The Speechwriter Read online

  That story is almost certainly untrue, but in the days that followed, when I’d sense keenly the pointlessness of everything I was doing, I’d think of that paper cascade falling around the governor, and it would make me smile. For years some of us had secretly imagined—we all knew how improbable it was, but it wasn’t impossible—the governor accepting his party’s nomination for the presidency. I had imagined him waving to great throbbing crowds in some vast arena, confetti falling all around. Now he was just a brooding sad-eyed failure of a politician with a few sheets of paper falling haphazardly over his head.

  13

  * * *

  IMPEACHMENT

  The next morning I woke up and thought I’d had a terrible dream. I know that’s a predictable thing to say, but it’s true. As slowly I realized what had happened, I got up and went to get the paper. I happened to notice on my desk Douglas Brinkley’s biography of Rosa Parks. I’d just started reading it with the intention of finding good speech material—one of a great many efforts that now seemed pointless.

  Everything we’d worked for was discredited; everything the administration aimed to achieve in its second term was at an end. Now we were either out of a job or bound to spend the next year cleaning up the dirty mess of an irrelevant politician. And yet I felt somehow liberated. I walked into the office that morning without wanting to vomit or turn around and go home. Everything was pointless now, so why care about it? Now it was at least funny.

  That day’s State newspaper had reprinted several emails between the governor and his mistress. Evidently the paper’s editors had had these emails for some time but didn’t publish them for lack of corroborating evidence, evidence he had given them when one of the newspaper’s reporters caught him coming back into the country from Buenos Aires. The emails themselves were all the things one would expect of correspondence between two middle-aged lovers in a secret affair—shallow, pretentiously worldly wise, cloying—but apart from one or two references to body parts, they weren’t dirty. The worst thing about them, for me, was that I couldn’t help feeling I’d written them myself. They were laden with words and phrases from my list, which I hardly bothered to consult anymore, so thoroughly had I internalized it. “You are special and unique and fabulous in a whole host of ways that are worth a much longer conversation.” “You have a level of sophistication that is so fitting with your beauty.” “In this regard it is action that goes well beyond the emotion of today.” “If you have pearls of wisdom on how we figure all this out please let me know.”

  There was to be a cabinet meeting the following morning; whether it had been scheduled beforehand or called for the purpose I don’t remember. Reporters and cameramen were everywhere. I’d made my way through them on the way in, and several had asked where the meeting would be. It was to be in a building adjacent to the State House, which meant the governor would have to walk through one of two public areas: either through the rotunda, where the press conference had been the day before, or outdoors across the grounds. Somehow the governor had already gotten into the office that morning, and now hundreds of these hounds waited at both exit points.

  At last he left, choosing the outdoor route. I followed at a distance. This great mob, with boom poles protruding from it, camera lights glaring, moved slowly across the grounds, with the governor at its center. He looked tired and exasperated, as if he’d been kept awake all night by people laughing at him. His eyes were red, his hair ungroomed and in need of a trim. Now and again he appeared to mumble something in response to a question.

  I watched the meeting on television; all the cable channels ran it live. Gil and a few others came in to watch. He began with the second of hundreds of apologies. “I let each of you down,” he said to the agency heads present. “And for that I again apologize. But I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching on that front, and what I find interesting is the story of David. And the way in which, aahh, he fell mightily; fell in very, very significant ways, but then picked up the pieces and went from there. And it really began with, first of all, a larger quest that I think is well-expressed in the Book of Psalms, on the notion of humility—humility toward others, humility in one’s own spirit.”

  “Did he just compare himself to David?” someone asked.

  “Dude,” Gil said, stretching, “that’s a bad analogy. David was killed by his son.”

  “No he wasn’t, you idiot.”

  “Uh-hut!”

  An hour or so later we were all still there, wondering if we should do any work. Even basic duties seemed pointless. On the news channels talking heads were ridiculing the boss every half hour or so. The papers were full of columns comparing him to other fallen politicians. Suddenly the governor, Nat, and Stewart walked in. “Would y’all excuse us please? Except for you,” he said pointing to me.

  When the door was closed, the governor said to Nat and Stewart, “Go ahead.”

  “Okay, you can’t compare yourself to David,” Nat said.

  “I wasn’t comparing myself to David. I was just saying, wwwww, ‘Here’s a guy in the Bible, he did some bad stuff, there were some dire consequences, but he picked up the pieces and went forward.’”

  I thought: He can’t describe what he’s done.

  “Governor,” Stewart said, in a slightly more deferential tone, “I admit, I don’t know that much about the Bible, and neither do most people out there, but most people have a vague recollection from Sunday school that David killed a giant when he was like ten, wiped out the Philistines, and did a lot of other bad-ass stuff. And I’m pretty sure he’s considered one of the greatest kings in the Old Testament, am I right? Anyhow, definitely one of history’s great men.”

  “And he didn’t just commit adultery,” Nat said. “He had the woman’s husband murdered.”

  I thought: He also repented.

  “Wwwww.”

  “Governor,” Nat said, “I get what you’re trying to say, but now’s not the time to draw comparisons between yourself and the heroes of history.”

  “Wwwww.”

  “Look, if you—.”

  “Okay I get it, I get it,” the governor said. “Bad analogy. So what I need you to do,” he said to me, “is come up with a few examples from the Bible—or from history, or from whatever—that kind of show, you know, how when you’ve made a mess, you do the best you can to clean it up, you make it right the best you can, and you keep going. You don’t just give up.”

  “What about Samson?” I suggested, remembering just as I said it that Samson killed himself and a lot of other people to “make it right.”

  “Wwwwhatever. Give me five to ten of them. Some stuff to react to.”

  * * *

  Almost every working day for the next two months, something bad happened. One day the house caucus published a letter, signed by all but two or three of its members, urging the governor to resign. The next day the governor told the Associated Press that Maria had been his “soul mate” and that their relationship had been “tragic” and “forbidden” but a “love story” all the same. The next day we heard from the press that he had seen Maria during a state economic development trip to a variety of South American countries, thus “using taxpayer dollars to see his mistress.” The next day a sometime ally in the legislature told the press he was preparing to introduce a bill of impeachment. The day after that the governor’s wife announced she was moving out of the mansion and taking their sons. A day or two went by with no bad news, but then the AP ran a story about an email leaked to one of its reporters showing the governor pleading with some kind of “spiritual mentor,” “I am committed to her [his wife] in a commitment sense, but my heart is just not alive here as it ought to be.” Then The State, whose reporters had now scoured documents relating to the governor’s travels, reported that he had once reimbursed himself for a flight he’d won at a charity auction. A couple of days later the first lady told Oprah Winfrey that her husband h
ad asked permission to see his mistress one last time—releasing another round of commentary about the governor’s cruelty and self-absorption—and the day after that The State ran a story about how he had flown business class while insisting that all other state employees fly coach. The day that last story ran you could hear Stewart walking around the office singing,

  Put me in, coach!

  I’m ready to play, today!

  The governor had two things in his favor. The first was that the legislature wasn’t in session. If it had been, impeachment would have come up quickly, and his enemies would have finished him off. The second was that the lieutenant governor was André Bauer. Bauer was the youngest lieutenant governor in state history, and he acted the part. He was known for showing up at bars and parties with a different twenty-year-old woman on his arm each time. He was young, midthirties, but he was one of those old-school politicians whose campaigns consist of a few badly made television ads and a million handshakes. He’d walk around, locking eyes with anyone within a ten-foot radius, saying, “How are you? Good to see you!” You had to admire his discipline. Like a lot of young up-and-coming politicians, though, he had lost the ability to seem authentic. He had vast energy but no sagacity. Once, he showed up at a homeless shelter to hand out blankets, only it was April and 70 degrees outside. Another time he showed up at a home for the elderly to hand out electric fans; it was late August.

  More widely known were Bauer’s misadventures behind the wheel—one resulting in a reckless driving charge, the next in a warning for speeding, and still another resulting in no charge at all for exceeding a hundred in a seventy-mile-per-hour zone. And during his reelection campaign he had crashed a plane apparently by the simple expedient of not knowing how to fly it. Neither instance suggested Bauer to be the possessor of wisdom. At the time of the governor’s fall, I heard a great many people say they didn’t favor resignation for the sole reason that André Bauer would become governor.

  He wanted badly to be governor, though. On the morning of August 26 he announced a press conference at which he would “issue a major public statement concerning the ongoing investigation” of the governor at noon. Bauer had a marvelous talent for bad timing; Senator Ted Kennedy had died the day before. (Even when Bauer’s timing wasn’t bad, Aaron would make it bad. If the lieutenant governor scheduled a press conference for two o’clock, Aaron would intentionally send out a substantive release—say, the findings of some study committee—at eleven. Aaron did this, to his great credit, “just ’cause I hate him.”)

  At the press conference Bauer made an offer to the governor: If he would resign, Bauer would promise not to run for governor. “I lie awake at night thinking and worrying about the people of this state,” he said with an expression of deep concern.

  We scheduled our own press conference for a few hours later. The entire press corps trekked to the State House again just to hear the governor say he’d decided not to take Bauer’s offer.

  The verbiage became so thick that summer you could almost feel it. There were hundreds of letters to the editor about him, and they were in every paper: local papers, weekly papers, even community newsletters that ordinarily didn’t deal with government and politics at all. A few of the letter writers took a measured tone, but most were outraged. The governor’s behavior seemed to inject harebrained metaphors and crazy images into the air; people could hardly express themselves without choking on them. “This is a transparent smokescreen!” “The meat and potatoes of it, in a nutshell, is that our state is once again a laughingstock!” One letter I thought a memorable specimen. I have it before me now. “Governor, your time line is at hand,” it says. “You have committed the ultimate sin. . . . ‘Lust’ was your driving force. So since you have been shown to be a ‘dog,’ wag your tail and keep on stepping . . . down, that is. . . . Take a good look in the mirror. The shoe hurts when it’s on the other foot.”

  A week or so after the governor’s “tearful confession,” as reporters referred to it again and again, the letters had begun pouring into the Correspondence Office. There were far too many to respond to, as in normal circumstances we tried to do, but I responded to as many as I could. Some of them were nonsensical; most were kindly meant, with odd impractical exhortations; some were touching. One little girl wrote, “I have heard you in the news a lot. I am not sure why, but I heard some people do not want you to be the governor any more. I like you to stay as governor. My mom said you said you were sorry for what you did wrong. Did you told Jesus you were sorry? If Jesus can forgive you, then everyone else should also. You are a very good governor and I hope you stay.”

  In early August the legislature scheduled a special session on extending unemployment benefits, but the rumor was that Representative Greg Delleney intended to introduce articles of impeachment. Delleney, ordinarily an inconspicuous member from the northern part of the state, was a man not to be trifled with on the subject of moral behavior. I remember hearing Jeane say that he was one of the few members who didn’t “fool around” when he came to the capital.

  For several days Nat had been saying this would be the end. “There’s no stopping it. For seven years the guys upstairs have hated him. He’s insulted them, he’s ignored them, he hasn’t taken their calls, and he’s exposed them. This is their chance to put him away, and I tell you they’re gonna do it. And to tell you the truth I don’t blame them.”

  “On what charge?”

  “Dereliction of duty. He left the state without telling anyone where he was going. Not even Stewart knew.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if this little state doesn’t have anybody in charge for a few days. Before cell phones—before phones—if the governor went up to Washington or some place, he’d be totally out of reach for two weeks.”

  “And he would have told everybody where he was going.”

  “What if he had a change of plans? He’d have to send letters telling everybody where he was off to, and that would take days.”

  I honestly didn’t think they would impeach him for the simple reason that to impeach a governor is to take a political risk, and the vast majority of them wouldn’t take serious risks. They would find a way to tut-tut and tell the world how inexcusable and reprehensible the governor’s behavior had been, but they wouldn’t actually put him out. They’d call it unacceptable and then accept it.

  The governor had become obsessed with lists. He wanted a list of opinion writers who had defended him and a list of those who had ridiculed him, another of donors he needed to call to apologize for “letting them down,” still another of Rotary Clubs he hadn’t addressed in more than a year.

  “Courson!” he might shout. He meant Senator John Courson. “What’s Courson said about resignation?”

  “Uh,” one of us would say.

  “Come on! We’ve got to know this. We need a list. Put together a list of every guy upstairs who’s said something publicly about stepping down.”

  And off one of us would go—usually it was me—to compile another list. Nat wagered it wouldn’t be long until he demanded a list of all our lists.

  I’d compiled that list of house and senate members who supported resignation, and it was almost identical to the list of members of the legislature. Only two or three members of the caucus didn’t put their name on a letter calling on the governor, for the good of the state, to step down.

  That afternoon I walked up to the house gallery and waited for the session to start. The floor was packed, which was extremely unusual for a special session in the middle of summer called for the purpose of changing one law that virtually every member agreed needed to change. They were there for Delleney’s motion, I thought.

  Speaker Harrell oversaw the proceedings efficiently. It took no more than thirty minutes to get the final vote on the unemployment law.

  “Is there any other business?” he asked.

  Delleney rose. H
e had a thin, pronounced nose and neatly brushed brown hair, and with his determined expression I thought he looked like a bird of prey.

  “Mr. Speaker,” he said, “I’ve introduced articles relating to the governor’s recent absence from the state. Rather than wait until January to address the matter, I would submit to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle that this is too important to be left for another six months. Mr. Speaker, I move we take it up now.”

  “Mr. Delleney,” Harrell said, “this session has been called for one purpose only, and I’m finding it hard to see how your motion relates.”

  “Mr. Speaker, impeachment is something only the house can do,” Delleney contended. “We act separately and independently from the senate in this process. We are the only ones that can impeach. I would submit that, in order to move forward on a subject as important as this one, the house should take it up now.”

  Harrell paused. “Mr. Delleney, your argument strikes me as tenuous, but I’m willing to entertain debate on the question. Is there debate on the question? Mr. McLeod.”

  Representative Walt McLeod, a tiny and ancient member, rose to his feet. As a member of the minority, McLeod had never been a “friendly,” as Jeane called potential allies. I knew little about him other than that he liked occasionally to rant from the podium, always in a voice far louder than his tiny stature would signify and always concluding with the words “I thank the members for listening to this little tirade” or some similar charming apology.