The Speechwriter (5 page)

The senator finished his plea after a windy explanation, the vote was taken, and the bill passed on second reading by a wide margin.

“The Knottsie's next,” said Gil, a policy advisor. “Knottsie,”
pronounced “Nazi,” was his name for Jakie Knotts. Gil was known for his inventive jokes at the expense of legislators. (“Know how to spell ‘McConnell?'” he once asked me. “Two
c
's, two
n
's, two
l
's, and two faces.”) Gil was pretty evidently in the wrong line of work; his research was sometimes inaccurate, his writing could be incoherent, and his opinions on policy matters seemed unmoored to any principle: one minute he would loudly proclaim support for legislation allowing law enforcement officers to take DNA samples at the point of arrest, and the next he would argue for the legalization of drugs. Everybody liked Gil. He was frequently wrong, but you had the feeling he knew this about himself. He often stretched his arms and back while he talked, as if he'd just awoken from a nap.

Several staffers were now gathered around the television in our office, watching the senate. One of these was Stewart. He had been with the boss since his congressional days and took this longevity as license to refer to the governor in fantastically demeaning terms. This had the strange effect of boosting morale, inasmuch as it gave you comfort to know that ill feelings toward the boss didn't signify incompetence or disloyalty or an inability to get along or even personal dislike. In appearance Stewart was not prepossessing: every day he wore a gigantic charcoal suit—in those days he was thirty pounds overweight—with a cheap white shirt and a drab tie; his haircuts were usually bad, and the roundness of his face gave him a boyish aspect that was only partially camouflaged by an intermittent beard and tiny wire-frame glasses. But he was utterly indispensable; he understood every policy
question the administration had ever faced, and he could explain the import of each one in overarching terms or in detail. Although he had a fierce temper (several of his assistants had fled in tears and never returned), Stewart had a way of cheering everybody up. He had a penchant for vaguely inappropriate humor and laughed with a great baritone tremolo; sometimes in a convulsion of laughter he flung himself violently backward in his chair and you feared he might fall and hurt himself. His jeremiads were notorious. When an adversary criticized the governor, Stewart would emit long streams of profane and grammatically flawless invective in defense of the administration. By the end, you wondered what reason anyone could have for criticizing policies so obviously reasonable. After a year or so it started to seem improbable that we were so consistently and wholly right about everything, but even then Stewart's jeremiads offered warm reassurance that we were basically, if not always wholly, in the right.

At a time like this we needed Stewart around, and I was glad he was there. Aaron casually mentioned that the governor had returned the money.

“Returned the money?” somebody asked.

Yes, Stewart said. That morning the governor had transferred the money out of Reform Alliance's account and put it in the state's General Fund.

Nat wanted to know why.

“For the sake of appearances. He hasn't done anything wrong, but just to be completely above board, he wanted to put the money into the General Fund.”

Nat rejected that explanation as “press secretary crap” and pointed out correctly that when you return something in a situation like this, you look guilty. Aaron said he'd told the boss that, and so had Stewart, “but that's what he wanted to do.”

Stewart: “You know he's always got to go further than any other politician would. He's got to be lily white, Nat. He's incorruptible.”

Nat: “Oh, that's great, now he looks like a crook. He didn't do anything wr—. Why would you—? Why didn't somebody—?” It was a sign of Nat's displeasure when he spoke in fragments. It was his way of saying things that couldn't be said without actually saying them; in this case he was saying that Stewart and Aaron had countered the governor's intention with insufficient force. He was saying they'd been cowards, and both of them knew he was saying it. I gathered from their silence that they knew he was right.

“The Knottsie's getting up,” announced Gil.

We watched as Knotts lifted himself out of his chair and leaned his belly against his desk. Senators spoke with hand-held microphones, and Knotts liked to put his almost into his mouth, so you couldn't always understand what he was saying. He asked the senate president to allow some arcane parliamentary move, was granted permission to speak, and began. “Mistah President, I wauna take up this ishah of the govnah's abuse of powah. I wauna stress at the beginning that what we're taukin' about ain't juss a matter of some”—his mouth stretched open, baring his teeth—“technicality.”

“He's getting warmed up, boys,” Gil said.

“What we're taukin' about is a alleged crime. Issa crime to take money from the state. He says, ‘Oh, but I put it back.' Mistah President, our jails is full o' people who wish they could put back the money they stole and go free. Our jails is full o' people who wish they could juss put it back, juss undo everythang.”

“I knew he—,” Nat said.

“Mistah President, this is typical of this govnah. Thass what I been trying to tell y'all. This is a man who thinks he's above the law. We got serious problem in this state. We got unemployment, we got crime, we got all kinds o' problem. The lass thing we need is a govnah who thinks he's above the law. That's just makin' our problem worse.”

The governor walked into the office. You could sense everyone's disappointment; we were just starting to enjoy the speech. When the governor was there you didn't feel the same liberty to crack jokes; you felt obliged to look busy and laugh nervously any time he attempted a bit of humor.

“The textile warehouse bill passed,” somebody said.

“Big surprise,” the governor said. “How many votes on our side?”

“Two.”

“That's a disgrace.”

“For too long,” Knotts was saying, “this state's been gettin' the short end of the totem pole.”

“Anybody besides Knotts talking?” the governor asked.

“No,” Stewart said. “Well, there's a rumor that McKinney is going to join him, but I don't see that happening.”

“Who's McKinney?”

Stewart looked at the governor with feigned disappointment. “Governor, really?” Stewart liked to remind the governor of his omniscience in strategically important matters such as past policy positions and the names and voting patterns of legislators. I had the feeling the governor didn't like this, or at least didn't like Stewart's calling attention to it in front of other staffers, but it was true and he needed to be reminded of it. I couldn't understand why he thought he could get away with not knowing the names of lawmakers—do other governors simply neglect to memorize their names?—but in the end it would cost him.

“Okay, I get it, Stewart. So who's McKinney?”

“Really? You actually don't know who Senator McKinney is?”

“Stewart, I get it.” I thought I saw a look of irritation in his eyes. Then he said placidly, “I know who McKinney is. Is he important or not?”

“. . . this govnah's tryin' to hang his hat on our coat hanger.”

“Glenn McKinney,” sighed Stewart. “Been in the Senate for like twenty years. Though, granted, he doesn't do much.”

“So is he important? Is he going to sway what's-his-name to vote with him?”

“. . . now he's got his lawyer, this hand-picked puppet, doin' his talkin' for him.”

“No, I wouldn't say he's important. And there's not going to be a vote. This is a rhetorical exercise.”

The governor did know the names of the important legislators, and one or two unimportant ones from his own part of the state. But he didn't care who they were. They sensed this, and it enraged them.

“Let me know if anything happens,” he said, and walked out.

The next morning, the
Herald
and several other regional papers ran an eight-hundred-word op-ed by Senator Jake Knotts. It began, “‘Methinks he doth protest too much.' There is great wisdom in that ancient Shakespearian line.” Gil walked into our office for a few high-fives.

“Did you see the Knottsie's piece this morning? Wonder who wrote that intro for him. I bet he's never even heard of Othello.” Still, you couldn't dislike Gil.

The governor had phoned in (he was speaking somewhere in the Lowcountry) and told me to “churn out some surrogate letters,” meaning letters to the editor that would appear to be sent by one of our supporters but would be written by me. This is a common practice in politics: calculated advertisements made to look like spontaneous outbursts.

I should explain that it had become my duty to respond to favorable letters to the editor published in the state's newspapers. These included letters in the three major dailies as well as all the smaller papers, of which there were around twenty that I knew of. It was one of the governor's unshakable convictions that letters to the editor had great influence on public opinion. Nat, whose duty it had been before I came, had once tried to tell the governor that letters to the editor are so poorly written, cranky, and consistently illogical that even positive
ones are a net liability. But the boss did not believe it. Print had the power to sway, in his view, no matter what the print said. I think he was right.

I was to monitor letters in order to respond to those that complimented the governor in some way. Apart from the time this consumed, it was an easy task, once you had his angular style firmly in your head. For almost all of them, you'd begin with something like “Dear so-and-so: I read your letter in
The State
and just wanted to thank you for writing as you did.” Then you'd restate the thrust of the letter, or the part of it that the governor would appreciate, usually including the word “indeed,” and then reaffirm the original letter's opinion in a way that made it clear to the recipient that this wasn't a form letter but a personal expression of gratitude. “The unpaid-for political promises made by state government over the last number of years have indeed reached a crisis point, and I do appreciate you making your voice heard on that front. Take care. Sincerely.”

Once you knew what sorts of letters the governor would respond to—all that praised him specifically and also many that took positions with which he agreed—it was a pretty easy task. It wasn't a waste of time, either, from the point of view of politics. People who write letters to the editor believe that the thoughts they took pains to put into words are insightful and original, and they are eager to see that opinion confirmed. The state, the nation, the world is in some respect ill-arranged, and they feel they have knowledge that can set it right. They want to see their words demolish the strongholds of prejudice and
ignorance by force of logic. Of course very few letters to the editor come anywhere near coherence. Mostly they're fragments of platitudes basted with the rhetoric of outrage. I used to clip the best ones. I kept a folder full of them; the one I have before me now deals with a subject about which I no longer have any recollection, but it's typical in its white-hot incomprehensibility. “This attitude is ludicrous, to say the least,” the letter concludes (on the letters page even the strongest words are qualified with “to say the least”), “with both sides sounding like perennial fence sitters. As for this situation they need simply to know the difference between right and wrong. They, like so many in this community, appear to be waiting for the next shoe to fall, trusting only in their instincts so as to land on the ‘right' side of the fence.” You wouldn't think these letter writers took much time to compose their broadsides, but you'd be wrong. And their authors are extremely eager for their thoughts to be well received. When they discover that the governor himself profited from their wisdom, they're grateful. Some of them would reply to him, thanking him for writing and saying they would frame his letter. These people, already disposed to like him, would now revere him. Enlisted soldiers became warriors.

Some of them, as a result of the governor's gratitude, would write more letters to newspapers. I kept a running list of their names so that when they wrote a second letter I could thank them for “another” or for their “latest” letter. One of these, I remember, was somebody named Larry Jones II. He wrote so many letters, all of them ecstatically praising
the governor's virtues and heaping ridicule on his adversaries, that after a time I had to stop responding to them lest it appear improbable that the governor himself was responding. Jones II once wrote a letter to the governor asking him to attend some sort of society gathering where men would talk about political philosophy and smoke cigars. He got a polite regret, or maybe—I forget—no reply at all. We would hear from him again.

There was a sense of surreptitiousness about this, as there usually is inside political offices. You always feel you're doing something that, if known, would scandalize somebody. That's what makes it fun, especially if you're young. But my conscience bothered me about the letters; it bothered me even more when I realized the governor didn't read half the letters I wrote for him. Though it was a good sign that he had started to trust me, at least with low-level stuff like letters, it seemed wrong that he wasn't even reading some of them. Even now there may be letters framed, prominently displayed in offices and living rooms, that the governor neither composed nor read.

I asked June, the deputy chief of staff, about it.

“He was brought up in the South,” she said. “That's what you do.”

Here's what I think she meant. The governor had been raised (as I had) to believe that if someone did something for which you were grateful, you bore an obligation to express that gratitude in writing. Mother made you write a thank-you note after your uncle took you duck hunting or after you had received a sweater from Grandmother. It didn't
matter if your feet were frozen and you didn't fire a shot or if the sweater didn't fit and made you look like a girl; you wrote the thank-you letter. These loyal constituents had done something similar. They had in some small way provided empirical evidence that average people liked what the governor was doing. It was impossible for him to respond to all these signals of favor, or even to a majority of them. The letters I composed were what he would have expressed if he were able to do it himself. Nor, after I had talked to June about it, did I let it bother me that there were electoral benefits to these responses. It was his habit; he was a politician; why should he spurn a habit just because it advanced his career?