Everyone had cleaned out their offices the night before. He wandered aimlessly around the Oval Office, absently letting his hand drift across the furniture, the walls, all that history, some of it made by him. Then he saluted and walked out the door, alone.
From across the room, Hutchins said to me, 'How about a deal? How about I resign, Wednesday morning, win or lose. I'll send my resignation up to the Congress. I'll schedule a speech and tell the public I have some illness or something like that. We'll figure that part out. I'll give you an exclusive interview about it tomorrow night, after the results are in, for Wednesday's paper. You alone, on the details of my resignation. And you agree not to write anything about my past.'
He paused and looked at me dejectedly, expectantly, seeking a reaction that he wouldn't get. In fact, it wasn't a bad deal under most circumstances, and would alleviate a lot of bullshit I was about to face, I'm sure, from Appleton and Martin. But there was one essential problem with it. It was another lie.
'I can't, sir,' I said. 'The public is entitled to the truth.'
A flash of anger spread across his face. 'The truth is,' he said, in something just short of a yell, 'the truth is that I've been a damned good president. That's the fucking truth. You want the truth, print that.'
'I will, sir. Any story will note your policies, your successes. It will note your popularity. It will also inform voters of your past.
They can decide what they want to do with that information.'
He collapsed into one of those pale yellow chairs where he was often pictured on television during photo opportunities with some visiting foreign leader. He rested his elbows on his knees and stared at the carpet in front of him, looking increasingly despondent. 'I tried to save you,' he said.
I assumed I must have heard him wrong, so I asked, politely, 'Excuse me, sir?'
'I tried to save you, and I tried to save your cohort, Havlicek. And this is the payback I get.'
I stared at him as he continued. 'When you started asking around about Paul Stemple last month, Drinker just wanted to kill you. Just kill you, no questions asked. Put an end to our fears. I wouldn't allow it. I had another plan. I said I could hire you, give you the job as press secretary. You seemed talented enough to do the job. You'd be on our side, and the questions about me and Stemple would never be asked again. They'd go away forever. I had no idea he was going to try to kill you at Congressional that day.'
I gulped hard at this matter-of-fact revelation. 'So that wasn't an assassination attempt on you? That was really an attempt on my life?'
'It was, but believe me when I tell you I didn't sanction it. My intent was to hire you. That was the point of golf that day, not to kill you.'
By now I had moved over to sit on one of the settees perpendicular to his chair. A single lamp lit this side of the room, leaving both our faces in virtual darkness as we talked, as if we were both sitting just off-stage, just out of the limelight.
I asked, 'Why Drinker? What's his motivation?'
Hutchins flashed me a wry look. 'Isn't self-motivation always the best motivation?' he asked. I stared at him but didn't answer. He said,
'He expected to be named the director of the FBI soon, by me, once I became elected, and his expectations were probably going to be fulfilled. He knows my goddamned secret. He was involved in the case way back when, and when I was about to become vice president, I had no choice but to call him up and make it in his own interest to keep my past the past.'
You never know what people might say in times of triumph and tragedy, how much information they may divulge, the depths of their emotions, and this soul-bearing exercise in the Oval Office was certainly proof of that. In some odd way, Hutchins began to look relieved talking about his past and the efforts to conceal it, so I continued to press him, and perhaps my luck as well. 'So it was Drinker who killed Havlicek?'
Hutchins nodded.
'Why?'
'You wouldn't take the press secretary's job. My plan failed. He also believed that Stemple began providing you with information after the Congressional shooting, and he couldn't find Stemple to kill him at first, try as he did, so he figured it was easier to kill you. And you guys wouldn't buy into our line that the dead assassin was a federally protected witness named Tony Clawson, which would have been embarrassing for the FBI, but would have assured that no one would ever associate me with Clawson for the rest of my life. I tried fending Drinker off by pushing and pushing you to take the job. You set yourself up by refusing to come aboard.'
If I thought about that too hard, the calculation would sicken me.
With that logic, I had caused Havlicek's death a number of different ways. But right there and then, I refused to dwell.
It was after eight-thirty and heading toward nine, the deadline for our first edition. I assumed I had blown that already. I steadied myself on the couch and said, 'Sir, I appreciate your help, but I have to leave. Is there anything else you want to make clear to me about your past, about the election, about your plans for the future? More to the point, if we run a story tomorrow, and we will run a story tomorrow, do you plan to resign in the light of these allegations, or will you remain in office for as long as you are able?'
He sat with his elbows on his knees and his head pointed straight down at the floor, as if in prayer. He looked up at me from the uncomfortable crouch and said, 'I don't know. I just don't know right now.'
I nodded. Why should he? I got up and started slowly, quietly for the door. When I got there, he said softly, 'So no deal?'
'I have an obligation, sir.'
'You know, you fulfill that obligation, it's the end of me. Have I really been that bad a person? Do I really deserve this?'
As I turned to walk out the door, he was still sitting in that chair by the fireplace, hunched over, looking nothing like the man I saw on the golf course on that brilliant October morning eleven days before. He said to me in a voice as plain as white paper, neither loud nor soft, angry nor sad, 'You should believe in redemption. And if you do, you should honor that belief.' I stopped walking while he talked, not wanting to be rude. He wasn't even looking my way anymore. When I began walking again, I heard him say, as if to himself, though perhaps to me, 'You more than anyone else should understand my grief.'
twenty-three
I gulped in the fresh night air as I stepped outside the West Wing and onto the North Lawn of the White House. Nearby, anchors for some of the cable stations, Moose Myers among them, did stand-ups for their preelection specials, all of them holding their microphones to their mouths, the glowing building as their backdrop, so completely, exquisitely oblivious to the news that was about to crash over the country.
I strode toward the northwest gate, looking out into the patch of black on the other side that was Lafayette Park. I stopped for a second on the White House drive. As soon as I stepped outside of that gate, I was fair game. Drinker could be sitting in that park right now, lurking, waiting, watching me, fingering a gun or a knife shoved into his overcoat pocket, his collar turned up against the breeze. He could be posing as a tourist with a windbreaker and a camera. He could be hiding in a doorway with a ski hat pulled down low over his forehead.
He could slash my throat as I walked on an otherwise barren street, grab my wallet, and leave me bleeding to death beneath a streetlamp on a littered city sidewalk. Isn't it ironic, the papers would point out, that a well- known reporter who had survived a shooting and a bombing was finally felled by what was probably a crazed drug addict in search of a few bucks, and isn't Washington, the nation's capital, a disgrace?
Time was my enemy here. Staring into the abyss of that park, I quickly turned around in the drive and began to trot toward the walkway that led to the adjacent Old Executive Office Building. Technically, it was off limits with my press pass, and at any juncture, the Secret Service uniformed officers could stop me, even detain me. But detention, I quickly calculated, was preferable to a violent death. At least I could probably make a phone call, most likely to Martin, and dictate what I had.
The guard shack between the White House and the ancient and ornate OEOB, which once housed the
