“I plan to stay here until the president will see me,” Edgar Franklin says.
“And if that doesn’t happen?”
“I plan to stay here until the president will see me,” Edgar Franklin repeats. His voice is firm but not belligerent—he speaks more quietly than the reporter, and he has a mild southern accent.
“Do you really believe you can convince President Blackwell to start bringing home the troops, or would you view a conversation as a symbolic act?”
“Too many young men and women have lost their lives, and I don’t believe the president has ever been able to justify our presence there,” Edgar Franklin says. “My impression is he hears selective intelligence, and it makes it hard for him to understand the personal toll this is taking.”
“Although you yourself haven’t had the opportunity to meet with the president, the White House has made a point in the last several days of mentioning his frequent visits with family members of the fallen, including two weeks ago in southern California. What do you hope to tell him that he wouldn’t have heard from others whose situations are painfully similar to yours?”
“After your son dies this way, you look for a reason his death meant something. You hope he made a sacrifice he believed in, and that’s why it’s tempting to accept”—Edgar Franklin hesitates—“the rhetoric of war, is I guess how to put it. If I thought Nate’s death was a waste, wouldn’t that be disloyal to my son and my country? It would mean I wasn’t patriotic, is what I thought at first, but I’ve come to see it that bringing our troops home would be the patriotic thing. A lot of families just now going through what I experienced two years ago, just starting to grieve, maybe they’re not thinking about the political side yet.”
“What do you make of the outpouring of support you’ve received since your arrival in Washington last Wednesday?”
“The tide has turned. Americans know it’s time for an honest conversation.”
“Colonel Edgar Franklin, thank you for speaking with me.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You’re listening to member-supported WBEZ,” a female voice says as our police-escorted Town Car is waved through the gates leading to the private section of the airport. We cross the tarmac, and in the overcast heat of the Midwest, a glare bounces off the Gulfstream parked two hundred feet away; the steps are already pulled down, awaiting us.
CHARLIE USED TO
have a line he’d tease me with before dinners on the rubber-chicken circuit; he’d say, “Don’t forget that
starts with
” He said this because he knew I loathed them—the repetition, the forced greetings and stilted conversations, the endless photo ops, and above all, the uncomfortably transactional feeling that people were literally buying us. I’ve always found the thousand-dollar dinners more unsettling than the twenty-five-thousand-dollar ones—if someone pays the Republican National Committee twenty-five thousand dollars (or, more likely, fifty per couple) to breathe the same air as Charlie for an hour or two, then it’s clear the person has money to spare. What breaks my heart is when it’s apparent through their accent or attire that a person isn’t well off but has scrimped to attend an event with us.
I want to say.
Instead, in a few weeks, they receive in the mail a photo with one or both of us, signed by an autopen, which they can frame so that we might grin out into their living room for years to come.
But there was one fund-raiser that, to my own surprise, I did find fun. This was a million-dollar dinner held at a former plantation in Mobile, Alabama, in July 2000. Charlie and I always ate at separate tables, and that night I was assigned to be with the wife of the chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, two well-dressed middle-aged couples who looked like variations of the people we knew in Maronee, and a father-and-son duo. Before an event, an aide provides a paragraph or two describing each of the bigwigs who will be in attendance, and that evening, the original plan had been that I’d be sitting between a man named Beau Phillips, who owned a regional chain of fast- food restaurants, and a man named Leon Tasket, who was the CFO of the largest producer of industrial machinery in Alabama. As it turned out, Leon Tasket’s wife had come down with the flu, and in her stead—it’s hard to imagine this last-minute switch happening now or at any point after Charlie became president—Mr. Tasket had brought his adult son Dale, a tall, heavy, mentally disabled fellow. Though I suspect Dale had the intellectual aptitude of a nine-or ten-year-old, I wouldn’t have guessed this if I’d been observing him from any distance—his features weren’t irregular, except perhaps that he looked friendlier than most other guests. When it was time to sit for dinner, the men at the table remained standing while I and the other wives found our places, and Dale, to whom I had been briefly introduced a minute before, plopped next to me in the seat that had a place card for his father; Mrs. Tasket’s place card was one more over. “Oh, no, you don’t,” Leon Tasket said immediately. Mr. Tasket was shorter and wirier than his son, with a well-trimmed white beard and mustache and a three-piece suit. “Boy, if Miss Alice Blackwell saw the way you ate, she’d be scared half to death.”
I smiled, shaking my head. “It’s fine with me if he stays there—if it’s all right with you, that is.”
“That’s an awful brave lady who doesn’t mind sitting in the vicinity of a black bear, isn’t it, Dale? You think we should call her bluff?”
On the stage just above our heads, a man in a flag tie was tapping the microphone, saying, “If you’ll all take your seats . . . ” At another table, Charlie sat between the governor and the state’s Republican Party chair.
“Really,” I said. “It’s fine.”
As waiters brought our salads, Beau Phillips, the fast-food honcho on my right, said, “Your husband is on a sure path to victory,” and simultaneously, on my left, Dale said, “My favorite actress is Drew Barrymore, do you know
