Fixers (39 page)

So my solution is to declare “a plague on all your houses” and blow up the lot. I realize there are risks, but the way I see it, none that are crippling. The first word out of millions of mouths when they read what I’ve got will be “impeachment.” I don’t think that dog will hunt. I believe Orteig when he swears OG never knew what was being done on his behalf. He wasn’t in the White House; he wasn’t even the nominee; the election was a year and a half off.
Winters and Holloway and Brewer weren’t privy to the arrangement that positioned them strategically. You might accuse me (and Orteig) of election tampering, but I never touched a ballot or a ballot box or paid someone to vote a certain way, and most of the refineries and pipelines through which I moved the cash lie outside U.S. jurisdiction. Besides, what Orteig and I got up to in 2007 was within only three years ratified as perfectly legal in
Citizens United
. As someone said to me once, the business of the Supreme Court is to discover law, not create it.

There’s a risk of plunging the country into another “long national nightmare,” which is how Gerald Ford described Watergate and associated commotions when he took over from Nixon. But the length of that nightmare was what? A couple of years, tops. The break-in was in August 1972, and within two years and a bit of change, Nixon was out of office. In a real crisis, with the right leadership, this country responds and heals quickly.

I plan to consult with Marina Hochster, who I hope will agree to be my Woodward and Bernstein combined. Over the past four years, thanks to B, I’ve gotten to know her. I respect her, and no present-day investigative journalist has the impact she has. Not that anything she’s done has been a game-changer. Nothing she’s ever written has made a real, practical difference. No politician or banker has gone to jail because of her. She recognizes this—and it drives her nuts, as she’s told B and me.

It’s the event written about, not the writing, that captures the public’s imagination and stirs up its fury. It’s
what
you have to write about, the creature you dig out of the muck, that grabs up the reader by his emotions;
how well
you report and write the story—dig up the dirt, come up with the right words and images—only enhances the effect. When Woodward and Bernstein tackled Watergate, there wasn’t withal the static and suppression that there is now, and even then no one followed up on the story. The front
page, the nightly network news: these were all you needed. The Internet didn’t exist; neither did social media.

But if you have the right-size story—and what could be bigger than fixing a presidential election?—then the Internet and its offspring can be unbelievably powerful when it comes to setting off a pandemic of anger and retribution.

So that’s my scheme.

I realize this represents a 180-degree swivel from where I started, and you probably want to know how this has come about—this radical change of heart and intention.

To answer the question, I fear I’m going to have to give you some sense of what I’ve been up to since we parted company four years ago.

As I’ve said, the best part of the last few years has been my life with B and her family, but there have been some professional high points, too. None higher than the Shakespeare opera series underwritten by my client Leonard King, who just sold his Zephyr family of hedge funds to a Qatari bank for a cool $10 billion. The series has been a huge success. I’ve attended the openings in Paris, Shanghai, New York, and Vienna, and all went well—especially Vienna, where the Adès
Tempest
was a huge success: ten curtain calls, standing ovations, and Leonard clapped onstage and presented with a huge bouquet of roses.

He’s setting up a foundation that he wants me to be the CEO of. I’m not sure how I’ll respond. I relish my independence. My business is fine: I have all the clients I can possibly handle, and my senior people are taking on more of the workload—clients originally mine with whom they’ve worked are calling them first. I like my new offices off Columbus Circle, although I do miss the old gang at San Calisto (I’ve kept in touch with Scaramouche). Still, a salary of $3 million a year isn’t to be sniffed at.

So everything was pretty hunky-dory until just ten days ago,
when B called me from a chartered jet on her way to Boston. She had devastating news: while in London to see friends, her mother had been run over and killed. Looked left when she should have looked right while navigating Berkeley Square, and was struck by a lorry and killed instantly. Could I come up to help out, since her father is a wreck and her brother has gone to London to fetch his mother’s ashes?

I rushed through the day’s remaining business, threw together a suitcase, and headed for LaGuardia. B had invited me to stay at the family house in Brookline, but there are times when it’s better to be nearby and available, but not underfoot. I checked in at the Hotel Charles, where I usually put up when I have business in Cambridge, and cabbed it to Brookline, arriving two hours after B.

It was weird being back in a house where, only a fortnight earlier, over Thanksgiving, I had stayed with the family under completely different emotional circumstances. But I swallowed my feelings and did my best to be helpful: ran errands, answered the phone, shook a great many hands, uttered the odd piety, and made myself useful—functionally and, I hope, spiritually.

Claudio returned from London on Thursday the 18th. The memorial service was held this past Saturday the 20th in Harvard’s Memorial Church.

It was both moving and classy. The readings and music were well chosen and delivered with art and eloquence, and unlike most upper-class funerals, the eulogists didn’t talk mostly about themselves. One felt this service was really about the Marjorie I’d known. The church felt truly suffused with love. After the instrumental interlude following the sermon—the slow movement of Beethoven’s “Spring” sonata marked
Adagio molto espressivo
, performed by a violin-piano duo from the Harvard music school—I doubt there was a dry eye in the house.

The final reading was the zinger. After the final strains of “I
Was Glad,” the congregation resumed its seats. A tall figure dressed in designer black appeared from behind the sanctuary, stopped at the front pew to embrace Thayer and his children, and made her way to the lectern. A rising murmur ran through the congregation as people realized who it was: the First Lady of the United States—FLOTUS, as the media and Secret Service shorthand her—Marjorie’s devoted former law school pupil and mentee.

I couldn’t help thinking immediately how tired Mrs. OG looked. What I saw in her face I’ve seen written in the features of other women, an expression peculiar to those married to men whom the world admires and praises and sucks up to, but men who are difficult to be married to, for any of a thousand reasons. When I reflect on OG’s marriage, I always find myself thinking of the Clintons—and the FDRs. Couples whose marriages were more in the nature of the deal I’d cut with Orteig seven years ago than an exchange of sacred vows and a mutual true love. There are frames in the terrific Ken Burns documentary about FDR when Mrs. Roosevelt had that look. It must be terribly draining, to live with someone like that. And FDR was a great man. Destiny’s jury is still out on OG.

It’s almost as if the psychological history of her husband’s presidency is written in her eyes and the corners of her mouth. I found myself wondering whether she too, like all those millions of other adherents, had been disappointed in her husband’s conduct of his office. Was it Marjorie who once told me that that FLOTUS could have had a big public career on her own, but chose to put her own prospects to one side and commit her abilities 100 percent to her husband?

When the First Lady spoke, however, it was in a strong, clear voice that belied her drawn appearance. It surely left no one in the congregation in doubt that this is a very formidable person.

“I’m going to read a few passages from a book Marjorie held dear,” she began. “The book is called
The American Democrat
. It’s
by James Fenimore Cooper. It was a favorite book of Marjorie’s and she made it a favorite book of my husband’s and mine. You might say Marjorie regarded it as a kind of secular catechism, but since the principles it enumerates are what any good Christian or person of faith—and certainly any good American—would hold dear, even though many of these seem lost to the present day, I have no hesitation in reading them here in church.”

“The copy I’m reading from was Marjorie’s own copy,” FLOTUS continued. “She gave it to me when I graduated from law school, and I will cherish it forever. The passages I’ll be reading are passages she marked. I’ve heard her quote one or two from memory; she obviously took to heart what she knew by heart.

“First, let me tell you just a bit about this book.
The American Democrat
was published in 1836, when Cooper had returned to his native land after seven years in Paris. It was written at the same time as de Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America
, so it gives us the opportunity to compare what a long-descended American—these are the same Coopers who founded Cooperstown—thought of his country as opposed to a French aristocrat. Without going into too much background, I’ll just say that Cooper didn’t like much of what he saw when he returned to his native land. Much of what he complained of will seem especially resonant today.

“Now, let’s start with this:

Hearing this, my first thought was, well, nothing changes, does it. “Leisure, money, intelligence, and means of combining.” Hello, Dreck brothers.

The First Lady read for perhaps another ten minutes. I paid close attention. Cooper was a Yale man, and if Bones had been around when he was on the Old Campus, I like to think we’d have tapped him.

Clearly, Cooper favored what I guess you could call a “moral aristocracy.” He was more than a bit of a snob, and yet at the end of the day his message is compelling, a point emphasized by the passage with which the First Lady concluded her reading:

With that, FLOTUS closed the book, looked out over the congregation for just a moment, as if to say, “You’ve heard what to do, now go do it,” then bowed her head, murmured briefly to herself—presumably a prayer for Marjorie—and stepped down from the lectern. She paused again to embrace Thayer and the twins, and took a seat beside him in the family pew, with her bodyguards lingering discreetly off to one side.

I was impressed. Marjorie had often spoken to me of Cooper’s book and had promised to get me a copy. About the only promise she hadn’t kept. The passages that had been read reflected Marjorie right down to the last atom of DNA, I thought. True noblesse oblige—the real thing—mated to uncommon common sense; faith coupled with reason and spiced with decency. Courage. Moral knitting stuck to. Codes of behavior and consideration observed. Compassion.

There was one word in particular word that several of the speakers used to describe Marjorie, an adjective that they never would use to describe, say, the merely-although-obscenely-rich like the Dreck brothers, who are trying to buy the last remnants of civil democracy out from under its citizens, or a boastful loudmouth like Donald Trump. That word is “patrician.” Marjorie was a perfect exemplar of the species. They’re hard to find now, because the qualities that make up an authentic patriciate have effectively disappeared.

Ten minutes later, after a rousing rendition of “Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past” and a final benediction by the Harvard chaplain, the service ended.

The congregation walked across the Yard toward Quincy Street and the Faculty Club. The First Lady led the way arm-in-arm with Thayer and B. The rest of us trooped along behind.

It was then that I decided I needed to make my diary public.

Thinking back, I’m tempted to regard this short stroll as my personal road to Damascus. It was as if I heard a voice—Marjorie’s voice—speaking to me out of a thunderclap heard only by me. I found myself thinking that I had somehow betrayed Marjorie. Ridiculous, I know. I had no idea she existed, she or her family, when I carried out my business with Orteig. And how responsible am I for what’s happened? There have been shortcomings in OG’s administration—serious, grievous shortcomings—and these have continued into his second term, when you’d think he’d be bidding
hard and talking tough to reclaim his historical legacy. But would Hillary have been preferable, with her husband running wild peddling influence and access? Or John McCain? A legitimate hero, sure, but with Sarah Palin a heartbeat away? That the governance of this great nation has become even more of a moral cesspool than in 2007 can’t be laid at my door; if you want to blame someone, blame Congress. Still, the feeling materialized and wouldn’t go away—it was like a pebble lodged in a shoe—that I owed amends for my role in this state of affairs. Amends to the traditions I was raised in; amends to Marjorie and what she represented; amends for betraying so much of what I had been brought up to believe, values that I had allowed to slip away the deeper and further I ventured into fixing and manipulating.