by Laura Hayden
“Since this is a farewell party and we’re saying farewell to Maia, I invited her.” Emily nodded toward the entryway to the headquarters. “She’s standing in the foyer.”
Kate knew she should have realized that when practically every man in the place turned his head and automatically took a step toward the door; it meant Maia had arrived.
She wore a deep red dress that went well with her olive complexion and dark hair. The woman always looked as if she’d stepped out of a magazine—no hair out of place and with the perfect accessories. She moved with the fluid grace of a dancer, charming her way across the room. It was evident her main objective was to get to Emily, but to do it, she had to find a way to subtly maneuver through a gauntlet of male admirers without making them feel slighted.
Judging by their rapt looks, it appeared as if Maia appeased them all along the way as she plotted a straight line to Emily.
“I don’t want to talk to her,” Kate said, looking around for an exit strategy.
Emily released an unattractive snort. “For heaven’s sake, pull up your big girl panties and stand your ground.” Emily raised her hand. “Maia!” she called out as if so very pleased to see the young turncoat. “Over here.”
Maia seemed imminently thrilled to have been singled out and used the excuse to plow faster through her crowd of admirers.
“I hate you,” Kate whispered.
“No you don’t.” Emily switched seamlessly from sotto voce to her polished politician’s voice. “I was just telling Kate that I hoped you would make an appearance.”
They did the usual European air-kiss thing, evidently also the popular greeting for girls from Hoboken. At least Maia didn’t have the audacity to meet Kate’s flat gaze.
She simpered nicely in her pseudo English-as-a-strong-second-language manner. “I just wanted to stop and tell you how much I appreciated being able to work with you. It was indeed a dream come true. As Miss Marjorie said, it was the sort of experience that comes once in a lifetime. I’m so very lucky and thankful that I was allowed such an opportunity.”
“Miss Marjorie” was Marjorie Redding, older than dirt but the foremost authority on image consultancy in the U.S. political arena. She claimed no political affiliations; she had worked with members of both major parties to retool their public images—changing hairstyle, clothing style, manners, and even speaking voices to make them more universally attractive and respected. When Marjorie got through with a client, they looked, sounded, and acted at the top of their game.
Maia, her protégée, had been sent to help Emily when Marjorie had a family commitment and couldn’t help during the debate preparations. Whether Kate liked the young woman or not, she’d done a good job of making Emily look every inch the perfect presidential candidate. And when the final count was tallied, enough people agreed that Emily was the right choice.
That had been the bottom line, at the time.
But now Maia was a liability—either a loose cannon indiscriminately smashing up the campaign deck or an ICBM in the hands of a master missileer like Emily.
Kate reached deep inside and found a smile that didn’t reek of insincerity. “We appreciate all the effort that went into helping refine Emily’s image.”
Now say good-bye and excuse yourself. Kate wasn’t sure if she was trying to instruct herself or influence the young woman.
In polite response, Maia offered her usual enigmatic smile and her hand to Emily. “It was my pleasure.”
Emily didn’t hesitate to accept the handshake. But when Maia turned to Kate, Kate not only curbed the instinct to reach out but found the fortitude to make eye contact with the young woman and say, “You’ll forgive me for not shaking your hand.”
No excuses. No explanations.
The young woman faltered for a moment, then pulled her hand back. “I’m . . . I’m sorry.” She pivoted smartly and made a hasty exit from their small conversation group.
Emily made a clucking noise once the young woman was out of earshot. “Was that entirely necessary?”
“To me, it was. She got the message, don’t you think?”
They both looked at Maia, who seemed to have survived the slight and was bestowing her considerable charms in the direction of Dave Dickens, Kate’s second in command.
“I don’t know about getting a message, but if I were to judge, I’d say you’ve probably made her an enemy,” Emily stated in a rather matter-of-fact voice.
“Probably have.” Kate feigned interest in a basket of Mexican wedding cookies, ignoring her stomach, which seized at the thought of eating anything now. “But I can handle her.”
Emily stepped next to her at the table. “How?” she asked pointedly.
Kate picked up a cookie and sampled its powdered sugar edge. “Pardon the pun, but I stole a page from your playbook. She knows that I know her biggest secret.”
“Which is . . . ?”
“If I told, it’d no longer be a secret, now would it?”
ALMOST SIX THOUSAND POSITIONS. Theoretically that was how many jobs could be up for grabs at the changeover from the Cooper administration to Benton control. The first thing Kate did was hire an experienced personnel staffer to manage the sudden wave of job applications that flooded their office. As the number of applications grew, so did the size of the personnel office, eventually topping two hundred people making contacts, checking references, cataloguing, and filtering through the paperwork generated by nearly two hundred thousand job seekers.
But before they could start filling positions, Emily, Kate, and the transition team had to determine which personnel connected with the current administration would stay and which would go. In theory, Emily could replace everyone from ambassadors down to the White House waitstaff, but that sort of explosive housecleaning was unnecessary. In practice, it would be highly detrimental to the smooth running of her new administration.
So she and her staffers had to operate like surgeons, keeping the good, removing anything that looked like trouble. Kate didn’t have it easy. In the days between the election and the inauguration, she caught meals on the fly and slept for only a couple of hours each night. It was the price she paid for doing what few if any campaign managers had ever done—moving immediately from managing a presidential campaign into the role of incoming White House chief of staff. Although it eased any friction between the campaign staff and the transition team, it gave Kate no downtime between critical roles.
Working from their transitional offices, she and Emily put into play the first level of plans that their inner circle had been working on in secret since the convention.
Their initial concern was securing those people who would fill the senior White House staff positions and become President Benton’s key policy advisers. The goal was to identify the designees as early as possible so that their FBI checks and economic disclosure reviews would be completed in time to give them transitional ramp-up time as well. They too had to hire their own staff and needed as much time as possible to do this before taking their official positions.
Emily had strong opinions about who should be among her inner circle of senior advisers. Working with their campaign’s advisers, a dream team of sorts had been assembled on paper shortly after Emily won the party’s nomination. Kept secret, this document became the initial blueprint of the Benton administration, and as the White House chief of staff designee, Kate’s job was to make it happen.
But if coming up with the dream team had been hard, making it a reality appeared to be nearly impossible. Considering they had only eleven weeks to assemble, vet, and flesh out the skeleton of the White House staff and then the cabinet, Kate, Emily, and their growing staff spent their collective energies contacting, negotiating, and sometimes reworking the elements of their plans.
As a result, Thanksgiving was lost in a blur. Kate remembered being slightly annoyed that government offices were closed that Thursday, and it wasn’t until someone brought leftover turkey into the office that she realized how much
she had missed the traditional gathering at her family’s house.
While the main personnel office—led by Pria Shangalia, who would eventually head the Office of Presidential Personnel—handled the bulk of the work, as chief of staff, Kate ran a separate personnel unit responsible for coordinating everything necessary to ease over six hundred people into their new positions and prepare them for new responsibilities. Many appointments couldn’t be made until Emily actually took office. Other appointments would have to wait for Senate confirmation before becoming set.
By the time Christmas rolled around, Emily made everyone take a mandatory couple of vacation days, saying that if they didn’t take a break, her first act as President Benton would be to institute a national week of sleep. In any case, they were stymied in their efforts to keep the bureaucratic ball rolling at the same speed since many government agencies were short-staffed around the holidays.
By the time they reached Inauguration Day, most of the positions had been filled, the selectees vetted and ready to pack their boxes and move from their transitional offices to the real thing in the White House after Emily took the oath.
In many cases, within the hour.
Ah yes . . . the inauguration. Kate thought about it with a fair amount of excitement and equal part dread. She looked forward to the traditional pageantry, the official pomp and circumstance which would start that day and continue for four years—eight, if they were lucky. But it was the carnival-like atmosphere that began five days prior to the actual swearing-in ceremony and the four days afterward she wished she could avoid.
She stared at the latest version of the ambitious schedule that the Presidential Inaugural Committee had drawn up. Parties, concerts, official presidential balls (nine of them), unofficial balls, receptions, candlelight dinners, brunches, luncheons, a parade . . .
It made her tired just to read it.
That’s just your fatigue talking, she told herself. It would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, something she’d never forget and would probably tell much too often in the old folks’ home. Sure, she’d been to her share of Washington parties, even an inauguration ball or two, but she’d never spent much time seeing the behind-the-scenes preparations.
So when the day of the inauguration finally arrived, Kate had already survived five days of events, including three concerts, a half-dozen receptions, and the Black Tie and Boots Ball. As she sat in St. John’s Church, one row behind Emily and Vice President–Elect Burl Bochner and his wife, Melissa, Kate sent up a prayer of thanks for the brief respite.
The next four years working at Emily’s side in the White House would likely be exhausting, exhilarating, and exasperating. But for the moment, Kate drank in the comforting silence of sitting on the far end of the president’s pew in the hushed church, waiting for the rector to take his position.
Kate didn’t have to be Episcopalian to find a sense of comfort in the rector’s words, his admonition to pay attention to the needs of the world around them and how it influenced the legacies of leadership.
“High above us is a steeple, and in that steeple is a very historic bell that still rings to this day. You probably heard it earlier this morning. The bell was installed up there in 1822, only a few months after being forged by John Revere, the son of famed patriot Paul Revere. I guess you might call it a legacy of freedom. As we witness the passing of the presidential torch later today from one administration to the next, I can’t help but think this is an excellent example of the American legacy of freedom in action, a legacy that knows no color, no gender, and no limitations.”
Kate glanced over at Emily, who seemed to listen with rapt attention. A sense of guarded pride grew inside Kate, not for herself, but for her colleague, her employer, her friend. Even though becoming the first female to achieve that lofty position was a singular accolade, Emily hadn’t won the office because she was a woman. She’d won because she had been the best candidate in the field, gender aside.
And Kate was going to do everything in her power to make sure the legacy Emily left behind was one of leadership, compassion, and strength.
Two hours later, at high noon, Emily Rousseau Benton stood on the steps of the Capitol’s west side, her right hand on the Bible and her left held aloft.
“I, Emily Rousseau Benton, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
There was the slightest of pauses as if she faced either a moment of indecision or she wanted to give more emphasis to her next words.
“So help me, God.”
A shiver slid across Kate’s shoulders. It had been Emily’s sole decision to add the phrase, which wasn’t technically part of the official oath.
Later, as they stood for the first time together in the Oval Office, Emily offered an explanation.
“Why? Because I figured I needed all the help I could get.”
“Seriously,” Kate chided.
Emily ran her hand over the edge of the famous Resolute desk that she’d opted to use as so many presidents had before her. “I knew it meant a lot to you, and therefore, it means a lot to me. Sometimes I don’t see the big picture, and there’s no bigger picture than God, right?”
Kate hugged her friend. “Absolutely right.”
That night, as Kate left the White House, she had her driver—who had introduced himself as Edward—stop outside of the iron fence that separated both Joe Tourist and Joe Terrorist from the White House grounds. She gave the grand old lady of a building a lingering look, containing far more awe than pride. “It’s hard to believe I work there.”
Edward nodded. “Yes, ma’am. I can imagine.”
She’d driven past the building a thousand times, even visited it a half-dozen times or two. But working there . . . she was still trying to wrap her head around that one. After one more look, she said, “Okay. Let’s head home.”
Edward pulled out into traffic, expertly finding a place between a cab and a double-decker tour bus full of people gawking at the sites.
Kate settled back in her seat, rolling the window up. “I guess you hear that a lot about the White House.”
“Yes, ma’am. At the beginning, at least.”
“And later on?”
“Not so much. The newness wears off. But that’s normal.”
Normal. Somehow, she didn’t think she would be able to use the word to describe her life over the next four years. Just today, she stood at the right hand of the most powerful leader in the free world. Later on, she ran a meeting of the newly installed White House senior staff. Some of them she knew personally, like Dozier Marsh; some she knew in passing; a couple she knew only by reputation. No matter whether they were men, women, older, younger, they would funnel their concerns, their programs, their communications through her to reach Emily.
Kate would now be the official gatekeeper to the president. Nothing would get to Emily, no one would step through the door of the Oval Office, without Kate’s knowledge or approval. It wasn’t a position to be taken lightly or more importantly, harshly. Kate had studied her predecessors in the job and intended her version of the position to be one of influence rather than control. She learned long ago that Emily would be receptive to the former and bristle, if not openly rebel, against the latter.
Once Kate reached home, she had a little over an hour to get ready before heading out again. What else would cap off her first day at work better than attending an official ball or two?
She remembered the first presidential ball she’d attended—in the far lesser capacity as assistant to the governor, when Emily held that post in Virginia. It had been crowded and hot, the food disappeared long before she reached any serving table, and once the president finally arrived, he and his wife had danced for exactly one and a half minutes before waving their good-byes and pushing off to the next in a string of patriotically named balls that sounded more like battleshi
ps than parties.
Liberty. Constitution.
However, this time, Kate’s party-going experience would be different. She had her selection of balls to attend and decided to go to two of the many—the Constitution Ball, the first one Emily would hit on her circuit, and the Commander in Chief Ball, the last event on Emily’s agenda, an event held exclusively for military personnel. Kate’s brother, Brian, an air force officer, would be her escort only because her sister-in-law, Jill, had broken her foot the week before and didn’t want to negotiate the crowds on crutches.
Ah yes, the sensitive subject of escorts . . .
The White House Protocol Office had approached both Emily and Kate weeks before, concerned at how the president-elect wanted to handle her unattached status when it came to social events such as the inaugural balls. Short of going out and dancing by herself, the president needed a suitable escort since there was no First Gentleman.
Emily and Kate had discussed options and finally settled on asking Emily’s cousin Richard Benton, son of former President William Benton, to be her escort in social settings requiring one. He was a familiar face at such events and, more importantly, had four years of experience under his belt of dealing with press, politics, and protocol. His unattached state was legendary in political circles. He’d been nicknamed a most eligible political bachelor and had even made People’s sexiest men list a time or two.
Duties that would normally fall to the First Lady would be shared by another of Emily’s cousins, Margaret Benton Shaiyne, and by Melissa Bochner, the vice president’s wife. The dichotomy of the two—a stay-at-home mother and a career-oriented mother—meant they would bring an interesting range of experiences to the position.
But in all her haste to see that Emily had the proper support in those key areas, Kate had failed to arrange an escort for herself. That didn’t mean her brother wasn’t a congenial substitute, but it still made it pretty evident that her social life had come to a standstill over the last two years on the campaign trail.