Senator

by Richard Bowker

  I didn't feel like asking her where my cuff links were. I went searching through bureau drawers, and in one of them I saw her gun.

  I hadn't thought about that gun in years. It was a Colt Python .357 Magnum, recommended to me by some cop when Liz decided she didn't feel safe with my going off to work every day as the chief law enforcement officer of the commonwealth. What if a mobster decided to get even with me? I couldn't really blame her, although I figured she had been in more danger when I was a defense attorney and occasionally lost a case that my scumbag client had expected me to win. She got her permit and practiced with the thing for a while, and then it found its way into a drawer and sat there, awaiting the crisis that had yet to arrive.

  Coming across it like that made me uneasy. The past hadn't really been simpler; there had always been danger lurking somewhere. And the danger still existed, waiting for us even as we ate pot roast and joked about our daughter's would-be boyfriend. I could live with it; in a way I thrived on it. But not Liz.

  Poor Liz. She had known what she was getting into when she succumbed to my blarney and married me, but she had gone ahead and done it anyway. And now she was crying in bed, and I was off again for another day of campaigning, and there seemed to be nothing she could do about it.

  I found my cuff links in the next drawer. "I'll be back late," I whispered as I finished dressing.

  Liz didn't reply.

  I went and kissed Kathleen good-bye, and then the long day began.

  Chapter 14

  Harold picked me up instead of Kevin, appearing out of the mist in his red Porsche. "What's the story?" I asked.

  "Kevin called and said he was sick," Harold replied. His tone of voice suggested that this behavior was totally unacceptable. He had a couple of coffees and a bag of doughnuts on the passenger-side seat. Did he know my favorite kinds, like Kevin?

  I moved the food onto the floor and got in. "Is it serious?" I asked innocently.

  "It better be. Let's go."

  He carefully made his way through the light early-morning traffic and onto Route 3, which took us down to Cape Cod. Everyone was going about twenty miles an hour faster than we were. It seemed ridiculous to be poking along the uncrowded highway in a sports car, but that was Harold, and I had known him too long to take much notice of his peculiarities. I handed him his coffee, and we drove in silence, trying to wake up. After a while he began prepping me: where we were going, who we were meeting, what I should say. There was a full day on the Cape ahead of me, followed in the evening by the main event back in Boston: a speech before the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Police Patrolmen's Association. Harold had the speech ready for me, and I glanced through it. I couldn't get interested.

  "The two of us on the road together—just like the old days," I said.

  Harold grimaced. "Don't get maudlin," he said. "There's too much work to be done for you to start reminiscing."

  "Except for the Porsche," I went on, ignoring him. "What did you have back then—a Dodge Dart or something?"

  "I had a Fiat, and I loved it."

  "You have to admit it was fun the first time."

  "It was fun because it was so easy," Harold said. "I wish it was that easy now."

  "If it had stayed easy, we'd be stale. You wouldn't have a challenge."

  "There are some challenges I don't need."

  Harold clearly wasn't about to wax nostalgic. So I did it without him.

  Harold White came into my life after the Everson trial, when Roger and I had more work than we could handle, and I was getting my first taste of glory and riches. He paid for an hour of my valuable time. When he showed up—in his blue blazer and gray slacks and bow tie—I tried to imagine why he needed a criminal lawyer. Securities fraud? Embezzlement? He had to be guilty of something, I assumed. "What can I do for you, Mr. White?" I asked.

  "I am a recent graduate of the Yale Law School," he began, "and—"

  I raised a hand to interrupt him. "If you're looking for a job, just leave your resume with my secretary. We'll get back to you if we're interested."

  "Mr. O'Connor," he said, "I have no intention of ever practicing law."

  "Well, good. That leaves the field wide open for guys like me that have to earn a living. If you don't want a job, you must be in trouble. So tell me about it."

  "It's not me who's in trouble, sir, but this state—and this nation. And you are the person who can save it."

  Harold never had any difficulty in thinking big. "How do you propose that I save the nation, Mr. White?"

  "You can begin by running for the Republican nomination for attorney general of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts."

  "I see. And do you represent the Republican party?"

  "No, sir. But I believe that if you so much as lifted an eyebrow as an indication of interest, the nomination would be yours."

  I thought about it. He was probably right. The state GOP in those days wasn't exactly crawling with people who wanted to run for the lesser constitutional offices. "So what's your stake in this?" I asked Harold.

  "I want to be your campaign manager."

  "Why?"

  "As I mentioned, Mr. O'Connor: I believe in you."

  "You don't even know me. You don't even know if I'm a Republican."

  "But in fact, I know a good deal about you, sir." And he then proceeded to recite virtually everything that was in the public record about me. He quoted from a speech I had made to some law students. He listed the candidates whose campaigns I had contributed to. He even knew about the time my grandmother had been mugged.

  "Well, I can see that you've done your homework," I responded. "But that still doesn't tell me why you believe in me."

  "Because I watched you during the Everson trial," Harold said. "And it was clear from your performance that you are destined for greatness. And I am enough of a judge of character to know that you feel the way I do about crime, about morality, and about civilization."

  I laughed. "I'm not sure I know how I feel about those things myself," I said. "Why don't you give me your opinions, and I'll see if I agree?"

  He nodded and settled in to give his lecture. "I believe that the only way America can hope to survive as a nation is by stopping its moral decline. Government can't make people better, it can't force people to be moral, but it can make sure that they take personal responsibility for their actions. And that means swift, sure punishment when they transgress the boundaries of civilized conduct."

  "People steal because they need to eat," I said in my argumentative fashion. "People do drugs because their lives are hopeless. Liberals would say you should be solving those problems instead of building more prisons."

  Harold waved away the liberals. "They are asking too much of government, and that's why their programs always fail. Government can't make people rich, and it can't make them happy. It can't make whites love blacks or Arabs love Jews. And it probably can't make the punks sitting across from you on the subway train leave you alone. But it might make the punks think twice about hassling you if they know they'll go to prison for it."

  "Sounds like you're proposing a police state. We already send a greater percentage of people to prison than almost anyplace else."

  "We're a violent nation," Harold replied. "That helped make us great, but it also threatens to destroy us. People fear those punks on the subway more than they fear some hypothetical foreign invader we spend billions protecting ourselves against. Why not spend as much protecting ourselves against the punks as we do on the military?"

  I shrugged. "Maybe because it's easier to protect ourselves against foreigners than it is to protect ourselves from each other. But anyway, I'm a criminal lawyer. A lot of people would say that guys like me contribute to this problem."

  "But you don't want to be a criminal lawyer, Mr. O'Connor," Harold replied. "You want to make a difference. And the best way of doing that is in government."

  "How do you know I don't want to be a criminal lawyer? If you followed the E
verson trial, you could at least see I'm pretty good at it."

  Harold simply shook his head. "You're just going to have to learn to trust me," he said.

  It was an amazing performance. I couldn't decide whether to laugh at him or be in awe of him. I didn't agree to run at the end of his hour, but I didn't charge him for the hour either. The cynical lawyer in me believed he was trying to snow me with his talk about saving the nation. He was really trying to land a job as a campaign manager, I figured, and to do that, he was trying to manufacture his own candidate. A clever idea, but not easy to pull off. Why would I give up the chance to make my fortune as a lawyer in order to go into politics?

  Except that he was right about me, damn it. Right, at least, about me and criminal law. I didn't want to help set more people like Paul Everson free. Was that a lucky guess on Harold's part? Cunning flattery? Or did he really understand me? I have always been inclined to believe that Harold White doesn't understand the first thing about me—and, furthermore, doesn't care. I am the clay he thinks he is sculpting; I am the empty vessel into which he has chosen to pour his own dreams and ambitions. If the clay thinks, if the vessel has dreams of its own, that is a trifling annoyance, an imperfection in the raw material.

  But I may be wrong. A lot of people have underestimated Harold over the years, thinking he is too cerebral, or simply too weird, to survive in politics. He has ignored them and done things his way, and no one—least of all me—can argue with the results.

  He certainly knew what to do after our first meeting. He went to the Republican leadership and told them he had interested me in running, but I needed convincing. The head of the State Committee met with me; Harold leaked news of the meeting to a friendly reporter, and the rumors started flying. Soon every Republican in the state (there weren't that many, actually) was importuning me to run.

  But if I ran—and I began to find the idea more and more appealing—why make Harold my campaign manager? I was a neophyte, and I would need a pro to guide me; Harold was just a kid. That's what I told him the next time we met. And that's when he produced his Master Plan.

  He had already written my position papers and my speeches. He had already mapped out the advertising campaign. He knew how much money we would have to raise and how we could raise it. He knew whose endorsements we needed and how we could get them. For two hours he led me through every step of the process by which he would make me the next attorney general.

  Perhaps a pro wouldn't have been impressed, but I was. I'm always impressed by good preparation. When I finally told the Republicans I was a candidate, Harold was part of the package.

  They handed me the nomination, and then there was just the little matter of defeating the Democratic candidate. His name was Francis X. Cavanaugh.

  Needless to say, handling the Everson prosecution turned out to be a major mistake for the Monsignor—especially when I entered the race. Everyone in the state knew his name now, but they knew him as the loser of the big case he was supposed to win. If the Democrats could have come up with another candidate for attorney general, I'm sure they would have. But Cavanaugh had laid his groundwork too well; he had the commitments from the delegates at the nominating convention, and the party bigwigs couldn't talk him into releasing them. They tried to get someone to run against him in the primary, but my reputation was already scaring potential candidates away. So they were stuck with Cavanaugh. He ran a straightforward, old-fashioned Democratic campaign: Get the union endorsements; get the big-city machines behind you; aim for the ethnic vote, the working-class vote, the intellectual vote. It worked when he ran for DA, and it might have worked this time. But he didn't have the money, he didn't have the charisma, and he didn't have Harold. He tried to make the case that he was the experienced prosecutor and I was just a flashy kid trying to capitalize on one fluke victory. No one listened. I had defeated him in the courtroom; I now proceeded to trounce him in the voting booth.

  It's easy enough to say that he should have dropped out of the race; he probably could have bided his time, let people forget about the Everson case, and won the job four years later, when I ran for the Senate. But a politician never knows when his opportunities will show up. If I hadn't been around, he might have been the one in the Senate now.

  I wonder if a day goes by when he doesn't think about that.

  At any rate Harold and I had started on the road to saving the nation. And here we were, ten years later, and we had traveled quite a distance. If we could only get past a roadblock named Bobby Finn, who knew how far we could go?

  The first event on the Cape was a disaster. How many businessmen wanted to attend a breakfast meeting early on a Saturday morning? No reporters bothered to come, and that was even worse. All the businessmen were going to vote for me anyway; at least the reporters might have spread the message to some people who were undecided. I gave a quick speech, drank some watery orange juice, shook a few hands, and got out of there.

  "Sorry," Harold murmured. "Have to have a word with the scheduling people."

  I didn't want to think about the tongue-lashing the scheduling people were in for. "That's the glamorous life of a politician," I replied. "What's next?"

  Next was a nursing home, where we had arranged an informal meeting with the senior citizens. A couple of radio stations covered it, and we had our own video crew there, in case we wanted to use footage for a spot. I talked about my grandmother, who raised me after my mother died, and my father, struggling to stay independent in his retirement, and it all went over very well. People don't necessarily demand that you agree with them; they do like it, though, when you can show that you understand and sympathize with their problems.

  No one brought up Amanda's murder, and I took that to be a good sign. If the issue was still alive in people's minds, then the media would not let me get my message out. They'd cover my response to the questions about it and ignore everything else I said or did.

  From there I went to talk to the members of a local elderly affairs council. They were a tougher audience. Why was I opposed to this bill? Why did I vote for that one? What solutions could I propose for every problem that old people faced nowadays? I regurgitated my position papers for them, but I knew I wouldn't be able to charm them. Finn would promise them heaven on earth, and he would get their endorsement.

  Next stop was lunch with the editorial board of a leading Cape Cod newspaper; its endorsement I was counting on. The board members brought up the murder, but mainly as a potential problem for the campaign. Did I think it was going to cause me difficulties?

  No, I honestly didn't.

  Would the Democrats try to keep it alive as an issue?

  You'd have to ask the Democrats about that. I certainly wouldn't want to see a murder investigation become politicized.

  After that, a couple of media events with local politicians. A fund raiser late in the afternoon on a CEO's estate overlooking the ocean. And then the long drive back to Boston for the speech.

  It was a typical day on the campaign trail. The pace can be killing, but you can't let up, you can't give in to your exhaustion, because your opponent is working just as hard as you are, and any of it can make the difference: the elderly vote; the Cape Cod vote; the sound bites chosen by some radio station; the endorsement of some newspaper. Carl Hutchins was undoubtedly back in his home state doing exactly what I was doing. I wondered where he would find the energy or the interest. He's in trouble, I thought. People sense it when you're tired, when you're going through the motions. At some level you can't just be acting; you have to believe in your role. And Hutchins no longer did.

  "How was I?" I asked Harold.

  "Okay." Harold didn't like to praise me; it might make me complacent. "You should be studying your speech."

  "Is Finn speaking tonight?"

  "He's probably delivering his oration at this very moment."

  "Do we have someone there to find out what he said?"

  "Of course."

  Stupid question. And h
ere was something else he would think was stupid: "Harold, I want you to put someone on Finn's war record."

  He glanced at me. "What in the world for?"

  I wasn't going to tell him about Everson, but I figured I didn't have to. The idea made sense on its own. "I'm vulnerable over Amanda's murder because I'm so big on morality and crime issues," I said. "Well, we can apply the same reasoning to Finn and his war record. He's supposed to be such a big hero, and he's so pro-military—well, if there's something bad in his record, that would really hurt him."

  "But why would there be something bad in his record?" Harold asked. "Finn's been around for years. People have looked at him pretty closely."

  "We're supposed to do things better than other people. Maybe we can find something no one else has been able to."

  "Sounds like a waste of time."

  "Humor me."

  He shrugged and studied the road. He would ignore my suggestion if he thought it was too stupid; he had done that before. But I had a feeling he'd go along. It didn't hurt to look, and Harold, like me, approved of being thorough. I would have agreed that it was a waste of time, except that Paul Everson didn't drop hints like that just for fun. And if there was something out there, we had to know about it.

  We got to the Hynes Convention Center in the Back Bay a few minutes before I was scheduled to speak, and Harold immediately found our campaign staffer, who briefed us on what had been going on. Good speech from Finn, warm reception from the audience. No mention of the murder case. Friendly faces surrounded me as I made my way toward the hall where I was going to speak—burly cops who believed in me, who in their own way loved me.

  I was on the up escalator when I saw Bobby Finn and his wife getting on the down escalator. "This is symbolic, Governor," I said as we passed.

  Finn laughed his hearty laugh. "You read too many books, Senator," he called out.

  He waited at the bottom of the escalator, looking up. I looked back at him, smiled, and took the escalator back down.