by Joe Klein
"The breakup in the middle might be cellular static, or they might have used it to cover."
"Wait a second," I said. It was coming. "Wait a goddamn fucking second. Play that again."
You think it's at all possible to get (crackle, crackle] laid tonight? "Again."
"What?" Libby asked.
"AGAIN, dammit."
You think it's at all possible to get [crackle, crackle] laid tonight? "Yourself. Yourself." I said. "Un-fucking-believable. You think it's at all possible to get YOURSELF laid tonight! Me! He was talking to me! It was New Year's Eve. Again, again-from the top."
So what you doin' tonight .. .
"Abrupt cutout, right?" I asked. "It was 'What you doin' tonight, Henri.' I remember he called me Henri."
. . . Stay at home and crack open a bottle of Chablis?
"He was asking me if I was going out to party that night. Jesus Christ, we got her!"
"You got her," Libby said. "WE don't."
She was right. There was no way to prove it.
"At least not yet," Libby said. "BUT WE WILL. Henry, you call the boss and tell him never, ever, on pain of his fucking life, talk on a cellular phone again. Me and Sailor are going to cook something up." I beeped Laurene. "This is just amazing, Henry," she said. "It's a zoo. We got a full plane with us-and you know what they're seeing? A full ballroom, one hundred dollars a head, in Baton Rouge. That was breakfast. We're in Jackson now We've got a full ballroom for lunch. A standing 0. Congressman Mobley introduces him, 'These attacks on Jack Stanton are attacks on our integrity, our regional integrity. We know who Jack Stanton is and what kind of governor he's been-and we don't cut and run when our boy's in trouble.' Henry, who'da thought it'd be a lucky thing for us these white boys down here still fighting the damnyankees?"
Laurene! We were all getting goofy. "Before you take off for Birmingham, you've got to get him for me," I said. "How long you think?"
"Ten minutes. So how was she?"
"Ridiculous, but devastating in a way. But I think we got her." "How?"
"Can't say. Listen: you have to make sure that his very first call is to me. No other calls. This is absolutely urgent."
We were driving back toward Mammoth Falls when he beeped me. "Henry?" he said, his voice hoarse. He sounded awful. He coughed. "It was bad?"
"It wasn't good," I said. "When you called me from Marco Island on New Year's Eve, it was cellular?"
"Let me think. Why?"
"Because they've been listening in and taping. Remember, you told me to, uh, enjoy myself that night? Well, they took it and used it. Now you're having a conversation with Cashmere about getting laid and being horny."
"They played this?"
"I'm afraid so."
"That's outrageous. She can't get away with-"
"Well, sir, there's no way we can prove it didn't happen. Although Libby does have an idea. But you've got to be more careful-on the phone. You've got to assume that they're listening to every last cellular conversation you have."
"Lemme talk to him," Libby said, ripping the phone from my hand.
"You ASSHOLE," she said. "Don't pull that outraged puppy shit with me. Sailor thinks some of the other shit she played was real. God, I wish we'd castrated you when we had the chance."
"Libby!" I said, "You're talking on a cellular phone."
"OH SHIT," she said and calmed down. ". Uh-huh, uh-huh. I've done a lot of that already. Got affidavits from her first husband, her sister-but it doesn't do us all that much good to prove that she's a lying slut who lucked around. That is . . . like manifest. That is not an ELUSIVE CONCEPT, you undisciplined shit. Ooops! I'll get it done. Okay. 'Bye."
We drove along. It was clouding up. Around a bend, near the airport, I could see the modest spires of Mammoth Falls. "Of course, Henry," she said, softly, dangerously, "there is one thing we could do that would-it might-ice this case. Some risk would be involved." She pulled off the highway at the Cranford Exit, just south of downtown. It was a formerly fancy area, large old houses-rooming houses, now-and vacant lots. We stopped in front of a faux plantation-style house, white paint peeling. "The law offices of Randolph Martin Culligan," she said. "I am about to do something crazy. If it backfires, I can plead non compos whatsis. And you can say you had no idea, since I'm not going to tell you." She turned toward me. Her blue eyes were soft-not crazy-now She was as reasonable as I'd ever seen her. "But still, you might find yourself in an awkward position. You can leave me to go in there alone-I will understand, I won't hold it against you-or you can come with me. There will be absolutely no advantage for you in coming with me. There may be disadvantages. But you can come if you like."
"But what-"
"No QUESTIONS, Henry," she said. "Faith or nothing."
Faith. She dialed a number. The phone was answered. She hung up. "It's a go," she said. She grabbed her satchel, put on her bush hat. We went.
Up an outside staircase, around the back. The sign on the door: THE LAW OFFICES OF RANDOLPH, MARTIN AND CULLIGAN. She laughed:
"Can you believe this shit? Randy's made himself into three partners." She rapped on the door. No answer. She raised a sneaker and kicked it in.
"What the-" Randy Culligan was up, behind his desk, holding the phone. He had scraggly brown hair, horn-rimmed glasses, a brown, long-sleeved knit shirt with a yellow argyle pattern across the chest, gray pants. A thoroughly undistinguished human being; an overachieving clerk.
"A triumphant day!" Libby said. "Perhaps your best ever! Is that Cashmere on the line? Oh, let me say hi."
"No, it's not. It's . . . not."
"Say good-bye to Sherman, then. We've got business." She sat down in one of the folding chairs in front of Culligan's desk; I took the other. This was a small outer room-normally, a reception area (for a doctor's office, at one time, I would have guessed). There were rooms behind. Randy probably lived there. The office was a catastrophe. The desk was a mess, there was plywood paneling, fluorescent lighting. There were diplomas on the wall, and pictures of Randy Culligan shaking hands with various local politicians, including Jack Stanton. The look on Governor Stanton's face as he gave Randy Culligan a meaningful handshake-two hands on his one-was distressfully warm and friendly. There was not a hint of reserve in it.
"It's not Sherman, either," Culligan said as he hung up. He had a deep, juicy voice. But he was a lousy liar: clearly, it had been Sherman Presley.
"Well now, Randy," Libby said expansively, "you've branched out. Electronics, now?"
"I don't know what you-"
"You've been recording your friend the governor's private conversations, haven't you?"
"Now, Olivia," he said, "why would I want to do a thing like that? I'm a big Stanton supporter. Always have been. He's putting this state right on the map."
"Well, Randy, I've only been here but a minute and you've already exhausted my patience," Libby said, reaching into her satchel and pulling out a very long, iron-black, ridiculously menacing gun. She didn't point it at him; she just sort of put it in her lap. I am not an expert about such things, but if it wasn't a .357 magnum, it was something equally dreadful. It was almost a parody of a gun-it was so foolish, so extreme. I could not take this seriously. This was not happening.
"Randy, I'm going to want a signed confession," Libby said. "Libby, put that thing away before you do something stupid and get yourself into trouble," Randy said.
Now she pointed it at him. She stood up, put her arms straight out and together, and pointed the gun right at his face. "Randy, you wet fart of a human turd, you ambushed Jack Stanton and you're gonna admit it, or you're gonna die."
"Libby, you're crazy!"
"CERTI-FUCKIN'-FIABLY!" She said. "And I'll go right back there. Happily. And you will be in heaven."
Randy suddenly noticed me. "You'll go to jail too."
"I don't know anything about this," I said, surprising myself. I was able to say this, to inner my mouth and all the rest, because I could not believe what I was seeing.<
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"He's shocked," Libby explained to Culligan. "He had no idea. Now, Randy, you gonna write this out in longhand?"
"I . . . I don't know what you're talking about."
"OH YES YOU DO, SHITBIRD," Libby said and she moved very quickly-just astonishingly fast-around the desk, behind him, putting a choke hold on Randy Culligan with her left arm and pointing the gun straight down at his crotch. "And I've got a better idea: I'm gonna shoot your NUTS off."
His head, quickly red, was crushed between her two giant breasts, which were like earmuffs on him. "I'm a gay lesbian woman," she said. "I do not mythologize the male sexual organ," she went on, jamming the pistol into his crotch. He started up; he yelped. "Now, now, now," she said. Her face was red, her eyes were wild, her hat rolled off her head onto the desk. "You TINY SCUMBAG, I know you did it. You're on retainer to the Flash, I KNOW that-and you, stupid little shit, you couldn't just make do with the calls you had. You had Jack Stanton, but you figured the world is as stupid as you are-you had to EMBELLISH. Well, mister: YOU ARE FUCKED."
I must say that I found her very convincing. But if this had gone on much longer, I would probably have had to make some sort of move to stop her. I couldn't even begin to imagine what I would do if she actually pulled the trigger.
"You have a choice to make, and very quickly," Libby said, yanking his neck. "But you know me, Randy. I would have ovarian cancer for Jack and Susan, especially Susan-and you are embarrassing them. You are ruining the pang. And I would just be SICK TO DEATH if you fucked up the campaign. I would want to DIE. So, you're going to have to decide: just lieu' desperately crazy is she? And you're going to have to do it now. One . . . two . . ."
"Okay. Okay, okayokay," he said.
"Very good, verrry wise," she said, loosening her grip and moving the gun from his crotch to his head. "Now I want you to be eloquent about this letter you're about to write, and penitent. I want you to be guilt-ridden about your jealousy and greed. You could not live with yourself if you deprived America of this man."
"The willingness to be violent is a force multiplier," Libby said afterward. "That's the reason why the Mafia has been so successful over the years. Those boys are just like everyone else, except they're willing to be violent."
Libby was crazier quiet, I realized, than she was manic. And she was very thorough. She was not going to let it go at that. The confession was not going to be enough, she was certain. The perfidy had to be plain. It had to be demonstrated. And so she sent Sailorman up to Washington to trail Ted Koppel around in an unmarked van and tap his car-phone conversations. This proved an inspired bit of whimsy. On the way into work that Tuesday, Koppel called his producer and said the following:
"What do you want to do tonight?"
"Do you want to do the Stanton thing?"
"I think that's sexier than Bosnia."
"What sort of guests should we have?"
These were spliced together with appropriate responses from the Cashmere tapes-and played on Nightline that Wednesday by Daisy, who was this week's designated hitter, after Arlen's pitiful display (and after Marty Muscavich once again demurred, thereby arousing Susan's suspicion-was he entirely loyal?-and, ultimately, ensuring himself a one-way ticket to Palookaville).
Daisy, however, was irresistible. She seemed tiny, funny, enthusiastic-she had all the qualities of a very precocious child. Only she could have gotten away with actually playing the Koppel-Cashmere tape, surprising him with it. Only she could have had him laughing after the last exchange:
TED: What sort of guests should we have? CASHMERE: How about your wife, sugar?
"Now, this . . . obviously . . . has been concocted," Koppel said, chuckling a bit nervously: no man wants to raise even the appearance of lasciviousness, and Libby-bless her heart-had shown how easily such appearances could be manipulated. "You did this to make a point. Right?"
"Yeah. Isn't it a stitch?" Daisy burbled. "I mean, can you imagine anyone taking that sort of thing seriously?" Then she moved for the kill: "And yet the outcome of an American presidential campaign may be influenced by this sort of garbage. Shouldn't you guys in the press be ashamed of yourselves? Don't you owe Governor Stanton an apology?"
People were jumping up and down on the sixth floor of the Hampton Inn. Richard was beyond words: "Canyajust . . . Canyajust . . . Nevahbelieveit . . . y'knowhattamean?"
Jack and Susan came out of their suite, walked down the hall, hugging people and smiling. Down by the elevator landing, where there was a larger space and people could gather, Stanton said a few words: "I want to thank you all for sticking with us, for working in hard, through all this." His voice was hoarse, his face red, his eyes watery.
He was in a gray nylon jogging suit, with blue stripes and green piping and had no shoes on. He was, I noticed, blimping up-all those late nights with Danny Scanlon were raking their toll. He had an arm slung over Susan's shoulders. (She was smiling and had an arm around his back.) "Now we have less than two weeks to go before this election, and we have to work hard-we have to get this thing back on track. But I know that with your help and God's good grace, we'll do what needs to be done. This hasn't been easy for us"-he looked down at Susan. "It's been pretty awful." He stopped, he was beginning to get a little misty. "But-we're-still-here!"
"You want to do the Stanton thing?" Daisy asked later that night, trying to bring her voice down to Koppel level.
"It's sexier than Bosnia," I replied, gathering her in.
But not that much sexier. Daisy was effusive and animated, but distracted. She wasn't quite with me. She was out there, in the world now. We had regressed to campaign sex.
George Will's question when the Stantons were interviewed on the Brinkley show-which I hadn't heard, of course, and hadn't even wondered about, and only found out about later when I read the transcript-proved prescient: "Whatever the facts of these incidents, your arrest in Chicago and this . . . unfortunate business involving Miss . . . McLeod, do you think it's possible the American people might conclude that you are more trouble than you're worth? They usually expect a bit more stability and dignity in a president." Yeah, well. I soon found myself wondering if old George might be right. We had been badly damaged. We were so out of touch, so completely removed from reality that we'd expected our rousing rebuttal to the Cashmere fiasco on Nightline to take care of it: if life were a movie, it would have. As if Libby's remarkably flagrant and heroic efforts were enough to turn the tide; as if Sailorman's electronic parlor trick-the Koppel-Cashmere Tapes-really meant anything; as if a "confession" from a sleazebag lawyer could erase the image and, especially, the awful woman's name-or change the impressions left by the tapes, some of which, I had conveniently forgotten, were real. The affair had happened. (Even if it hadn't, there would have been the presumption of guilt--he was a politician.) But we'd allowed ourselves to be convinced that because some of it wasn't true, none of it was. We had allowed Susan to convince us of that. It was a lawyer's trick, and she was a fine lawyer.
But that conviction did not exist very far beyond the edges of our little campaign, our little world. I actually expected the movable zoo would dissipate after we destroyed Cashmere's credibility. I needed to believe we'd get back to the game Jack Stanton was so good at, the game we'd been winning before the craziness began. But nothing had changed; indeed, it grew worse.
Most Americans didn't watch Brinkley or Nightline (or the evening news, for that matter). They were just beginning to hear about us, in ways we couldn't predict or control--a joke on Leno or, more likely, their morning drive-time radio program; a rant on some call-in show; and, of course, it was now there on every supermarket checkout line in America (where the National Flash headline--seDucED AND BETRAYED BY STANTON-loomed in all its stupid, garish enormity). Cashmere's credibility or lack of same didn't matter; she was assumed a slut. But Jack Stanton was a presumptive president. He had to be more than credible, he had to be above suspicion. We could destroy Cashmere and still be destroyed by her.
/> I thought about this, but not for long. Right at that moment, we were deep into New Hampshire--and the rules were somewhat different there than in America, or so we thought. We were known in New Hampshire. We had, a few weeks earlier, been awesome there, about to run away with this election. People--political people--had made commitments to us, had put their reputations on the line, had bought in; they were continuing to work. But, even there, we were beginning to lose altitude. Leon was tracking every night and we were drifting down, having reached a peak of 37--after the second debate, to 34, on Monday night, after Cashmere's press conference, to 32, on Tuesday, 31, on Wednesday, 29, on Thursday. It was slipping away. And Jack Stanton was sick. The weather had warmed some; it was rainy and slushy on Thursday--and we all felt like wet flannel. We rushed in and out of overheated buildings all day; from hot and sweaty to chill and damp. His eyes were glassy, his face was red; he was running a fever. We plied him with cough drops and hot water with lemon and honey; but he was dragging. He did a Kiwanis lunch in Manchester and had nothing going for him. He slumped in the van and fell quickly asleep as we headed for an after-school Drug-Free America rally in Nashua. We had trouble rousing him. He looked at me, blinked and croaked, "Can you get me one of those hot toddies, Henry? How much more of this we got today?"
At the Drug-Free America rally-which consisted of lots of kids from different schools brought together at the largest gymnasium-auditorium in the district-he began to cough and couldn't stop. "'Scuse me a second," he wheezed. "Someone get me some water?" The water didn't help. He began to shudder, the water was cold and he was chilled. He barely finished; the audience didn't ask questions-it seemed an act of sympathy. Bart Nilson, who was next on the program, caught Jack offstage. "Look, Jack, you want some advice from a guy who spent his whole life campaigning in the north country?" He put a solicitous arm around Stanton's waist. "Take it down for a couple of days. Get your strength back. You could run yourself right into the hospital."
There was a warmish, foggy mist in the night air as we came out of the auditorium; it fuzzed the absurdly tall gooseneck lights in the parking lot; it felt like airborne perspiration. Stanton leaned against the van, his head resting against his arm. Suddenly, he buckled and heaved. "Mitch-take the governor!" I said. Then I turned around to make sure none of the scorps had caught this. Rob Quiston, the AP guy, was about fifty feet away, approaching the wire van. Most of the other scorps had stuck around inside, since all the candidates were scheduled to appear at the antidrug dog and pony show. "Hey, Henry," he shouted, "what's going on? Sounds like someone blew lunch?"