by Edward Klein
“Relax and enjoy it,” said Rahm Emanuel.
The steward removed Obama’s shoes and socks and began washing his feet.
“Mmm…that feels soooo good,” Obama said, wiggling his toes.
“Get used to it,” said Emanuel. “My first order as your chief of staff was to give your steward, Disaderio, instructions to come in here twice a day and wash your feet.”
“That reminds me of the old Bob Marley lyrics,” said Valerie Jarrett. She broke into song and started dancing the reggae around the Resolute Desk:
Who are you to judge the life I live?
I know I’m not perfect—
“Not perfect?” Obama shouted. He stood bolt upright and, in the process, spilled the entire basin of soapy water over the Resolute Desk.
“Of course you’re perfect,” said David Axelrod, mopping up the water with his necktie. “You’re unrivaled, unequal, matchless, incomparable, peerless, unsurpassed—”
“You’re the top,” said Rahm Emanuel. “You’re the Coliseum.”
“You’re tutti frutie,” said Valerie Jarrett.
“A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bop-bop!” said Sydney Michael Green.
“Sir,” I said, trying to wedge my way into this songfest, “I’m your John the Baptist from the CIA.”
“Welcome, John,” Obama said. “Nice to have you onboard.”
“Call me Higgy,” I said.
“Folks, meet John. Hey, wait a second. Haven’t we met before, John?”
“Yes, sir, in fact we have,” I said. “Several years ago, I came to see you at the Harvard Law Review about becoming your literary agent.”
“Oh, yeah,” Obama said. “I remember that day. I told you back then that I’d write a bestseller and it’d catapult me to national stardom and that I’d become the first African-American president. I was right, wasn’t I?” I could tell he really liked the idea of being right. “How was I dressed that day? In my Gold Trumpeter suit, I’ll bet. Was my hair longer then? Did I look lean? I was into high-impact aerobics back then. Hadn’t begun golf. Shot an 83 the other day. My putting needs work…”
Sydney Michael Green leaned toward me and whispered, “I counted ten ‘I’s’ and four ‘me’s.’ “
“You missed three ‘my’s,’” I replied sharply.
Valerie Jarrett approached the president. “Barry…uh… Mr. President,” she said, “the wardrobe mirrors that you ordered have been installed on the back of every door here in the Oval Office. That way, when you’re alone, you will be with your favorite person.”
“Sir,” I continued, “As your John the Baptist, I’m here to brief you on highly classified matters.”
“I want a smoke,” the President said petulantly.
Sydney Michael Green produced a Marlboro and a gold lighter with the presidential seal on it.
“Don’t tell Michelle,” Obama said, taking a deep drag on the cigarette.
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” Sydney Michael Green said.
Obama looked at him with a weird expression that said “who is this guy?”
Rahm Emanuel snapped his fingers and three short, barely dressed Thai boys appeared carrying large palm-leaf fans. They deployed themselves around President Obama, who was already engulfed in a cloud of cigarette smoke. The boys kneeled on the floor and began fanning the smoke toward an open Oval Office window.
“Mr. President,” I continued, “it is my responsibility to alert you about any potentially dangerous security problems. We at the CIA have it on good authority that Moscow has an extensive file on you, Mr. President. A file loaded with blackmail material ranging from the truth about your birth right up through your days in Chicago. The Russians’ top operative, Yurik Maligin, intends to force you to withdraw the anti-missile systems from Eastern Europe and to decrease American influence in the Middle East.”
“Hey, you never know,” Sydney Michael Green butted in. “Those Russians might force you to approve the construction of a mosque at Ground Zero.”
President Obama waved Sydney Michael Green away and walked over to one of the floor-to-ceiling mirrors and peered at himself. Then he turned to me and said, “Do you dance, John?”
“Do I what?” I said.
“Dance,” he said. “You must know the basics of ballroom dancing.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I do.”
“Good,” the president said. “Your first assignment is to stand in for Michelle as I rehearse for my Inaugural Balls tonight. Here we go.”
The president signaled Valerie Jarrett, who played a slow fox trot on her iPod. Obama raised his left hand and grabbed my right hand in it. He cupped his right hand around the middle of my spine and began leading me around the newly installed Oval Office rug, which was embossed with his chin-up profile.
“Slow…slow…quick, quick, quick…slow…that’s the rhythm, John… You’re not a bad dancer.”
“Call me Higgy, Mr. President.”
For the next five minutes, we danced around the two sofas and two armchairs, with the president of the United States repeatedly studying his image in the mirrors.
When he was satisfied with his dancing, he said, “Okay, that’s enough.”
A staffer ran over and blotted his sweaty brow with a tissue.
“John, here’s the first thing I want you to do,” the president said. “I want you to make sure I get the Olympics in 2016 for Chicago. I have plans to rename Chicago after me. Obama, Illinois. Sounds good, doesn’t it? After that, we’re going to make Obama, Illinois, the new capital of the United States. I mean, after all, why should a slave owner like George Washington be the namesake of the nation’s capital?”
Just then one of the mirrored doors opened and Vice President Joe Biden stumbled in. He caught his reflection in the mirror, twirled around, and began working on his hair and practicing his smile.
“After you get the 2016 Olympics, John,” the president continued, ignoring his vice president, “I want you to find a way to pass my energy bill—cap-and-trade.”
“Who’s this Captain Trade? “ Joe Biden asked.
“Sir,” said one of the staffers, “it’s cap and trade.”
“I know,” Biden said. “But why does the Senate have a bill named after him?”
“Sir,” the staffer tried again, “it’s a bill to set up a system to reward conservation of energy. And it creates a way to trade clean energy credits.”
“Well,” said Biden, “you can count on this proud son of Delaware from the steel mills of Pennsylvania as being in favor of anything that’s clean. With the exception, of course, of energy.”
No one dared to contradict the vice president.
Meanwhile, the president continued with his list of demands.
“On the campuses,” he said, “I want the textbooks completely rewritten. They need to explain how every problem we have in this country is the Republicans’ fault and that I came along to save the country. You shouldn’t have too much trouble getting those lefty professors to write that, eh?
“Finally, John, there’s the issue of my life after the presidency,” he continued. “Of course there’ll be the books and speeches and the presidential library…and I’ll make millions… But I’m already so big that that won’t suffice. So here’s what I want you to do for me, John. I want you to make a plan to put my likeness up on Mount Rushmore. And that, for the moment, is all I can think of. You can go.”
He dismissed me with a wave of his cigarette.
As I turned to leave the Oval, David Axelrod called after me.
“Hey, John,” he said, “don’t get the wrong impression. These mirrors aren’t here just to boost the president’s ego. They’re here as a symbolic statement that the Oval is only a reflection of the real government. If you want to know how the Obama administration is really going to work, go down to the Situation Room.”
“Thanks for the tip,” I said.
“Any time, John,” Axelrod said, wringing the water out of his necktie.
“Call me Higgy.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
At David Axelrod’s suggestion, I made my way down to the Situation Room, the mammoth, five thousand-square-foot conference area and intelligence-management center in the basement of the White House. This was where the president, in times of crisis, exercised control, influence, and authority—The Deuce’s triad of power.
The first person I ran into was the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. He was using his iPhone to take snapshots of Bill Ayers, who was sitting at the head of the long wooden table in the president’s chair.
“Man,” said Ayers, fingering the buttons and communication equipment, “can you just picture the bombings I could orchestrate from here! Pow! There goes the Pentagon. Pow! There goes the State Department…. Pow! There goes the Palm restaurant…”
The Reverend Wright looked up from his iPhone and noticed me.
“Alfie Douglas!” he said, surprise written all over his face. “What are you doin’ here?”
“Uh, hello, pastor,” I said, trying to think of a convincing explanation for my presence. “The Chicago Low Income Trust asked me to scout locations for our CLIT convention next month. We’re thinking of renting the Situation Room and inviting the rapper Eminem to sing for us.”
“Don’t say?” the Reverend Wright said. I detected a tone of suspicion in his voice. “Tell me, what song is that white honky rapper goin’ to sing anyways?”
“The Real Slim Shady,” I said.
“Never heard of it,” he said. “Sounds shady to me. Let me hear you sing it…if you can?”
I had no choice. I was on the spot. So I began to sing:
“Slim Shady, I’m sick of him
Look at him, walkin around grabbin his you-know-what—
“Gentlemen,” one of the Situation Room duty officers said, mercifully interrupting my off-key singing, “the Joint Chiefs of Staff are going to need this room in less than an hour to discuss a crisis in Afghanistan, and so I think you should get started with the people you asked to interview.”
“Bring ‘em on, bring ‘em on!” the Reverend Wright said.
Four men entered the room and took seats around the table. “We’re here tonight to put in place the real Administration, not the one upstairs, which operates with cigarette smoke and mirrors,” said the Reverend Wright. “You folks are going to be sent out to various departments to keep an eye on people. You’re going to enforce our real policies.”
The heads of the four men nodded in unison.
“And we’re going to call you czars. Like in the old days in Russia. You’re going to boss people around and pay no attention to their opinions.”
As I listened, the Reverend Wright’s words triggered a memory of my childhood in Isfahan, the ancient capital of Iran. I recalled the fateful day that the Deuce had taken me aside and lectured me on his great-man philosophy of politics. How had the Deuce put it?
“Democracy gives the poor, weak, pathetic mob the illusion that they have power and that they’re running things. Whereas in fact the mob has to be ruled by strong and powerful men.”
Bill Ayers cleared his throat and broke my reverie.
“What the Reverend Wright is saying is that there are really two governments,” Ayers said. “The public one that we see on TV. White bread. Boring. Safe. Mainstream. And then there’s the real Obama government. Radical. Revolutionary! Out to make fundamental changes from top to bottom.”
So far, there hadn’t been a peep from the four men at the table.
The Reverend Wright opened a file.
“Now you, Dr. Holdren,” the Reverend said, pointing to a man with a bushy Van Dyck beard. “We have you penciled in for Science and Technology Czar. Back in the late 1970s, you co-authored a textbook in which you offered ideas for coercive, involuntary fertility control, including—and I quote—‘a program of sterilizing women after their second or third child.’ You also discussed in that book the development of an ‘armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force’ to which nations would surrender part of their sovereignty.
“Are those your true words, Dr. Holdren, and do you still stand by them?” the Reverend Wright asked.
“My exact words, from my textbook Ecoscience, are these,” Dr. John Holdren said. He read from a book open in front of him.
Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger society.
“And what about single mothers having their babies taken away by the government?” the Reverend Wright asked.
“I wrote,” Dr. Holdren said, “that one way to carry out this disapproval of out-of-wedlock births might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption.”
“Consider yourself President Obama’s Science Czar,” Bill Ayers said. “Bravo!”
The Reverend Wright turned to the next man.
“Professor Cass Sunstein,” he said, “we particularly liked your legal paper arguing that animals should have the right to bring lawsuits against their owners. So, we’re moving you over to be our Regulatory Czar. You’re going to oversee all our new regulations. And there’s going to be a lot of them, let me tell you….”
While the Reverend Wright was talking to Professor Sunstein, I studied the third man at the table—a sturdy-looking fellow with a shaved head. He looked familiar. Then I realized that I knew him; we had met at the secret 2004 campaign-organizing meeting in the basement of Trinity United Church. His name was Van Jones. He had served serious jail time in Connecticut in the 1990s, and was a leader of STORM—Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement—an activist collective with Marxist influences.
“Van,” the Reverend Wright was saying to Van Jones, “you were recruited by Valerie Jarrett to be part of President’s Obama’s inner circle. Let me read you what you wrote about your prison experience, and you tell me if you still stand by it.
I met all these young radical people of color—I mean really radical: Communists and anarchists. And it was, like, ‘This is what I need to be a part of.’ I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary.
“Bingo!” said Van Jones. “Right on the money. I said it. I believed it. I stand by it. Proud to be a revolutionary!”
“Well said,” said the Reverend. “And because of your outstanding environmental record, we have you headed to the position of our Green Jobs Czar.”
The Reverend Wright turned to the fourth and last member of the group.
“Richard Holbrooke,” he said, “you’ve been America’s ambassador both to Germany and to the United Nations. You thought you deserved to be appointed secretary of state. Instead, your friend, Hillary Clinton, got the job at State. She is your friend, isn’t she?”
“Sort of,” Holbrooke said.
“What does ‘sort of’ mean?”
“It means,” said Holbrooke, “that in my line of business, you don’t have personal friends. You have permanent interests.”
“Good answer,” the Reverend Wright said. “Now your job is going to be the hardest job of all. We’re appointing you the Hillary Czar.”
“What do I have to do?” Holbrooke asked.
“Keep an eye on that woman and make sure she doesn’t double-cross the president. We hear that Hillary’s already been in touch with the Russians, behind President Obama’s back. She’s been having clandestine conversations with the Russian spymaster Yurik Maligin. I want you to find out what Maligin knows.…”
I didn’t need to hear any more. I decided that it was time for me to act. I was going to pay a little visit to Yurik Maligin at his dacha on Lake Komsomolskoye.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Three days later, I was standing in the back of a bright red cigarette boat, one leg braced against the gunwale, as it rocketed across Lake Komsomolskoye at fif
ty miles an hour.
“The lake is within commuting distance of St. Petersburg, and is named after Komsomol, the youth wing of the old Communist Party,” explained the cigarette boat’s captain, who spoke serviceable English. “Many of the top members of our government have dachas on the eastern shore of the lake.”
The captain offered me his flask of vodka. “To ward off the cold,” he explained. “And the chilling prospect of meeting Comrade Maligin.”
“I don’t drink,” I said.
He looked at me like a typical crazy American. “Suit yourself.”
I settled down on a leather seat, and covered my legs with a blanket as we skimmed across the lake. Fifteen minutes later, the boat slowed down, and we passed a Federal Security Service chokepoint at the entrance of a small, secluded cove. Two tough-looking security guards, with machine guns strapped to their chests, looked me over and then waved us into a large boathouse with six slips.
One of the security guards led me up a hill toward a gigantic athletic building similar to those found on American college campuses. As we entered a part of the building used for martial arts, I could hear opera music playing on a P.A. system.
“Comrade Maligin will be right with you,” said the guard.
After he left, I inspected a wall of color photos. In one of them, Maligin wore a Russian Orthodox cross, which, I knew, had been given to him by his mother. Another photo was of Maligin on a white horse. A third showed him with a live Bengal tiger. Several others showed him demonstrating advanced judo moves.
According to the CIA profile on Maligin, he had started training in sambo, a martial art that originated in the Soviet Union, at the age of fourteen. Later, he switched to judo. His status as a judo expert was unquestioned; he held a sixth dan (red/white belt) and was known for his Harai Goshi, a sweeping hip throw.
“Comrade Higgy! Welcome!”
It was Maligin.
“I want to show you something,” he said, not wasting any words.
