The 45th, page 10
“Only if you assume that he isn’t smart enough to know that not every effect has a cause.”
Matson said this with a look with which Ismael had become familiar. When someone wanted something as much as the governor wanted the presidency, anything other than an emphatic and openly offensive refusal was taken as an implied promise of support.
“He did not ask to meet with me. He could have - and in some ways it would have been not just normal, but even expected: he’s the governor of the state hosting the convention; I’m chairing the convention. But he didn’t ask; he was waiting.”
“Waiting?”
“To see what happens, to see how things fall out, with a convention this divided, with enough people suggesting that this might be the first convention in the modern era that doesn’t end on the first ballot. That would open the way for a third candidate. That’s why he didn’t call me, and that’s why he thinks the fact I called him so significant.”
“What did you tell him about why you wanted to see him?”
“I just said I thought it would be good to have a talk before the convention opened, because after that we might not have the chance. So he came here…at midnight, and we spent about an hour together.”
“And you decided…?”
“Nothing; nothing was decided. He asked a lot of questions: Did I really think it might actually go beyond the first ballot? Didn’t I think there was a chance a deal might get made? What was the Michigan delegation going to do? All good questions,” said Matson, scratching his ear; “and no good answers - or, rather, answers that did not answer anything. Yes, I thought it could go to a second ballot, or even beyond. Yes, there could be a deal, but I couldn’t imagine what it might be. No, I didn’t know what our delegation would do: they were free, each of the delegates, to vote for whomever they wished.” Matson leaned back in his chair, trying to suppress a grin. “I told him they could even vote for him, the governor of Ohio, on the first ballot, if they decided they wanted to do that.”
He could still see it, that moment of hope and indecision in the governor’s eyes, the instant hesitation about what to say, how to reply; the quick, fumbling calculation, as he wondered whether, more than a meaningless remark, this was a test to discover the degree of interest, an invitation to ask for the opportunity to address the delegation so he could by the power of his personality and the force of his rhetoric convince them to withhold their support from anyone until, with a second ballot, everyone would be free to look for a third, a new, alternative – him.
“I mentioned to Julian that the governor might end up being everyone’s second choice; that once it goes to a second ballot everyone will start looking for someone who can win,” remarked Ismael, nodding in agreement with what, though Matson had not said it out loud, they both understood.
“And Julian was not all that enthused, was he? Let me guess: too ordinary, too much like everyone else; a competent governor, but that’s all.” Matson shoved himself back from the table, folded his arms across his chest and looked at Ismael from beneath a lowered brow, his gaze thoughtful, serious, and nostalgic. “We all grow up with heroes and dream of one day becoming what, when we were young, we thought they were. I don’t think Julian ever did. I think he knew from the beginning that there was not much difference between those who made it to high office and those who were never elected to anything. I think he knew that most of what happens happens by chance. Most – not all; because he knew he was different, better, than everyone else. Yes, I know,” he said, waving his hand to ward off the obvious objection. “Half of Washington thinks they’re better than anyone else; but that’s because they see all too clearly the weaknesses, the failures, of others and forget their own deficiencies. Julian never compared himself with anyone. If he had been a Roman – Don’t forget,” he added with a quick self-deprecating smile, “I was a history major – he would have been a Stoic, convinced that all the things we prize – money, power, fame – are nothing so much as the mark of our own vanity and stupidity, the failure to understand that the only life worth living is the one dedicated to learning all we can and making the lives of others a little better than they are. So, no, that Julian would find the choice of the governor shall we say, uninspiring, does not surprise me. That is what Julian would think about almost anyone the convention might choose. It’s one of the things that make him so damn interesting.” With a rueful laugh, Louis Matson shook his head. “You want to know the truth? – I think the same way he does. There isn’t anyone I look up to. The strange thing is that if I could start all over again, if I could be like anyone, it would be someone just like him.”
Matson glanced over to the desk and the speech he was scheduled to give that evening.
“The first time I read it, that was the thought I had: that I wished I could have done something half as good as that,” he said with a look of the utmost seriousness. “And he did it in – what? – a couple of hours the night you were there, out in California.”
Suddenly, Matson remembered what time it was and what he had to do. He got to his feet and started to the other room to dress. He stopped at the door.
“I didn’t tell you. When the governor was trying to figure out whether he ought to ask for the chance to say something to the delegation – I invited him. He’ll be there at one o’clock. I told him that because he was the governor of the host state, and because he’s almost as well known across the border in Michigan as he is in Ohio, the delegation would love to have him say a few words of welcome. And then I told him that it might be useful if he stayed while we listened to Trump and Cruz each make their case, why they ought to have the nomination.”
“And did you remember to tell him that the meeting of the delegation is going to be open to the press, that the debate will be on television, that anyone who speaks will have a national audience?” asked Ismael drily.
“I may have said something about that. In any event, he’ll be there, and he has never been shy about injecting himself into an argument. It may get interesting. Make sure Julian is there. As soon as it is over, I need to go over the speech. He promised he would help.”
Ismael looked across to where the typewritten speech lay stacked in ten pages on a fake French desk in the style of Louis XIV that sat below a copy of a painting done by a French Impressionist more than two hundred years later.
“It’s better if you haven’t read it; that way you won’t have any preconceptions when you hear it tonight like everyone else.”
Ismael had the feeling that Matson had not spent any time with it himself. It was still there, in the same position that it had been the day before. And if Matson had not been studying it, learning the way each line should be phrased, where to pause, where to take a breath, neither had he made any arrangements to have it put on a teleprompter so he could read what he was supposed to say without the constant need to look down at a written text. When he had asked if Matson wanted him to do it, he had put him off with the vague suggestion that there was nothing to worry about, that everything would take care of itself.
“Later, after this is over,” said Matson, when Ismael asked again, just before the door shut and the Michigan delegation was called into session.
They met in a hotel ballroom with pink painted walls and two crystal chandeliers. The delegates sat on cushioned metal chairs. When the state party chairman introduced, “Our senator, Louis Matson,” two hundred men and women rose as one and in what was more a gesture of respect rather than any new sense of excitement greeted him with a long round of sustained and dignified applause. Matson, genuinely moved, raised both hands in acknowledgement, which instead of bringing to a stop only increased the intensity with which they signaled how they felt. They did not know he was dying – that was still his secret – but they knew that he might not run again and that, such is the term of our existence, it would probably be the last time that, gathered all together, they could tell him what he had meant and how much, whenever that time might come, they were going to miss him.
With the cheerful cynicism of the seasoned politician, a part he had learned to play and, like everything played well, had come to love, Matson changed the mood to laughter by the announcement that he had not realized just how grateful they would be, released from their commitment, not to have to waste their vote on him.
When the room went quiet, Matson got right to business; or started to, because, as everyone soon discovered, he had a surprise for them.
“We are delighted to have with us today the two leading candidates for the nomination. They are each going to speak about why we should give them our support, why they would be the best candidate we could choose, why – and this is the ultimate question – they would be the best president the country could have.”
The two candidates were sitting in the first row on opposite sides of the room. They tried to appear calm and dignified, happy to be there and eager to make their case. They each exchanged a friendly nod with Matson when he mentioned their names.
“Before we start, however, our friend, the governor of Ohio, has a few remarks -” A sly grin stole across Matson’s jagged mouth. “Now that you are free to vote for whomever you want, perhaps the governor wants to share with you who he has decided to support. But before we get to that, before we start the discussion on as serious a matter as we will ever have to decide, there is someone else that I know you will want to hear from, someone that many of you know and all of you will remember, someone who once honored us with his service – Julian Drake.”
Julian had come in just a moment after the majority leader. Most of those in the room had their eyes on Matson, but some had noticed the younger, well-dressed man a few steps behind him. They thought he looked familiar, but could not quite place him. The mention of his name, however, ran like a current through the crowd; they had, almost all of them, been active members of the party for years and they remembered, even after a dozen years, Julian Drake and what he had once seemed to promise. The applause was scattered, doubtful; no one knew quite what to make of the fact that Julian Drake was back. A moment after he began to speak it was as if he had never left.
He spoke to them as if they were the most intelligent people he knew. There was none of the ‘how great you are, how glad I am,’ the routine remarks with which too many speakers advertise in advance that they have nothing important to say. He said nothing at all about himself. He had always known what an audience needed to hear; not what they wanted to hear, not what would make them feel satisfied with what they had done, but what would help them see what had yet to be achieved.
“You are here to decide who the next president of the United States will be. After almost two years of endless campaigning, after dozens of primaries and dozens of debates, no one has won a majority, and for the first time in more than half a century, the convention, and the convention alone, will decide who will be the nominee. The Michigan delegation – your delegation – can now decide if the nomination should go to Senator Cruz or Mr. Trump who, between them, have divided up most of the vote; or whether you should withhold your support and in that way open up these proceedings to someone else, a third, or even a fourth, candidate. It is not for me, an outsider, someone who does not even have a vote, to advise you what to do, but no one who calls himself a conservative will fail to recognize that the first rule in making any decision is to take whatever time is necessary to get it right. Listen to what those who speak to you today have to say; listen, and then ask yourself whether this is someone you trust, not just to win an election, but to lead the country. And remember, finally, that the real task of a conservative is not to tear down what has been built up over the years, but to rescue from the oblivion of time what is worth keeping from the past.”
Louis Matson stood off to the side watching the reaction. No one cheered, no one applauded; they did something he could not remember having seen outside a formal ceremony in a church: they stood up, every one of them, and waited until Julian Drake walked to the back of the room and took a chair. Resuming their places, no one spoke, no one said a word; the only sound an abbreviated cough or the scraping movement of a chair. Matson stepped back to the front.
“And that is just one of the reasons why those of us who knew him when he was a member of Congress wish he had never left,” he said, as he looked to the far end of the ballroom where Julian sat quietly. “But now, let’s begin our work. We will hear first from the governor.”
Rachel Wood could only shake her head in wonder. She had started scribbling her first impressions in her reporter’s notebook almost before Julian had finished speaking. Quite without knowing what she was doing she had risen to her feet with the rest, stood there in the silence of that mute applause, witness to something extraordinary; but when she tried to find the words to describe it, she failed to discover a comparison, something by which to show the reader what the reader had not seen. A minute later, when the governor began to speak, and when, after him, the two candidates each tried to plead their case, she realized just how far Julian Drake’s brief performance was beyond the common measure: no one – not the governor, not the candidates - even tried to rival what they had heard; they changed nothing in the way they spoke. The governor lavished praise on his own achievements, all the things he had done to make Ohio a model for the nation, which, by implication, could best be done by someone who had done it once already. The two candidates repeated the same arguments, the same time worn phrases, about the urgent need for “bold, new leadership” they had used so often before that now, with the race almost over, they exaggerated all their gestures, intensified their mannerisms, from the perhaps unconscious fear that they might otherwise appear bored with what they were saying. The truth of course was that their own voices were the only ones they heard, those self-same speeches the catechism of what had for them become the received wisdom of the only belief that mattered: what they wanted, what they had by now convinced themselves anyone with any decency and intelligence would want as well. They were like soldiers who had marched so long in the same direction the only thing they had to follow were their shoes.
If Julian Drake had not spoken, Rachel Good might have missed it. The contrast between what he had done and what the others did taught her a difference that, if she had known it before, she had known only vaguely. It was one thing to understand that nearly everyone in politics said the same kind of things and had, almost all of them, the same kind of ambition; it was something else again to see how predictable, how fundamentally uninteresting, they really were, the phony enthusiasm, the empty rhetoric, the thoughtless conviction with which they tried to convince everyone that they could better than anyone else lead them where they wanted to go.
“I remember you from your years in the House,” said Rachel Good.
Julian looked up; a modest, almost bashful, smile slipped slowly across his lips.
“I don’t remember doing anything memorable.”
“Who in the House ever did?” she replied.
Her cynicism could not quite conceal the deeper meaning of the glance with which she studied, or tried to study, the look in his eyes, a look that seemed to mark something that was far more confident than that modest smile suggested. She waited for an answer, some comment that almost anyone who had been in Washington would make, an agreement that on their best days members of the House were insignificant, incapable of doing anything, much less something worth remembering. But Julian said nothing. The silence was not awkward; it was just different. She started over.
“Louis told me you were helping with his speech. Were you surprised - when he asked you to do that?”
The meeting had broken up; the governor and the two candidates were trying to shake as many hands, pose for as many photographs as they could. Everyone was milling around, waiting to exchange a few words with someone they thought important or wanted to meet. There were hundreds of people in the room, but only a few of them came over to say a word to Julian Drake, and most of them older delegates who had known him when he was a rising star. Much later, when Rachel Good looked back on things, she would remember this and decide it had been the first clear example - that and the way his brief remarks had been received - of the hold he had on people; the respect, bordering on reverence, for the way he spoke to them, as if they were every bit as serious and intelligent as he.
“Surprised?” He motioned for her to take the vacant chair next to him. “If you had asked me if Louis Matson - or anyone else - would ask me to write the first draft of a speech, I probably would have laughed. But surprised? No, I can’t say that.”
Rachel was confused. “But if you didn’t expect it; if, as you say, you would have laughed if anyone had suggested…? Well, never mind. That isn’t what I really wanted to ask you. What I really want to know is - Who do you support? Who does Julian Drake think should be the Republican nominee?” she asked, narrowing her eyes as she leaned forward, as curious as she had ever been. “I remember what people were saying about you, twelve years ago, when you were in that senate race.”
“That it was only the next step; that after a few years in the senate I’d be running for president,” he replied, shaking his head at what now seemed the absurdity of it. “Does it surprise you - that I remember, or that I’m willing to tell you that I had that thought myself? That isn’t the same thing as saying that it would have happened; there are all sorts of reasons why it might not. But I must have had some ambition, running for the House, then the Senate; so it would not have been out of character to think about what might happen next. All I can tell you for certain is that I’m glad that it didn’t.”
