The Good Lie

by Tom Rosenstiel

  Curtis Gains is a relatively junior congressman from Florida who through good luck and retirements had become chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee after just two terms in Congress. Gains, too, has been clamoring for hearings.

  “Do you think I should?” Winley asks.

  “If we want hearings on Oosay, Les, don’t you think pressure from two places is better than one?”

  “Very wise, Senator.”

  “Well, that’s fine.”

  * * *

  It was actually Curtis Gains’s chief of staff, a man named Tom Beyers, who had been urging the congressman to become the most vocal member of the House calling for hearings on Oosay. He needed an issue to stand out, Beyers kept telling Gains. Getting your chairmanship was just an opportunity, Beyers advised him. Now people need to see what you will do with it. Beyers was shrewd and aggressive and Gains was grateful to have him, someone so naturally political.

  After getting the call from Winley, it was Beyers who persuaded Gains to call the Speaker of the House immediately and ask for an audience. If you can get here in ten minutes, the Speaker has an opening, Gains was told.

  Gains and Beyers speed-walk from the Rayburn Building across Independence to the Speaker’s “private” office in the Capitol just off the House floor.

  In the inner office, Gains hands over a copy of the memo, walks through the basics, and announces he would like his own committee, Foreign Affairs, to hold hearings on Oosay.

  The Speaker, a pear-shaped, disheveled man, doesn’t know Gains well. But he generally considers anyone in only his third House term a neophyte. He tapped Gains to fill the vacant chairmanship of Foreign Affairs because he needed to mollify, once again, the Common Sense wing of the party.

  Take it all together—a baby House member, a hard-liner, and a lawyer—and the Speaker, who doesn’t much like lawyers, isn’t thrilled.

  He weighs all this in a few seconds.

  “Curt, we’re gonna get to the bottom of what happened in Oosay. You bet. But I don’t want to look like we’re just going fishing. You run out on a lake in a boat without the right tackle and all you come back with is an empty cooler, a hangover, and a sunburn.”

  If the Speaker isn’t sure what to think of this young House member, Congressman Curtis Gains has no doubt what he thinks of the Speaker. He considers him weak, suspiciously moderate, and maybe dull-witted. But he recognizes the old Ohio relic has friends in every quarter of the House GOP caucus, something no one else in the leadership can say, and that is how he maintains power.

  “Mr. Speaker, if we hesitate, I understand Senator Bakke has this memo, too. The Senate may act before us.”

  If Gains knows one thing for sure, it’s that the Speaker hates Senator Dick Bakke, who spent two terms in the House scorning the Old Man before jumping to the Senate.

  “Whaddya think, Mitch?” the Speaker says, turning to his chief of staff, Bobby Mitchell.

  The Speaker and his aide aren’t rookies at this, for goodness’ sake. They know the Winley memo is circulating and that it might be why Gains was coming by.

  “If Senator Bakke has this memo,” Mitchell says, “it might be wise to consult with Susan Stroud. See what the Senate majority leader has in mind.”

  “Aw Christ, Mitch, we run our own chamber here,” the Speaker replies, as rehearsed. “Let the Senate delay. We should act.”

  “And we can, Mr. Speaker. But why not know what the majority leader has going on first?”

  Among other virtues, the Speaker hopes, this little dance will remind Gains of all the complications and nuances the Speaker has to consider.

  “He has a point, Curtis,” the Speaker says to Gains. “Sit tight. We’ll be back to you.”

  “Mr. Speaker, even if you create a special committee for this, I’d like to chair it,” Gains says.

  It is an absurdly audacious request. But then Gains had always been quick on his feet.

  The Speaker drags his palm down the lower half of his face, a habit when thinking that brings unfortunate attention to the flesh on his neck.

  “Let me talk to Stroud, Curt.”

  Twenty-Two

  An hour later, the Speaker and his chief of staff have traversed to the north side of the Capitol—a trip that requires crossing under the Capitol Dome—and are sitting in the ornate suite of the Senate majority leader. Susan Stroud’s ceremonial office in the Capitol makes the Speaker’s own ceremonial Capitol office look meager.

  Everyone knows the nicknames. The Senate is now “House Stroud.” The cautious inscrutable majority leader is “the Southern Sphinx,” and “Wake Up, Lil Susie,” when she is slow to respond. Nicknames attach themselves to politicians like gum on the floor of old movie theaters. And for a woman, the whispered corridor sobriquets often involve misogyny, sexism, physical slurs, innuendo, and every kind of harassment imaginable. In her rise to the top, Stroud steeled herself to it and gained strength from overcoming it. In one of her early local races, an opponent had dubbed her “Madame X,” a reference to the famous portrait of a mysterious young woman whom the artist depicted as undeniably pretty but perhaps empty-headed. The painting, on loan from New York at the time, was on posters all over Gulfport and Jackson under the title Who is Madame X? Stroud, initially furious, had turned the phrase to her advantage and won. Now, during her fourth decade in politics, that nickname could instill fear in her enemies over her unpredictability: What would Madame X do?

  They sit in facing chairs, their chiefs of staff with them. Stroud stares at the Speaker, the frumpy man whom she considers a kind of cut-rate Columbo, smarter than he seems but not as smart as he thinks.

  With them is a fifth person the Speaker has not expected. Senator Llewellyn Burke of Michigan, chairman of Armed Services. Not formally a part of the Senate leadership, Burke is a member of Stroud’s more informal “kitchen cabinet.” Burke, it seems to the Speaker, is an informal counselor to nearly everyone in this goddamn town. He is even friends with the president and is the former boss of the Oosay investigator, Peter Rena.

  “Les Winley is peddling this memo around,” Stroud says. “Which means he has given it to the press, too.”

  “I assume,” says the Speaker.

  “So let’s consider the details.”

  It is something Stroud says often. She is always careful about “the details.” About protocol. And timing. To whom she is talking. About appearances.

  And if she had any core political philosophy, it was probably purely practical: Always play the long game. That’s why she likes the Senate. Senators run every six years. Presidents run every four—and they’re out after eight. The long game is the whole point of the Senate.

  “I’ve got chairmen chomping at the bit,” the Speaker says.

  “We all have people chomping at the bit, Mr. Speaker. I just got off the phone with Senator Bakke. He wants to hold hearings, too.”

  “Lew, what’s your gut tell you?” Stroud asks Llewellyn Burke.

  “Well, if the Speaker has people who want to call hearings in the House, and you have people who want to call hearings in the Senate, why not create a joint committee of both chambers?” Burke says.

  “Joint. House and Senate?” Stroud responds.

  “You and the Speaker could handpick the members,” Burke suggests.

  Stroud rubs her index finger against her thumb, a habit she has when thinking. The high-gloss red polish on her nails catches the light. She smiles.

  “A joint committee could both contain this and empower it,” Burke says to Stroud.

  She nods and glances at her chief of staff.

  “Be careful who you put on it, Susan,” the aide says.

  “Mr. Speaker?”

  The Speaker is unsure what to think of this idea. It is confusing and unusual, but it would at least give the House equal billing. “Let me sleep on it,” he says.

  AFTER THE SPEAKER AND HIS AIDE ARE GONE, Stroud and Burke spend more time mulling over who should be a part of the Select Joint
Committee on Oosay.

  There would be fourteen members in all, eight Republicans and six Democrats. To get there, they begin with the so-called Gang of Eight, the members of Congress to whom the CIA has already granted special access to classified intelligence. The eight include the highest-ranking Democrat and Republican on the House and Senate intelligence committees, plus the highest-ranking member from each party in the House and Senate—the Speaker, the Senate majority leader, and the two minority leaders.

  To that, Stroud adds a Democrat and Republican from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Reform. That would give that little creep Dick Bakke a seat. Then a Democrat and a Republican from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, to accommodate Curtis Gains in the House. Added to that, she names two more Republicans to give the majority party two extra members of the committee.

  As a member of the Gang of Eight, Stroud herself would be part of the formula. But being on a committee investigating Oosay would both dirty her hands and tie them.

  “Lord knows, I can’t be on this. Nor, I dare say, can the Speaker. Would you sit for me?” she asks Burke.

  “You don’t want an old dog like me, Susan. I’d send the wrong message. How about Wendy Upton?”

  “Why her?”

  “If Dick Bakke has thoughts of using this committee as a presidential launching pad, why not give Wendy a boost, too?” Burke says.

  Wendy Upton, the junior senator from Arizona, is a former army attorney who’d been groomed by the ageless and legendary Judiciary chairman Furman Morgan to enter politics. She was the intellectual leader of the GOP on Judiciary, and on her other committees as well, with a kind of prosecutorial independence and sense of right and wrong that made people around her seem to be their better selves. She is being pushed by some in the party as the future of mainstream conservativism, and many are urging her to consider a run for the White House.

  “Don’t make her chair,” Stroud’s chief of staff advises. “You don’t need the grief with the Common Sense Caucus.”

  THAT NIGHT, the Speaker’s home phone rings at 10:30 P.M. He has just fallen asleep.

  The caller ID announces it is Susan Stroud.

  “Goddamn it,” the Speaker growls. He’s being played.

  The Speaker is famous for needing his nine hours a night—an early-to-bed, early-to-rise man. The Senate majority leader is calling him late, hoping he’ll be impatient, maybe even asleep, and agree to anything.

  She isn’t the first to pull this shithead stunt with him.

  “Okay, I agree!” she chimes after he picks up.

  She agrees to what, he wonders.

  “Let’s do a joint Senate-House select committee on Oosay,” Stroud says.

  The Speaker tries to focus. He is sitting up now, feet on the floor off the side of the bed.

  “Here’s what we propose,” Stroud explains.

  She goes through the numbers—how many Democrats, which committees to draw from.

  “So your boy Gains gets a seat,” she says. “And you and I each get to pick one more member of our choice.”

  The Speaker hates getting rolled, and he hates the House always getting shit on by everyone—the Senate, the press, everyone.

  “Gains is chair,” he hears himself say.

  It is the first thing he can think of. Gains had suggested being named chair this afternoon, and he said he’d consider it.

  Yet he likes the idea instantly. A House chair. A Common Senser. No doubt Stroud will think she can control him anyway.

  “Be serious,” she says.

  “I am. Gains got the memo. And I’ll have hell to pay if I give this over to the Senate to run. We could have done a committee on our own, Susie.”

  Susie. She will hate that.

  He could screw with her head, too.

  “Bakke got the same memo,” she says.

  “You won’t let Dick Bakke chair this in a month of Sundays any more than I would.”

  “I get to advise on your other House member who serves in your stead,” Stroud says.

  She’s making him eat it, too. He couldn’t pick his own surrogate without her managing it.

  Oh, what the hell.

  “Done. But the goddamn press release is produced jointly. And not till we have all the names. Or the deal is undone.”

  “Sleep tight, Bill,” Stroud says. But she is reminded again that the slovenly old man is maybe not the fool he seems.

  The next morning there are the usual eat-shit-and-die phone calls with the Democrats in both houses. But by midmorning there is a deal.

  As if the Democrats had any choice.

  Twenty-Three

  FRIDAY, JANUARY 10

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  On the Washington Richter scale, the seismic magnitude of any event is measured in the number and size of reactions in other offices across the city.

  At Rena and Brooks’s firm, that event begins with Walter Smolonsky appearing in Peter Rena’s doorway. Smolonsky is back from Europe. He failed to locate any of the five men who had been monitoring communications in the Barracks in Oosay. They know they will have to send him back, but for now they need him here.

  “Our lives just got a lot worse,” says Smolo.

  Rena looks up from his desk.

  What now?

  “Congress just announced it’s holding hearings on Oosay. A joint committee. House and Senate.”

  Rena regards the giant former police detective.

  “Who’s chairing?”

  “Curtis Gains.”

  “The House guy? Foreign Affairs?”

  “Yeah. Little guy. Buzz cut.”

  A hard-liner, Rena thinks. It is a bad break for them.

  “We knew it would happen,” he tells Smolo. Smolonsky has hated this job from the start. No need, Rena thinks, to make him feel worse by sounding alarmed by congressional hearings. “That’s basically why the president hired us—to be ready for this.”

  “We ready for this?” Smolonsky asks, moving into Rena’s office and sitting down.

  Now Brooks appears in Rena’s doorway.

  “You hear?”

  “About Congress? Yes, this scary man just told me.”

  “So, we ready for this?” Smolonsky repeats.

  “You keep asking that,” Rena says.

  “I’ll take that as a no.”

  Rena looks at Brooks. She’s been frustrated, too, about their lack of progress. Rena is also nervous but tends to ponder problems in the back of his mind, arriving at sudden intuitive solutions. Brooks is a list maker, a linear thinker, and a worrier. And right now, she thinks, the list stinks. The Tribune exposé came out more than two weeks ago. They’d seen Rousseau the day after Christmas to help them chart a new course. But to Brooks’s analytic mind, they had made depressingly little progress since. They’d lost another week to the New Year’s break. It is now January 10. They still haven’t located the men who’d been in the Oosay Barracks that night. They’ve made little more progress moving up the ladder of seniority at State, the National Security Council, or the CIA. No senior administration officials had agreed to see them yet. “The holidays,” they were told. She’d also received another phone call from David Traynor’s people pressing them to do work for him. She hadn’t told Rena about that, either.

  “Maybe the announcement of hearings will buy us time,” Rena suggests. “If they want to do it seriously.”

  Rena and Brooks know a good deal about congressional hearings. They had met as Senate investigators preparing for one and they had recruited some of their team, Conner, Robinson, and Smolonsky, from Senate ranks. Good hearings can take more than a month to prepare. Bad ones can be rushed in days.

  “I figure George Rawls will have our asses over at the White House before lunch to demand what we know,” Brooks says wearily. “What do we know?”

  “More than we think,” Rena says.

  IT IS CLOSER TO 3:30 P.M., ACTUALLY, when Rawls demands their presence. The meeting is held in
his auxiliary office in the Old Executive Office Building, where most of the White House counsel staff is located, away from annoying reporters who monitor meeting schedules in the West Wing. Carr is there, but says nothing. Rawls listens to their status report.

  “You need to lean harder,” the old lawyer’s typewriter voice bangs at them. “The point here is to stay ahead of a congressional inquiry we knew was coming.”

  “Then we need your help,” Rena says.

  “What do you need?”

  “Webster,” Rena says, referring to the director of the CIA.

  Brooks wants to run at Diane Howell first, but Rena worries she will be too careful. He wants to try Webster. If the old CIA hand is the bureaucratic survivor who is always in favor of what will happen, he would be a good read, Rena thinks, because he will yield, bend, somehow, if only to shift the blame. They just need to have their eyes open to recognize it.

  “We’ll see what we can do,” Rawls says with a glance at Carr.

  Rena looks at the chief of staff.

  “Owen is a difficult man,” Carr says. “But I’ll call him.”

  * * *

  When Will Gordon calls her, Jill Bishop is looking for her car somewhere in the labyrinth of the Tysons Corner shopping center.

  “Where are you, Jill?” Gordon says.

  “Lost.”

  “What?”

  “I’m at Tysons. I don’t remember which garage I parked in.” She has just been meeting with her intelligence source, Talon.

  Gordon lets it go without comment that the nation’s most famous investigative reporter can’t remember where she’s parked.

  “Congress just announced hearings on Oosay,” he says. “A joint Senate-House committee, no less.”

  “That’s pretty rare, isn’t it? A joint committee? Who’s on it?”

  “Eight Republicans. Six Democrats. And get this, a House chairman. Curtis Gains.”

  She doesn’t know him well. A hard-right guy. Somehow he wrangled the chairmanship.

  “Who else is on it?”

  He walks her through the names.