The Rationing

by Charles Wheelan

  “He’s right,” the President said. “We need to put some numbers against this. What kind of problem are we talking about?”

  “There are a lot of variables,” the Director of the NIH explained. “What is the rate at which the virus turns fatal, how much Dormigen will we need for other health issues around the country, how much Dormigen can we borrow—”

  “Obviously,” the Strategist interrupted. “So we build a model with our best estimate for each of those variables. Then we update the model as our information gets better.” He looked around the room as if he were teaching fractions to fourth-graders. “Yes?”

  “That’s exactly what we do,” the Secretary of Defense agreed. “We’ll never have all the information we need, but there is no excuse for not making a plan with the best information we have at any given moment.”

  “Thank you,” the Strategist said. He was not being sarcastic or deliberately mean. He simply felt relieved when others finally caught up. “That model is going to spit out one number that counts: How many people die from this sleeping virus, or whatever the fuck it is, because we run out of Dormigen? That’s it, one number, that’s what matters here—like I said five minutes ago.”

  “Right now that number is zero,” the NIH Director said, trying to reassure the room. “We have likely commitments from enough OECD nations that we should be able to cover the Dormigen deficit.”

  “What exactly is a ‘likely commitment’?” the President asked.

  “Sounds to me like a military treaty with the French,” the Secretary of Defense offered.

  “We’re still working that out,” the Chief of Staff said. “The disruption at HHS has made things more difficult.”

  “That’s why we need somebody from HHS in this group,” the President repeated.

  The Secretary of Defense offered, “In my experience, commitments become wobbly when the shooting starts. I think the relevant number here is how much Dormigen we have in our possession, not what’s been promised.”

  “I agree,” the President said.

  The Chief of Staff nodded, making notes on a legal pad in an elegant leather case with the White House logo on it. Yes, I was sitting in the Oval Office, but the meeting felt like every other meandering group discussion I had been a part of—until this point. “Okay, then,” the Chief of Staff said, “I will brief the Acting Secretary at HHS. We need to firm up the Dormigen commitments from OECD allies. The Capellaviridae task force needs to speed up their work and get us an estimate on the rate at which this thing is spreading—or whatever we want to call it. We’ll use that to build the model we discussed.” As she ticked off each item, she pointed her Montblanc pen at the person responsible, who would nod in acknowledgment. “Anything else?”

  Silence. “Okay, then let’s meet again tomorrow,” she said.

  “I don’t need to be in the room for that,” the President said.

  “Let’s see what we learn,” the Chief of Staff replied. With that, she stood up and we followed her out. The President did not look up as we left. From that point on, we were talking about “the number.”

  16.

  THE PRESIDENT WAS TALL AND THIN, HANDSOME IN A POLITICAL kind of way. He had good hair. He kept it long to emphasize that, I suspect. He had been a high school basketball star in Virginia, where he still holds the high school record for most points in a single season. His team did not win the championship that year, as many commentators have pointed out. “He’s the kind of guy who yells at you if you don’t make a shot,” one of his teammates said years later. (In my limited experience, that is exactly what makes mediocre players clutch up and shoot worse.) In any event, the President was smart, refined, and politically savvy. He may not have had the natural political talent of the Majority Leader, but he made few mistakes. Every decision was put through a fine political filter, beginning in his early twenties. He was accepted to Yale Law School but attended the University of Virginia instead. I spent enough time pretending that I was going to law school to know that Yale is a better law school—arguably the best—but the University of Virginia is a better place from which to launch a political career in Virginia.

  He married a law school classmate. She helped him run his first few campaigns for the state legislature. They divorced during his first term in the state legislature, without children. To her (Marnie’s) credit, she kept a low profile during the presidential campaign, always politely refusing to make any comments about her ex-husband. “It was a long time ago, and we grew apart. I wish him the best, both personally and professionally. He’s a good man and will make a good president,” she would say. She never deviated from that line; eventually the press left her alone. The “mainstream media” recognized that she was not really a legitimate news story. The less reputable news organizations eventually got bored. There are only so many times you can follow a plain-looking fifty-year-old woman to the supermarket while the stories that generate clicks are happening elsewhere. It would be a real journalistic fumble to follow the President’s uninteresting ex-wife as she weighs kiwis when, just across town, a drunken celebrity has crashed his car through the front wall of a yoga studio with a prostitute in the passenger seat.

  The President’s political career marched steadily on. Now single, he was elected governor of Virginia and then to the Senate. Not surprisingly, he showed up periodically on the glamour blogs as one of America’s most attractive single men, that kind of thing. If you believe the rumors, Washington was his sexual playground, particularly young lobbyists and staffers, but since he was not married there was no scandal. He eventually married the CEO of Kraft Foods, a forty-year-old corporate star, who had also been divorced a decade earlier and had no children. She was a fashion icon and a strikingly beautiful woman, albeit with a reputation for ripping people’s eyes out if it would improve cash flow. The most famous bloodbath for the bottom line was the “Mac ’n’ Cheese Massacre,” a mass firing of twenty-one hundred people three days before Christmas. A ham-handed PR executive tried to minimize the damage by releasing a statement saying that laying off employees before Christmas was the humane thing to do because it would help them budget more realistically for the holidays. This became a punch line for late-night comedians, at which point the PR executive was fired, too. The President and his CEO wife became one of America’s most glamorous power couples. Their wedding gained some notoriety when two tabloid helicopters nearly collided while filming the reception at a borrowed ranch in Santa Barbara. Had the helicopters gone down in a flaming wreck on the tent below, it would have taken out some of America’s smartest, richest, and most beautiful people.

  The first time I met with the President one on one, I was ushered into the family quarters of the White House. He was in his small study, dressed casually, eating a piece of toast. I was struck that I was watching the President eat. “So you’re a hotshot scientist,” he said. I felt pretty damn important. “I understand you went to Dartmouth,” he continued.

  “I did,” I said. I told him the year I graduated.

  “Harold Scott wasn’t still there, was he?”

  “He was.” Harold Scott was a legendary basketball coach who had been at Dartmouth for three decades. He turned the program around and went to the NCAA tourney a handful of times. The Ivy League champion always gets a bid, but Harold Scott’s teams actually won a few NCAA tournament games. My senior year they bumped off Kansas State in the first round. “Do you play?” the president asked.

  “Basketball? Just for fun and exercise,” I said.

  “We should throw it around sometime,” he offered.

  The President of the United States wanted to play basketball with me. One-on-one? Or maybe it would be a pickup game with some other White House insiders. What does one wear to play basketball with the President? I could not rush out and buy all-new stuff, or I would look like a newbie. On the other hand, I could not show up in running shoes. There I was sitting in front of the President of the United States, trying to remember if I had k
ept my Converse basketball shoes from graduate school. Might they be in that box of stuff I left in my parents’ basement? Because the President wanted to play basketball with me.

  “I don’t know if you have a girlfriend, or anything like that, but this might be a tough stretch. I appreciate your willingness to help out,” he said.

  “I am seeing someone,” I offered.

  “At some point, when this is over, I’d like to meet that person to say thank you.”

  I realized that the President was referring to “that person” because I hadn’t specified that I was dating a woman. “Ellen,” I said.

  As if he cared. I eventually learned that I would not be playing basketball with the President. Nor would Ellen and I be dining with him and his CEO wife. Rather, the President had a unique ability to speak with a relative stranger for a few minutes and leave him or her feeling like an important friend. It is an impressive skill, though it stings when you eventually see through it. Several days later I overheard him referring to me in a conversation with his Chief of Staff as “the guy in the brown shoes.” I was wearing a black belt for that first meeting, and I had been self-conscious that my belt did not match my shoes. It was an odd thing to worry about when thousands of people might die from an uncontrolled epidemic. I do not know if the President had noticed that my shoes and belt did not match; maybe the brown shoes were just my most distinguishing characteristic. In any event, he had no idea what my name was. And I know he did not spend a lot of time thinking about whether I was dating a man or a woman.

  17.

  THE CHIEF OF STAFF HAD COME FROM HARVARD, WHERE SHE was dean of the Kennedy School of Government for over a decade. When I looked around during our meetings, she often struck me as the only “real” person in the room, in the sense that she had a life beyond Washington. She had kids who got sick, or had to be picked up after band practice. Obviously she had people to help her deal with that kind of thing, but she acted like someone you might run into at a school potluck. Her husband was a pediatrician, one of the nicest guys I met in Washington. They were both from Minnesota and conformed to every stereotype of the Midwest I had ever encountered, particularly the wide-eyed cheeriness and optimism. The Chief of Staff had been a star researcher at the University of Minnesota in the field of child and family poverty. Much of her work followed the effects of the 1996 Welfare Reform, and then the 2021 law that further curtailed benefits. Harvard hired her away to become dean of their policy school and she proved to be the rare academic who was also a good administrator.

  When the President spent a stretch at the Kennedy School after losing a tight election for Governor of Virginia, they struck up a friendship—some said more, but I never saw any sign of that. During his second gubernatorial race (he won), she advised him on social welfare issues. Later, when he was in the Senate, she coordinated all his policy work, and when he was elected President, she became Chief of Staff. It was probably a mistake. She did not have the thick skin or the political experience necessary to operate effectively in that job. She should have been his domestic policy adviser, but the President was often accused of being a lightweight on policy, and a Chief of Staff from the Kennedy School at Harvard was supposed to address that weakness. I always found myself happy that she was in the room. Once she baked cookies. They were not great, if I am being honest, but she brought in this wobbly paper plate heaping with oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. The White House staff always gave us whatever we needed, including lots of cookies, but this homemade gesture, no doubt baked after the kids had done their homework and gone to bed, was one of the most human gestures that emanated from the cabinet group during this stretch, even if the cookies were not very good.

  By the time the two of them reached the White House, the Chief of Staff had already made her permanent mark on the President’s career, and also on the trajectory of American politics. She had helped him run successfully for the Senate from Virginia as a conservative Democrat. He won by huge margins in suburban areas, particularly with women and college-educated voters. The handsome senator was fiscally responsible but not scarily so. He believed in climate change (and the scientific method more generally) without ever asking voters to do anything uncomfortable about it. When he began thinking about the presidency, however, he had a problem. The Democratic Party was in complete disarray nationally, with a deepening split between the progressives, who were trying to pull the party sharply to the left, and the moderates, who believed the future of the party lay in winning the American political center.

  The Democrats had developed a “Tea Party problem.” Just as the Republicans were finalizing their divorce, leaving the New Republicans free to run without pandering to the Tea Party, the Democrats were still trapped in a bad marriage. Progressive Mommy and centrist Daddy were fighting incessantly, and it was killing their White House prospects. Every national Democratic candidate would kowtow to the progressives, especially to raise money in New York and California. They would promise a $20 minimum wage, a carbon tax, and a whole bunch of other things that would then sink them in the flyover states. When Elizabeth Warren received the nomination in 2024, she went on to lose forty-nine states in the general election, even New York because she had so antagonized Wall Street. It is a special achievement for a Democrat to lose New York.

  What was a smart, handsome, ambitious Democratic senator from Virginia to do? He polled well nationally, but the progressives distrusted him (rightfully). And without the progressives he could not win a Democratic primary. More irony: he could probably win a general election for president, but there was no obvious way for him to get on the general election ballot. There was talk of him switching to the New Republican Party, but voters hate that kind of opportunism; when pollsters asked about it as a hypothetical, his numbers plunged.

  The Chief of Staff found a way through this political labyrinth. Her motivations were entirely altruistic; she had decent instincts for politics but no love for the political game. “I want to bounce an idea off of you,” she said one night on a private plane, returning from a dinner speech somewhere in western Virginia.

  “What?” he said, somewhat rudely. He had been dozing lightly. The plane cabin was dark. The two were alone on the flight except for the pilot and copilot. The President was more introverted than most political types. Political events often left him enervated, particularly at the end of a long day.

  “One term for one nation,” the Chief of Staff said.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he asked. He often spoke like that. He had been rude to subordinates for so long that he no longer recognized how rude he was.

  “That’s the campaign slogan.”

  “For the presidency?” he asked. “I pledge to serve just one term?”

  She nodded. “That’s part of it. And you run without a party.”

  “As an independent? You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s a terrible idea. No one can win the presidency as an independent.” He closed his eyes and settled back into his seat.

  “George Washington did.”

  “I don’t have time for this,” he said without opening his eyes.

  She had thought about it more than she let on. The two ideas in that simple slogan resonated with voters who were tired of partisan politics and organized interests. In one stroke, this campaign could transcend both: a candidate with broad centrist appeal would leave his party and pledge to serve a single term. No more fundraising once he was in office. No more obligations to a political party. One term for one nation. The George Washington comparison was not entirely spurious. One could make a reasonable argument, in 1789 or 2028, that a president should transcend political parties, representing all of America.

  It was the right message at the right time. The Chief of Staff put some polls in the field to test hypothetical candidates. A candidate with the profile of the senator from Virginia did reasonably well. More important, the “one term for one nation” message tested off the charts, especially after voters were
reminded that George Washington had been elected without a party. (They were not reminded that he had served two terms.)

  “Have we all forgotten about the Electoral College?” the President grumbled when he was presented with the data. “I’ve seen strategies for student council elections that were more sophisticated than this.”

  “I can make it work,” his Strategist said. “You will win.” Others in the meeting rolled their eyes. The Strategist did not say, “You might win” or “You can win.” He said, “You will win.” The Strategist was everything that you have probably read about, almost to the point of being a caricature of himself: rude, brilliant, abrupt, funny, socially inept, and brutally honest. But he was not mean, at least not intentionally. If anything, he could be sweet in a childish kind of way when he was not saying remarkably harsh things. I remember the first time I encountered him in a meeting in a small conference room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. “Nice tie,” he said. I looked down at my tie self-consciously, assuming he was being sarcastic. That was the kind of thing my college friends would say if the tie had some garish paisley pattern, or if it had a giant ketchup stain. But the Strategist was entirely serious. “The green pattern makes it more interesting,” he said as he walked past and took a seat at the far end of the conference table.

  I tried to remind myself of that exchange at later meetings, when he would say things like, “That’s a horrible idea,” or “You have no idea what you are talking about,” or my personal favorite, “If you were smarter, this would make sense to you.” I will leave it to others to speculate about whether the Strategist was “on the spectrum.” In any event, the President had enormous respect for his analytical abilities, both the political acumen and the policy smarts. The Strategist formulated a strategy—abetted by a healthy dollop of good luck—that delivered the President 274 electoral votes, and perhaps more impressive, a narrow majority of the popular vote. Others have written more extensive accounts of that unlikely victory. The important thing to recognize is that the Chief of Staff conceived of the audacious idea that an independent could win the White House. The Strategist developed a plan to make it happen. The President played his role without messing up the lines.