Wag the Dog (3 page)

The guest looked at her questioningly.

“You can wait here,” the nurse said, pointing at a chair by the bed. “If you want,” she added with some diffidence. This was not a public hospital full of oppressive visiting regulations and rules, where the doctors and even lowly nurses told the patients, their family, friends, or patrons what to do and when to do it, and expected to be obeyed.

“He was asking for me?” the guest asked.

“Yes,” she said. “He said it was important. Very important. But,” she immediately added, “he didn't tell me anything more than that,” as if to reassure the visitor she knew no more than she ought.

The visitor calculated. He was a very, very busy man. Very busy. About the busiest in the empire. Now. The man who was dying had been a friend. A colleague. A member of the same winning team. The visitor figured he could spare ten minutes. If the dreamer awoke and spoke, then it would be mission accomplished. If not, it was duty done and he could leave with conscience clear.

The patient's name was Lee Atwater.
²
He was dying of brain cancer.

This was a piece of irony so splendidly vicious that even his
enemies thought it was in bad taste to chortle about it.
³
And his enemies hated him. He had made brilliant and devastating use of innuendo, half truth, and political distortion to exploit the malignancies of American society, especially racism.
⁴
Racism was always effective, but it was dangerous to employ and required expert handling. It was not excessively egotistical for the dying man to feel that it was he himself who had made George Bush president in 1988. Before Atwater unleashed his campaign, Bush had been eighteen points down in the polls. Before Atwater engineered the media event in which Dan Rather was suckered into an attack on the then vice president so that Bush could lash back, Georgie was a man with a reputation as a wimp. A man who couldn't speak a complete and coherent sentence unless it was pre-scripted, who was tainted by Iran-contra, and on and on, liability upon liability. With this crippled pony, this lame—if thoroughbred—nag, Atwater had won the biggest race in the world.

The seconds clicked by. There were gray clouds outside the window. Funeral weather, thought the visitor. It was less than a minute and he was already impatient. It was insane of him not to have brought his cellular phone up to the hospital room. Goddamn it,
it was insane of him not to have brought his cellular phone and a couple of aides and a Portafax. If anyone would have understood, it would have been Lee, how precious time is to a busy, busy man.

Atwater thought on, dreamed on, of the man he had made king and whom he would leave behind to fend for himself Although it was Bush who was president and Atwater who was the advisor—a dying one at that; and it was Bush who would go down in history, while Lee would be lucky to be much more than a footnote; and it was Bush who held power while Atwater could only suggest how it should be employed, one voice competing out of a cacophonous chorus, Atwater still felt, frankly, rather patronizing about George. This is common in political consultants. As it is with lawyers about their clients, doctors about patients, agents about talent. They feel that the client is a product incapable of caring for itself who has to be directed, instructed, cared for, protected. When the client does what it is told, it succeeds, thrives, survives. When it does not take advice, it makes a mess, it hurts itself, it creates more work for the handler, whatever the handler's title is.

There were a hundred different versions of that basic story floating through, sometimes zapping through, Atwater's mind. An entire assortment of images. He was Merlin, wand and cap and gown, to the presidential Arthur. Cus D'Amato to Mike Tyson. Brian Epstein to the Beatles. Livia to the emperor Tiberius. It was his mission not merely to have raised up the king but to protect him—lo, even from beyond the grave. Like a guardian angel. Something more than mortal. A spirit that could reach from the other side. A hand that held a fiery sword, like the archangel Gabriel, come down from heaven . . . In that, there was a sort of immortality. If he could do that, he was the most cunning of them all, slicker than death.

Enough of this, the man in the chair by the window thought. I've done my duty. Close to three minutes had passed. He got up to go.

Atwater had neither moved nor spoken. His message still buried in weariness and morphine. His visitor, passing the bed, looked down at the wasted body and bandaged head. Where once the creature below him had been full of exuberant vitality, clever,
bullying, sharp-eyed and sharper-tongued, now the dullness was upon him, the emptying had begun. Atwater's hand, under the sheet, appeared clenched.

The visitor couldn't think of anything to say. Not to a recumbent form that neither spoke nor saw. He wasn't that kind of guy, who spoke to people in comas, saying, in that made-for-TV style, “Yes, yes, he [or she] can hear me. I know they can.” So, whatever Lee had summoned him for would have to wait until later on, World Two, heaven or hell or Washington, D.C., in the summertime, wherever dead politicos went this millennium. He nodded and turned to leave the room.

Inside Atwater the Merlin character arose. As if by magic, he reached beyond the dulled and sleeping senses—or perhaps opened the passage between sense and sensibility. Atwater got the message that his guest was here. “Jim,” he whispered, “Jim.”

James Baker, secretary of state, hand on the knob, stopped. He turned. Atwater's eyes were still closed, but his breathing was more urgent and his hand seemed to move.

“Lee?”

“Ahhh,” a groan, a grunt, a summons. Baker went to the bedside. Atwater's eyes suddenly opened. The old hawk looked out. Full of cunning and ego. “Listen,” he said. “George . . .”

“George what . . .”

It seemed to Baker that he could see Atwater's thoughts like waterworks turning and meshing behind Atwater's eyes, and what he seemed to have thought was,
I can speak my mind. Baker can't take it back to the office and use it against me, because, cackle, cackle, I'll be dead before he does.
“George,” Atwater said, about the president, “is a wienie. Ambitious, conniving, vengeful, but still . . . And he's going to blow it, Jim. If he does . . .”

“What do you mean, blow it?”

“I mean in the polls,” Atwater said, as if Baker shouldn't have had to ask, as there was nothing else. “And if he doesn't do something about it, the reelection.” It was hard, after Reagan, Reagan again, and then Bush/Quayle, smashing the opposition, to imagine that reelection could fail.

“Don't worry about it,” Jim said, a bland reassurance. “We'll take care of it, Lee.”

“That's my job. My mission.” One hand reached out and clutched Baker, grabbed at his sleeve, held him, and pulled him closer. Atwater's breath was bad. Foul, fetid. Jesus Christ, Baker thought, why don't they brush his teeth or dose him with mouthwash or something. “I have a plan,” Atwater said. The other hand, the near one, came out from under the covers where it had been visibly clenched. It held a half-crushed envelope. “If Georgie blows it, you open this. This is the surefire, ultimate election winner.”

“Hey, thanks,” Baker said politically. “I'll tell George. He'll be touched. You, in your condition—your thoughts are of him.”

“Fuck that,” Atwater said. “My thoughts are of winning. Remember that, Baker. There's only two things—winning and dying.” He cackled. “Don't show it to him now. Don't you even look now. Wait . . .”

“For what?”

“Till you're in trouble and you need it.”

“It's like a magic coin in a fairy tale or something like that?” Baker asked.

“Like that,” Atwater said.

“Why can't I look now?”

“Because you'll think”—Atwater paused for a breath—“that it's insane. And it will frighten you. But it's so sane, and so logical, that you won't be able to resist it and you'll try it out too soon . . .”

“And so?”

“Then it may not work anymore.”

“Like the goose that laid the golden egg or three wishes from the genie?”

“That powerful,” Atwater said, appearing somewhat demented. He pushed the envelope into Baker's hands. Baker couldn't imagine what it could be. “It's beautiful. The president will love it. After you realize it's not insane. Not insane at all.”

 

 

 

¹
Machiavelli was second chancellor and secretary of Florence from 1498 to 1512. He was frequently an envoy, though not an ambassador. Without a thorough familiarity with the period, it is extremely difficult to make comparisons between the power of his post and that of his spiritual heir. After the Medici regained power in Florence, Machiavelli never held an important office again.

²
This is a work of fiction. Many public figures are named in the text. Politicians, celebrities, presidents, etc. Their actions as depicted here are absolutely figments of the author's imagination and should in no way be construed as “true” or even a “fictionalization of a truth that can be told no other way.” Unless of course the reader has independent documentation that real actions are coincidental with these fictional ones. The same is true of the depiction of characters. The author has no knowledge of any real person mentioned in this book beyond what is in the public record, and even then he has chosen to treat that information with literary license—because this is a work of fiction.

³
Atwater commented on it in his autobiography
Life,
written with Todd Brewster: “I recalled the maxim we had used in '88: ‘Get inside the mind of your enemy.' Now cancer had used it on me.”

⁴
Democratic representative Pat Schroeder called him “the most evil man in America.” Reverend Pat Robertson said, “Lee Atwater has used every dirty trick known to mankind” and “the Republican campaign was blamed for planting specious rumors about the mental-health history of Michael Dukakis.” (William Greider,
Rolling Stone,
1/12/89)

“Lee Atwater, his communications director Mark Goodin and Congressman Newt Gingrich . . . worked to spread a long-standing unsubstantiated rumor [of homosexuality] designed to humiliate new House Speaker Thomas Foley.” (
Time,
6/19/89)

“From his earliest days, Mr. Atwater displayed a skill in the use of racial messages and maneuvers, a crucial part of the effort by Southern Republicans to appeal to white voters.” (Obituary,
New York
(
Times,
3/30/91)

Also, the
New York Times Magazine
(4/30/89) repeats a story—which Atwater always denied—that Atwater connived at getting a third-party candidate to use an anti-Semitic campaign against his main opponent, thus gaining the benefit without getting the backlash.

I'
M AN AUTHENTIC
American hero. Really. That's what I am.

First, you start out with that I'm basically a little guy. I don't mean that I'm lacking in physical stature or I'm inadequate. I mean I'm kind of a regular guy. So there I am, a regular guy. Not out to change the world. Not out to be some kind of big shot. I got no ax to grind. I'm just a guy with a job to do and I try my best to do it. Well, what the job is, that's something else of course. I'm a dick. A gumshoe. A P.I. The stuff that dreams are made of. Books, TV, movies.

The difference between me and them, the guys you usually see on the tube, is that I'm not a small-time loner working out of a shabby upstairs over some dry-cleaning plant or a playboy with a Lamborghini who's a detective just as another way to get his kicks. I work for a major corporation. Not Fortune 500, but not too far from it either. Our national headquarters is in Chicago. We have offices in twenty-two U.S. cities and in fourteen foreign countries. A business, you understand, like Wackenhut or Pinkerton. Whatever a client needs, in the way of security, we do it. Alarm systems, armored cars, around-the-clock armed response, commercial guard services, we do it all. We have a sales-incentive system that runs through the whole company. Like if you decided you needed one of these many services that we do, I could make a commission by introducing you to it, even though what I am is an investigator.