American Wife

decision had to be made in time for the Republican National Convention, and it came down to two candidates: Arnold Prouhet and Frank Logan. Frank was two years younger than Charlie, a Colorado senator who was serving his third term, came from a wealthy Baptist family, was a father of eight, and was a vocal critic of homosexuality and abortion. (I have always found it peculiar, to say the least, when conservatives, especially conservative men, make these particular issues their ideological focus; there is something suspect to me about individuals who devote enormous amounts of time and attention to subjects they profess to find repugnant.) I was opposed to Charlie selecting Frank as his running mate, and I also didn’t relish the idea of spending time with Frank’s wife, Donna Sue, who had self-published several books proffering tips on raising a traditional Christian family.

Meanwhile, Arnold Prouhet had been a congressman from Nevada in the seventies and early eighties who subsequently served under two presidents as a security adviser. As far as I knew, Arnold was more a fiscal conservative than a social one, he was eleven years Charlie’s senior, and on the few occasions I’d met him, he’d seemed serious and taciturn; I imagined these would be qualities that might help balance Charlie’s playfulness. (While Charlie had, under Hank’s tutelage, become a disciplined student of policy and government, I knew, and I think everyone knew, that he was in it for the power and adventure and human connection and not because of any wonkish devotion to or interest in the issues. The problem that has ensued is that wonkish devotion cannot be faked. The fever isn’t in Charlie’s blood, as it is in Hank’s—Charlie would never read a book about the First Amendment for pleasure—and this is why so often in the years since, when there has been a deviation from the public script or when, as at a debate or a press conference, there isn’t a script, Charlie falters. Being president is for him like taking a ninth-grade English test on The Odyssey, and he’s the kid who did most of the reading, he studied for an hour the night before, but he’s not one of the people who loved the book. Besides, he’d always rather crack a funny joke in class than offer a genuine insight.)

Hank objected to the selection of Arnold Prouhet, saying that where Frank Logan shared Charlie’s youthful energy, Arnold seemed old and dour. Arnold also could make Charlie appear insecure, as if he were seeking a father figure. But Arnold’s foreign policy expertise was significant, I countered when I was asked to weigh in (which was never by Hank and occasionally by Charlie, though usually he wanted to vent more than he wanted input). I also worried that Frank Logan’s own ambitions might hinder his work with Charlie; if he became vice president, he’d probably run for president afterward, whereas if Charlie served two terms, Arnold Prouhet would be seventy-three when they left office, and unlikely to embark on a presidential campaign. Charlie’s advisers besides Hank—among them Debbie Bell, a consultant named Bruce Kettman, and a frighteningly smart twenty-six-year-old protege of Hank named Scott Taico whom Charlie called “Taco”—had mixed opinions, and I felt fairly sure Charlie would pick Frank Logan, but he didn’t. He picked Arnold. The night before he made the announcement in July 2000, he said to me, “I think you might be right about Logan, that he’s too focused on peering into people’s bedrooms and not enough of a visionary.”

Again, then, I find myself wondering if I am partly to blame for what has happened since. Would Frank Logan in fact have been a better vice president, would there have been less bloodshed under his watch? More homophobia, a sharper curtailing of reproductive rights, but not the unilateral use of military force, the defiant enthusiasm for preemptive war? It is indisputable that Charlie has been greatly influenced by Arnold Prouhet, and indeed it seems to be because Arnold has been so influential that Charlie insists as relentlessly as he does that he believes in the war, that he won’t back down. How embarrassing it would be not only to rely on the guidance of one’s hierarchical inferior but to rely on the wrong guidance—how unsophisticated Charlie would seem to himself and everyone else. And so rather than consider this possibility, he forces it to be untrue, he continues down the path he chose.

Years ago, shortly after Charlie and I moved to Milwaukee and joined the country club in the late seventies, we went there for dinner one night, to the main dining room on the first floor, and I excused myself from the table to use the ladies’ room. There was a lounge-like anteroom, a pretty area with couches and a dressing table and walk- in closets for hanging coats, a place where, sometimes at large parties, you’d find women chatting or applying their makeup. This was the first time I’d ever been in it, and once you entered the anteroom, you saw two more gold- handled doors: one directly across from the one you’d just come through and one to your left. I was trying to find the toilet stalls, and rather than asking one of the three older women then sitting on the couches—I say older, though they were no doubt younger than I am now, and stylishly dressed—I took a guess and walked forward to the door that was farther away. When I opened it and stepped through, I found myself back in the dining room where Charlie and I had been eating. I immediately realized there were two separate ladies’-room entrances; obviously, the toilets were behind the door I hadn’t tried. The logical thing at that point would have been to turn around, but I felt self-conscious. I was unaccustomed to country clubs, I imagined the women in the anteroom would notice and think me silly, and so, with a full bladder, I rejoined Charlie and didn’t urinate until we arrived home over an hour later. What I mean to say is that a part of me understands Charlie’s behavior. I understand it because I love him, because I am predisposed to sympathize, but I also think that, unlike many in government or the media, I don’t ascribe to people’s loftier motives just because they’re in a loftier place.

It seems to me that after the terrorist attacks in 2001, Charlie panicked. And Arnold, who had a professional history with these countries, who had already sparred a decade before with the dictator of one, swiftly stepped in with recommendations. He was hawkish, he believed in America protecting its superpower status, and he was confident of victory. He convinced Charlie, or Charlie convinced himself—establishing democracy in the Middle East, what a legacy that would be—and the rest has followed. The part that caught me by surprise was how the American people and the American media egged him on, how complicit they were in Charlie’s cultivation of a war-president persona. The terrorist attacks have given President Blackwell a heretofore undemonstrated seriousness of purpose, averred Time. Or, as The Washington Post put it, If there is a silver lining to these tragic events, it’s that President Blackwell has risen to the occasion as a leader . . . In the Times, an unsigned editorial was titled simply “Blackwell’s Finest Hour.” Had none of these people ever taken Psychology 101? Did they honestly believe Charlie, or anybody, changed in a matter of days? Did they think because, amid the rubble in lower Manhattan, he climbed atop a fire truck and spoke into a megaphone with resolve and sympathy, he was a new man? Charlie had always had the capacity for resolve and sympathy, which had nothing to do with whether invading other countries was a good idea.

I don’t mean to minimize how frightening the terrorist attacks were, how confused everything seemed in their aftermath. We all thought, of course, that the fourth plane was headed for the White House that day, and so they hurried me and Arnold Prouhet to Camp David on helicopters (Charlie was giving a speech in Ohio to a real estate association, a speech he famously declined to interrupt, and I didn’t see him until that night; when we hugged, when I had him in my arms, it was the first time since learning of the attacks that I wept). Even after we returned to the White House, we were evacuated several more times during the next few days, and once, in the middle of the night, we were rushed by agents from our bedroom to the Emergency Operations Center, an underground bunker beneath the White House. Then there were anthrax spores being sent through the mail, the threat of smallpox bombs. Charlie and I visited Pentagon burn victims, and later we met family members of men and women killed in New York, among them young children, and every morning I read the Times’s “Portraits of Grief ”—I read them all, and they were devastating. So it was a strange, difficult time, and we were in the thick of it. I don’t doubt that both Arnold and Charlie had to harden in certain ways during this period, that their toughness wasn’t just masculine bluster; it was interior as well, and for the benefit of others.

Nevertheless, I feel a growing suspicion that Charlie continues to fight this war for much the same reason I couldn’t bring myself to reenter the ladies’ room at the Maronee Country Club, and he even has my compassion, except for this—that night at the club, when I needed to urinate and hadn’t, the only one who suffered for my foolishness was me.

RIGHT BEFORE OUR plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base, I said to Jessica, “I have one more stop for us