Manion coughs, but the president cuts him off: “Arthur, you’re off the hook.” The old diplomat is not strong on television.
“We need to work up talking points,” Carr says.
“Let’s do it now, here,” Webster says.
“Keep it vague,” the president announces. “Stick to what we know. Don’t get out over your skis.”
Whatever people think of James Nash, he often surpasses expectations, particularly during crises. After his surprise reelection he succeeded in getting an iconoclast on the Supreme Court, forced broad infrastructure rebuilding plans through a reluctant Congress, and guided the country masterfully during a domestic terrorist attack last spring—the one that had postponed the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner to last night.
The president also has an uncanny ability to remain graceful and authentically eloquent at moments when the people around him are tense. This grace under fire is Nash’s special élan, his runner’s extra tendon, something even skeptics admire. The public sees his calm as distinctly American, the quiet reluctant hero from books or movies.
But this morning, to the people in this room, the élan seems absent. Nash is tense and irritated. Diane Howell thinks of the word brittle. And she has a suspicion why. Last night, she, the national security advisor, felt caught unawares about Roderick being in Oosay. No doubt James Nash feels that way, too.
The president is standing.
“Spencer, please brief the press secretary,” he says. Press Secretary Doug Paterno had asked to be present at this meeting. Carr had declined the request.
“Yes, sir,” Carr says, adding, “And everyone, we have a full meeting of the National Security Council at ten.”
Almost before Carr has finished his sentence the president is gone.
When he reaches the Oval Office upstairs, the sun has risen, but Nash is struck instead by the gloom he’s learned seems to attach itself to every president in the final two years of power. Just when you finally know how to govern, all attention turns to who will succeed you, and it becomes almost impossible to accomplish much more, after accomplishing too little already.
Nash stares into the Rose Garden. The manicured bushes, pruned for winter, look like skeletons in the predawn gray, and a sense of alarm sweeps over him, an undefined premonition of looming disaster, a feeling as desolate as a road visible in front of you for a hundred miles, empty and unchanging.
Eight
“Peter, it’s George Rawls,” a smoky voice on the other end of the phone says. “I hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time.” It is early afternoon the same day.
George Rawls is the White House counsel.
Rena is sitting in the den of his West End row house. Sonny Rollins is playing “A Night in Tunisia” on the stereo. It must have been quite a night. Rena is making no discernible progress in a new biography of Ulysses S. Grant. Instead he keeps picking up the legal papers that came the day before in the familiar gray of Halsted & Cummings, the law firm that represents his ex-wife, Katie Cochran. The envelopes arrive every few months, asking Rena to sign here and here and initial there, erasing point by legal point any residue of his marriage to Katie, which ended three years ago. Rena considers the papers a tangible reminder of the doubts harbored by the Cochrans of the Rappahannock about the marriage of their daughter to the Italian immigrant boy who had befriended their son at West Point.
“No, George, it’s not a bad time,” Rena says.
“Do you think you and Randi might manage to get free and come to my house this afternoon?” The voice is southern, courtly, and sounds like bourbon and cigars. “Now if possible,” he adds, a little less courtly. “I could have a car pick you up in thirty minutes.”
“I’ll call Randi.”
The black Cadillac CTS is idling in front of Rena’s row house in twenty. Darkened windows. Silent driver. Rena, out of his sweater and blue jeans and into a charcoal suit and blue tie, slides in and they head wordlessly to Brooks’s apartment in Kalorama.
“Summoned,” his partner says with a crooked grin as she bends into the backseat. Brooks is trying to hide her excitement. She loves the game, the idea of being called by the president’s personal lawyer behind the scenes into a crisis. And she is extraordinarily good at such moments.
They had met working as Senate investigators, Brooks for liberal Democrat Fred Blaylish of Vermont, Rena for a moderate Republican, Llewellyn Burke of Michigan. From the start, people considered them an odd pairing: Brooks, the loud New York lawyer, staunchly liberal and feminist, the product of private schools who talked like a sailor; Rena, the quiet, bookish soldier, military polite, who tended to believe in history and human nature and distrusted ideology.
But they bonded over something more hardwired than their political beliefs. A shared conviction in the importance—or was it sanctity—of getting to the bottom of things, all the way down to where the mulch of truth could be found. And they shared a belief that when the government used its frightening power to investigate, the inquiries should be real, not political or cynical. Facts were not something to be manufactured in TV ad production studios. They were real, and if you followed them, people would have something in common and the country could find its way.
They both had their own reasons for being suspicious of secrets, reasons from when they were young, reasons they had shared with each other once and then never talked about again.
In time, Rena came to feel even their ideological differences were less a gulf than others saw them. Randi, like most liberals he knew, tended to see the problems with America and wanted to fix them. Peter, like most conservatives, tended to see what was right in America and wanted to protect it. But they both, he decided, wanted to make the country better. They just came at it from different directions.
“Rawls say anything about what this is about?”
“He did not.”
“It’s Oosay,” Brooks guesses, and Rena says nothing. The big black car glides up Connecticut Avenue five miles to Chevy Chase, the Maryland suburb closest to Washington—“the Village,” as it is known to residents—home almost exclusively to Democrats, a disproportionate number of them with law degrees, and a somewhat smaller concentration of journalists. Republicans tend to nest across the Potomac in Virginia.
George Rawls lives on Cedar Parkway, a tree-lined lane facing the back nine of the Chevy Chase Country Club, in a center-hall colonial built one hundred years ago to look one hundred years older than it was. They drive past the house to an unlocked gate leading to a small hut at the edge of the golf course. There, Rawls, in a cardigan sweater over a dress shirt and knotted tie, greets them from behind the steering wheel of a golf cart. “Just a little detour to avoid the press pool,” he says. They drive a hidden trail about one hundred yards and stop at a gate behind Rawls’s house; then they enter the backyard and walk up some steps and through French doors.
The cherrywood library is large enough for an ornate hand-carved desk, a couch, and four armchairs. Standing at one of the bookshelves is White House chief of staff Spencer Carr. In a red leather armchair sits the president of the United States. James Nash rises, gracefully, hugs Brooks, and extends a hand to Rena.
“I’m afraid I need to ask another favor,” he says.
On a Sunday evening eighteen months earlier in the White House private residence, Nash had asked Rena if he and Brooks would vet and then shepherd the nomination of Nash’s first Supreme Court pick. The full truth of what had happened was known by only a few people in the world, the majority of them in this room.
“Please, take a seat,” the president says, settling back in the red chair. Then he looks at George Rawls to begin.
Rawls is a big man with a face that looks carved from granite, the square edges smoothed only a little by time. He is in his late sixties, but he is still imposing, a careful, calculating North Carolinian who had come north to wrestle at Dartmouth and then attend Harvard Law School. He had been helping people navigate power for more
than three decades, and, as far as anyone knew, had never betrayed a secret. Rena and Brooks had worked closely with Rawls on the Madison nomination.
“I assume you know,” Rawls begins, “what happened last night”—a pause and stare—“in Oosay, Morat?”
Rawls speaks painstakingly, the words doled out two or three at a time, as if he were adjudicating each one before releasing it to the world. When they finally come, they explode into life like they were banged out on an old manual typewriter.
“And you’ve been following, I take it, the statements on the Sunday shows and social media this morning from our friends on the Hill?”
The majority of the people on the Hill are not Jim Nash’s friends.
“Some,” Brooks says with a wry smile. Rena rarely watched the Sunday interview shows—the city’s unofficial intercom, where officials delivered messages to one another and about 2 percent of the country listened in. He rarely heard much there he considered new or honest. But Brooks watched them faithfully. In the car, she’d described to Rena what she’d heard. Dick Bakke, the wolfishly ambitious chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Reform Committee, had declared that the death of a U.S. general was “de facto proof of incompetence by the Nash administration.” He’d carefully used the same phrase on four different shows to make sure no one missed it.
Curtis Gains, the young chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, said he was calling for an immediate congressional investigation.
The Nash administration, meanwhile, seemed to be singing out of tune rather than in harmony. National Security Advisor Diane Howell said the early evidence suggested Oosay was a protest outside the gates that had run amok—not an organized act of terror. Defense Secretary Dan Shane was more circumspect, saying it might have been planned. The dissonance between them was already being exploited by administration critics. It was uncharacteristically poor White House messaging.
“We expect . . . there will be congressional inquiries,” Rawls says.
That was Rawlsian understatement. The last terrorist incident on a U.S. facility abroad, an attack on the embassy in Tunisia, had prompted seven investigations—three House, two Senate, plus those required of the FBI and State.
Rena considers this investigation mania a damaging national disgrace—a far cry from his military days. The attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon during Reagan’s presidency, which killed 241 Marines, triggered a lone congressional inquiry in 1983. So had an assault on the Nairobi embassy a decade later during Clinton’s presidency. Attacks abroad once unified the country. Now they triggered congressional Star Chamber inquiries and were a standard part of the city’s paralyzing culture of attack and guilt by suspicion. Rena found it offensive. He considered blaming specific acts of terror on the people fighting the terrorists as idiotic, like blaming police for crime.
“And of course there will be media inquiries,” Rawls says. He adds a fatherly stare for emphasis. Then he delivers what he’d summoned them to hear.
“Randi and Peter, we need you to conduct an inquiry on this incident. We need to know what others might unearth before they unearth it. We need to stay two steps ahead.”
“Isn’t this an FBI investigation, George?” Brooks says.
“The formal inquiry will probably be interagency,” he says.
Rena and Brooks share a glance. Interagency means the intelligence community needs to be involved. Meaning Roderick was involved in something covert. The general was not merely meeting with moderates in Oosay in an innocent diplomatic role.
“We need something,” Rawls says, “more nimble than the formal interagency inquiry. And, to be blunt, more secure.”
Rawls, who’s been standing in the middle of the library, now folds himself into one of the leather chairs. “You would be working under the auspices of the White House Counsel’s Office,” he says with a sigh.
The White House Counsel’s Office is one of the most ambiguous in Washington.
Before Watergate, the job barely existed. The president already had a personal lawyer, the attorney general, with almost ten thousand more lawyers below him. But after Nixon’s attorney general went to jail for helping engineer the Watergate cover-up, the Senate began to insist the attorney general pledge first allegiance to the rule of law and the public—not to the president.
Thus rose, largely invisibly, the power of the office of White House counsel. Presidents still needed personal lawyers and legal protectors. Once that was no longer the attorney general, the counsel’s office had swollen from four people before Watergate to more than a hundred. And the White House counsel had become one of the most powerful posts in Washington.
One reason for this power was secrecy. The counsel wasn’t Senate confirmed, meaning the president could choose whomever he or she wanted. And the counsel’s advice was covered by “executive privilege,” meaning Congress couldn’t haul the counsel up to the Hill to testify about anything.
What exactly the counsel did, or didn’t do, depended on who had the job, but history showed one task more important than all others: keep the president from breaking the law and keep the president’s staff from embroiling him in scandals. In other words, keep the boss’s ass out of trouble—legal or political—and keep his minions out of jail.
That is one of about four hundred reasons that Rawls tells his staff to write down as little as possible. Don’t rely on remembering to drop your notes in the “burn bag” at the end of the day.
Rawls gives Rena and Brooks a Cheshire cat smile. Got you two caught in my trap.
“If the counsel is covered by executive privilege, then would our inquiry be as well?” Brooks asks.
“That is my position,” Rawls says.
“And what we learn is covered by lawyer-client confidentiality?” Brooks asks.
“By . . . executive privilege. But I think they are largely interchangeable in this context.”
“Will we have the power to subpoena?”
“No. But you have the influence of the counsel to the president.”
All of this will be a challenge, but it’s what Rawls hasn’t said that worries Rena most. Why is Nash turning to a pair of outsiders to conduct an investigation into Oosay? He has a whole government to investigate this.
Spencer Carr, the president’s chief of staff, is leaning against bookshelves, watching Rena.
If James Nash is charismatic and often underestimated, his chief of staff derives much of his power from something different—fear. He is tall and good looking in a dry, villainous sort of way, and Carr’s presence here means he would help Rena and Brooks, but only so far as it served Nash’s interests. If their inquiries turned up anything that would hurt the president, Carr could turn on them.
“Can you do this?” Rawls asks.
Brooks looks at Rena, who has been quiet up to now. “I have a couple of questions,” Rena says.
A droll smile forms and just as quickly disappears on the face of the president of the United States.
On his best days, Rena thinks, Nash is now a 50-30 president—meaning about 50 percent of the country is inclined to believe him, 20 percent isn’t sure, and 30 percent think he lies about everything. It is, Rena knows, about as good as a president gets these days.
“Mr. President, most Americans will think you already know the truth about what happened in Oosay,” Rena begins. “And if you discover any of your people misspoke about it, they’ll expect you to correct the record as soon as you do.”
Nash’s endless blue eyes hold Rena’s dark brown ones.
“And your critics,” Rena continues, “they’ll think if you didn’t know what happened in Oosay, you’re incompetent. And if you did and don’t share it immediately, you’re part of a cover-up.”
Nash’s smile broadens slowly—until it becomes that famous, magnetic, hard-to-resist smile known around the world. “This, Peter, is why you’re here,” he says.
“And if we find a mess in Oosay, will you tell the American p
eople?”
Rena can feel Carr’s displeasure from the other side of the room radiating at him.
“Yes, Peter. If we are going to win the war against terrorist Islamic extremism, we need to know what happened last night,” he says. “So your interests here and mine are aligned.”
From the bookshelves Carr asks: “Satisfied?”
“I have one more question,” says Rena.
Nash glances toward Carr with an amused look and nods to Rena.
“Do you know what happened in Oosay, Mr. President?”
“Jesus Christ,” says Carr.
Rena and Brooks have learned the hard way to always ask: get every client on record telling you the truth, or at least find out if they won’t give it to you. They aren’t the president’s lawyers who have to defend him. They are investigators trying to find out what really happened. If you are being lied to from the start, you may need to run.
Nash finishes whatever amber liquor is in his glass and says, “At seven A.M. this morning I was briefed by my national security staff about what they knew. That is what I know. That is what you will know.”
Peter Rena’s political mentor, Senator Llewellyn Burke, had a theory about Washington and lying. The city had two faces to the world, Burke said. One was public. The other was private and personal.
Politicians knew that when they spoke in public, they often had to talk in broad hyperbole and bright colors, usually in vagaries and sometimes in evasion.
Because Washington people operated with these “acceptable public lies,” as Burke called them, the city only functioned in private when people leveled with each other. Away from microphones, a person’s word was expected to be his or her bond precisely because in front of the microphones it was not. A lie to a colleague’s face was considered a greater transgression than a wrong vote or a hypocritical press conference.
More than once, Rena had heard a senator say venomously about another, “That man lied to me. To my face. He’s a liar.”
The Good Lie Page 4
