Shining City

by Tom Rosenstiel

  Had it been winnable, everything would have been different. Or if Johnson had pulled out in 1964 when he was first told he couldn’t win, or even in 1966 or ’67. But that’s not what happened. And a lot of the country condemned the soldiers who went anyway as if they were to blame.

  To Rena that made the sacrifices of these soldiers more tragic and valiant, not more shameful.

  It didn’t make Vietnam right. But it dishonored the protestors. And it had cleaved the nation in two, a split that still hasn’t healed, even if half the country is too young to remember or have been alive.

  Roland Madison, like most people his age, seems to consider his protests of the war a badge of honor, or something humorously young and hardly worth reflecting on. Maybe that isn’t so unusual. But Madison is supposed to be extraordinary.

  As the car heads up Seventeenth Street Rena sees a collection of protestors gathered near the White House. There are always some, a constant but changing and motley troop, carrying hand-painted signs.

  “The Army Tested LSD on My Father.” “Save Our Country: End Foreign Aid.” “Please Find My Daughter.” “Will Anyone Help Me?”

  Twenty-four

  Saturday, April 25, 4:04 P.M.

  Woodside, California

  The position is perfect.

  From here he can see the house and also sections of the trail coming down from the house and he can still be hidden as someone on the trail gets close.

  There is a rock outcropping, and when he slips behind it he can remain hidden from almost every angle. Yet with two steps forward he easily has room to swing a club and kill anyone coming down the trail.

  Whoever is coming down that path is defenseless. And the faster they run, the more lethal the blow. A good spot. A killing spot.

  The weapon was a challenge. He needs something found here, in these woods. Like Bird said, anything you bring from somewhere else reveals more about you. And it had to be a hardwood, thick and long enough to be struck across a man’s head with enough force that it could crack the skull. That meant it couldn’t break. It needed to be strong. A killing stick.

  The blow is simple. It’s a backhand swing, like a righty batting left-handed. And the force would be even harder ’cause the runner would be coming at him down the hill. Sure thing.

  A man would go down easy. And once he is down, well, he has another plan for that. At one end, the stick he’s found will also work like a spear. He can drive it down into the judge’s chest, crushing the rib cage. Like a knight with a lance. Righteous. A goddamn avenger.

  The only problem is if someone is coming up the path from below at the same time. The path curves there, and so he wouldn’t see someone coming up. He could hear but he couldn’t see. So he will need to listen in both directions.

  And there’s one other risk. The biggest one. It came to him like a flash, as the whole plan had formed in his mind over the last month. This hiding place, this killing place, changed something. When they come out with their tape, and their chemicals and their bullshit, the police will figure someone had waited, had stalked. Unlike the other two, they would know this wasn’t random, and they will try to imagine all the people who might want to kill the judge. They would ask everyone and make lists, and in time, they might begin to connect the other two, and begin to figure it out.

  But by then he would have vanished.

  That is the plan. That is the trick of the whole thing, the plan of doing them so close together.

  Always plan, right, Bird?

  He has looked at it both ways, pro and con. Cost and benefit.

  The cost of doing them all at once is he wouldn’t learn as much from the first kill, from the woman. He took months, worked them all out, and he couldn’t do the first one until the last one was all figured, down to the last thing.

  But now he feels rushed.

  Maybe it’s all the better. Like a raging fucking hail storm coming down. Before anyone figures out anything. That is a benefit.

  The other cost, he figures, might be his own panic. What if he gets excited? Or hurt? He will have no time to calm down. No time to regroup.

  But he is good at this. He can feel it. He sensed it right away, even before the woman. So much of it, little things, things many people wouldn’t think of, seem to come into his mind right away. Like it’s natural.

  He looks up the ridge, trying to pick up the early parts of the trail.

  About time.

  The judge usually runs alone. Weekends at 4:00 when he’s home. Like clockwork.

  You gotta love it. Routine makes a man vulnerable.

  He puts the binoculars to his face again and scans the ridge, trying to find the trail.

  He sees him . . . distant. In the trees and shadows.

  Time to slide into the spot, the little crevice, where he could hear the footsteps on the trail. He waits. It seems forever. And then he hears. Yes.

  Wait.

  Not yet.

  He feels the stick in his hands. Lighten the grip. Be cool. Be loose. Listen.

  The footfalls are getting closer.

  Fifty feet.

  Easy.

  Now forty.

  He can hear himself breathe.

  Thirty.

  Can he move? Can he slip out? Yes, he is loose. Don’t make a sound.

  Twenty.

  Deep breaths. Relax. Relax, man.

  Time the footfalls. He feels that syrupy feeling again, the one he felt the first time with the bitch in Berkeley. Yeah.

  Ten.

  Now.

  Wait. Just as he begins to move, he slides back, into the crevice.

  And he sees the runner pass.

  Shit. Goddamn it. His heart feels like it is going to blow out of his chest. Breathe.

  He looks, through the tiny space, and watches the runner move down the trail, leaning back just slightly as the trail steepens.

  But it’s a woman. Not the judge.

  She reaches the curve of the switchback and is gone.

  He cannot calm his breathing. His heart.

  But he feels pride, too.

  That he sensed something wrong.

  He isn’t here for the daughter.

  Twenty-five

  Monday, April 27, 2:40 P.M.

  Washington, D.C.

  The president walks to the microphone alone.

  The Rose Garden had been the president’s idea. “An august occasion, a Supreme Court nomination,” he’d said whimsically. “And it’s springtime. Get the wretches out of the press room.”

  Rena and Brooks sit in the first row of white folding chairs set up on the grass, beside senior White House staff, plus the attorney general and solicitor general and their chief aides. The press is seated in the rows behind. A Rose Garden press conference vaguely resembles a small wedding.

  The president carries no note cards with him. He looks down at the portable lectern to center his thoughts and then up at the “pool” camera at the back.

  “History shows us that among the lasting impressions of a presidency, a so-called presidential legacy, perhaps no element is more significant in its implications on the lives of ordinary Americans than the jurists you place on the country’s highest court. Today I make my first nomination to that court.”

  Brooks is leaning over her cell. “Still no name,” she whispers to Rena, meaning it hasn’t leaked. The reporters must be livid.

  The president’s remarks touch on the significance of the Court, the importance of consensus, the desire of Earl Warren that as many decisions as possible be unanimous. It’s a veiled slight at the decisions rendered by the Court under current chief justice Stephen Forner.

  He invokes, as he had the first night with Rena, what the Federalist Papers said about what a president should seek. “Nothing but judgment,” Nash repeats. “Wisdom, judgment, that is a judge’s power. That is the gift we seek, the temperament we need. No jurist in America epitomizes those qualities more than the judge I introduce to you now.”

 
At the word “now” the door that connects the Oval Office to the Rose Garden opens, and Edmund Roland Madison emerges, followed by Victoria Madison.

  Reporters whispering. You can hear typing on wireless devices as people scan the Web to ID the man. At least for some, the White House has achieved actual surprise.

  They’d worked on Madison’s statement last night and most of the morning, ever since Carr called to say Nash had decided on him. Madison had chafed at the vagueness of it. “Dad, just go with it,” Vic advised.

  “Your only job is to be grateful and humble,” Brooks said.

  “Should I wear a monkey’s cap and be tied to the organ grinder’s wrist?”

  “If it will help,” Rena said. That had prompted Vic to laugh—sending a message to her father: “Stop, Dad.”

  Madison pulls the statement now from his jacket pocket.

  “It is with great humility and gratitude that I stand before you today. I have spent my adult life studying the law, practicing it, teaching it, presiding over it.”

  The statement offers just enough biography to introduce Madison without any hint of what he thinks or believes. He mentions being a widower and a single father. He acknowledges Vic. He thanks the president and his home-state senators.

  Press conference by numbers. No questions. “Your nomination is the news. You don’t want to make it any more with anything you say,” Brooks had told him.

  It all goes fine until a reporter yells out asking whether he looks forward to appearing at Senate confirmation hearings. Perhaps the inanity of the question pushed a button.

  “You know that isn’t required by the Constitution,” Madison responds.

  “Oh, God,” Brooks mutters.

  “That protocol, having nominees testify, is really a creature of television. Before that, it almost never happened.”

  Madison ad-libbing. He means it as a joke. But it’s not funny.

  “But if the Senate Judiciary Committee asks me, of course, I look forward to it, and to answering whatever questions they have.”

  Senate Cloakroom

  2:53 P.M.

  Senator Wendy Upton isn’t quite sure if she heard right.

  Did the man whom President Nash nominated to the Supreme Court just take a royal piss on the Senate confirmation process?

  Right there on television?

  It was subtle, but it was there. His appearance before the Senate isn’t required by the Constitution. He would appear “if the Senate asks”? And something about a “creature”?

  The talking heads on TV seemed to have missed it. The anchorwoman, a redhead made up to look more like a porn star than a college graduate, is reading some biographical factoids about Madison she probably got from a White House handout. It depresses Senator Upton that cable channels insist on making women look like that. The same information about Madison is repeated in graphics running down the side of the screen and again in text crawling across the bottom.

  Upton looks around the cloakroom to see if any other senators noticed. A half dozen are on their cell phones texting or on Twitter, probably trying to assess reaction. A few senators don’t even have smartphones yet, but some of her colleagues reveal more on Facebook than they tell spouses or staff.

  A maverick on the Judiciary Committee who rose to prominence as a crusading attorney for the Judge Advocate General’s Corps in the U.S. Army, Upton had caught the eye of the GOP in her home state of Arizona after being profiled by 60 Minutes. She had a reputation on Judiciary as the house intellectual, a freethinker, an instant star because of her obvious legal intellect and as a woman. Well, what should she should think about Nash’s choice for the Court? She has questions. Certainly she has questions.

  She sees Senator June Blanchard, a new member on Judiciary, and catches her eye.

  “June, you see the press conference?”

  “Yes, I will need to know more, but he seems like an interesting choice,” she says with a practiced senatorial vagueness.

  Upton can’t decide whether the honorable Senator Blanchard is careful or vapid, a distinction sometimes difficult to make with politicians.

  “This will be my first Supreme Court nomination as a member of Judiciary,” Blanchard says.

  “Yes, they are always interesting,” Upton offers. She had worked on a Supreme Court nomination during her brief stint as a staffer for Judiciary chairman Furman Morgan after leaving the army. Her time as a Senate staffer was followed by four years in the House, then a successful run for the Senate.

  Blanchard’s cell phone vibrates, and she is instantly absorbed by it. Upton excuses herself and wanders over to eavesdrop on four other senators, three of them liberal members from the Northeast, standing near another television talking. She hears the words “moderate,” and “California,” but the tone is hard to discern.

  “John, Marty, Sandy, Fred,” Upton says in greeting.

  “Wendy.”

  “You see the president’s announcement?”

  “No, but we were just talking about his pick. Seems like Nash is trying to avoid trouble,” says John Rasmussen of Connecticut. “Madison is a moderate.”

  “Smart,” says Marty Rogers of Massachusetts.

  “Or gutless,” says Fred Blaylish of Vermont.

  “I don’t know. Berkeley. Harvard. He’s not exactly getting to the heartland, is he?” says Upton.

  It’s obvious that none of them knows any more about Roland Madison than they had just heard on TV.

  “You going to play the culture war here, Wendy?” Blaylish shoots back.

  The culture wars? Fuck you, Fred.

  Blaylish seems to think that what he calls the “culture wars,” the social values politics of the 1980s and ’90s, were cynical rather than sincere. They weren’t. And they are a lot simpler than the pressures from constituents Upton faces now to keep her seat. Today she has to have the right position on abortion and guns, and then also worry about where the Common Sense vote is on taxes, and health care, debt, climate change, evolution—and who knows what will be next.

  She will find out when she “dials for dollars” tomorrow. That’s how she spends most of her time now, it feels like—on the phone raising money. It is up to four to six hours a day, depending on the time of year. When she started it was maybe one or two—and many days none. And most of these hours are spent talking to your most angry supporters, extremists so aggrieved they will give you money only if they’re sure you’re as zealous as they are. Or the transactional jerks, people who want something hard and expensive for their contribution and are willing to pay for it. You need these angry and demanding people’s money to serve. But they want assurance you are as angry as they are, or that they will get a return on their investment. Once you say yes, you owe. You owe and owe. The money game is so out of control and people don’t seem to realize these aren’t supposed to be bribes. Well, it’s the age of accountability, baby.

  The Common Sense phenomenon awed her most of all. It is less a movement than an emotion—anger directed at almost everything, the economy, race, multiculturalism, modernism, taxes, the Chinese, the Koreans, aging, change, about the whole goddamn state of things.

  One of her closest friends, Randall Stone, saw his bid to retain his seat in the House in South Carolina fail in a primary loss by 3,200 votes to a Common Sense candidate, and Stone was probably the most conservative person she knew. Randy taught Sunday school and took a hard line on almost every social issue there was. His sin was that he believed that climate change was real, and he had voted to raise the debt ceiling. “You either get with the program or get run over, Wendy,” Stone had told him. “Even if you think they are crazy you have to agree. Either that or get out.”

  She looks over and sees her mentor, Senator Furman Morgan, the senior senator from South Carolina and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Morgan will chair the Madison hearings. She walks over to him.

  He is asleep, slumped in a red mahogany leather armchair in the Senate Cloakroom with his
eyes closed.

  Of course, she thinks.

  Morgan hides in one of the cloakroom’s plush armchairs with his eyes closed many afternoons around 2:30—at least on those days when the Senate is in session. Out for about twenty minutes, give or take.

  Morgan even bragged about preferring to nap in the cloakroom, the sprawling offices just off the Senate chamber, rather than his office across the street in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Only senators and aides are allowed in the cloakroom, and what occurs in the cloakroom is strictly private. It may be one of the few places in Washington where nothing leaks. Every senator spends time here. Which means everyone is vulnerable. So everyone is safe.

  Upton owes the old man a good deal. She had met Morgan when she was a young JAG lawyer, at a time when women were far and few between in key military positions. Morgan, who had a reputation for staffing his office with beautiful women and marrying a succession of younger wives, had surprised her by encouraging her, then grooming her to run for a House seat and eventually the Senate.

  But it is not clear anymore whether Morgan is conservative enough, passionate enough, energetic enough, for what is to come. The old man has sat on Judiciary for forty-three years. He was the committee’s staunchest conservative in the culture wars of the 1980s, was enraged by the Bork hearings, had done more than anyone to carry the conservative cause during the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings in the 1990s. But Morgan came to the Senate in another time, an age when senators fought in public but socialized in private—and measured a large part of their senatorial value in the deals they made. Two years from now Morgan will face a primary challenge from any number of Common Sense advocates. A lot of folks doubt the old man will survive, if he is stubborn enough to try.

  You never know. The man is a sphinx. But more and more Upton worries.

  Upton heads toward the door of the cloakroom when she hears Senator Morgan’s voice.

  “Wendy,” the old man says in an impish whisper.