The Last Debate (24 page)

Barbara’s attention was on how few dark faces she saw out there. These white boys and girls look like they want to hang me from a limb of a tree with a rope around my neck. OK now, Gramma Maude, I need that hand of yours again.

Henry felt great up there in front of all of those ladies and gentlemen of the international media. After watching you-all make absolute fools of yourselves just now, I am even more at peace about myself, about this brown boy. Ask
me
your questions and I will tell you no lies.

And then the yelling started. Several voices, a mixture of all genders, ages, and volume, came right at them.

“Mike Howley! Mike Howley! Is it true the idea for this conspiracy was yours?”

“Was destroying Meredith what you came here to do?”

Howley’s mouth moved, but it was impossible to hear what he said. It was not impossible to see him shaking his head. No was the answer.

The questions continued at full volume all at once. The press riot continued all at once.

“Are the four of you satisfied?”

“Why did you do it?”

“Is this what the press is supposed to do?”

“Who appointed you four to decide who gets elected president of the United States?”

“Where did all of that abuse stuff come from?”

“We hear you got it from the Greene campaign.”

“Did the Greene people pay you?”

“Are any of you going to work for Greene in the White House if he’s elected?”

They were pretty good questions. But there was no way to answer any of them. There was not enough quiet space between and among the screamed questions for Howley, Joan, Barbara, or Henry to get even a word in.

Jesus, thought Barbara. Am I one of these?

Shut up, you fools! thought Henry. Let us answer!

Mike Howley held up his hands for quiet.

Trying to read his lips at the time and listening carefully to the tape afterward, I am fairly sure he only said: “There will be no answers under these circumstances.”

The yelling continued.

Mike Howley said: “Look, unless you give us some quiet …”

A few stopped screaming questions and started screaming at each other. “Pipe down!” “Let ’em talk!” “Shut up!”

Joan knew that Jeff and the twins, along with the rest of the world, were watching. She wanted to tell the twins she was not like the people in this room. Their mom did not screech at people like this. Their mom was a real journalist, one of the old-fashioned kind. The kind who treated people with dignity and respect. These screaming crazies are not journalists! They’re not even human!

Howley shouted: “There will be no answers until we and you can be heard. So shut up, goddamn it!”

There were pockets of quiet now.
Shhhhhhhhhs
ricocheted around the room.

“All right, Mike!” boomed a loud male voice. “Tell us who appointed you four people God!”

Howley clearly recognized the voice, and when he found it he recognized the face. So did most everyone else in the room, including me. They were those of T. R. (Teddy) Lemmon, Jr., the lead political reporter and analyzer for
The New York Herald.

Suddenly, magically, the room was absolutely silent.

Howley waited a few more beats and then said to the room: “Did everyone hear the question?”

That drew a few hundred laughs and/or snickers. Howley said to Lemmon, who was in the middle of the room about eight rows up: “Nobody appointed us God, Teddy. We did not see what we did tonight as playing God, as a matter of fact. If you do, then so be it. Write it.”

Jesus, thought Barbara. Mike Howley is one tough sunavabitch. That was Teddy Lemmon himself!

Howley pointed at Tom (Bat) Masterson of
The Boston Globe.
He and Bat had known and liked each other for years. Bat talked, but nobody could hear him in the avalanche of questions that came shouted from all around the room.

Mike Howley held up his hands again for quiet. “Please, let’s have some quiet.”

There was no quiet. I heard a male voice from over somewhere yell out the question: “Do you bear some responsibility for the injuries suffered in the disturbance in this room a while ago?” I would have loved to have heard an answer to that one. But it did not get answered by anyone.

Howley, on the platform, turned to Joan, Barbara, and Henry. “What do we do?” he asked.

“This is appalling,” Joan said, raising her voice to be heard. “Let’s get out of here.”

She turned to Barbara. “I’m with you,” Barbara said.

“Henry?” Barbara said after repeating what Joan had said.

“We’re press. How can we walk out of a press conference?” he said to Barbara. He moved in front of her toward the podium. Mike Howley smiled and slapped him on the back, helping him to a place right behind the microphone.

“Hey!” Henry shouted into the microphone. “Everybody in the world is watching all of us! Do you realize what kind of scene you-all are making for them to see? Don’t you realize what you already did a while ago?”

“Don’t lecture us, Ramirez!” a man yelled back. He was in the front row and thus one of the few who could hear what Henry had said.

Henry turned to face Barbara, Joan, and Howley, and gave them a palms-up what’s-the-use gesture.

And they all four walked off the stage and out of the Virginia Room after twelve minutes and having answered only one question.

What they heard as they left were boos and shouts of scorn for having run away.

I could not even begin to imagine at that moment what the American people were thinking about me and the others of their free press.

After a state and sound of civilized behavior returned to the Virginia Room, I phoned Jonathan Angel, my
Tatler
editor. He had caught sight of me on television during the press riot. “Are you all right?” was the fourth question he asked me from New York. The first three were: “Are those people nuts?” “Was it as bad as it looked?” “Is it over?”

My answer to all four questions was yes—yes, they
are
nuts, it
was
as bad as it looked, it
is
over, and I
am
all right.

“Jesus,” said Jonathan. “Did you hear what Jill just said?”

“Jill?”

“
The
Jill of Jack and Jill. She said the panelists should be indicted for criminal conspiracy. Jesus … Let me see what Ross is up to.”

I heard the sounds of another set of televised voices in Jonathan’s background. “He’s got Gerry Ford and Walter Mondale.…” I heard a click. “Norman’s got a bleacher full of senators.… Tom, are you watching this stuff? It’s incredible. Look! PNN’s got shots of cars full of Meredith supporters turning around in the middle of the highway. They were on their way to Williamsburg. They heard him say ‘fucking.’ It’s unbelievable. They heard him on their car radios. I cannot believe this.”

I could see glimpses of Jack and Jill and Ross Perot and Norman Schwarzkopf and their guests and all kinds of other things in the various TV monitors around the room. But I could not hear what anybody was saying.

Said Jonathan: “Jesus. Jack and Jill just announced they were going to stay on the air until they got to the bottom of this thing.”

“That’s what I want to do, too, Jonathan,” I said. “I want to stay on this story.…”

“Go, Tom, go. Yes, yes. Go after this story with everything you have. Go until you have everything, until you have every drop, until
you
get to the bottom of it, until you drop.”

I was delighted. I said: “Thank you, thank you.”

He kept talking. “The earth moved a while ago, Tom. I felt it. We all felt it. The earth movers were those four people out there on that stage. Go get ’em, Tom. Who are they? What are they? Where are they? Jack and Jill said Joan Naylor was coming on their show. Ross and Norman said they were trying to get all four of them. Jesus, think of the questions. Particularly for Howley. Howley! Who would have thought Howley? Why did he and the others do what they did? Who are they? How are they? I want to know it all. Every tiny little detail, Tom. Give it to me. Give it to America. They moved the earth, Tom. Four journalists moved the political earth of America. They got Meredith to say ‘fucking’ in front of everybody! How did they do it? Go get that story. Go, Tom, go.”

Go, Tom, go.

“Jesus, Norman’s already gone to the phone calls! He said there’s never been so many in the history of the phone! Not just to him but everybody. Everybody’s on the phone, Tom! Jesus! Perot’s doing something now with Lilly.… He’s something with Greene.”

“He’s the campaign manager,” I said.

“Right, right. He just compared the four debate panelists to the signers. The guys who signed the Declaration of Independence. Jesus!”

It was time for Tom to go.

I left Jonathan in the hands of his channel switcher and Jack and Jill, Ross and Norman. My intention was to go, Tom, go immediately from the Virginia Room in search of the four earth movers. But the authorities had yet to alter the room’s “status quo,” meaning they had yet to conclude that the press could be trusted to move about Colonial Williamsburg and elsewhere in the outside world without hurting ourselves or others.

So I moved over to a corner of the room where there were a cluster of television sets. All of them were tuned to some kind of debate-reaction programming. Except on some of the specialized cable channels that ran nothing but old movies or documentaries about icebergs and wolves mating, there was nothing else to watch. Reaction to what had happened on that stage some fifty feet down the hall from where I was then standing had consumed all of television, and through it not only Jonathan Angel and his friends on the West Side of New York, but most everyone in America, too.

And there on the screen of one of the monitors came Joan Naylor on the
Jack and Jill
show. Several of us there in the corner moved right up to the set so we could hear. But in a few moments it was no longer necessary. Miraculously, the Virginia Room got absolutely silent. Everyone—all three-hundred-plus members of the confined press—also wanted to hear what Joan Naylor had to say. They wouldn’t listen to her before when she was right there in the room with them, but now they did. Now they would listen.

Jill came at Joan in a full rage.

“I assume the first thing you did after the debate was take a shower?” she asked.

The camera, up close on Joan, revealed without question that she had no idea what Jill was getting at. “A shower?” she said. “I’ve been waiting down the hall to come on your program.…”

“To wash off the dirt and slime of what you and your three co-terrorists did to David Donald Meredith?”

Now Joan knew what was going on. And she was up to it. “He did the worst terrorism on himself. I would think that you and the other Meredith supporters have had reason to take a lot of such showers during this campaign—and another after what he did tonight.”

Ms. Perky had decided she was not going to take any shit from the likes of Jill of Jack and Jill.

Jack said: “Great answer, Joan. Absolutely perfect.” He sent one of his traditional scowls toward Jill. Then back to Joan, he said: “But. But, but. As much as I abhor Meredith, Joan, and was as repelled as anyone by his profane fit there at the end, I must say the idea of four journalists interposing themselves between the candidates and the voters the way you-all did tonight gives me serious pause. I like the end result—exposing Meredith for what he really is—but I wonder about the means. That is my question.”

It was, of course, no such thing as a question. But again, Joan was there. “We did no interposing,” she said. “The voters of America will make the final decision on Election Day. They will make their own judgments about the candidates and about what happened here tonight.…”

“It was outrageous what you did,” Jill said.

“You are welcome to your opinion just like every other voter, Jill,” Joan said.

“Whose idea was it? Whose idea was it to take the electoral process into your own hands?” Jack asked.

“We all made it and we made it together.”

“Why won’t you answer Jack’s question?” Jill said.

“She did, darling Jill,” Jack said, turning to face his wife/co-host.

“She did not, darling Jack.” Swiveling back to Joan, she said: “We hear it was Howley. We hear he browbeat the other three of you into doing it.”

“That is not right. We were together. Nobody browbeat anybody into anything.”

Jill said: “Are you proud of what you did, Joan Naylor?”

“I don’t know if ‘proud’ is the word.…”

“Would you do it again?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is this the kind of thing we can expect from journalists now? Deciding for the voters who should win or lose?”

Jack said to Jill: “Come on, darling Jill. As Joan said, the voters still make the final decision. Nothing that happened here in Williamsburg changes any of that.”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong. Everything changes because of what happened here in Williamsburg.”

Jack said to Joan: “I do have one last question. We asked you here this morning if any bombshells were coming tonight and you said no. Why did you tell us that?”

“It was an honest answer,” said Joan. “Nothing along the lines of what we did had even been discussed by then, much less decided on.”