The Rationing

by Charles Wheelan

  The Speaker organized “No Rationing” protests in a number of cities. Several were scheduled for that afternoon. However, the agenda had been coopted by other progressive groups; the demonstrations now included protests against income inequality, domestic violence, sexual assault, and racial profiling. (The Democrats’ progressive wing prided itself on a lack of hierarchy, which took a toll on focus and strategy.) A Palestinian rights group offered up several speakers to address Israeli land annexation in the West Bank. In the end, the disparate causes rallied under the banner of “A Protest Against Unfairness and Oppression.” Predictably, no one without a nose ring showed up.

  I was in no mood to see humor in any of this, but I now find it amusing that the Tea Party was blasting our Dormigen rationing plan at the same time. “This is exactly what happens when you put the government in charge of anything: rationing,” populist radio host Chuckford Pickens told his loyal listeners. These anti-rationing diatribes bounced around the right-wing echo chamber for a while, though the sentiment wilted quickly when exposed to anything approximating logic. As the President pointed out in a moment of exasperation, the whole point of the free market is to ration goods, albeit using price rather than some other mechanism. (I vaguely recall my microeconomics professor saying the same thing.) Eleven thousand economists signed a petition affirming the importance of government patent protection to promote innovation, and government funding to promote the kind of basic research that often lays the groundwork for major pharmacological breakthroughs (like Dormigen). Chuckford Pickens disparaged the petition on his program, describing it as “more sad evidence that our universities have been totally hijacked by the left.” Several callers shared stories of lefty academic exploits; one concerned an Oberlin professor teaching a course called Gender and Sexual Identity in The Wire.

  “The Wire—like the TV show?” Pickens asked the caller incredulously.

  “Yep,” the caller affirmed.

  “My God, it’s not bad enough that you can watch television for college credit, now it also has to be about gender and sexual identity. You can’t even get credit for watching straight people on TV anymore! Can you believe that?” Pickens exclaimed, clearly pleased with his own analysis of the situation. “You know what we should do, we should get a copy of the Oberlin course catalog. Can we do that?” he asked his listeners, though the question was presumably directed to a producer in the studio. The answer must have been yes, because Pickens continued, “We’re going to do that.” The supposed logic of this meandering conversation, as best as I could infer, was that a handful of silly courses at Oberlin College somehow obviated the collective wisdom of eleven thousand economists, including twenty-one from the University of Chicago (a bastion of free-market thinking).

  For all that, the President’s response to the Outbreak enjoyed reasonable support. He had never been personally popular. (Even before the Outbreak, fewer than half of those asked said he would be a fun person to have a beer with.) The “adults” in Congress had done a good job of explaining and defending the White House response to the crisis. The most idiotic ideas floated by other members of Congress, usually in front of a television camera, tended to sink on their own (e.g., using military force to procure Dormigen from countries unwilling to share). Policy types offered up numerous sensible reforms to ensure there would not be another Dormigen-type shortage in the future. Most of these recommendations had been filling binders and glossy reports for years. (The Brookings Institution had hosted three conferences over the previous decade on issues related to the development, affordability, and distribution of “uniquely valuable” prescription drugs; only eighty-three people attended the largest of them, including Brookings staff.) Of course, now that the milk was spilled, the nation was giving more time to those who had warned that the glass had been perched precariously on the counter. Still, the milk was spilled. Most reasonable people agreed with the President’s effort to clean it up. One could argue the President’s approach was sensible because it protected so much of the population. He was taking heaps of abuse for his proposed rationing, but, more quietly, he was also getting credit for the implicit triage. Most Americans were protected. The President had been elected by a coalition of voters exhausted by political nonsense; for the most part, they were sticking with him.

  Around ten-thirty in the morning, I received a text from the NIH Director summoning me to a noon meeting. Tie Guy called me separately. “They found a difference,” he said when I answered.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “The biochemists. The virulent form of Capellaviridae is missing a protein,” Tie Guy explained. He was speaking faster than I had ever heard him speak, and my cell phone reception was choppy, so I could not absorb all the details that he was spewing. “This is what we’ve been looking for,” he continued.

  “A missing protein,” I repeated.

  “Yes,” Tie Guy said excitedly.

  “Which means the harmless form of the virus has an extra protein,” I said, thinking as I spoke. “As if it had been neutralized by an antibody.” That is how antibodies work: they attach proteins to viruses, rendering them impotent, like the key in a lock.

  “That’s what it looks like, more or less,” Tie Guy said, growing calmer.

  “It’s consistent with our theory,” I said.

  “Yes, good work,” he offered.

  Our noon meeting was delayed, as the NIH Director finished a call with the Chief of Staff to apprise the White House of our latest findings on the virus. She and the Chief of Staff agreed that we were not ready to make a public announcement of the breakthrough. There were too many outstanding questions: What caused the difference in the two viruses? What role did the dust mite play, if any? And most important, how could this discovery help those who became sick with the virulent form of the virus? The President overruled their decision, ordering the Communications Director to put out a release immediately. “You don’t think it will raise false hope?” the Chief of Staff asked.

  “That’s the point,” the President answered, turning his attention to the Communications Director. “Say that scientists have—no, make it ‘NIH scientists’—we might as well get some credit for government work. Say that NIH scientists have made a major discovery . . . something about why the virus turns deadly.”

  “The NIH scientists have identified the protein responsible for the difference between the indolent and virulent forms of Capellaviridae,” the Communications Director offered.

  “Fine, but don’t say ‘indolent’ or ‘virulent.’ Use words that people watching The Bevin Crowley Show can understand.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then say that scientists are optimistic this will lead to a non-Dormigen treatment for the virulent form of Capellaviridae—but don’t say virulent.”

  “Dangerous,” the Communications Director suggested.

  The Chief of Staff warned, “That’s a very strong statement. The NIH Director just told me they have no idea what accounts for the difference in the two viruses and they don’t think they can develop a vaccine in three days.”

  “Do we want to create false hope?” the Communications Director asked.

  “Yes, I just told you that,” the President answered impatiently. Once again, he was playing political chess while others in the room were playing checkers. The press release went out shortly after noon in Washington. In New Delhi, where it was nearly ten at night, an aide to the Indian Prime Minister delivered the news to him: the Americans had cracked the code on the Capellaviridae virus. The Prime Minister was planning to phone the U.S. Secretary of State in the morning to offer a Dormigen shipment sufficient to solve the shortage (subject to certain conditions, of course).

  “What if they solve this thing before we can offer them the Dormigen?” he asked his assembled aides. He really said that out loud.

  77.

  OUR EARLY DISCUSSIONS ABOUT DORMIGEN RATIONING HAD been theoretical, almost like an exercise in a college ethics class. It was no longer
feeling theoretical. Those of us working closely with the President could see him carrying the pressure. He physically looked different, weighed down somehow. Even the sardonic humor was gone. The President reminded staff members that thousands of lives were at stake. Cecelia Dodds reminded us that each one of those cases would be a tragedy somewhere, regardless of how sick or old that person happened to be. People are going to die who do not have to die, he would intone to anyone whom he felt had become too insouciant with the situation. The staffer would apologize, surprised by the emotion in the voice of the President, a guy who normally guarded his emotions closely, especially around junior staff.

  There were several White House interns whose job it was to sort through the mail (after the security screening). The President had a standing request to see a sample of the physical mail and e-mail flowing into the White House. The interns would select a handful of positive notes, a handful of critical ones, and then several selected at random. Under normal circumstances, the interns would also bring him a few from the “crazies”; the President found temporary amusement in letters from people who blamed him for the poor performance of the U.S. men’s soccer team or warned him of an imminent Canadian invasion. One famous letter from San Diego—three pages, typed—complained that a neighbor’s dog was “shitting all over a six block radius” and asked accusingly what the President planned to do about it. There were five pages of accompanying maps and several photos that appeared to have been taken by a drone. If the President was in a particularly good mood, he might dictate an ironic response. For example, he wrote a letter to the San Diego complainant informing him that the “defecating dog” was really a matter for Congress to handle. “Make sure you copy the Speaker,” he told the staffer to whom he had dictated his reply.

  Even during the Outbreak, the President was diligent in spending some time every day with his mail. While he was on Air Force One, he had letters scanned and e-mailed to him, as he wanted to maintain a feel for what ordinary people were thinking and feeling. Polls could give him a snapshot of national sentiment, but they were “shallow,” as he liked to describe them. People around the country—those who bothered to answer the phone—were disturbed as they cooked dinner or watched television or surfed the Web. They answered the requisite questions, eager to get off the phone as quickly as possible. But the folks who took the time to write to the White House were different—whether it was an old-fashioned handwritten letter with an envelope and stamp (the President’s favorite, even when they were critical) or by e-mail. They tended to express a thoughtfulness and depth of emotion that the polls could not capture.

  Shortly after the President arrived back from Australia, one of the interns in the mailroom phoned the Chief of Staff. “I think you should see this,” she said.

  “Have you alerted security?” the Chief of Staff asked distractedly.

  “It’s not that. I just think you should see this, maybe the President, too.”

  “Can you just bring it up?”

  “It’s pretty heavy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it’s too heavy for me to carry.”

  “Okay,” the Chief of Staff agreed. In the midst of everything else that was going on, she could not have been happy to trudge down to the basement office where the screened mail was sorted, but that is what she did.

  When the Chief of Staff arrived in the cramped office, a glorified closet with exposed pipes running across the ceiling, the intern pointed at a brown box about the size of a laser printer. It appeared to be full of paper clips of all colors and sizes. “Paper clips?” the Chief of Staff asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  The Chief of Staff ran her hand through the paper clips, letting them slip through her fingers. “Are you sure security cleared this?”

  “It’s from an elementary school outside of Chicago.”

  “I think we’re fine on office supplies.”

  “It’s based on a documentary,” the intern explained. “I looked it up online. There’s this film about a group of elementary school kids who collected six million paper clips, one for each Jew killed in the Holocaust.”

  “And this?” the Chief of Staff said, pointing at the box.

  “I’d bet it’s about forty thousand, one for each person who will not get Dormigen—”

  “Of course.” They both stared at the box for a while. “That’s a lot of paper clips,” the Chief of Staff said softly.

  “Do you think the President will want to see it?” the intern asked.

  “I do,” she said. And then, “He should, in any event.”

  Later, when the President returned to the Oval Office from a meeting in the situation room, the Chief of Staff was waiting for him, along with the open box of paper clips that had been wheeled on a cart up from the basement. The President noticed the box immediately. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “It came from an elementary school near Chicago,” the Chief of Staff answered. There was a brief silence as the President waited for the balance of the explanation and the Chief of Staff decided how to couch it. “There’s one paper clip in the box for each person who would be denied Dormigen—”

  “Like the documentary,” the President said.

  “Yes, exactly,” the Chief of Staff replied. He still surprised her on occasion, despite their many years working together. The typical day in the White House was a blur of fifteen-minute meetings; the President survived by exercising good judgment and knowing just enough about a lot of things. It was the opposite of her experience in academe, where her colleagues could spend hours drilling down on the most obscure of topics. She would sometimes forget that the President was a reader and a film enthusiast; it was his escape. After his divorce, he spent a long stretch alone in Washington. There had been a lot of media buzz in those years about his antics as one of the nation’s most attractive bachelors, but the reality was that he retired most nights to his tiny apartment with a book or a film. Even in the White House, with the First Lady traveling frequently, he would do the same, after the Chief of Staff had gone home to her husband and teenagers. On occasion, the President would invite authors or directors to dinner—not the famous ones, as he had no particular affinity for celebrities, but a historian or an accomplished filmmaker. The Chief of Staff should not have been surprised that he had seen an obscure documentary about schoolchildren who collected six million paper clips, even though she was.

  “Leave them here,” the President instructed.

  “In the middle of the office?” she asked.

  “Somewhere everyone can see them,” he said. The paper clips were different sizes and colors: big, little, metallic, green, blue, bright pink. There was one paper clip resting on top with a sticky note attached to it. The President was not wearing his glasses when he picked it up, so he could not read the tiny elementary-school handwriting. But he knew what it said: Cecelia Dodds. In subsequent days, when staff members would ask about the box, or make jokes about buying paper clips in bulk, he would explain their significance.

  Not long ago, when the President was in the final months of his term, he visited the students who had done the Dormigen paper-clip project at their elementary school in a Chicago suburb. The President spent nearly an hour and a half talking to the student body and answering questions, an unheard-of amount of time for a presidential visit. “Your project was a crucial reminder for me during the Outbreak of how our decisions would affect real people,” the President told the assembled students, most of whom were too young to appreciate the significance of what they were hearing. “That didn’t make it easier—harder, probably. But we needed that. We needed a constant reminder that the decisions we were making would affect real people and families—thousands and thousands of them,” the President explained.

  The event garnered a great deal of national and international attention. To that point, the President had said relatively little about his decisions during the Outbreak. There was speculation that his elementary school
visit would prompt some newsworthy reflection. By then, however, the President was thoroughly fed up with the media. He ordered the student assembly closed to the press, except for two reporters from the school newspaper, the Springhill Chronicle.¶ The balance of the media—over a hundred photographers, videographers, pundits, writers, and bloggers—were relegated to the school parking lot while the President spoke inside. Then, in a moment of delicious irony orchestrated by the President, one of the student writers for the Springhill Chronicle was deputized to give a pool report for the global media assembled outside.

  “It’s going to be a pool event,” the Communications Director told the traveling White House press corps, smirking visibly. (When events were space-constrained, or when a large group of reporters might disturb an event, such as a visit to the bedside of a wounded soldier, the Communications Office would choose a single reporter and cameraperson to cover the event and share information and photos with the rest of the “press pool.” However, the reporter designated for such responsibility was not usually an eleven-year-old writer for the Springhill Chronicle.) After the event, the President stood on a patch of grass outside the school, smiling and silent, as eleven-year-old Dan “Bucky” Riegsecker reported dutifully on what had been said inside. Correspondents from the New York Times, the Washington Post–USA Today, Home Depot Media, and all the major cable news stations—notebooks out, cameras rolling—lapped up the tidbits Bucky tossed their way.

  78.

  THE PHONE RANG AT THE U.S. AMBASSADOR’S RESIDENCE IN New Delhi around midnight. It was Sumer Patel requesting a meeting as soon as possible between the Indian Prime Minister and the U.S. Secretary of State. “The Secretary of State is in Bahrain,” the Ambassador told Patel.