There Will Be No Miracles Here

by Casey Gerald

  Roosevelt drew a large cross in his diary for 14 February 1884, and wrote beneath: “The light has gone out of my life.”

  This was the Theodore Roosevelt that moved me—the one who lived in darkness, who did not sleep and chose instead to work, to strive, to read at least one book a night, remembering it all the next day, who spent himself in so many worthy causes that he was hailed the greatest moral force of the age by King Edward VII of England. He was also denounced as the most dangerous man of the age by Woodrow Wilson, perhaps the most advanced white supremacist ever to occupy the White House, not to mention the most self-righteous dealer of subterfuge since Thomas Jefferson. And most vitally for me it was said by Henry Adams that Theodore Roosevelt had the quality that medieval theology assigned to God—he was pure act. Of course it is now believed that Mr. Roosevelt was a manic-depressive, but I did not know this at the time and I’m not sure it would have made a difference. I’d found the greatest leader in the history of America, at least for the kind of thing I was trying to lead.

  And so I also found the sadness Julius Caesar found at the close of one of his successful campaigns, which I read about in another Capitol Hill Books discovery, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, by Suetonius. He wrote:

  [Julius Caesar] came to Gades, where he noticed a statue of Alexander the Great in the temple of Hercules. At the sight of it he drew a deep sigh, as one displeased with his own shortcomings, in that he had as yet performed no memorable act, whereas at his age Alexander had already conquered the whole world.

  I felt the same way when I discovered the life and legacy of Theodore Roosevelt. If I was going to make up for lost time, still have a chance to meet his standard and mount the world, then I would need more than inspiration. I would need instruction. Thanks to my still-strong obsession with John F. Kennedy and my belief, at the time, that I should read only books that had won a Pulitzer Prize, just to be safe, I found exactly what I was searching for: The Making of the President, 1960. In the pages of this book, which explained exactly what the title promised, I learned a vital lesson: Long service in Washington at the court of power decisions causes men to forget that power rises ultimately from beyond the Potomac.

  And by the time I read this line and all the others in that manual, it was clear what my next move would be. I had to go back home.

  chapter TWENTY-ONE

  Just like the good old days, home tried to kill me. Ice this time—icicle daggers on the roof, ice crust on the lawn, dirty slush on the sidewalk, black ice, sneaky on the road.

  I don’t care how bad the roads are, I told myself that January morning, I’m getting the hell out of this house.

  Five months had passed since I’d returned to Dallas with nothing but my bags and my plans. Five months of those plans foiled. Five months of kissing ass. Five months of less money than the no-money I already possessed. Five months of nights on Granny’s couch—one sheet, one blanket, one pillow, a few roaches, a lot of noise. I had to leave and could so did, in the middle of an ice storm.

  Little did I know, the house was less dangerous than the roads, and the roads were less dangerous than the idea that was on my mind, that had been placed there by the one man who remained from my time at Vinson & Elkins, perhaps the only of those men who grew to see me as something other than a human trinket. Yet he was still eager to buy me a meal and offer advice and, when I had clearly failed in my homecoming quest, convinced a friend to hire me even though I had no skills and no experience that Neiman Marcus could use, though I used Mr. Marcus’s money to get my own apartment and off the couch. And even this had not been enough generosity for him, for Jeff Chapman, the quiet man with the gentle smile and University of Iowa degree to go along with his Iowa City baby pictures and all the stories of the Iowa State Fair and similar niceties of midwestern life, which obscured the truth about this man, which I sensed in him and, perhaps, he sensed in me when we first met: He would slice your throat to get what he wanted. Not that things ever got that desperate, his mind being weapon enough. In any event, Jeff was the best listener I’d ever met, which meant he spent a great deal of time asking questions, which also meant that, if you weren’t paying attention, he could ask you something that you might answer and regret. Such a question he asked me on my twenty-fourth birthday, in a plush leather booth at the Dallas Ritz-Carlton.

  Have you ever thought about running for Congress?

  I had not, I promise. In part because if the vice presidency isn’t worth a warm bucket of piss, then a seat in the US Congress did not seem worth a metaphor. More importantly, all I wanted to do, all I had come home to Dallas from Washington to do, was start a little program, fight for one lil ole bitty cause.

  My hope is to help Mayor Leppert create an initiative to make service easier, more visible, and more effective. This bold action will allow Dallas to join the ranks of over one hundred cities across the country—including every other major city in Texas—that have put volunteerism at the core of citizenship.

  In other words, I hoped to get more citizens to work for free on behalf of the common good—which still strikes me as a decent idea . . . perhaps because, as you might have guessed, it wasn’t mine. National service, as it was called, was as old as Sargent Shriver, older even, and this particular version of it had begun a few years prior in New York City, led by an alum of Wolf’s Head, who told me everything I needed to know to plant it and myself, in Dallas.

  And though I had been informed that ours was now a woman’s nation, I knew that yet and still, in Dallas, the root question of politics is always: Who’s the man to see? So I went to see the Men with my idea. These men did not mingle at coffee shops, or even at Al Biernat’s or the Ritz. They ruled from perches like the Petroleum Club, on the thirty-ninth and fortieth floors of Chase Tower in downtown Dallas. Petroleum as in oil: black oil money for white oil men, since membership was limited to white men as late as the 1980s.

  A member of the Petroleum Club had to be one of the most important men in the oil business (or, later, an equally important industry)—which meant the most important men in Texas and, as long as Texas was still a global oil capital, some of the most important men in the world. I didn’t have any interest in oil or these men, but I needed them to have some interest in my idea, or at least enough interest in me to support the idea anyhow. So I went to the Petroleum Club and ignored the dismay on the faces of its patrons upon my entrance. Two, three, four months of this, all captured in one day: a lunch with a man amongst men, one of the members whose table other members paid tribute to, whose name shall remain unsaid because I can’t remember it off the top of my head and I’d rather not dig up the notes in my files.

  We sat side by side (I never sit across from a person if I can avoid it) at a table for four—me with my idea in my head and on sheets of paper, with everything else exactly where it was supposed to be, according to the rules I’d learned. He, as I imagine his Southern planter forebears might have done, sat with a long white linen napkin draped from his shirt collar, gray wavy hair lightly pomaded to one side, his fingers thick with the extra gristle of a diet rich in US dollars, one baled with a wedding band, another with a ring from the University of Texas.

  Now, son, tell me about your idear.

  I got to talking—man, I believed in this idea so much, had facts and figures and timelines and everything—and when I finished, I handed him a folder that contained, in writing, all that I envisioned and had just said. I waited for some support. A word.

  Well . . . that sure does sound interesting— Before he could go on he started coughing . . . Coughed so long, so violently, that now I wonder whether that was a sign of power for a certain generation: a man starts coughing in the middle of a sentence and the more power he’s got the longer his audience is willing to sit there and watch salad and butter roll chunks fly out of his mouth. Pardon me. Now, I’m not sure I can help you here but let me give you some advice. You should always carry a lett
er of introduction when you’re meeting with somebody. People need to know who sent you. You understand?

  Yes, sir. I’ll be sure to do that, I said, as I wrote his advice in my notebook.

  Fuck you, I thought, as I added Mr. Man to my list.

  You see, I had not stopped reading after Suetonius described Julius Caesar’s despair re: Alexander the Great. I read all the way up to page twenty-three, where Suetonius records the famous boast—I came, I saw, I conquered—which was the last thing I underlined. But between the despair and the conquest was all the trouble Roman aristocrats gave young Julius, blocking his path to any real power, trying, for example, to stymie his agrarian reforms with the ancient equivalent of a filibuster: announcing “adverse omens.”

  Business—in the Roman Senate—could be interrupted or postponed by the announcement of an auger or a magistrate that he had seen a flash of lightning or some other adverse sign.

  Julius got fed up with these charades and so, before long, found a clever solution:

  Marcus Cato, who tried to delay proceedings, was dragged from the House by a Lictor at Caesar’s command and taken off to prison.

  It is fair to say Mr. Caesar took this a bit too far but it is also fair to say his tactics proved effective, at least until they got him killed. I intended to go just far enough with the Petroleum Club men and so I kept my list and garnered, at the cost of all those meetings, wisdom that I was also getting from our modern-day Suetonius, Robert Caro, in his biography of Robert Moses, who seemed so much like myself at the time, not only because he had graduated from Yale a century before me, after also having a miserable start in New Haven. He hadn’t fared much better than I had, upon entering the real world:

  Robert Moses was the optimist of optimists, the reformer of reformers, the idealist of idealists. So great a nuisance did he make of himself that in 1918 Tammany Hall decided it had to crush him. It did so with efficiency. . . .

  When the curtain rose on the next act of Moses’ life, idealism was gone from the stage. In its place was an understanding that . . . an idea was no good without power behind it, power to make people adopt it, power to reward them when they did, power to crush them when they didn’t.

  How, exactly, do you crush the people in power? In Caesar’s day you could throw them in jail or kill them. We had, for better or worse, come a long way since then. So I learned—was forced to learn—another lesson from the 1960 presidential campaign and accepted that only the people, voting at the polls, give a man true power in American government. Only the people could give me the power that I needed. Jeff’s question came shortly after I had taken this as truth. And once he told me that the former mayor of Dallas had yelled Who the fuck does Casey think he is?! when Jeff ran the idea by him—Well, at that point I figured I’d better hurry up and get to Congress so I could issue this mayor a nice little congressional subpoena so he’d know exactly who I was, or give a big speech attacking him—something. In any event, this congressional thing was looking pretty nice, especially since my path to people power would not lead me through just any old people: they would be my people.

  Confined to Dallas County, the 30th Congressional District stretches from Dallas Love Field southeast into downtown Dallas. It then dips south to take in some suburbs, such as Lancaster, where many black families have relocated after leaving the city. Black residents account for 37 percent of the population—the highest percentage in any Texas district—and 41 percent of residents are Hispanic . . . In 2008, the 30th—the only Democratic district in the Dallas-Fort Worth area—gave Barack Obama 82 percent of its presidential vote, his highest percentage statewide.

  If my people had been that eager to give Barack Obama all that power, I figured they would be willing to grant the same or nearly to their son his doppelgänger, even though I had gone to considerable lengths, at least in my head, to distance myself from him, just as I had once done with my father. But if it was bad to be known for so long as little more than the son of Rod Gerald, I could only imagine how bad it would have been to be known as the son of some bum or to not be known at all. The same was true with being considered the next Barack Obama or the next Anybody Else, for that matter. When you strike at a king, you must kill him, sure. But in order to even strike, you’ve got to be damn close, close enough to stand in the glow of that Great Figure but not so close that the people can’t see you.

  I knew only one person who understood this paradox, who had studied power and those who held it. The person in question had such a burning desire to hold power himself that his eyes—protected behind unframed glasses and often strands of blonde hair—never rested on anyone unimportant, if at all, and he snickered sometimes when no joke had been told, as if some vital part of his designs had been revealed. On more than two occasions he had been seen slashing a conductor’s baton through the air—on top of office tables; in Washington Square Park—to conduct heard and unheard symphonies as he would, with hope and patience, one day conduct the world. He was a young man, but one with enough energy, genius, moral objections, and personality disorders to make him the quintessential, if not some day the greatest, member of Scroll and Key. We’ll call him Franklin.

  Franklin and I had not known each other at Yale, only of each other, but we had both gone to a lunch senior year to meet Ted Sorensen, John F. Kennedy’s former advisor and speechwriter. This took place the same day my Rhodes/Game crisis came to a head, so I didn’t have time to shoot the shit with anybody, Kennedy aide or not. Franklin had time. Moxie, too. He pressed his way into a private audience with Mr. Sorensen and asked one question: What does it take to be a great presidential speechwriter?

  Mr. Sorensen, palsied after a recent stroke, responded: Easy . . . Find a great president.

  By January 2011, it seemed that I had become Franklin’s man. For my birthday, he sent a personalized astrology reading: CASEY GERALD, Destined for Greatness

  This astrological combination indicates an ambitious nature and an inclination to seek the limelight of leadership . . . You are at ease in situations in which it is necessary to conform to authority and discipline . . . The key to a more harmonious existence lies in tempering your self-assertive and egotistical tendencies . . .

  In response to the universe’s call to temper my egotistical tendencies, I informed Franklin that I was going to run for Congress. He replied:

  Casey,

  Went to Shriver’s funeral yesterday. Was five feet from Steve Wonder, fifteen from Bill, Oprah, Bono and Muhammad Ali.

  There is absolutely no daylight I can see between the outlooks and even experiences of you and Sarge Shriver. I am now at your service to do whatever thinking you need me to. What are the big questions?

  —F

  There were many questions at this exploratory stage of a campaign: how to recruit a team, how to raise one to two million dollars, whom to talk to and when, what policies to support and denounce and why. But the big question at any stage of any campaign is always the same big question: How do I win the people? I knew this and so did Franklin, who had a particular gift for winning people (of their own free will, for now). He sent a homework assignment: I would love to see from you what the THREE BIG IDEAS are that you want EVERYONE who thinks of YOU to remember WITHIN TEN SECONDS.

  I gave him one: I’m running so that we may dream again. Which, in his hands, became a slogan:

  CASEY GERALD

  We Can Dream Again

  And a bludgeon: Almost finishes for Obama what he started but didn’t follow through on—Yes We Can—which is, if you think about it for two seconds, meaningless beyond inspiring hope. Your message says yes we can DREAM again . . . which is to say, there’s actually substance in what you’re saying!

  Except that there was not. I would present my campaign treatise to prove the point but I won’t waste your time, for if you’ve seen any political ad recently, you’ve heard at least 90 percent of what I planned to tel
l the people and you will also understand what I mean when I tell you that Casey Gerald the candidate suffered from a condition known to plague many if not most politicians: he was full of shit. Perhaps not a complete fraud, but so void of substance that it is difficult to view him as an actual human being. And this, in fact, was the point—the more substance a campaign carried, the more likely it was to be a losing campaign. The absolute worst kind of substance was the candidate’s substance. It only got in the way of the people’s substance and thus could be fatal—which is why, I suppose, a United States senator (a serious, liberal senator) stressed in 2008: The message you’ve got to send, more than any other message, is that Barack Obama is just like us. That effort became the gold standard of modern politics if not modern life—which also seems to demand that we each do whatever it takes to be able to look back at the end of our days and say, with peace and satisfaction, I was just like everybody else. This draws the candidate and the common citizen into risky delusions and great lies—and so it drew me, as the campaign became a real possibility, into a corner.

  Seems to me the key issue in his District is going to be easy: convincing people that he’s a leader they can trust. Especially given the recent scandals . . . He basically needs to have people say they trust him over, and over, and over again. That he’s honest over and over again.

  This was wisdom from one of the country’s top congressional campaign strategists, sent through a friend from my Washington days, who was, at that time, what we will call a senior White House official. The campaign would have to raise millions of dollars, earn thousands of votes, knock on hundreds of doors and shake even more hands, survive dozens of weeks to reach a final victory—yet all of it would boil down to one issue, one contrast: trust us, not them.

  This was not a moral issue for Casey Gerald, the candidate. It was an issue of strategy. And so he—I—had been crafting a strategy to make the people trust me. It was informed by my boy Jack Kennedy, who delivered a speech during his 1960 campaign, in Houston, to convince the people that he was not in bed, so to speak, with the pope. It was also informed by Barack Obama the candidate, who delivered his own speech at Philadelphia, in 2008, to convince the people that he was not in bed with radical blacks like Reverend Jeremiah Wright and, more broadly, was not in any way a nigger. My own speech, to be delivered in Dallas sometime in 2011 or 2012, would have to convince the people that though I had, technically, been in bed with men, I was not then, nor had I ever been, a faggot. I was just like them—and despite any sense of what might await me in the life to come, they could trust me in the current one.