The 45th, page 27
“Yes, but there are some of us - Julian, for one - who did know what to do with power -”
“And because he knew it, did not want it. He took it, arranged things so he would have it, because he had no choice.”
“Because Constantius would have had him killed. Yes, but that wasn’t the only reason, was it? Even if his life had not been in danger, he knew that no one else could rule as well. That knowledge brings with it an obligation, because no matter how important the pursuit, the search, for wisdom, for philosophy, we are, all of us, human beings and we have a duty to look after one another, to do what we can to make us better than we are.”
“Better than we are,” agreed Julian, nodding emphatically. He turned around, his back to the window, a look of the utmost seriousness burning in his eyes. “Better than we….” A smile shot across his mouth. “Everyone, almost everyone, when Plato was alive and now as well, preservation, ‘mere existence,’ is what they think most about. How make them think instead that other things are more important. Plato thought you would have to get rid of everyone over the age of ten to have any chance of creating a citizenry capable of living the way we should.”
“That is not entirely impossible,” remarked Marcel Dubose, lifting his chin in a way that suggested a kind of eager malice, a dismissal of any false sense of decency. “What other reason did Moses have for keeping everyone in the desert all those years - so no one who remembered Egypt would be part of the new citizens of the Promised Land. Why else did he kill everyone - thousands - who attempted to oppose him? I said, not entirely impossible,” he remarked as Julian was about to object. “You can’t do that now. Too many people, and where could you take the others? There are no hidden places anymore. But the point about the children is not without relevance. It is worth remembering, a president does not just execute the laws, he doesn’t just recommend changes, and he is more than the commander-in-chief. He is, if he wants to be, and if he knows what he is doing, the spokesman for what the Americans would like to think they are. We’re talking about the Laws. Remember the passage: Others consider someone educated who is trained in trade or commerce, but ‘we mean rather the education from childhood in virtue, that makes one desire and love to become a perfect citizen who knows how to rule and be ruled with justice.’ From childhood - That, surely, is an argument a president can make. Speech is everything. What do you want your citizens to be like, what kind of people should they be? I remember - you remember - what your civil rights leader said, that memorable phrase, that speech Martin Luther King, jr. gave some fifty years ago, that hope, that expectation, that one day ‘our children will be judged not by the color of their skin but the content of their character.’ Isn’t that the point you have to make? Character, what it should be, why that is the most important thing for any human being, what kind of person, what kind of citizen, he can be.”
Julian had thought of another line from the same dialogue. “‘It is possible to persuade the souls of the young of just about everything, if one tries.’”
“That line comes, remember, just a little after Plato makes two observations which seem to me of supreme importance. First, when he write, ‘Surely it is necessary that one who takes delight in things becomes then similar to the things he takes delight in, even when he is ashamed to praise them….’ And then, because this leads to the question how to lead them to take delight in things they would not be ashamed to praise, he insists that ‘an audience should be continually hearing about characters better than their own….’ I remember reading somewhere that you can always tell what kind of people you are dealing with if you know what it is they look up to.”
“You read that in Machiavelli,” said Julian without hesitation. “Everyone looks up to something or someone. ‘What the Lord praises, everyone praises.’ I think that was the line.”
“I was a young man when John F. Kennedy became president. Every young man, and not just in America, wanted to be just like him.”
Two hours later, when Julian was walking back to his hotel, he stopped at the side of the river where, a few blocks past Notre Dame, it flows back together after passing both sides of the island, and remembered the other nights had had come the same way, other nights spent with Marcel Dubose in the most serious conversations he had ever had. He wondered whether, after tonight, he would see him again or, as seemed more likely, this would be the last time. He felt what he thought that Julian, the ancient Julian, must have felt when, having become emperor, he knew that he would never see Paris again.
Chapter Eighteen
Trying not to smile, Louis Matson sat back in the gray leather chair he had been using since the day he was first elected to the senate, and nearly burst out laughing at how everything had changed. He still thought party chairmen the dullest, least interesting people on the planet, and Reece Davis in particular a mindless mechanic, all charts and numbers, one dimensional and that dimension not much more than a thin veneer of habit and ambition, someone for whom self-knowledge began and ended with the title he happened to hold. The chairman, the national chairman, of the Republican Party, kept a picture of Lincoln on the wall behind his desk that seemed to suggest a direct line of succession from the beginnings of the party before the Civil War to the present day. They all did that, everyone, or almost everyone, who held any kind of office. It was greatness by association, every new member of Congress , every lunatic elected in a spasm of popular anger and hostility, another Henry Clay, another Daniel Webster; every new president, however incompetent or morally reprehensible, another Roosevelt or Kennedy, another Washington or Jefferson. They held the office, they had the title, what reason to think themselves less able than any of the others who had held it before? Louis Matson remembered the stories about Richard Nixon, talking in the middle of the night to the White House portrait of Lincoln, searching for the reason why he was being forced out of the office he had spent a lifetime trying to get, Nixon, driven crazy by his own failures, talking to Lincoln as if the office itself had somehow made him Lincoln’s equal.
Matson gripped the arms of the chair and told himself to concentrate. He had to be careful. The medicine his doctor had given him to control the increasing pain had sometimes a disorienting effect, his mind would start to wander, turning his attention from one seemingly unrelated thing to another, straying from a normal, logical sequence into a labyrinth of different, disordered thoughts, a kaleidoscope of shifting images. He did not have much time left, perhaps only a few months. He squeezed hard the arm of the chair, clenched his teeth until his jaw began to shudder, and then let go. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, took another, opened his eyes and looked around. The long, rectangular room, as familiar as the face of an old friend, seemed suddenly alien and strange, a place that had lost its meaning, like a home that, put on the market, becomes again a house, a property, someone else will soon occupy. He picked up the telephone and told his secretary to send in the chairman. He had made him wait ten minutes, the same ten minutes Davis had been late when he had come to see the majority leader months before.
Leaning on his elbows, his fingers spread wide apart, three of them pressed against each other, the tips of his index fingers against his nose, his thumbs right below his chin, Louis Matson watched in silent amusement as Reece Davis hurried into the room. Suddenly, as if he had never seen it before, he stopped in front of the painting of the White House on fire in the War of 1812. Shaking his head, he looked at Matson, certain he would understand.
“Some of those people we had in Cleveland - some of those who used to give millions to the party - they’ll tell you privately they wish something like that would happen again. Makes you wonder - doesn’t it? - what kind of people we have to deal with.”
“A couple of months ago,” replied Matson, without any change of expression, “someone came in here, looked at that painting, and said exactly that, that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to burn the White House down to the ground.”
“Unbelievable!” remarked the chairman, as he settled into a chair in front of Matson’s desk.
Months ago, the day before yesterday, it did not matter how much time had passed, Davis would not remember what he had said. It was a common mistake to think politicians insincere, or even inconsistent; they simply said what they thought others wanted to hear. You might as well accuse a mirror of lying when it reflected different things back to different people.
“You asked to see me,” said Matson, sitting back in his chair. There was a glint of irony in his half-closed, drooping eyes, the residual habit of an endless curiosity, the interest of someone who, without any particular desire to help with whatever problem you might have, and in fact a desire to avoid if possible any involvement at all, wanted to know which among the various stupidities you might this time have committed.
David bent forward to the precise degree to which Matson had leaned back. Matson placed both elbows on the arms of his chair. Davis rested his forearms on Matson’s desk.
“Julian Drake would not be president if it weren’t for what we did,” he began, a solemn, practiced complaint in his solemn, practiced voice. “He’d still be somewhere out in California, if it hadn’t been for that speech he gave, that speech you were supposed to give, the speech I asked you to give. He wouldn’t be president if I hadn’t convinced everyone in the party - and not just the candidates and their millions of followers, but the money people, the -”
“Some of whom spent considerable amounts of money trying to help the other side.”
“Yes, that’s no doubt true,” conceded Davis, with a brisk nod of his head. “But everyone else went along, everyone else stayed loyal. I didn’t do all of this myself, of course, but….They stayed loyal, did what they could for his election, and, thanks in part to them, he’s president.”
“I know that,” said Matson. “I know he got elected. And I also know he got elected without any help from anyone. He didn’t raise money, he didn’t spend money, and he didn’t -”
“It’s been almost a month since the inauguration, almost a month,” said Davis, trying, and failing, to control his frustration. “A month, and I can’t even -”
“You can’t remember a better inaugural address, is that what you’re trying to say?” interjected Matson, more than ready, eager, to pretend he did not know what had Davis, and half of Washington, so angry and upset. “I’ve heard them all, going back to Eisenhower when I watched it on television with my seventh grade class. The only one you can compare it to is Kennedy’s - don’t you think? They both talked about the need, the importance, of sacrifice, of doing what is necessary for the country, the responsibilities, and not just the rights, of citizenship.”
“Yes, yes, terrific speech. Everyone said so. But then, after that…nothing, not a word from the president, not a word out of the White House. Hell, some people have started to wonder if he’s even there, if anybody is there. Ismael Cooper is chief of staff, but if anyone else has been hired, if there is anything like a White House staff, if there are any presidential assistants, it is the best kept secret in town. I can’t even get a telephone call returned. Reporters are calling me all the time, people are asking me all the time - ‘Where is the president, what is he doing, what is happening over there.’ What am I supposed to do, what am I - what the hell am I - supposed to say?” cried Davis, as he threw up his hands and raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Every day a new rumor, and the rumors stranger all the time - No one has seen the president, no one has seen his chief of staff. Next thing, the tabloids will start reporting that aliens have kidnapped the president! Even serious journalists are saying Ismael Cooper never leaves the White House, that the White House is his new home, that -”
“That isn’t a rumor, that’s true. Ismael has taken up residence. He lives there now. Why shouldn’t he live there? Knowing Julian, he won’t have time to sleep.”
Astonished, Davis started to say something, but Matson stopped him with a look. He picked up the phone and on his private line put in a call.
“Ismael, I’m sitting here with our good friend, Reece Davis. He tells me he can’t get anyone over there to return his calls. He wants to know what he should be saying to everyone who keep asking what is going on, why no one has seen or heard anything from Julian - I mean, the president.” He listened in silence for a moment. “Okay, I’ll tell him: Six o’clock tomorrow evening.”
Matson hung up the phone and for a moment did not say a word. A thin, subtle smile slipped across his heavy mouth.
“Have you noticed? They’re all trying to talk like him now.” The smile moved to his eyes, became cunning and sly, filled with a deeper knowledge of the vanity of things. “Not Ismael,” he remarked, removing any possible confusion. “Everyone else. Those mindless one-liners everyone used, the constant repetition of the same few meaningless words, the unfinished sentences, the fragments of abbreviated speech - the way everyone running for office learned to talk before, the way they had to talk to get something they said on television. Who is going to do that when everyone now thinks everyone should speak like Julian Drake?” he asked, his tired eyes flashing with the light of an agreed understanding, the certainty that, even if he had not thought of it before, Davis would share the same belief. “They’ll all fail, of course; they’ll talk themselves stupid. But it isn’t what anyone does now that matters; it is what the next generation thinks it wants to be, what those just starting out think they have to learn, what they think they have to be good at. It is what they look up to, who they want to be like. If you’re a college student and you think you might one day want to run for public office - if you think that one day, in the far distant future, you might want the chance to run for president - who do you want to be like? - Julian Drake, or one of those half-educated fools he defeated? Julian is going to be a great president. He already is, and if you aren’t yet ready to believe that - though you were there, sitting two rows back, at the inauguration - wait until tomorrow evening when Julian - when President Drake - holds his first presidential press conference, televised live to the nation.”
By the time Davis left the majority leader’s office, news of what would the first presidential press conference of the new administration was all over town. The announcement that it would be held in the East Room, instead of the White House briefing room, and that it would be broadcast live to the nation made it seem all but certain that after nearly a month of silence something major was about to happen. What else could Julian Drake have been doing, how else explain the astonishing secrecy that had drawn a curtain over what the president was doing? All the major newspapers sent their best reporters, all the networks, all the cable news shows, sent the reporters who had covered Julian Drake during the campaign. The East Room, the room where Teddy Roosevelt’s children had once ridden their pony, where other, less exuberant presidents had presided over the most important public functions, was crowded to capacity. The air was electric, the sense of anticipation intense, everyone’s mind concentrated on only one thing: what was going to happen when Julian Drake entered and made whatever announcement he was there to deliver. Louis Matson, who had come to watch, sat on a chair in the back row, and, though everyone recognized him, no one thought to so much as say hello.
Precisely at six o’clock, Julian Drake, dressed in a dark blue suit, light blue shirt and maroon striped tie, walked from a door at the side directly to a podium and three microphones. Louis Matson had already turned to watch another man in a dark suit move quickly away from the podium and vanish behind the crowd the other side. He had seen the same thing countless times before, but he still marveled at how deftly it was done, the impeccable timing with which a secret service agent, at the exact moment the always anonymous voice of another agent announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States,” at the exact moment that every eye turned toward the side from which the president was about to enter, walked from the opposite direction, placed the official seal of the United States on the two brass hooks on the front of the podium, and then, without breaking stride, turned and, just ahead of the changing glance of the crowd following the president, disappeared out of view. It was a magician’s sleight of hand, done in plain sight where anyone could see and no one ever did. Sleight of hand, seeming to do one thing while you were doing another, that was not just a magician’s trick, it was what lay at the heart of the difference between those who could, and those who could not, play the politician’s game. And now, unless he missed his guess, Julian would show a more practiced hand at the art than anyone had yet thought possible.
Julian Drake stood at the podium, smoothed his tie with his right hand, and then, with the same hand, brushed the back of his head. He looked around the crowded room, the glistening faces of hundreds of journalists and reporters caught in the bright lights of television.
“This is the first of what will be a regular weekly occurrence. I will hold a press conference once a week, broadcast live. Now, who would like to ask the first question?”
There was a stunned silence. They had come expecting a major announcement, some accounting of what he had been doing and what he was planning to do, and he had nothing to say?
“Ms. Good?” he said, pointing toward Rachel Good sitting to his left in the first row.
“You have been in office nearly a month,” she said, as she jumped up from her chair. “This is the first time any of us have had a chance to ask anyone anything. There isn’t anything you want to announce? Nothing you want to say about what new legislation you might be about to propose, nothing about whether you are really going to ask Congress to do some of what you said in the campaign you would try to do?”
