The 45th, page 23
“I’m sure Louis has told you as much about that as he’s told me. But - and I think this is the question you and a lot of other people want to know - is when did I know what he was going to do, if in fact his collapse wasn’t real. I didn’t. I did’t know I was going to giving that speech until he was lying on the floor and he told me I had to do it.”
Rachel Good had never quite believed that. She had become convinced that from the moment he began to write that speech he had somehow known exactly what would happen.
“But you knew - you must have known - that Louis would know as soon as he read it that he could never give it and that you were the only one who could. And if you knew that,” she went on, pushing herself forward on the chair until she was perched on the very edge of it, “you must have known that he would try to find a way to make it happen, arrange things so you could give the speech at the convention and what you imagined when you wrote it would actually happen.”
A kind of hard shrewdness, not quite concealed by the friendly smile on Julian’s mouth, came into his eyes.
“I have a certain belief in fate, but I’m not clairvoyant. But you didn’t come here to delve into the strange origins of my nomination….”
Rachel had no choice but to nod a reluctant agreement. She moved back into the deep comfort of the chair and glanced down at her notebook.
“After you got the nomination, why did you decide not to run a campaign in the traditional sense, no television commercials, none of the normal campaign appearances, no staff, not much of anything, really, except speeches, each one different from the others, and the press conferences you hold every week?”
Julian hesitated. He searched her eyes, making sure she had not forgotten the condition under which they were speaking.
“I understand, this is background only, nothing will be attributed to you.”
“ I promised you an interview the night at the convention when I gave you the story about letting the convention decide who the vice-presidential candidate should be, and I am sorry I have to insist on this.”
“Speeches, press conferences, but no interviews, only this one and it has to be a secret. What is the reason for all this? No one has ever run for president this way.”
“Wouldn’t that be reason enough?” asked Julian, laughing. His eyes were alive with the sheer temerity of what he had done, defied the conventional thinking that had made politics so utterly predictable and banal. “There is a reason. What is the effect of all these political campaigns conducted through thirty-second ads? They change the way people think. Everything is reduced to an attitude, a simple-minded opinion: cut taxes, cut spending, save the environment, create jobs, stop terrorism, make America strong, make America great. It’s what Orwell was writing about in l984 - a world in which everyone speaks in slogans. And at one level everyone knows it. Listen to what all these self-styled experts say about candidates and their campaigns. The only question is the measured reaction to the different words and phrases in a debate. It is a recipe for stupidity. Everyone sits around trying to find the exact word that will produce the most favorable response. We have forgotten how to speak, what it means to make a reasoned argument, what it means to think sequentially. This is the reason why I am doing this, why there are no slogans, no mindless commercials. I’m not going to be the clown in someone’s badly written comedy. I am going to assume that there are still some people out there who want a president who is going to treat them with the serious respect they deserve, and that means, as someone once taught me, always to talk as if there were someone in the room who knows more than I do. Because if you believe that, you will treat everything with all the intelligence you can. I am doing what I am doing as a candidate because that is the way I intend to govern. Everything is going to be public, nothing is going to be private. That is the reason why, with this one exception, I won’t give interviews in which the public is not involved. I make this one exception because it is the only way I can give you the kind of background that may help you explain to your readers the reasons for the things that are happening.”
“Everything public?” repeated Rachel as if to assure herself that she had heard right. “Except what you regard as private.”
“If you mean…, then, yes, you have a point. My niece and nephew have enough to do without having people show up at all hours of the day and night asking what they think of all this.”
“I didn’t mean that. You’re the biggest story in a generation. No one has ever done what you have. They don’t even make movies about something this improbable. You’re probably going to be president and no one knows anything about you. All we have is what could be written on a half sheet of paper, a one paragraph biography.”
“You mean, ‘Who is Julian Drake?’” he remarked with a dismissive glance. “Everyone knows what I intend to do if I’m elected. It’s all there in the speeches I’ve given, in the answers I’ve given to all the questions reporters have asked. I know. You want to know - because you think the public wants to know - about my personal life. What if I told you I’ve never really had one? What if I told you,” he said with a soft undercurrent of laughter in his voice, “that from as early as I can remember all I have ever wanted to do was learn about the world and my place in it?”
“You raised, you helped to raise, two children!” objected Rachel.
“It would be more accurate to say that they helped raise me. I did not teach them anything; we learned things together. They helped me see the world with the child’s eyes that, like everyone else who thinks he has grown up, I had lost. When I say I’ve never had a personal life, that doesn’t mean that there haven’t been people I have cared about; it doesn’t mean that I haven’t had my share of disappointments. It doesn’t mean,” he said, pausing to smile in a way that suggested a confidence, ‘that I never wanted to get married.”
“Jolie Wharton. She told you. Yes, it makes perfect sense that she would. Did she tell you…?”
“Everything,” replied Julian. He shook his head at what he must have seemed like, all those years ago, the strange intensity that had both attracted and discouraged the women he had known. “What she told you isn’t all true. I really was in love with her. Marriage wasn’t just something I thought I should do.”
With three fingers of his left hand he scratched at his eyebrow and tried to think how to explain what he had not fully understood at the time. If he had gained any clarity in the vast retrospective of what was now half a lifetime there was always the question how much of what he remembered was the wishful work of his own imagination. Pressing his fingertips together over his mouth, he sat there for a moment, pensive and, as it seemed to Rachel, a little lost.
“I was always talking about what I thought important things,” he remarked, coming back to himself, “things that had no obvious bearing on what it takes to live day to day, things that had no relation to what most people are concerned about. I did not care about the things most people care about. All I wanted was to learn, to find someone who could teach me. What kind of woman would have wanted to marry someone who half the time did not know where he was or what time it was, someone more interested in what was going on - and I mean to put this in the present tense - twenty-five hundred years ago in ancient Athens than in what was going to happen tomorrow.” With a bashful grin, he added, “Not to put too fine a point on it, I was a complete disaster, a hopeless romantic unwilling to be a prisoner of the present. Which is probably the reason I was so devastated when Joli wouldn’t marry me. She thought - she told me - that she didn’t think I was really in love with her; she told me she didn’t think I could ever really be in love with anyone. I knew then I was never going to have a normal life, that I was always going to be a kind of outsider, that whatever life I had would be lived largely inside myself.”
Suddenly aware that he had gone much farther than he had wanted, disclosed more about himself than he had ever intended, Julian looked at Rachel, acknowledging the skill with which she had brought him to talk about things he would never have talked about on his own. He looked at her with the wry respect of a player who too late learns he has lost. He became confidential.
“It’s your face. I knew a lawyer who almost never lost a case at trial. A judge said it was because he had a face like a sworn affidavit. All you had to do was look at him and you were sure you could trust him. Joli told me she told you things she shouldn’t have, and now, despite that warning, I’ve done the same thing.”
“I’m obviously not as persuasive as that lawyer: I couldn’t get either of you to talk on the record.”
“That isn’t the point, though, is it? You got both of us to tell you things we never would have told anyone else.” Stretching his right arm along the back of the sofa, he turned on his hip and with what seemed genuine curiosity and an equally real doubt, asked, “Does it help? Do you know someone better when you know some of the personal details of their private life?”
It seemed an odd question. In any event, the answer was obvious.
“Yes, of course it helps.” With a reporter’s instinct, she turned it into a question of her own. “Wouldn’t you want to know as much as you could about the background of someone you were going to entrust with an important office?”
“Do you mean,” he replied with a quick, eager glance, “someone I was thinking to ask become secretary of state? No, I wouldn’t. What conceivable difference would it make whether they had a happy childhood or had ever been in love? I know nothing about your background, where you came from, what you wanted to be when you were a young girl, but I trust you to keep your word. I wouldn’t have done this with any other reporter. Part of it is that Louis knows you and trusts you, but I make my own judgments. Why do so many people seem to trust me, someone just a few months ago they had never heard of? We trust others because of judgments we make from almost the first moment we hear someone or meet someone. I didn’t fall in love with Joli Wharton because of the things she told me about herself, I didn’t fall in love with her because she was going to be a doctor, I didn’t fall in love with her because she was black and beautiful and exotic; I fell in love with her the first time I saw her. It is as simple, and as profound, as that. All this analysis, all this endless asking questions, all this search for causes - it is the mystery of existence, and instead of asking how something came to be we ought to be grateful for what it is.”
A broad smile shot sideways across his mouth, a triumph over his own impatience, as he laughed away any thought that he might ever be able to explain that what nearly everyone else took so seriously was so comically wrong.
“Next question?” he said, springing forward, ready to get back to specifics.
Rachel glanced at her list, but when she looked up, Julian was on his feet, walking to the window. He shoved his hands deep into his coat pockets and leaned against the casement with his left shoulder. With a wistful expression in his eyes, he studied the scene: not just the White House the other side of the square, but the perspective, the way it looked from this one very particular location.
“I used to come here for breakfast, when I was in the House,” he said, looking back to Rachel, sitting straight and alert in the shadows of the elegantly appointed sitting room. “Not very often, but once in a while. I would sit there, in the restaurant down on the first floor, watching well-dressed lobbyists talking seriously among themselves or with some congressman or senator, explaining how some bill would either save the republic or destroy the American economy, and I would wonder whether any of them knew where they were, if any of them knew that this hotel in which they carried on their lucrative trade was once two separate, but joined, houses built for two of the most extraordinary men this country has ever known. John Hay - do you know this? - was one of the two young assistants to Lincoln. Hay and the other assistant, Nicolay - the White House staff, if you will - wrote one of the few biographies of Lincoln worth reading. Hay went on to become one of the greatest secretaries of state we have had. Henry Adams, almost forgotten before he had a chance to make any mark of his own, along with his brother, Brooks, the last of the line that began with John Adams, his son John Quincy Adams, both of them presidents, then Charles Francis Adams, the son of John Quincy, ambassador to Russia and then, more importantly, ambassador to Great Britain during our Civil War. What was left for a fourth generation Adams to do, with all that history running in his veins, all that second-hand experience, all the stories told by all his old relatives, but become a historian himself, probably - though most of our academic historians would doubtless disagree - the greatest one we have had.”
Julian’s eyes moved slowly, and, as it were, reluctantly, back to the window and the White House and all the history he remembered, history in which, so far as he could tell, few others had an interest.
“Adams and Hay became lifelong friends,” he said, continuing his narrative as if there was some reason that made it important, a reason she would soon come to understand. He gave her a look that seemed to suggest that it was somehow the key to understanding him and what he was trying to do. “Adams, never part of what was going on around him, content to be an observer; Hay, driven to try to make some difference in what he saw as the coming madness of the world, everyone, like their friend Theodore Roosevelt intent on making America a power to be reckoned with, an industrial giant with a military force that other nations would not only respect but fear.”
Julian stared down at the hard polished floor, the side of his face burnished bronze in the sparkling light of the morning sun. The other half, the side closest to where Rachel sat silent and waiting, dark and brooding, as closed to any scrutiny as the other half seemed open to the world. When he turned to look at her his eyes now seemed burdened with regret, a sense of something already lost, the knowledge that what he wanted to accomplish was more than he could ever achieve, that for all the hope and promise, all the bright dancing dreams of the future, it would all end in failure. Then it vanished, that haunted look of a future known before it happened, vanished so quickly that it would have been easy to think it had never been there at all.
“Hay and Adams, the lives they had, the things they knew,” he remarked with cheerful seriousness. “What they both saw coming! The law of acceleration - that is what Adams called it - the increasing rate of speed with which through science and technology the world, and especially America, was moving. This, remember, was at the end of the l9th, the beginning of the 20th, century. No one was going to be able to control it! What Adams did not understand - or perhaps he did - was that the time would come when no one would want to, that the time would come when we would all become the prisoners - the willing slaves, if you will - of the science and technology that seemed to promise that with each new discovery, each new breakthrough, each new invention, we would be closer to a golden age in which everyone could have whatever they wanted and would be happier than anyone had ever been. We forgot that the only important question is what kind of people we are, what kind of people we want to become.” With a taunting grin, he added, “Write that. Say that you asked me for a list of the most important books I have read and that among other long forgotten things I mentioned The Education of Henry Adams as something that everyone who wants to understand this country and how it has changed should read. That by itself might be enough to cost me the election.”
Rachel seized on the suggestion. “And what other books would be on that list?” she asked as she turned the page in her notebook.
Julian ignored her in a way that made it seem he was not ignoring her at all. He had not finished what he wanted to say; he had left out something essential.
“It started the first world war, it started this century long series of wars and revolutions, technology, industrialization, everything changing, never anything stable, the only constant the fear that you might not keep up, that you might fall behind, that someone else, some other nation, might through some new discovery, some new development, become more powerful and that you would lose your independence and become a client state in another nation’s empire. Without any thought what we were doing, without stopping to ask what kind of country, what kind of people,, we would become, we became a world power with an empire of our own. That is the issue, the question that needs to be addressed: Should the United States be an empire or a republic? If you are an empire there is no end to the power you think you have to acquire, and like every empire that ever existed every citizen will think the same thing: that whatever you have, you have to keep acquiring more.” Julian gave Rachel a long, searching glance. “And what chance do you think I have of convincing anyone of that?”
Chapter Sixteen
Julian Drake leaned against the grey stone casement of the window, his arms crossed over his chest, staring at the White House glowing in the darkness of a cold November night the other side of Lafayette Square. It was a little before ten o’clock. The polls were closed on the East coast, but they were still voting in California.
“You want to hear a great story?” he asked, smiling at something he had not thought of in years.
Ismael Cooper was struck by the calm quiet of Julian’s voice, how utterly composed he seemed. Anyone else would have been wild with excitement, knowing that it was just a matter of minutes before every television network declared the election as good as over.
“Sure, go ahead. Tell me a great story. This may be the last time I won’t feel obligated to applaud and tell you it was the greatest goddamn story I ever heard!”
Julian turned toward Ismael slouching in the soft comfort of the sofa half a dozen steps away.
“I imagine we’ll both have enough to do without worrying about applause,” he said drily. “You may know the story,” he remarked with an air of indifference, turning back to the window. “I wonder what it is like over there. Almost everyone in politics, national politics - has had the itching eagerness to be president. They imagine what it would be like to run, to win, to hold the office. How many of them ever wonder what it would be like when it is over? How many of those who actually got there - how many presidents - gave any thought to what it was going to be like the day they have to leave? Some of them, some of the best - Lincoln, FDR, Kennedy - die while they’re still president, but the others…? How many of them haven’t wished they could do it all over again, certain that after what they have learned they could do it better? And whatever their mistakes, whatever their failures, they’re probably all convinced that history will decide that they could have been one of the great ones if only they had not been stopped at every turn by a senseless opposition. The verdict of history! They forget that history has to be written and that there isn’t anyone anymore who knows how to write it!”
