by Steve Lewis
President Earle Jackson suppressed a twitch in his shoulder as the enemy spat out his venom.
‘If you run you will lead us to an epic defeat,’ the Chairman of the Republican National Committee growled. ‘The base – our base – is gone. You humiliated America; there’s no way you can win back the people’s confidence.’
Jackson was defiant as he slammed his clenched fist on the table.
‘People have been writing me off all of my political life,’ the president seethed. His face was set like a Rushmore statue, his voice squeezed out through his teeth. He did not try to hide his anger.
‘There will be challengers.’ The chairman’s hard eyes met the president’s wrath. ‘And no matter who runs against you they will win some primaries. That will embolden others to stand. The vice president might even make a bid. How would that look? Our executive at war. As the good Lord and Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”’
Jackson shook with rage as the chairman spoke.
‘It will be a repeat of the Johnson campaign in ’68. How will you cope if you, the president, lose primary races? Your last days in this office will be consumed by campaigning. And a series of bitter defeats.’
‘What are you saying? Spit it out.’
The chairman took a long breath. He glanced out the windows behind the president into the semi-darkness and then looked long and hard at Jackson before he spoke.
‘Do what Johnson did. Stand down.’ His voice was calmer, but still determined. ‘Say your health is shot. Say you want to spend more time with your family. For the love of God, say you want to take up painting. I don’t care. But for the good of this party, for the sake of this nation, stand down and give us a chance at winning in 2016.’
For a long time the two were frozen in angry silence. Then the president dropped his gaze to the desk in front of him and ran his fingers along its edge.
‘You see this,’ he said, emphasising the point with two sharp raps. ‘It’s made from the timbers of a British ship that was abandoned and thought lost in the Arctic. It was found and sailed to America by a whaler. It was refitted and given as a gift to the Brits at a time when we once again stood on the brink of war. Then in 1880 part of it came back here as a desk, a gift from Queen Victoria, as a sign of the enduring friendship between our nations.
‘Each day when I’m at this desk I touch this wood and I think of that ship’s name. The Resolute. And that’s what I intend to be.’
The president stood slowly, theatrically. He was a tall man who used his height and bulk to intimidate his opponents. He leaned across the desk into the chairman’s space.
‘You might be right.’ His voice was controlled but steely. ‘I might be humiliated in a primary battle with my own party. But I will not run from this fight.’
The Republican chairman was shorter than the president but as a sign of defiance he also stood and leaned across the desk to meet the challenge.
‘With respect, Mr President,’ – there was a sarcastic tone in his voice – ‘it was running from a fight that got you to where you are now.’
Jackson balled his hands into fists and rested his knuckles on the Resolute’s timber. He had to resist the urge to hit the chairman.
‘Get out of my office,’ he spat. ‘Never contact me again. And when I win I will be coming after you.’
The chairman nodded, his face impassive. ‘Mr President, I don’t doubt your will or your determination. But you will not win. Remember I tried to warn you.’
Jackson remained standing until the chairman had left his office. As the door clicked shut, he sank back in his chair and flicked on the TV.
He knew he shouldn’t watch Fox News, the broadcaster that gave voice to a generation of rabid conservatives and made Rupert Murdoch America’s most powerful media baron.
On the high-voltage, high-rating O’Reilly Factor, the panel was in hyperdrive as the hawkish pundits tore into their hapless foe.
But this time the victim wasn’t some limp-wristed liberal trying to ban Nativity scenes in schools. The target was him, the highest profile Republican in the land: the forty-fifth president of the United States. The right-wing hit squad was united: the Grand Old Party would be best served if Jackson did the decent thing and resigned. If he didn’t, then it was someone’s patriotic duty to challenge the president in a primary run-off.
Just two years into his first term, Jackson had fallen further than Lucifer when he was cast out of Paradise. A single calamitous miscalculation had eviscerated him. He was now a national embarrassment, a lame duck leader whose fallibility and misjudgement had shamed America.
Jackson could never escape the memory. As he looked over the White House lawns from the Oval Office; caught the gaze of other world leaders; paused during paperwork or wrestled himself to sleep – he would live and relive one defining decision.
Sixteen months ago he had ordered the USS George Washington into the Taiwan Strait to demonstrate that America was the world’s only superpower. Then, as confrontation with China loomed, he instructed the strike group to retreat.
He’d believed it was the right decision, that if the group had pressed on it would have been annihilated by the weapons that lined the Chinese shore. Then he would have had no choice but to declare war on China, a war America could not win and one where it would be seen as the aggressor.
But the spectacle of the Stars and Stripes being lowered before a rising Red Flag had recast the global order in a single, fateful afternoon. It was the retreat watched around the world, America’s most humbling moment since Vietnam – but with much more serious implications. Vietnam was a setback; this was a shift in the tectonic plates of power.
The Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, had put it bluntly in a searing phone call to him: ‘Mr President, the United States has been castrated.’
Jackson knew all too well what he’d done to the American psyche. The damage was immense. A nation reared to believe in its invincibility was shaken to the core. The stock market crashed, consumer and business confidence were crushed – and forests had been sacrificed to explain what it all meant.
The electorate hated him for puncturing their mythology. His poll numbers fell to single digits and Jackson achieved the rarest of feats: uniting the Democrats and Republicans against a common foe.
Fox News feasted on his corpse, launching a jihad as fierce as any that it had waged against its many enemies on the left. The full-throttle 24/7 character assassination showed no signs of letting up.
Jackson watched as Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for George W Bush, echoed the views of Murdoch about the man whom the media mogul had once enthusiastically endorsed.
‘“Jellywall” Jackson continues to stain the office of president of this great nation,’ Thiessen growled. ‘He is a disgrace and should resign.’
Jackson punched his remote to end the torture and turned up a favoured piece of choral music. The searching strings and choir soothed him, though he wondered whether they were playing his requiem.
It would be easy to resign and fade into the shadows. But given the biggest mistake in his life had been to retreat in the face of a foe, he couldn’t live with himself if he again cut and ran.
One of his few remaining friends had sent him a line from a book he had never read, John Milton’s Paradise Lost. He’d had it framed and it sat on his desk. He picked it up and read it aloud: ‘Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n.’
He smiled as he remembered the words of his mother. ‘Yes Mom, that is what Jesus would do.’
He was still the leader of the free world and it was his solemn duty to put things right, to restore America’s pride. He had triumphed against impossible odds before as he’d risen through the Republican ranks to become governor of Mississippi before storming the White House with his 2012 victory that had shocked the pundits.
He could do it again; he just had to have faith.
Jackson turned to the bay windows and rocked his h
ead from side to side to relieve the stress. He felt a trickle of sweat run down his back. The torment of this office was something no man could prepare for.
Outside, a heavy layer of snow had painted the White House lawn, the temperature in DC dropping to ten degrees Fahrenheit as the long winter deepened.
Brutal days lay ahead, but he’d be damned if these faceless backroom boys would tear him down. He was elected by the people and he would reconnect with them.
He would return to his roots, go back to making stump speeches in the hamlets. He would win back the country, town hall by town hall. He would speak in parks and on street corners to the real America. He would reach out to those who’d suffered the ignominy of unemployment as the economy shed blue-collar jobs. And he would speak of his plans to make the nation great again.
Like Teddy Roosevelt he would declare that his setback was not the end – because ‘it takes more than that to kill a bull moose’.
As the music rose in its majesty he tilted back his head and stretched his neck before thumping his fists on the oak desk.
‘Kiss my ass, Bill O’Reilly,’ the president yelled, to no one but himself.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sydney
The passenger’s head was lowered, his vacant eyes staring out from a grimy face. Clad in tattered jeans and an ill-fitting T-shirt, he clutched a battered leather satchel containing his few possessions: a notepad, a coin purse and a lanyard printed with the seal of the Federal Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia. It bore his name and told of his past: Harry Dunkley, The Australian.
As Martin Toohey sank into the front seat, his COMCAR driver turned off the air conditioning and lowered all four windows, despite the stifling heat.
‘Best let the air circulate, Mr Toohey,’ he said.
Toohey nodded. ‘Yes, best.’
It was nearly 1pm and the former prime minister and one-time lawyer had spent nearly two hours at the Downing Centre, waiting for a magistrate to hear the case against Dunkley, whose demolition derby in the News Corp offices had caused thousands of dollars’ damage. Some of Murdoch’s top henchmen were keen to throw the book at their former employee. But common sense prevailed and Toohey’s offer to stump up for damages and legal costs, and keep an eye on the man who’d once terrorised his government, had been accepted.
Now Toohey turned to study the wild thing slumped on the spotless upholstery that usually carried politicians, diplomats and other VIPs.
His nostrils filled with the pungent smell of a man who hadn’t washed in weeks. His unimpressed driver asked for directions.
‘Hunters Hill; you know the place.’
They drove through Sydney’s CBD, following a bus lane out of the city towards the inner west, making light of the lunchtime traffic.
The three didn’t speak as they crossed the Anzac Bridge before turning right onto Victoria Road, passing a derelict power station. As the turnoff to the Balmain peninsula loomed, Toohey contemplated the transformation of the once proud Labor heartland into a Green utopia, cashed-up, hand-wringing luvvies replacing the horny-handed sons of toil and their hard-scrabble wives who’d given the place its working-class character and soul.
He shook his head as he recalled Neville Wran’s dictum that Balmain boys don’t cry. Now, the basket-weavers never stopped moaning about the perils of middle-class living: close-fit development, traffic snarls and the absence of ‘fair trade’ coffee beans. All risk and fun were being sucked from life.
They crossed the Iron Cove and the sweeping span of Gladesville Bridge before veering into Hunters Hill. The small village shopping centre gave way to streets that recorded the Catholic Church’s past colonisation of this now wealthy enclave: Matthew Street, Luke Street – the saints paraded by.
The car glided past the back of St Joseph’s College and turned onto Mary Street. Just beyond the neo-gothic Villa Maria church they pulled into a driveway split by a small roundabout and stopped in front of an old sandstone building.
From the back seat the passenger spoke for the first time.
‘Where the hell are we?’
‘Marist Fathers’ seminary in Hunters Hill. My old digs. I studied here thirty-five years ago. They taught me many things.’
Toohey turned to meet Dunkley’s gaze.
‘This is your home for a while.’
Dunkley hunkered down in his seat.
‘I am not going to doss down with a bunch of clapped-out God-botherers.’
Toohey winced as he caught a blast of Dunkley’s toxic breath.
‘I’m a tolerant man, Martin, and I have never held your weird superstitions against you. But I am a card-carrying atheist. So were my parents. It’s an honourable family tradition.’
Toohey sought to reassure his dishevelled companion.
‘You’ve been released into my care. This is a genuinely safe house and they are good men. These are my friends, Harry, and they know how to keep a secret.’
CHAPTER FIVE
Beijing
The morning sun had barely seeped into the Hall of Purple Light but the grand building was already ablaze.
Jiang Xiu stepped around the scaffolding that encased the building and made his way inside. Over a hundred artisans and tradesmen had been indentured to renovate this edifice that had stood at the centre of noble Chinese ceremonies for centuries. They worked with fierce determination, intent on maintaining a cracking pace in order to please their supreme leader.
The propaganda minister had played an important role in building the profile of his president, but it was a remarkably easy job. President Meng Tao exuded the certainty of those who are destined to rule. Thick jet-black hair crowned a strong face set with high cheekbones and intense, intelligent eyes. A touch of puffiness about his jowls hinted at too many state banquets and too little exercise. But his shoulders were wide and his arms strong. His hands bore the traces of the long hours he had spent in hard physical labour in his youth.
Although Meng was a ‘princeling’ – the son of a revolutionary veteran – his path to leadership had been arduous. His father had been vice premier but was purged and imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. At fifteen, Meng left Beijing in shame, a ‘sent-down youth’ banished to a remote village in the Shaanxi Province for seven years.
Those wilderness years in rural China were the ‘turning point’ in his life, according to the official biography that Jiang had commissioned. What was not recorded was that it was there that Meng had forged enduring bonds with other sent-down princelings, the ‘Shaanxi Gang’ ultimately rising to grasp four of the seven seats on China’s supreme governing body, the Politburo Standing Committee.
Old hands had watched first in admiration then trepidation as Meng’s influence grew. Step by step he was taking control of all the supreme institutions in the Communist Party, the state and the military. He already chaired the National Security Committee and the Central Leading Group on Comprehensive Deepening of Economic Reform – two crucial decision-making bodies in Zhongnanhai, the Communist Party’s central headquarters.
In this teeming state of 1.3 billion souls, his eyes and ears were everywhere. Jiang was one of the trusted few. The president was a micro-manager, right down to personally supervising the renovation of this monument of ancient power.
Meng had closely studied revolutionary leaders and he’d been struck by George Washington’s passion for architecture and landscape design. He had directed Jiang to read the detailed letters Washington had penned about the rebuilding and expansion of his Virginia home, Mount Vernon, even as the British made their grand push against Brooklyn in August 1776. Washington hated disorder and had fussed over every detail of his estate, down to the wallpaper, paint colour and ceiling ornaments.
So Meng ordered his palace as he ordered society – with the iron resolve of a budding dictator. The president would quote the ancient maxim ‘Virtues are central, punishment supplements them’ as he scoured the land to purge dissidents.
He had
a fearful temper and his moods had become increasingly unpredictable as his power and popularity had grown. The state was in control, and he controlled the state.
Not since Mao had a Chinese leader so dominated the party and combined power with the cult of personality. Since his ascension to the presidency just over two years previously, Meng had been sending an unmistakeable message that China was not ruled by a faceless party – it was ruled by a man.
He was a Cult of One who made a display of his personal life and cultivated a connection with the masses to become the ‘People’s President’. He was married to a famous opera singer who travelled with him abroad. He sat cross-legged with rural peasants to eat dumplings, and carried his own umbrella. The People’s Daily had even given him a nickname reflecting his exalted status: Meng Dada or ‘Uncle Meng’. Some China observers in the West had adopted a more sinister translation: ‘Big Brother Meng’.
Meng saw himself as greater than Mao because the founder of the communist state had done enormous damage by rejecting China’s richly embroidered history. This error, Meng believed, had stunted his country and he was determined to reconnect with that history, recreate it and bend it to his purpose.
Part of Jiang’s role was to reinvigorate the belief planted deep in the souls of the Chinese populous that they were the centre of all things. Having that snatched away by the West during the ‘Hundred Years of Humiliation’ had created a deep sense of resentment. It was a powerful weapon, but it had to be wielded with great skill.
‘History is created by the people and so is civilisation,’ Meng told Jiang during one of their many discussions. ‘We should be more respectful and mindful of five thousand years of continuous Chinese culture.’
Following his president’s directives, Jiang revived interest in all things Chinese with a motto that Meng borrowed from the Ming Dynasty: ‘A society without ritual is like a plough without a blade.’ The people lapped it up and courses in Confucianism flourished.
The defining moment of Meng’s premiership had been when he forced the retreat of the USS George Washington from its mission to sail the length of the Taiwan Strait. It drove his status and popularity to levels Western leaders could only dream of. It poured fuel on nationalistic fires and secured his freedom to make ever bolder moves in domestic and foreign policy.