The 45th, page 15
“Julian asked me the same thing. The honest answer is I don’t really know. It might have been the first time I met him. I think I knew that if I ever had the chance….” Matson scratched his head, laughing at his own incoherence. “When I read the speech he had written,” he said, now, on the instant, suddenly quite sure. “I knew by the time I turned to the second page. I understood - I remembered - how different, how much better, he was than all the others. And I remembered…how old I am now, how I would never have another chance to do something that would….”
Rachel understood. But she wanted, she needed, a better explanation than what he had read in the first three or four hundred words of a speech, no matter how good that speech had been; a better explanation than what he remembered of when he first met Julian Drake.
“You have to measure all that - what that speech brought back - against everything that has happened, the deep decline, the growing stupidity, of everything we do. Twelve years ago, Julian was better than anyone we had - but today! Hell, its like comparing, if you want to look at the other side, the Clintons, either one of them, to JFK or FDR. Read a speech by John F. Kennedy, there is something memorable in every line; read every speech Clinton - either one of them - ever gave and you won’t find a line you would want to remember even if you could.”
Matson shrugged his shoulders and turned up the palms of his hands, as if what he had just said must be as obvious to her as it was to him. Rachel shook her head, but not because she disagreed.
“There is something missing; something you keep leaving out. You haven’t told me if he was in on it, if he knew what you were going to do. And,” she added before he could reply, “if he didn’t know, what made you think he would go along with it, let you decide that he was going to be a candidate?”
“I didn’t tell him; I didn’t tell anyone,” said Matson emphatically. “If I had, he would have been on the first plane back to California. He never would have done it. Never. This way he had no choice; and this way,” he added, pulling back his lower lip in a look of shrewd calculation, “no one can ever accuse him of conspiring to steal the nomination. He is now the perfect candidate, the only one who did not want to be president. How did I know he would do it, take what I gave him, take it without objection? Because of what he did twelve years ago when he quit that senate race. His sense of duty, his belief in what we used to call fate. There is another reason - and you are never to use this, it’s just something for you to keep in mind while you watch what he does as a candidate, and then when he becomes president. Julian Drake is quite simply the most ambitious human being I have ever known. You watch,” he said when he saw the doubt in her eyes; “you heard what he said in that speech. He meant everything he said, and a good deal more,” he added significantly. “This isn’t going to be a presidency of small changes. You would have to go back to the New Deal, and maybe farther back than that, to find a precedent for the kind of things he’ll want to do.”
“He has to get elected first. He’s been out of politics for twelve years; he hasn’t run for office since. How is he going to handle a national campaign? Although given the way he got the nomination,” she remarked with a quiet laugh, “he may not think he needs to campaign.”
“You’re laughing; maybe you shouldn’t,” said Matson in a way that suggested some prior knowledge of what the new candidate was going to do, a knowledge he immediately denied. “It’s just a guess; a feeling, really. Whatever he does, it probably won’t be what we’re all used to seeing,” he remarked as he got to his feet. “I have to go,” he added with friendly reluctance.
With Rachel Good tagging along, Matson went directly to the ballroom where the Michigan delegation was waiting to hear what he had to say about what had happened last night, the nomination of Julian Drake and the now frantic rush of a half dozen different campaigns for the second place on the ticket. As he walked through the door, he threw back his head and laughed in triumph. Everyone was on their feet, clapping, their faces beaming with pleasure, whether because he had survived his collapse or because, as rumor insisted, he had staged everything to give Julian Drake the nomination, none of them could have said. Whatever the cause, the effect was all that any of them could have wanted. The other candidates had been all but forgotten. What no one could have predicted twenty-four hours ago had now taken on an air of inevitability, as if Julian Drake had been the only candidate they had ever really wanted. Louis Matson enjoyed every minute of it.
“Strange, isn’t it? - How much better you sometimes feel after you have been ill than you did before!” he said, shaking his head at the wonder of it. “Almost as if,” he added with a puckish grin, “you had never been sick at all!”
Not everyone understood what he meant; there were some delegates too new to politics to see everything through the eyes of a cynic, or the eyes of wisdom and experience, but there was not anyone who did not sense the eager confidence, the sheer excitement, with which Louis Matson spoke to them, the feeling that something of importance had happened and that they were part of it, part of something, moreover, that was just beginning.
“There is one more thing that needs to be done. Last night we nominated Julian Drake for the presidency. He has decided that because he had not been a candidate, because he had not run in any of the primaries, because he had not campaigned for the job, he should not dictate to the convention who the vice-presidential nominee should be. I understand his reason for doing this. I also understand that the best way to show that what we did last night we would do again, that if we now had a roll call vote the outcome would be the same, that we would choose Julian Drake over anyone else whose name was put in nomination, is to choose someone to run with him who also did not seek the office, someone who knows what it means to govern. The convention has been thrown open; you may vote for anyone you choose. The only vote I control is my own. I am going to use it to vote for the governor of Ohio.” And then he added, with a look that seemed to cast doubt on the trustworthiness of anyone else who might be seeking the office, “Someone I know will always support the president he is elected to serve.”
The reporters who were there began to shout questions. Matson flashed a smile at a few congressmen sitting among the delegates in the first few rows and then left through a back entrance, got on a service elevator and rode up to the chairman’s suite on the top floor where a tumultuous meeting was already underway.
They were all there, the same wealthy power brokers who had been there two days before, the money people, the ones who had come to nominate someone who thought that government best that governed least, the ones who thought that money bought not just access but control. The only two people absent were the representatives of what a day earlier had been the leading candidates for the nomination. They had not been invited. The chairman, Reece Davis, was sitting at the head of the long conference table, fidgeting with his manicured hands, tapping his Gucci clad feet, seeming lost and confused under the baleful looks of a dozen pair of angry, unhappy eyes.
“What the hell are we supposed to do now?” wondered Conrad Wilson. “I’m the one who insisted that, given all we’ve done, all the money we’ve spent, we at least be informed what Matson was going to say in that speech of his. And now - this! We don’t know anything about this guy, we….”
He did not finish. Louis Matson had come in, silent and, for a moment, unobserved.
“It was the greatest goddamn speech you ever heard, Conrad,” growled Matson. “What the hell is your complaint? - That we finally have a candidate who deserves the office?” he asked, a corrosive grin on his sagging mouth and what seemed a lethal warning in his eyes.
Davis started to say something, invite him to take a seat, something civil, polite, an attempt to give at least the appearance of being in charge. Matson ignored him. Patting the shoulder of each of those he passed, as if he had come to give them solace and support, he made his way to the empty chair at the opposite end of the table. Facing the window with its view of downtown and the river in the distance, he sat sideways, leaning on his left elbow. Tugging his tie into place, he pulled down the french cuffs on his shirt, and then slowly and quite on purpose stroked his chin as he turned his head and looked at each of their puzzled faces. Then he turned back to Conrad Wilson.
“You were saying?”
Wilson was in his early sixties, with gray hair cut close to disguise how far back his hairline had receded. He seldom moved when he spoke; he never gestured with his hands, his face was almost always a blank mask. It was a conscious effect, a way to keep anyone from knowing, or even guessing, what he really thought. He often held his chin with his forefinger and his thumb and spread the other three fingers in front of his narrow mouth. He was very good at cards, and very good at making money. It was only when it came to politics that he allowed his emotions to show, and then, when he found he was not in control, that he could not be in control, he forgot all the practiced lessons of restraint and his outbursts could be volcanic.
“You were saying?” repeated Matson, wearing a tight smile Machiavelli would have envied, the kind you only see when the game is over and you have lost.
“You lied to us!” screamed Wilson, his neck now seeming two sizes too large for his shirt. “You came to us, asked our support, for whoever became the nominee, promised you would stay neutral, promised -”
“I didn’t promise a damn thing. I told you I had only my own vote, and I didn’t even use that. I didn’t break any promises; I came here to give a speech. I couldn’t do it. Julian Drake took my place, and after that….You were there, you saw what happened.”
“I saw you take over the convention, change the rules, hand the nomination to someone we don’t know a damn thing about!”
Matson gave him a strange, searching look. “In addition to everything else, you’re a member of the New York delegation. What did you do, did you protest….?” He looked all around the table. “Did any of you object, any of you raise your voices against what the convention was doing, responding to what - tell me if you don’t agree - was the greatest speech any of us has ever heard? Is there anyone here who honestly believes that anyone else we could have nominated would be a better president?”
There was a long, awkward silence.
“Well? Anyone?” asked Matson, daring them to say what was on their minds.
“You came to us - remember? You asked us to agree in advance to support whoever won the nomination,” said Rufus Chambers who controlled a dozen different companies doing business around the world. “I asked what guarantee we had that if it was someone other than the candidates we supported - candidates who were known to us, candidates we had helped along the way - it would be someone we could trust.”
He was staring at Matson through small, hopeless eyes. With round sloping shoulders and a mouth like a parrot’s beak, he had the friendless look of someone absorbed in some private care of his own. He was always worried.
“You’re right, what you said about that speech,” continued Chambers; “but you’re wrong about what it means. Don’t misunderstand. It was a great speech - the way he delivered it; the immediate effect it had. If he had said two plus two is five, that the world is really flat - he could have said anything - and we would all have believed him, believed him until we recovered our senses and freed ourselves from the spell he casts.” Chambers looked around the room. Everyone was listening; everyone agreed. “I read the speech this morning. All of you should do it. He can speak, he can write - even when I was reading it, alone in my room, the words, the language, catches hold of you, carries you along; but then you start thinking about what he is really saying. It is all about going back, recapturing the past, remembering what conservatism used to mean. It’s the stuff for college seminars, what some people write books about. I know what it means to be a conservative: it means keeping government out of the way; it means free enterprise, competition; it means putting a stop to every attempt to penalize success. And now, thanks to you, we have a candidate who wants to do - what, exactly? Tax the hell out of us so everyone who does not want to pay for college can go at our expense! Read the speech, read it carefully. Everyone has a right to serve in the armed forces! Everyone. Sounds great. Very patriotic. But then, four years later, the bill comes due. And forget what is going to happen to the military, its ability to function, to do what we spend hundreds of billions of our money on each year, when you suddenly have a few million more recruits! No, this is a disaster! We came here to nominate someone we could trust and we nominate instead someone who thinks government can solve all our problems. I might as well become a Democrat!”
“Perhaps you should,” said a voice that everyone now immediately recognized. Julian Drake was standing just inside the door.
It is one thing to vent your frustration in a private gathering of like-minded friends and acquaintances; it is something else again to show the same anger, or the same blunt confidence, in the presence of the person who is the object of your wrath, especially when that person is now quite possibly the next president of the United States. Without another word, Julian moved toward the head of the table where the chairman sat. Davis was on his feet, holding the chair. Dressed in a gray suit, white shirt and gray tie, Julian sat straight, one leg crossed over the other. He looked directly down the table at Rufus Chambers.
“You have to understand,” began Chambers, tapping his fingers together, as if to underscore the serious thought he had given to their predicament, “that this is nothing personal. It’s just that you were not what we expected.”
Julian’s eyes flew open, a smile darted across his mouth.
“It wasn’t what I was expecting, either,” he said in a self-deprecating tone that started to put everyone at ease. But he had not come to make them feel comfortable. “Don’t deceive yourselves. The speech I gave last night is only just the beginning. I did not come here as a candidate - that does not mean I’m going to leave here feeling grateful, much less indebted, for the nomination. I have the luxury of not owing anything to anyone, a luxury I am not going to give up. We can talk about that later. I came because Louis asked me if I would,” he said, suggesting that he otherwise might not have come at all. “If you have any questions, I’ll be glad to try to answer them.”
A woman laughed. “We’re sitting here while everyone else is trying to decide who they want for vice-president; sitting here, the financial backbone of the party, listening to you tell us that you don’t owe anything to anyone,” said Angela Murray in a waspish voice.
“And the question…?”
“The question is do you have any idea how much it costs to run a national campaign, a general election campaign for the presidency? Where do you think that money is going to come from, if not from us and the people who listen to us? - Small contributions of a hundred dollars or less from millions of right thinking, civic minded citizens? You don’t think you owe anything to anyone - maybe not yet,” she remarked, her strident eyes shining. She spoke as if she were holding a pointer to a list of all the things to which everyone, whether they liked it or not, would have to agree.
Julian rested his left elbow on the arm of the chair and, holding two fingers against his temple, stretched his thumb beneath the line of his chin. He fixed her with a look of silk and steel.
“You seem to forget that there is a public system.”
She laughed even louder, a corrosive, patronizing laugh. The smile on Julian’s face went deeper into his eyes.
“The other side will never do that. Obama didn’t do it, which is how he won. You would be outspent by two or three billion, when you add everything up.”
“I won’t be outspent if I don’t spend anything,” he said in a strange, cryptic way, almost as if he were speaking only to himself. “You may be right,” he said, louder and more directly, “but money isn’t as important in a presidential race as it is in other contests.”
This was a thought none of the others in the room had ever had, and, for that reason, only deepened their suspicion that Julian Drake, for all his brilliance, was politically naive.
“You weren’t a candidate; you didn’t run a campaign. You have no organization, no one who works for you. We can help with that. We have the money; we have the people. We know everyone involved in all the other campaigns, all the major candidates who were trying to win the nomination. They’re all available now. All you have to do is choose who you want. This is a major undertaking, something that requires hundreds, thousands, of people. You need a polling operation, media consultants, people who buy television time, people to do issue research, opposition research. You need someone to manage your campaign. You need -”
Julian held up his hand. “I’m sure that is exactly what I would do - if I had come here as a candidate, if I had won the nomination after a long campaign. That isn’t what I am going to do now.”
“But, you don’t understand; you have to -”
Julian threw back his head and laughed, a deep full throated laugh that enveloped the room, a laugh that seemed to carry a meaning no one could quite grasp.
“No, you don’t understand. It’s what I have been trying to tell you, the reason there isn’t any need for money; the reason why I don’t have to ask any of you for anything; the reason why, if I win the office, if I become president, I won’t be under any obligation to you or anyone else. There isn’t going to be a campaign; at least nothing like what everyone has come to expect. Things are going to be different, different from what they have been before,” he added as he rose from his chair, “more than any of you can yet imagine.”
