The 45th, page 13
Julian was not interested in what anyone was going to write.
“Is that the reason you didn’t say anything to me about this?” he asked, wanting to be sure of something. “Because you thought I would say no?”
“Yes, exactly; you would have.”
A strange look of disbelief, a look of shrewd skepticism, entered Julian’s eyes.
“There is more to it than that, though, isn’t there? Because if you had asked me, and I had agreed, you would have made me a co-conspirator in a lie, part of a set piece fiction, in which you pretend to be ill and I act the part of the innocent bystander forced to do something he had never wanted to do,” he said, daring him to disagree. “There is a third alternative, but never mind that now….”
A third alternative? Ismael Cooper wondered what it could be, and then, suddenly, he thought he knew. The speech. Julian had known when he wrote it that Louis Matson could never give it. Was it possible, was it conceivable, that without actually planning it, Julian Drake had foreseen the possibility, had taken the first step, written a speech only he could give, the first step in a sequence that would then have to follow?
There was a sudden, loud knock on the door. Matson and Ismael looked at each other.
“I told them to hold all calls,” said Ismael, as he got to his feet and turned to Julian. “It must be a madhouse down there, everyone waiting to hear from you. This will be the chairman, wringing his hands, wondering what he should do.”
Julian shrugged. “Tell him I left town and no one knows where I have gone,” he said, laughing. And then, to spare Ismael the trouble, answered the door himself. It was the chairman.
“What can I do for you?” asked Julian, with a friendly grin as he shook his hand and invited him inside.
“I didn’t think…, I thought that….”
“That Louis or Ismael…? They’re right here. We were just discussing whether I ought to go downstairs and hold a press conference or have a few selected reporters come up. What do you think I should do,” he asked, giving the impression that he would gladly do whatever the chairman thought best.
“Well, I don’t…, the place is just a zoo. I mean, as you can imagine, no one was prepared for anything like this; no one ever thought that….It was a great speech,” he added, remembering that Julian was after all the nominee. “And I think that - what the convention did, the unanimous support, without precedent in my experience - well, I think that….”
“I’ll come down,” said Julian before the chairman choked himself to death. “Shall we say ten minutes? Will that give you enough time?”
The lobby was packed with reporters eager to get their first chance to see close up this new phenomenon who in half hour’s time had gone from anonymity to the only person in America anyone could talk about. There was a frenzy of expectation, a kind of mystery about what it all meant, a sense that something more than a bizarre ending to a year long fight for the nomination had taken place, something that threatened the known assumptions, the way that politics was understood. The place was buzzing with anticipation, and then Julian Drake walked in, alone and unannounced, and the silence itself became electric.
It was curious, the way everyone seemed to take a step back to let him pass; curious, the puzzled expressions, as if they were trying to discover in the way he looked the secret of what two hours earlier they had watched him do with an audience who had not known who he was. Slight of build like a long distance runner, with dark brown hair and light blue eyes, he moved toward the microphones set up in front without any noticeable hesitation or doubt as to why he was there. If he felt in any way self-conscious, awkward or uncomfortable, worried about this, his first experience, with the national media, he did not show it. Just before he reached the microphones, he bumped into a reporter who, too late, tried to get out of the way. Julian grabbed his shoulder to steady him, smiled and apologized for not being more careful. Astonished, the reporter smiled back.
Julian Drake was still smiling when he took his place behind the battery of microphones and looked out at the sea of faces looking at him. He waited a long moment, and then, the smile broader, he tossed his head to the side and announced, “Well, if no one has a question, I’ll….” Everyone was on their feet, shouting, asking, demanding, to go first. Julian pointed to someone in the back.
“Doesn’t it feel a little strange, suddenly to find yourself, someone no one knew, the Republican nominee for the presidency?”
“It isn’t true that no one knows me,” replied Julian with a sparkle in his eye. “And it isn’t strange - it’s an honor - to be the nominee.”
“No, what I meant - “
“I know. It’s a fair question. A few hours ago I could have walked through the lobby of this hotel, or anywhere else, and no one would have noticed, and now I can’t go anywhere without being recognized. But that is how we live now. Fame comes in an instant. The only real question is what you become famous for, and, once you have it, that fame so many people seem to want, what you do with it.”
“There is a rumor that Louis Matson staged the whole thing,” shouted someone closer to the front; “that he did not want the nomination to go to Cruz or Trump or any of the others, that he wanted you; that he wasn’t ill at all, that he faked that collapse so you could take his place and give his speech and in that way -”
“That sounds pretty unlikely, don’t you think? Who could have known, who could have predicted, what happened tonight. I certainly did not know I would be giving that speech. If I had known what was going to happen,” he added with a modest, eager grin, “I would have stayed in California.”
“You mean - you really expect us to believe - that you wouldn’t have wanted the nomination if you had known you were going to get it?” asked a reporter from the Washington Post.
“If I had known…?” Julian threw up his hands. “I did not know anything. I left politics twelve years ago and never imagined I would be coming back. I wrote that speech because Louis Matson asked me to write it. It was the first time he had ever asked me for anything. It was a chance for me, not to pay back - nothing could ever pay him back for what he once did for me - but to at least show the gratitude I have always felt, and the respect I have always had.”
“What did Louis Matson do for you? What was the reason you thought you had to write that speech?” a reporter with one of the cable shows, a young woman with long dark lashes and bright painted nails, cried above all the others clamoring for attention.
Julian quickly shook his head, as if the questions were somehow impermissible, an intrusion into what was private and personal. He took a deep breath, sighed, and shook his head again, but this time with an air of resignation.
“Twelve years ago, I was a candidate for the United States Senate. I had to quit the race. Louis Matson understood the reason and gave me the help I needed.”
Watching from the side, Rachel Good could hear in her head the inevitable next question and did not doubt for a minute that Julian Drake could hear it too.
“What was the reason, the reason you had to quit, what was it that Louis Matson understood?”
The look on Julian’s face seemed to say that his comment about staying in California had he known what was going to happen was not as light-hearted, as bright-witted, as it had seemed,; that it had covered something tragic.
“My sister and her husband were killed. They had two young children. There was no one else to take care of them, no one else to raise and educate them. There really was no choice. They had lost both their parents; I could not let them be raised by someone who could never be there because I was always out campaigning.”
Someone started to ask another question, another question about the same thing. Julian stopped him with a glance.
“There is one thing, the only thing, I will not take questions about. The children are grown up now; they have their own lives. That is all anyone needs to know.”
A heavy-set reporter with heavy-lidded eyes and a pockmarked face stood with notebook in hand on which he had written out the question he wanted to ask. Some thought it was a trick, a way to make his questions seem thoughtful and important; others, less charitable, insisted it was because if he did not read the question he would not remember what he wanted to ask.
“Nearly everything you said in your speech is a direct attack on what the Republican party has stood for since at least Ronal Reagan.”
Dropping his right shoulder, Julian bent his head to the same side and raised his eyebrows.
“And your question is…?”
“Are you really going to turn your back on what the party stands for?”
Julian stroked his chin with his thumb and two fingers.
“I did not get the nomination and then give that speech,” he said, a shrewd glint in his eye. “I gave that speech and then got the nomination. It seems to follow that instead of turning my back on what the party stands for, the party agrees with me.” Pausing, he shook his head, dissatisfied with what he had said. He looked at the reporter who had asked the question and, to everyone’s astonishment, apologized. “I’m sorry; that was not a fair answer. It was not an answer at all. Most of what happens in politics, most of what we talk about, is a response to what seems to be the immediate situation in which we find ourselves. The Reagan Revolution, as it was called at the time, was a reaction to what was commonly seen as an unprecedented growth of governmental power and control. The New Deal under F.D.R., the Great Society under Lyndon Johnson, government was involved in more and more of our lives, regulating, or trying to regulate, everything we did, and taxing everyone to do it. Reagan promised lower taxes and better times, a new beginning, ‘Morning in America.’ Taxes would be lowered, and because government was the problem, not the solution, as he liked to say, government would do less than it had, but do what it still had to do, especially on the question of defense, much better than it had before. There is nothing wrong with trying to make government, government at every level, more efficient and less expensive; nothing wrong in trying to relieve people of the burden of undue taxation. The problem was the assumption that, left to their own devices, free of governmental control, everyone would be able to take care of themselves, that it did not matter, that it was in a sense all to the good, if the workings of the free market made some incredibly rich and a great many others struggling to survive. Economics became more important than politics, making money more important than what we could do together as a people. That is what I was trying to speak about tonight, that money is a means, not an end; that the only thing worth pursuing, the only thing that will make a nation great and worth remembering, is human excellence.”
Another reporter, a middle-aged woman with deep wrinkles around her eyes and a scratchy, no-nonsense voice that made every question seem an accusation, jabbed a crooked finger in the air.
“You just said that you did not get the nomination and then give that speech,” she quoted from memory. “You did not make that speech as a candidate seeking the nomination, you wrote it for Louis Matson. He wasn’t running, either. It was supposed to a keynote speech, a statement of why the Republicans should win, a statement -”
“‘Of sound and fury signifying nothing,’” interjected Julian. “Sorry. What is your question?”
“Would you have given the same speech if you had been speaking as a candidate?”
“No,” he replied with a blank expression.
“No?” asked the reporter, stunned by his response.
“No, it would have been much shorter. A speech of withdrawal usually is.”
“A speech of…?”
“How many primaries do you think I would have won, suggesting the kind of things I did tonight?” he replied, as the room erupted in laughter. “I’m serious,” he insisted. “This is a national convention, a national audience. When you talk to the whole country, you can - you should - talk about things on a large scale, what the country needs to do. Look,” he said, his tone now intimate and casual, “it’s one thing to speak in a crowded hall; it is another thing altogether to speak in someone’s living room to a dozen people come to decide whether you might be the candidate they want to support. What happened tonight - what kind of headline will there be? - ‘The impossible has happened: Republicans nominate someone no one has heard of!’ What I spoke about, the things I tried to say, could not have happened anywhere else.”
“What everyone wants to know, though,” insisted a reporter who had written several books about the last several presidencies, “is whether you meant what you said. Is it what you really intend to try to do if you are elected in November?”
The words were civil enough, but there was a skepticism, a doubt, that now that Julian Drake was a candidate he would act or think the same way he had before. It was the cynic’s certain knowledge that speeches should never be taken seriously, except for the effect they might have on an audience. Julian was not amused.
“Did you think I was lying, that I wasn’t serious about what I said; that I was perfectly content to say what I thought others - whoever got the nomination - should do, but that I would not think of doing myself? Even if I wanted to play the coward’s part, try to win an election by being all things to all people, the speech has been given, the whole country knows what I said. And the country knows something else as well: I did not give that speech, I did not say what I said, because I was trying to win anyone’s vote. Like it, don’t like it; agree with it, disagree with it - it is what I believe, what I think needs to be done. Vote for it, vote against it. There will be no room for confusion. What I say I’ll do, I’ll do.”
“Or try to,” a voice shouted out. “You have to get Congress to agree.”
“Congress tends to agree with whatever the American people want. What they want, they’ll decide in the election. Everything follows from that.”
Every hand shot up, everyone halfway out of their chairs, eager, angry, swearing under their breath, desperate to be next. Julian, for his part, seemed relaxed, at ease, in no hurry. Everyone else was sweating with the tension they felt, the need to get something they could use; Julian seemed to grow stronger, fresher, the longer it went on. He took seriously the questions they asked, and seemed grateful for the chance to answer, to think about something he might otherwise have ignored. To Rachel Good, it seemed completely in character: he had that kind of curiosity. A question, instead of something to be handled and turned to his advantage, the kind of answer, the only kind, most people in public life knew or understood, was for Julian Drake a way to force to the surface of his mind something that, until he heard himself the answer he was giving, must otherwise have stayed hidden, something he had not known he knew.
“You’re the Republican nominee for president,” said a smooth modulated voice trained for television, “and America doesn’t know anything about you. Why don’t you tell us something about yourself. What do you like to do, what…?”
“Are you married?” interjected a young woman with the laughing eyes of a woman who hoped he was not.
“More than once?” inquired a balding, bespectacled round faced man in a rumpled suit with a voice that sounded like tires on gravel.
“Yes, what have you done all the time since you left Congress?”
“Lived a quiet life,” replied Julian. He had caught the change of mood, the new interest in him as a person. “Read as much as I could; tried to learn what I could about the world; tried to learn what it means to be a human being. I studied; and no, I’m not married,” he added with a quick glance back at the young, very attractive, woman who had asked. “But you never know what may happen,” he remarked with a slight, disarming smile before he turned again to the crowd and nodded toward the next reporter with a question.
“What it means to be a human being? Is that what you said? What exactly did you mean by that?”
Julian’s blue deep-set eyes seemed to grow larger, moving with lightning speed in a dozen different directions, as if searching among all the known possibilities for the one explanation that would make sense to someone who had not made the same journey and seen the same things.
“That is a very long question. Let me just say that, because of the time I had spent in Congress, the years involved in politics, I had an interest in how we had gotten to where we are, so I read everything I could about the history - our history - of the twentieth century. But if you do that, you are led back to the nineteenth century, and then back to the beginning, the early years of the Republic, the War of Independence, the Constitution. And I realized you could not understand anything about any of it - why Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, all the rest, did what they did if you did not understand the way they thought about things. Who had they learned from, who were their teachers? You cannot understand what we were, how we began, you cannot understand the Declaration of Independence, unless you read John Locke. And when you do that,” continued Julian as if he were talking to a graduate seminar instead of a room full of seasoned political reporters who were now listening in close to open-mouth wonder, “when you study Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, you start to realize that he is following, and if you will, correcting, Thomas Hobbes. And then that both of them were making a conscious break with the ancient wisdom, replacing, or trying to replace, the teachings of Plato and Aristotle with a new teaching of their own. But the significance, the meaning of that, can only be understood if you begin to understand what the ancient teaching was. And so,” he added with a sudden, self-deprecating smile meant to show that he knew this was nothing they had come to hear or had any reason to take seriously, “I was compelled, despite my obvious inability, to begin the study of those two impossible authors. Does that answer your question?”
