The Nominee

by Brian McGrory

  “Cozy place, isn’t it,” he said, making a motion around the room with his left hand. “Christ, the Capitol dome is right over there. Had I known you got these kinds of perks, I would have run for Senate instead of governor.”

  I said, “Well then, it would have helped if your father was a senator rather than a governor when he died or else you stood precisely zero chance of getting elected.”

  Okay, I didn’t say exactly that, maybe because it was slightly too obvious, or perhaps just baldly impolite. But give me a break. There’s that born on third base syndrome manifest for all to see, or at least me to confirm.

  The office, as I said, was small, but extraordinarily regal, very, for lack of a better word, senatorial. There was no desk, just the couch and the chair upon which I sat and a small refrigerator with some glassware on top of it shoved off into a corner. The floors were dark marble with a mosaic inside the stones, covered in part by a vibrant cranberry-colored rug. The photographs on the walls chronicled Senator Gillis’s high-points in Washington—meetings with presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Hutchins. The one small-paned window looked north with a crystalline view of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial beyond it.

  “How are you, Governor?” I asked.

  “I think I’m better at Beacon Hill than Capitol Hill, but give it some time,” he said, sitting back down. “Give it some time. You certainly made my life a little more complicated today.” He took his stack of papers and turned them upside-down on the coffee table, then met my gaze flush. “I’ve got theWashington Post and theNew York Times crawling up my ass. All three nets have asked for live interviews. Reporters from around the country are swarming all over the State House looking under every rock in my past, all courtesy of you.”

  He said this not in any vindictive or caustic way, but almost as a detached observation, and with a shallow smile. Then he added, “Jesus, look at you. You look exhausted.”

  You might logically wonder how he knew, since we’ve only met two, maybe three times before. Maybe this was my everyday look. Maybe I was anemic, or had an infant at home, or was perpetually sleep-deprived. But understand that with almost every politician I’ve ever met, there’s this sense of faux familiarity to the proceedings. At one level, I think they try to trick you into believing there’s a bond, because with a bond comes an investment, and with investment comes support, whether it be political, financial, or in my case, journalistic. At another level, they spend their days around people who are constantly nodding their heads and telling them, “Yes, sir” or “ma’am” and their nights meeting the general public at community events and chicken dinners. They live life on the surface, putting up fronts, smiling when they want to scowl, bouncing from one crowd to the next, one issue to another. For all I know, this little meeting with him qualified us as longtime friends.

  “I’ve had a few things going on as well,” I said, smiling wanly.

  He kept a serious gaze fixed on me. “Well,” he said, leaning back, “Unfortunately, I think I’m about to add one more.”

  He paused, as if to also add drama. I regarded him for a moment. He looked younger than his forty-three years, his smooth skin void of blemishes, his dirty blond hair full and casually combed. His coat hung on the back of the door. He was in his shirtsleeves—those sleeves being unfastened and rolled up to the middle of his forearms. His top button was undone and his blue-and-green rep tie slightly loosened at his neck. He had a look, in total, as if he should be the model on a brochure for a stately Nantucket resort, pictured at an al fresco table, his face kissed by the sun, a sweater tied over his shoulders, laughing at a preposterously funny line uttered by a similarly beautiful woman in his small group—maybe something like, “Imagine if we didn’t have turndown service at the inn?”

  He looked down, as if trying to figure out how to launch this part of the conversation, though I had a pretty good idea that he already knew. Just as litigators don’t ask questions without already knowing the answers, politicians rarely stray far from a practiced script. It’s just a fact of modern life.

  He looked up at me with his soft blue eyes and said, “You guys were right in today’s story. You had it.”

  Well, if nothing else, I certainly liked that quote. I could form an entire follow-up story off that one quote, under the headline, “Governor Admits to Embellishing Record.” I was half tempted to pull out my cell phone and call Mongillo right then and there with the glorious news of a confession.

  Then he said, “I need to talk to you off the record, this whole conversation.” He looked at me expectantly and asked, “That a deal?”

  “I don’t know what you want to talk about yet.” I said that with the quasi-intention of being an obstinate prick—partly because of my aforementioned mood, but partly because I wanted him more on edge than comforted by this meeting. I didn’t want him to have the impression that he was setting the terms.

  “I’ll tell you, but only off the record. Trust me, once we get going, you’re not going to want to be sticking this stuff in your newspaper.” He said this almost dismissively.

  Well, okay, he had me hooked. How do you say no to this? I said, “All right, off the record.”

  He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped together as if in prayer.

  “Look, my conviction record got inflated. I don’t deny it. I did a pretty damned good job as the Suffolk County DA. I didn’t have to exaggerate my rate. It was higher than my three immediate predecessors. It was higher than nine of the fourteen other DAs in Massachusetts. It was higher than the national average.”

  He stopped and looked hard at me. He remained silent, as if waiting for something, so I gave it to him. I asked, “Then why did you inflate it?”

  “I didn’t,” he replied. “Robert Fitzgerald did. Your star political reporter put the figures into the paper without ever getting authority from me, anyone in my campaign, or on my staff.”

  My head began to hurt, just a gentle cracking on either side of my scalp as if a pair of holes was erupting in my two temples. Robert Fitzgerald, one of the biggest, most important names at theRecord, was by everyone else’s account, an inveterate liar.

  I said, “I’m confused.”

  Granted, there were probably better comebacks for me to make, but any that were grander, more sweeping, or contained greater depth, eluded me at that particular moment. I added, “Help me out, Governor.” I emphasized the word “Governor” as if I was getting in some sort of dig, but what kind, I don’t know.

  He sighed and leaned back, then forward again. Outside the window, the light in the Washington sky was beginning to fade, leaving us in the descending dark of the office. The two lamps in the room remained off.

  “You know, I’m sure, that Robert has some issues regarding the truth.”

  I didn’t, but I was beginning to learn. So I said, “Why don’t you explain to me what you mean.”

  I found myself talking to him not in the tone of respect that I normally extend to someone in a position of authority, even if I was about to put the screws to him in print, but more as an equal, and as I’ve said, an equal that I didn’t particularly like. I mean, give me a break. I’ve sat with the president of the United States. Some Chipster in an Izod shirt who got his job because of his old man hardly warrants too much of my respect.

  He hesitated, looking at the floor, bridging his fingers together, then placing them on the back of his neck as if to relieve stress. Don’t for a second think I didn’t regard all of this as an exquisite act. Politicians, by virtue of the television age, are actors to their core. If they’re not, they don’t survive as politicians very long. At least with Ronald Reagan we knew what we were getting, and we got a great one at that—an actor, I mean, if not a leader, but perhaps that as well.

  He looked at me again and said, “As I’m sure you know, Robert and my father were very close—a relationship that transcended the politician/journalist thing and exten
ded deep into their private lives. They golfed together. They hunted together. My mother and father got together regularly with Robert and his wife, Eleanor.

  “And as you certainly remember, Robert was uncommonly kind to my father in print.”

  He paused again and averted my gaze, staring at some point on the wall over my right shoulder. By now, his face was mostly in shadow. The sun had faded from the window and the patch of sky that I could see was a vibrant red, almost the color of cherry licorice.

  “Something happened to Robert after my old man was shot,” Randolph said, fixing on me again. “He lost not only his most reliable source in government, but his best friend in the world. He got lazy, I think, sloppy, desperate to make new friends in power.”

  A pause again, mostly for dramatic effect, because by the look on his face, I knew that he already knew what he wanted to say.

  “And he began to lie. In print. In theRecord.”

  He let that hang out there for a long moment, like an ominous thundercloud having just rolled in across a distant plain.

  He added, his voice softer and his tone tempered with apology. “And he lied about me. Good lies. Helpful lies. And I accepted them.”

  He sat back and gazed through the silence and the shadows at me sitting upright in that chair.

  “Lied about what?” I asked, my voice flat, simply inquiring.

  “About my record. A couple of months after my old man died, Robert came to my house one night. I had just announced my campaign to succeed my father as governor. I was figuring out my issue stands, getting an organization together, starting in on a message. And he showed up at my door and said he wanted to talk.

  “So we drank some port and he asked about my performance as district attorney, and I told him where I stood. He said, ‘You’re going into this campaign with a lot of advantages, Lance. You’ll have a lot of your father’s tried and true supporters behind you. You’ll get a sympathy vote for what happened at the school that day. You’re a handsome young man, so you’ll get some votes from women.’

  “But then he said, ‘You have some baggage, too. There will be a lot of people who think you’re trying to take advantage of your father’s death for your own political gain. There will be people who will say that you’ve been riding an elevator, not climbing stairs, your entire career. There will be people who will say you don’t even deserve the Democratic nomination, never mind actually being governor.’”

  Another dramatic pause. He picked up a can of Coke on the coffee table and took a long swig. “So he told me that I have to show the public that when I did a job, when I served as district attorney, that I was the very best in the state—not second best, not third best, but the very best. I had to have the highest conviction rate. I had to have the toughest reputation. I had to show the public that when I got the opportunity to serve them, I was my own man, with my own exemplary record. I had to show the public that I had earned the governorship, not inherited it. Earned, not inherited. Those, I recall, were his exact words.”

  He looked at me and I kept my gaze steady on his.

  He continued, “So a week later, he runs a story citing these fabulous conviction rates that I had in Suffolk County. Look, I was already pretty proud of my real rates. This ain’t Norfolk or Barnstable Counties, with a bunch of shopliftings in the local mall and the occasional wife-beater who pleads out. We have tough crimes, murders and rapes and robberies, and some top-notch criminal defense lawyers in Boston. This ain’t Charlotte, North Carolina.”

  Charlotte, by the way, has an extraordinarily high violent crime rate, but I didn’t see the need to point that out to him just then, only not to break his train of words.

  He continued, “But he goes and makes them better in print. He said my unpublished conviction rates for the year were likely to be the best in the state. It wasn’t as if he had to double them or anything. All he did was embellish them—make them maybe six percent, maybe eight percent better. That day the story came out, the numbers just kind of sat out there. No one complained.

  “So I had a choice. Do I publicly accuse my father’s best friend, a revered political reporter and analyst for the most powerful newspaper in Massachusetts, of lying, even as he thought he was doing me a favor? Or do I sit there and live a lie that might well help me win the gubernatorial election?”

  He looked at me, then down, then at me again. He said, “Well, it’s obvious what I did. And now the same newspaper that set me up is in the process of taking me down.”

  I sat there silent, stunned, exhausted, just to list a few things. Here are a few others: dirty from all the sweating I did that morning in the Florida sun, aching because I hadn’t had the chance to exercise in what felt like the longer part of forever, hungry because Mongillo had grabbed my peanuts on the flight. My mind flickered over to the University Club on Sixteenth Street, specifically to the Grille Room on the second floor, where perhaps Lyle might be willing to pour me the coldest beer in Washington—just like the old days.

  Back to Capitol Hill. I was thinking of what I could possibly say, when Randolph added, his tone far sharper than before, “But don’t think for a second that I’m falling alone. I go down, theRecord comes down with me. Your reporters, your editors, and especially your publishers, have been hiding Fitzgerald’s lies for years. All you people want to do is sell newspapers—first on my successes, and now on my failures. I’ll destroy your credibility, Jack. I’ll destroy your whole paper. Believe it.”

  I’m not precisely sure what it feels like to have an elephant walk across your chest, but I suspected this moment might be the closest I’d ever come to knowing. So basically, let’s do a quick census of my problems: A second-rate chain is on the brink of buying my newspaper, the governor of my state is intent on destroying it, my publisher and friend is dead, his predecessor was murdered, the company president’s a traitor, the star reporter (me aside) is a recidivist liar, I’ve killed a man, and I’m hiding from the police. Oh, and my ex-girlfriend seems interested in getting back together and I can’t get my mind around it.

  I asked, “Is that a threat?”

  Well, dumb question, I know. Of course it was a threat. It contained threatening words likedestroy, it was spoken in a threatening tone. But I think I was just trying to buy time.

  “Jack, theRecord has threatened my career during the most important week of it, when I’m about to become attorney general of the United States. I’m only telling you—promising you—that I will not fall alone.”

  I asked, “What do you want?” I asked this knowing that Mongillo was back at the bureau furiously dialing for news, and all I wanted to do was call him with the word that we were dead-on right. The Fitzgerald part, I’d vastly prefer to leave out for now.

  “I want you to drop the story. Obviously I know enough to realize that a retraction is out of the question. But if you don’t keep pushing it, the national press may realize it was just a one-day wonder, as Benjamin likes to call these things, and move on before any real damage is done. If you back away, I’ll put out a statement tomorrow—I’ll even give it to your paper first—acknowledging an accounting error and blaming an aide who tallied the numbers.”

  I mulled this. How was I supposed to tell Mongillo and Justine Steele that a follow-up wasn’t necessary on a raging national story involving the president’s nominee to be the attorney general of the United States? Did I even have the ability to persuade them to drop it? If I did, how was I then supposed to have the paper accept and publish a statement that I knew on its face to be an utter and absolute lie?

  “How do you know the publisher knew about the problem?” I asked.

  He remained silent for a moment. The shadows had now given way to darkness, such that I could barely make out his features. He leaned over and switched on a lamp and we both blinked in the dim glow.

  “I just know.”

  “Bullshit.” You don’t often say this to the governor, never mind the nominee to the highest law enforcement office i
n the land. It felt neither good nor bad, because he wasn’t at that moment a politician as much as he was a raw adversary gunning for my throat, just as I was gunning for his. When they talk about politics being hardball, the ball doesn’t get much harder than this. Remind me to go to some sort of yoga class when this is all over where I can sit in a circle with mostly women, hold hands, and chant.

  We were both leaning forward now, aggressive, eyeing each other in a newfound light, as well as newfound light, if you know what I mean, which I think you do.

  “I have notes, or I should say, letters. I wrote to John Cutter complaining. He wrote me back saying the problem would be addressed. Obviously, it never was.”

  I sucked in air, trying to prevent the appearance of gasping. He kept his eyes fixed hard on my face.

  He said, more slowly now, his tone casually ominous, “If you don’t drop the story, if you insist on pushing a problem that your paper created for me, then I’ll give full disclosure to theNew York Times tomorrow, so it hits their Sunday paper.” A pause, followed by: “Think hard about that, Jack. That’s your paper, already on the block, with negative front-page exposure in theNew York Times. What’s that going to do to your reputation and future, and what’s that going to do to your newspaper?”

  Good questions, though I’d prefer to be the one posing any interrogatories. To his, I didn’t know the specific answers, though I knew generally that it wasn’t good—at all.

  I swallowed hard and said, “We need to have a follow-up story of some sort tomorrow. We can’t just drop it. That alone will be too suspicious.”

  Already, I was talking like this was a conspiracy and I was a principal in it. I didn’t like the feeling.

  He shook his head. “If you have a story, you better go out and buy the SundayTimes.”

  I subscribe, but didn’t see any need to inform him of that right now.

  I replied, “Let me find out what we have in the works.”

  I picked up the telephone on the coffee table and dialed the number to the Washington Bureau. When Rose, the kindly receptionist, answered the phone, I asked to be connected to Mongillo, trying, I fear in vain, to keep my voice as steady and casual as can be.