The Speechwriter Page 15

  Things settled down. He wasn’t invited to speak at any out-of-state events any more, but the Rotary Clubs were always happy to have him, and even a damaged governor is good enough for a ribbon-cutting ceremony, of which there seemed to be an inordinate number during that last year. The one thing that changed definitely for the worse was the sheer embarrassment of being a writer for a disgraced politician. One minute you worked for a popular and energetic politician, one whose name was frequently mentioned (however tenuously) among those of other presidential contenders, and the next you worked for a blubbering emotional wreck of a man. Even now, when I tell people what I used to do, someone will ask, “Did you write that speech?” I just chuckle miserably.

  The late-night shows, the columnists, the bloggers—they were relentless: always crude, often predictable and unfunny, occasionally devastating. Maria’s name was part of the fun: “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” Eventually we began to enjoy the humor in it. At one point a few of us competed to produce the most apt literary quotation. The winning entry came from The Picture of Dorian Gray: “I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it brings a great deal of romance into one’s life.”

  The governor became to us like a drunkard father. He was a monster and a lout, but he was our governor; we could ridicule him, but outsiders couldn’t. So when a variety of opponents and former allies tried to capitalize on his political weakness, we responded from the soul. We disliked him severely already—some of us hated him—so if they had simply ignored him or at least been subtle in their attacks, we would have agreed with them. As it was, they tried to destroy him, and we felt obligated to fight back, hard.

  The situation brings to mind Adam Ferguson, the eighteenth-­century political philosopher, whose works I read at Edinburgh. Ferguson thought the spirit of rivalry, when kept within limits, had the beneficial effect of encouraging a proper affection for one’s own nation or culture. Rivalry and patriotism exist, says Ferguson, in a kind of symbiotic relationship: “Our attachment to one division, or to one sect, seems often to derive much of its force from an animosity conceived to an opposite one: and this animosity in its turn, as often arises from a zeal in behalf of the side we espouse, and from a desire to vindicate the rights of our party.”I Anyone who has played sports at a competitive level or worked for a underdog company fighting for market share will admit that the emotions flowing from sheer dislike of a competitor, or from an almost irrational desire to vanquish that competitor, have a way of eliciting a high level of performance.

  I think of one senator especially. Even now I want to call him a pretentious semiliterate boob—which itself suggests I still have some emotional investment in defending the governor. This senator got hold of some law that state employees are required to take the least expensive option in any travel arrangements paid for by the state. It was a preposterous reason to attack the governor, or any governor, for not flying coach, but the senator was running for U.S. Congress and must have thought he could benefit from appearing to be “tough” on the adulterous governor. Well, the adulterous governor needed to be punished severely for innumerable hypocrisies—we all felt that—but we weren’t going to let some bumbling opportunistic yokel abuse our old man. A good number of us got in on the effort to upend the senator. We did a little research and found that he’d taken a handful of high-dollar trips himself and that other governors had flown first class and business class—one of them had taken a transatlantic trip on the Concord—and the senator hadn’t said a word about it. I don’t know what, if anything, was done with that information, but the whole matter quietly fizzled and the guy’s congressional campaign flopped.

  It was the same when the house Judiciary Ad Hoc Committee, on which Greg Delleney sat, brought up impeachment. If Delleney had been content to limit the impeachment articles to the governor’s being gone for five days without notifying proper authorities, or to lying to staff and by extension to the public about his whereabouts, either might have been a reason for considering impeachment. As it was, he had to bring up every conceivable ethical infraction: the governor had visited his mistress in Argentina while on an official visit to Brazil; he’d flown on the state plane to a supposedly political event, as if every event attended by a politician can’t be construed as somehow political; and on and on. He even brought in Larry Jones II as a witness. Jones II—the prolific adulator of the governor who’d wanted him to attend some kind of philosophical gabfest—claimed he had heard the Argentine ambassador to the United States say the governor told him that he wasn’t interested in expanding trade relations with Argentina, thus indicating that the Argentine leg of an economic development trip to South America must have been added for no other reason than to facilitate the governor’s affair. Indeed so bitter was Jones II’s disappointment in the governor that, during the administration’s last year, he undertook a letter-writing campaign as fiercely critical of the governor as his former correspondence had been supplicatory.

  Jakie Knotts, proud of his coup, crowed to the news media as if the governor had been caught embezzling money from a church. “How many moe shoes have gotta drop before we see the truth of this thing?” he kept asking. It all felt unjust. If they’d only stuck to the basic deed, we would have been happy to see him brought down. But not this way. And not by these people. Almost without meaning to we threw ourselves into saving the old man. Gleefully we found old flight manifests showing a good number of the governor’s adversaries had used the state plane for purposes that could hardly be called official. We already knew about one senator’s wanton use of his campaign account; after a little digging and asking around, we also discovered that he’d used that account for a variety of lavish indulgences that I shouldn’t mention. These findings must have found their way to the offenders’ mailboxes, but I never heard how.

  That year’s session went modestly well. A couple of bills the governor had pushed for passed the legislature; the Employment and Workforce Commission got overhauled, and one or two other things. The common explanation for this was that the governor had made himself irrelevant and therefore easier to work with: the legislature no longer cared about wrecking his presidential ambitions and so lacked a reason to oppose him on everything. But it was pretty negligible stuff compared to what we all knew the governor thought he’d be doing by this time. Signing a few modest reforms and publishing a few op-eds in state newspapers about piecemeal measures that “have the potential to make a real difference in people’s lives” doesn’t feel like much compared to making speeches in Iowa and meeting with billionaires about financial support and U.S. senators about endorsements. Avoiding impeachment and getting credit for restructuring the state Workforce Commission doesn’t mean a lot when you have to watch in futility as the nation searches for somebody exactly like you but passes you by because you’re a joke.

  Still, and despite the fact that most of the media attention was now premised on his fall and not his rise, there was something about it that he couldn’t help enjoying. The crowds of reporters, the incessant headlines, the necessity of responding every day to some new self-inflicted absurdity—there was something about it all that made him thrive. Once, we held a press conference about some piece of legislation or other, and in usual press conference style the governor stood behind a podium flanked by four or five grave-looking lawmakers. There were maybe two questions about the bill, whatever it was, and then Donald Hatfield asked, “Are you still seeing her—Maria?”

  You could see it on the governor’s face. He wanted the whole thing to go away and to become again what he had been. But not enough to ignore that question. The world was interested in his life, what he did with himself, who he was seeing, and that was a good deal better than
ignoring him. He paused and looked around the room. And then he answered the question. “Well clearly, I mean, it’s not going to be easy to maintain a relationship across that geographical distance, but we’re working through that.”

  “So you are still seeing her?” Hatfield persisted.

  Quietly the politicians behind the governor began slipping away.

  “Wwwwwell I mean, the obvious is the obvious. In other words . . .”

  Later that night I was still in the office when the governor walked in looking for Nat, who’d gone home.

  “Okay,” he said. He sat down.

  Beyond the occasional greeting and an awkward chat at one of the mansion parties, he and I had never spoken to each other about anything unrelated to work. When you were in the car with him and the conversation inadvertently veered toward something remotely personal, he’d quickly switch topics or get on his phone or make up a reason to criticize you. Now he was sitting there for no reason, apparently needing to talk to somebody.

  “What’d you think of that?” he asked.

  “Well,” I said. Lots of things passed through my mind, but I just sat there stupidly saying, “Well.”

  He waited.

  At last I said, “Well, you’ve never been happy just saying what any politician would say. That’s what got you in trouble when this whole thing blew up. Do you know Michael Jackson died the day after it all happened? The twenty-fifth. The whole thing would have been buried—maybe not buried, but almost. You couldn’t stand saying the usual boring stuff, though.” It felt awkward criticizing him like this, but once I’d got going I couldn’t stop. “Sometimes you should just say what every other politician would say. When Hatfield asked you whether you were still seeing her, you should have just said, ‘Donald, I’m not here to talk about my personal life.’ But you’re so addicted to being different, you just had to say something weird.”

  There was truth in what I told him, even if I had put it in a way that would appeal to his self-regard; I admit that. But there was truth in it. He always had to say something original, something quotable or memorable. That’s why, in his notorious press conference, and in the notorious interview with the AP (“soul mate,” “love story”), he’d been so incapable of simply closing his mouth. Any other politician—at least any other politician not intending to resign on the spot—would have emitted the usual rigmarole about how this was a private matter and how he was going to work through some difficult issues with his wife and how he had disappointed his family and his staff and the citizens of this great state. This governor was incapable of the usual rigmarole; his strength was his folly. Instead of giving the press formulaic balderdash, he kept rummaging through the tawdry verbiage of middle-aged love affairs trying to find something redeemable, something that would show the world that his infantile obsession with a foreign divorcée was somehow nobler or more pardonable than the sordid entanglement of an average politician.

  “Yeah, I guess that’s a big part of it,” he said. He leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling. “I’m always looking for language that’s—I don’t know.”

  “Language that’s what?”

  He kept looking at the ceiling. “I don’t mean just language, just words. It’s more than words. It’s conceptual. It’s real. I always find myself trying to communicate something—larger.”

  “Larger” was one of the words on my list. He used it all the time. Sometimes he spoke of the “larger issue” or the “larger question,” but usually it was the “larger notion.” Sometimes he spoke of “this larger notion” of something or other in a way that made sense (“this larger notion of serving others”), but at other times it prefaced some noun phrase that couldn’t be described as a “notion” at all, far less a “larger” one (“this larger notion of fairness and minimizing the tax burden on the job-creating businesses and hard-working people across this state”; “this larger notion of how well automotive companies are able to compete with counterparts elsewhere in the world”). The phrase had long been the source of jokes among staffers. “Why larger? Larger than what?” When we drafted a release or a press statement and weren’t sure if he would approve it, someone would say, “Stick ‘a larger notion’ in there and it should be fine.” I remember someone saying that if the governor ever wrote a book about God, it should be called “The Largest Notion.”

  “Larger?” I said.

  “Yeah. I know that sounds weird. And I don’t know what I mean by it exactly. It’s just—I feel there’s something—larger—you know, just bigger—bigger than what I’m able to communicate in words. That’s what I’m after.”

  * * *

  Strange things happen toward the end of an administration. One of them, in my case, was admittance to the gift room.

  Politicians receive more gifts than you can imagine. Admirers send books and framed photographs and, at Christmas, specialty food items. Appreciative crowds show their gratitude to the guest speaker by presenting him with a hand-carved letter-­opener or a small sculpture by a local artist. When I had traveled with the governor, I got stuck carrying the things back to the car or the plane, usually a T-shirt or a “golden” shovel (for ceremonial groundbreakings) or a giant pair of scissors (for ceremonial ribbon cuttings). Sometimes he got something genuinely interesting. At a town meeting inside the warehouse of a small metalwork company the employees presented him with a state flag they had fashioned from a sheet of copper—a three-by-five-foot rectangle with the shapes of a palmetto tree and a crescent moon cut out of it—a beautiful object in its way, and one I would have liked to have.

  Ethics laws dictated that all gifts had to be recorded, along with their approximate value, and a list of them deposited with the requisite agency at the end of the year. If you were the staffer who brought the gift back to the office, you had to do this. Sometimes the governor would tell you to keep them; I got several T-shirts this way and one variety pack of floor polish. But usually you had to make up values—$10 for a T-shirt, $20 for a book, $100 for an original sculpture or a copper flag—fill out the paperwork, and give it to June for depositing in the gift room. I imagined a closet-size room somewhere in the governor’s mansion crammed with decorative pillows and model cranes and framed photographs.

  With a few weeks left in the term, June came into the press office and invited me and two colleagues to this room. It wasn’t a closet in the governor’s residence at all; it was a huge room in a dreary government building adjacent to the State House. The room was lined with tables, each covered with trinkets and gadgets and baseball caps and books. There were shot glasses, books of postcards, novelty lighters, tote bags, stacks of Fireproof DVDs, and innumerable coffee mugs. We were told to take anything we liked. My attention inclined to the books, but I was disappointed. There were books about counties and agricultural methods and chiropracty and the textile industry. An entire section was devoted to marriage. There were books about Baha’ism and the 1984 presidential election and a variety of foreign cities, almost all of them inscribed to the governor, but nothing I was interested in.

  I did pick up a few things: a baseball cap, a beer koozie advertising some private boarding school, a white golf shirt with the BMW logo on the sleeve, a print from the National Gallery of Ireland, a tartan tie, and a ballpoint pen made of wood. I loaded them into a tote bag bearing the words Universität Stuttgart, also from the gift room. If I had to estimate the combined price of everything in that room, say for insurance purposes, I would guess $50,000. If you added the things the governor had kept for himself and his wife and sons—the great sheet-metal flag, for instance, was not in the room—as well as the hundreds of things he had regifted over the years, the combined worth must have been $100,000 or more.

  A large room full of token mementos, well-meaning but frequently inappropriate gestures, and lame attempts at ingratiation: you could interpret it as a small manifestation of modern democratic politics—full of
waste, insincerity, and comic impropriety. (Did someone really think this governor would appreciate a cigarette lighter made to look like a 9mm handgun?) On the other hand, although these gifts were not extravagant—nothing I saw would have been likely to influence a policy decision—many of them had an understated quality. The tartan tie is made from clearly superior fabric, and the ballpoint pen, I later discovered, contains a laser pointer.

  * * *

  We did all the things a political office does on the way out. We sent out press statements about the need to continue reform; the boss traveled around urging tax reform; he quietly backed a candidate in the race for governor. My project was to put together an “accomplishments list,” an improbably long document listing the administration’s achievements in misleadingly straightforward language. (“We achieved the largest recurring tax cut in state history.”) He was keenly interested in this product and badgered me relentlessly about the wording of its hundreds of items. “We’ve got to tell the story,” he would say. “Nobody else is going to tell it for us.” Which I guess was true.

  With a few days left, the constant need for talking points finally ended. Those of us who hadn’t left yet were interviewing for jobs elsewhere. Nat would go back to the upper Midwest to work for a large multinational corporation whose public-relations arm needed help in crisis management. Stewart found a place in the highest echelon of the state department of education. Some of my colleagues left to make large amounts of money “consulting,” whatever that means. I was interviewing for a position with a small nonprofit group, and eventually took it. A few months later I would admit to myself, then more gradually to Laura, the distance I had allowed my old job to place between me and my wife.