'Tell him I want to see him.'
'Lockheed's board is giving him a free hand to—'
'That's the idea, George.'
'What about my job, I mean, what you want me to do. The rule is—'
'I know. You'll be acting Secretary until we get things put back together.'
Winston nodded. 'Okay. I need to bring a few people down with me.'
'I'm not going to tell you how to do it. I'm not even going to tell you all the things you have to do. I just want it to get done, George. You just have to tell me ahead of time. I don't want to read about it in the papers first.'
'When would I start?'
'The office is empty right now,' Ryan told him.
A final hedge: 'I have to talk to my family about it.'
'You know, George, these government offices have phones and everything.' Jack paused. 'Look, I know what you are. I know what you do. I might have turned out the same way, but I just never found it… satisfactory, I guess, just to make money. Getting start-ups off the ground, that was something different. Okay, managing money is important work. I didn't like it myself, but I never wanted to be a doctor, either. Fine, different strokes and all that. But I know you've sat around a lot of tables with beer and pretzels talking about how screwed up this town is. Here's your chance. It will never come again, George. Nobody will ever have an opportunity to be Sec-Treas without political considerations. Never. You can't turn it down, because you'd never forgive yourself if you did.'
Winston wondered how one could be so adroitly cornered in a room with curved walls. 'You're learning the political stuff, Jack.'
'Andrea, you have a new boss,' the President told his principal agent.
For her part, Special Agent Price decided that Gallic Weston might be wrong after all.
THE NOTICE THAT there would be a presidential address tonight upset a carefully considered timetable, but only by a day. More of concern was the coordination of that event with another. Timing was everything in politics, as much as in any other field, and they'd spent a week working on this. It wasn't the usual illusion of experts moving with practiced skill. There had never been practice in this particular exercise. It was all guesses, but they'd all made guesses before, and mostly good ones, else Edward J. Kealty would never have risen as far as he had, but like compulsive gamblers, they never really trusted the table or the other players, and every decision carried with it a lot of ifs.
They even wondered about right and wrong on this one—not the 'right and wrong' of a political decision, the considered calculation of who would be pleased and who offended by a sudden stand on the principle du jour, but whether or not the action they were contemplating was objectively correct—honest, moral! — and that was a rare moment for the seasoned political operatives. It helped that they'd been lied to, of course. They knew they'd been told lies. They knew he knew that they knew that he'd lied to them, but that was an understood part of the exercise. To have done otherwise would have violated the rules of the game. They had to be protected so long as they did not break faith with their principal, and being protected from adverse knowledge was part of that covenant.
'So you never really resigned, Ed?' his chief of staff asked. He wanted the lie to be clear, so that he could tell everyone that it was the Lord's truth, to the best of his knowledge.
'I still have the letter,' the former Senator and former Vice President, and that was the rub, replied, tapping his jacket pocket. 'Brett and I talked things over and we decided that the wording of the letter had to be just so, and what I had with me wasn't quite right. I was going to come back the next day with a new one, dated properly, of course, and it would have been handled quietly—but who would have thought…?'
'You could just, well, forget about it.' This part of the dance had to be stepped out in accordance with the music.
'I wish I could,' Kealty said after a moment's sincere pause, followed by a concerned, passionate voice. This was good practice for him, too. 'But, dear God, the shape the country's in. Ryan's not a bad guy, known him for years. He doesn't know crap about running a government, though.'
'There's no law on this, Ed. None. No constitutional guidance at all, and even if there were, no Supreme Court to rule on it.' This came from Kealty's chief legal adviser, formerly his senior legislative aide. 'It's strictly political. It won't look good,' he had to say next. 'It won't look—'
'That's the point,' the chief of staff noted. 'We're doing this for apolitical reasons, to serve the interests of the country. Ed knows he's committing political suicide.' To be followed by instant and glorious resurrection, live on CNN.
Kealty stood and started walking around the room, gesturing as he spoke. 'Take politics out of this, damn it! The government's been destroyed! Who's going to put it back together? Ryan's a goddamned CIA spook. He knows nothing about government operations. We have a Supreme Court to appoint, policy to carry out. We have to get Congress put back together. The country needs leadership, and he doesn't have a clue on how to do that. I may be digging my own political grave, but somebody has to step up and protect our country.'
Nobody laughed. The odd thing was that it never occurred to them to do so. The staffers, both of whom had been with EJK for twenty years or more, had so lashed themselves to this particular political mast that they had no choice in the matter. This bit of theater was as necessary as the passage of the chorus in Sophocles, or Homer's invocation of the Muse. The poetics of politics had to be observed. It was about the country, and the country's needs, and Ed's duty to the country over a generation and a half, because he'd been there and done it for all that time, knew how the system worked, and when it all came down, only a person like he could save it. The government was the country, after all. He'd spent fits professional lifetime devoted to that proposition.
They actually believed all that, and no less than the two staffers, Kealty was lashed to the same mast. How much he was responding to his own ambition even he could no longer say, because belief becomes fact after a lifetime of professing it. The country occasionally showed signs of drifting away from his beliefs, but as an evangelist has no choice but to entreat people back to the True Faith, so Kealty had a duty to bring the country back to its philosophical roots, which he'd espoused for five terms in the Senate, and a briefer time as Vice President. He'd been called the Conscience of the Senate for more than fifteen years, so named by the media, which loved him for his views and his faith and his political family.
It would have been well for him to consult the media on this call, as he'd done often enough in the past, briefing them on a bill or amendment, asking their views—the media loved for people to ask their opinion on things—or just making sure they came to all the right parties. But not in this case. No, he couldn't do that. He had to play everything straight. The appearance of currying favor could not be risked, whereas the deliberate avoidance of that maneuver would give the patina of legitimacy to his actions. High-minded. That was the image to project. He'd forgo all of the political tapestry for the first time in his life, and in so doing embroider a new segment. The only thing to consider now was timing. And that was something his media contacts could help with.
'WHAT TIME?' RYAN asked.
'Eight-thirty Eastern,' van Damm replied. 'There are a couple of specials tonight, sweeps week, and they've asked us to accommodate them.'
Ryan might have growled about that, but didn't. His thoughts showed clearly on his face anyway.
'It means you get a lot of West Coast people on their car radios,' Arnie explained. 'We have all five networks, plus CNN and C-SPAN. That's not a given, you know. It's a courtesy. They don't have to let you on at all. They play that card for political speeches—'
'Damn it, Arnie, this isn't political, it's—'
'Mr. President, get used to it, okay? Every time you take a leak, it's political. You can't escape that. Even the absence of politics is a political statement.' Arnie was working very hard to educate his new boss. He listened well, but he didn't always hear.
'Okay. The FBI says I can release all of this?' 'I talked to Murray twenty minutes ago. It's okay with him. I have Gallic incorporating that in the speech right now.'
SHE COULD HAVE had a better office. As the number-one presidential speechwriter, she could have asked for and gotten a gold-plated personal computer sitting on a desk of Carrara marble. Instead she used a ten-year-old Apple Macintosh Classic, because it was lucky and she didn't mind the small screen. Her office might have been a closet or storeroom once upon a time, back when the Indian Treaty Room had really been used for Indian treaties. The desk had been made at a federal prison, and while the chair was comfortable, it was thirty years old. The room had high ceilings. That made it easier for her to smoke, in violation of federal and White House rules, which were in
