Fixers

by Michael M. Thomas

  The next two days should be terrific. Marina and the diary, then B for New Year’s. One triumph after another.

  DECEMBER 29, 2014

  This has been some day. Not at all what I expected. A total bummer.

  You’ll recall, Gentle Reader, that I left the diary at Marina’s yesterday.

  She called first thing this morning. Excited is hardly the word for how she sounded. Apparently she stayed up until three in the morning reading the damn thing and says she needs to talk to me soonest. Needless to say, her excitement is infectious. Like her, I can hardly wait to get going. But I had a lot on my plate today that had to be dealt with, so we made a date for 6:00 p.m. at my place to discuss strategy.

  I got through the day OK, although I confess my mind was elsewhere a good deal of the time. In my business, you get pretty good at centering your thoughts on B while your face and small talk indicate absolute concentration on A. I made sure I got out of the office early in plenty of time for a pit stop to pick up some special cuvée Pol Roger with which to toast the salvation of this great republic—and Marina’s future Pulitzer.

  The bell rang promptly at six. When I flung open the door, a huge triumphant grin pasted on my face, I got a shock. Marina wasn’t alone. Artie was with her, and I could see at once that this wasn’t some fortuitous coincidence, their arriving together. They had the look of a tag team climbing into the ring. Something was up. I guessed that she’d shown Artie the diary.

  Even as I was sorting that out, I took note of Marina’s expression. Marina’s not exactly a high-fiver, but I was still expecting something more exuberant and positive than what was on her face. At least the kind of smile you see when your team leaves the field at halftime up 45–0. What I was looking at was the reverse: down 0–45, and your quarterback’s just been lugged off to the infirmary.

  When we sat down, I decided to let them have the opening bid, and looked expectantly from one to the other. After a short pause, Marina reached into her handbag and took out the memory stick I’d dropped off just a day and a half earlier. She placed it carefully on the coffee table, then gave me a warm smile, and said: “Chauncey, you’re right. This is potentially the greatest gift—the greatest scoop—any journalist has ever been offered. You make Deep Throat look like chopped liver.” She paused, and I knew at once that bad news was on its way, and I could guess what it had to be. She was turning me down.

  I’ll give her credit. She looked uncomfortable when she told me that she feels she simply can’t do this, that in her opinion it will tear the country apart, and she doesn’t want to be the agent of its destruction. “Forty years ago,” she said, “it was different. Watergate fell on differently tuned ears. The country still had a modicum of community left. There was a kind of civic pride that kept things together. A kind of common purpose, you might say; a consensus, an agreement—admittedly vague—about what this country is supposed to be like and who’s entitled to what. Today there’s none of that left.”

  She let that sink in. Artie just sat there, keeping a poker face, but his body language declared that he was on board with Marina’s thinking. I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat there, too. Now will come the conciliatory bit, I found myself thinking. And I was right.

  “Chauncey, your diary is pure gold, journalistically speaking,” she went on. “If anything can stand up to the money that’s poisoned our politics, it could only be something like what you have. Your journal certainly clears up a number of things I’ve had trouble with. I could never understand how the candidate—what do you call him, ‘OG?’—suddenly came by all that early money in 2007 and 2008. One minute his people were in the streets with tin cups, the next he had money coming out of his ears to the point that he could walk away from public financing. It looked legit, all those small contributions, but when you think about it, the final number—around $750 million, $25 for every person in the country—seems out of whack.

  “The Winters and Holloway appointments never made any sense to me, either, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand how someone like Brewer got her job in the Justice Department and then kept it. Everything she did and said about Wall Street prosecutions flew right in the face of what the president had talked about in his campaign. And I’ve often wondered how exactly Struthers Strauss got bailed out of its GIG trades. Or how Polton slipped the noose on that Protractor deal. Then there’s Greece: why Struthers hasn’t been punished for helping them pull a fast one on the EU, Zeus only knows. I don’t suppose you have the answer to that?”

  I shook my head. I still had no idea what to say.

  “So I’m flattered that you think enough of me to give me first dibs. If I took your material to David Remnick, I’m sure The New Yorker would devote an entire issue to it. I think Graydon Carter would give his eyeteeth to publish it in Vanity Fair. You and I would be on every talk show you can think of, and you’ll surely be asked to testify to Congress.”

  I hadn’t thought of this. The idea of having to face a panel of the peckerwood troglodytes committed to put Wall Street’s and the GOP’s well-being ahead of the people made me shiver, even as I heard Marina finish: “You could probably get seven-figure bids from publishers for the book rights, Michael Lewis money. Bob Woodward would jump at this!”

  “This isn’t about the money, Marina. You know me better than that.”

  “Look,” I said in a voice that didn’t sound pleading. “I know there are great journalists out there. But as much as I admire people like Taibbi, I don’t know them. This is an all-time hot potato, and I can only give it to someone I trust to cover my ass. I betrayed the voters when I cut the deal with Orteig, and now I’m proposing to betray the people in whose interest I acted. That’s a shitload of betrayal for one little guy to be lugging around. Hell, it could get me killed. I need to feel comfortable with whoever I do this with, and with us WASPs, comfort begins and ends with old acquaintance.”

  This made her smile. I started to continue, but Artie stepped in and cut me off: “Chauncey, it isn’t just generalities. There are specific practical, political reasons for not making this public. Right now the GOP is flailing about. They need a cause. They’d like nothing better than to impeach the president. Your diary will give them the ammunition they crave.”

  “Why should it?” I wanted to know. “Impeachment is for bad stuff that goes down in the White House. When I cut my deal, this guy wasn’t even a nominee.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  She looked over to Artie, who took up the thread: “The truth is that OG hasn’t been all that bad a president, considering the obstacles he’s faced. But he needs—the country needs—to see him finish strong.”

  “He let Wall Street off the hook,” I objected. “And what about health care? It’s a mess.” I was going to go down swinging. It’s my diary after all, and maybe Marina had a point: these weren’t the only two fish in the sea. At least that’s what I told myself at that moment.

  “Nobody can say whether the ACA’s working or it isn’t,” Marina argued. “Health care’s like Dodd-Frank. Once the lobbyists got through with it, no sentient human being could understand how it works, really. But people seem satisfied on the whole. Or at least, a great many people who didn’t have insurance are now covered. The GOP claimed the costs would skyrocket, but that hasn’t happened.”

  The fact was, I don’t know enough about health care to argue one way or the other. “OK,” I said, “give him the benefit of the doubt on health care. But what about foreign policy? You can’t tell me that’s not a total mess.”

  “You’re talking about the Middle East,” Artie said, “but that’s a Gordian knot that Metternich, Bismarck, and Talleyrand combined couldn’t have unscrambled. He who was our ally on Monday in Syria is fighting us to the death on Tuesday in Yemen. Mistakes have been made, no doubt, but you have to ask yourself: who could have done better?”

  “What it comes down to,” Marina interjected, “is this: your diary can cripple this administrat
ion, what little time it has left. But is that what we really want? Arthur’s right; it’s highly likely that releasing your journal will move the GOP to bring an impeachment bill. It’ll be a straw man, but it will burn up vast amounts of political energy. And I will guarantee you that this president won’t cave the way Nixon did. He’s not a drinker, and he isn’t exactly full of self-pity. He’ll never agree to give in to people he holds in utter contempt. The government truly will grind to a halt. Nothing will get done.”

  “It seems me to that nothing gets done as it is,” I responded. Weakly, honesty compels me to add.

  Marina now took the debate in a whole other direction. I was having trouble keeping my thoughts organized. “Chauncey, you have to be pleased with yourself for what you accomplished,” she told me. “You were given a job; you did it—and did it wonderfully well. But has it occurred to you that your dealings with Orteig may have been only one of a series negotiated with the 2008 campaign? Has it occurred to you that yours might not have been the only $75 million moved into the campaign in return for understandings concerning other spheres of business? He raised over $800 million overall.

  “Just think about it,” Marina continued. “Wall Street’s just one of many hogs at the trough. Look at Big Pharma and the health insurance companies and what they stand to milk out of the Affordable Care Act. You can hear them licking their lips from here to Capitol Hill. You think they were handed that for nothing? Why do you think health-care stocks keep reaching new highs? And what about the trillions in untaxed profits the big companies and wealthy individuals have stashed overseas? The legislation that protects these would be worth a great deal more than $75 million to the 1 percent, wouldn’t you think? There would have to have been fixes put in all over the place. You may have just been one—and not a very big one at that.”

  This is something that’s bothered me from time to time since I carried out my mission for Mankoff. It might be flattering to consider myself the only game in town, the man who fixed the World Series. But how could I be sure? I frankly found the inference hard to take. Still, I had to concede that while the notion might be demeaning, it was also possible. Would Mankoff have done that to me?

  Of course he would. That’s why he was Mankoff.

  “And think of what Fox News—people like O’Reilly and Hannity—will do with your diary,” Artie now added.

  I was starting to feel like the shuttlecock in a game of badminton. “Those people are liars,” I said. “No one I know listens to them.” Even to my own ears I didn’t sound convincing.

  Marina: “No one except half the country. The half the three of us don’t know. The half I don’t write for because I know they refuse to read me. The half with guns. Just imagine how they’ll react, given the excuse. You think this will change their minds about anything? It’ll only fan the flames. There could be blood in the streets. Is that what you want?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  And I’m not. Or I wasn’t—not at that moment. Tomorrow, when I’ve had a chance to think this all through, I may change my mind. One thing I’m sure of, though: Marina’s not going to change hers. She’s out. For reasons I would only learn about later from Artie, reasons I have to respect even if I think the hand I’ve offered her is stronger than the hand she’s chosen to play.

  Anyway, we wore out the subject for the next hour, arguing up one side and down the other. At one point we got into a circular discussion about how my disclosures would prompt some smart lawyers to bring a class-action suit, the way they did against BofA and Citi, collecting multibillion-dollar multiples of the piddling multimillion-dollar settlements Uncle Sam extracted. If they could figure out whom to sue, that is. The government, for inadequate vigilance with respect to the electoral process? Mankoff’s estate? Me? I do well enough, but I’m not good for that kind of money.

  In the end, they wore me down and I ran up the white flag. I know I’ve mentioned in this diary how I was trained in various schools to lose gracefully, a concept that’s next to blasphemy in twenty-first-century America, so when I finally accepted that I might potentially be responsible for the destruction of a polity that had lasted for two centuries, I broke out the champagne and we drank to principle—another notion that’s not exactly prospering in the way we live now.

  When it came time to part, all that could be said having been said, Artie asked if he could stay behind. He had something else he wanted to discuss with me, he said. Marina gave him a suspicious look, but what could she do? We embraced at the door, and I promised to give B a big hug for her. We swore eternal fealty, that this would make no difference to our friendship, and I think the feeling is genuine on both sides.

  “Well,” I said when I returned to the living room, “that was a surprise. I was flabbergasted to see Marina chicken out like that. You don’t get many chances in this life to do someone a favor that’s a real game-changer, and here I thought I was doing just that. Handing Marina the keys to the kingdom, the goddamn gold of the Nibelungs and Aladdin’s lamp all at once, not to mention a sure-thing Pulitzer Prize, and she turns me down flat.” I eyed him suspiciously, then added, “Something’s going on, isn’t it? You going to tell me what that something is?”

  “There is,” Artie answered. “She’s sworn me to secrecy, but I suspect she knows I’d tell you anyway, so here we go. Marina has a conflict of interest that she’s not at liberty to disclose to you, but which I, as your friend, feel I should.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Have you heard anything about something called the Rediscovery Initiative?”

  “Only vaguely.” Scaramouche had mentioned it in his final letter, but frankly, I hadn’t understood the reference, and hadn’t bothered to look it up.

  “I’m not surprised. For the moment, it’s very hush-hush. I trust you know who Merlin Gerrett is, but are you aware that he has a sister?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Her name is Circe. Apparently their father had a thing for sorcerers and sorceresses. Anyway, it seems that Circe Gerrett is a kind of philosopher queen who lives a reclusive life in the Rockies. Somewhere in Montana. She has a big influence on her brother—she owns a huge position in his company through a series of trusts—and she’s convinced him that the only way this country can be saved from itself is if enough good big money can be persuaded to go up against bad big money. Just like we discussed at lunch all those years ago.”

  “Bad big money, like the Dreck brothers?”

  “Exactly. Hence the Rediscovery Initiative. ‘Rediscovery’ as in helping America rediscover its founding principles.”

  “In other words, a third party?”

  “Not quite. Maybe, in time, but for the moment it’s a bunch of ideas the Gerretts believe the electorate, from both sides of the aisle, can be convinced to buy into. It’s a political philosophy that’s the direct opposite of what the Drecks and people like them believe. They believe in top-down control of the political economy: by buying politicians, basically. The idea the Gerretts are backing argues that the way to go is through bottom-up reclamation. Brother and sister are committing $2 billion at first, and they’ve already signed up Bloomberg, along with some very big Seattle money, and a bunch of Silicon Valley heavy hitters.”

  I had to sound skeptical. “ ‘Bottom-up reclamation’?” I responded. “Are you kidding? In this country? Now? When the 1 percent have everything nailed down and to their liking and the lower brackets are fighting each other for crusts.”

  Artie smiled. “Cynicism doesn’t become you, Chauncey. Just hear me out. Have you heard of Benjamin Barber? He’s a CUNY professor who wrote a book called If Mayors Ruled the World. Its thesis is that reform politics and sensible government must be local to really take hold, and that it should be built around mayors. Circe Gerrett read it, was impressed, and got her brother to read it; he was impressed, too, and when they decided to go ahead with this Rediscovery Initiative they also decided to make the “Barber plan” a core program. They’re recru
iting 200 mayors who represent a cross-section of America: high-tech, Rust Belt, college towns, dirt-road hamlets, urban sprawl, you name it. And Marina’s writing the manifesto.”

  “How did she get involved?”

  “It seems that Circe Gerrett’s a big fan of her writing. She reached out to our friend to head up the Initiative’s communications end. As it happens, she caught her at just the right moment: Marina’s decided to switch voltages. She’s concluded that tearing-down journalism isn’t doing any good. The bad guys are too entrenched; they just get up, dust themselves off, and go about their business.”

  This wasn’t a surprise. Words rarely work: to do the job properly you need sticks and stones and they cost money.

  “The way she puts it,” Artie went on, “is that even before the Gerretts popped up on her radar, she’d decided to get out of the Chicken Little business. She was just plain tired of writing bad stuff about terrible people. And then like an answered prayer, Circe Gerrett calls and offers her this job.”

  “You know what they say about answered prayers?”

  “I’m going to choose to ignore that. It’s a job with tremendous access; I gather that the remuneration is terrific, not that money has ever mattered to Marina, and it jibes perfectly with her present state of mind. But for the Initiative to take hold, the country needs to be relatively calm—that is, in no more than its usual uproar, and certainly not in the hysterics your revelations are likely to set off.”

  “I see.” And I think I did. And I had my doubts. You may think your boy Chauncey cynical when I say that the last thing the country needs right now is another one of those feel-good, do-good, save-the-nation causes with names like the Hamilton Project, which bien-pensant billionaires are always launching to show how imbued with civic and cultural virtue they are. On the other hand, $2 billion for openers? That’s serious money. Of course, the better angels of our nature, if there are any such creatures left, had best be billionaires.