Wilson was a decorated combat pilot who, as a midwestern congressman, became known as his party’s steadiest antiwar voice. He was a conservative on some issues, liberal on others, but refused to be typecast as either.
Criticized by his party for refusing to join the rank and file, he ran as an Independent and won three more terms in the House and then a seat in the U.S. Senate. Wilson switched parties yet again when he ran for the presidency. Even his campaign platform bucked Democratic and Republican stereotypes with unorthodox positions on gun control, abortion, the death penalty, and drugs.
Wedge issues that defined lesser politicians set Wilson apart as a freethinking maverick. He was passionate about stem cell research but pushed hard for returning the Pledge of Allegiance and prayer to public schools. He was an environmental hawk who railed against the hypocrisy of not relying on our own oil preserves. He was an antiwar dove, although he warned of a “global fascist awakening.”
Voters have an affection for maverick outsiders that’s almost as strong as the contempt felt for mavericks by Washington insiders. Things did not go smoothly for Kal Wilson when he and his renegade administration arrived inside the Beltway.
By the fourth year of his term, the man’s star was flickering. “Unorthodox” had been redefined as “inept.” His administration had brokered a cease-fire in the Middle East but been blamed for Central America’s instability, particularly the countries bordering the Panama Canal.
Wilson’s main adversary had been Juan Rivera, a man I came to know well during my years in the region. Rivera was a Fidel Castro-style revolutionary who publicly, and repeatedly, outmaneuvered the American president, contributing to the perception that Wilson was weak.
When Wilson changed the phrase “global fascist awakening” to “global fascist fundamentalism,” it was perceived as a ploy to boost his approval rating. When he stopped referring to terrorists as “Muslim extremists,” insisting that “Islamicist killers” was more accurate, he drew fire from both parties in our politically correct Congress.
It got worse when a reporter from Al Jazeera television asked him to explain the difference between “Islamicist killers” and “Zionist killers”-an impossible question because of the way it was couched-but Wilson answered, anyway.
Zionists, he said, believe a Jewish state should exist in the world. Islamicists, he continued, believe that the world should exist as an Islamic state.
“Are they both killers?” the reporter pressed.
Wilson bulled ahead. “An interesting distinction. Killing women and children at a bus stop or in a Nazi concentration camp-or at the federal building in Oklahoma City, for that matter-should be referred to as ‘murder.’ They aren’t acts of war. They’re acts of cowardice.
“So ‘fascist fundamentalism’ would be a more accurate term when used generally. ‘Islamicists’ would be the specific that describes murderers who use religion as a shield.”
Kal Wilson, the “freethinking dove,” was vilified as a bigot and a warmonger, and he effectively alienated fundamentalists of all faiths.
It had something to do with a bounty being offered for his head.
The silhouette dozing in the front of the canoe was the president of the United States…
As my mind lingered on the complex personality that was Kal Wilson, I sometimes paused to remind myself what the man had achieved, trying to counterbalance his unpresidential snoring.
Why wouldn’t he snore? He was human… one of six billion members of our species who, at that very instant, were inhaling or exhaling, making respiratory noises, as the earth orbited through the silent universe that blazed above our canoe.
He was flesh and finite; an ordinary man. As a man, though, he had lived an extraordinary life.
Wilson was among the youngest men ever elected to the presidency. He’d upset an incumbent, served one turbulent term, then shocked the country by not running for a second.
“Our reasons,” he said, “are personal”-the plural “our” referring to his wife, who, he often said, was the smarter half of their two-person presidency.
At a news conference, a famous anchorman referenced Wilson’s fifty-seven percent approval rating, before pressing, “Is it because you and the First Lady fear that you’ve polarized the American people?”
Wilson’s reply was measured and presidential-he never lost his poise in public.
Offstage, though, an unseen microphone caught what he whispered to his wife: “What I fear is polarizing the American press by smacking one of those pompous assholes in the face. Most of them are spoiled brats born with silver spoons up their asses. That’s why feeding people a line of crap comes so natural.”
Like most presidents, Wilson had run-ins with the media. But his “spoiled brat” line so endeared him to the public that the media retaliated by attacking as a pack. “Personal reasons” wasn’t explanation enough for not running, so the press speculated. Theories made headlines based on shock value, not fact, and they ranged from the offensive to the grotesque.
Wilson never fired back, though. A distant descendant of Woodrow Wilson, he’d become an expert on the office long before he held it, and he was fond of stiff-arming reporters by quoting his predecessors instead of allowing his own words to be twisted. He remained in the background, refusing comment on world affairs, and taking pains not to second-guess the current administration.
An example: Wilson, a track star and boxer at the Naval Academy, made headlines by winning his over-fifty age group in a Chicago triathlon, but then quit the sport. Characteristically, he offered no explanation, but friends said it was because he felt it wasn’t in the nation’s best interest to divert the spotlight from a sitting president.
Even out of office, Kal Wilson remained presidential. He stayed cool -cold, some said. The exception was when he denounced the media for not running the Danish editorial cartoons that sparked riots.
Tomlinson was wrong when he told me the incident was after Wray Wilson’s plane had crashed but right about the former president becoming more outspoken in the weeks after her death.
Wilson began using the term “Islamicists” and “Nazis” as synonyms.
He referred to the Islamic cleric who offered a bounty for his head as a “failed paperhanger” who didn’t have the courage to look an enemy in the eye-an obvious comparison to Adolf Hitler.
In an interview with BBC television, Wilson warned that the United Kingdom, Holland, France, and Germany, through their policies of appeasement, were “providing the knife and whetstone” that Islamicists would use to cut Europe’s throat.
He said, through the “dangerous charade” called “political correctness,” the United States was doing the same.
Both political parties began a subtle process of distancing themselves from Wilson. Newspaper editorials hinted that his thinking had become “unsound” as a way of explaining why they now refused to quote the man.
“Even former presidents sometimes need editing,” an editorial suggested.
“Censorship through intimidation,” Wilson responded, “is the first objective of tyranny. Once accomplished, the truth is easily perverted to serve the tyrant’s goals.”
For the first time in his career, Kal Wilson was criticized for behavior that was unpresidential.
Did Wilson believe there was a link between the million-dollar bounty and the former First Lady’s death? In the next few days, I would find out.
That was one reason I’d felt disappointed when I thought the trip was canceled. Another was that it was my chance to find out how Wilson was different. It interested me as a biologist and as a man. Extreme environments catalyze extreme adaptive mechanisms. By virtue of having inhabited the White House, Wilson was unlike other men.
But how?
I thought about it as I banged the canoe through the Intracoastal’s rough water into the slick, moon blue shallows. It was a question made more interesting because the man was a few feet away, motionless but no longer snoring.<
br />
Had the office elevated him? Or only isolated him?
Both, I guessed.
All U.S. presidents are awarded a place in history, but the spatial corridor is limited-eight years or less. What happened before is historical context. What happens afterward is postscript. A president’s life is defined by the office, then cast in bronze, often long before the man’s death. Typically, the life of a former president consists of a long, polite silence that ends with a bugler’s farewell.
Did ex-presidents chafe at inactivity? At the perception they are the walking dead?
Maybe that’s why Wilson was determined to spend his final days as a free man. He was a cool one, sometimes cold. But history’s bronze statue still had a beating heart, a warrior’s soul. A river flowed beneath the ice.
I liked that.
But he wasn’t an easy man to get along with, as I was learning.
“You could’ve cut off five, maybe ten minutes if you’d pointed us a few more degrees south. Get sloppy like that in an F-14, you could end up in Austin instead of Boston-if the pencil pushers hadn’t retired that beautiful machine.”
Wilson hadn’t spoken for half an hour. I thought he was still asleep.
I continued paddling, the island now so close I could smell the salt pan musk of cactus and sea oats. “I played it safe. We’re only a couple hundred yards north of where you told me to land.”
“A quarter mile, is more like it. But that’s okay. That must be the cabin-do you see it?” As he stretched, he used his paddle to point at a shadowed geometric set back from the water. Its tin roof was ivory, the windows glazed. “We can lay in close to shore and no one will see us take our gear inside.”
He was concerned for a reason. A few hundred yards down the beach, the bonfire was encircled by a cluster of men and women, their shadows huge. Some were dancing; others sat shoulder to shoulder, their faces golden masks.
I said, “Are you sure you want to risk landing where there’re so many people?”
“I told you before, I don’t think the public’ll recognize me. And if they do? Well… it’s better I find out now.” He tilted his head for a moment. “Why the hell are they doing that, you think? Banging away at this hour?”
The beach people were pounding drums… tin cans… plastic buckets, too, judging from the noise. They maintained a steady, low-resonance rhythm that, for a while, I’d mistaken for the rumble of ocean waves. It was 5:45 a.m. Sunrise was in an hour.
I said, “It’s called a ‘drum circle.’ A fad. People who normally wouldn’t give each other the time of day meet to play drums, usually on a beach around sunset. But this time of morning? It’s weird.” I paused, surprised by a sudden word association. Tomlinson’s face had jumped into my mind. “This friend of yours,” I said slowly, “how long have you known him?”
In the chiding manner of a football coach, Wilson said, “You’re an expert navigator who ignores shortcuts and a marine biologist who makes assumptions. I’m worried about you. Those are unexpected flaws in a man of your accomplishments.”
“Huh?”
“You made an assumption, Dr. Ford. When I said we were meeting a friend, you assumed it was my friend.”
He began to snub his backpack, getting ready to land, communicating the obvious through his aloof silence. It was worse than him saying it.
You assumed wrong.
Even though he was down the beach, I recognized Tomlinson’s scarecrow dancing as he juked his way to the center of the circle and took a seat on a log-Ray Bolger from The Wizard of Oz. He was barefoot, shirtless, wearing a pirate’s bandanna. The muscle cordage of his arms moved at languid angles as he slapped at an ebony drum angled between his knees.
A couple dozen people danced free-form around the fire to the beat of tambourines, cowbells, congas, Jamaican steel drums, water bottles, a surfboard, beer bottles, and at least one frying pan.
The former president seemed fascinated. “The reason they’re dressed like that… it’s because of Halloween?”
I said, “They’re Tomlinson’s friends, so I don’t think it would matter.”
Some wore full body paint: jaguars with breasts for eyes, or flowers, rainbow streaks, and bizarre tribal designs. A few were naked, others wore shorts and bikini tops. Those who weren’t painted wore costumes. It was a popular year for angels, demons, and Gilligan’s Island.
“I expected the place to be deserted. When he told me about Cayo Costa, I got the impression it hadn’t changed much in the last forty years. That it was still unpopulated.”
It was Tomlinson who’d also told the former president that he had friends who owned a cabin, that the cabin was empty, and where the keys were hidden.
“This isn’t typical. Except for weekends, Cayo Costa’s quiet.” Because Wilson had said still unpopulated, I thought about it for a moment. “You’ve been on this island before, sir?”
We were carrying our bags from the canoe to the cabin. He slowed. “A long time ago. Our first trip together, Wray and me. I’d graduated from the Academy the previous spring. We took the train from Maryland to Tampa, borrowed a buddy’s car, and drove to the Naval air base in Key West. Sanibel was on the way, so we spent a couple nights on the islands. We honeymooned on Useppa, the Barron Collier Room.”
That explained why he’d attended a party there.
It was too dark in the shadows to read his watch, but he glanced at it, anyway. “It was exactly forty-one years ago to the day that Wray and I came ashore here. Cayo Costa Island… only, back then, I’m certain it was called ‘La Costa.’ Palm trees and sand; not a human soul for miles. Pretty exciting for two hick kids just starting out. It was forty-one years ago, and”-he looked at his watch again-“forty-one years, plus… plus about an hour, that I… that we…” He caught himself; his pace quickened-getting too personal.
I let him move ahead. He was about to tell me that something important had occurred on this island between him and his late wife. They’d made a sunrise visit, probably shelling or picnicking. Today, November 1st, was their fortieth wedding anniversary, he’d told Agent Wren. Perhaps Wilson had chosen the same date, a year earlier, to propose. Here. On this island.
While he waited on the porch, I pushed the door open, then used my flashlight to hunt for lanterns and matches. “Did you tell Tomlinson you’d be arriving this morning?” I was as uncomfortable discussing personal matters as the former president. I was also anticipating being pissed off at Tomlinson for not having the cabin ready. I saw no food, no ice, and the generator wasn’t running. Typical.
But I was premature.
Wilson said, “No, he’ll be surprised. When he told me he knew of a secluded place, that it was available, I told him if I did show up it would be around the first of the month. He said his sailboat’s anchored somewhere nearby. We’d been discussing Zen meditation. I suggested that if things worked out, maybe we could go for a cruise.”
I’d seen Tomlinson’s old Morgan, No Mas, anchored off the beach, its hull pale as a mushroom in the moonlight, bow pointing water light into the tide.
“A cruise,” I said. “Meaning his boat’s ready, provisioned with food and supplies.”
“I assume so.”
“You told me to do the same thing. Have my truck ready.”
Wilson placed his duffel bag on a table as I filled a Coleman lantern with fuel. “It’s good to have options. We may need your truck before we’re done.”
“Did you tell him to bring a passport and block out a week or two, just in case?”
The president said, “Tomlinson doesn’t strike me as the type who keeps a calendar.”
“I think you know what I’m getting at, sir. You said you knew things about Tomlinson that would surprise me. Did you offer him the same deal you offered me?”
Wilson was unpacking a shaving kit, a towel, a photograph in a brass frame, positioning them neatly. He didn’t reply.
I struck a match. The lantern hissed, filling the room with stark light. “
Am I allowed to read between the lines, Mr. President? Or maybe it would be easier if you just came out and told me what’s going on.”
“You’re supposed to call me ‘Sam.’ A slip like that with people around could cause problems.”
“Sorry, Sam. We’re taking Tomlinson’s boat, aren’t we? That’s not hard to figure out. But where? Tampa? Key West? You mentioned both. Is this some kind of farewell, sentimental journey? If it is, I understand. I’ll stick with you. But why involve Tomlinson?”
“You’re a perceptive man, Ford. I would like to revisit some places important to my wife and me. But I don’t have time. In fact, if we could press on right now”-he looked at the exposed beach, the falling water, his expression impatient-“I’d say let’s get going. Wray and I loved this part of Florida. It’s true. We had a lot of fun here. But you say the word ‘sentimental’ like it’s sweet. There is nothing sweet about what I intend to do”-he looked at me sharply-“or what I intend to ask you to do.”
“Then this is about your wife’s death. You believe she was murdered.”
“I believe it’s probable. Wray and six other good and decent people. One of her best friends was aboard that plane. A fellow we’d known since grade school who became a very fine plastic surgeon.”
“Do you have evidence?”
“It’s my opinion. My wife’s death wasn’t an accident.”
There was an intensity to his silence and something suggestive about the way he busied himself neatening his gear. Customs agents and cops learn to watch the hands. People who feel guilty use busywork to dissemble.
“You were supposed to be on that plane, weren’t you, sir?”
His hand came to rest on the photograph. It was facedown on the table. “That’s right.”
“It wasn’t mentioned in the news accounts.”
“No one knew. No one was supposed to know, anyway, and the media still hasn’t found out. I told the FBI, of course. They’re working on the investigation with an international team. It’s important for them to understand there was a motive.”
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