The Last Debate (14 page)

It was their specific decision to form themselves into a two-person, left-right, one-call-does-all commentary team that led to their Sunday program. All networks, national radio call-in shows, and others competed to pay them money and tribute to come on after presidential speeches and other events to offer instant analysis. Then it came to a head for Jack and Jill, CNS, and America when instead of returning to their original profession, political consulting, when the current presidential campaign began, they chose to remain on the outside in their new world. They
offered themselves to all interested parties as a commentary/television team on an exclusive basis. In a fortunate bit of timing, the bids were still being considered when Southern flopped. CNS jumped in, dramatically raising its bid both in money and program potential.

Face to Face with Jack and Jill
was not only number one in the ratings from its first week on the air, it had since gone to a full two hours and there was talk of making it even longer. “How long, O Lord, how long will it be before CNS turns over not only all of Sunday but possibly even all of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday to them?” asked the
Los Angeles Times
television critic.

As coincidence would have it, when I returned to the Inn from my jog I ran into somebody who was going to be a guest on today’s
Face to Face with Jack and Jill
later in the morning. I knew it from my reading through a stack of press releases and Media Alerts that had been pushed under my hotel-room door along with a packet of background clips and other material the
Tatler
research office had FedExed to me.

The person was Joan Naylor, the CNS anchorwoman, who like the young jogger was a debate panelist.

I had never met Joan Naylor, but she was known to be a friend of the
Tatler
because of a long, favorable profile we had run of her a few months ago. I recognized her immediately when I entered the Inn’s large Regency dining room, which was filled with flowers, white starched tablecloths, heavy silver, and journalists who were in Williamsburg for the debate. She was at a table for two with a woman I did not recognize. I, for reporting and courtesy—and, yes, bravado—reasons, decided to go over and introduce myself. I was not yet seriously interested in the panelists for my story, of course. I saw it mostly as a social call.

“Happy hunting tonight,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said. I found her to be as attractive and charming in person close-up as she was from the distance of television and as she had been portrayed in our profile.

“Meet Barbara Manning,” she said, motioning to the young black woman sitting across the table from her. “She’s also part of the hunting party.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, and extended my hand. I was struck immediately by the perfectness of Barbara Manning’s face and the coldness of her
right hand. She told me after the debate that the coldness was caused by the nervousness she had felt that morning when she woke up. She had immediately called Joan and asked if they could meet for breakfast. “I needed a fix of comfort, companionship, company,” she told me.

I had no idea of any of that at the time, obviously. I had now, by chance, met three of the four debate panelists. The opportunity to meet the fourth, moderator Mike Howley, was presented to me via a Media Alert I found under my door when I returned to my room a short time later to shower, change, and prepare for my day and night of work.

TODAY’S JOURNALISTS TO QUIZ THOMAS JEFFERSON
, said the announcement. Howley and five other reporters would participate in a special nine
A.M.
press conference with “then Governor Jefferson on the occasion of his departure from Williamsburg with the moving of the Virginia state capital to Richmond in 1780.” It was being staged as a fund-raiser for some local Williamsburg charity in the East Lounge of the Inn.

It sounded intriguing, fun—interesting. I figured there might be something there for my magazine piece. And I could possibly meet Howley, too. So I went.

Howley and the other reporters—none of whom I knew or recognized—played their parts well. So did the guy, a professional actor all dressed up in full Colonial regalia that included white breeches and a burgundy frock coat, who played Jefferson. He not only stood tall and supreme the way we would want Jefferson to stand, he also spoke in a voice that was deep and firm and Jeffersonian—or at least Jeffersonian as we would imagine it to be.

Jefferson was asked several questions that were clearly setups. They were about attacks by hostile Indians between the Ohio and Illinois rivers, a Patrick Henry-sponsored bill to collect taxes in support of Christianity, and a territorial dispute with Pennsylvania, among other things. Then for a few final minutes it turned open and freewheeling.

“Did you and your fellow revolutionaries really believe you were going to be able to prevail over Britain when you signed the Declaration of Independence?” a reporter asked.

“There are times in the course of a man’s life, sir,” said the Jefferson character without missing a beat, “when the price of doing nothing is much higher than that of defeat.”

I had no idea if Jefferson ever said anything remotely like that, but the actor certainly made it sound Jeffersonian-authentic.

Mike Howley asked the last question of Thomas Jefferson. “Have you a dream for what this new nation might become in two hundred or so years?”

“Yes, sir, I do. It is a dream I dream most nights, particularly after having spent the day looking out from Monticello, my mountaintop home west of here, at a land and a people that have had the good fortune to be put in the same place at the same time by a benevolent and thoughtful God.”

Again, it had the sound of the real Jefferson. I had no idea if it really was and it did not matter.

I went up front afterward and shook hands with Howley. We had the following exchange:

“I guess we shouldn’t be expecting any bombshells tonight?” I said. It was strictly a small-talk question.

“Not unless you know something I don’t,” he said. “I’ve got to run now, sorry. I want to catch the talk shows and then there’s a lot of work still to be done before tonight.…”

He seemed relaxed, cool, confident—the way the outside world had come to view Michael J. Howley. Sifting through his words and demeanor after the fact of the debate for any clues of what was to come was fruitless. He gave nothing away that morning to me or to Thomas Jefferson.

I, too, had clippings and background material to read and television programs to watch. It was, in fact, almost time for
Face to Face with Jack and Jill.

Joan Naylor had kept her public mouth very quiet about Jack and Jill. But privately to Jeff and to a few others she held nothing back. She thought they were more than the beginning of the end of network news. They were the end. She had already visualized the scene and heard the words when somebody, probably a somebody she had never met before, called her into an office to inform her that, effective tonight, Jack and Jill would be anchoring the nightly news seven days a week from now until the end of time. Nothing personal, he (Oh, please God, let it be a he, not
a she!) would say. We simply are no longer in a financial position to give the people what they no longer want, which is regular journalist-type people doing regular journalism-type news on television.

The awful irony for Joan, one she also mentioned to very few people, was that she thought Jack and Jill were terrific on the air. They were funny, entertaining, and fascinating to watch. It was certainly not journalism, but it was … funny, entertaining, and fascinating to watch.

And watching them was what she was doing now in a huge Williamsburg Lodge ballroom CNS had converted into a broadcast studio for Jack and Jill. Joan was waiting with twenty-two other guests for her turn to go on the air.

Their now famous opening came on. It was a double head shot, live, of Jack and Jill from the side, noses almost touching.

Jack said: “Once again you are in a position of defending the indefensible—namely that nonprincipled scumbag candidate of yours.”

Jill said: “At least he breathes and he talks, which may be more than can be said for that intellectual and emotional cipher you are supporting.”

Jack: “Watch him pull the upset of the century tonight in the debate!”

Jill: “It would take an act of God for that to happen, and He’s clearly on
our
side.”

They both turned toward the camera and Jack said: “Good morning, Democrats and other correctly thinking Americans, I am Jack.…”

Jill said: “And I am Jill. I have a good morning to the real Americans of America … the Republicans and those of like right mind who want to Take Back America.”

They smiled at the camera, then back at each other as the camera pulled back to show them sitting side by side in red, white, and blue director’s chairs while the orchestral rendition of their theme, which sounded similar to “America the Beautiful,” played in the background.

After a few credits and commercials, they started through their guests, all of whom were seated facing Jack and Jill in plush movie-house chairs arranged bleacher-style in four rows of six. There were always twenty-four chairs, and there were always only twenty-three guests. The empty chair was always reserved for the president of the United States, the outgoing one being the only public person in all of America—excepting
possibly J. D. Salinger and Elvis—who had thus far been asked and refused to appear on
Face to Face with Jack and Jill.

Jack said this morning, as he did every Sunday morning, that “one day we will look up and that empty chair will be occupied by
a
president if not
this
president.”

The twenty-three guests this morning were a typical assortment. The secretary of state, three pollsters, two columnists, two regional newspaper editors, two economists, two senators, two high-school debate coaches, a Southern Baptist minister, a Presbyterian minister, a banker, an Exxon service-station owner, two housewives, the presidents of two university student bodies, and Joan Naylor. The breakdown gender-wise was twelve men, eleven women. Eleven were white, five were black, four were Hispanic, and three were Asian. All were there to speculate, argue, or otherwise talk about that night’s debate, the one and only debate of this presidential campaign.

The swift, skillful, fun, and seemingly effortless way Jack and Jill passed the question balls back and forth and among twenty-three guests—any twenty-three guests—was a marvel and the central core of why their program worked. There was nothing else like it on television anywhere. Again, in the words of the
Los Angeles Times
television critic: “Alas, what is left for poor Norman and poor Ross to do but to add guests. They could go to 25 or 27 or 31 or even 50. Think about it. A talk show with 50 guests! Think about it! The tragedy is that somebody probably already is.”

They were more than forty-five minutes into the program before Joan was formally introduced and asked by Jack: “I guess you’re not going to tell us what you’re going to ask these two clowns tonight?”

“That’s right.”

“Make that one clown, one saint,” Jill said. “This is a pretty big deal for you, isn’t it, Joan?”

“Pretty big for everyone, I would say.”

“You could go down in history with a real zinger question, couldn’t you?” Jack asked.

“Remember what Bernie Shaw did with that wife-rape question to Dukakis,” said Jill.

“No thanks,” Joan said.

“Doug Mulvane said in his op-ed piece this morning that such hypothetical were ‘gimmicks designed to show off the questioner rather than to elicit information from the candidates.’ Do you agree?”

“Yes,” said Joan. “I think I do. Although some hypothetical might be all right. Shaw’s question did lead to quite a revelation about Dukakis.”

“Yeah, that he was a jerk,” Jack said.

Jill said: “Mulvane also said you and the other panelists should … and I quote … ‘stand in front of a mirror and say aloud: This is about them, not me. This is about them, not me.’ Did you do that this morning?”

“I didn’t have to tell myself that,” Joan replied. “I already knew it.”

“Are you in the market for questions?” Jack asked.

“Sure.”

“Well, then, how about this for Meredith? ‘Sir, why is it that you are a bigoted man intent on destroying the live-and-let-live philosophy that has helped this country grow and prosper?’ ”

Jill said: “I have one. ‘Governor Greene, is it true that you have not had a fresh idea since the day you were born?’ ”

Joan, feeling like a fool, smiled and shook her head, first at Jack and then at Jill.

“I assume all of you panelists are dyed-in-the-wool Meredith haters?” said Jill.

“No, no—”

“Is there anyone anywhere in the press who supports the man who is going to be the next president of the United States?”

“Not only not in the press but anywhere else this side of a Take It Back rally or an NRA meeting,” Jack said.

“Should we look for anything dramatic tonight, any fireworks of any kind?” Jill asked Joan.