The Speechwriter (15 page)

I gave up. Let him figure out what to say himself, I thought.

Five or ten minutes before he was supposed to leave for the event, he burst into the office. “Okay, what am I saying at this thing? You've had time to think about it. Give me something. Go.”

“Governor,” I said, “I'm out. I've given you everything I can think of.”

“Okay, this is pathetic.” He gritted his teeth and narrowed his eyes, like a wolf. “Pathetic. I can't believe you've been with me for, what, three or four years now, and you can't think of a single interesting thing to say at a—at a—at a whatever this is. I've got to walk into this thing, not you. I've got to stand
up in front of a crowd, not you. And I don't have jack to say. This is a joke.”

Somehow, I don't know how, an idea came to me. It was like Nat's inspirations, only real. “What's the date?” I asked.

“Wha—?”

“The date. Isn't it the fourth?”

Nat, who was listening silently, nodded yes.

“It's Rosa Parks's birthday.”

The governor just stared at me. His face softened.

“That's what you want,” I said. “Rosa Parks thought about buses in a new way. What she did on a bus changed the world. What TerraPax is doing with an old idea—the bus idea—has the potential to change the world. Both take courage. The one changed society for the better and made us a better nation. The other is improving our quality of life, or the quality of our air, or something, and it has the potential to make us a better society. Something like that.”

It was absolutely ridiculous, but it was perfect. I knew it and he knew it.

At last he said, “Okay. That's something. That's actually something.”

Soon we were back to writing op-eds. But it was a trickier business now. Scores of words, phrases, and concepts were, like the governor's love story, forbidden. I couldn't use the word “family,” for example, or “faith” or “cry” or “love.” Any of these would have invited the ridicule of the naughtier commentators.
He was already the victim of enough double entendres without adding to the list; many a joke was made about the governor having his own “stimulus package,” and “hiking on the Appalachian Trail” had become his special contribution to American slang. After I wrote the phrase “hiking taxes” it occurred to me that “hiking” would have to be changed to “raising.”

Before the fall he had often alluded to his sons as members of a future generation whose income the federal government was effectively stealing by spending borrowed money. Scratch all references to the boys. Even if he'd betrayed their mother and not them, it would have sounded rich for him to affect deep concern for their well-being; the rhetorical reprisals would have been swift and painful. Before the fall he had often criticized the federal government's fiscal and monetary policies by referring to Argentina's experience with hyperinflation during the 1970s and 1980s. Obviously he couldn't say anything about Argentina, so that argument was gone. But it wasn't just Argentina. It was any South American country; they were all too close, too suggestive. Before the fall the task of writing remarks to be delivered at the opening of a Brazilian-­owned manufacturing plant wouldn't have taxed my imaginative powers; now it became a challenge.

Things settled down. He wasn't invited to speak at any out-of-state events any more, but the Rotary Clubs were always happy to have him, and even a damaged governor is good enough for a ribbon-cutting ceremony, of which there seemed to be an inordinate number during that last year. The one thing that changed definitely for the worse was the sheer embarrassment of being a writer for a disgraced politician.
One minute you worked for a popular and energetic politician, one whose name was frequently mentioned (however tenuously) among those of other presidential contenders, and the next you worked for a blubbering emotional wreck of a man. Even now, when I tell people what I used to do, someone will ask, “Did you write
that
speech?” I just chuckle miserably.

The late-night shows, the columnists, the bloggers—they were relentless: always crude, often predictable and unfunny, occasionally devastating. Maria's name was part of the fun: “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” Eventually we began to enjoy the humor in it. At one point a few of us competed to produce the most apt literary quotation. The winning entry came from
The Picture of Dorian Gray
: “I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it brings a great deal of romance into one's life.”

The governor became to us like a drunkard father. He was a monster and a lout, but he was our governor; we could ridicule him, but outsiders couldn't. So when a variety of opponents and former allies tried to capitalize on his political weakness, we responded from the soul. We disliked him severely already—some of us hated him—so if they had simply ignored him or at least been subtle in their attacks, we would have agreed with them. As it was, they tried to destroy him, and we felt obligated to fight back, hard.

The situation brings to mind Adam Ferguson, the eighteenth-­century political philosopher, whose works I read at Edinburgh. Ferguson thought the spirit of rivalry, when kept within limits, had the beneficial effect of encouraging a proper affection for one's own nation or culture. Rivalry and patriotism exist, says Ferguson, in a kind of symbiotic relationship: “Our attachment to one division, or to one sect, seems often to derive much of its force from an animosity conceived to an opposite one: and this animosity in its turn, as often arises from a zeal in behalf of the side we espouse, and from a desire to vindicate the rights of our party.”
I
Anyone who has played sports at a competitive level or worked for a underdog company fighting for market share will admit that the emotions flowing from sheer dislike of a competitor, or from an almost irrational desire to vanquish that competitor, have a way of eliciting a high level of performance.

I think of one senator especially. Even now I want to call him a pretentious semiliterate boob—which itself suggests I still have some emotional investment in defending the governor. This senator got hold of some law that state employees are required to take the least expensive option in any travel arrangements paid for by the state. It was a preposterous reason to attack the governor, or any governor, for not flying coach, but the senator was running for U.S. Congress and must have thought he could benefit from appearing to be “tough” on the adulterous governor. Well, the adulterous governor needed to
be punished severely for innumerable hypocrisies—we all felt that—but we weren't going to let some bumbling opportunistic yokel abuse our old man. A good number of us got in on the effort to upend the senator. We did a little research and found that he'd taken a handful of high-dollar trips himself and that other governors had flown first class and business class—one of them had taken a transatlantic trip on the Concord—and the senator hadn't said a word about it. I don't know what, if anything, was done with that information, but the whole matter quietly fizzled and the guy's congressional campaign flopped.

It was the same when the house Judiciary Ad Hoc Committee, on which Greg Delleney sat, brought up impeachment. If Delleney had been content to limit the impeachment articles to the governor's being gone for five days without notifying proper authorities, or to lying to staff and by extension to the public about his whereabouts, either might have been a reason for considering impeachment. As it was, he had to bring up every conceivable ethical infraction: the governor had visited his mistress in Argentina while on an official visit to Brazil; he'd flown on the state plane to a supposedly political event, as if every event attended by a politician can't be construed as somehow political; and on and on. He even brought in Larry Jones II as a witness. Jones II—the prolific adulator of the governor who'd wanted him to attend some kind of philosophical gabfest—claimed he had heard the Argentine ambassador to the United States say the governor told him that he wasn't interested in expanding trade relations with Argentina, thus indicating that the Argentine leg of an
economic development trip to South America must have been added for no other reason than to facilitate the governor's affair. Indeed so bitter was Jones II's disappointment in the governor that, during the administration's last year, he undertook a letter-writing campaign as fiercely critical of the governor as his former correspondence had been supplicatory.

Jakie Knotts, proud of his coup, crowed to the news media as if the governor had been caught embezzling money from a church. “How many moe shoes have gotta drop before we see the truth of this thing?” he kept asking. It all felt unjust. If they'd only stuck to the basic deed, we would have been happy to see him brought down. But not this way. And not by these people. Almost without meaning to we threw ourselves into saving the old man. Gleefully we found old flight manifests showing a good number of the governor's adversaries had used the state plane for purposes that could hardly be called official. We already knew about one senator's wanton use of his campaign account; after a little digging and asking around, we also discovered that he'd used that account for a variety of lavish indulgences that I shouldn't mention. These findings must have found their way to the offenders' mailboxes, but I never heard how.

That year's session went modestly well. A couple of bills the governor had pushed for passed the legislature; the Employment and Workforce Commission got overhauled, and one or two other things. The common explanation for this was that the governor had made himself irrelevant and therefore easier to work with: the legislature no longer cared about wrecking his presidential ambitions and so lacked a reason to
oppose him on everything. But it was pretty negligible stuff compared to what we all knew the governor thought he'd be doing by this time. Signing a few modest reforms and publishing a few op-eds in state newspapers about piecemeal measures that “have the potential to make a real difference in people's lives” doesn't feel like much compared to making speeches in Iowa and meeting with billionaires about financial support and U.S. senators about endorsements. Avoiding impeachment and getting credit for restructuring the state Workforce Commission doesn't mean a lot when you have to watch in futility as the nation searches for somebody exactly like you but passes you by because you're a joke.

Still, and despite the fact that most of the media attention was now premised on his fall and not his rise, there was something about it that he couldn't help enjoying. The crowds of reporters, the incessant headlines, the necessity of responding every day to some new self-inflicted absurdity—there was something about it all that made him thrive. Once, we held a press conference about some piece of legislation or other, and in usual press conference style the governor stood behind a podium flanked by four or five grave-looking lawmakers. There were maybe two questions about the bill, whatever it was, and then Donald Hatfield asked, “Are you still seeing her—Maria?”

You could see it on the governor's face. He wanted the whole thing to go away and to become again what he had been. But not enough to ignore that question. The world was interested in his life, what he did with himself, who he was seeing, and that was a good deal better than ignoring him. He paused and looked around the room. And then he answered
the question. “Well clearly, I mean, it's not going to be easy to maintain a relationship across that geographical distance, but we're working through that.”

“So you are still seeing her?” Hatfield persisted.

Quietly the politicians behind the governor began slipping away.

“Wwwwwell I mean, the obvious is the obvious. In other words . . .”

Later that night I was still in the office when the governor walked in looking for Nat, who'd gone home.

“Okay,” he said. He sat down.

Beyond the occasional greeting and an awkward chat at one of the mansion parties, he and I had never spoken to each other about anything unrelated to work. When you were in the car with him and the conversation inadvertently veered toward something remotely personal, he'd quickly switch topics or get on his phone or make up a reason to criticize you. Now he was sitting there for no reason, apparently needing to talk to somebody.

“What'd you think of that?” he asked.

“Well,” I said. Lots of things passed through my mind, but I just sat there stupidly saying, “Well.”

He waited.

At last I said, “Well, you've never been happy just saying what any politician would say. That's what got you in trouble when this whole thing blew up. Do you know Michael Jackson died the day after it all happened? The twenty-fifth. The whole thing would have been buried—maybe not buried, but almost. You couldn't stand saying the usual boring stuff, though.” It
felt awkward criticizing him like this, but once I'd got going I couldn't stop. “Sometimes you should just say what every other politician would say. When Hatfield asked you whether you were still seeing her, you should have just said, ‘Donald, I'm not here to talk about my personal life.' But you're so addicted to being different, you just had to say something weird.”

There was truth in what I told him, even if I had put it in a way that would appeal to his self-regard; I admit that. But there was truth in it. He always had to say something original, something quotable or memorable. That's why, in his notorious press conference, and in the notorious interview with the AP (“soul mate,” “love story”), he'd been so incapable of simply closing his mouth. Any other politician—at least any other politician not intending to resign on the spot—would have emitted the usual rigmarole about how this was a private matter and how he was going to work through some difficult issues with his wife and how he had disappointed his family and his staff and the citizens of this great state. This governor was incapable of the usual rigmarole; his strength was his folly. Instead of giving the press formulaic balderdash, he kept rummaging through the tawdry verbiage of middle-aged love affairs trying to find something redeemable, something that would show the world that his infantile obsession with a foreign divorcée was somehow nobler or more pardonable than the sordid entanglement of an average politician.