by Mo Rocca
A couple hundred yards away late-night straggler Ann Coulter was hiking across the lawn barefoot in a skimpy black cocktail dress talking with Hannity. Colmes trailed behind, holding her high heels.
“Oh, please!” she scowled. “Lincoln was about as Republican as Bill Weld.”
Once they’d passed I was alone, the Mall desolate. I walked to the top of the memorial’s steps and looked up at Lincoln. It was just the two of us, and I instantly felt calmed. I held in my hand the Fala chew toy, perhaps the only thing standing between the safety of the presidential pet and a complete takeover by the President’s inner circle of radical Barney opponents. So much was at stake and while I was no believer in voices from the dead, I held out hope that maybe some answers would come to me if I meditated long enough.
I got down on my knees and bowed my head. “Oh, Mr. President,” I whispered, “what has happened to the White House? You were just a simple rail-splitter from Hardin County, Kentucky, born in 1809 to undistinguished parentage. But you were an honest and wise leader with a diverse Cabinet that you listened to. It was a glorious intellectual ferment, a constant exchange of ideas. You actually engaged the press in a rich dialogue. Your correspondence with Horace Greeley about the Union and slavery—”
I would have continued but when I looked up, something miraculous had happened. Lincoln’s right thumb and forefinger were reconfigured in an “L” shape on his forehead.
“Mr. President!”
Then something even more magical happened. Lincoln spoke. “Sorry, guy,” he said, “but someone needs a reality check.” He had a high, thin voice. “I appointed a diverse Cabinet because I’d made campaign promises. And as for the press, I was a master manipulator. I offered one Democratic editor the post of minister to France just to get him off my back. And don’t get me started on Greeley. I had to humor him since the guy was ripping me a new one every chance he got. He even called for my resignation at one point.” Lincoln threw up his hands. “Give me a break!”
That Lincoln sounded like ABC’s John Stossel was something of a letdown, but I was riveted by his words.
“Here’s the thing: editorial writers know zip about running the country,” Lincoln continued. “Don’t get me wrong, I like that Tom Friedman fellow, even if the whole ‘Arab street’ line is a little played out,” he added tartly.
“Well, no one created metaphors like you,” I gushed. “By the way, can I tell you what a huge fan I am of your House Divided speech?”
“Thanks. I lost my Senate race after that so I’ve always been a little insecure about it.”
“Anyway,” I said, “I guess I am a little naive. You were a politician after all. You had to do some pretty unsavory things to get your way.”
“No kidding. I suspended the right of habeas corpus, I imprisoned southern sympathizers without trial. This is true. But give me a break!” Once again I cringed. “I was trying to save the Union, folks! To give hope to the world for all future time, people. These were big-ticket items—not midnight basketball penny-ante b.s.”
I hadn’t planned on talking with Lincoln this night so I wasn’t really prepared with questions. “I hope this isn’t too personal, Mr. President, but I’ve read that you could sometimes get a little, well, gloomy. How did you get through it all?”
“Gloomy? Try bipolar,” he said. “Of course it didn’t help much that I married a lunatic. To stay focused and keep my spirits up I relied on my better angels,” he said, referring to his first inaugural address. “And if you don’t know who they are by now, you’re more clueless than General McClellan. Better Angels, come on out.”
Two goats galloped out from behind the statue.
“It’s Nanny and Nanko!” I said. Nanny and Nanko were the rambunctious goats who belonged to Lincoln’s youngest son. He used to attach kitchen chairs to the goats and ride them around the house.
“Those animals were smart. They knew that the best thing they could do was keep me entertained,” said Lincoln as the goats took center stage and began doing a jig. Lincoln was in heaven.
“Mr. President,” I said, “it’s clear to me that every presidential pet has had a different way of serving its administration. I don’t know much about Barney’s strengths and weaknesses. But I fear for our country if he’s not able to speak his mind to the current President. He may be our last best hope.”
“Hey, good line. I share that opinion. But who am I? The world will little note nor long remember what I say here, but—”
“No, it won’t!” echoed a deep and menacing voice.
Suddenly Lincoln’s face clouded over!
“What’s happening?” I yelled. A beautiful scene had just turned dangerous. I looked at Nanny and Nanko, who started bleating in terror. I turned back to Lincoln’s statue. But as the cloud cleared, Lincoln was no more. The head on the statue was Richard Nixon’s!
“Richard Nixon! What have you done with Lincoln?”
“Sorry, kid, but now he belongs to the ages—and he ain’t coming back.”
“What is it that you want?”
“You’re a little too curious about presidential pets and I think you need to back off—or you’ll get your skinny little tit caught in a wringer!”
“You stole that line from John Mitchell. Well guess what? I’m not scared of you. You always hated the press. And you did bad things. Okay, you also did some good things, like opening relations with China and starting the EPA. I believe the National Endowment of the Arts began under your watch as well.” I wanted to be fair. “But you tried to make yourself unaccountable. Well, President Nixon, I’m no lapdog!”
“Now, now, let’s relax.” He leaned toward me. “There’s no reason we can’t be friends. Bebe! Get our friend a drink.”
Suddenly Nixon’s best friend, the Cuban American banker Bebe Rebozo, walked in. He was immaculately dressed in white trousers, Gucci loafers, and a guayabera linen shirt.
Bebe approached me with a mojito in hand. I couldn’t see behind his sunglasses—the kind I’d always associated with Meyer Lansky—but I felt threatened, even if I was momentarily taken with his vintage Seiko.
“Please, have a mojito,” he beckoned as he moved closer. Just then Checkers, Nixon’s vice presidential dog, bounded out from behind the statue and began pulling on Bebe’s pant leg with his teeth.
“Checkers,” scowled Nixon, “get back from there!”
But Checkers wasn’t obeying.
“Please, have the mojito,” persisted Bebe as he moved still nearer, the dog futilely trying to hold him back. That’s when I noticed Bebe slip a white powder into the drink and stir.
“No, thank you, Señor Rebozo. I’m fine.”
Bebe was becoming more aggressive. “You like the mojito,” he said hypnotically. I started backing up down the steps, determined not to be poisoned by Bebe Rebozo on the steps of this temple.
“No, really. Thank you, Bebe, but I’ll pass.”
“Mo-ji-to,” he chanted.
I was walking backward down the steps more quickly and nearly tripped a couple of times. Bebe wasn’t slowing down, though. At closer range I could see that behind his sunglasses he was eyeing my Fala chew toy. I clutched it even tighter.
I’d come to the bottom of the steps and continued walking backward, the pace still quickening. Bebe wasn’t letting up.
“Checkers, get back here!” barked Nixon from his chair.
It was then that I decided to make a run for it. But as I turned around, I ran right into the edge of the Reflecting Pool. I teetered for a moment before regaining my balance, when a blinding whiteness came rushing in from my left. It came so quickly, I didn’t have a chance to turn and see what it was barreling toward me. Suddenly a large cold hand gripped my neck from behind and plunged my face into the pool.
I’m not sure how long I was under because everything went black. I only heard voices—a stream of voices from the present and the past:
“You have dishonored yourself and your sensei,” said Wol
f.
“I’m sorry, Mo. I just can’t do this anymore,” said Candy.
“ ‘Swing low, sweet chariot,’ ” sang Marian Anderson.
“What’s next, a memorial for Jim Jeffords?!” said Ann Coulter.
“Give me a break!” said Lincoln.
I assumed I’d passed on. It hadn’t been such a bad life, I thought. A little on the short side, yes, but not if I’d been born in Bangladesh, where the life expectancy for men is forty-eight years. And let’s face it, I never once had to deal with monsoon season.
Just as I was making peace with the humiliation of drowning in the two-foot-deep Reflecting Pool, someone grabbed the neck of my shirt and fished me out. It was Laurie Dhue.
“Oh, wow, Laurie!” I said, my vision blurred since my glasses had dropped to the bottom of the pool. “I think you saved me. Bebe Rebozo was going to poison me.”
“Are we rolling?” said Laurie.
Before I could ask what she meant, the scene came into more of a focus. Laurie was filming me, and we were live.
“Yes, Shep, I’m live at the Mall and while I haven’t got anything to report on Barney and his rickets, I am witnessing a tremendous moment of a different kind. Mo Rocca, an MSNBC reporter, known to the hundreds of people nationwide who sometimes watch that network, has gone over the brink. We’re looking at the self-destruction of someone who one day might very well have found a job at CNNfn.”
I was still disoriented. “Laurie, what’s going on? Why are you doing this? The real story is Nixon. He’s back. Just look up there.”
I looked up the steps, squinting hard enough to see that it was Lincoln, not Nixon, in the Lincoln Memorial.
“It’s sad, Shep, to see a comrade fallen in arms,” said Laurie in her full-out “sad story” voice.
It appeared that I’d been framed and soon I would receive strike three from Eric. I needed to leave—with my Fala chew toy, of course.
But it was gone! I must have released it in the water. And whoever had tried to drown me had taken it away.
“How does it feel to have America watch you slip over the edge on live television?” Laurie asked. She didn’t get an answer. I fished my glasses out of the Reflecting Pool and was running once again, this time back to the White House, to find Helen.
26
The Compromise of Helen Thomas
When I got to the White House, I immediately sensed trouble. A fire truck was parked in the driveway. I was already pushing through the turnstile as I flashed my ID to the security guard when he put his hand up.
“Whoa, there, big guy. No one’s entering right now.”
“What happened? I have to know.”
“You and everyone else,” he said, motioning with his chin behind me. I turned to see six correspondents already reporting live from Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House as their backdrop. Ordinarily they would have been inside the gate, doing their stand-ups from the lawn.
“Next time wait for a lifeguard before you go for a dip,” the guard piped in. I could see that his little TV was turned to Fox News. Apparently he couldn’t resist.
From what the correspondents were reporting, something deeply disturbing had happened.
“The explosion seemed to come from somewhere below the lower floor of the pressroom,” said Norah O’Donnell to camera.
Before I could imagine the worst, I felt a nipping at my pant leg. I looked down to see not Checkers, but Mr. Peabody looking up at me. So as not to draw attention to himself he was barking like any ordinary dog would. He was even wearing a leash—and holding the leash was Helen! Her eyebrows were singed but she was alive.
“Please, let’s go somewhere,” she said under her breath. “Quickly.”
“THEY’RE CLOSING IN,” she said. Helen, Mr. Peabody, and I were sitting in my apartment.
“Someone told them about the archive,” she continued. “They might have known about it for a while. It doesn’t really matter. They did what I was afraid they’d do—destroyed it and all the evidence of the sacred animal.”
It wasn’t a simple fire that had been set. The saboteurs dropped a daisy-cutter bomb from above—probably a spare from the war in Afghanistan. The lair was decimated and Helen had barely escaped.
“Thank goodness you were aboveground,” she said to Mr. Peabody.
“Yes, thank goodness,” he said emphatically. “I just can’t imagine how they found out about your archive or why they struck now.”
“I’m afraid I might be able to tell you,” I said sheepishly. “They have the Fala chew toy.”
“What?!” squawked Helen. “But how?”
“It’s a long and trippy story,” I said. “But I guess now that they have the complete Fala Grail they figured they could destroy the remaining archives, consolidate their power—”
“—and bury the truth forever,” said Helen wanly. “Poor Barney is on his own now. If they move against him . . .” She trailed off.
“There, there, Madame,” said Mr. Peabody, waxing her new feathers with some shortening I kept in my cupboard. “You can always hope for a miracle, as unlikely as that seems.”
“Wait a minute, Helen,” I said. “You don’t need a miracle. You have your memory—the whole untold history of the White House is in your head. You know the past and if you choose to tell all, then—”
“That’s impossible,” snapped Mr. Peabody. “Madame cannot divulge such things.”
“I still don’t understand that,” I said. “It makes no sense.”
“Mr. Peabody is right,” she said. “I can’t.”
“But why, Helen? The stakes are so high.”
Mr. Peabody was becoming more sharp with me than ever before. “It is not for you to know.”
“The hell it isn’t,” I shouted back. “I’m sorry, Mr. Peabody, but it’s not just that Bebe Rebozo nearly had me killed. I’ve been through too much with Helen already to be kept in the dark.”
Mr. Peabody raised the canister of shortening over his head, as if he might strike me with it.
But Helen placed her claw on his shoulder. “Mo, I need to level with you,” she said. Mr. Peabody begrudgingly backed off.
It was, apparently, time for another confession. Little could shock me at this point. If Helen had somehow unzipped her coat of feathers, revealing the body of a coyote, I would have been bored. Thankfully her revelation was far more interesting.
“I once told you I was never a presidential pet. I’m afraid I was more than a presidential pet. As you know, 1848 was a big year for me.”
“Actually I didn’t know that,” I said.
“Well, it was. President Polk was just completing his single extraordinary term. America’s territory now stretched coast to coast, thanks to the Mexican-American War, and manifest destiny was reality. That was the year America elected Zachary Taylor president.”
“Old Rough and Ready, right? He was a hero of that war.”
“That’s right. A fearless man. The question was, was he strong enough to deal with the slavery question? Years before I’d been invited to Nat Turner’s uprising. It was a lovely affair, before it turned bloody, and the whole experience made me very anti-slavery. I wanted a President who could face down the southern slave interest but Taylor made me uncomfortable. He owned one hundred slaves himself. That’s when I met a certain vice president from the state of New York,” she said dreamily.
“Millard Fillmore!” I said. “The only President to have no presidential pet.”
“You’re only half right,” she said. “Let me explain. Millard and Abigail Fillmore were delightful. She was a teacher and fervently anti-slavery. And Millard, well, Millard had the most piercing blue eyes you ever saw on a vice president. My God, he made Hannibal Hamlin look like Garret Hobart.”
“He was that good-looking?” I asked.
“Hotter than Hubert H. Humphrey,” she said, fanning herself with her own wing.
“I got to spending some time with Millard and Abby . . . then just with Mi
llard,” she added, lowering her voice and glancing down, a little bit shamefaced. “We got to talking—about my childhood with the Shoshones, his growing up in the Finger Lakes region of New York.”
“He built his own house in East Aurora, New York,” I chimed in. I’d been there for a tour and purchased a souvenir hot plate.
“Built his own house?” she gaily laughed. “Typical East Aurora hokum. Millard wouldn’t have known a hammer if it banged him on his beautiful head.” She was clearly still enamored.
She continued. “One evening we got to talking about the congressional deliberations on the Compromise of 1850, a Whig bill meant to stave off war. It had some good provisions—admission of California as a free state and the elimination of slavery in D.C. But Millard seemed worried that President Taylor wouldn’t sign it into law.”
Helen started pacing around remembering the details of her fateful conversation with the future thirteenth President.
“ ‘But he’s a Whig, too,’ I told him. ‘Surely he’ll side with his party in Congress.’
“ ‘You silly bird,’ he told me. ‘Old Rough and Ready’s not dealing with a full deck. He’s still shell-shocked from the Battle of Buena Vista.’ ” This was a reference to one of General Taylor’s triumphs in the Mexican-American War. “ ‘So really, there’s no telling what Taylor will do about this,’ ” Helen quoted Fillmore as saying.
“What about Old Whitey?” I asked, referring to Taylor’s beloved horse.
“He was a sweet horse,” said Helen. “He’d fought with Taylor in Mexico. The trouble was, he lost his hearing, what with all the gunfire. So he was no use to us or him as far as counsel went. Things just felt precarious. That’s when Millard made me an offer that I found difficult to refuse. ‘I want you to be my presidential pet,’ he said. ‘Together we can do great things for this country.’
“I was flattered but I figured we’d have to wait until 1856, if President Taylor chose to run for reelection. It was then that I saw Millard look at me as he’d never looked at me before. ‘We can’t wait that long, Helen,’ he said. ‘We must act now.’ ”