He ran behind his desk and rummaged madly in several drawers, lunged around again to me and pulled his chair up touching mine. He sat down tapping a piece of paper. “Look!”
It was an outline map of the world traced out of an atlas and colored with crayons, red for Russia, yellow for China, green for our side, brown for the Third World and light blue for the oceans and major inland bodies of water.
“Look,” he said, “all these people—all these people”—his finger pecked at the red part—“hate me. Hate me! And these, almost all of these”—the brown part—“hate me! Can’t stand me! And these, lots of them, maybe all of them, I don’t know”—green—“hate me. They resent me! They make jokes! And, Word!” He ran a finger from sea to shining sea. “Even these! Forty-seven percent of these, maybe it’s more now, don’t even like me that much! Even these.”
The thought exhausted him.
It was hard to know what to say. I mean he had a point!
“Not all of them, sir!”
He cracked his right forefinger, his second finger, his third finger, his fourth, worked through the fingers on the other hand, the thumbs, the wrists, the shoulders, the hips, the ankles. He bent his head, held it between his forearms and twisted till something popped.
“Hum Fat!” he said, unrelieved. “Hum Fat calls me every day!” He jerked his head at a red phone on his desk. “He says I’m running an empire! Exploiting everybody! History is catching up, he says! He doesn’t let me say anything, he just talks for hours about the inevitability of historical process until I hang up! I try not to think about the phone and when I pick it up again he’s still there! Laughing!” He almost wept. “I tell him it’s not my fault! It isn’t me! I don’t even want to be president! They said, Hey, do you want to be president and I said Sure I want to be president! Who doesn’t want to be president? I didn’t know! I’m not doing all this bad stuff! You think I know what’s going on at the Pentagon? Over at State? I don’t even know what socks to wear in the morning! My wife dresses me! She takes me in to breakfast, it’s all organized. Then I go to the toilet and come here. I don’t leave until she comes down to get me.”
He threw himself out of his chair and walked aimlessly, running his hands through his hair. If there’d been a corner handy he would surely have backed into it and turned his face to it as he sank weeping to the floor, but of course there are no corners in the Oval Office. As it was he paused at the end of the room and collapsed onto a chair.
“I’m a fraud, I’m a fraud,” he said. “And I’m responsible for the whole world!”
The whites showed all the way around his eyes. He put his hands to his face and stared at me through trembling fingers.
8.
There was more.
We went the whole afternoon.
No one bothered us. No telephone warbled. No policy meetings required the President’s presence. No state business called him away.
“I’m alone!” he wailed. “Alone!”
At first I took this to be an existential cry. The hollowness of command and like that. Lonely at the top.
Only gradually was I able to admit to myself that the President had no command!
Apparently the High Lamas had decided to leave him to himself and let him get on with his nervous breakdown. It was May, the election and inauguration had been a few months ago and the country, by now comfortable with the new President and First Lady, had pretty well o.d.ed on politics for the time being. Summer lassitude was settling over Washington and people were thinking vacation and no doubt assuming the President was due for a rest. If his presence was barely being felt in the houses of government, well, he was a minimal president. He knew how to delegate.
In fact he’d been almost completely occluded from the process. Dealt out. Nobody came to consult him, nobody talked to him, nobody asked him what he took in his coffee. The man in charge wasn’t in charge!
And he was too panicked to protest! Suppose they ignored him! Suppose they rejected him! He couldn’t risk the humiliation!
And suppose they didn’t reject him! Suppose they granted him some measure of authority! He’d just have to sit there thinking over and over all the possible consequences of any move, any move he might dare to make!
“I can’t! Oh, God, Word, I can’t! I’m a fraud, I can’t!”
The tension music was getting weird. Inevitable.
How had this happened? This was the man whose vision had united first his party, then the whole country! The man who projected such firmness and warmth! The strength to act and the tact to take everybody into account! The President!
He rambled desperately, sometimes inaudibly, diverted by random associations, befuddled by twitches, trailing off or stopping dead, reaching culs-de-sac and staring at an inner wall. Only gradually, with a patience born of dumb horror, did I manage to configure a few details.
He came from a New England family whose roots went back to balloon shorts and leotards, and under their protection had passed a childhood and adolescence almost stuntingly bland. At Harvard he’d emerged as a big smiling guy, too down-to-earth to have any particular intellectual enthusiasm but rich and good-looking enough to be popular. His classmates had given him the affectionate nickname, Yoyo.
Flat feet kept him out of Viet Nam—officers weren’t that fashionable by then anyway—and he’d proceeded into law school. After some intensive tutorial transfusions and a couple of runs at the bar exams he made it through and entered his father’s firm, where he was made responsible for taking minor clients to lunch until he could be brought along. It became clear that he had no talent for business or the law, and a career in politics was practically inevitable.
But it was slow going. He was an active party member and gave useful service on the sidelines—election fund-raising, organizing hats and placards for the rallies, that sort of thing—but his father kept him out of the mainstream until maturity might obscure his qualities as a dork.
Meanwhile he married and settled in for some quiet desperation. Why he chose that particular woman I don’t know, it’s hard to think of anyone whipping himself over the top with thoughts of Mrs. President, but she must have been what he wanted at the time. Lots of class and everything, I gather she reminded him of his own mummy. And father approved.
And when the time came she made the right impression on the electorate. In an age when people were no longer permitted to get old she put across a soothing motherliness that complimented his jut-jawed thumbs-hooked-in-the-beltism. By then the kids had grown up—he’d barely known them, they were already writing books—and he was running for the Senate.
Daddy’s organization got him through it—the President had always felt like more or less of a corporation—and when he’d won the seat there were advisers and speechwriters to help him manage his role in there. He had some touchy points to raise and he looked good in the interviews on the steps, and party people were noticing how long, in a quiet way, he’d been there. He was getting a reputation for modesty as well as experience, and damned if he didn’t find himself being put forward for president!
It was just a feeler of course but his father figured it was now or never, time to bet or fold, so the team went to work. He was on a slate with six other candidates and debates were arranged but he had nothing to gain—his advisers assured him he had nothing to gain—by showing up. Everything to lose.
Speeches was what did it. There were issues—edible petroleum products, airline overbooking—he was running on issues and he wasn’t going to smoke up the air trading short bursts with amateur debaters.
When it came down to the convention there were really only three major contenders. The guy on the left didn’t have much of a chance, the left hadn’t had a hit song in years. And it emerged that the guy on the right’s middle name was René, a little faggy but he was getting by with it until they hung No-Way René on him and that was no good, people didn’t want that.
That left the President in the middle. His detractors s
aid he was stop-gap and called him on his lack of experience. But his accent, his middle-distance gaze, his—who knows!—were so exciting that it just didn’t seem to matter. He swept the convention off its feet and bored it into a comfortable sense of reality with his acceptance address.
Now the election. Speeches, ten-second spots, okay, but the nation expected a debate. Debates.
His press people coached him in stance and gesture, editorialists threw practice pitches at him, his speech writers Magic Markered all the pauses. He was honed to the suppleness of a gymnast and in that shape—speaking and smiling as if he’d memorized the moves in a high-school play—he went on television and faced a panel of journalists who treated him and his opponent like students taking an oral.
The other guy looked good too. He was smaller, which made his arm movements doll-like on camera, but he had a good serve and he could whack the ball back, boy! It was the third debate though, and nothing much had happened beyond a lot of stiff ground-holding, when the President, the soon-to-be-President, got him on the smoking issue.
“Do you,” he said—he hadn’t even brought the thing up—“or do you not: smoke! one and a half packages of charcoal-filter cigarettes per day!—in flagrant defiance of the Surgeon General’s recommendation!”
The other guy looked amused but Jim Lehrer paused and admitted the question. Here was a little outburst of dialogue and the audience was ready.
The opponent shrugged. Okay, sure. He smoked! There were lots of American smokers! Was the candidate trying to suggest that there was something unAmerican about smoking? Was the candidate questioning his loyalty? His respect for the Constitution? Again?
But he had begun to prevaricate. Dither. Rub his five-o’clock shadow. Everybody could see it was all over before he’d even sensed the wind of change.
“He’s doing it again!” he shouted.
Later they said it wasn’t the question so much as the way the President looked on it. Good. In control. Presidential.
The rest is history.
So all right. Fine. Great presidents have come out of just such backgrounds.
The President wanted the job, that was important. He’d been more or less pointed at this all his life and it would be neat to be known by his initials.
And he’d convinced the country that he was a good leader and felt on both sides of all the issues. He had a vision of America that had inspired him, he said, since his school days. Not that he’d ever tried anything else or anything but he trusted his intuition. And given the high visibility of public life the country could be expected to hold him to it.
But two things had happened. Two things that changed the whole course of a presidency.
The first was the death of his father in a croquet accident. Tripped over a wicket or something.
The old kingmaker had been fairly ripe and everything, he was already held together with wire, and there were grounds for reflecting that his passing wasn’t altogether inopportune. No telling how much national sympathy it threw onto the President’s side for one thing. And then, he was just coming into his own and now he was forced to do without the paternal safety net. Stand out of the shadow.
But perhaps it came a little too soon.
Second, there had been something at the convention, something the President flinched at and kept dark. It was just before the speech in which he was to name his running mate.
The man his team had chosen, the man whose name would come up on the teleprompter, was of the Texas-rancher mold and a vital balance to the President’s image on the ticket. Of the viable modes of American aristocracy, war hero, southern planter and movie star had been done lately and northeastern preppy plus cowboy had less recent resonances. It was all set!
But when the moment came, before the whole convention and for the first time as far as anyone but the nominee knew, the President named Raymond “Reb” Rawlins as the next Vice-President of the United States, a man who chewed gum incessantly and was apt, at any moment to reach into his pants and rearrange his testicles.
His people looked at one another aghast. What? His campaign manager! Hand-picked by the old man, all right. The hardest-nosed promoter and media-packager in the business. But he had less political experience than the candidate!
Down on the convention floor lazy-eyed Reb was surrounded by reporters. “No-o-o problem,” he said. He chewed and kept his arms tightly folded. “We gone awl the way on this one. Takin’ her right from pig to porkchop.”
It was the President’s first executive decision and he’d picked a clinker of a running mate. There was a turn-back-the-mile-o-meter look about Reb that couldn’t fail to register with the voters, and the odds-makers recalculated.
And yet he did contribute a certain raw force to the campaign. He got attention, no question about it. In the debates between the vice-presidential candidates he was asked if he thought the same way as the President on questions of policy.
“Well I got in-surance! Hyuh, huyh.”
There had been proposals for taking certain drastic steps to counter inflation. What about the predictions of such-and-such an economist? Had Reb read his book?
“Well, yes,” he said, “but not personally.”
Some experts suggested that an about-face was due in managing the budget.
“Engine-revvers,” he scoffed. “They be last off the mark when the light changes.”
Did he have any specific plans for dealing with the new deficit? “You ain’t runnin on a deficit, you ain’t alive!” he said. “You daid! We gone leave all that to the bean-counters and get on with runnin’ the govamint.”
The story circulated that his first time in Washington he’d been walking around looking for the Library of Congress, needed something from the records, and stopped somebody. Said, “Scuse me, son, can you tell me where the lieberry’s at?” To which the stranger said, “Here on the Hill we don’t end our sentences with prepositions.” “Oh. Oh. Sorry. Well could you tell me where the lieberry’s at, asshole?”
Not a man to be denied the last word.
How would Reb react at the prospect of a nuclear confrontation?
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’d have to ask God.”
Everything he said was calculated to move the hick heart. Between them they seemed to have some kind of combination, and in January the President was President.
And in trouble. He arrived in office without the nucleus of staff intimates that had accompanied other presidents into the White House. His key campaign people had been alienated by his springing Reb on them, but not by Reb himself who was after all their boss. They filled their new posts and did their jobs all right but more or less tended to continue in the context of Reb’s machine and the President didn’t hear much from them.
Daddyless and with a wife who had no more confidence in him than his father’d had, a man without a corporation, the President suddenly had eyes that hung from satellites, arms that could strike anywhere, judgments to make that affected millions and millions and millions of people, and he found the glamour all but annihilating. The vertigo struck terror into his soul.
Just ad-hoc it, he told himself. It’ll develop your poise, he told himself. He said the prayer of refusing to consider any other possibility and felt his way down the dark corridor.
Reb drew up a list of nominees for the cabinet posts and the President was grateful. He couldn’t do everything! Trouble was, most of the secretaries turned out to be associates of Reb’s and when it came to the shaping of actual policy the President felt left out.
If he had a proposal to put on the table on how to handle a flare-up in the Middle East, say, he’d hand it to Reb. Reb would finger a page or two and slide it over to Secretary of State Tupper, Wayne Thompson “White Trash” Tupper, Reb’s good buddy of long standing and more or less Lester to his Earl.
The Secretary would work his glasses down his nose and stare over them at the proposal, flip to the back page and chew meditatively. “Nope,” he’d say
, “can’t do ‘er. Say, Reb, when you gone sell me that dawg?”
“Why, Dubya Tay, I cain’t sell you that dawg! That’s my best dawg! He been in the fambly for years! My pappy had that dawg’s pappy!”
“Oh, Reb! Don’t you go in-flatin the price with sintamint! That old dawg ain’t no good to you! Why if that dawg was on roller skates he couldn’t catch a backin’-up car! I just need him to fill out my pack! Be reasonable, Reb!”
“Why, Dubya Tay, how you do take on! I wouldn’t go huntin’ without that dawg! Why I couldn’t find my way back out the woods without that dawg!”
Here Reb belched and broke wind simultaneously to terminate the discussion, a thing he could do when it was called for, and W.T. slid the proposal back across the table. Reb replaced it before the President and called up the next order of business.
If the President raised his hand and ummed or anything the others would glance at him pointedly and exchange remarks. “What the haitch?” and so forth.
“Wait a minute,” Reb would say, “I’ll talk to him. Uh, sir”—Reb would turn to him ponderously and put his elbow up, a rig driver in a semi—“the thing is, this matter you raise is already well in hand? Implementing this particular playun would involve the dismantling of layers and layers of carefully contrived diplomacy? It’d take hours to explain right now, sir, and, well, time presses. Why don’t you take this here and, uh—huh!—sit on it for a while!” He looked slack-eyed at the others and they laughed without smiling.
Made him feel like a dipbulb.
But what could he do? The cabinet was supposed to be his responsibility! If he fired everybody they’d say he didn’t know what he was doing! And they’d all write books!
They were waiting for him to make a mistake. He knew they were waiting for him to make a mistake. He couldn’t afford to make a mistake.
“They study your record. They go over your record. They look for something. They watch you.”
The President's Palm Reader: A Washington Comedy Page 10