Shining City

by Tom Rosenstiel

  Rena hasn’t been interested in dating much since he and Katie split two years ago. He suddenly wishes he and Brooks were spending more time in California. Then he wishes Vic lived in Washington, and that she were somebody else’s beautiful daughter rather than Roland Madison’s.

  “And how’s my father doing?”

  Rena smiles and shakes his head sympathetically.

  “Sorry, Vic, my opinion can only be offered to the president. That confidentiality also protects your father. But I’d like to know how you think he’s doing.”

  She stops, her hands suspended over a tray on which she is arranging mugs. “I think he will be fine. He is always fine.”

  She smiles at him, more thoughtfully this time, not in jest but in recollection. It’s a great smile. The smoke-colored eyes shine even more.

  “You know, earlier, when he was being difficult, well, that was just Rollie trying to be honest. He dislikes falsity. He takes pride in that. And he didn’t want to be false with you. So he tries to disarm people by being candid, even provoking, to get them to be honest with him. You have to remember he’s been in a position of absolute authority—a professor and then a judge—for a long time.”

  It’s clear Vic believes this. Rena wonders if he will come to agree. And then he wonders if can get the judge to knock it off if he comes to D.C. to be confirmed.

  “Are you married, Peter?” she says suddenly. She has some of her father’s directness, too. “I’m sorry,” she adds. “It’s none of my business. I don’t know why I asked.”

  “I used to be,” he answers.

  She blushes and says, “There is no better way to say that, is there? How long ago did it end?”

  “Two years. Divorced just over a year. What about you?” She’s divorced, too, he knows from the file but he asks anyway.

  “My own story isn’t so raw,” she says, drying her hands on a dish towel. “Not anymore. We were law students together. We weren’t well matched, but we were the kind of people who didn’t fail at things. So we worked hard not to fail at this.”

  She pours tea into four mugs and then opens a cupboard, pulls out cookies, and begins to arrange them on a plate.

  “It must have been a different kind of childhood,” Rena says, hearing himself changing the subject, “growing up in this house. So far in the woods.”

  “Just Dad and me. Yes. You have a take a car everywhere. But it’s not as remote as it looks. And you?”

  Rena thinks she is asking about his parents.

  “Also just my dad and me. We came from Italy when I was almost two. My father was a stone artisan. Churches.”

  Then he realizes she was probably asking where he grew up, not how.

  “He carved the National Cathedral in Washington. The gargoyles, the balustrades.”

  “Makes you close, when it’s just two of you,” she says. “No room for rebellion.”

  Rena thinks of his dad, and feels the familiar sense of loss, which makes him think about Katie.

  Vic picks up the tray of tea and cookies and says, “Follow me, soldier.”

  “Dad, it’s almost four p.m.,” Vic announces a half hour later after observing more questions by Brooks.

  Madison glances at his watch.

  “I like to run on weekends, around now if I can,” he explains. “A trail run, not far from the house.”

  “My father is a creature of habit.”

  “A believer in routine,” Madison corrects her. “It’s amazing what routine can do for productivity. I write in the mornings before work. Exercise late afternoon. Read at night.”

  “Yes, routine is the way to master time rather than squander it,” Vic teases, repeating what is apparently a favorite paternal aphorism.

  “Perhaps I should stay and we keep going,” Madison says.

  Rena wants him to leave. He’d like to comb through the house to help get a better fix on the elusive judge.

  “Go ahead, Judge,” Rena tells him. “Randi and I could use the time.”

  On a distant ridge, a man watches the judge and the daughter on the trail and notes the time.

  Twenty-three

  Monday, April 20, 5:52 P.M.

  Washington, D.C.

  James Nash is not good at waiting.

  It is more than a week since Julius Hoffman died. Nash has given the ex-army investigator Peter Rena and the veteran judicial reviewer Randi Brooks two days with Roland Madison in California. But he has asked that they come straight from the airport to the White House on their return. He likes to hear things immediately, and unrehearsed.

  “They’re here, Mr. President,” Sally Swanson buzzes at last.

  “Send them in.”

  Brooks enters the Oval Office in a rumpled gray pantsuit looking exhausted. Rena looks as if he’s just showered. A steward brings lemonade and ice tea.

  Nash asks them about the flight and their hotel—small talk that keeps him in touch with details of regular life—then leans back on the sofa, draping a leg over the couch’s arm.

  “Do you know the biggest mistake most presidents make?” Nash says.

  Brooks shakes her head.

  “They become too isolated. They get too much information filtered through a handful of senior aides, and let one or two of their staff know as much as they do. This cuts off the person with the best instincts for decision making from fully understanding problems and creates alternative power centers in the White House.”

  Lincoln, he tells them, monitored battlefield news directly at the telegraph office. Reagan divided the chief of staff’s role into three jobs—in his first term anyway. Franklin Roosevelt enlisted special envoys who reported directly to him.

  “That’s why I asked you to take this on and why I’ve asked you to report back to me immediately before you’ve had a chance to speak to anyone else.”

  “Of course, sir,” Brooks says.

  Nash slides his leg off the arm of the couch, leans forward, and takes a sip of his iced tea.

  “So what did you think of him?” he asks Brooks. “Should I put Roland Madison on the Supreme Court?” Nash knows her history, a dogged and astute attorney who has vetted a lot of judicial nominees for a past president and in the Senate. Now in her forties, she would be at the peak of her skills.

  “Mr. President?” she says, caught off guard.

  “That doesn’t sound very positive.”

  “I, it’s just a question with a lot of dimensions.”

  “Should we go one dimension at a time?”

  She laughs. “It would be less intimidating.”

  Good. She’s relaxing. One of the most frustrating things about being president is getting people to calm down enough to be honest with you.

  A knock on a side door. “Come,” the president says. Spencer Carr steps halfway into the room. “May I?”

  Nash had wanted this meeting without Carr. Spencer has been fighting him on this whole thing. But William Barlow Nash’s son is also not going show up his chief of staff in front of outsiders.

  “Of course, Spence,” the president answers. “I was just about to ask Randi how would it change the Court if I replaced Julius Hoffman with Roland Madison? Randi?”

  “It might confuse everything,” she says after a breath.

  “How?”

  “Judge Madison strives very hard to be an iconoclast, in the best sense of the word. Someone free of cant and orthodoxy. He tries to push back against the liberal ‘critical legal theorists’ who argue there is no such thing as objective law—that it’s just all ideology. But he pushes equally hard against conservative orthodoxy that sees the Constitution in what he considers too rigid a way.”

  “So he’d be an unpredictable choice . . . politically unreliable.”

  “He might relish it.”

  “How would the other justices react?”

  “Some will be annoyed. But it might inspire other justices to be more freethinking. History suggests that is hard to predict.”

  Nash looks pl
eased.

  “What’s his most unorthodox position?”

  “His theory of ‘essentialism.’ That’s the idea that the Constitution was a document of political consensus that articulates sometimes conflicting ideas. As he puts it, the Constitution is brilliant, but human, not divine.”

  She was a good choice for this, Nash thinks.

  “How does he come across personally?”

  “You mean how will he do in hearings?” she asks. “To be honest, he can be challenging. He’s brilliant, but he doesn’t have much patience for what you might call social niceties.”

  The president doesn’t react.

  “Have you met him, Mr. President?” Brooks asks.

  Nash smiles and glances at Carr. “Oh, yes.” He and Carr have met a lot of possible Supreme Court nominees privately over the course of the last year, often out of Washington, spread out in a way that the meetings would go unnoticed.

  Nash turns to Rena. The man has a lethal stillness about him, Nash thinks.

  “You agree, Peter?”

  “I’ll defer to Randi on the law, sir.”

  “Then tell me about the politics.”

  The ex-soldier is an unusual Washington fixer, the president thinks. He came to it not entirely by choice, and he is a little too independent. All of which, according to reputation, has made him an unusually cold-eyed and objective political tactician.

  “The Right will be caught off guard but the hard Right will conclude Madison is even more of a threat because he is unorthodox,” Rena begins. “And the cultural cues will grate on some people—Berkeley, the sixties, articles about everything from birding to single parenting.”

  “What about my own party?”

  “They’ll be conflicted between supporting you and being disappointed you didn’t pick a stronger liberal. And that ambivalence will embolden your enemies to fight you more.”

  “And the press?” Nash asks.

  “They despise the current state of politics so they’ll be impressed by an iconoclastic choice. But they’re fixated on winners and losers, so they’ll note the lack of enthusiasm in your own party. Ultimately, they’ll say it’s another enigmatic move,” Rena says.

  The president has a taut expression and then his face softens. The soldier does live up to his reputation for frankness.

  “No credit for trying to change the dynamics of the Court?”

  “That’s too subtle a narrative for a hundred and forty characters.”

  The president looks at Brooks and then to Carr for rebuttal, but they are looking at Rena. Nash creates a pause by taking another drink of iced tea, then moves on.

  “You find anything that could damage us? Any dirty laundry that can’t be cleaned? I don’t mean some random phrase taken out of context from a law review article. If we can’t handle that, we don’t deserve the White House.”

  “We found one thing,” Brooks says quickly, and Nash wonders if she has jumped in before Rena can answer.

  “And that is?”

  “Vietnam antiwar protests.”

  Bemused, Nash says, “Why is that a problem?”

  “Because Madison and his friends have hidden it all these years.”

  “Why have they done that?” Nash asks.

  Brooks tells the story and she puts it as nicely as it can be put, Rena thinks. But she includes everything they know—the vandalism of the ROTC office and car, detention by an army MP, contacts with other groups, including those shepherding people to Canada. She uses the phrase “civil disobedience group” and says “Madison was seventeen.”

  Nash shifts around uncomfortably on his sofa, as if a spring were suddenly poking out of it.

  “They actually ferry anyone to Canada?”

  “Not that we can find. They put people up. They didn’t know where they went after.”

  “One of them may have been part of the Weather Underground. That would be a felony,” Rena adds. “That is serious.”

  “But there is no evidence of that,” Brooks says. “It was a rumor. And they were never charged with a crime of any sort, and laws at the time mean the statutes of limitation have run out.”

  Nash looks at Carr, then back at Rena and Brooks.

  “If it’s been hidden, how did you find it?” Nash asks.

  “Isn’t that’s why you hired us?” Rena answers.

  Rena is trying to read him; the president can sense it. Nash’s grandfather, a great card player, used to call that “listening with your eyes.”

  “Why the hell did they try to hide it?” Carr says from the other side of the room.

  “It seemed more controversial at the time than it does now,” Brooks says.

  Nash rises from the sofa and begins to pace, marking a path back and forth. “Would Madison volunteer it?”

  “Yes,” Brooks says. “The problem is two of the others, who’ve insisted from the start. They work in government and they think they would be damaged now. A judge and a high-ranking government official.”

  Nash stops pacing and scans the faces of the three people in his office.

  “Mr. President, in my view, this is innocent,” Brooks says. “And it was forty years ago.”

  “Peter? Something bothering you?”

  “It may be a youthful indiscretion. But to some people this will sound like acts of treason. And the fact that they have hidden it makes it worse.”

  “Treason, that’s ridiculous,” Carr says. “By that standard millions of Americans—”

  Nash raises a calming hand. He is standing next to the sofa so the four of them form a circle, the three aides sitting, the president standing over them.

  “Your recommendation, Peter?”

  “I think you have three choices,” Rena answers, as he might a commanding officer in the army, where you lay out options rather than tell the boss what to do.

  “You could choose to volunteer this information. You might even make it a condition of a Madison nomination.

  “You could choose not to reveal it and hope it remains hidden. But if it leaks, he’s probably done and your presidency would be hurt. You have picked a radical and hidden it.

  “Or you could decide that his silence over this, if not the protests themselves, disqualifies him from being nominated.”

  Nash looks at Carr again, but with a slight shake of his head the chief of staff indicates he has nothing to add.

  “Mr. President, may I ask you a question that isn’t my job to ask?” says Rena.

  Nash, still standing but looking restless again, says, “Fire away.”

  “Why don’t you pick Laura Joiner from Tennessee? She’s more liberal. She’s African American. She’s younger. She’s probably more confirmable.”

  Rena wants to read Nash responding to a direct question about this. He wants more clues about what the president really wants. And whether Madison and they are being set up.

  “Because Joiner rebalances the Court, but that’s not what I want to do. I don’t want to rebalance it. I want disruption.

  “Now it’s my turn for a question,” Nash says. “If you found this hidden Vietnam stuff why won’t others?”

  “We can’t guarantee they won’t,” Rena says.

  The president stares at him. Then a mischievous grin crosses Nash’s handsome face, and it makes him look younger.

  “Makes life interesting, doesn’t it? A politically unreliable iconoclast who might just move the Court in an important new direction, but who may never get confirmed. And there’s a secret that could blow up in our face.”

  The president is enjoying the moment, the stakes, the decision making.

  “Time for bottom lines,” Nash says. “Randi, yes or no?”

  “I doubt, sir, there are a dozen people with his kind of legal mind in the country, and that includes the eight sitting on the Court already,” Brooks answers.

  “Peter?”

  Rena can feel something welling up. He isn’t sure what he is about to say. In his soccer days he learned to prepar
e by actively emptying his conscious mind, a form of trusting yourself so your fears didn’t overwhelm you. The technique had helped him cut it in Special Forces, a place where you dedicate yourself to going beyond the limits of what you thought you could handle.

  He sees Madison’s face at lunch, the dismissiveness in his eyes, as he described the thinking that went into the war protests when he was seventeen.

  “My father used to say, ‘There are a lot of people who are smart. Not so many who are wise.’”

  “You don’t think Roland Madison is wise?”

  “What the hell was that?” Brooks says after they get into the car waiting for them outside the White House. “You don’t think Madison is wise enough to be on the Court?”

  She is somewhere between furious and amused, but she hasn’t made the whole journey between them yet. “Jesus, Peter, we’re sitting with the president of the United States in the goddamn Oval Office. You’re not at some D.C. dinner party throwing out bullshit.”

  Brooks is falling for Madison, Rena thinks, or falling for the idea of picking a different kind of person for the Court.

  “You afraid we might lose?” she demands.

  Rena looks at his partner across the backseat.

  “Because he spray-painted an ROTC window when he was seventeen and let strangers stay in his dorm room?”

  The limousine taking them home stops at the security gate behind the White House on Seventeenth Street.

  Rena suddenly realizes what he is feeling. It isn’t the prospect of losing that bothers him. It’s the idea of helping Madison win.

  He was mentored by men who had fought in Vietnam. Those men, his friends and teachers, bore a triple scar. They had been damaged by the war in the way soldiers always are. Then they had come home and were despised for their patriotism, and that was a national disgrace—as much as persisting in fighting a war that couldn’t be won.

  But the third scar was the worst. The soldiers were also despised for losing the war.

  People don’t admit that last one. It makes everything more complicated. But a good many antiwar protesters were simply afraid of going. They didn’t know if the war could stop communism in Asia or not. How could they? All these kids knew was that the war seemed hopeless.