The Bear and the Dragon

“But I don’t, Arnie, how can that be?”

“It just is the truth, Jack. It doesn’t have to make sense. It just is. Deal with it.”

I do so love these lessons, Ryan thought to himself. “Okay, today is …?”

“Social Security.”

Ryan’s eyes relaxed. “I’ve been reading up on that. The third rail of American political life. Touch it and die.”

For the next half hour, they discussed what was wrong and why, and the irresponsibility of the Congress, until Jack sat back with a sigh.

“Why don’t they learn, Arnie?”

“What do they need to learn?” Arnie asked, with the grin of a Washington insider, one of the anointed of God. “They’ve been elected. They must know it all already! How else do you think they got here?”

“Why the hell did I allow myself to stay in this damned place?” the President asked rhetorically.

“Because you had a conscience attack and decided to do the right thing for your country, you dumbass, that’s why.”

“Why is it you’re the only person who can talk to me like that?”

“Besides the Vice President? Because I’m your teacher. Back to today’s lesson. We could leave Social Security alone this year. It’s in decent enough fiscal shape to last another seven to nine years without intervention, and that means you could leave it to your successor to handle-”

“That’s not ethical, Arnie,” Ryan snapped.

“True,” the Chief of Staff agreed, “but it’s good politics, and fairly Presidential. It’s called letting sleeping dogs lie.”

“You don’t do that in the knowledge that as soon as it wakes up, it’s going to rip the baby’s throat out.”

“Jack, you really ought to be a king. You’d be a good one,” van Damm said, with what appeared to be genuine admiration.

“Nobody can handle that kind of power.”

“I know: ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power is actually pretty neat.’ So said a staffer for one of your predecessors.”

“And the bastard wasn’t hanged for saying it?”

“We need to work on that sense of humor, Mr. President. That was meant as a joke.”

“The scariest part of this job is that I do see the humor of it. Anyway, I told George Winston to start a quiet project to see what we can do with Social Security. Quiet project, I mean classified-black, this project doesn’t exist.”

“Jack, if you have one weakness as President, that’s it. You’re into this secrecy thing too much.”

“But if you do something like this in the open, you get clobbered by ill-informed criticism before you manage to produce anything, and the press crawls up your ass demanding information you don’t have yet, and so then they go make up stuff on their own, or they go to some yahoo who just makes up bullshit, and then we have to answer it.”

“You are learning,” Arnie judged. “That’s exactly how it works in this town.”

“That does not constitute ’working’ by any definition I know of.”

“This is Washington, a government town. Nothing is really supposed to function efficiently here. It would scare the hell out of the average citizen if the government started to function properly.”

“How about I just fucking resign?” Jack asked the ceiling. “If I can’t get this damned mess to start working, then why the hell am I here?”

“You’re here because some Japanese 747 pilot decided to crash the party at the House Chamber fifteen months ago.”

“I suppose, Arnie, but I still feel like a damned fraud.”

“Well, by my old standards, you are a fraud, Jack.”

Ryan looked up. “Old standards?”

“Even when Bob Fowler took over the statehouse in Ohio, Jack, even he didn’t try as hard as you to play a fair game, and Bob got captured by the system, too. You haven’t yet, and that’s what I like about you. More to the point, that’s what Joe Citizen likes about you. They may not like your positions, but everybody knows you try damned hard, and they’re sure you’re not corrupt. And you’re not. Now: Back to Social Security.”

“I told George to get a small group together, swear them to secrecy, and make recommendations-more than one-and at least one of them has to be completely outside the box.”

“Who’s running this?”

“Mark Gant, George’s technical guy.”

The Chief of Staff thought that one over for a moment. “Just as well you keep it quiet. The Hill doesn’t like him. Too much of a smart-ass.”

“And they’re not?” SWORDSMAN asked.

“You were naive with that, Jack. The people you tried to get elected, non-politicians, well, you semi- succeeded. A lot of them were regular people, but what you didn’t allow for was the seductive nature of life in elected government service. The money isn’t all that great, but the perks are, and a lot of people like being treated like a medieval prince. A lot of people like being able to enforce their will on the world. The people who used to be there, the ones that pilot fried in their seats, they started off as pretty good people, too, but the nature of the job is to seduce and capture. Actually, the mistake you made was to allow them to keep their staffs. Honestly, I think the problem down there is in the staffers, not the bosses. You have ten or more people around you all the time telling you how great you are, sooner or later you start believing that crap.”

“Just so you don’t do that to me.”

“Not in this lifetime,” Arnie assured him, as he stood to leave. “Make sure Secretary Winston keeps me in the loop on the Social Security project.”

“No leaks,” Ryan told his Chief of Staff forcefully.

“Me? Leak something? Me?” van Damm replied with open hands and an innocent face.

“Yeah, Arnie, you.” As the door closed, the President wondered how fine a spook Arnie might have made. He lied with the plausibility one might associate with a trusted member of the clergy, and he could hold all manner of contradictory thoughts in his head at the same time, like the best of circus jugglers … and somehow they never quite crashed to earth. Ryan was the current president, but the one member of the administration who could not be replaced was the chief of staff he’d inherited from Bob Fowler, by way of Roger Durling …

And yet, Jack wondered, how much was he being manipulated by this staff employee? The truthful answer was that he couldn’t tell, and that was somewhat troubling. He trusted Arnie, but he trusted Arnie because he had to trust him. Jack would not know what to do without him … but was that a good thing?

Probably not, Ryan admitted to himself, checking over his appointment list, but neither was being here in the Oval Office, and Arnie was at worst one more thing not to like about this job, and at best, he was a scrupulously honest, extremely hardworking, and utterly dedicated public servant …

… just like everyone else in Washington, D.C., Ryan’s cynicism added.

CHAPTER 6 Expansion

Moscow is eight hours ahead of Washington, a source of annoyance to diplomats who are either a day behind the times or too far out of synch with their body clocks to conduct business properly. This was more a problem for the Russians, as by five or six in the evening, most of them had had a few stiff drinks, and given the relative speed of all diplomatic exchange, it was well into the falling night in Moscow before American diplomats emerged from their “working lunches” to issue a demarche or communique, or a simple letter of reply to whatever the Russians had issued the previous working day. In both capitals, of course, there was always a night crew to read and evaluate things on a more timely basis, but these were underlings, or at best people on their way up but