“What’s up?”
“Brian’s on the phone.”
“It’s three in the morning in D.C.”
“That’s why I interrupted you.”
Melanie rushed to the holding room.
“Honey, is everything OK?”
“Everything is fine. I’m sorry I worried you. I told them to tell you that it wasn’t urgent.”
“Oh, my God. My heart is beating out of my chest. What are you doing up?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I was worried about you and the baby.”
“We’re fine. I promise.”
“When you get back, I think we need to make a plan for you to slow down. I don’t think all of the travel is good for the baby, and I know it isn’t good for you.”
“We’ll do that. Don’t worry. I’m not straining myself. I slept eight hours, and when I’m not puking, I’m stuffing my face.”
“I worry all the time that something is going to happen.”
“Me, too, but this little baby is going to be fine.”
“I know.”
“Get some sleep.”
She hung up and touched her stomach. Brian was overly concerned, but Melanie had to give some thought to her travel schedule and the hectic pace she’d always maintained. She had spent her entire adult life working harder and longer than everyone around her. She couldn’t imagine doing these jobs any other way. She finally understood why so many women felt forced to choose between their careers and their families. Melanie couldn’t comprehend what full-time motherhood entailed. She only had a few friends who were mothers, mostly former White House colleagues who dropped out of politics and talked about being swallowed whole by the production of taking care of a newborn and then by the playdates and toddler classes that followed. It sounded daunting, but after everything they’d been through to get pregnant, she couldn’t envision handing her precious little baby over to a stranger.
Melanie also felt the baby might provide a graceful transition out of government. Surely no one would fault her for stepping away from public service after nearly two decades to raise her child? Melanie rubbed her stomach again and realized that she was famished. She pushed herself up from the table and headed back toward the conference room in search of the cheese tray.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dale
Dale slid her iPhone out from under her pillow and watched the time change from 3:59 to 4:00 A.M. She gave up on sleep and thought about how she would have given anything to magically transport Warren across the river to his own bed so she wouldn’t have to get dressed in the dark. After carefully extricating herself from his embrace, she balanced her iPhone and BlackBerry on top of her iPad and tiptoed to the bathroom. Once inside, she scanned the e-mails that had come in during the four hours she’d been unplugged. While she waited for an attachment from one of her deputies to open, she glanced at her reflection. Marie Claire magazine had flown in a colorist and a hairstylist to give her a new haircut and highlights for the photo shoot they’d done of her the week before. Her dark brown hair had a great bouncy shape, and a fresh batch of chestnut-colored strands made her skin look less pale. As the face of the administration, she was getting plenty of attention for her appearance, but it wasn’t the kind of attention that did her any good at all at the podium. She hoped the “Day in the Life” production would be the catalyst for people seeing her as more than a spokesperson; she wanted to be viewed as an influential presidential advisor.
Dale thought she heard Warren stirring. She stuck her head out the bathroom door to check. He’d rolled onto his back and was snoring. She closed the door and finished her hair and makeup with more care than usual and then padded into her closet to get dressed. She selected a black Jil Sander dress that her personal shopper from New York had sent down the week before. Its exquisitely cut shape, fabric, and construction would be lost on the Ann Taylor enthusiasts on the White House staff, but she felt more like herself when she adhered to her fashion-addicted New York ways.
Lucy would appreciate the dress. Lucy Edinburg and Richard Thompson, CBS’s hot new evening anchor team, had been Dale’s pick for the “Day in the Life” special.
She had selected Richard and Lucy over the other network anchors she knew better because everything they did these days was generating tons of buzz. They were being hailed as the saviors of network news for figuring out how to make the evening newscast the most-watched twenty-four minutes of television again.
The rise of Lucy and Richard at CBS represented a final nail in the coffin of Old Journalism. Lucy was a former Fox News anchor, and Richard a beloved fixture at ESPN over the previous three decades. Neither one of them had ever reported from a combat zone, covered a presidential campaign, or done a turn as a White House correspondent. They were skilled conversationalists who managed to endear themselves to viewers by sharing just enough of the details of their personal lives to prove that their challenges and headaches were the same ones that everyone else faced. Their guiding philosophy was that viewers wanted the news delivered by people who managed to inform them without talking down to them. When Lucy underwent invasive fertility treatments at the age of forty-two, she did so with a camera crew in the room. Similarly, Richard did a weeklong special on difficult-to-diagnose ailments that focused on his own symptoms of low energy and weight gain. He subjected himself to several different medical exams, and the series culminated in a visit to an endocrinologist who diagnosed him with “low T” on the air. The reality-television aspect of their newscasts was only one part of their successful formula. Despite a twenty-year age difference, they had the kind of chemistry that made you feel you were peering into someone’s breakfast room on a Sunday morning to listen to them read the best parts of the newspaper to each other. Whether or not their off-air relationship was as cozy as their on-air presentation suggested was a topic of endless debate, but most people in the news business figured that they were simply maximizing every tool at their disposal to attract viewers.
While at Fox, Lucy had built a loyal audience by railing against the mainstream media and conducting tough interviews with politicians and so-called experts. Like most of the women who appeared on Fox News, Lucy was blond and looked more like a beauty queen from the South than a woman who’d lived in New York City for more than a decade. Since she’d made the move to CBS, she’d traded sleeveless teal and fuchsia mini-dresses that looked like they’d been sewn onto her for sophisticated suits in black, navy, and off-white that were expertly tailored. She’d also cut back on the Botox injections and stopped wearing false eyelashes.
Richard added whatever gravitas the team possessed. He was the one who was most likely to apologize to a policy expert or a foreign leader if Lucy asked a question about twerking. With a thick head of silvery blond hair and a permanent suntan, Richard was one of the most likable people on television Dale had ever seen in her life.
Their path to success started a little more than a year earlier, when they were paired up for a weeklong pilot at the third-place morning show. Management was throwing everything against the wall to see if anything would stick, and Lucy and Richard were instructed to be themselves. What happened was pure TV magic. Lucy was irreverent and feisty, and Richard was funny and relaxed. Together, they interviewed celebrities, senators and congressmen, victims of a tornado, and other journalists. Since they’d never covered any official government beats, they leaned heavily on the network’s correspondents at the White House, the State Department, and the Defense Department and, at times, kept them on for an entire newscast. If a celebrity meltdown or weather story was dominating the news, they talked about that and ignored the network correspondents at the White House, State, and DOD. Their approach had plenty of detractors, particularly among the Washington, D.C., circles of elite journalists and pundits, but it attracted viewers from every important demographic. Richard and Lucy quickly turned their show into the hottest thing in television news. After a nine-month streak on the morning show, they’d taken their freew
heeling, teleprompter-free gabfest to the evening news hour, and that program had moved from dead last to second place in only a few short months.
Dale had taken a sizable risk by selecting Lucy and Richard for the “Day in the Life” special, but she wanted to do everything in her power to extend Charlotte’s second honeymoon with the press, and that included courting the journalists who were getting the most attention.
The vice president had also been a strong advocate for doing the “Day in the Life” with Lucy and Richard. Maureen had a very positive impact on Charlotte when it came to her approach with the media. She was generating a lot of goodwill herself through her “open-door” policy. There were as many reporters in and out of the vice president’s office as there were in and out of the press office. Dale privately worried that the vice president’s open-door policy would eventually clash with Charlotte’s preference for keeping the media at arm’s length, but so far, it had only served to enhance reporters’ understanding of the close partnership Maureen had forged with Charlotte. As longtime politicians who’d largely sacrificed their mothering years for their careers, both women shared a bond of wistful acceptance of the trade-offs they’d made to arrive at their positions of immense power. They’d also both endured messy chapters in their personal lives that had played out publicly because of their high-profile positions and unfaithful husbands.
Dale liked to think that Craig’s ascent to chief of staff and her promotion to press secretary contributed to the positivity that the press felt toward the administration. History suggested that Charlotte was wise to shake things up in her second term; successful second-term presidents almost always demanded staff turnover, and Charlotte was an astute student of the pitfalls of the modern American presidency.
Dale glanced at herself one last time in the mirror, and then, with her BlackBerry screen as her flashlight, she made her way toward the front door, picked up her heavy purse, threw a black cashmere sweater across her shoulders to keep herself warm inside the over-air-conditioned West Wing, and shut the door behind her. As soon as she stepped into her building’s lobby, she noticed the van parked in front. The plan was for a CBS crew to drive in with each member of the senior staff. She tucked her hair behind her ears and went out to retrieve the crew.
“Good morning, everyone.” Dale wasn’t good at forced cheer, especially in the morning. The crew piled into her car and positioned a camera in the front seat. When they turned the camera light on, Dale was temporarily blinded.
“Do you usually stop for coffee?” one of the production assistants asked from the backseat, where he’d settled in amid the dry cleaning she kept forgetting to drop off and two gym bags that she’d packed and had never used.
“Nothing is open before five.” She tried to make eye contact with him in her mirror, but he was focusing intently on holding her pile of black suits off his lap as he jotted notes in a spiral notebook. She’d been meaning to stop at the cleaner’s for weeks.
“Do you want me to pull over and put that stuff in the trunk?”
“No, I’m fine. Will any of the other senior staff be there when we arrive?”
“Probably not, but I’m supposed to meet with Craig to go over the final line-by-line for the day,” she said, glancing in the rearview mirror again to get a better look at her questioner. He looked twenty years old.
“Are you an intern?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.”
He’d called her ma’am. She sighed and shook her head slightly. It served her right for asking. She stayed quiet for the rest of the drive, except to answer the twenty-year-old’s questions. Dale thought about how thankful she was that Craig was her boss. At least they could laugh about this at the end of the day. Dale knew exactly what he’d say. “The things we do for love of country and Charlotte Kramer,” he’d joke. She smiled thinking about it as she pulled into the entrance on E Street and flashed her hard pass. The guard greeted her with a nod and waved her onto the pad where the canine unit would examine her car for explosives. When the dogs were satisfied, the large steel gate would disappear into the ground, and Dale would be free to drive slowly toward the next gate. She cherished the lengthy process and treated it as her last moment of peace before the workday commenced.
“Ma’am? Excuse me?”
“Yes?”
“Who is allowed to park in there?” The producer was pointing at West Executive Drive, the strip of coveted parking spots between the West Wing and the Old Executive Office Building that separated the most senior advisors from the rest of the presidential staffers. Dale had pulled up to the third and final entrance and was waiting for the large wrought-iron gates to swing open.
“Only assistants to the president may park in here,” she replied. His face didn’t register any comprehension, so she explained the White House hierarchy that allowed her one of the best parking spots on the White House complex.
“Assistants to the president are the most senior staffers. They have what we refer to as walk-in privileges. That means that they can walk into the Oval Office without an appointment. I mean, most of us call ahead. It’s not like we just barge into the Oval Office.” Dale laughed. She was afraid she sounded like a jerk.
Dale heard the alert on her phone that signified a new text message had come through. Relieved by the distraction, she fished her iPhone out of her giant bag. Dale smiled as she read Craig’s message. “They lit my block with stadium lights to film me walking from my front door to the SUV. You owe me many drinks,” he wrote.
She quickly typed back: “I’m driving in with Doogie Howser. Don’t complain.”
Craig shared her sense of humor, and the two of them were often described by other members of the White House senior staff as being “in cahoots” on matters large and small. And while they often sat together on long flights and at staff dinners and meetings, their relationship was purely platonic. Craig was gay. He was only partly out of the closet, but it was not enough to quell suspicions from some corners of oblivious Washington about his relationship with Dale. Privately, they laughed about the knowing winks from congressmen and members of Charlotte’s cabinet who suspected that the two were an item. Dale wished Craig would come out more publicly, but it was something he wasn’t ready to do.
As she pulled into her regular parking spot, she thought about how wrong the reporters had been about Craig’s role in the Tara Meyers scandal. A couple of the most aggressive investigative reporters had sniffed around months earlier about whether he had played a role in leaking information to Congress and the media about the former vice president’s instability and questionable competence. Dale had felt torn about whether to take the inquiries to Craig or the White House counsel or even the president. The rumors about Craig unfairly painting Melanie as the leaker had posed a giant moral dilemma for Dale, as Melanie was the one who’d made sure that Dale had a top-notch lawyer to defend her from charges from Congress that she’d played a role in covering up the vice president’s condition. Melanie was also the one who had warned her about how ugly the West Wing would become once an investigation was under way. Ultimately, Dale had decided not to confront Craig with the allegations. She could not fathom that he was capable of what the reporters suggested. He was her closest friend in Washington and her steadfast ally. Craig had also waged an aggressive campaign to help Dale secure the press secretary job. Surely he was entitled to the benefit of doubt from her. Dale was interrupted from her thoughts again by the sound of the production assistant tapping on her window.
He had hopped out of the car to help the crew set up to shoot her walking into the West Wing.
“Are you guys ready?” she asked him.
“Yes, ma’am. Whenever you are.”
CHAPTER NINE
Charlotte
Charlotte reached over and turned off her alarm before it went off.
“Are you getting up?” Peter asked.
“I’m going to get some reading done. I’ll go into the study so you can go back to sleep
,” she whispered.
“It’s the middle of the night,” he protested.
She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “It’s almost five, and I’m about to walk into an ambush. CBS is going to be embedded with me all day. I’m not going to get any real work done. You’ll call Penny?”
“As soon as the sun comes up on the West Coast.”
“Before that, please.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Charlotte scratched Cammie’s ears, gathered her pile of papers from the nightstand, and walked down the hall to her study.
The White House staff secretary had placed a copy of her briefing book for the day in the center of her desk. The White House office of the staff secretary—a little-known and utterly indispensible group of West Wing employees—was responsible for assembling the briefing book and setting it on her desk at whatever hour it was completed the night before. The book contained detailed minute-by-minute schedules, briefing papers, final versions of speeches, and any sensitive background material for every meeting and event on her schedule. Even seemingly spontaneous drop-by meetings on her schedule were carefully researched, vetted, and scripted to avoid any potential for embarrassment.
The actual newspapers wouldn’t be brought up until about 5:45 A.M., but there was a set of news clips still warm from the copy machine that had been placed next to the briefing book on her desk. A junior staffer in the White House press office came in at two A.M. and printed off the major stories from the Web sites of all the major newspapers. The “clips” were then photocopied for the senior White House staff and also placed on their desks.
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