The Rationing

by Charles Wheelan

  His “possibility” was this: An Arizona-based Latino separatist group had genetically engineered the virulent strain of Capellaviridae. He could explain to his readers what we scientists were unable to explain—why an innocuous virus suddenly became deadly. This separatist group, the so-called Latino Liberation League (LLL),** had also engineered an effective antidote for the virus. According to Perez’s initial story, the LLL was offering the antidote to the President and Congress in exchange for the creation of an independent, Spanish-speaking nation to be carved out of parts of New Mexico, Arizona, and West Texas. Perez’s story had two graphics: a map showing the proposed borders of the new independent nation, Estado Latino Nuevo, as well as a larger map of the United States with eleven red dots indicating where the virus had been deliberately introduced.

  For all the fiction embedded in the story, there was one pillar of truth sufficiently strong to keep the story alive: There had been talk in previous years, mostly among fringe groups on the far right and far left, about a Latino independence movement. One Arizona community, some little town with 350 residents, had voted to make Spanish its official language. Never mind that no one had ever articulated what an “official language” really means at the town level; this quirky development was enough to inflame the imaginations of both right-wingers (who feared the country was being hijacked by Mexicans) and left-wingers (who were advocating for more explicit political rights for the nation’s Hispanic population). When Perez tossed Capellaviridae into this political maelstrom—a fake news grenade—he hit the readership jackpot. For the President, who was preparing to address the nation from a military base in Honolulu, it meant that a shockingly high proportion of Americans believed the country was under bio-attack from a domestic terrorist group.

  The President was scheduled to address the nation at noon Eastern Time, six a.m. in Hawaii. He and his principal advisers were not the only political leaders for whom the crisis was top of mind. In China, Premier Xing had been huddled with his senior staff since the Capellaviridae story broke. It is not hard to infer what they were discussing: What ought to be the price for the Dormigen that America was now desperate for? And when exactly should that offer be made?

  * Martin “Bo” McCormick, The Source of My Courage (New York: Little, Brown, Simon & Schuster, 2032).

  † Sam Williams Wainwright, In Service to My Nation (New York: W. W. Norton, 2031).

  ‡ Sociologists would later note a sharp reversal in a decades-long trend: Americans were more likely to gather news related to the Outbreak in those early days on television rather than from the Internet. They speculated that the nature of the crisis was such that humans felt an unconscious need to share the news with other people as the situation unfolded.

  § The President himself described “roaring” at aides throughout the Outbreak: Robert Evan Steans, Leadership in a Time of Crisis (New York: Crown, 2034).

  ¶ Simran Shankardass, “Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There: The Emotional Need for Volition During the Outbreak, Journal of Social Psychology 169, 1 (2033): 123–146.

  # Perez’s conviction is still winding its way through the courts. He was originally convicted of reckless endangerment, but that conviction was overturned on appeal on First Amendment grounds. Perez continues to maintain that “alternative news” is a form of freedom of expression. Nearly every legal scholar I have spoken with on this topic believes that the Perez case will ultimately end up before the Supreme Court.

  ** Perez told Congress that he came up with this name, the LLL, while waiting for his burrito to heat up in the microwave.

  PART 5

  THE CHINA OPTION

  49.

  HAD THE SECRETARY OF STATE BEEN DELIBERATELY excluded from our Dormigen discussions, as she would later allege? I saw absolutely no evidence of that. True, the only credible alternative explanation—that no one thought to include her—suggests an almost unfathomable incompetence. In her congressional testimony, the Chief of Staff took responsibility for this oversight, explaining that the Secretary of State would have been briefed before any meetings began in Australia. The National Security Adviser was more direct: “I just assumed she knew,” she testified.

  I can attest that there was never a grand strategic plan with regard to who was in the room. One thing just led to the next. The Capellaviridae challenge was compounded by the fact that the principals making decisions always felt that a solution would present itself—that the planes headed for their targets would turn around, figuratively speaking. They believed—we believed, if I am being honest—that something would save us: an antidote, more Dormigen from our allies, or something else at the eleventh hour. Or with one call to Beijing we could make the Capellaviridae problem go away. With the China option on the table, the Secretary of State should have been involved from the beginning. In fact, she boarded Air Force One for the flight to Australia with no knowledge of the crisis the White House was trying to manage. She learned about the Outbreak only when the story went public and Air Force One started doing 180-degree turns over the Pacific.

  Imagine the Secretary of State’s surprise and dismay when she was awakened abruptly, ushered into the conference room, and told for the first time that the South China Sea Agreement might be scrapped because China was the only country with enough Dormigen to save the Americans afflicted by a deadly virus. She would later write in her autobiography, “At first I thought I was dreaming. This had to be some kind of nightmare. I had spent the previous week in Tanzania and Kenya. I was still taking anti-malaria medicine. One of the benign side effects of that drug (Malarone) was particularly vivid dreams. What other explanation could there be? Would the President of the United States really withhold this information from his Secretary of State, even as we were flying to sign the most significant international agreement of his presidency?”

  Yes. Though I am not convinced that “withhold” is really the right word, nor that gender had anything to do with it, as the Secretary of State has often alleged. In any event, this bad situation was made worse by ongoing turf battles between the Departments of State and Defense and a personal animus between the two Secretaries. The Secretary of Defense had been involved in the Capellaviridae meetings from the beginning, in part because of his close personal relationship with the President, but mostly because he happened to be at the White House on the morning of that first meeting. The Secretary of State, paranoid on the best of days, rejected that benign explanation. The suspicion between these two cabinet members was inflamed by political differences. The Secretary of Defense was a New Republican; the Secretary of State was a Democrat. (The President’s cabinet was a mix of independents, New Republicans, and moderate Democrats.)

  To put a cherry on top of it all, the Secretary of State was highly sensitive to being treated differently as a woman. By all accounts, including everything I experienced, the President was gender-blind, in a good way. His appointments going all the way back to his early days in Virginia were always reasonably inclusive. There was nothing to suggest he would exclude a senior cabinet member from some discussion because she was a woman. (He had, after all, picked her for one of the most important jobs in the cabinet.) Having said that, I should say also that the Secretary of Defense was more, well, old school. He had been dogged with charges of sexism for much of his career, including his infamous remark (disavowed aggressively at his confirmation hearing) that women are less fit for senior military positions because “maternal instincts could cloud their judgment in the heat of battle.”* That is really what he said; I have watched the video.

  Also, one could not help but notice that the President and Secretary of Defense—both tall, fit, middle-aged white guys—gave off a certain fraternity brother vibe. If you were to see them chuckling comfortably as they walked into a room together, you might assume they had just come from a weekly squash game. All of this is relevant if one is to understand the dynamic on Air Force One in those first hours after the Outbreak became public. The Secretary of State h
ad gone to sleep after a light dinner, assuming she would wake up when the plane landed in Australia. As America’s top diplomat, she would accompany the President as he signed the South China Sea Agreement, arguably the most significant international agreement of the twenty-first century.

  The Secretary of State had spent much of her earlier career working to reform the United Nations. She had negotiated on behalf of the U.S. for the enlargement of the Security Council and the adoption of an updated charter that breathed new life and relevance into the UN. There was serious talk that she might be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, most likely to be shared with some of the world’s other senior diplomats, for having revitalized multilateral diplomacy and repaired much of the damage done during the Trump presidency.

  The reality on board Air Force One turned out to be radically different than the Secretary of State’s serene expectations. She walked into the conference room and encountered a handful of adrenaline-addled advisers trying to manage a situation that was spinning out of control. The Chief of Staff briefed her quickly on the Outbreak and the impending Dormigen crisis. We do not know exactly what was said, other than that the Secretary of State used “inappropriate language,” as she would later describe it. We know for certain that the Secretary of State quickly joined the other foreign policy advisers in making the case that the President must continue on to Australia to sign the South China Sea Agreement. Any other tack, she argued, would alter the course of international affairs in ways that would limit American influence, sell out our key allies in the region, and give a green light to some of China’s most nefarious activities.

  These arguments had been made before, but the Secretary of State brought three things to the room. First, she knew the South China Sea Agreement better than anybody on the American team. She had been negotiating the most niggling details for years; she could literally recite the rise in carbon emissions that would result if the harmonized carbon tax among the signatory nations were not implemented.† Second, the Secretary of State was walking into the room with fresh eyes. Those of us who had been involved from the beginning were partially blinded by a “fog of war.” We had made decisions, told each other those decisions were sensible, and then made more decisions based on what we had done earlier. The Secretary of State described this as going “deeper and deeper into a maze.” That seems overly harsh given the unprecedented nature of what we were dealing with. Still, the Secretary of State brought new and much-needed perspective to the situation. We were slowly persuading ourselves that it would be unacceptable to let Americans die if the Chinese were willing to throw us a lifeline. This was a moral calculation, not a political one. The Secretary of State dismissed our reasoning almost as soon as she walked into the conference room. “By that logic, Churchill should have cut a deal with Hitler,” she said. “That would have saved English lives, right? Does anyone here believe that would have been the right thing to do? Look out the window, people. There is a reason we fought at Kiribati and Guadalcanal.”‡ By all accounts, she paused and stared intently at the President before continuing. “With all due respect, sir, your responsibility is to do what is best for the long-term interests of the country, and that may well involve extraordinary sacrifices in the short run. Abraham Lincoln was not—”

  “Okay, I get it,” the President said, cutting her off. The Secretary of State’s historical references may seem facile in the retelling. The reality is that the third thing she brought into that stifling little room was a powerful intellect and unparalleled global experience. Her parents had both been American diplomats, moving from posting to posting every couple of years. The Secretary of State spoke Swahili, Arabic, and enough Hindi to delight any Indian audience. Perhaps more important, she had attended local schools in many of those postings, picking up a visceral understanding of the needs and wants of local families. She could tell humorous stories about bouts of dengue fever (Indonesia), or winning a goat in an elementary school spelling bee (Tanzania). The Secretary of State was not, however, a natural politician. Twice she had run for office, once for Congress in a suburban Maryland district and once for the U.S. Senate, also in Maryland. Both times she was trounced in the Democratic primary, having delivered long monologues on “America’s unique leadership role in the post-industrial world” that caused voters’ eyes to glaze over. She declared bitterly at the end of her Senate campaign, “Americans have stopped caring about the rest of the world.” There was a grain of truth in that, but it was also true that the Secretary of State had difficulty speaking about issues in ways that made normal people care. A Washington Post–USA Today political columnist described her stump speech: “Imagine your worst college professor. Then take away the excitement.” A YouTube video of the Secretary of State speaking about a Brazilian antipoverty program went viral, apparently because college students had turned it into a drinking game.

  For anyone willing to listen, the Secretary of State offered a deep understanding of the sweeping forces of history. She did not see international affairs as a stark, ongoing battle between good and evil, as the Secretary of Defense was wont to do, but she did believe that history offered up repeated cases in which “the forces of liberalism and enlightenment must face down our darker human impulses or face the awful consequences.” She had lived in Rwanda and Cambodia, both places where the effects of genocide were still palpable. To put a fine point on all this, the Secretary of State viewed the South China Sea Agreement as a historic inflection point. She did not consider China to be an evil regime on par with the Khmer Rouge or the Nazis. Rather, she compared the Beijing government to the Soviet Union during the Cold War: an enormously powerful and influential nation that was steadily pulling the world order in a bad direction—flouting international agreements, trampling civil liberties, selling weapons to despots, despoiling the environment at a historically unprecedented pace, and demonstrating to bad governments around the globe that they could get away with it all. “The South China Sea Agreement will redirect the course of the world order, as NATO and the United Nations did after World War II,” she had told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs—one of her many appearances as she stumped for the agreement across the country.

  The Secretary of State was flabbergasted that the President was seriously considering selling out the future world order to get through a short-term public health crisis. “The Dormigen shortage is, what, five days?” she asked. “Capitulating to the Chinese would be the next century.” The President respected her judgment, though he found her to be pedantic and insufficiently respectful of his domestic political constraints. Sometimes, after a sour encounter, the President would tell anyone in earshot, “She couldn’t get elected to a school board.” For her part, the Secretary of State was often impatient with the President’s lack of interest in detail and his poor grasp of history, particularly Asian and African history.

  I should point out that none of the senior advisers on Air Force One had eaten in many hours. The Chief of Staff, recognizing the combined dangers of sleep deprivation and low blood sugar, asked the Chief Steward to bring breakfast. The crew on board, having expected a jubilant, unrushed breakfast upon the approach to Australia rather than a tense meal in the middle of the night, had planned an omelet station for senior staff. There was no other food readily available, so the Chief Steward directed the chef to set up a buffet, including the omelet station, in an alcove outside the conference room. This explains one of the more scurrilous charges to emerge in the aftermath of the Outbreak—that the President and senior advisers had been blithely dining on pastries and omelets while the country was overcome by plague, like Nero if he had had his own 797. Yes, there was literal truth embedded in the story. There were croissants and fresh fruit; there was an omelet station. But the reality is that the Chief of Staff was trying to feed a staff who had been working around the clock with the food that happened to be available.

  As Air Force One made its final descent into Honolulu, the President told the Secretary of State, “We
have not made any decision about the South China Sea Agreement.”

  “What are you going to tell the country?” she asked.

  “First, we just need to explain what’s happening,” he said.

  “Is the Chinese Dormigen offer for real?” she asked.

  “As far as we can tell, yes,” the Chief of Staff answered.

  The Secretary of State said, “They are going to do everything they can to exploit this situation.”

  She was correct.

  50.

  THE PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS TO THE NATION WAS SCHEDULED for twelve p.m. Eastern Time. For once, the administration did not have to wrangle with the networks to get them to cover the speech. Upon landing, the President was hustled to a studio at Fort DeRussy in Honolulu. Almost immediately the schedule began to slip. The President was traveling with a single speechwriter, who had been brought along to draft valedictory remarks after the South China Sea Agreement was signed. Instead, she was awakened in the middle of the night and told to write a fifteen-minute national address on a subject she knew nothing about. The President angrily rejected the first draft, which was heavy on Pearl Harbor imagery. He snarled, “Pearl Harbor was the beginning of World War II. What I’m trying to convey here is that everything is going to be okay.” The Communications Director wrote a short draft himself, but the President was unhappy with that as well, taking a Montblanc pen in his left hand and crossing out the whole first paragraph, then, as he read on, the whole second paragraph, before tossing the whole thing aside. “I need something short, straightforward, and reassuring,” he said. “Do I have to write this myself?”