The Latina President...and the Conspiracy to Destroy Her

by Joe Rothstein

  “Republican? You want me to appoint a Republican to the most important job in the cabinet?”

  “Don’t you love it? He’d get minimal opposition from the Republicans. The Democrats will squirm, but they can’t refuse your first appointment. The public will see you reaching across the aisle to end gridlock. And you’ll get a reformer as ferocious about it as we are. Tenny, one thing about us, you and I always have had fun together, no matter what. Consider it just another in our lifelong girlie pranks. I can’t wait until I’m at the New York Economic Club lunch where Phil first announces that he favors a return of Glass-Steagall, which I know for a fact he does.”

  Tenny pressed her friend Fish to take over the Interior Department. But Sheila Fishburne said she was perfectly happy being in Congress.

  “Here’s what you don’t know about the Interior job,” said Fish. “I’d have to defend land and resource policy that Alaskans hate. Nothing personal, but I’d much rather stay in Congress and fight you, and at the same time, of course, drop by now and then for a late-night nip so we can figure out how you can give me what I want.”

  Would Hal join her in Washington?

  “And give up running one of the biggest countries in the world? Our GDP’s bigger than India’s, Canada’s, Spain’s. I should be invited to those G whatever meetings your economic people put together. Tell you what, Tenny. You win a second term and then appoint me ambassador to Paris or London. Sally would love that. She’d preside at all those formal dinners like a queen.”

  Although many of Tenny’s closest friends were demurring appointments, she was finding strong talent compatible with her planned policy battlegrounds over the next few years. Most who agreed to enter her cabinet and other top jobs shared her sense of excitement and her passion.

  Two nights before inaugural day, a visitor slipped quietly into Blair House, late, near midnight. The rest of the household was asleep, except for those whose job it was to stay awake, alert, armed and trained to treat with aggressive ingratitude any uninvited guest who might spoil the tranquility of the evening.

  This visitor, however, was invited and expected. The guardians at the gate checked his credentials, escorted him to what would be his bedroom for the following four nights and bid him good evening. Then the front desk phoned the sleeping president-elect as instructed. She awoke quickly, splashed water on her face to wash away remaining elements of dream, donned a terry cloth robe over her night gown and hurried to the visitor’s door. He answered promptly. She threw her arms around him in an embrace so complete and so forceful it could have lasted forever.

  “Federico. Federico.” She kept repeating. “Oh, God, how I’ve missed you.”

  Federico returned her embrace. He kissed her forehead, a gesture he had performed so often in his lifetime, on so many occasions, for many people. No occasion fraught with more meaning and significance than the pending inauguration of his sister as president of the United States.

  Federico escorted her into his room, kissed the tears that had found their way down her cheeks, and said softly, “Bell, dear Bell, surely you must be tired. I’m so sorry to be here this late. You were so kind to send an airplane for me. But then there was a mechanical problem, and weather....”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’re here now. You’re hungry, I know. I’ll order food. I can do that you know.”

  They smiled at one another, a thousand thoughts racing at byte speed through their minds, flashes of his life and hers, such different voyages.

  “Tomorrow is soon enough. We will have time to talk then.”

  “No, I no longer belong to myself, Federico. I belong to a thousand people demanding my time. But they leave me alone now. This is our time. We’ll eat, we’ll drink, we’ll talk now. Until dawn if we want. No one will interrupt us.”

  Four years had passed since Tenny and Federico met in Tampico, Mexico, drawn together by concerns that someone, for some reason, was following Federico’s travels. Nothing had changed since then. More often than not, someone was watching Federico. Many of those Federico had ministered were asked the nature of their contact, what was said, what was promised. Federico was told of these encounters but had little concern. His work was to bless births, minister to the dying, teach children, renew faith in the faithful. He found sources of food when it was needed, provided medical assistance as he could, shared helpful information to villagers and did all that could be expected of a traveling Jesuit priest. In time, Tenny’s fears for him subsided, but not his for her.

  “I don’t want to spoil this wonderful occasion, Bell. You should know, though, that people have been asking questions about you. Not just curiosity questions. Questions such as exact dates you traveled to one city or another working for the Aragon company, or as a member of the United States Congress. Who you met with. Even sexual encounters. These all began soon after your election in November.”

  “Who’s asking? What people?”

  “I’m trying to find the source. It’s alarming, but some I believe are tied to the cartels.”

  “Drug cartels?”

  “Yes, drugs and more.”

  “More?”

  “The gun trade. Pay-offs to border officials. Assassinations. The worst people possible.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “After all my years of travel, Bell, I have many friends, many people who care about me and my safety. More than once I have been alerted to leave places that were about to become violent. Many criminals still respect the Church and my robes. They protect me. They talk to me.”

  “Why would they be looking for things about me? The election’s over. I’ve won.”

  “Maybe they fear what you will do now.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing I plan to do, Federico. I plan to spend much time in Mexico. I plan to become as known and popular in Mexico as in the United States. And with my influence, I plan to push the Mexican government to make the kinds of reforms that you and I have talked about for so many years. And I am going to restore the family’s good name.”

  “What a wonderful plan. You already are so very respected where I travel. Everyone asks me about you. But about that good name, Bell, don’t consider us orphans of a great family that died before our eyes. Papa Miguel told that great family story to us so often, and with such feeling. But it’s not true.”

  “Not true! How can you say that?”

  “I’ve done my own research during these past few years. Queen Isabella had people burned to death for failure to convert to Christianity. She expelled all Jews from Spain, most leaving behind all their possessions. It was a fifteenth-century holocaust. As for King Ferdinand, he was even worse. A liar, a thief. He promised Isabella on her death bed he would never marry again, but months later he did. He promised he would help his daughter assume the throne but then plotted to have her confined as mad. No, Ferdinand of Aragon should be no one’s role model. You, however, dear Bell, now have power such as Isabella and Ferdinand never dreamed. You will be a wise and humane ruler. But do it for now, for the living, not for the ghosts of the past.”

  

  The next day, four blocks west of Blair House another meeting, another reunion of sorts. Blue Bankcorps’ CEO Jack Hurley entered Javier Carmona’s suite at the Ritz Carlton hotel. Both were in Washington to attend the inaugural.

  “A cordial?” Carmona, displayed a bottle of Dalmore 21, which Hurley immediately recognized as one of the world’s most desirable Scotch whiskeys.

  “Not usually an afternoon drinker,” said a grateful Hurley. “But for Dalmore I’ll make an exception.”

  “Good. To your health and continued good business fortune.”

  “I guess whether we have continued good fortune depends on the new lady in the White House. Sorry I doubted you when you warned us. She’s tough.”

  “So now we must take a bit more extreme measures to destroy her popularity with the people and your Congress. “You have ways to influence members of Congress and the American m
edia?”

  “Yes, of course. Through our own people, through the association, the chamber. We spend millions at it and are really good at it.”

  “Very good. Then we will have to open channels between us. I will designate one of our most trusted people as a contact on my side. We will need one on yours. I’m also in touch with those we met with at Davos and others. Among us we will have a campaign that makes the very popular President Tennyson quickly a very unpopular and disgraced idol. If we do our work well, we can defeat her. If we do it very well, maybe we can see the last of her before her four years in office are over. We certainly cannot allow her to win re-election.”

  “Can you fill me in on what you have on her?”

  “It’s best that I don’t say now. But let me assure you, you provide a way to make the stories known and to insure that members of your Congress interfere with her success. I will arrange the scandals.”

  26

  While not all Tenny’s prescriptions for future policy were popular, her intensity advancing them was. The country was aching for strong leadership. Now it stood before them in the person of a woman whose eyes glowed with energy seeking an outlet, a lightning bolt ready to touch down, a passion that flooded stages wherever she appeared.

  Years earlier, after arriving in Congress where “why do they call you Tenny?” was a predictable, pervasive question, Isabel Aragon Tennyson decided to learn more about Alfred Lord Tennyson, the Victorian era poet whose name she shared. She was surprised that many of his words could have been hers. And she began using them.

  Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” particularly its opening passage:

  Half a league, half a league,

  Half a league onward,

  All in the valley of death

  Rode the six hundred.

  "Forward, the Light Brigade!

  "Charge for the guns!" he said:

  Into the valley of death

  Rode the six hundred.

  Another Tennyson favorite was the closing line from Ulysses:

  “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

  The hot breath of her campaign had swirled the political winds of national opinion in her direction, sweeping up Democratic Party candidates who otherwise might have been left behind. When the final votes were counted, the Democrats controlled the Senate. The House remained in Republican hands, but reduced to just a slim five-vote majority. Not only had the Republicans lost dozens of House seats, those who lost were mostly right-wing zealots who for years had been obstacles to compromise. Twenty-two of the Republicans who survived represented districts that gave Tenny comfortable vote majorities. Those members could not afford to be total obstructionists. To extend their own political careers, many Republicans would have incentive to work with the new White House and the Democrats in Congress.

  Tenny rode into office with an economy surging and world conflicts becalmed after a run of tempestuous years. This allowed her a wider range of focus. She had big plans to convert this good fortune into a fast start. As soon as the final blue state reported its election returns, sealing her victory, Tenny switched off her political circuits. She disappeared behind a wall of Secret Service protection and into a vortex of transitional issues and top-level team selections.

  Ben had not seen Tenny since the raucous election night party in Los Angeles. That’s when she claimed her victory from a platform at the fifty-yard line of Pasadena’s Rose Bowl. More than 100,000 filled the stadium. Outside, hundreds of thousands more watched on giant Jumbotrons. Ben wanted no job, no part of the transition effort. He was neither surprised nor offended that his candidate had abruptly become inaccessible after more than a year of constant mind melds with her. He was impressed by the quality of the people Tenny was appointing and by the policy initiatives taking shape. What concerned him was the thin political depth in her appointments, a lack of interest in keeping the political organization together or transferring that organization’s assets and still-potent voter reach to the Democratic National Committee.

  On inaugural eve, for one last time, they assembled at Blair House, the key campaign staff, state managers, top fund-raisers, and others who had just donated a year of their lives to helping President Tennyson take up residence at the White House. Ben knew this would give him a rare chance to spend a few moments alone with Tenny. His carefully rehearsed warning went like this:

  “The first few weeks and months are critical. The longer you can keep the glow of the campaign burning, the deeper the impression it makes. It fortifies you for later, when you put your popularity to the test with inevitable contentious policy battles. For those battles, you need campaigns as well-planned and executed as the one that elected you. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both took nasty hits their first year because they dropped their guard.”

  Tenny listened to Ben’s advice then grabbed his arm and escorted him into a small office away from the rest of the party.

  “Ben,” she said, “I ran and got elected to do things. I hope we manage to do a lot of things, but I’ll judge myself by just two. The first year we get immigration. It’s way too personal for me to fail. Whatever it takes, we’re going to get it. And when that’s done, we’re going to break up the capitalist system we have now.”

  “Break up the capitalist system?”

  “I’m aiming high, Ben. The whole financial system’s become rotten and it’s rotting the political system. We’ve got to get control of it before it tears the country apart.”

  “Well we beat them at the election game this year despite ....”

  She didn’t let him finish. Tenny was a passionate woman, and her passion was clearly aroused.

  “Ben, rigging elections, media monopolies, control of the regulators, hiding from taxes, all of that. Worst of all, turning the public against their own government and convincing way too many people that government’s a problem, not a resource.

  “Do you know what we’re becoming? We’re becoming a nation of customers and shareholders, not citizens. Think of the danger in that. It’s all based on money, not community, not pride. If business does it, it’s good. If government does it, it’s bad. Why pay taxes since government just wastes it and screws things up. Business should run everything—the schools, the health system, the Social Security system, all the utilities, the airports, the FAA, the national parks. Just get out of the way and let the markets—oh, those efficient markets—decide what’s best.

  “How long since you’ve gone through the visitor’s center at the Capitol? Or the National Archives, or the memorials to Lincoln and Jefferson and FDR and MLK on the Mall? I took dozens of groups from California around personally when I was in Congress. You look at the exhibits and see the movies and it all makes you incredibly proud. Common good. Common purpose. No matter how many times I’d go to those memorials and exhibits, or just see them, I’d choke up. I still do. Not only because I believe in our common purpose, because I’m so concerned we’re losing it.

  “I’ve lived a good share of my life where democracy doesn’t work right. I used to look past it because I was okay. Not my problem. But then my brother Federico opened my eyes and I saw it was my problem. And then I had an experience I may tell you about some time that showed me what happens when economic power gets out of control. And then I worked those years in L.A. with Hal and on my own and saw things every day that made me ask why? This is personal for me, too, just like immigration. I’m putting together a plan to stop what happened in Mexico from happening here. We’re a nation of citizens, not customers or shareholders.”

  Ben looked at her curiously. This was a Tenny he had never seen. Sure she was a fireball in campaigns and a terror in Congress. But all that focused on specific issues. Immigration. Health. Housing. Now he realized that this woman had set her sights on something far more ambitious: to change the national culture, or more accurately, to return the culture to those times seen mostly in war and national disaster when something else emerged, a sense of self, of
place, participation, custodians of a revolution, where people think and act together for common good and purpose.

  “What you’re talking about, Madam President, is a campaign against nearly every entrenched powerful institution in the country. Not to be disrespectful, but you can’t hope to win a campaign like that by winging it. We have the advantage of time. We should use it to recruit, to plan to organize. “

  She had been semi-pacing as she spoke, agitated and exhilarated, both emotions powering her legs, arms, voice. Now she stepped right up to Ben and embraced him, hard.

  “I love you, Ben. I really do. You’re brilliant. You’re decent. You’re honorable. I’m proud to have been with you these past years.”

  She kissed him on the lips and then backed away, holding one of his hands.

  “I did everything you told me to do during the campaign. When to wake up, when to go bed. When to smile and when to feign concern. I read your words as my own in speeches. I even gagged on Rusher. We did everything except have sex. Physical sex, that is. Mentally we bonded as tightly as two people can. I was on your turf. You were the expert. And you were right. I wouldn’t have won without you. Hell, I wouldn’t even have run for Congress, the Senate, or president if you hadn’t set it all up and been so convincing.

  “But now the political campaign’s over. My days of partisan political elections are over. I’ll do anything for you. Just ask. But what you’re suggesting I see as a huge distraction from where I am now. “

  “But, Madam President, it doesn’t have to be...”

  She cut him off in mid-thought.

  “For Christ’s sake, quit calling me that. For the rest of the world I’m Madam President. And I’ll insist on that. For you I’m Tenny. I’ll insist on that, too. Now I have to get back to the others or they’ll think we are having sex in here. Ben, your work is done. Relax, read, travel, write books. Help more good people get elected or stay elected. If I run into trouble I’ll call you, but for now, and I hope forever, I’m out of the political pool.”