America the Beautiful

by Laura Hayden

  When the Bentons got together to celebrate holidays as a family unit, Claire Rousseau Benton didn’t even attend. But Emily did, and she happily joined in every contest with her supercompetitive cousins.

  Competition—whether for office, for money, or for a flag football touchdown—was highly valued in that family, and Emily definitely embraced her family’s values.

  Emily punched the speed control on her treadmill and the machine picked up the pace. “Found your dad . . . that new sand wedge . . . he’s been . . . talking about.”

  Good thing I didn’t get it, Kate thought. Anticipating Emily’s largesse, Kate had gotten her father a monogrammed golf bag and, thanks to the celebrity aspect of running a presidential campaign, had it autographed by Tiger Woods.

  She smiled. Sometimes rank really did have its privileges.

  “What?” Emily challenged.

  “Nothing.”

  “C’mon. . . . You’re grinning. . . . Why?”

  Kate caved. “Because I figured you were going to get Dad the sand wedge, so I got him a golf bag.”

  Emily grinned back. “We make . . . a formidable team, sister-friend.” She held out her hand and Kate slapped it.

  “We do, indeed.”

  A warm sense of connection with Emily ran through Kate.

  “BFF . . . best friends forever . . . right?” Emily gasped.

  “You bet.”

  They ran for another couple of minutes with Kate nudging her treadmill’s speed higher until their feet pounded in a simultaneous rhythm.

  Belatedly Kate realized what sort of strategic mistake this was. She’d learned long ago not to give Emily any sort of open challenge such as matching treadmill speeds. To Emily, it became an invitation to prove how much faster, better, and smarter she was than her competition, even when that competition was her best friend.

  Therefore, Kate knew what was coming next.

  “About . . . ready . . . to . . . stop?” Emily asked.

  Kate wasn’t ready, but “Who can last longer?” was yet another area of contest between them. Emily would never voluntarily stop if Kate was still there, plodding along. Emily couldn’t let anybody, not even Kate, beat her. She’d run until she dropped. Literally.

  Bentons never gave up. Not first. Not ever. It made for interesting family football games.

  “Okay, I’ve had enough,” Kate lied.

  Once they landed back in Virginia, she’d go home and the first thing she’d do would be apologize to Buster the Wonder Dog. Then after he was sufficiently loved on, she’d strap on her iPod, jump on her own treadmill, crank it up to whatever speed she liked, and run until her bones ached, her joints screamed, and her heart pleaded for rescue. A real workout.

  It wasn’t until Kate reduced her speed to a sedate cooldown crawl that Emily reached over, sped her own machine up, and took her last “I’m so much faster than you” show-off sprint.

  Emily needed to demonstrate her superiority; Kate understood that. In fact, she deliberately fed into Emily’s overwhelming need to win by always making sure there were small successes for her friend to savor as often as possible. A string of small, even inconsequential, wins allowed Emily to better cope with the tougher issues, the harder battles, and heaven forbid, the occasional loss along the way.

  That insistence on winning was one of the things that made Emily such a good politician. She never gave up. During Emily’s years as governor, she accomplished things all the pundits said were impossible because she just kept pressing until everybody came to the table—Republicans and Democrats, elected officials and bureaucrats—and gave Emily what she needed. Virginia was a much better place these days because Emily never gave up. It had better roads, better schools, lower taxes, and a better safety net with a significant participation of charities and churches in that safety net—that was Kate’s baby. Emily had been really good for Virginia. Kate couldn’t wait to see what would happen when she got her hands on the whole country. The people who said Emily could never win the presidency . . . well, Kate figured they’d never dealt with Emily. She would go the distance, just as she was doing now on the treadmill, if it killed her.

  The run for the presidency was the big picture. Down on the ground at M Central, Emily’s drive to succeed meant that Kate shut down her treadmill a little earlier than she liked every day. Kate figured it was worth it to keep Emily happy. ’Cause if Emily wasn’t happy, nobody was happy. And all of Kate’s plans to change the world for the better depended on Emily being happy.

  Letting Emily win was a lesson taught to Kate by a very wise woman who had forgotten more about the art and craft of politics than Kate would ever know.

  Marjorie Redding, image consultant to four presidents, including Emily’s uncle Bill, had been the person to formally identify Emily’s driving need to succeed in all things at whatever cost. Marjorie might have been older than dirt, but she knew her business well, catering in confidence to clients who were seeking very public careers in either politics or the media. Marjorie had wisely pointed out Emily’s consistent knee-jerk reactions to competition in a private conversation with Kate as the campaign manager and Dozier as Emily’s chief political adviser.

  “How can we . . . fix this?” Kate had asked. She couldn’t quite shake the mental image of Emily filleting a psychiatrist long before he dug into the gooey inconsistencies beneath her shiny candy shell.

  “The key to image consultancy is to change or tone down those aspects of a candidate’s personality that appear to be weaknesses and to exploit and build on those aspects that appear to be strengths,” Marjorie explained. “You do the opposite against an opponent, of course. You wear down the strengths and accentuate the weaknesses. In fact, a good consultant can even use an opponent’s strengths against him. Think of how Karl Rove used Kerry’s military service to take him down in the 2004 election against George Bush.”

  She sat back, obviously pleased to have an audience.

  “Rove was worried that Bush’s National Guard service didn’t stack up well against Kerry’s time in Vietnam. So the Bush campaign worked up a strategy. And shortly thereafter, a few Vietnam vets who’d served with Kerry and many more who hadn’t but who wanted to denounce him joined forces with a well-heeled group of Bush supporters from Texas to form an organization called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The organization paid to make four commercials in which those people told their stories. Then they paid to have those commercials played all over the airwaves to anybody who would listen. By the time the election was over, Kerry’s supposed advantage of military service had been turned into a terrible liability.

  “President Bush and Karl Rove claimed to have nothing to do with those ads. But a number of Rove associates and Bush advisers had connections to the Swift Boat campaign. They resigned from the campaign as soon as those connections became known during the buildup to the election. And no one was ever able to track a firm connection back to Bush or Rove. But I like to think Rove planned it and pulled it off. As a political ploy, it was masterful.”

  She pointed a gnarled finger at an eight-by-ten glossy photo—Emily’s official portrait. “I’d like to think I can do the same for Emily one day.”

  “Think of Emily as a piece of banged-up furniture.” Dozier added his folksy translation. “We take reality, polish up what we can, sand off any burrs we can, and spackle the remaining holes. By the time we’re done, she’ll be a showpiece.”

  The woman released a rare smile. She was evidently used to Dozier’s homilies. “Emily is no banged-up specimen. It’s not often you bring me such good material to start with.” She gave Emily’s photo a slow once-over. “She’s pretty in an understated, classic sort of way. Excellent features—she has the Benton eyes and the Rousseau chin. Thank heavens,” she muttered under her breath.

  Emily’s mother, Claire, had brought European bone china–delicate features into the hearty Benton stock. Dominant genes meant that all the Benton men bore a strong resemblance to each other—be they father
, son, uncle, brother, or cousin. And as for the sisters, it was a general consensus that the Benton features looked far better on the men in the family.

  However, no geneticist in the world could have dipped into the Benton-Rousseau joint gene pool and recombined the DNA better than the genetic permutation that had spawned Emily. The Rousseau line softened the harshness of the Benton features, and the Benton strength removed the air of delicacy from the Rousseau lineage.

  As a result, Emily might not have been as beautiful as her mother or the other Rousseau women, but she was the most beautiful Benton woman ever born. She totally lacked the faintly masculine-horsey looks of her female cousins.

  One particularly astute columnist had described Emily as looking as perfect as a china doll—but with the durability and unbreakable nature of a rag doll.

  Along with beauty and stamina, Emily possessed a quick wit, a steel-trap mind that embraced all things academic, a strong, clear voice, a drive to serve her country, and an unmistakable lifelong love of politics. Essentially, she was the dream candidate.

  And yet Marjorie still had her work cut out for her back then. After they finally met, she’d circled that younger Emily like a tiger sizing up its prey.

  “Today’s female politicians are a new breed,” Marjorie had preached. “It’s not a matter of trying to look and act more like a man but to find a way to champion your feminine qualities and present them as assets, not liabilities.”

  She walked one more circle around Emily, then paused to her side. “Any children in your future?”

  Emily glanced at Kate. “No. I can’t have them.”

  Marjorie shifted until she stood in front of Emily, skinny arms folded, her soul-piercing gaze and body language screaming in doubt.

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  No one stared down Emily Benton. “Does it matter?”

  “What matters is how you present the idea. So let me ask it again. Can’t or won’t have children?”

  Emily closed her eyes, drew in a deep breath. “It’s a personal question, but I don’t mind sharing.” She opened her eyes, now glistening with slight moisture. “One of the greatest joys in a woman’s life—or so I’ve been told—is to give birth. What I do know is that one of the greatest responsibilities in life for any person is to nurture a child, to help him or her grow up healthy and wise and to find the right path in life. I’ve always regretted that I’ve been unable to share in the joy and the responsibility of being a mother, and I can’t help but appreciate and maybe even envy a little those women who do have a chance to have children.”

  The delivery was perfect, the sentiment possessing just the right balance of wistfulness and acceptance of untenable fact. If Kate hadn’t known better, even she would have gotten a little choked up. But Kate did know better. Kate had been there several years ago when Emily first mentioned how she couldn’t afford—wouldn’t afford—to take the necessary time out of her life to have a child. Much less raise it.

  It . . . Not her. Not him. It.

  Marjorie appeared completely unmoved. “That’s a start, but the wording could be better. Instead of saying that giving birth is one of the greatest joys in life, say that one of the greatest joys in life is ‘to become a mother.’ This way you don’t risk alienating adoptive parents.” She continued without a pause. “So when did you have your tubes tied?”

  Emily blinked.

  Marjorie pointed at her face. “If you have a reaction like that, everyone will know the truth. The American public will not be thrilled to realize you had elective surgery. When was it done?”

  Emily paused for a moment; then her lips thinned. “I had an emergency appendectomy while on vacation in Acapulco. My father bribed the doctor into tying my tubes at the same time and leaving no paper trail.”

  The woman raised one eyebrow. “Without your consent?”

  Emily looked shocked. “Of course not. I begged him to do it. K can tell you that. She was there.”

  Kate bit her lip. What she could tell them was that she knew all along that the ruptured appendix claim had been a lie from the beginning. Emily had planned the trip for the express purpose of having the tubal ligation procedure done outside of the prying eyes of the media. Emily had thought she’d tricked Kate with the faked pains and even more faked insistence that her father be called. Emily had exploited both of them—using Kate to lend credence to the trip as a carefree vacation and Big Henry for his ability to use his good sense to buy her a suitable surgeon as well as the man’s medical silence. Whether it had been an arrangement between father and daughter, Kate honestly didn’t know.

  Marjorie seemed to infer all of this without explanation. “You planned ahead. Good. Most people I work with don’t think that far in advance when it comes to their political careers. If anyone asks about your trip, stick with your original story—vacation in a foreign land, unfortunate health problem, Daddy comes to the rescue, and you have surgery there. If anyone ever looks hard and starts to draw a connection between your infertility and your trip, then your camp hints that the surgeon was less skilled than advertised and that the infertility was due to complications from what should have been a simple operation. If they look into the surgeon’s background and he comes out clean, your fallback position is that the procedure was done to you without your knowledge by your manipulative father. That it was never a matter of your choice. And, Miss Rosen, you know nothing about this, correct?”

  Kate fully expected Emily to step forward and defend the memory of her late father. Big Henry may have been a scheming cutthroat in the boardroom and the scourge of every marble-lined corridor in the District, but everything Kate knew about him substantiated that he truly, unconditionally loved his only child, Emily.

  So if Emily could swallow the idea of using her father as a posthumous scapegoat–slash–contingency plan, who was Kate to argue? She gave Marjorie her most innocent stare. “Me? Sorry, I wasn’t listening. You were talking about . . . what? Taking a vacation?” It was an evasive nonanswer that seemed to satisfy both Emily and Marjorie. The truth was, she wasn’t sure who was to blame—Emily or her father. And not knowing freed her from lying and violating her personal code of conduct.

  Kate believed in the Ten Commandments—all of them. That included the ninth commandment, the one that made politics such a tricky business for Christians: you must not lie. Practical politics was all about shading the truth. Sometimes being a Christian and being a political consultant was a tough mix. Kate did her very best to live up to her faith. She tried always to stay on the right side of that bright line of the truth. But occasionally it was a real struggle.

  She prayed she’d never hit the point where her beliefs made it impossible for her to go on in politics. In fact, Kate firmly believed God had placed her in politics to do whatever she could to change the world for the better. And that potential ability was what made her look forward to getting up and going to the office every day.

  And on that day, at least, her conscience had stayed clear. Mostly, anyway.

  Emily locked eyes with Dozier, the last real member of her father’s inner circle, the man who represented Big Henry’s generation of politics. “If it comes to that, are you okay with blaming this on Dad?”

  He shrugged. “I can believe he might have done something like that. As far as that goes, I always had my suspicions that he might have engineered it.” A paternal smile spread across his face as he gazed at Emily. “I had no idea you had the gumption to do something like that at such a tender age.”

  “It’s not like I was sixteen.” Emily didn’t blush easily or often, but she did this time as if she were indeed some schoolgirl. “I was twenty-two at the time.”

  He beamed. “And a visionary.”

  Marjorie tapped her watch. “I don’t have all day to validate your past actions. We need to work on your present to assure your future.”

  From that moment on, Emily didn’t question a single suggestion made by Marjorie Redding. Kate agreed that the
woman had no political ax to grind, so it didn’t become a matter of Marjorie trying to change what Emily believed or why but one of simply coaching them all on how to best present Emily’s appearance, philosophies, and plans. Some of the changes Marjorie suggested were alterations in Emily’s appearance, softening her usual dark suits, using more subtle touches of color. Marjorie simplified Emily’s makeup as well, which actually took a couple of years off her looks, even though she had been a well-documented forty-two at the time and was forty-four now.

  There was no lying about Emily Benton’s age; the media loved repeating the story of how her father, a young politician under JFK’s tutelage, was supposed to be in Dallas that fateful day in November when the president was assassinated. However, Big Henry Benton had stayed back in Virginia to tend to his wife during her difficulties in childbirth and had thus missed being an eyewitness to the death of Camelot.

  John Connally had been sitting in what would have been Henry’s customary place near JFK, and he was wounded in the chest and the thigh. Big Henry, who was taller and broader than the Texas governor, might have being more seriously injured or even killed. Hank had said publicly that he wished he’d been there to take that bullet for the president.

  What he said privately was that, unlike Kennedy, LBJ got things done. That was something Big Henry admired in a man.

  What Hank didn’t know then was that he’d eventually get his wish. Years later, an assassin would take Hank’s life while trying to kill the president.