Primary Colors (17 page)

The Stanton suite, where we met, was something of a mess now. The whole sixth floor of the Hampton Inn, where we had camped out, was beginning to take on the musky odor--sweat, dirty laundry, stale pizza--of a college dorm. We each had our rooms. There were piles of garbage everywhere--newspapers, faxes, campaign literature, street signs, empty Diet Cokes, half-eaten sandwiches, empty Dunkin' Donuts boxes, spoiled fruit. There was an actual campaign office i
n d
owntown Manchester; but more and more, as we hunkered down, the sixth floor became the nerve center of the campaign. Brad had moved in Xerox machines, faxes and computers. There was a press office; there were muffins--and bustle. I was relieved by the bustle: we still seemed a normal campaign.

Susan floated above the mayhem. When we met that Friday morning, she sat at the head of the table in the suite, carefully put together in a blue Armani blazer and gray slacks, with a very cool lime silk blouse, drinking tea. Her hair was gathered, severely, under a hairband. Her eyes were clear, the least bloodshot of anyone's in the mom; she was wearing mascara--and lipstick. She was making a statement. The rest of us were a mess. "Leon, when do you think we'll have some sense of how this is playing?" Susan asked.

"Well, we know this much already: We were moving and Chicago stopped us. We didn't lose anything, but we stalled out at thirty-five. No one else is moving either." Leon was sitting but moving; his leg was jiggling, which caused his tight blond curls to shudder slightly--a human hummingbird. "It's as if this whole thing is frozen. The folks want to see what happens next. Now, I'm sure a lot of the others will be in the field tonight, but Ins gonna hold off. Friday nights are lousy." "But won't this be different," Susan asked, "with the debate and all?"

"Let the debate settle in," Leon said. "Immediate reactions don't mean much there, either."

"But we gotta have some sense of where it's goin'," Richard said. He was jiggling, too. Then he was up and pacing. "And we gotta start preparing for what happens if we start to lose ground. Like what do we put on the air? Do we confront this stuff directly? Y'know they mighta given him Chicago--twenty-five years ago and all--and they mighta given him Cashmere, she's sellin' a story, right? But the two, right on top of each other. Y'knowhattamean? Y'know, do we really want a former revolutionary who messes around with hairdr--" Richard stopped in his tracks. All eyes turned to Susan, who was flushed and furious. She launched herself into Richard's face: "He didn't fuck Cashmere McLeod," she said with a vehemence that was impenetrable and startling. The mom was silent. Susan was standing
,
leaning, hands planted on the table, staring us down; no one, so far as I could see, had the courage to stare back. "If you can't handle that simple fact, you can leave right now," she said.

No one knew what to say. I didn't know what to think, and I didn't dare look around the table--not even just across it, at Daisy--because I was afraid that it would convey something less than total devotion. "All right, then," Susan said. "Let us think this through."

So much for that: there would be no debate on how we'd "handle" Cashmere McLeod. The campaign would proceed under the assumption that the story was trash. The official posture would be outrage: who could take such garbage, sold to a supermarket sheet for money, seriously? "Who has thoughts about Sunday?" Susan asked.

"You do Sixty Minutes, you have a national audience," Arlen said. I looked at Daisy now: she was deferring to her boss, but she had her doubts. She glanced back at me: it was an I-need-a-hug glance. She had a wad of Kleenex in her hand; her nose was red and running; her eyes were watery, feverish; she coughed. Sporken continued, bubbly: "You and the governor will be able to put this thing down, show who you are, what this campaign is really all about, and you'll do it before the largest possible audience."

"They gonna let you show what this campaign's all about?" Richard asked. "Who's been dealing with them?"

"Howard?" Susan asked.

"They will give you twenty minutes, immediately after the postgame Super Bowl show," Howard said dryly, precisely. "It will be Lesley Stahl or Steve Kroft. They didn't even propose Wallace--I guess they figured we'd never say yes. I said you'd only be interested if you and the governor could talk about the real issues in the campaign, why you're running. We didn't want the piece to be a high-toned National Flash. They said they understood that."

"This would be live?" Marty Muscavich asked.

"I don't know," Howard said.

"Does it matter?" Susan asked.

"Of course," Muscavich said. He had a kindly, rubbery face, dominated by a large mouth with thick lips. His hair was white, what was left of it. I remembered seeing pictures of him, from the sixties--black and whites, White House photos; he was never one of the group inthe Oval Office, but you'd see him in the campaign shots, one of the bright young men in thin, dark, loosened ties and slope-shouldered Ivy League suits surrounding the young president as he made his way through a crowd. He'd never been a real player, but he'd been there. And now he was here, with us, wearing a dullish paisley tie and a PT-109 tie clasp. (He was the only man in the room wearing a tie, I realized.) "If it's live, you can control it better," he said. "You can tell your story, use the tension of the moment to embarrass whoever's interviewing you. Y'know: Why on earth is a nice fella like you so interested in this trash? Why would you dignify such accusations? This is a presidential campaign; let's talk about the economy. If you pretape, they have control: even if you get the upper hand on their interviewer, the audience will never know that. Your great moments'll wind up on the cutting-room floor."

"I don't know why we have to do any of this," Lucille said. Marry ignored her and went on: "There's a famous story about Menachem Begin and Sixty Minutes. Who knows? It might even be true. Anyway, Mike Wallace-I think it was Wallace-wants to interview Begin. He calls up and flatters him, and says he'll need two hours to do the interview. 'Two hours, Mr. Wallace?' Begin says. 'You are going to use two hours of Menachem Begin on American television?' Wallace said no. They would edit the piece down to eighteen minutes. 'Then, Mr. Wallace, I will give you eighteen minutes,' Begin said."

"Howard, why don't you go into the other room and call them?" Susan said. "We'll talk about Nightline."

"Do we have to do it?" Lucille asked. "And why do we have to do it tonight? Why can't Koppel wait till Monday or something? It's gonna step all over the debate."

"We asked the Stanton campaign to par-ti-ci-ate in this broadcast," Richard said, doing an awful Ted Koppel, "but they refused. So they must be guilty as fucking sin, right?"

"So we just have to take it?" Lucille pressed. "They're going to dignify this garbage, treat it like a real story-and we have to go along with that?"

"They say it's a show about how the media handles these sorts of stories," I said.

The room dissolved in laughter. "Hey, why'n'tcha call Koppel back"--Richard was giggling--"'n tell'im we're up for a show about how fucking Nightline finesses sexy stories it doesn't want to acknowledge? I'll get on for that."

"Oh, that would give us real credibility," Lucille said. "The Stanton campaign will be represented tonight by a hyperactive redneck from outer space."

"You'd do well yourself," Richard said, and was about to say something fabulous about Lucille and sex when he remembered Susan was in the room, and shut down.

"Well, who do we put on?" Susan asked.

"How 'bout Henry?" Lucille said.

"Not bad," Richard said. "He can Mau-Mau Ted with race voodoo and erudition."

"Henry's too young," Susan said. I was sort of stunned, and yet relieved. I was being talked about as if I were a commodity, as if I weren't there--but I was more than happy to be rejected for this particular assignment. "We need someone more authoritative. Marty?" she asked. Susan had, suddenly, fallen in love with Marty.

"Who ant I?" he asked. "You need someone who's been associated with the campaign."

"Who the fuck knows who's been associated with the campaign?" Richard asked.

"The people who watch Nightline," Marty said. "It's a New York--Washington show. They want to see what kind of face you're going to show the public when times get tough, and they also want to see some continuity. If you change horses now, they'll think we're panicking."

"Aren't we overthinking this a little?" Leon asked.

"No," Daisy said. "Our public face is absolutely crucial, especially now We need someone who's calm, confident--and someone who looks like a regulation American: I nominate Arlen."

Oh, Daisy: browning the boss. But she had a point. As I looked around the room, I realized that, as a campaign, we were short on regulation Americans. As if to prove my point, Howard returned then, sere and hawklike and intense. If you put hint or Richard, or Lucille, or Libby on the air, or, better still, all four of them together, you woul
d h
ave the College Bowl team from Bedlam State. I started to smile at the notion of them, there together: the Stanton campaign electroshock troops-then saw that Daisy thought I was laughing at her. She froze me with her eyes, then seized up into a fit of tight, angry coughing. Poor girl.

"I think Daisy's got a-" I began, but Susan wanted to know about 60 Minutes. (Daisy acknowledged my apology with a nod, wiping a cough-induced tear from her eye.)

"Tape," Howard said.

"You asked for live?" Susan asked.

"Of course, but they gave me some technical gobbledygook that was impossible to understand."

"You said live was the only way we'd do it?"

"I implied it. I didn't want to close any doors."

"Do we really need this?" Lucille asked again. "Is this how you want to be introduced to the American public? Those are going to be real people-American people-not just primary voters out there watching. They're not thinking about politics yet, and suddenly you get this governor from a state no one ever heard of, denying a supermarket tabloid story on Sixty Minutes right after the Super Bowl. Doesn't that look just a little bit defensive? If Leon is right, and we don't know how the folks are reacting to this thing, why should we put everything on the line? People may turn out to be sane about this. They may just think it's trash. You never know."

A reasonable point from Lucille. Wonder of wonders. "But we do need to do something," I said, "or else they're going to say we're ducking it. We should make some sort of stand. The Times or the Post maybe?"

"Don't have any more control over those fuckers than we do CBS," Richard said. "I say Brinkley."

"What's the story with Brinkley?" Susan asked.

"They were going to do the president's trip to Japan," I said, "but they said they'd give us twenty minutes at the top, before the Jack Smith set-up piece. We can do it from here. But I don't know. You want to contrast our problems with the president being presidential for a change?"

"It's not the president they're having on, is it?" Arlen asked.

No, of course not. The secretary of state. "Then no one's going to notice," Richard said. "Soon as we're off, half of Washington's gonna pick up the phone and start callin' around to the other half--How'd he do, how'd he do? Y'knowhattamean?" True enough. I wasn't having a very good meeting here.

"Who does the interviewing?" Susan asked.

"The usual," I mid.

"Cokie?" She asked.

"I'd guess," I said.

"Then it's gotta be both of us."

Lucille looked up sharply at Susan. "You . . ."

Susan met her glance--calmly, firmly, completely under control. Well, of course it had to be both of them. I had assumed it would be both of them. But up till that moment I hadn't realized how absolutely crucial Susan's presence was going to be. She would be watched as closely as the governor. She would have to strike the right chord--vehement, but not too defensive. I wondered what she really thought about all this; I realized I didn't have a clue, not a scintilla of an inkling. I was feeling out of it, removed from them for the first time since I'd signed on.

One thing was clear. Susan had--suddenly, and not very subtly--taken charge. She had decided how we'd respond to the Cashmere situation (and that there wouldn't be any internal debate about it). She would make the final call on who did Nightline. She was, obviously, tilting toward Brinkley and away from 60 Minutes. She had always been a powerful force in the campaign, of course, but Cashmere had made her indispensable. "Henry, where's Jack?" she asked, emotionless. "You want to take this to him before we firm it up? Now, let's move on to the debate."

The debate was strange, otherworldly. Charlie Martin hit us for not being specific enough on health care; Lawrence Harris hit us for proposing a tax cut, given the enormous budget deficit; Bart Nilson hit us for not proposing more government jobs to ease unemployment. None of them talked about Chicago or Cashmere. It was as if there were two campaigns going on: the legitimate one, the campaign being covered by the prestige papers and the television networks (none of whom had touched Cashmere yet)-which our opponents were still honoring-and the trashball one, the tabloid morass that had become our reality. There was overlap, but it was oblique: the other candidates' energy level was up a notch, their excitement over our difficulties was palpable, but it remained discreet. That was smart. (It was interesting how even mediocre politicians reflexively found their way to the elemental rules of the game-in this case: Never attack an opponent when he is in the process of killing himself.) So they remained determinedly high-toned. They stayed clear of the sewage, fearing that some might splash back on them. But heightened ambition was in the air, sharp and obvious, like English Leather, and you could see the three of them puffing themselves up, trying to appear presidential, auditioning to replace us-if and when we went down.