Remember when David Souter won confirmation to the Supreme Court? One of his best qualities was that no one knew anything about him because he was such a recluse and never wrote anything down. This is like that. In a media age when all we do is look for scandal, he didn't have any because his whole life was made up. And fortunately for him, we all found scandal in his opponent, so we were distracted."
I could hear Martin breathing heavily into the phone, playing out every angle of this story, every possible thing that could go wrong versus what might be right.
"You have it firm enough to go with?"
"No. But Hutchins has agreed to see me. I'm heading over there in about an hour."
"Is it safe for you to go?" Good question; Martin getting his bearings.
"Don't know, but it's even less safe not to go."
"All right. I'll be in the office when you get back. Be careful, and be good."
When I paged Drinker next, he returned the call before I could even lean back in my chair.
I said, "I need to speak with you soon. I'm ready to go with a story and want to go over some angles. You know as well as I do that I wasn't the intended target at Congressional. I'll give you one final chance to help."
He replied, sounding sincere, "Go ahead."
"No. In person. Meet me in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in twenty minutes. And just so you know, I've already written everything I know down and passed it on to my superiors. Don't fuck with me. It won't do anyone any good."
Maybe it was rude to leave him hanging in a hotel lobby on the night before this historic election. But maybe it was ruder still to kill Havlicek in cold blood, and try to kill me. Screw him.
I paused and ran my fingers over a picture I had in my luggage of Katherine, eight months pregnant, sitting at our patio table, her chin resting on the palm of her right hand, smiling at me. "This is it," I whispered. Then I snuck out the back, through the kitchen.
It was after dusk, chilly. I scanned the parked cars, checking to see if any of them pulled out and followed me as I walked, but none did. I had the feeling that death waited around every corner. I headed down Sixteenth Street with a baseball cap pulled low over my head and flanked by the two gentlemen I had assigned to protect me. I ducked into the Hay-Adams Hotel, just across Lafayette Park from the White House. I sat at the bar, ordered a Coca-Cola, and wrote out the lead to my story dozens of times on the keyboard of my mind, glancing constantly at the door all the while.
About forty minutes later, out the tall windows, I could see Marine One descending from the sky and disappearing from view to land on the South Lawn. One more time, I pulled my cap low, and hurried straight across the park at a pace that was closer to a trot than a walk. At any minute, I felt, my life could end. I also felt as if my destiny was out of my hands.
I arrived at the northwest gate, where I flashed my badge to a Secret Service agent. I felt safe on the White House grounds, maybe wrongly.
The agent buzzed me in with a bored nod. An interview like never before.
Truth be known, I didn't have anything close to what I needed to get this story into print. Like I said, I had the word of two admitted felons, one of whom was dead. I don't think even the National Enquirer would go to bed with this one.
So what I needed here, like a good cop trying to create an airtight case, was a confession. And just as a good detective uses the power of the law to scare the bejesus out of suspects, I needed to use the power of the written word to intimidate a president on the verge of his own election. I needed him to think that his fate had already been decided, at least in terms of the coverage in the Boston Record. I needed him to think about the inevitable onslaught to come, the media maelstrom that would follow my story, the classic feeding frenzy from which there would be no escape. I needed him to believe that the best and perhaps only way out was an honest admission of fault.
When I was led into the Oval Office, Hutchins was sitting at his desk in shirtsleeves and a crisp red tie loosened at his neck, the top button undone. He was alone. Dozens and dozens of lawyers and dozens more political advisers and newly minted friends in every corner of official Washington, and he chose on this evening to handle this topic alone, just as I suspected he would. That, in itself, was interesting.
He held a heavy lowball glass in his hand, and the glass was filled with about three fingers' worth of what looked to be whisky and ice.
As I sat in a chair in front of his desk, he nervously slid the glass around, causing the cubes to smash softly against each other. He brought the glass up to his face and absently took a sip.
"You believe in redemption?" he asked me, his voice deep, animated, breaking the heavy silence like a clap of thunder.
I considered that question for a moment and replied, "I do, sir.
There's something very human about it, something almost moral, and something uniquely American. We have the right to screw up. More important, we have the right to another chance, at least in most cases."
He pondered that for a minute, shook the ice around in his glass again, and took another sip.
"It's election eve," he said, looking me in the eye. "My pollsters informed me this afternoon that I'm going to win. You care for a celebratory Scotch?"
Why not? Create a mood of confidence, two men exchanging secrets. "If it's convenient, sir."
He pressed a button on the side of his desk, and a dark-skinned steward, Indian-looking, came silently through a side door. "Raj, get my friend a Johnnie Walker, please," Hutchins said. To me, "Rocks or no rocks?"
"No ice."
"Neat," he said to the steward, who turned and walked quietly out the door he came in. Hutchins called out after him, "Make it a double, Raj. We're celebrating."
After I got my drink, Hutchins bore into me with his eyes. "I watched you guys go after my opponent early in the campaign. Christ, what did he do? Fudge some information on his mortgage application or something ten years ago, and you guys try taking him down, try ruining his political career. You were throwing around half-truths and nontruths and buying into anything you were fed. I thought it was sickening then, but it helped me, so I kept my mouth shut. The guy, he wins his party's nomination. He's sacrificing his time, his livelihood, his fucking reputation. He's on the doorstep of the White House, for God's sakes. He's campaigning all over the country twenty hours a day for something he believes in, even if that something is only himself.
Christ, he should be applauded. He's part of the elite. And you guys won't cut him a break." He paused and laughed a breathy, bittersweet laugh to himself.
He looked down at his drink, took another sip, and continued. "And now here I am. I'm on the verge of winning the election. I'm going to get my own four-year term. Things are going all right. We're getting a good team in place, even if you're not on it. The economy's doing well. Wall Street breaks a new record every other day. And you guys, you're bored. You're fucking bored. You need something else, something to get your teeth into. So you turn on me because that's just what you do. You can't help yourselves."
He stared at me. Maybe glare is a more appropriate word. I stared back. That's easy to do when you're in the right. He eventually averted his eyes, giving me some small victory. He said, decisively,
"All right, tell me what you think you know."
I took my own sip of Scotch. I don't particularly like whisky on the best of days, but the taste seemed especially harsh tonight, almost medicinal.
After grimacing, I showed him all my cards. It was coming up on 8:00
P.m. and I didn't have the time or the creativity to do anything cute.
"Sir," I said, "you are living under an alias. You were born Curtis Black. You were a convict in Massachusetts. You turned government's witness. You were relocated under the federal witness protection program under the name of Tony Clawson. After being in the program for eight or nine years, you switched names a second time, to Clayton Hutchins. Through a combination of luck, timing, and skill, you have risen
to the top of the world."
This time, he laughed a devilish laugh, then leaned back in his high-backed leather chair. "I'm the fucking president of the United States, young man. President Clayton Hutchins. What you have is some cockamamy story that's probably been put out by my political opponents in a final, desperate attempt to defeat me. You're embarrassing yourself by even bringing it up."
If that was true, what was he doing sitting here with me alone in the Oval Office on election eve drinking a Scotch whisky?
"Sir," I said, always talking to him in that formal way, "I have two men involved in the armored car heist on the record-"
"Bullshit," he said harshly, leaning forward this time. "Armored car heist? There's no fucking armored car heist. You've been set up, by my opponent or someone who is desperate to make sure I don't win.
Check my fucking biography. I was never involved in any fucking armored car heist."
He was pursuing the precise strategy that I feared the most-a hard-and-fast denial, followed, no doubt, by complete inaccessibility, at least long enough to be elected president the next day. Basically, what he was doing was issuing a challenge, daring me to go with the information I had, which he realized was pretty damned flimsy. His arguments would be almost identical to the ones I would hear from the paper's editors, from Martin to Appleton, as they tried to protect the institution from libel and shame.
There are a lot of reporters, mind you, who are all too willing to stretch their information in stories, to make supposition appear as fact with a few careful twists of phrases and subtle caveats. I'm as willing as anyone to stretch my information, but I do it before I write the story, like now, as a device to achieve the truth.
"Sir," I said, "we have a source, someone familiar with your transition into the witness protection program, who is helping us out. Later tonight, this source, who has intimate knowledge, will agree to go on the record to discuss your case. He is familiar with all the details-the initial criminal charges, the name change, the cosmetic surgery."
I eyed him carefully to see if I was having any effect. I couldn't tell. Hutchins shook his glass some more and gazed back at me with a look that was tough to read.
Maybe I was just having a tough time with perspective. I was physically exhausted and mentally drained, and perhaps because of that, Katherine's image kept rolling through my mind. I thought of that ride to the hospital the year before. I thought of how she put her face against my shoulder and held my arm and kissed my hand and told me that she felt as if she were born to have children with me. She told me that even after we had our baby, I would always, always, be the most important person in her life, the one she cherished the most, and that I had damn well better feel the same way about her. And I did. I did.
Which is why ever since, the emptiness had been so overwhelming, the loneliness unbearable, even when I wasn't alone.
Then, sitting there in the Oval Office, I had another thought, as if Katherine had all but whispered it to me in this time of need.
"Sir, it's god-awful to have your wife and child die the way yours did," I said. "Unbearable." I paused for a long moment, then added,
"I understand that all too well. I understand what it can do to your heart, to your mind, to your very sense of being. It can change everything, even if you don't realize that it's changing anything at all."
That was followed by a long stretch of silence. He wasn't looking at me, but rather down at his glass, if, in fact, he was looking at anything at all.
I said, "You don't need me to tell you how much of a monumental success you've become," I said. "And against all odds. I have a hunch you didn't turn to crime until after your wife and son died, when you didn't know what else to do. I have a feeling that their memory gave you an awful lot of support when you left crime behind and started your new life. I have a feeling that you miss them now in a way that only the two of us could ever really understand, that you'd like to be true to them, that you want to stop living this lie."
He still stared down at his desk. I couldn't be positive, but I thought I saw a drop of water-a tear-roll off his face and splash into his glass.
I paused for effect more than anything else, took another deep breath, and said, "Sir, tomorrow morning, I'm fairly certain I will have a story on the front page of the Boston Record explaining that your past is fictitious, that you are a rehabilitated felon." I then added in an admittedly lame attempt at humor, "At least I think you're rehabilitated."
He didn't laugh.
Behind me, on the other side of the office, the burning logs in the fireplace snapped several times, sounding like gunshots, making me jump, but imperceptibly so, I hope. Darkness engulfed the room, the reflection of the desk lamps shining on the inside of the French doors and the tall windows. In front of me, Hutchins held the glass in his hand on the surface of the desk and shook it back and forth again, then lifted it to his mouth for another sip. He still hadn't met my eyes.
The quiet seemed interminable.
"I am Clayton Hutchins," he said finally, looking up, his voice softer, his tone less resolute. "The government says I'm Clayton Hutchins.
All my records say I'm Clayton Hutchins. I have a birth certificate.
I was home-schooled by parents who have since died. I worked on a farm, went to college later in life."
I stayed silent. I saw that his cheeks were damp. I shook my head slowly in a sign of disappointed disbelief.
More silence. He took a deep breath, focused on some point beyond me, and said, "It's one thing I always liked about you, Jack, one thing that always drew me to you. You know what it's like to have everything taken away from you by some arbitrary hand. You know what it's like to lose everything you've ever wanted, all of your hopes and all of your dreams and all of your expectations for the future, all in one incomprehensible act of a God who you could never, ever even pretend to understand. You know what it's like to live the rest of your days knowing you can never get it back, no matter who you are, even if you're the president of the United States. You know all that."
I was riveted, fearful that even the slightest movement or noise would stop his inevitable confession.
He continued in a louder, firmer voice. "I paid a steep price. I struck a deal. I traded in my entire life, or what was left of it.
You know what that's like, to give up your life? And now that I've turned myself around, now that I've made it on my own, you're going to hang all that around my neck and choke me to death, all over again?"
He pronounced those last three words by punching out every syllable.
"I deserve better," he said. "You know that."
He paused, stared down at his glass, at the ice melting into the whisky, and added, far more softly, "This wasn't part of any deal."
I probably should have felt pity. But all I really felt was relief.
Sitting in the Oval Office on deadline on the night before the election with the president of the United States, I had him cold. I had my story. I even had my quotes, which I repeated in my mind several times to help commit them to memory.
"Sir, you may be right. It wasn't part of the deal you had with the government. But you had a deal with the American people, and that deal was to tell the truth, to let them know who you are, to be judged on the whole rather than just the past few years."
His voice grew louder. "I did tell them who I am, dammit. I am Clayton Hutchins. I made my money on my own, with no help from anyone.
For chrissakes, I gave up a lucrative life to be Clayton Hutchins. I succeeded. And now you're about to burn me with my own success?
Where's the fairness in that? Where's the fucking fairness in that?"
He pounded his fist on the desk as he asked these last questions. I remained silent, taking in this remarkable situation. Hutchins started up again, seething. "You think I've been a bad president? You think all those people who are planning to vote for me tomorrow believe I'd make a bad president for the next four years? You think my policies aren
't carefully thought out? You think I've been corrupt? No, goddammit. No."
He took a long, final sip and slid the glass aimlessly across his desk as he reclined in his chair. "Raj!" he yelled. The steward appeared silently in the doorway. "Another Johnnie, please."
"Sir," I said. "The voters have a right to know who they voted for.
They have a right to know your background, your experiences, the truths in your life, and the lies. All of that shapes who you are, and dictates how you'll act in the future as the country's leader, in times of good fortune and in times of crisis. The voters have the right to the truth."
He shook his head dismissively. "But I struck the deal with the government. I honored my part, they honored theirs."
"Sir, with all due respect, the people are the government. Yes, it's a clich'e, but it also happens to be the truth. And the people have a right to know."
And I believed this. Light, sunshine, is an amazing thing. It keeps a democracy vibrant by keeping the people informed. Informed people are usually wise people, or at least practical. Was there self-interest in this story? Of course. I'm in this business to break news, to tell people that which they don't already know, to place important facts in the rich dialogue of our nation. This wasn't about his sex life or some ancient two-bit misdemeanor. This struck at the very foundation of who our president is, and in this case, was.
He stood up and stared down at me from across the desk, then walked toward the French doors, slowly. He stopped and looked out into the Rose Garden, black but for a few spotlights shining on some chrysanthemums standing sentry against the autumn breezes. Then he walked slowly over to the fireplace and stood there for a moment, gazing at the unfinished portrait of George Washington hanging over the mantel. I sat in silence, following his movements, thinking of the office. I remembered hearing how Ronald Reagan, on his last morning as president, walked slowly from the residence to the West Wing and found it completely darkened and empty. Everyone had cleaned out their offices the night before. He wandered aimlessly around the Oval Office, absently letting his hand drift across the furniture, the walls, all that history, some of it made by him. Then he saluted and walked out the door, alone.
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