them, he gets it as a gift, a gift he doesn’t even want. Or did he?” he asked with a sudden sharp, inquiring look. “You’re close to Louis Matson. Was any of this…?”
“I don’t know when he decided to do what he did. The only thing I know for sure is that Julian Drake did not know about it. There is no story there.”
“It’s part of the story you’re writing now,” he reminded her. “I know Matson is a friend of yours, but….”
“All right, I think Louis staged the whole thing. A lot of people think he did. And he’ll tell you - he told me - that almost from the first time he met him, when Julian first came to Congress, he thought Julian should be president. But he’ll never admit he didn’t suffer a collapse; he’ll never say that he faked it so Julian Drake could give that speech.”
“But you think he did?” asked Hobart, just to be sure. “Interesting, because that would help make the case.”
“What case? What are you talking about?”
Hobart smiled, shook his head, then looked depressed. He tapped his fingers, sighed, reached for the cup of cold, stale coffee, picked it up, then put it down.
“The case, the case,” he repeated, turning his head from side to side. “‘Nothing is what it seems.’ ‘If something sounds too good to be true, it isn’t.’ The usual timeworn, but time tested, rules of reporting, the hackneyed, trite expressions, not so much of method but attitude. Attitude!” he repeated, a cynical grin weaving its way across his drooping heavy lined mouth. Jumping forward, he dropped his forearms on the desk and, careful not to hit anything, pounded his clenched fists in a brief staccato. “If Matson knew all along what he was going to do, wouldn’t he have made sure that if Julian Drake got the nomination he would have all the support, all the financial support, he needed? Yes, I know,” he said, growing more intense, more convinced that there was a story here, “Drake isn’t taking any money from anyone. But everyone knows - he said it in the press conference - that he can’t stop anyone from spending money on his behalf, that he can’t do anything about what some political action committee decides to do.”
“No, that’s not right,” objected Rachel. “He said he would never talk to anyone who did.”
Hobart raised an eyebrow.
“Why do you have to talk to someone you’ve elected when the reason you elected them is because you know what they’re going to do?”
Rachel threw back her head and laughed.
“From the start he’s made, from what’s he said so far, it doesn’t sound like the kind of thing people like Rufus Chambers and Conrad Wilson - that crowd - would be much inclined to support!”
“Sometimes you support someone because you want him to win; sometimes you support someone because you want the other side to lose.” Like a seasoned gambler calculating the odds, Hobart slowly and methodically spread his fingers and began to tap them together. “They’re already doing it, running commercials in the dozen states likely to decide the election. That story will be in the paper tomorrow, along with the latest poll results. Julian Drake is running way ahead nationally, but its closer in the states that count, and millions are being spent in those places on ads attacking the other side.” He narrowed his eyes, concentrating hard. “They never mention Julian Drake, never give a reason why anyone should vote for him. It’s all about making her unelectable. Vicious stuff, some of it; libelous if you were dealing with a private individual. Now, the question is - and I know what Drake said at the press conference - is this all simply happenstance, or planned, orchestrated, from the beginning? Did they know, did they understand, that no one who was seeking the nomination could win in the general election? Did they decide that only if they had an outsider, someone they could portray as an independent, someone above politics, would they have any chance of winning the presidency? Or rather - and this is the point - stopping a Democrat from getting it? If Julian Drake wins, won’t that be the effect? The question is whether the effect has a cause, and, if so, what is it? Was it just the inspiration of Louis Matson, acting all alone, or was there something else involved, a conspiracy, a lie like nothing else we have ever seen, a candidacy that was never anything but a fraud?”
Rachel Good looked at him as if he were half insane. Hobart knew that look, he had seen it on her face nearly every time he had tried to show her what she might be missing.
“Okay,” he relented, “you know Louis Matson a lot better than I do. If you tell me he wouldn’t be involved in something like this, okay…, but, still, there has to be more to this story than this.”
“Why? It’s perfect the way it is.”
“Perfect?”
“We haven’t had a convention in fifty years in which there was fight for the nomination. When was the last time - maybe the Democrats in l972, but everyone knew that it would be McGovern. But the old days, before we had all these primaries and someone wins a majority of the delegates before the convention convenes, hardly anyone still living remembers when someone gave a speech that sent everyone into such a frenzy of excitement that they forgot everything except how much they wanted the one who gave that speech to be their nominee. Hell, Hobart, when was the last time anyone gave a speech at a convention anyone would even want to remember? Julian Drake is what no one expected, and though they did not know it, what everyone was looking for. I’m older than you are. When I was a freshman in college, JFK was president. We used to skip class so we could watch on television whenever he was holding a press conference. Guys who had never been to Massachusetts starting speaking like they had been born and raised in Boston; girls all wanted to look like Jackie Kennedy. Kennedy was different - younger, smarter, with that wonderful wry humor, generous, self-deprecating. There is a number that tells everything. He won in l960 with 49.6 percent of the vote; when he was killed three years later, almost seventy percent insisted they had voted for him. Things like this happen, not very often - not very often at all - but they happen. The case, as you put it a moment ago, the case isn’t about some right-wing conspiracy, a shrewd appraisal of what might be the only chance for the Republicans to win; the case is about the American love for what seems new, and, strange as it may seem, the American love for the language. Or maybe it isn’t so strange. Having lived for years now in our sound-bite incoherence, Julian Drake comes along and we suddenly realize what we have been missing.”
Like a metronome measuring time in the ordered segments of a closed system, Hobart’s round, balding head moved slowly from side to side, and in the same rhythm tapped his fingers on the desk. And then he stopped and looked at her, completely still.
“And what do you think would have happened if Kennedy were running today? We remember the charm, we remember the speeches, but what he was doing - the women in his life - wouldn’t be treated the way it was then when no one reported on the private lives of politicians. Now it’s damn near all anyone wants to know. That is what is missing here. There is nothing about his private life. Yes, I know - that girl he knew when he was in law school, the woman who told you things you promised not to use. But since then? Never married, never engaged, doesn’t, so far as we know, see anyone now. He isn’t gay. So what is he - a priest? Hell, he’s not even Catholic! I mean, everyone has someone, or wants someone. Are you telling me he’s really that different? There has to be something.”
Rachel remembered something Joli Wharton had told her, something Julian had said late one night, years before, when they were both still young enough to take things seriously.
“It isn’t like giving up food or drink. You won’t die if you never have sex.”
“No, but neither will you find many like-minded friends,” replied Hobart with a droll expression that did not quite hide the lively sparkly in his tired eyes. “Well, why don’t you ask him, ask Julian Drake what he has against sex?”
“Ask him? When? I’ve been trying to arrange an interview, but….”
“Ask him at the debate. The first one is set for next week. There will be three reporters asking questions. You’re one of them.”
“I’m…?”
“The request just came in, last night, before you got back. I said I couldn’t answer for you, but that I was pretty sure you would be willing to do it. I hope it was all right to say that. I think you’re the first reporter we have had asked. I’m told that Drake insisted on it. Not you by name, you understand - though I suspect he knew you would be the name they chose. He insisted that there be at least one reporter who wasn’t affiliated with television. He seems to have the idea that we still do a more serious brand of journalism,” he said as a thin smile edged its way across his mouth. “So go ahead, destroy his last illusions, ask him what he has against sex, what he has against what everyone else seems to think the only way to real happiness.”
This, a chance remark, a rather uninspired commentary on a fairly minor difference in the way someone has lived his life, began to take on a life of its own. In the days leading up to the first of what were supposed to be three nationally televised debates Rachel Good found herself coming back again and again to that single question. Sex, like ambition, had it’s center the desire for recognition, the acknowledgement by someone else that you were worth something; worth, at least at the moment, more than anyone else. There was also the desire for immortality, if not in the literal sense of living forever, the foreseeable future: the lasting fame that comes with high office, in the one case; the continuation in the lives of the children who, after that instant of joyful agony, you leave behind you, in the other. Nearly everyone in politics seemed to want both, fame but also children. Was that the secret of Julian Drake’s astonishing gifts, that untrammeled by the same carnal desires that most men, in or out of politics, never thought of controlling, he could concentrate all his thought and energy on the greatest prize of all? And if that were the case, what did it really mean? He had not done anything that suggested that he was even ambitious in the usual, political, sense of the word. Was he, as she had insisted to her editor, what everyone had been waiting for, or was he, in a way she did not yet understand, dangerous, a danger, if in no other way, to what everyone believed?
The first debate was held in southern California on the campus of UCLA in an auditorium in which the audience had been as evenly divided as possible between Democrats, Republicans and political independents. Each candidate was given two minutes for a brief opening statement. Hillary did what candidates almost always do, thanked the sponsors of the debate, thanked the university, and thanked the audience that was sitting there and the millions more who were watching at home for giving her the chance to share with them her hopes for the country and what she knew they could accomplish together. In forty seconds time, she described growing up in a middle-class family, her term in the senate and her service as secretary of state. She looked forward to this and the other scheduled debates and the chance to show the important, even crucial, differences between her and her opponent. She spoke in a calm, confident, friendly voice, every word memorized, rehearsed, tested for it’s likely response. It was, in other words, predictable, dull, and safe. The rule, as all the experts agreed, was to get through the debates without making the kind of egregious error that could destroy a candidacy. It was a lesson she had not needed to be taught. There was always a reason not to take chances.
Julian Drake did not seem to want to do anything else. Instead of opening with an expression of gratitude for what everyone had done to make the debate possible, he opened with an apology for something he had not done.
“Before we start I want to apologize to Secretary Constable,” he said, turning toward her for just a moment before looking back at the camera. “I don’t watch television, and so I haven’t seen the kind of things that have been said in commercials produced and paid for by an independent political action committee. The things that are said about Secretary Constable in many of these commercials are, so far as I know, not even close to the truth. I had nothing to do with them. After the convention, after I was nominated, I met at their request a number of wealthy donors. All of them had been backing other candidates. I told them I wasn’t interested in their financial help and that I wasn’t going to change anything in what I said or in what I believed to win their support. At a press conference I tried to make my position as clear as I could. I said, and I am saying here again tonight, that should I become president no one involved in this, no one who put up so much as a dollar for this kind of scurrilous television campaign will ever be given so much as a minute of my time.”
Smiling in disbelief, Julian shook his head.
“Would you really give up your vote, give up your right to use your own intelligence, your own good judgement, because some paid for idiot on television tells you some made up story about how the election of one candidate or the other will destroy civilization or blow up the world? What kind of people do they think we are? And so tonight, in front of all of you, I apologize to Secretary Constable for my failure to convince these people - the people who did this - that I meant what I said, that the only communication they will ever have with me is the off chance that I might read part of something they may hire someone to write as an op-ed piece in the New York Times. Let me close by saying - and I hasten to add that I mean this only figuratively - that if it were up to me I would have anyone who did this taken out and shot.”
There was a stunned silence. No one knew quite what to say. The moderator, Richard Cromwell of public television, who, along with Leonard Rosenthal of CBS and Rachel Good had spent hours preparing and organizing the questions they were going to ask, was so startled that he suddenly turned to Hillary Constable and blurted out: “What do you think of that? Is there anything you want to say?”
The cameras had caught her in open mouthed astonishment. There was no time to consider, no time to craft a carefully scripted response of the sort she had spent days rehearsing, no time to calculate the effect on the various constituencies into which with precise analytical measurement the electorate had been divided; all she could do was close her eyes and leap. But then, just as she started to answer, Cromwell added, “Will you make the same pledge - promise that if you’re elected you’ll have nothing to do with anyone associated with the various political action committees responsible for the television commercials attacking Congressman Drake?”
For an instant she froze. Her eyes, distant and remote, moved left to right and back again, reading some hard-earned lesson from the pages of her own biography, searching for the words, the right combination of phrases, that would allow her to make a promise that could always, later, be reinterpreted.
“If anyone were to run the kind of things against Congressman Drake that have been run against me, commercials full of half-truths and lies, commercials that engage in the worst kind of character assassination, then, yes, I can assure you, they certainly would never have a chance to talk to me, or, I might add, have access to anyone in my administration.”
“But you wouldn’t have them taken out and shot?” asked Julian with a quick, bright smile.
It brought down the house. Even Hillary Constable had to laugh.
“No, but it’s tempting, isn’t it?” she asked with the friendly confidence of a competitor who knows what being a candidate is really like.
“Leonard Rosenthal has the first question,” announced Cromwell in his pleasant, easy going voice.
With a thick, bulldog neck, a tight, quarrelsome mouth, and small, deep set grey eyes that looked out at the world with what seemed inveterate suspicion, Rosenthal had a voice like a nervous tick, a kind of itching scratch, the words coming a few at a time, a short staccato, each separated by a brief flash of his eyes, sometimes followed by the kind of sudden thin-lipped smile one might see on the grim face of an executioner who took pride in his own efficiency. But he was at heart a kind and sensitive soul who tried with a series of shrugs and mournful sideways movements of his head to apologize for the impression he more than anything wished he could control and change. He glanced down at the first of the questions he had written out, then shoved the list aside.
“My question is for Secretary Constable. Congressman Drake just apologized for what others have said against you - political action committees over which he has no control. I noticed you did not apologize to him. Isn’t there something odd about that?”
“Odd?” she asked, not certain what he meant or where the question was going.
