The Rationing

by Charles Wheelan

  Shortly after five a.m. Hawaii time, the President was ushered into a small, secure conference room at Fort DeRussy along with the Strategist and the Chief of Staff. There were still no draft remarks. The Communications Director was working frantically with the studio crew to find an appropriate backdrop for the talk, something that would approximate the Oval Office. The television studio at Fort DeRussy had a digital background; the producer could manipulate the scene behind the President with the click of a mouse, like changing screensavers. The Communications Director leaned over the producer’s shoulder as they tried out backdrops, most of which had been designed for military briefings. The first digital background showed the Pearl Harbor Memorial, with an expanse of ocean and blue sky. “That’s the U.S.S. Missouri Memorial,” the producer explained.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” the Communications Director exclaimed. “That looks like the President of the United States is on a Hawaiian vacation.” The producer clicked on his console, bringing up a new digital background: dark wood bookshelves, lined with serious-looking books, like a cozy academic office.

  “Maybe that?” the producer offered.

  “What are the books?” the Communications Director asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “The books. What are the titles of the books?”

  “They’re not real. They’re just digital images.”

  The Communications Director spluttered, “I understand that. I am not an idiot. But they still have titles, fake or not. Make it bigger, so I can read them.” The producer enlarged the image, so that the fake titles on fake bookshelves became readable. After a few seconds, the Communications Director muttered, “No . . . no . . . no. Clausewitz? Counterinsurgency. They’re all military books.”

  “That is what we do here,” the producer said, finally pushing back. “It’s a military base.”

  “This looks like the President is getting ready to invade some small country.”

  “I can blur the titles so they’re not readable. It might look a little strange—”

  “It will take five minutes before some douchebag living in his mother’s basement unblurs them, and that will become the story. What else do you have?” The two of them finally agreed on a simple background with the presidential seal and an American flag, after which the Communications Director asked who would load the remarks into the teleprompter.

  “We don’t have a teleprompter,” the producer said.

  “Jesus. Does the President know that?”

  “I don’t speak to the President.”

  Of course, there were no remarks to be loaded into a teleprompter at that point anyway. The President, true to his word, had begun drafting a short speech, longhand on a legal pad. When the Communications Director called the President from the studio control room to tell him there would be no teleprompter, the President read him his draft remarks over the phone. It was a short, simple speech that again emphasized the three key points we were trying to make: no terrorism attack; the virus does not spread; the Dormigen shortage is manageable.

  “It’s good, but don’t say ‘terrorism,’ ” the Communications Director said.

  “How the hell am I supposed to deny that there has been a terrorist attack without using the word?”

  “You can’t say terrorism. It gives credibility to the rumor,” the Communications Director explained. The two men knew each other well enough that the President waited for the Communications Director to propose alternative language, which he did. “Just say that this is a common virus that has always been endemic to the United States. No hostile parties, foreign or domestic, have played a role in this public health challenge.”

  “Isn’t that denying that it’s terrorism?” the President asked.

  “Yeah, but you can’t use the word. You can’t say ‘terrorism.’ ”

  At about that moment, the Chief of Staff, who had been talking on her own phone, handed the President a note. “Holy shit,” he said to the Chief of Staff, but loud enough that the Communications Director could hear.

  “What?” the Communications Director asked.

  “I’ll call you back,” the President said, hanging up.

  The Chief of Staff’s note was short but powerful: “Our model now shows lower bound on deaths at 10,000.” The NIH Director had called with the first really good news of the crisis: Nations around the world, recognizing the severity of what was happening in the U.S., were willing to dig deeper into their own Dormigen supplies. She had spoken personally to senior government leaders in Australia and other signatory nations of the South China Sea Agreement to inform them of the China dilemma. If these governments wanted to protect the agreement, she told them, they needed to help render the China Dormigen offer unnecessary. Hence the note that the Chief of Staff slid to the President: With the new Dormigen pledges, the NIH model was showing a range of “excess Dormigen-preventable deaths” from ten thousand to sixty-five thousand, depending on six or seven key variables in the model (e.g., the severity of any other disease outbreaks in the coming days).

  The President and his advisers were obviously focused on the lower end of that range. It was tantalizingly close to zero, as the President grasped immediately. If somehow that lower bound were to go to zero—with more Dormigen pledges or more optimistic forecasts for other variables in the model (e.g., less flu)—the President could credibly tell the nation that the situation was under control. “We have to get that to zero,” the President said.

  “We’re working the phones,” the Chief of Staff said.

  “I mean now. Before I give my address.”

  “We’re doing everything we can,” the Chief of Staff assured him.

  “It’s got to go to zero,” the President repeated. “Get the NIH on the phone and tell them the lower bound needs to get to zero.”

  The Chief of Staff said, “They can’t just change the model.”

  “Look, I spent five years as a consultant building these kinds of models. If you change a few assumptions, you can get the earth to spin backwards.”

  The Strategist added, “It’s true. They don’t have to do anything dishonest. Just tell them to ‘reexamine the assumptions’ to see if anything may have changed. Just a fresh look.”

  “We only have twenty minutes before you go on air,” the Chief of Staff replied.

  “Push it back, if we have to,” the President said firmly. “I want to be able to tell the American people that we can manage this situation without any incremental deaths.”

  “It’s still just the lower bound,” the Strategist pointed out.

  “I understand that,” the President said. “Just make zero a possibility.”

  “I will ask them to do what they can,” the Chief of Staff said, stepping out of the conference room to make the call.

  They all recognized, of course, that the President would be addressing not just the American people, but also the international community, and the Chinese leadership in particular. The less desperate he appeared to Beijing, the better. While the Chief of Staff spoke with the NIH about “taking a fresh look” at their model, the President asked to be connected with both the Senate Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House. Congress was in recess, but both chambers had called emergency sessions; representatives and senators were rushing back to the Capitol to deal with the Outbreak, or at least give that impression. In a matter of minutes the President was on speakerphone with the two legislative leaders.

  “You had to know this moment was coming,” the Speaker said after some terse pleasantries. “You couldn’t keep something like this from the public forever.”

  “Now we need to manage the situation,” the President replied. He described his proposed remarks. “I need you both to assure me that Congress is going to be a constructive partner as we work through this.”

  The Senate Majority Leader said, “The Senate is going to be like a teakettle—lots of steam getting blown off. I will do everything in my power to steer that emotion in a construct
ive direction. You have my complete support.” As an amateur historian and a powerful senator who knew he would never reach the White House, the Senate Majority Leader was anticipating his shining moment. If he could help steer the Senate, and therefore the nation, through this crisis, history would be kind to him. He was a man vain enough to aspire to have parks, streets, and schools named after him, but honorable enough to feel he ought to deserve it. He continued, “Send me your draft remarks and I will issue a supportive statement. The Senate is going to be mayhem for a few hours. We’re going to have to let that run its course, but we’ll eventually get down to business.”

  “I think that’s unrealistic,” the House Speaker said. “The anger . . . My members are talking about impeachment. The nation feels like we were kept in the dark. Why weren’t they told earlier?”

  “You know darn well why they weren’t told earlier,” the President said angrily. “It would have provoked the panic we’re seeing now—to no good end.”

  “There is a huge trust deficit, Mr. President,” she warned.

  The Strategist had been pacing around the small conference room, rolling his eyes at the Speaker’s melodramatic lamentations. Finally, he could contain himself no longer. “Can we just save all that for your campaign?” he said.

  The President signaled for the Strategist to keep quiet. “Madame Speaker, when the House comes back into session, can you please try to forestall any actions that would be counterproductive to what we are trying to do here?” the President asked earnestly.

  “What are you trying to do?” she asked dramatically. “I have no idea what you are trying to do. The response seems rudderless.”

  The President answered, “We are gathering additional Dormigen commitments. We are continuing our work to understand the virus. We are urging anyone who is ill to seek treatment. And we are evaluating all other reasonable options.”

  “Those are just talking points,” the Speaker said.

  The Senate Majority Leader interjected, “I appreciate your leadership on this, Mr. President.”

  “The NIH model is now showing that we might not have any incremental deaths,” the President said. “The lower bound on their estimate is zero.”

  “Near zero,” the Strategist said, instinctively protecting his boss.

  “What does ‘near zero’ mean?” the Speaker asked. “Thousands of people have died already.”

  “From idiocy,” the Strategist said in the background.

  “Preventable deaths,” the President clarified. “It means that with a little more work on our part, or a lucky break, we may get through this thing without any deaths for lack of Dormigen.”

  “What about the China option?” she asked.

  “We are still looking at that. There is a consensus among my foreign policy advisers that it would be far too steep of a price to pay in the long run. You heard some of those discussions.”

  The Senate Majority Leader asked, “Is the China offer public information at this point?”

  “No,” the President said emphatically. “And I’d prefer to keep it that way. Among other things, we don’t actually have a firm offer in hand.”

  The House Speaker said, “I cannot in good conscience withhold that information from the House, or from the public. If China is offering lifesaving medicine, the public needs to know that.”

  The Chief of Staff walked back into the room and thrust a piece of paper in front of the President. It had a big “0” written on it—nothing else. The President understood immediately. He said sharply into the speakerphone, “We’re now at zero deaths. I have a speech to give. All of the discussions with the Chinese are confidential. If you so much as hint at that in your public comments, I will personally have you arrested.” He poked at the console on the speakerphone, trying to end the call, but he hit the wrong button, causing a loud beeping noise. The Strategist quickly stepped beside him and hit the correct button, hanging up on the Speaker and the Majority Leader.

  The Chief of Staff began explaining: “The NIH revisited their projections for the number of people who would seek—”

  “I don’t want to know,” the President said, walking out of the room. “Let’s do this.”

  51.

  I FOUND MY WAY TO THE RADIO STATION IN PLENTY OF TIME, even before the President pushed back the time of his address. The studio was smaller and less elaborate than the CNN facility. I waited in a sitting area with three large flat-screen televisions, each tuned to a different news station. A handful of station employees stood idly watching with me, waiting for the President to appear on camera. The address was postponed another five minutes as the President’s staff (unbeknownst to the public) wrestled with the teleprompter issue, or more accurately the lack of a teleprompter. The President’s handwritten remarks had been quickly typed up, but the font was too small for him to read without his glasses. There was a debate among the staff over whether it would be better for the President to wear his glasses, something the public had never seen before and might distract from the message, or to have the speech printed in large enough font for him to read without glasses. The latter seemed an easy fix, but the font turned out to be so large that there were only a few sentences on each page, creating a strange effect whereby he had to flip rapidly through many pages while saying relatively little. “It looks like he’s reading a speech written in crayon by a kindergartner,” the Communications Director said. In the end, the President wore his glasses. The reading glasses produced no meaningful public reaction. However, the public had been so conditioned to leaders using a teleprompter that there was some comment on the fact that the President read from an actual speech, looking down at the pages and then up at the camera.

  In the studio, a producer sidled up to me as I waited for the President’s speech to begin. “Have you ever done a satellite tour before?” he asked.

  “I don’t even know what it is,” I said.

  The producer pointed to a chair opposite a microphone in the middle of a small room surrounded on three sides by soundproof glass. “You’re going in there. I’m going to be in the booth. We’re going to do fourteen segments in about ninety minutes, mostly AM news programs, a few public radio segments. All live. If you mess up, just keep going. After you finish each interview, keep quiet and I’ll patch you into the next one.”

  The President began his address and we all turned toward the televisions. Someone scrambled to find a remote to turn on the volume. The producer said to me, “When he’s done, we’re going to go right into the studio. You’ll be fine.”

  I looked down at my phone as the President’s voice boomed into the room. Tie Guy had sent me another text: “Nature strikes back. Call me!” I quickly texted back that I would call him after I finished my radio interviews. Nature strikes back? Why was he quoting Huke to me?

  The President’s speech was clear and authoritative, if somewhat short on artistry. There were no ringing phrases like “a day that will live in infamy” or the “axis of evil.” Instead, the President did what he had to do, explaining Capellaviridae, the nature of the Dormigen shortage, the need for anyone who felt ill to seek treatment, and most important, the ongoing government response. The penultimate draft included the line: “I will do everything in my power to ensure that no American lives are lost.” The Secretary of State had pleaded with him to remove or change the line. “It will make it that much harder to stand firm with the Chinese,” she argued. Both the National Security Adviser and the Secretary of Defense concurred.

  “People have died already,” the Chief of Staff reminded him.

  “Obviously,” the President snapped. “This is about the Dormigen shortage.”

  “Maybe we need to say that,” she suggested.

  The television networks were getting impatient, as they had already interrupted their scheduled programming for nearly half an hour. “How about this?” the Strategist offered. “I am confident that we can weather this crisis without any preventable loss of life.”

&n
bsp; “Yes,” the President agreed.

  “That’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it?” the Chief of Staff asked. “How about ‘preventable loss of life from the shortage—’ ”

  “Too clunky,” the President said. “I’m comfortable with this. It’s what people need to hear right now. Today is about quelling the panic.”

  “Sir, I think that leaves you in a better position with regard to the Chinese,” the National Security Adviser said.

  The Chief of Staff, still uncertain, said, “Only the lower bound of the model shows no loss of life. Everything has to go our way.”

  The President said, “The speech says, ‘I am confident we can weather this crisis without any loss of life.’ It’s about how I feel right now. I am confident that we are going to get through this without any preventable loss of life. That’s what I’m asserting.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said the Strategist.

  The President, no doubt feeling a rising surge of adrenaline, said impatiently, “I’m ready. This is the speech I’m giving.” I do not believe it is a coincidence that the President was an extraordinary basketball player. He had the ability to harness his anxiety in a way that elevated his performance, rather than smothering it. He may have looked somewhat awkward reading his speech off the printed page, but his demeanor and the message were pitch-perfect. I watched with a small, nonrepresentative group of people in the radio studio, but the feeling in the room after the President had spoken was different than it had been just seven minutes earlier. The brevity of the speech gave it additional power. The President did not have the eloquence of FDR or JFK, but he explained clearly what was happening and made a short but compelling case that the situation was under control. The immediate headlines suggested a public reaction similar to mine. Even before the President was done speaking, Bloomberg posted a one-paragraph summary of the speech under the headline: “President Urges Calm, Predicts No Loss of Life in Capellaviridae Crisis.” The stock market, which had plunged more than 5 percent on the initial reports of the Outbreak, regained most of the losses.