The Last Debate (6 page)

“We had to at first. He’s our main guy, like it or not. You were our fallback and they wouldn’t buy it.”

“Who wouldn’t buy it?”

“I can’t say.”

“Because you don’t know or because you can’t say?”

“I can’t say.”

“Damn it, Carol. Damn it.”

“I agree. Damn it.”

“Howley? He’s mainly print. And he’s already done everything. Isn’t it time to start spreading it around a little bit?”

“That was exactly the argument we made. But they wouldn’t budge.”

“I had my heart set on this. I really did. It … Well, I don’t have to tell you what it could have meant.”

“That’s true.”

“Is this some kind of message being sent some kind of crazy way from the network?”

“No! Don’t go anchorperson paranoid on me now.”

Joan stood to leave. The feeling of happy warmth had been replaced with fury heat. “Well, count me out. I am an anchorwoman. It’s either moderate or nothing. I will not be just another panelist.”

“Sit down, please, Joan.”

“No.”

“All right. Have it standing up. I will join you.” Carol stood. “Number one, dear friend and colleague, let’s not lose sight of what is going on
here. We are talking about the one and only debate of this campaign between the candidates for president of the United States.” She handed Joan a piece of paper. It contained the advance word on next week’s poll showing Meredith moving out ahead of Greene. “This is what it is about.” Joan glanced at it and said: “I do not believe the country is going to elect that guy. I don’t care what the polls say. In the privacy of the voting booth they will not vote for Meredith. But what’s your point?”

“This is not about Joan Naylor or Mike Howley or anybody else who goes out there and asks questions.”

“It’s about network-news politics. That is what this is about,” Joan said.

“I’ll ignore that. The really important point is the deal is done. We already told them you would do it.” “You had no right to do that!”

“Oh, please. Let’s not go into rights. The fact is that this was worked out on a slot level. A slot for CNS News on the panel. All of the networks wanted one. We are the only one that got one. The other three slots are going one to radio, two to print. We are the only television. We won. We got it. We being CNS News, not you Joan Naylor. It’s that simple.”

“That is not simple. That is awful. Who did we make the slot deal with?”

“Oh, shit, Joan, just do it. One hundred million or so of your closest friends and fans will be watching. It is good for you and for the network.”

“I want to know who we dealt with.”

“Drop it.”

“Tell me or I will not be a party to this, thank you.”

“Yes you will, thank you.”

The phone on Carol Reynolds’s desk rang at that moment. Within a few more moments Joan was talking to Nancy Dewey. With Carol Reynolds staring at her, she listened to the official invitation. And when Dewey finished Joan Naylor said, Fine, OK, I accept, I will be one of the panelists at the Williamsburg Debate.

She then walked out of Carol Reynolds’s office without saying another word. She was angry at Carol and the network and the gods and devils of television. But she was also not proud of herself. She wished even then that she had merely declined the invitation politely. She didn’t because in
the final few seconds she had to think before replying to Nancy Dewey, she realized that the decision to decline was also probably the decision to walk. Good-bye CNS News, good-bye chance to be the first sole principal woman anchor in the history of network television. At the age of forty-two, her opportunities for bigger and better things were here and most likely only here. CNS had spotted her on KFAA in Cincinnati twenty-two years ago and had brought her along and to national prominence. She was theirs, they were hers. There had even been a story in a recent
TV Guide
that the competition for viewers in the new multioutlet media world might cause the networks to scrap their perky women who were always there under what was known as the Doris Day Always Lives Here rule and go exclusively to what the article called “slink, slim, and cerebral” in their women anchor and correspondent corps. ABS had already done that with its prime-time newsmagazines. All four of them were anchored or co-anchored by women clearly chosen according to what Russell Baker in
The New York Times
called “their Bedroom Fantasy Quotient, hereafter and forever to be referred to only as their B.F.Q.”

Joan told me that if she had known her network had made a deal with “that devil Meredith” for its slot on the panel, she would have definitely declined
and
walked. There is no way for me to evaluate such a hypothetical declaration.

Joan Naylor did not go home from the CNS studio on Wisconsin Avenue, NW. She had a network car and driver take her directly and late to a dinner party for twelve at the Cleveland Park home of Lyle Willard and Marge Chambers-Willard on Highland Park Place, NW. Willard was a law partner of Joan’s husband, Jeff. Marge was trained as a lawyer but had spent a few years as a reporter for the
Chicago Tribune
and then CNN before becoming what she was now, the executive director of Women in Communications and the Arts, an international study and lobbying organization.

Joan was able to say only a brief hello to Jeff, who was already there, before Marge took her over to meet the special guest for the evening, South African novelist and activist Nadine Gordimer. Joan had wanted to tell Jeff about the debate things, but it was not possible. He was not only her husband and the father of her children, he was also her number one adviser on all professional things that really mattered. Normally she
would have called and consulted with him before deciding on Williamsburg. But that had not been a normal situation in Carol Reynolds’s office just now.

A while later at the table, and by her own account and admission, Joan did something really stupid. She told her dinner companion on the right, Senator Lewis of Missouri, about the debate invitation. The senator, without a word of reaction to her, tapped his glass for attention.

“Ladies and gentlemen, if I may stop proceedings here for a quick moment for a special announcement,” he said. When everyone was quiet, he said: “It is with great pleasure that I announce that my distinguished and esteemed and charming dinner companion on my left, the one and only Joan Naylor, has been selected to be one of the panelists of the one and only presidential debate coming up at Williamsburg.”

Joan looked across the table at Jeff, whose face was nothing but a huge smile. “Madam moderator, I salute you,” he said. If Joan had been sitting next to him she would have slugged him. If she had had a 9mm pistol she would have shot him. If she had had a baseball bat she would have hit him and his head out of Cleveland Park.

“Here, here,” somebody else said.

“I’ll drink to that,” said another, and there was nice noise around the table. When it died down Joan, in great pain, said: “As a matter of fact, I am not the moderator. I’m one of the three panelists. Mike Howley’s going to moderate.”

Jeff’s smile disappeared. It was replaced by a deep color of red.

Joan Allison Naylor and Jeffrey Alan Grayson had met at a cocktail party fifteen years earlier. She had just come from Cincinnati to Washington as a general-assignment reporter for CNS; he had just joined Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, a prestigious Washington law firm. He had graduated fifth in his law-school class at Harvard and clerked for a federal judge in his hometown, St. Joseph, Missouri. Jeff proposed marriage six months to the day after they met and they married six months to the day after that. Joan had kept her own name when they married, a natural thing to do at the time. Joan Naylor told me the only problem it caused now was with their twelve-year-old twin girls. They carried Grayson as their last name, which meant nobody knew Joan Naylor was their mother until they were told. And then that usually only confused things. Jeff very
much wanted Joan to change her last name to Grayson but also very much understood why professionally it made no sense. Joan Naylor was Joan Naylor. Joan Grayson would be nobody.

I’ll never take your last name now! was the message she was transmitting with her eyes across the Willards’ dinner table at this moment.

“Well, well, what difference does it make?” said Lyle Willard, the perfect host. “Moderator or panelist or whatever, our Joan will be the one and only star of that one and only night.”

“I agree,” somebody else said.

“It’s an honor, no matter,” said another.

“It
does
matter,” Marge said sternly, taking charge. “It matters a lot.”

Joan said, “Please, Marge,” wanting desperately to keep this from going on. She knew Marge Willard.

It was too late. Marge Willard said: “I think it is outrageous that you were not chosen to moderate and I will say so publicly and loudly.”

“Good for you,” said the senator, which came out sounding condescending and drew a stern frown from Marge Willard.

“Please don’t, Marge,” Joan said. “It will only make it worse.”

“I disagree. These people should not be allowed to get away with this kind of crap anymore.”

Jeff said: “Marge is right, honey.”

That drew a sharp shut-up stare from Joan. Shut up! was what she wanted to shout to Marge and to everyone else.

“What is your network going to do about this?” Marge asked. “They should be raising the real hell.”

Joan just shook her head. Maybe if she refused to talk, the whole thing would peter out on its own. She was wrong again. Mary Beth Riley, the chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, was sitting on Jeff’s right. She was a former Wimbledon tennis champ who had gone on to a second stardom as a Stanford economist. She was known as someone who took no prisoners. She said now in a rising voice to Joan:

“I think it is outrageous that the CNS network is not prepared to defend the right of its premier woman anchor to moderate this debate rather than just be a panelist. You should be moderating, and the fact that you are not is a clear case of discrimination and you know it.”

Joan, still determined to control the damage, said only: “It’s more
complicated than that, Mary Beth.” She gave Willard a pleading look. Please move it on to something else! Help!

Willard read it and said: “The real question about Williamsburg is Meredith. Is this country really going to follow that talking buffoon over the cliff into extremism, isolationism, racism, and many other forms of fanaticism?”

Everyone had an opinion and they carried the rest of the evening through to the dinner party’s conclusion promptly at 11:10.

Joan and Jeff were the first to leave and thus the first to have at each other in the privacy of an automobile.

Michael J. Howley was on an airplane thinking strange things when he received the first contact about the Williamsburg Debate.

He was thinking about the very early morning during the 1980 campaign when somebody—probably Mashek or Dickenson—asked everybody on the press bus to write the lead for his or her own obit. They were about to get back on their snake-bit chartered jet to follow Jimmy Carter from Atlanta to Kansas City, Chicago, Des Moines, Minneapolis, Denver, Los Angeles, and finally to San Francisco. The plane, a United 727, had had a series of disconcerting mechanical problems, the latest having been a tire blowing out on landing just the night before. The idea, which not everyone thought of as a complete joke, was that it would be a thoughtful parting gesture to have some copy standing by for their respective employers when the plane went down.

Mike Howley wrote and recited out loud on the bus:

“The most prominent person aboard the fallen press plane was Michael J. Howley, America’s premier political reporter. His only youthful ambitions had been to be William Faulkner and to be the first boy in his high-school class to run off to Durant, Oklahoma, to get married.

“He was thirty-four.”

Mary McGrory topped him and everyone else with:

“Mary McGrory, the most beautiful columnist in the world, had been a Las Vegas showgirl before falling back on a career in journalism.

“She was twenty-three.”

That occasion and that campaign came back to him as he looked out
the window of this other jet, a regular-schedule American Airlines 757 still on its initial ascent from the Dallas-Fort Worth airport on its way to Washington National. Howley strained his eyes and his imagination off and down to the left to see Denison, Texas, the place he would have run from to Durant, the marriage capital of that very small part of the world. Nobody he loved or even knew well lived in Denison anymore, not even May Ann Brinkman, the girl he would have run off with if she would have gone, which she most surely would not have done.

He was most likely struck by the one singeing similarity between 1980 and this election. No thoughtful person he knew, most particularly in the press, believed then that Ronald Reagan should be president of the United States, but they were all sure he was going to be. All rational people in the country as well as the thoughtful ones were now certain David Donald Meredith should not be president and were terrified by the prospect that he was going to be. The upcoming NBS–
Wall Street Journal
poll the office had just told Mike Howley about made that more than just a prospect.