pocket, grabbed my White House clearance pass out of my top drawer, and headed for the door. As I walked the two blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue, I thought back to a running joke that Katherine and I had. We were figuring out how to decorate our upstairs study. She wanted colorful soft lines and a veritable jungle of plants. She said it helped her to create, all that growth and brightness. I wanted the feel of an English library, with hunter green walls and a leather club chair. We compromised, shooting for what she described as an Oval Office look. We refinished the moldings in bright white and hung old prints on pale yellow walls, and rather than an overwhelming desk we bought a nice library table at a little storefront antique shop near Middleburg, Virginia. Neither of us had a clue what the Oval Office actually looked like, except that it was probably oval, and our own little office was square and about one tenth of the size. When we were done with the decorations we toasted many hours of creative thinking with a glass of champagne, then effortlessly ended up on the antique rug engaged in a fit of wonderful sex. Nice memories, and soon I was there, at the guard shack, staring inside a sheet of bullet-proof glass at a bored-looking member of the U.s. Secret Service.
seven
At the entrance to the West Wing of the White House, a marine in full dress uniform stands so perfectly straight that visitors think he might be a mannequin, a toy soldier, until he snaps open the substantial door with a flip of his brawny wrist. Inside, in the lush reception area, an inevitably becoming young woman provides callers with an escort to their destination.
I don't know why I bring this up, however, because as a reporter I am required to enter through the press briefing room. It looks nice on television, when presidential spokesman Royal Dalton stands before a deep blue curtain with a White House emblem and rattles off the news of the day at his afternoon briefings, taking questions on anything from the subtlest change in U.s. policy toward Zimbabwe to whether White House aides are serving as the source of negative information about income tax and real estate questions faced by Democratic presidential nominee Stanny Nichols. (they were, despite Dalton's assertions to the contrary.) The podium gleams, the room looks spacious and official, and it appears as if American journalism-indeed, American democracy-is well served in that daily sixty-minute word fight when White House officials stand before a sometimes frothing press.
In point of fact, though, the room is an absolute pit-a bus station, others have called it, though they are quick to add that such a comparison may be slanderous to the well-meaning folks over at Greyhound. Years ago, this used to be the site of the White House swimming pool, where John F. Kennedy swam laps as therapy for his chronically ailing back. Richard Nixon, for reasons that have never been explained, filled the pool in and turned it into a briefing area.
Now, burly cameramen allow their Starbucks coffee cups to pile up for weeks at a time before throwing them away. Their colleagues inevitably come along and choose a cup in which to deposit a wad of old chewing tobacco. The highly paid on-air talent toss their notes on the floor, assuming that someone else, as in the rest of their lives, is there to pick up after them. The threadbare rug is stained by the slush of too many winters and the sweat of too little air conditioning in the strangling Washington summer. And the chair backs are soiled by pencil gouges and graffiti marks, with declarations like 'I should have gone to law school.'
Sunday noon brought me through this very room, darkened because of the weekend. I climbed the few steps into the West Wing from the press area and announced myself to a uniformed Secret Service agent, who gave me a 'So what?' look he seemed to save for all reporters seeking another bit of information to help along another story that was probably not very good for the administration. It was a look that made me want to grab him by his starched white poly-cotton shirt. But my ribs.
'I have an appointment with the president,' I said, in what amounted to a verbal cuffing.
This made him take his task more seriously. He picked up the telephone, had a brief conversation that as best I could tell consisted of half a dozen prehistoric grunts, then led me past the Roosevelt Room on the right, past the Cabinet Room on the left, into an anteroom with two secretaries, one of whom greeted me with an enormous smile and unabashed pleasure at our meeting.
'Sylvia Weinrich,' she said, holding out a delicate, perfectly manicured middle-aged hand. 'It's delightful to see you. I must say, you've carried yourself with great dignity on television after the shooting. I don't know how I would have handled all that.'
'Jack Flynn,' I said, this time speaking the obvious. 'I had the great advantage of not actually being hurt. Had I been, that might well have changed things.'
We laughed politely at a joke that really wasn't all that funny, until Sylvia casually looked over her shoulder into an open door and said,
'Why don't we just head right in. The president will probably want to get started.'
She then brought me through a pair of wide doors into one of the most incredible places I have ever been: the Oval Office. The rug was such a colorful blue you could almost get lost in it, like the sea. In the middle was a bright eagle within the presidential seal, and beyond the rug on all sides was a shiny parquet maple-and-oak floor. A tall case clock ticked loudly by the door. Sunlight streamed in over the South Lawn through French doors and long windows. Magnificent paintings and portraits decorated the walls, including an unfinished one of George Washington hanging over the fireplace. Hutchins, in shirtsleeves-though elegant ones, I must say, with a fine blue pinstripe and presidential cuff links-stood up from his enormous oak desk at the far end of the room. It was a substantial, beautiful desk, a desk where presidents have signed declarations of war and treaties of peace, addressed the nation in times of crisis and triumph, plotted strategies to win reelection, to shape history, taped conversations that would haunt them to their graves. Hutchins stood up and boomed,
'From the land of the living dead, Jack Flynn. Damned nice of you to come over.'
I offered a simple smile at him and his surroundings, noticing Sylvia backing quietly out of the room. 'A pleasure, sir,' I said. 'Thank you for the invitation.' I found myself addressing him in that unusually formal tone, like on the golf course, and wondered if it was like that for everyone, especially in this office. I kind of presumed it was.
'Let's sit,' Hutchins said, lowering his hand toward a blue-and-white-striped couch that I'd seen on television many times, though usually then it was occupied by a Middle Eastern king negotiating a truce or a Senate Republican having his arm twisted to back what always seemed to be billed as a landmark budget deal.
Hutchins settled in a pale yellow upholstered chair set to the side of the fireplace.
'How are your ribs?' Hutchins asked as I lowered myself gingerly onto the couch. Then he answered his own question, as he tended to do.
'Doctors tell me you're doing pretty well. Helps to be young and virile, huh?'
The door to the office swung open. Hutchins looked over, slightly startled, then watched calmly as the tall, courtly form of White House chief of staff Lincoln Powers came striding into the room.
'Sorry to interrupt, Mr. President,' Powers said in that patrician Texan twang he has. 'Have an important message I need to pass on to you.' He handed Hutchins an official-looking memorandum, then turned back to me. 'Well, you look even more handsome in person than on TV, young man,' he said. 'I'm Lincoln Powers, Mr. Flynn. Nice to meet you.'
This TV thing, unbelievably, was starting to get old. I wondered how Walter Cronkite handled it all the time. I suppose it's different when you do it for a living.
Anyway, the story of Clayton Hutchins and Lincoln Powers was an unusual one-how the lives of two very different men intersected at a time of national crisis, and how they had bonded together ever since.
Hutchins's, mostly, was the amazing story. He had made his mark as a successful businessman in Des Moines, Iowa, taking a startup technology company that produced personal finance software called Cookie Jar into the big leagues, eventually becoming a staple in households across America and earning its inventor hundreds of millions of dollars. Across Iowa, a state of significant prudence and few celebrities, Hutchins became a folk hero, lauded for his ambitions and his brains and loved for his massive acts of philanthropy. Some of the state's elder politicians took to joking that Hutchins's name became so commonplace on libraries, hospital wings, and school buildings that people might think he owned a construction company.
