The Speechwriter Read online

  12

  * * *

  FALL

  It was a Thursday. The governor was leaving town and wanted to see me and Chris about something before he left. We sat silently outside his office, where the schedulers’ desks were, and June’s. We often sat there looking like a pair of schoolboys waiting outside the headmaster’s office for corporal punishment. Chris looked unhappy; he once compared one of the governor’s fiercer tirades with being “shot in the face.” He would go on to be a highly successful television news producer, but he didn’t flourish in this job; he liked to edit copy, not produce it.

  “It’s your birthday?” I asked June. There was a cake on Frances’s desk that said “Happy Birthday June.” It hadn’t been cut, and the candles hadn’t been lit.

  “Sure is,” June said. “On Saturday. These young things thought it would be nice to remind me of it.”

  Just then the governor’s meeting ended and a few people filed out.

  I put my head through the door. “You wanted to see me and Chris, sir?”

  He motioned for us to come in.

  “Wwwwait a minute,” he said, fiddling through papers. “Okay, I’m going out of town for a few days, and I want you guys to work on some arguments. Big picture arguments.” Now he looked at the ceiling, as if he could see these arguments. “The federal government’s essentially devaluing the currency, going further into debt by printing money and trying to manage the national economy. I know other economies have tried to do that. Disasters. Think of Weimar Germany. I don’t know. Argentina in the nineteen-eighties. Find some historical instances where government spending took above a certain percentage of GDP—I don’t know what the percentage is, maybe forty, fifty percent. Britain in the seventies. Japan now. I don’t know. Whatever you can find. Books. Magazine articles. Nothing too technical. But I want it boiled down. Don’t just give me a book and say ‘Here, read it.’ I’m reading a stack of books as it is. I need to have a deeper understanding of this stuff if I’m going to try and pitch it to a bigger audience, and I need to be able to put it in terms that everybody can understand.”

  Chris glanced at me when he said “bigger audience.”

  We scribbled everything down as he spoke, and after another four or five minutes we were done. Chris and I walked out. I stopped at Frances’s desk to ask about something or other.

  The governor walked out of his office a few seconds later. He was about to say something to Lewis, his personal assistant, when he caught sight of the cake. “Oh,” he said, almost inaudibly.

  Then, with four or five of us watching in silence, he walked over to the cake, mumbled the words, “Eat this tonight,” picked up a knife, then cut a corner out of the cake and put it on one of the paper plates. He took the cake into his office and shut the door.

  Frances sat with her eyes wide, her mouth gaping. “Did he just do that?”

  “I’m sorry,” June said with a disbelieving smile, “did he just cut my cake and not even wish me Happy Birthday?”

  Later the staff gathered and sang “Happy Birthday” to June, presenting her with a cake with a corner missing.

  * * *

  The governor wasn’t yet leading the national opposition to the president, but he was elbowing his way to the front. Invitations to more and better speaking events were coming in all the time, and more and more well-known television journalists wanted to talk to him or have him on their show.

  One Saturday afternoon I was talking to a neighbor as our children played together. He asked me what it was like to work for the governor. I stammered for a moment and came out with something that didn’t make much sense. My neighbor said, “He just seems like—I don’t know—like he doesn’t enjoy being governor very much.”

  * * *

  When I think back to that summer, I can’t remember any sunlight. In fact there was plenty of it; I mean actual, literal sunlight. I just don’t remember any. I feel now as if I spent the entire three months in that tiny press office, with great stacks of newspapers all around and sterile fluorescent light shining from above. The days were long, but they were spent entirely (it now seems) indoors, tapping out press statements and fielding calls from famous journalists and angry constituents and poring over photocopies of flight manifests. Not writing speeches. That summer I wrote no speeches, no talking points.

  In the afternoons I often had coffee with Stella. She’d been hired as some kind of computer guru on the strength of having come from San Diego. Stella rode her bike to work, wore flip-flops and brown and black clothes, and refused to take orders. She probably should have been fired on many occasions. The governor would tell her to do something slightly improper and she would tell him, directly, as if she were a defiant daughter talking to a timorous father, “No.” (All politicians from time to time direct their staff to do things that, technically, as public employees, they shouldn’t do. Nothing terrible or even scandalous, just improper: make a photo album for the politician’s daughter, deliver a bowl of chicken salad to a party hosted by the first lady.) The governor would call Stella, and she would ignore the call—it was wonderful. Somehow, though, she couldn’t be fired. This wasn’t because she was young and chirpy and beautiful, as the schedulers were; Stella was sufficiently attractive but not eye candy like them. Yet there was something about her that made the thought of treating her roughly, even when she deserved it, unthinkable.

  One afternoon in June she asked if I had heard anything. I hadn’t. Stella’s desk was near Stewart’s and she often overheard things.

  “SLED put an APB out on the governor.” SLED was the State Law Enforcement Division.

  “They lost him?”

  “I guess so. That’s why you put out APBs.”

  The governor was always slipping away from his protection detail. Some high-level politicians cultivate the “entourage look,” as Lewis called it. They like to be surrounded by men in dark suits and wearing earpieces; they must feel it makes them look presidential. The governor of Texas was notorious for his entourage at National Governors Association meetings. A ring of Rangers surrounded him wherever he went. I was told by a colleague who’d just come back from an NGA meeting that a reporter had tried to get past the Rangers to ask him a question and they knocked her down.

  Our governor, by contrast, was always telling his security detail to stand some distance away, which in some settings made their job extremely difficult; sometimes, without telling anybody on the detail, he went out to a hardware store or on a bike ride by himself.

  “That’s fantastic,” I said. “He’s always giving them the slip.”

  “No,” Stella said, “I don’t think it’s fantastic. Not this time. SLED wouldn’t put out an APB unless he was really gone. Like gone gone. Lost, nowhere to be found.”

  “Maybe he’s dead,” I said, laughing. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

  “He could be. But I think he might have gone crazy.”

  I still wanted to laugh, but I could see she was serious, which was unusual. And I knew she had a point. He had been acting oddly even by his own standards. A week before he had scheduled a trip to Washington to attend what anybody would regard as a highly important event to which he’d been invited to speak; he had put long hours into the talk he’d planned to give, but then at the last minute he decided not to go because he was “sick,” which he manifestly was not. Just a few days before that, he’d come into the press office and given me a sheet of paper. He wanted me to file it. We often filed material he thought might be useful for speeches, and sometimes this included notes he’d jotted down. “It’s important,” he said. “Don’t lose it.” After he walked out, I read it. On a plain piece of notebook paper he had written, “Once upon a time there were 3 little pigs & the time came for them to leave home and seek their fortunes. Before they left—their mother told them—whatever you do, do it the best you can because that’s the way to get along in the world.”<
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  “What if he’s gone off somewhere, and just lost it?” Stella asked.

  “He’s a bit too calculating, don’t you think, to lose sanity altogether?”

  * * *

  Later that day reporters started calling, asking where the governor was. Aaron asked why they wanted to know. Because, they said, Jakie Knotts called them and told them to call and ask.

  Apart from what I’d heard from Stella, I hadn’t heard anything spoken openly about the governor’s whereabouts, so I asked Aaron how Knotts knew to ask.

  “Because someone at SLED leaked it to him. He’s got friends there.”

  I waited for more, but Aaron said nothing. So I said, “I don’t mean to be a pest, but—um—.”

  “But do we know where he is?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Do we?”

  “No,” he answered. “He’s supposed to be on some kind of hiking trip. But we haven’t been able to get in touch with him. To be honest, I don’t care where he is. I get a lot more done when he’s gone. And it’s a lot pleasanter when he’s gone. Do you care where he is?”

  “No, I like it much better. I think he should stay gone all the time.”

  On Wednesday morning his absence was above-the-fold headline material: “Where’s the Governor?” “Governor Goes Missing.” “Governor AWOL.” Someone from The State had contacted the first lady, who said matter-of-factly that she didn’t know where he was. No one in the office took her comment that seriously; we all knew he liked to go off by himself. I remember hearing someone say that the governor liked to be in front of the crowd or not in the crowd at all, at the center of attention or totally absent from it.

  The night before, a little after ten o’clock, Aaron had sent out a press statement—not a release, just a four-sentence statement—about where the governor was. He’d been “hiking on the Appalachian Trail,” the statement said. “The governor called to check in with his chief of staff this morning. It would be fair to say the governor was somewhat taken aback by all of the interest this trip has gotten. Given the circumstances and the attention this has garnered, he communicated to us that he plans on returning to the office tomorrow.”

  Early that morning Aaron, Stewart, Nat, and a few others were in the press office. By the time I got there, around eight-thirty, they were debating whether the boss was a bastard for leaving without making it clear where he was going or was entitled to go wherever he wanted without telling anybody because it didn’t matter if the governor of an insignificant state couldn’t be reached instantly by phone.

  After about ten o’clock I didn’t see Stewart or Aaron any more. Reporters were everywhere. Most of them I’d never seen. Some of them I’d seen on the national networks and cable news channels. Cameramen lugged their equipment around the State House rotunda. It was all pretty amusing; they’d come all the way down here from Washington and New York because they thought they’d see some sordid southern tale, but all they’d see is a governor who, in addition to the typical politician’s need to soak up attention from everyone, also liked to be alone and unreachable.

  I saw Nat in the hall. “Do you know what’s going on?” he asked me.

  “I never know what’s going on.”

  “The place is crawling with reporters, and Aaron’s nowhere. Stewart’s nowhere. Something’s definitely not right.”

  “What’s not right,” I said in an attempt to be reassuring, “is that the governor is a self-absorbed jackass who doesn’t have the decency to tell his chief of staff where he is even though half the world is asking.”

  “Yeah, I heard the London Telegraph called.”

  “They did.”

  “Great. I’m telling you, something’s going very wrong.”

  “You’ve said that many times before,” I said.

  “Which means I’m bound to be right this time.”

  * * *

  Aaron called around noon. “Lots of people calling?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re doing a press conference in the rotunda at one o’clock.”

  “What’s he going to say?”

  “That’s all I can tell you. Just tell media it’s at one.”

  “This is bad, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  I hung up and told Chris about the press conference.

  He responded, in a singsong falsetto voice, “Awesome.”

  For forty-five minutes we answered phone calls from journalists and told them there was a press conference at one o’clock but that we couldn’t say what it was about for the excellent reason that we didn’t know what it was about. Around fifteen minutes before one, June walked in. Her eyes were red and glistened with tears. She was about to speak, but paused. We waited. Then she said, “The governor is about to say something that’s”—again she paused—“going to be disappointing.” And she walked quickly out.

  * * *

  When the governor had a press conference in the rotunda of the State House, we usually prepared for it pretty thoroughly. We’d coordinate with the reporters and camera crews, ensure the podium was in the right place, have releases ready to hand out, and so on. This time it all happened on its own. I just stood in the crowd and tried to look grave and well-informed, but I also tried to eavesdrop on the reporters’ conversations in an attempt to figure out what was going on. But they were as clueless as I was. The man in the Mets cap was there, gazing up at the lightbulbs; he knew as much as I did.

  At last the governor came through the entrance of the west wing of the State House. All the talking and bustle quieted down. We all stared at him as he walked slowly forward. He walked gracefully as always, but as he passed me I saw in his face an expression of fear that I’d never seen there before. He tried to mumble “Hello” and “How are you?” to people he recognized, but his eyes were large, maybe swollen, and they’d lost that appearance of cool omniscience I’d seen so often before. He looked like a man about to ask for mercy from a stern judge.

  He began by saying he’d be brief and to the point but then started talking about “adventure trips” he’d taken as a teenager. He stammered and talked almost inaudibly; I could hardly follow him. I thought for a moment that he’d been caught in some act of corruption. Then I heard him say, “I’ve been unfaithful to my wife.”

  I’ve never been able to bear too much truth at one time, and from this point I didn’t register much. “It started out as these things often do, as a dear friendship,” he was saying, and I felt an overwhelming desire to lie down, alone, and think about nothing. I walked back to my desk and put my head down. I could still hear everything he was saying because we’d left Fox News on—“I hurt her, I hurt my wife,” click-click-click went the cameras—but I didn’t comprehend.

  Bridget put her hand on my shoulder and said, “It’s gon’ be all right, baby. I know it hurts. He’s a piece o’ work as it is, and now this. Lord. But it’s gon’ be all right. Remember, the Lord knows.”

  Over the next few hours, as colleagues gathered in the press office to express a variety of opinions about what had happened, I kept quiet and gathered the essential facts. He had been in Buenos Aires, not on the Appalachian Trail. His mistress was named Maria. A reporter with The State had gotten a tip that he was on a flight from Buenos Aires to Atlanta, and she’d confronted him as he stepped into the terminal. The first lady had known about it for some time and fiercely disapproved. He’d said in the press conference that he’d spent the “last five days crying in Argentina,” which we all agreed was an unfortunate way of putting it.

  He was not resigning, not immediately anyhow.

  “Still,” Aaron said, “it won’t hurt to start looking around, boys.”

  “You think they’ll impeach him?” Nat asked.

  Someone said they’d been looking for an excuse to bury him for seven years and that this would give them
their chance.

  Paul, now the head of policy, sat on the edge of a desk looking cross and silently throwing a rubber ball against the wall. It was odd to see him silent. Paul was one of the world’s great interrupters; when he wanted to tell you something, he didn’t care what you were doing or who you were talking to at the time. It was an odd trait in a southerner. Later I learned his father was from Cincinnati.

  At last someone asked Paul what he was thinking. He stopped throwing the ball against the wall. Then he threw it one more time and said, “Could somebody explain to me why he couldn’t just admit what he’d done and shut up? Why couldn’t he just say, ‘Okay, so I was down in South America with this girl. Woman, whatever. I’m sorry. I lied. I said I was going hiking, but I went to see her.’ Done. Why couldn’t he just say that? Why couldn’t he just shut his hole?”

  Nat: “Because he—. You can’t just—. We should have—.”

  Someone asked if anybody had seen Stewart.

  “He’s in his office,” Aaron said. “He’s a little upset.”

  The thought of Stewart being upset put a stop to the chatter. It didn’t seem possible that Stewart could be shaken by anything, not by anything the boss did. During the press conference the governor had evidently made it insufficiently clear that his staff, namely Stewart and Aaron, had not intentionally misled journalists but had simply relayed what he had told them about his whereabouts. When the press conference was over, Stewart, Aaron, and Rick Wilken (the previous chief of staff and a longtime friend of the governor) had followed the boss into his office. The result of this conference was a press statement making it clear that no one had deliberately lied for the governor. What happened in that meeting became the subject of rumor and legend; one version had Stewart—or perhaps it was Aaron—picking up a manila folder full of papers and throwing it hard, straight at the governor. Supposedly the folder curved upward into the air and came down in a shower of paper all around the governor as he sat looking angry and helpless at his desk.