Primary Colors

by Joe Klein

  It was, to be fair, an unappetizing March day-cloudy, near freezing and blustery. But it was a Saturday, the NCAA basketball semifinals wouldn't start till later that afternoon, and Rucker had promised a crowd. We arrived in a van, trailed by a press bus filled with our national regulars. (The utterly unregenerate and incorruptible New York scorps would never hit us up for transit-they arrived separately, in their own cars, with special press plates that enabled them to park illegally just about anywhere.)

  "Henry, I am not stepping out of this van until we find the mayor and figure out what the fuck is going on here," Stanton said.

  I called Bobby Tomkins. "Where are you?" I asked.

  "Here," he said. "We're in a holding room across the plaza. I can see you just pulled up. Let's get it on."

  "Where are the people?" I asked. "Where's the crowd?"

  "A fuckup," Bobby said. "We got fucked. We were depending on the Brooklyn organization to advance it-but you know how things sometimes are between the Brooklyn and Harlem organizations. There's, you know, a rivalry. Sometimes they don't want us looking too good. And I'm sure, in this case, they probably got a message from Albany saying this might not be a time for Harlem to shine. 'Course, if you ask them, they'll tell you some incredible story about signals missed and wasn't it supposed to be tomorrow? But I won't bullshit you: they flicked us." "Whut's goin' on?" Stanton growled, turning back toward me from his usual spot in the front seat.

  "The mayor--" Bobby said.

  "Hold it," I said to Bobby.

  "What do you mean, hold it?" Stanton screamed.

  "The mayor--" Bobby said.

  I cupped the phone. "They screwed up, something about Ozio and the Brooklyn organization--but this is all they've got for us."

  "So what do they propose we do?" Stanton asked.

  "So what do you want to do?" I asked Tomkins.

  "The mayor wants to go ahead with it," Bobby said.

  "The mayor wants to go ahead with it," I told Stanton, who ripped the phone out of my hand. I gave him a look. He gave an immediate, contrite flicker of response. But still.

  "Bobby, you tell the mayor I ain't going ahead with no goddamn thing that involves me speaking to three stray dogs and a wino," Stanton said. "He whut? You're kidding? Bobby, put him on the goddamn phone. He won't? Shee-it! I guess we have a standoff."

  He hung up. I asked what the story was. "The mayor, if you can fucking believe this, wants to deliver his speech. He wants to speak to this empty plaza. He says it isn't empty: there are scorps. He says he's already issued a press release and a text, so he has to deliver it." Stanton was nonplussed--half laughing and half about to punch out a window. "If it's anything like that snoozer he gave the other day at City Hall, endorsin' me, he probably ought to think twice. But I don't think that's within the realm of his capabilities. Oh, the other really terrific thing is: he won't talk to me on the phone. He thinks it's improper for principals to talk on the phone."

  "Well, we've got to work out something," I said. "I'll go over and talk to them."

  "I've got half a mind to just pull out of here. But yeah, I guess you're right," he said.

  "So what should I settle for?" I asked.

  "Settle for?" Stanton asked, petulant.

  2/

  "What do you want?"

  "A crowd."

  "Short of that," I said.

  "To fucking kill that asshole," Stanton screamed, then calmed. "I don't know--maybe we should just work the stereo."

  "All right," I said. I walked across the plaza, past scraggly, newly planted linden striplings, toward a vacant storefront where two mayoral security guards framed the door. The area was empty in the distinctive, depressing manner of overly optimistic urban renewal cityscapes; it had recently been spilled up--brick walkways, an Africa Pride mural--and teetered at a sterile apogee of nondecline. Wind whipped fat bunches of undistributed "Stand for Stanton" handbills against brick planters and into the whitewashed corners of the plaza. Several New York scorps moped about the storefront entrance, buthappily--they didn't recognize me.

  The mayor did. "Mr. Burton," he said, not rising from a desk planted below a bare lightbulb in the middle of the empty storefront; indeed, he hardly looked up from a Greek salad in a tin take-out tray. "This is unfortunate."

  "Hey, man," Bobby Tomkins said, coming over, shaking my hand. He was a large man, with a dark battered face. It hadn't surprised me to learn that he had played nose tackle for Kutztown State and came from a freeholding Pennsylvania farm family--he had a sane, steady decency to him. He was truly embarrassed by this.

  The mayor wasn't. "Mr. Burton," he said, "when do you think the governor will see fit to emerge from his vehicle and allow us to begin this event?"

  I couldn't tell if he was mocking me with this bitter formality or whether he always spoke like that. He sat regally in the midst of the redeveloped but never reoccupied storefront; there were stray ladders, bare Sheetrock walls, blueprints and a thin layer of construction dust. He was wearing a black satin Spike Lee "40 Acres and a Mule" baseball jacket over a white shirt with a perfectly starched collar and an elegant silver tie. An aide stood to the side, carrying a severely unwrinkled blue double-breasted blazer in clear plastic wrap on a hanger. There was a boom box on the desk. The mayor was listening to latish, lugubrious Billie Holiday: "I Don't Know Why I Love You Like I Do."

  "The governor," I said, "isn't going to give a speech to an empty plaza."

  "The governor abuses my hospitality," the mayor said, again barely looking at me. I didn't exist; I was dirt.

  "I think, sir, the governor's trying to do you a favor," I said. "The way things stand now, the national press will report tomorrow that Richmond Rucker can't raise a crowd in Brooklyn. We have to find a way around that."

  "The way things stand now, young man," he said, finally looking at me with rhiney blue-green eyes and unconcealed disdain, "the New York press will report continuing friction between the Harlem and Brooklyn organizations-several paragraphs down. Their lead will be that Governor Stanton's campaign has had a rocky start in the city, that it is having difficulty engendering much enthusiasm, and then there will be a graph or two reporting on my speech denouncing federal indifference to our situation in the cities and reminding people about the UCSER initiative."

  I was tempted to say: Right, we need UCSER to build more urban wastelands like this one-and I wonder how many of your pals got construction contracts? But I am a professional, as was Bobby Tomkins, who gave me a you-see-what-I-have-to-dealwith-I'll-bet-you-got-troubles-too look. "Mr. Mayor, I mean this with the greatest respect," I said. "But there is no way on earth Jack Stanton is going to join you at that lonely podium in that empty plaza unless you find some people to fill it. The governor would like to discuss this with you directly. All you have to do is pick up the phone."

  "That would be unseemly," Rucker said. And that was all he said. I looked at my watch. "Mr. Mayor, it's now one-fifty. I'm going to walk across that plaza and tell the governor about this and then, at two o'clock, Governor Stanton is going to begin a walking tour down Fulton Street, accompanied by the national press."

  "Don't threaten me, boy," he said, rising, leaning forward on the desk. "And who ever taught you manners? Don't look at your watch in the presence of a superior, unless he asks you the time. And tell the governor that at two o'clock, I'm going to deliver my address here, in the plaza, with him or without."

  "So I walked back across and told Jack," I said to Daisy as we rode the E train that night out to Forest Hills. "And we went our way-and Rucker gave his speech, and the press was all over both of us, and the story tomorrow will be about the public rift between the governor and the mayor, and the disastrous start for the Stanton campaign in New York."

  "Shit," she said. "And the Furtive Cipher, was he all apologies?" "No," I said. "Howard said, 'You have to handle the mayor very carefully.' And Jack said, 'Like toxic waste?' Actually, the weird thing-and, of course, you could have predicted this-w
as that Jack was feeling pretty up after all that street work. He had a wonderful time on Fulton Street. And I think we got some great pictures out of it. He must have hugged every overweight black woman in Brooklyn."

  "So he lives to fight another day?" Daisy asked.

  "I don't know," I said. "He always does. Daisy . . ."

  "What?" she asked, and took my hand. We pulled into Queens Plaza; people got on and off.

  "I keep thinking about the conversation I had with Luther Charles the other night. It started out about the usual bullshit, him endorsing us or not, the terms of his blackmail-but it somehow moved on to my grandfather. He talked a lot about the Rev and about my father. You know, I'd never talked to him about it. I just remember the others rifling on him, dismissing him. All my 'uncles' in the Charmed Circle had their take on Luther, they laid it on him all the time-and no doubt they were right. But he has his side, too. That's what I learned the other night. He loved the Rev as much as any of them, and he really knew my father-better than I do, most likely. Anyway, Luther finally said: the Reverend Harvey Burton would've never wanted his grandson to be a servant to some Southern governor. I told him Jack wasn't just some Southern governor. And he said, maybe not, but you're just a servant."

  "Luther was gaming you, Henry," Daisy said, outraged. "You aren't a servant. You know that. You mti this thing. More than anyone else. Don't you see how people-Jack, Susan-look to you in any given meeting? Someone comes up with a goofy idea, you lift an eyebrow and it's done. You are Mr. Sanity. They'd be lost without you."

  "Isn't that what people always say about the good butler?" "Henry, you are deputy campaign manager of a presidential campaign-and the campaign manager is an asshole, and everyone looks to you: you call that being a servant? By that standard, the only people who aren't servants are CEOs."

  Well, yeah. Okay. I looked around the subway car. It was an old habit of mine: scoping the car, thinking about what sort of society the passengers would form if we were stranded in a tunnel; what would happen if we learned that nuclear missiles were heading toward New York and we only had ten minutes to live, which woman I'd want to pair up with before the great gittin' up morning. This car was pretty empty. There were sales clerks coming home after a long day at Macy's or Bloomie's; they were immigrants-Indians, Pakistanis, Latinos-exhausted, but relieved, thrilled to be where they were, on a New York subway, heading home. There were older, ewish men and women, coming home, after a Saturday afternoon of culture in Manhattan. There were several thermonuclear love-in candidates among the salesclerks: good-looking brown-skinned girls, carefully put together, the sort of girls you see behind the makeup counter. They could have been Latinos, South Asians, almost anything; ethnic distinctions were being pureed in Queens. Under normal circumstances-all my life, in fact-I'd flirted with these girls in subway cars, made eye contact, smiled, fantasized. But here was Daisy, fiercely holding my hand, and I looked at her as I might have at a stranger: I would never pick her out of a crowded car. She wasn't unattractive; she was cute, close up. But she was not the stuff of fantasy. Her hair, which flopped down over her eyes when we made love, was pinned back precisely on both sides, barretted. She had dressed a bit for the visit to Mom. She was wearing a black, simple, elegant overcoat, a wine-red scarf, a white silk dress shirt and black slacks.

  And the very act of looking at her that way, as a stranger, became a self-fulfilling prophecy: I felt disconnected, I didn't know her. This was, I realized, about the most banal thought in the male-female courtship playbook. But there it was, and she sensed it.

  "Henry, it's been a really shiny day," she said. "And just wait till you meet my mother."

  Her mother was dressed like a Gypsy, or perhaps the "sale" rack at a secondhand folk costume store. She wore a high-necked, embroidered--red and black on white cotton--Russian-style narodniki blouse; a floor-length black Indian skirt with elaborate creweled flowers in horizontal bands, and a multicolored Andean (or perhaps African) bandanna, which covered her head. I thought for a moment that she might be a recent chemotherapy patient, but stray wisps of gray snuck out at her ears--this head covering was a fashion statement. She was wearing dangly Mexican silver and turquoise earrings. The immediate effect was ... too much.

  She seemed to gasp as she opened the door to her apartment, as if to say: You actually brought him. "Ruth Green," she announced, sticking out a hand. "I am so pleased to meet you."

  Her apartment was the museum of the Popular Front--bare, undistinguished Danish modern furniture overwhelmed by an international brigade of people's art: the Ben Shahn Sacco and Vanzetti poster, in which the Italian anarchists are made to seem simple, bemused immigrant workingmen; the famous Martha Graham photo, head down, fist at forehead, everything akimbo in glorious consternation; a Fasanella poster; Guatemalan wall hangings; Dagon sculpture. And enough plants to create a weather system. On her coffee table, placed with an almost grotesque lack of subtlety, was Plowing Our Field, Planting A Dream: Sermons by the Reverend Harvey Burton. "I've been so nervous about this," Ruth Green said. I could see Daisy in her, Daisy older, lonelier, slouched a bit; it was not an attractive thought. "I keep thinking about the Langston Hughes poem. You must know it." Incredibly, she began to recite:

  "I know I am

  The Negro Problem

  Being wined and dined

  Answering the usual questions

  That come to white mind Which seeks demurely To probe in polite ways The why and wherewithal Of Darkness USA...

  and then it goes on," she sputtered. "There are more lines, I don't remember all of it, but eventually the white host says, I'm so ashamed of being white.' And . . . I know I shouldn't, but I can't help feeling that way. I do, I do. This is such a racist country. We've been so ugly toward, ahh . . . each other. It's so difficult to break through the barriers and, you know, talk. I mean, I was such a devoted follower of your grandfather's. I can hardly believe you're, Daisy's . . . Which is why I've been so nervous." She stopped. Looked at me. Blinked. "I just wanted that out on the table. It's so awkward between the races most of the time, but I guess you two have dealt with that in your own way."

  Yikes. Daisy rolled her eyes, then said with them: See, I told you so. I thought: I have stumbled into Negro Poetry Month. First Luther, now this; they were symmetrical. With Luther, the poetry had been a lovely, nostalgic breakthrough; this was quite the opposite.

  "Can I get you something?" Ruth Green asked, calming a bit. She had worked hard on her opening statement, and was relieved that it was now over-and was quite oblivious to its impact on the company assembled. "Seltzer? A beer?"

  "A beer," I said.

  "I'll have one too," Daisy said, not having been asked-not having been looked at, so far as I could tell, by her mother.

  "You know where they are," Ruth now said to her. "Why don't you get three."

  As soon as Daisy walked out into the kitchen, Ruth turned to me: "Don't you think Daisy's underemployed? She's got a PhD in public policy. She did her thesis on structural flaws in the Canadian single-payer system. She should be doing serious policy work, don't you think? She should be at the Urban Institute or something. I don't like this political commercial business-negative advertising, always negative. How can you raise up the people, always being so negative?"

  "She's very good at it, Mrs. Green," I said.

  "Did she ever tell you I used to do population control work for the United Nations before I started teaching?"

  Daisy was back with the beers, mortified. "Mom, policy-shmolicy," she said, too cheery, handing me a can of Bud Light. "You design these things, the politicians screw them up. Nothing ever really works." "Daisy! Really. You sound like a neocon. Henry, policy does matter, doesn't it? Tell her. Daisy, you couldn't bring glasses?"

  I looked at Daisy. I started to say something, but she jumped in: "Of course policy matters, Mom. It's just not what I like to do. And I'll get the glasses."

  "So you sell soap."

  "Let it go, Mont."

>   "Did Daisy ever tell you about her father, may he rest in peace?" Ruth asked, turning to me again, as Daisy returned to the kitchen. She had her daughter's eyes. Or rather, her eyes were shaped like Daisy's. She didn't have Daisy's eyes. Daisy saw everything, and always understood what she was seeing. It was disconcerting--looking into Daisy's eyes and seeing them blind.

  "He was a union official," I said.

  "An organizer," Ruth said reverently, glaring reproachfully toward the kitchen, as if Daisy hadn't explained her father well enough. She stood up, went over to the plain maple sideboard, opened the top drawer and came out with a picture of Daisy's father. He had a mustache, wire-rimmed glasses and a sly, knowing smile: he had seen everything, too. "This was Max," Ruth said. "Max did the toughest work, organizing textile factories down South. He was beaten, badly beaten, once in Greenville. He had his heart attack in High Point, North Carolina." I nodded, trying to communicate that Daisy had told me all this, though Ruth didn't appear to notice. "Anyway, he always said the reason organizing had gotten so hard toward the end was television. Marx, he said, didn't know from opiates. And here's Max Green's daughter, doing television."

  "And not even public television," Daisy said, returning. She had been here before, obviously.

  "Go ahead, make jokes," Ruth Green said, suddenly morose. "But you could be doing something for the people."

  "Mom, what's for dinner?" Daisy asked, clearly hoping to move things along.

  "Boneless chicken breasts," Ruth said. "It's in the refrigerator. There's also some fresh broccoli. Daisy, could you be a darling girl and fix it up for us? You're so much better than I am at that sort of thing. Henry and I will set the table. And could you cook up some rice?"