The Rationing

by Charles Wheelan

  He was not scary on social issues, so the suburbanites were attracted to him. That was part of the Republican divorce. The New Republicans got the low taxes, pro-business planks in the platform and the Tea Party got the social issues: opposition to gay marriage, abortion, and the like. (They had joint custody of guns.) The settlement was lopsided, at least with someone as politically adroit as the Majority Leader atop the New Republican Party. “Let me see if I can explain the difference between the New Republicans and the Tea Party,” he would tell his audiences. “Our number one New Republican priority is making sure that hardworking people can earn a decent living.” He would pause, making eye contact around the room, big or small. “Sometimes that means a little help from the government.” Another pause, more eye contact. “Sometimes it means keeping the government out of your business.” Pregnant pause. “I believe that honest people deserve to make an honest living, and that we should do whatever we need to do to make that possible.”

  There would be enthusiastic nods of approval—not whoops or cheers, but heartfelt agreement. And then he would go in for the kill. “Now, the Tea Party, they are going to work just as hard. I do not doubt their passion or commitment, not for one second. I agree with them on a lot of things. These are good people, many of them, at least.” There would be some chuckles. “The difference is priorities. They are going to spend every waking moment trying to get Washington to tell you what you can and can’t do—in your bedroom, in the hospital, in the bathroom, at school—sometimes even in the bathroom at school.” Lots of laughter. “I’m pro-business, they are all up in your business!” This last line did typically provoke cheers of approval. It was a brilliant strategy, allowing him to transcend the social issues that had previously been a political fault line. He could tell the social conservatives that he shared their beliefs. They were tired of being mocked and disrespected by the liberal establishment. Yet he could also tell libertarians and liberal suburbanites that he was not going to politicize those same social issues.

  The Majority Leader eviscerated the Tea Party in Illinois, and later marginalized them nationally when he became Majority Leader and de facto national leader of the New Republicans. After he delivered high-speed rail to the Midwest and found federal funding for a third airport in Chicago, he was untouchable. He and the President had a better relationship than one might expect. True, they did not share a political party, but they both were creatures of Washington. The President envied the Majority Leader’s ability to connect with Main Street, even as he mocked his lack of sophistication. The President frequently referred to him behind his back as “Lyndon,” as in Lyndon Johnson, because of his coarse manners and savvy political machinations. “Tell Lyndon we need to get this out of the Senate without any amendments,” he would say at the end of a staff meeting. The irony, of course, is that the Majority Leader would have considered the LBJ comparison nothing but a compliment.

  The relationship was made easier by the fact that the Majority Leader had no designs on the presidency. “I’m too fat and too short,” he would tell people who asked. It was a brilliantly disarming answer, mostly because it hewed so closely to the truth. He had seen the polling data (as had the President and others): most Americans were willing to elect a president without a college degree, but they could not get past his body type. Focus groups would hem and haw when asked to explain why the Majority Leader “did not look presidential.” If the discussion went on long enough, or if the participants were asked to write comments anonymously, they would just come out and say it: “He’s fat,” then adding some tortured reasoning as to why a man who had functioned brilliantly for seven years as the leader of the U.S. Senate would not be able to serve effectively as Commander in Chief because he weighed too much.

  Unlike the real Lyndon Johnson, the Majority Leader did not lust for what he could not have. He had a love and appreciation for politics—not just winning elections, but also the legislative give-and-take. He had a long memory but also a thick skin. He never forgot a political defeat, but he was not apt to take the setbacks personally. Instead, every loss, big or little, was a lesson on how to do it better next time. “This isn’t powder puff,” he would tell his audiences, whether it was a Rotary lunch or a group of CEOs. His one intellectual passion was political history and he could recount in detail, more accurate than not, the political failures that had brought great civilizations to their knees.

  Others have written in great depth about this unlikely “bromance” between the Majority Leader and the President; there is not much for me to add, other than underscoring that the two of them got along well because they had so little in common. There was no margin on which they viewed themselves in competition with one another. The President called frequently on the Majority Leader to chat informally about the political viability of various ideas. “How can I sell this in the Midwest?” the President would ask earnestly. For his part, the Majority Leader was flattered to be so important to the White House.

  The Secretary of Defense was in the room because he had been at the White House for a different meeting and the President asked him to stay for a few minutes. Like I said, no grand strategy—not at the beginning. The Secretary of Defense had spent his career making tough decisions in the face of uncertainty. He and the President had a respectful if somewhat guarded relationship. The President had not served in the armed forces; he recognized that as a weakness and did what he could to remedy it. Still, there was more to the relationship between the two men than that. The Secretary of Defense was a straight shooter who often saw the world differently than the President and did not hesitate to speak candidly to his Commander in Chief. He was loyal, too. The President had come to appreciate the honesty and loyalty in a town where both virtues are oddly rare. “Can you stick around for a few minutes?” the President asked the Secretary of Defense as a meeting on the newly restarted North Korean nuclear program was breaking up. “We’ve got some problem at HHS with our stock of Dormigen.” One has to appreciate the innocence of that moment, because that is really all the President knew: “some problem at HHS”—seemingly just like all the other little fifteen-minute annoyances that made up each of his days at the White House. A treaty here, an angry African leader there.

  “I don’t know anything about Dormigen,” the Secretary of Defense replied.

  “Neither do I. But if you don’t mind, I’d like you to sit in, just fifteen minutes or so.”

  “Of course, Mr. President.”

  There were pleasantries as the participants filed into the Oval Office. The President and the Majority Leader, taking advantage of a moment together, conferred briefly over some matter. The Majority Leader took a pen and small blue notebook from his breast pocket and made a small notation, a note to himself, presumably. The technology was so old that I found it striking at the time. “Okay, where are we on the lurking virus thing?” the President asked, trying to call the meeting to order.

  “One minute,” his Chief of Staff said, looking at her phone. “Are we going to invite Prime Minister Abouali to the White House while he’s in D.C.?” She was a petite, athletic-looking woman with short dark hair that was going gray in streaks. She wore dark-rimmed reading glasses that she put on when she consulted her notes or her phone and then took off as she spoke to the President, almost like a nervous habit. She could have passed for a school librarian, albeit in a very well-funded school district.

  “Sure. Why not?” the President asked.

  “The Jordanians have asked that we not grant him a formal meeting,” the Chief of Staff explained. Her tone with the President was respectful but far from obsequious.

  “How about a walk-through?” the President said.

  “That will have to be end of day Thursday—”

  “Fine,” the President said, cutting her off.

  “Remember, I won’t be here,” the Chief of Staff said, prompting the President to look at her quizzically. “It’s Maddie’s lacrosse banquet,” she explained. “The whole fami
ly will divorce me if I miss this one.”

  “I’m sure the Prime Minister will understand,” the President said sarcastically. I don’t know if he was attempting humor; if so, it fell flat. The two of them seemed oblivious to the rest of us standing awkwardly in the Oval Office. I felt like I was watching my parents squabble over whose turn it was to walk the dog.

  “I put it on the schedule eight weeks ago,” the Chief of Staff said firmly.

  “I understand,” the President replied. His tone, however, suggested that he could not fathom why anyone would leave work—at the White House or anywhere else—to attend a high school lacrosse banquet.

  “I’ll let the Prime Minister’s people know,” the Chief of Staff said.

  The President looked up at the rest of us, as if he were noticing us standing there for the first time. “Do we really have to spend time on this lurking virus thing?” he asked. He was not being insouciant. He had no sense of the crisis at that point. The Chief of Staff had put this briefing on his daily calendar, over which he had less control than one might think. At the end of every day, as he headed up to the family quarters, he would get a single typed card with his schedule for the next day, neatly divided into fifteen-minute increments. In the President’s mind, there was no crisis, not yet. Yes, a high proportion of the government’s Dormigen supply had been destroyed, and now the contingency stock was compromised—but in three weeks everything would be back to normal. Might the situation spin wildly out of control during that window of vulnerability? Of course—but that was true of nearly every fifteen-minute headache on the President’s schedule, day after day. The impending Dormigen shortage did not feel like it was a crisis because it was impending. If you are wandering in the desert and I tell you that your water supply will be cut off next Tuesday, you will not feel thirsty, even if you should be panicked.

  Most of the matters brought to the President’s attention involve problems that are already manifesting themselves: a bridge collapses, a leader is assassinated, a police officer shoots an unarmed black man. The problem is lying there on the ground—literally, in some cases—for everyone to see. In the Oval Office that first day, however, no one was feeling thirsty. Not yet.

  The situation—this sense of calm in the face of something that would inevitably go wrong—reminded me of a time I ran out of gas on an interstate in the middle of New Hampshire. I had flown into Boston after midnight and picked up my car in the remote parking lot. I opted not to get gas as I left Boston; I figured I might need a break from driving after an hour or two. I discovered—too late—that the gas stations along I-89 were closed after midnight. Not a single oasis. The gas light on my dashboard had been glowing orange since the New Hampshire border. The trip computer, one of those fancy gadgets I rarely paid attention to, was counting down the miles left until my tank was empty: forty, thirty, twenty. Then I saw a road sign; the next exit was forty-two miles away. I could not beat the math: I was going to run out of gas.

  But the car was running fine. That was the thing. I was moving along a beautiful New Hampshire highway at sixty-five miles an hour on a clear night with a bright moon and almost no traffic. It was a lovely time for driving. A passenger in the backseat would have had no sense that a problem was imminent, that the math would inevitably catch up with us. Everything would be fine—for fifteen miles, or thirteen, or seventeen—at which point the engine would cut out and I would end up stranded on the side of the road. That was what I could see coming. So it was on that first morning in the White House. The people in that room were the first ones who would get a glimpse of our equivalent of the trip computer. The math.

  Many of my NIH and CDC colleagues knew what was happening with the lurking virus—but they had no idea the country might run short of Dormigen. For them, Capellaviridae was a curious intellectual puzzle. Meanwhile, over at Health and Human Services, the Secretary and several of her deputies were aware that the nation’s surplus Dormigen stockpile might run low for a few weeks—but they had no idea the nation might need those stocks. It was surplus, after all. When Centera Biomedical Group failed to produce its twenty million doses after the Long Beach warehouse fire, the department set in motion several contingency plans. Federal prosecutors were notified so that civil charges could be filed against the company and criminal charges against its top executives. The missing doses would be replenished in three weeks. The HHS models predicted that even with the warehouse fire and the Centera debacle, the doses on hand would be sufficient. Canadian health officials offered to transfer up to two million doses to cover any shortfall. Nobody at HHS had ever heard of Capellaviridae. They looked out the window and saw a warm, sunny day—perfect for a picnic. No one told them that a hurricane was bearing down, so they continued to plan for their picnic.

  Five minutes into that first meeting, those of us in the Oval Office—and only those of us in the Oval Office—could see the totality of what was happening, the confluence of the Dormigen shortfall and whatever was happening with Capellaviridae. We could see the trip computer counting down: forty, thirty, twenty. “The numbers are not looking good,” the Chief of Staff said.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” the President asked. “And why don’t we have someone here from HHS?” he asked.

  “We are trying to keep the number of people involved small at this point,” she replied. “This is starting to look like a potential public health crisis.”

  “If it’s a public health crisis, then we need definitely someone from HHS,” the President said sharply.

  “I will brief the Acting Secretary,” she said. The Chief of Staff quickly outlined the situation: the Dormigen stocks were running low; the Capellaviridae virus presented a potentially fatal threat to a significant percentage of the population in the absence of Dormigen. There had already been 171 deaths in cases where the virus had been left untreated, usually because the victim had not sought medical attention. She read from her notes: “Thirty-one in New England. Twenty-five in the New York metro area. A handful in Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota—”

  “How does it spread?” the President demanded. We were sitting on sofas. He was at his desk, signing documents of some sort. I noticed for the first time that he was left-handed. No one answered. “How does it spread?” the President repeated impatiently, looking up from the papers he was signing, as if to say that we were wasting some of the precious fifteen minutes we had been allotted. The other participants on the couches looked at me.

  “It doesn’t spread, actually,” I said. “That’s what’s so curious. The virus is very common. Most of us are probably carrying it now. It’s just that for some people, under some circumstances, it turns lethal.”

  “Which people and under what circumstances?” the President asked.

  “We don’t understand that yet,” I said.

  “Jesus, what the hell else is there to understand?” the President said, tossing his pen onto the desk. “That’s pretty much all that matters.”

  “We have a team of people working on this around the clock,” the Director of the NIH interjected.

  “How quickly is it spreading?” the President asked.

  “We don’t like to use the word ‘spread,’ ” I answered. I did not feel comfortable correcting the President of the United States, but this was a crucial point. I continued, “It implies that there is some kind of contagion, that people catch it from one another. That’s not really how this thing works. You have it or you don’t. And it turns deadly or it doesn’t. It’s more like cancer than the measles.”

  “But it’s a virus?” the President asked.

  I answered, “Yes, it’s a virus, but—”

  “People are not going to understand that,” the President’s Strategist interrupted. “No fucking way. There is no way we can explain to the public that there is a virus killing people but that it’s not contagious.”

  “I just explained it,” I said.

  The Strategist laughed dismissively. “Twenty percent of the country does
not understand that the earth rotates around the sun. This is going to be fucking mayhem.”

  “It seems to me that we need to stockpile more Dormigen,” the President directed. “And we need to figure out what the hell is going on with this a cappella virus.”

  “Capellaviridae,” I said. The President did not dignify my correction.

  The Director of the NIH said, “We’ve reached out to all the OECD countries to borrow enough Dormigen to cover our gap until our stocks are replenished. But, frankly, we’re getting a little pushback because most of these countries are either seeing the same increase in Capellaviridae-related illness, or they’re afraid they will soon. They’re hesitant to make a firm commitment.”

  “So what’s the number?” the Strategist asked of no one in particular.

  “What number?” the Chief of Staff replied.

  “How many people will die?” he asked.

  “It’s not that simple,” I offered.

  “Yes, it is,” he said. “We have some estimate of the rate at which this virus turns fatal, right?”

  “A guess,” I said. “It’s pretty rough.”

  “Well, it’s going to get less rough as we get more data,” the Strategist said, indignant that this had to be explained. “For now, we have an estimate?” he asked. I nodded yes. He continued, “Okay, based on that estimate, we can project what the demand for Dormigen is likely to be and when our stocks will run out, if they will.” He looked around the room. “Am I not speaking English here?”

  “These are all very inaccurate projections,” the Director of the NIH said, visibly annoyed by the Strategist’s reductionist logic.

  “For fuck sake, people, an inaccurate projection is better than nothing. We need to know what might happen here, even if it’s just our best guess.”