“Senator?”
She looks down at Morgan. The old man, usually so natty, so vital, appears shrunken in the big chair, his suit bunched up at the back of his neck. Morgan still has his eyes closed.
“Looks like we are goin’ to have to a little fun with Judge Madison,” Morgan says, drawling his vowels and dropping consonants for effect.
“Sir?”
“If, uh, we, ‘insist’ on his testifyin’? Well, I am afraid perhaps we shall.”
“Yes, sir,” Upton says.
“We won’t insist, of course. We shall humbly request. We would never imagine insistin’.”
“No, sir.”
“This isn’t a great sin on his part, Wendy. But I believe we may conclude that we may have to instruct this young judge from the western state of California in the value of humility and polity. Washington is, after all, a southern city. Manners still matter.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So you noticed his impudence, Wendy.”
“I did, sir, yes.”
“I’m pleased to hear that.”
“Thank you, sir. I thought you were sleeping.”
“Oh, just listenin’. Not sleepin’. But, Wendy, there is little that will happen in this town that has not happened before. And after forty-five years I have even seen some of these things that have happened before for myself.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So you learn, Wendy, when you need to listen, and when you need to watch.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sometimes, listenin’ is better.”
“Yes, sir.”
The old man still had his eyes closed.
Twenty-six
9:30 P.M.
Washington, D.C.
Before she starts, Brooks calls Rena. She is sitting at her kitchen table with her laptop, tablet, and phone, ready to pore over the first cut of press coverage and social media building in response to Madison’s nomination. She is feeling exultant.
She knows her partner still harbors doubts—personal ones about Madison and Machiavellian fears about Nash.
“Here we go, partner,” she says to him over the phone.
It’s a line they share when they have passed the point of no return on a project.
“Here we go,” he answers back with a soft laugh.
Brooks can hear jazz playing in the background through the phone. He is probably sitting in his den, she thinks, reading some tome about the planning of an obscure Revolutionary War battle. But he sounds more relaxed than he has in days.
“You remember when you told me that in the back of your mind you still couldn’t shake the idea that we’re being set up, that Nash wants Madison to implode?”
“I remember,” he says wryly.
“How did you put it—give the other party a pound of flesh and then Nash can pick someone more liberal. It was your Washington as lawless frontier, dystopian theory.”
“I still think the paranoid scenario is worth considering,” he says.
Now she laughs, an outsize wholehearted laugh, a release of tension of the past week.
“Well, I’ve been thinking about that,” she says, “and I don’t think it’s that simple. Jim Nash is too clever for that.”
“Okay, I will call Dr. Kissinger and tell him I want to stop my therapy sessions,” Rena says.
“Oh, Madison could implode all right,” Brooks adds. “But I don’t think Nash wants him to. The brilliance of picking him is that Nash wins either way. That’s what became clear to me today, Peter, as we were sitting at the ceremony. If the judge makes it, the president has done something big. If he goes down, Nash still gets credit for trying, and gets another pick. Men like Nash always play with more than one option. That’s how you get to be president.”
In his den, Rena closes the book he is reading and lays it in his lap. It’s a fair theory, he thinks.
“So we’re not being set up to fail, Peter. We’re being set up to succeed. If we’re up to it.”
Meaning get with the program, partner. Madison’s the guy and it’s up to us now to get him confirmed.
“You feel me, kemo sabe?” she asks.
Now Rena laughs.
“I feel you, Lone Ranger.” He pauses and says, “You’re the white guy, right? I’m the Indian? ’Cause that’s how I’d cast it.”
“See you tomorrow, Peter.”
Nash had decided on Madison the day after they returned from California. Despite the judge’s lack of respect for the process. Despite his oddness. Despite the fact that Madison refused to disclose the antiwar activity—and Lord knows they had tried. Madison insisted he wouldn’t betray “a promise to my friends.”
Nash went ahead anyway.
Brooks never had any doubt he would. She had walked out of the Oval Office six days ago convinced Nash was genuine about wanting to change the Court.
She sensed that he was ready to flout his own party and the opposition and be unconventional. She believed him when he said Madison is just the kind of judge the Founders had in mind.
In a way, she had told Rena, Nash is picking himself for the Court. Someone who aspires to be original, free of cant, and wants to inspire others to try to be.
Rena is more skeptical, but then he hadn’t voted for Nash—twice—as Brooks had. And he’s right: There is still plenty to go ass over heels.
Republicans controlling the Senate, Madison’s criticisms of conservative ideas and liberal ones, his California eccentricities, his refusal to talk about the Vietnam protest group, and his resistance to being handled. Culminating in today’s ad lib.
So now they will have to balance her enthusiasm and his doubts. If they’re going to succeed, Brooks thinks, that’s how they’ll do it.
She pulls out her iPad. Time to see how Roland Madison’s nomination is playing. She taps the icon for the New York Times.
For all the changes in the world, the most important scorecard in Washington is still the Times’ front page. Only now you read it the night before—via Twitter feeds.
Along with the White House, Rena and Brooks are dealing with Madison’s greatest vulnerability—his criticism of the cherished conservative idea of strict constructionism—by running at it headlong. They’ve uncovered all of his criticisms and put them out there for all to see, along with a simple narrative. In many ways, Madison is the ultimate advocate of original intent. He just realizes it’s more complicated than some of the slogans, and requires more of judges. And his arguments are beginning to change the view of legal intellectuals about the whole concept of intent.
It’s a plain enough strategy: Exhaust the subject before any critic could get a hold of it.
She pores through close to forty pieces from a couple dozen sources.
The longest story is a biographical profile in the New York Times.
“Roland Madison: Pegged Early as a Prodigy, ‘a Mozart of Law’ and Renaissance Intellectual.”
The piece is a tour de force of White House message control, and the sheer weight of assembled detail will make it effectively the basic public biography. If opponents want to attack Madison now they will have to alter this narrative. The story quotes almost two dozen people from Madison’s life—nearly all of them sources she, Rena, and the White House had lined up.
The other side’s criticisms, for the moment, are vague and ritualistic. “Madison is a liberal activist of the first order who poses as a moderate and puts his own philosophy above the Constitution,” says Wally Short of a group called Judicial Confirmation Alliance. The same quote appears in several stories—it was emailed.
So they have achieved one goal: surprise.
She feels a rush that goes with knowing you have momentum. She loves this.
They could fix Madison’s faux pas in a day when they made initial rounds of courtesy visits in the Senate. A bad joke. No harm, no foul. But it was a sign that they had to watch him. One faux pas they could handle. More than one could become its own problem—a sign of insensitivity or
arrogance.
Her phone chimes. An email from Ellen Wiley—with a link to a list of 150,250 social media posts. Wiley has hired a firm whose algorithm files and categorizes the posts into Pro, Con, and Neutral. She can scroll through quickly to scan them. They are grouped by Facebook, Blogs, and Tweets.
A third firm is tracking the “network” relationships among the tweets, to find out who the most influential tweeters are on the subject, based on how many followers each has and how often their tweets are retweeted. This identifies influential voices in social media they might have to target and either feed with positive messages or discredit by feeding bits of misinformation. The Web is the Wild West. You can pull absurd stunts, and if you get caught no one seems to mind all that much.
She should stop. She’s exhausted. But she’s riveted. She goes another hour.
Twenty-seven
Tuesday, April 28, 11:19 A.M.
Washington, D.C.
Gary Gold has chewed the plastic stick from his coffee into a twisted mess.
“Max, you should be in jail,” he says into the phone. “You know you should. I should have put you there.” He is grinning like a thirteen-year-old boy playing a prank that is just a little deliciously dangerous.
It is one of Gold’s more curious habits. He loves to needle his sources, especially his shadier ones. He has one foot on his desk, and the other on the floor, and he is leaning back in his chair so that one of its wheels is off the floor. His cubicle is located almost precisely in the middle of the Washington Tribune newsroom; anyone sitting within twenty feet of Gold can hear his conversation. At fifty-seven, Gold has never fully mastered what his mother still irritatingly refers to in his presence as an “inside voice.”
“Oh, shit, Max,” Gold says, interrupting the man on the other end. “Please. Who do you think you’re talking to? You’re not in jail because I love you. And you always help the ones you love. Even if they don’t help you. Even if they hurt you, Max. Because that is what love is.” The grin broadens.
Gold is rolling the coffee stirrer between his thumb and forefinger. Now it is flipped back into his mouth. Suddenly it is out again.
“Bullshit. I never would write a story that way. I always throw straight down the middle. Hard slider. Like Mariano Rivera, baby.”
Gold pulls his foot off the desk, and has both feet on the ground, so he can concentrate. The foot that was up is now vibrating, the toes on the floor, the heel bobbing up and down at high speed.
“If Cameron told you that, he’s lying. He’s testing you. And I’m ashamed of you for falling for it.”
Gold listens for longer this time.
“If that were true I would have put it in the paper.”
Another line lights up on Gold’s phone. Then the light goes out and the message light comes up. Then the second line lights up again.
“So you gonna help me? And then I can help you?”
He is laughing in a way that suggests Max is laughing, too.
“Yeah, the Tune,” he says, referring to the Tune Inn, a bar and restaurant on Capitol Hill. “Around one thirty . . . Sure, he can come, too.”
The phone is down and the pulpy stick is back in his mouth. He ignores the message light.
He grabs the plastic stick and flips it toward the trash basket under his desk. It hits the side of the basket and bounces onto the floor near a dozen others.
Now Gold is up and walking toward a glass office in the front of the room facing out to the street. Inside Jack Hamilton, the assistant managing editor for national news, is talking to his deputy, Marjorie Watson. Hamilton sees Gold and shakes his head signaling that he is too busy for him. Gold heads right in.
“Jack, you’re gonna have to give me a Sunday slot for a Slavin story. Page One. I’m gonna nail that guy. He’s dirty, and I’m this close. This close. I was just on the phone with my source, and he’s absolutely ready to confirm. Maybe this afternoon.”
“Gary, not now.”
“But before I finish that, I have a better idea. Let me in on Madison. You’ve done the basic quickie bio thing today. Good grief, Jack. Did they pay us? Huh? Huh?”
“Stop it, Gary.”
“Let’s not do what everyone else is going to on the next one—the Times and the LA Times will do, and the Journal—breaking off different sides of the guy. One piece that tracks a few quirky decisions. Another that traces his intellectual influences. Another one that explains his independent streak. Talk to his professors, his colleagues, his spunky ma, blah, blah. I can write it for you now. ‘Undeniably brilliant. Iconoclastic decisions that could make trouble. Extraordinary guy people always thought might be on the Court.’
“Let’s do this thing differently for once. Just once, for God’s sake. Let’s scrub the shit out of the guy. Do it investigative. Not soft. Not human interest. Really dig, Jack. We have a responsibility to, ya know. Money. Connections. How did he get to the top? What were the compromises? Do it right. Cold-eyed. Do it cold-eyed, with some courage.
“Mad Dog,” Hamilton says to stop him.
Mad Dog is the nickname Gold earned thirty years earlier. Not that many people in the newsroom actually know it. But Hamilton does, and he uses it now to get Gold’s attention. During a virtual monsoon one summer in Washington the elaborate stone entrance to Gold’s apartment building was flooded, trapping the tenants inside. They had a party for the day, everyone’s doors open, the apartment turning into a dormitory. Except for Gold. He jumped out of a window and swam across the parking lot in his underwear, then dressed on the street and went to work. When he arrived, soaked, and bragged about how he had made it in, his boss, the editor of a struggling Capitol Hill wire service was appalled rather than impressed. “Gary, you are like a mad dog. The only way to stop you is to shoot you,” said the boss, a now-forgotten Washington editor. Gold knew instantly the nickname should spread so that his sources would hear it. And maybe they would fear him for it, just a little. When a decade later he made it to the Tribune, after winning a Pulitzer in Chattanooga and being a finalist twice more, he tried to shed some of his more legendary eccentricities. The nickname, now no longer necessary, was one of them. But it lingered, now embarrassing rather than impressive, mostly forgotten but not entirely.
“Jack, don’t be a pussy. Oh, sorry, Marjorie. Jack, don’t be a wuss. Don’t do what everyone else does. The usual, the safe—the boring. The thing that just makes you want to kill yourself because the same friends and neighbors and relatives are quoted in every story to the point that it sounds like it was written by the Madison nomination team. Jack, you know I’m right.”
“Did you read what was in the Times today?” Gold is holding it in his hand and begins to read. “‘. . . described as a surpassing legal scholar and a remarkably wide-ranging public intellectual . . .’ Barf bag, Jack.”
Gold flips inside the paper. “And the bio profile is even worse. Two full pages that sound like they were written by the president’s press secretary. ‘Roland Madison: Pegged Early as a Prodigy, ‘a Mozart of Law’ and Renaissance Intellectual.’”
Thirty seconds ago Hamilton had had every intention of telling Gold he was too busy to talk to him, that he and Watson were trying to put out a fire and that he would have to wait. Now that had been superseded by this other challenge. Gold was insulting. But not wrong.
“What if, just supposing, Gary, there is nothing about Madison that merits a prosecutorial expose? You don’t want to hang the man for nothing, to make something sound sinister only because you were looking for it.”
“You won’t know if you only send out feature writers,” Gold says. “Send feature writers and you get features.”
Hamilton looks at Watson to see if she would have a faint smile of assent on her face or a stern look telling him not to back down. He cannot tell what she is thinking. He has begun to care too much about what she thinks, and he worries that people may have begun to notice. Especially his wife.
“We have a goddamn responsibilit
y, Jack. We ought to do these things right for a change. Hell, just for once. Just to see what it feels like. Eh?”
Gold looks like a whippet, about five feet six and couldn’t weigh more than 140. Paradoxically, the man is both a runner and smoker—the common denominator there being obsessive behavior. And he is the worst-dressed man at the paper, his shirt always untucked on one side and his mud-brown tie he wears several days a week pulled to one side from compulsive tugging.
Yet Gold, somehow, is impossible to dislike. He is infuriating as hell, and he is incapable of not making a pest of himself. Gold knows exactly what he is doing, and everyone else knows it. That is his charm. Gold has perfected it.
“Huh? Jack? Right?”
Hamilton is trying to think.
“And, Jack, I know the folks who are handling the nomination. Rena, Brooks. You know, that former Senate guy and the gal lawyer, they’re like super private investigators or something. I know a bunch of the guys who work for ’em. Old, old friends. I can get inside.”
More hesitation.
“But you’ll nail down this Slavin thing, first, right?” Hamilton says.
“Nail what?”
“Slavin. The bribery story. Congressman Slavin.”
“This afternoon. The man is as good as in prison.”
“I mean it.”
“It’s in the bag.”
“And Mad Dog, the Madison thing is a team effort, okay. Team, as in cooperate and collaborate.”
“Of course, Jack! That’s me. No i in team.”
“Okay, Gary,” Hamilton says warily.
Gold heads back to his desk.
“But there is one in win!” he shouts over his shoulder.
Twenty-eight
Thursday, April 30, 6:30 P.M.
Washington, D.C.
Deborah Cutter looks at her watch. Straight-up 6:30. She has called a meeting for 6:45.
She recalls an old habit and clicks one of the old broadcast network nightly newscasts. There was a time when this was how she ended most of her days in Washington. Everyone did. Twenty years ago, the news cycle ended around now, and everyone watched the network news to see how they did, how they scored, how the day played out. Today the news cycle never ends, and nobody she knows catches the network news anymore. . . . No, that’s too strong, but it almost seems that way.
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