by Joe Klein
"So we just have to take it?" Lucille pressed. "They're going to dignify this garbage, treat it like a real story-and we have to go along with that?"
"They say it's a show about how the media handles these sorts of stories," I said.
The room dissolved in laughter. "Hey, why'n'tcha call Koppel back"--Richard was giggling--"'n tell'im we're up for a show about how fucking Nightline finesses sexy stories it doesn't want to acknowledge? I'll get on for that."
"Oh, that would give us real credibility," Lucille said. "The Stanton campaign will be represented tonight by a hyperactive redneck from outer space."
"You'd do well yourself," Richard said, and was about to say something fabulous about Lucille and sex when he remembered Susan was in the room, and shut down.
"Well, who do we put on?" Susan asked.
"How 'bout Henry?" Lucille said.
"Not bad," Richard said. "He can Mau-Mau Ted with race voodoo and erudition."
"Henry's too young," Susan said. I was sort of stunned, and yet relieved. I was being talked about as if I were a commodity, as if I weren't there--but I was more than happy to be rejected for this particular assignment. "We need someone more authoritative. Marty?" she asked. Susan had, suddenly, fallen in love with Marty.
"Who ant I?" he asked. "You need someone who's been associated with the campaign."
"Who the fuck knows who's been associated with the campaign?" Richard asked.
"The people who watch Nightline," Marty said. "It's a New York--Washington show. They want to see what kind of face you're going to show the public when times get tough, and they also want to see some continuity. If you change horses now, they'll think we're panicking."
"Aren't we overthinking this a little?" Leon asked.
"No," Daisy said. "Our public face is absolutely crucial, especially now We need someone who's calm, confident--and someone who looks like a regulation American: I nominate Arlen."
Oh, Daisy: browning the boss. But she had a point. As I looked around the room, I realized that, as a campaign, we were short on regulation Americans. As if to prove my point, Howard returned then, sere and hawklike and intense. If you put hint or Richard, or Lucille, or Libby on the air, or, better still, all four of them together, you would have the College Bowl team from Bedlam State. I started to smile at the notion of them, there together: the Stanton campaign electroshock troops-then saw that Daisy thought I was laughing at her. She froze me with her eyes, then seized up into a fit of tight, angry coughing. Poor girl.
"I think Daisy's got a-" I began, but Susan wanted to know about 60 Minutes. (Daisy acknowledged my apology with a nod, wiping a cough-induced tear from her eye.)
"Tape," Howard said.
"You asked for live?" Susan asked.
"Of course, but they gave me some technical gobbledygook that was impossible to understand."
"You said live was the only way we'd do it?"
"I implied it. I didn't want to close any doors."
"Do we really need this?" Lucille asked again. "Is this how you want to be introduced to the American public? Those are going to be real people-American people-not just primary voters out there watching. They're not thinking about politics yet, and suddenly you get this governor from a state no one ever heard of, denying a supermarket tabloid story on Sixty Minutes right after the Super Bowl. Doesn't that look just a little bit defensive? If Leon is right, and we don't know how the folks are reacting to this thing, why should we put everything on the line? People may turn out to be sane about this. They may just think it's trash. You never know."
A reasonable point from Lucille. Wonder of wonders. "But we do need to do something," I said, "or else they're going to say we're ducking it. We should make some sort of stand. The Times or the Post maybe?"
"Don't have any more control over those fuckers than we do CBS," Richard said. "I say Brinkley."
"What's the story with Brinkley?" Susan asked.
"They were going to do the president's trip to Japan," I said, "but they said they'd give us twenty minutes at the top, before the Jack Smith set-up piece. We can do it from here. But I don't know. You want to contrast our problems with the president being presidential for a change?"
"It's not the president they're having on, is it?" Arlen asked.
No, of course not. The secretary of state. "Then no one's going to notice," Richard said. "Soon as we're off, half of Washington's gonna pick up the phone and start callin' around to the other half--How'd he do, how'd he do? Y'knowhattamean?" True enough. I wasn't having a very good meeting here.
"Who does the interviewing?" Susan asked.
"The usual," I mid.
"Cokie?" She asked.
"I'd guess," I said.
"Then it's gotta be both of us."
Lucille looked up sharply at Susan. "You . . ."
Susan met her glance--calmly, firmly, completely under control. Well, of course it had to be both of them. I had assumed it would be both of them. But up till that moment I hadn't realized how absolutely crucial Susan's presence was going to be. She would be watched as closely as the governor. She would have to strike the right chord--vehement, but not too defensive. I wondered what she really thought about all this; I realized I didn't have a clue, not a scintilla of an inkling. I was feeling out of it, removed from them for the first time since I'd signed on.
One thing was clear. Susan had--suddenly, and not very subtly--taken charge. She had decided how we'd respond to the Cashmere situation (and that there wouldn't be any internal debate about it). She would make the final call on who did Nightline. She was, obviously, tilting toward Brinkley and away from 60 Minutes. She had always been a powerful force in the campaign, of course, but Cashmere had made her indispensable. "Henry, where's Jack?" she asked, emotionless. "You want to take this to him before we firm it up? Now, let's move on to the debate."
The debate was strange, otherworldly. Charlie Martin hit us for not being specific enough on health care; Lawrence Harris hit us for proposing a tax cut, given the enormous budget deficit; Bart Nilson hit us for not proposing more government jobs to ease unemployment. None of them talked about Chicago or Cashmere. It was as if there were two campaigns going on: the legitimate one, the campaign being covered by the prestige papers and the television networks (none of whom had touched Cashmere yet)-which our opponents were still honoring-and the trashball one, the tabloid morass that had become our reality. There was overlap, but it was oblique: the other candidates' energy level was up a notch, their excitement over our difficulties was palpable, but it remained discreet. That was smart. (It was interesting how even mediocre politicians reflexively found their way to the elemental rules of the game-in this case: Never attack an opponent when he is in the process of killing himself.) So they remained determinedly high-toned. They stayed clear of the sewage, fearing that some might splash back on them. But heightened ambition was in the air, sharp and obvious, like English Leather, and you could see the three of them puffing themselves up, trying to appear presidential, auditioning to replace us-if and when we went down.
Not even Harris, Mr. Classroom Exercise, was immune. His poll numbers had drifted down as ours moved up, but he remained respectable (about 20 percent); we assumed that he was serving as a familiar parking place while the New Hampshire Democrats watched the show and waited to see if we'd prove worthy. Now, though, you could see the first, faint glimmerings of aspiration. I imagined him shaving that morning, the thought drifting idly from deep brain to frontal lobe: Hmmm. If Stanton went down, who else would there be? His challenge had been deft, playful in the past. But now there was an edge to his skepticism when he came after us in the debate. And he used an interesting word: "moral." "It just isn't moral to play with our children's future," he said. It was used in passing, no special emphasis, but I saw Jack Stanton flinch. His head was down-he was taking notes-but he caught a breath and his shoulders tightened. Did anyone else notice?
We'd figured Harris wasn't just playing the game for fu
n. He was looking for work. The campaign was his application for the position of elder statesman. He would push us, push his ideas, win plaudits from the pundits, then warmly endorse us when it was over. And hope for-what? Treasury secretary? Something. That still might be his game, but the use of that one word-"moral"-seemed a scouting expedition, an exploration of the next level up. The purpose was mostly self-exploratory, I guessed. He wanted to see how it might feel, coming after us, being a player. He wanted to feel the adrenaline rush; he wanted--literally--to feel it in his damaged heart, to see if he could handle it. The moment came and went too quickly, and I was too intent on my candidate, to read the reaction. But I took a certain satisfaction from having caught this nuance. This was, if you could stand back from it, a wonderfully intricate game.
Afterward, the spin room was eerie. There wasn't as much attention directed toward as as there'd been in the past. It was a barely noticeable diminution, but I sensed that the first rush of scorps--the heavy hitters--was toward the other candidates. This made sense. The other candidates hadn't been paid much attention for the last forty-eight hours. The scorps had been on our case, and this was the first opportunity to probe the other camps for Cashmere "react." Clearly, they weren't too interested in the debate. You could just sense it in the room. They had heard our react all day--the outraged stonewall--and figured that the news, if there was to be any, would come from the other candidates. I was kind of curious about that, too: Had any of the others made a decision to have a spokesman let something slip, move the story just a little bit closer to the center of the campaign? Again, the strange meteorology of New Hampshire: I was freezing and suffocating. I was catching whatever it was that Daisy had. erry Rosen drifted over, very solicitously. "How ya doin'?"
"Fine. He did great tonight, don't you think?"
"He did okay, considering."
"Considering what?"
"Well, he still hasn't really defined himself," Rosen said. ust what I needed.
"Oh, come on."
"I mean, what does he really stand for, what does he believe in?" "Oh, for Chrissakejerry, you've seen him work fifty times by now You know what he stands for."
"Tell me."
But there wasn't time. The second wave of scorps was heading my way now They would want a react to whatever the opposing spinners had laid down. And now they were all over me, and the questions--it was weird--were about process: How would we be able to soldier on with the press all over us about Cashmere? How would we be able to get our message out? Wouldn't we just be on the defensive now? The press was asking this. It was surreal. I don't know what I said to them: nothing much. I looked to see what was happening to Laurene and Richard-also working the spin room for us. (Spork was preparing for Nightline.) But I couldn't, and I couldn't afford to look too hard. I was talking-wallpaper talk, nothing talk. And, meanwhile, thinking it through. The opposing spinners probably hadn't said anything about Cashmere. They'd talked about the feeding frenzy. "Gotta wonder how Jack's gonna get his message out with you assholes all over him." Something like that. And so the scorps, dumb animals, came with that: How you gonna get the message out with us all over you? It made perfect sense. Wonderful sense. Everyone was clean (except us). Everyone could shave tomorrow. They weren't scumbag gossip reporters, they were media analysts. The scorps weren't reporting the trash, but how we dealt with the trash. The story hadn't really broken yet-and already it was one step removed: the press was reporting about how the candidate would deal with how the press would report about the story.
More of the same on Nightline. The show opened with shots of Gary Hart overwhelmed by reporters in 1987, and then a question, very precise, very efficiently put by Koppel, in his austere, authoritative way: Is this the sort of feeding frenzy that Jack Stanton will be facing now? Is it possible for any candidate to survive this sort of treatment? Is it fair? "We'll be joined by a top adviser to Governor Stanton, and also by a professor who has studied this phenomenon and written a book titled Feeding Frenzy, and the media critic for The New Yorker" Poor Arlen. He sweated, stumbled, fell. He looked like a regulation American, but he was far too nice, and not nearly quick enough, for this sort of duty. We watched him, horrified-a group of us, in Richard's room at the hotel-as he actually analyzed the difference between the Hart case and ours. "Well, Ted, Hart appeared to be caught in the act in 1987, but there's no evidence this time that . . ." Blah, blah, blab.
"WORK FOR US, YOU DORK," Richard screamed.
"He should be outraged," Daisy said quietly, stricken, watching her boss destroy himself. "He should be calling out Koppel for the phony he is. The guy is legitimizing this fucking thing--a boughtand-paid-for supermarket tabloid story--and Arlen is letting him get away with it."
The worst came at the end when Koppel asked the professor what the prognosis for Jack Stanton was. "Does anyone ever survive one of these feeding frenzies?"
"Well, Clarence Thomas did, but at this level . . ."
The asshole from The New Yorker--tweedy, supercilious--jumped in: "Ted, ifJack Stanton had been around for twenty years, was a well-known figure in American life--someone like Governor Ozio, or Donald O'Brien, the Senate majority leader--and some . . . floozy appeared with a story, well, it would be dismissed out of hand. The burden of proof would be on her. But most people don't know who Jack Stanton is. This is the first thing they'll hear about him. You've got to figure this will be a crushing blow. You've got to figure he's history."
No one said anything. Richard kicked over a chair. One of the muffins, a college kid named Alicia, was in tears. I walked down the hall to the Stanton suite. Uncle Charlie answered. "He's over at Dunkin' Donuts."
"When did he go?"
"After Arlen began to sweat."
"Say anything?"
"Broke a few things."
"Charlie, could you do me a favor? You go get him tonight. I'm just wiped. I need some sleep."
It was 2:28, digital time, glowing red in the achy exhaustion of the night, when Daisy knocked on my door. "You want to catch my cold?" she asked.
We made love, slowly, carefully, very much aware of the fragility of the moment, intent on not causing discomfort of any sort. It was not particularly passionate or transcendent, but it wasn't campaign sex, either. The kindness of it was memorable, and touching. She sniffled afterward, and coughed a bit. I felt a dampness on my chest: tears.
"Are we flicked, Henry?"
"I don't know," I said. "But we were wrong about Cashmere. The crucial variable isn't her. It's us. People don't know him. They look at him and see another pol--another overambitious trimmer who thinks he can get away with anything. They don't know how smart he is. They don't know he cares. We've gotta find a way to get that out, to let them know"
She was hot, feverish, on me; she shuddered--chills. I held her closer. "You got any Sudafed?" she asked.
I don't remember much of Saturday. Another bad day. The frenzy intensified. I saw it on the news that night--it had penetrated the weekend network news. (Not much else was happening in the world; the weekend anchors didn't have the stature of the regulars, so they could dive in where Dan and Tom and Peter feared to tread.) I saw it in Jack Stanton's eyes, when he came in that night: he couldn't quite believe what he was experiencing, the dream of a lifetime had dissolved into . . . this. He seemed crushed, his eyes dead. He didn't want to see anyone; he watched basketball on the tube alone. (Susan was out at a women's college--a fabulous event, I later learned; she was sharp, aggressive, funny. Her strength in the face of this embarrassment was strange. She was drawing attention to her perfection, which only served to remind people of her husband's imperfection--it was, I realized, a vengeful act.)
I walked back to my room, lay down on my bed, stared at the ceiling. Richard marched in right behind me, lay down next to me, stared at the ceiling. "So," he said, "he figured he was God. He figured that Cashmere McLeod would be so fucking honored, so fucking thrilled, so breathless at the prospect of sucking the governor's dick, that
she would never betray the secret. She would carry it with her, in her heart, to the grave, hoping that he would secretly put a rose there from time to time, or at least send over Tommy in the Bronco to make sure the grass was trimmed."
"No, it's not that," I said. "He's not so good at seeing ulterior motives."
"Henry, he is a fucking politician."
"That's different-that's the arena," I said. "He catches everything in the arena. You see him when Harris used the word 'moral' last night? I never even talked to him about it afterwards-didn't have to. I just knew he caught the nuance."
"Yeah, of Natural Forces is road-testin' ambition."
"So where are we now?" I asked.
"A place I've never been before."
"I can't believe it's over," I said. "The whole thing just seems like a mirage. It's not really happening, y'know?"
"It's happening."
"But I get the feeling we're gonna pull through," I said. "I don't know how."
"What do you mean, he's not good at seeing ulterior motives?" Richard asked.
"He wants to think the best about all his friends," I said. "He's desperate to think the best. You know what Momma says, he was always like that. The Sunshine Kid."
"Except for the thunderstorms."
"They pass," I said.
"We haven't even had time to prep them for Brinkley," he said. "I just can't wait to hear George Will utter the words 'Cashmere McLeod.' That should knock us down a couple of points right there." "He won't. Not his style. He'll do Chicago."
"So who does Cashmere?"
"Cokie-or Sans Donaldson. Susan figures Cokie. Remember she asked about her at the meeting yesterday?"
We worked through it. We did the entire interview. It was reassuring. In our version of Brinkley, we lived to fight another day. "Y'know," Richard said finally, "we just take these things. Think 'em through like we would normal stuff, like a debate or an issue or a week. We might even pretend our way into thinking we got a normal campaign here." "It's like you're taking a shit in the woods," I said, "and this wild boar makes a rush at you . . ."