Madam President

by Wallace, Nicolle

  “Try not to worry about my reputation for five minutes so I can ask you something.”

  Melanie sighed. “What can I do for you, Madam President?”

  “We took our foot off the gas, didn’t we, Mel? I took my foot off the gas. We got distracted and lazy, and they hit us. They never take their foot off the gas, do they?”

  “No, ma’am. They do not.”

  “What do I say to them?”

  “To whom?”

  “The families. The ones who had loved ones who were embarking on cruises or visiting New York City and got blown up this morning? How do we make this right?”

  Melanie had seen a president rise to the occasion of comforting the families after September 11. She had seen him changed by it, and she’d watched the president turn the families’ healing process into the nation’s purpose. Melanie wasn’t sure that Charlotte had the same capacity for communal grief.

  “You’ll do what you have to do to make it right. It will become the entire purpose of the rest of your presidency. It will go on after you’re no longer president. You won’t worry about your poll numbers or the stupid spats with Congress. Your purpose will be singular. You won’t let it happen again.”

  She could hear the president tapping her pen against her desk.

  “I know what you’re not saying, Mel.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You’re afraid that I’m incapable of comforting people in a public, cathartic way.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t have to. And I didn’t miss your jab about focus groups and polls.”

  “Madam President, I—”

  “No, you’re right. We lean on Warren too much.”

  “He can actually be very helpful to you now, though not as a pollster. You could put him in charge of recovery efforts in New York or Miami. He’s infinitely optimistic.”

  “When do we start talking about recovery as opposed to rescue?”

  “The FBI director will make an official designation in consultation with each city, but I think you need to let people keep hope alive for a while longer.”

  “Is that a kind thing to do or a cruel thing to do?”

  “Madam President, you’re about to discover just what a fine line there is between the two.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Dale

  Dale, I have Marguerite calling for you.” The military aide who was fielding all incoming calls to the PEOC pointed at a blinking line, and Dale picked up.

  “What’s going on?” Dale asked.

  “I have an insurrection on my hands. CBS is going completely batshit; half of our press is stuck outside the gate; all of our interns were evacuated with the rest of the White House staff, and the Secret Service won’t let them back in; and I’m sitting here by myself trying to answer the phones. Can you please come up here for a few minutes?” Marguerite sounded uncharacteristically hysterical.

  “I tried calling you before the last briefing, and no one picked up. You should have called me sooner. I’m on my way.”

  Dale allowed herself a sideways glance at Peter, who looked up briefly. She smiled sympathetically in his direction and then turned to go. When he stood, Dale thought for a moment that he was going to follow her out. She waited in the hallway for a few seconds and then saw him pour himself a cup of coffee. Dale walked quickly to the press office. When she entered the hallway outside the offices that she and Marguerite shared, she could hear her deputy screaming into the phone.

  “Get me your supervisor. Please. I need all of the credentialed press and all of the press interns allowed back inside the White House complex now!”

  “Who is that?” Dale asked.

  “Some jerk from the Waves office who refuses to let our press back in.”

  The Waves office was responsible for clearing staff and visitors into the White House complex. Dale took the phone from Marguerite and hung it up.

  She dialed the PEOC and asked Craig for a favor. Two minutes later, the deputy director of the Secret Service walked into the press office.

  “How can I be of assistance?” he asked.

  “Thank you so much for coming up. We need your help getting our press and our interns back into the complex.”

  “Happy to help,” he said.

  The three of them walked out the door of the West Wing lobby. It was the first time Dale had been outside all day. She placed both hands around her eyes to shield them from the bright light.

  The sky above her was hazy from the smoke on the Mall. The sirens from fire engines and emergency vehicles competed with the whirring of the helicopters patrolling the airspace above the White House. Dale knew from her time in the PEOC that those helicopters were the only aircraft allowed to fly in the now-closed airspace. Dale noticed that there was a burning smell in the air. To her right, the White House fountains were running as they always did, a bizarre nod to the automated grandeur of the White House complex. As Dale, Marguerite, and the deputy director of the Secret Service strode purposefully down the driveway, Dale noticed that about half a dozen White House correspondents were filming live shots from their designated spots in front of the White House’s West Wing. The press location was called the North Lawn, but it was actually a patch of gravel wired for live broadcasts so that the White House correspondents could air their news reports to the country and the world with the White House residence as the backdrop. As soon as all of the White House correspondents arrived back from the Women’s Museum, they would stand shoulder-to-shoulder on that patch of gravel with hot lights shining down on them. They’d provide minute-to-minute updates about the president’s actions. Between live shots, they’d frantically call, text, and e-mail their White House sources for nuggets of news that hadn’t aired anywhere else. Dale didn’t miss that gravel at all.

  She glanced over her shoulder to get another look at the North Lawn and was surprised that so few of them had returned from the museum. She should have offered to help Marguerite sooner. They approached the Northwest Gate, the entrance most commonly used by visitors, staff, and the press assigned to cover the White House briefings. Dale spotted the well-known faces of the network correspondents at the front of the crowd waiting impatiently behind a temporary perimeter that had been set up twenty feet beyond the gate.

  “Dale, come on, get us out of here!” one shouted.

  “If we go out there, you’ll make sure we all get back in, right?” Marguerite confirmed with the Secret Service.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Dale and Marguerite stood outside the Northwest Gate rounding up their staff and reporters. The deputy director of the Secret Service worked his magic, and a guard held the gate open for everyone wearing a hard pass, the official photo ID that, on a normal day, meant that you could walk into the White House complex without inviting more than a glance at the pass from a guard. Marguerite stepped back out for a moment to shout at a reporter from the Huffington Post who was taking video of the chaos at the gate.

  “You’re either a cameraman or a White House reporter. Can’t do both, Stanley. You coming or staying out here?”

  “I’m coming,” he replied.

  Dale watched Marguerite pull the White House reporters through the rope line and push them toward the gate. Marguerite scanned the crowd one last time and then walked to where Dale and the Secret Service officer were standing.

  “Is that everyone?” Dale asked.

  “Everyone I could see.”

  True to form, some of the reporters started shouting questions at Dale as soon as they stepped through the gate.

  “I’m not out here to brief. I came out to get everyone back inside. I’ll come down to the briefing room as soon as everyone is back on the White House grounds.”

  “Can you bring the national security advisor to the briefing room?”

  “I’ll make the request.”

  Dale turned back toward the West Wing and noticed that Lucy and Richard were watching the entire ordeal. Two of
their crews were filming the activity at the gate. Dale wasn’t the least bit surprised that they’d ignored the evacuation order. Dale reminded herself that as a journalist, she never would have evacuated the White House on a day like this, either. For a reporter, there was something honorable about putting yourself in danger to cover the president. It was a mutually beneficial, if irrational, calculation, but from the perspective of the White House, there was a benefit to allowing the public to see the decisive actions that their leaders were taking in the face of grave danger through the press coverage. It was a dynamic that ensured that the press would always be underfoot even when dealing with them felt like an unnecessary burden.

  “Hello, Lucy, Richard. How are you guys doing?” Dale asked.

  “How is the president holding up? How are you doing? I hope she’s cooking up plans to obliterate whoever did this. Is she going to stay out of the PEOC for the rest of the day?”

  Dale smiled at the anchors and glanced at the four cameras filming their interaction. “She’s doing fine. I’ll try to come up and brief off-camera as soon as we get everyone back in the briefing room. Some people got stuck at the Women’s Museum.”

  “We sent a crew over to film it all.”

  Dale smiled again. “Are you going to be broadcasting from the North Lawn or back at the D.C. bureau?” she asked.

  “Wherever they send us.” Richard shrugged as though they had no say, which Dale knew was not the case.

  Dale turned and walked quickly back toward the West Wing. Something was bothering her. She turned back around.

  “Lucy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can I talk to you off-camera for a second?”

  Lucy walked to where Dale was standing and held her hand over her microphone. When Dale didn’t say anything, Lucy unclipped the microphone pack from her belt and handed it to Dale. Dale flipped the power switch to off and handed it back to her.

  “Who told you that the president had left the PEOC?”

  “What? Oh, no one. I just assumed that if you were out here, you guys had maybe cleared out of the PEOC and she was back in the Oval Office because the security situation had stabilized.”

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s stabilized. It’s been what? Five or six hours? I think we’re a long way from stable.”

  Dale always knew when a reporter was covering for a source. She pressed her lips together and stared at Lucy. Dale felt like her shrewd, skeptical self again.

  “And the president is still working out of the PEOC,” she said icily.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Charlotte

  Charlotte had called off the continuity-of-government planning that would have required her and the vice president to separate. She’d also excused herself from the PEOC this time with the permission of the Secret Service.

  She was staring at the draft of her remarks from the speechwriters for later that night.

  “Sam, can you get Melanie on the phone again?”

  “She’s on the line,” Sam replied a minute later.

  “Where are you?” Charlotte asked.

  “Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean,” Melanie replied.

  “Do you have a copy of the remarks?” Charlotte asked.

  “I don’t, but I started working on something for you a few hours ago. I know sometimes the speechwriters are kept out of the loop, and they spend all their time chasing meaningless details, so I thought it might be helpful to frame something out.”

  “Send it to me, because I can’t stand what I have.”

  “I just sent it to Sam.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What time are you going to do this?”

  “Not at six, seeing as how it’s five-thirty now. There’s some talk about trying to assemble a joint session of Congress tonight, but I think that’s going to be impossible to pull off. We may just bump it to eight or nine P.M. Is it terrible to wait that long?”

  “It’s not ideal, but I understand that these things take a while to sift through. You’ll put the FBI director out before that, right?”

  “Yes. Dale and Marguerite are prepping him now. He’s going to head down to the White House briefing room with Tim.”

  “Good. That’s good. That will buy you some time.”

  “The FBI thinks that more than two hundred people may be dead in Miami, Mel.”

  “I heard.”

  “How do you retaliate against someone who targets innocent families? What possible military action can come close to evening the score in the eyes of their loved ones?”

  Melanie didn’t say anything.

  “What was he like on September eleventh?”

  “The president?”

  “Yes, Melanie. The president. What was he like? Did he feel like he was in control? Because I don’t feel like I’m in control of anything.”

  “I was a junior staffer. I didn’t see him on that day.”

  “But you were around people who did.”

  “I don’t think he felt like he had any control. But he knew right away that the country was at war. Just as you did, and after making sure that his family was safe, he wanted to be in the loop with his national security team. Unfortunately, he was stymied by technological breakdowns. Air Force One didn’t have the same video teleconference ability, and the phones kept cutting out. It was incredibly frustrating. He wanted to get back to the White House, but the vice president and the national security advisor kept urging him to stay away from Washington. You were wise to push back when they wanted to get you out of D.C.”

  “Sam just handed me a note from Tim that says the second D.C. blast took out two FBI agents, a reporter from a local TV station here in D.C., two members of a CNN crew, and some volunteers who were helping the wounded.”

  “It’s awful.”

  “People are going to need to feel like someone will be punished.”

  “Everything will be on the table, Madam President.”

  “The country doesn’t have the stomach for a war. Any response will have to be surgical.”

  Melanie was quiet. Charlotte wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know, but Charlotte knew Melanie would not appreciate being told what kind of strike was needed before they had all of the information about the attackers.

  “We should have a clearer sense of our options in the next couple of days.”

  Sam walked in again and handed Charlotte an outline and introduction that Melanie had drafted. She paused to read them.

  “Mel?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is exactly what I had in mind.”

  “Madam President?”

  “The remarks.”

  “They still need a lot of work.”

  “I’m going to tell Dale and Craig to scrap the earlier version. We will wait for your next draft.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Melanie?”

  “Madam President?”

  “I’d like for you to come straight here when you land at Andrews.”

  “Yes, ma’am. In the meantime, I will work on the remarks. I’ll send you something in about an hour.”

  “Thanks, Mel.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Melanie

  Melanie was thankful to be working on the president’s speech instead of monitoring the videoconference. The situation remained fluid, but the next significant briefing, as far as Melanie was concerned, would come after the attackers’ bodies were identified or when the interrogations started yielding information. Melanie had access to all of the official sources of information, but being cut off from the media coverage made her feel strangely detached from the human reaction. She hoped that it wouldn’t hinder her ability to write a speech that struck a chord with the public. It would be a couple of hours before the satellite on her plane started picking up U.S. TV channels.

  On September 11, watching the day’s events unfold on live TV had been a crucial part of the collective experience for Melanie and her White House colle
agues. She remembered when she first saw the image of the World Trade Center tower with smoke billowing from its side. She had just returned from the daily meeting of press staffers in the West Wing. She had taken a seat behind her desk to listen as Katie Couric and Matt Lauer calmly discussed the different possibilities for the disconcerting spectacle. One of them suggested that a commuter plane could have made a tragic miscalculation. Incapable of looking away, Melanie had been staring at the screen when the second plane, a large jet, had careened into the second tower. She’d felt a physical jolt at the moment of impact. One of her colleagues ran in to see if Melanie had seen the shocking images. A few minutes later, Melanie had been on the phone with the White House chief of staff, who was traveling with the president that day. The senior press officers were all on the road with the president, he explained. He needed her and her team to research when and how previous presidents had addressed the public and the press in the wake of terror attacks that had occurred on their watches. The chief of staff was doing what Charlotte had been doing earlier in the day: He was trying to figure out how much time they had before the president needed to speak to the nation.

  Now Melanie directed her thoughts back to Charlotte’s speech. Drafting the sentences that the president would utter to the nation was a familiar exercise. She knew exactly how far to push Charlotte without making her uncomfortable. The president would want to be resolute, but Melanie would make sure that she also expressed tenderness and compassion toward those who’d endured unspeakable losses. The trick would be finding the right words to accomplish all of those things. Melanie rubbed her stomach and stretched her neck from side to side. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting in front of her laptop, but she had the main section of the speech in good shape. She needed to come back and work on the second half of the address. The way she closed the speech would determine its success or failure. What was missing from the current draft was an element that would allow Charlotte to present herself as fully in touch with the profound suffering of the day. Melanie racked her brain for an appropriate passage to provide a literary entry point for Charlotte to transition into something heartfelt. Nothing came to mind. Melanie let her mind wander to all of her favorite writers and their lesser-known works for something unexpected but profound. She sat perfectly still and looked up at the ceiling. She missed the collaborative process of working with the speechwriting team, but it was probably better that she work alone.