The Good Lie

by Tom Rosenstiel

  Every media outlet in the stratosphere has run with the emails, which were sent by an anonymous hacker group in Europe to the website WeLeaks. “Emails Reveal Oosay Committee Insiders See Probe as Largely Political,” reads the headline in the New York Times. A few mainstream outlets mused about the ethics of publishing stolen emails. But the emails were real, the editors concluded, and in the twenty-first century, the public, not the press, will be the arbiter of their propriety.

  Stroud herself never loved this committee, everyone knew, but she had assented to it to accommodate the rising powers on the right in her party, powers that she knew in time would engulf and destroy her. But not, she thinks, today.

  Bakke sits on a sofa across from Stroud. Next to him, looking as if they have been called to the principal’s office, is Gains, and beside him his chief of staff, Beyers.

  On a facing sofa sits the Speaker of the House, hands cupped on his stomach, and next to him Burke. Stroud has taken an armchair.

  Wendy Upton is standing at the window overlooking the National Mall, too agitated to sit. In a single glance, she can see the Smithsonian museums, the Washington Monument, the memorials to Vietnam, Korea, and World War II, the reflecting pool, and the Lincoln Memorial. Halfway down the mall on the right, in what were marshy flats at the time, Thomas Jefferson and his architect Pierre L’Enfant placed the White House, so the people’s legislatures would always look down on the country’s chief executive.

  Bakke has already started talking.

  “Before we go too far, let’s remember this leak was a criminal act. Private emails were stolen.” He glances at Stroud, the only person here with even nominal authority over him. “And in private there’s nothing wrong with speculating on the political impact of hearings. Indeed, I said nothing in those emails I have not said on the record.”

  Chairman Gains has his eyes in his lap.

  Stroud raises her hand, palm out, a signal she uses to get people to stop talking, particularly men. Bakke stops, and Stroud turns to Senator Burke.

  “Lew, I asked you here because you’re not part of this committee. I wanted an outside read on the damage and what we might do.”

  Burke shifts his body toward Bakke in a way that conveys respect. It is one of Burke’s gifts that he can make everyone in the room feel listened to.

  “I sympathize, Dick,” he begins. “We can’t govern the country in a fishbowl, without some zone of privacy. Any more than we can govern it on cable TV.” The last remark is a gentle reminder how often Bakke is in front of cameras.

  “But we need to recognize a political reality. Our party controls both legislatures, so the responsibility here is entirely on us as Republicans. We need to show skeptics we can be serious and fair, and show our faithful we can be thorough. To do that, we have to be above reproach.”

  Burke wrinkles his brow in concern. “Your emails, Dick, have brought reproach on us.”

  He turns to the staffer, Beyers. “And Mr. Beyers’s emails, which put his personal ambition above his responsibility, do worse than that.”

  “Respectfully,” Bakke answers, before anyone can agree with Burke, “we’re ignoring the elephant in the room, which isn’t my emails. The problem is this committee has gotten nowhere.”

  Bakke glances at Gains. Stroud uses the slight hesitation to interrupt.

  “Mr. Speaker,” she says, “what do you think?”

  She looks at the frumpy man on the sofa, third in the constitutional line of succession, two heartbeats from the presidency. The Speaker shifts his girth. He knows what the people in this room tend to think of him. It’s fine. He has learned the advantages of being underrated.

  “The elephant in the room, if I may, isn’t the committee’s progress. It’s the presidential election. Young Senator Bakke here is almost certain to be a candidate. And there are some in our party who would also like to see Senator Upton here run as well. And on the other side, Senator Traynor looks like he might run. And possibly Senator Kaplan, a former comedian, God help us.”

  No one laughs.

  “My fear is if we let this committee become a campaign event, we all suffer. I say let’s contain the committee, focus it, and not let it turn into a fishing expedition trolling for anything bad we can find about the Nash administration.”

  The Speaker is talking in code, but everyone in the room has the decryption key: he hates Dick Bakke and the new right in his party—even more than Stroud does. Every House member has to run in the next election, and if Bakke is head of the ticket, the Speaker thinks they all may suffer. So make Bakke pay for the email leak. Never let the opportunity of a good disaster go to waste.

  Bakke is reading the code, too, and the code in this room, he thinks, is awful. Stroud has set him up. The only other genuine conservative here is Gains, and the congressman is terrified. The only way out of here alive, Bakke thinks—the only way the conservative movement has flowered in the first place—is to blast his way out.

  “Mr. Speaker, I’m sorry. Not only can this committee’s findings be whatever we discover. They must be. If we find the Nash administration is hiding something we weren’t looking for, we have a responsibility to get to the bottom of it. If we find out they murdered someone in the White House, would we tell the American people we didn’t care because that isn’t what we were asked to look at?”

  “Do you have evidence someone was murdered in the White House, Senator?” Burke says with a flash of more genuine anger than he usually reveals.

  “Do you have evidence someone wasn’t?” Bakke answers.

  “Is that the standard now?” Burke says. “We imagine a crime and ask the president to prove his innocence?”

  Bakke smiles like a hungry crocodile. “We’re not a court. We’re a congressional committee. So let’s not fool ourselves: this is about politics. And frankly it feels to me as if you’re embarrassed by that. Even afraid of it. Don’t be. When we look back at this committee, no one will care what liberal newspaper columnists wrote. What they will wonder is one thing: Did we win the next election? Or did we lose it?”

  The room is silent. For a moment, Bakke thinks perhaps he has prevailed.

  “Enough.”

  Every head turns.

  The voice belongs to Wendy Upton, and it contains an authority many of them have not heard before.

  “The problem, Senator,” she says, “is not any lack of passion by the people in this room, or some fear of politics. The problem is we used the discovery of political emails by a Democratic aide at the State Department to trigger this committee. Now, your own private emails suggest the motive behind the committee was always just to harm the president and gain ground in the next election, perhaps for your own candidacy. That makes everyone in this room, and in our party, a hypocrite. Whether the emails were private or not, whether their being stolen is illegal or not, whether anyone agrees with you or not. That is the politics of this.”

  Bakke’s heart begins to sink. He has never heard the polite and careful Upton sound so venomous.

  Upton moves from the window to the center of the room and the rest of the group.

  “Our job now,” she continues, “is to limit the damage those emails have done.”

  She looks at the Speaker.

  “Sir, I know you prefer to handle these things in private, before they get out of hand. Perhaps you could do that today by asking Mr. Beyers here, whose emails have embarrassed the House, to tender his resignation this afternoon, and ask Oosay chairman Gains here to accept that resignation. That would be your acknowledgment that this committee is fair-minded and more than a political proposition.”

  The Speaker is kneading his hands together in his lap as if he were feeling the idea in his fingers. “Yes,” he says. “I believe that is a good idea.”

  Upton turns to Bakke. “I can’t tell you what do, Senator,” she says, “but when Mr. Beyers’s departure is announced, reporters will most assuredly call you for comment. I suspect the majority leader would appreciate y
our promise not to embarrass her, or yourself.”

  It is a subtle twist of the knife, getting him to pledge to make Stroud happy.

  Bakke’s own hard life had taught him something about defeat, and when he arrived in the Senate Aggie Tucker had given him an axiom that put it into words: never forget and never forgive and always nurse your resentments longer than your enemies do. He will remember this moment.

  Forty-Eight

  WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 12:30 P.M.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  What could happen in ninety hours, Rena had wondered.

  A U.S. senator had tried to implicate them in an alleged assassination plot of an American general in the field. The senator’s private email, and that of a congressional aide, had been hacked and leaked to the press. The former CIA director of operations had come to Rena’s house and told him the Washington Tribune was about to break a story that could do irreparable harm to the U.S. war on terrorism. And the only thing they knew for sure about what had happened in Morat was that the president and his own national security team no longer trusted each other.

  The country feels at war with itself, as if the foundations under the stone and marble federal buildings that lined the city, which were built to express the nation’s pride in the idea that people could self-govern, were decaying from some long-neglected rot and were about to collapse in on themselves.

  Dick Bakke’s voice still rang in Rena’s ears from five nights before, mocking the word truth. Maybe knowing the truth about what happened that night in Africa was a fool’s errand. Maybe thinking that knowing the literal facts about anything would get you closer to the truth was as simplistic as Bakke suggested, a worn-out trope, or a naïve antiquated notion from another time, like a gentleman’s honor.

  They have one more chance, a Hail Mary. Then their time will be up. The Oosay Committee will reconvene, delayed a day or two. Or the Tribune’s mystery story will run. And they will have failed.

  He and Brooks have almost reached the entrance to the Four Seasons hotel in Georgetown, where they’ve been summoned by Anthony Rousseau.

  Brooks’s phone rings. She looks at the number—the Washington Tribune.

  “It’s Jill Bishop,” she says. “If I answer this, even to tell her I can’t talk, she could say she’s reached me. That might be enough for her to run her story, saying we offered no comment.”

  “Let it go to voice mail,” Rena suggests. “Then she hasn’t reached you.”

  He has no idea whether that gambit will work at the moment, but eventually it would not: “The investigating firm Rena, Brooks & Toppin did not respond to repeated efforts to reach them for comment.”

  Brooks lets the call go.

  “I wonder if we’re at the end of the road.”

  Brooks only murmurs the words, as much to herself as to Rena.

  Sometimes his partner’s wonderfully strategic mind works against her, Rena thinks. She can see all the possible moves on the chess board. And the effort of trying to assess which one to make can paralyze her.

  “We’re only at the end of the road if we stop,” he says out loud.

  At the entrance to the Four Seasons, Anthony Rousseau is waiting. He has not told them why they should come, and he says nothing as they follow him through the revolving doors and down the hotel’s long, wide hallway. Rousseau leads them to the darkened entrance of the restaurant called Bourbon Steak at the rear of the hotel, where you can order an ounce of forty-year-old single-malt scotch for $230. Rousseau whispers something to the maître d’ and they’re led to a private room. Security agents with earpieces stand outside the door.

  They enter, and the secretary of defense, Daniel Xavier Shane, turns from the window overlooking the Potomac.

  “Mr. Secretary,” Rousseau says, “I’m afraid I can’t join you for lunch after all. I have to go back to Seattle suddenly. But my friends Randi Brooks and Peter Rena can keep our date for me. I know how much the president would appreciate it. And I know how much you have been trying to see them. I’m so glad this worked out. Please excuse me.”

  And before Shane musters a response Rousseau is gone.

  The secretary regards the two fixers he has been avoiding for weeks with something between fury and surrender.

  “I should throw you two out on your ear.”

  But he holds out a hand, inviting Brooks to sit at the small table set for four, and pushes her chair in for her as she sits.

  Rena has no idea what to expect. But now they can ask their questions, which in the end amount to only one: What went wrong in Morat you are covering up? They are convinced now Shane is the only one likely to tell them. Shane moves to a chair and sits.

  He is tall and athletic, even at sixty-two, still a quarterback’s frame inside his navy-blue suit. Big hands, dimpled chin, Irish handsome. It is a face etched by a large and successful life.

  “You two have a helluva job,” says Shane.

  “Finding the truth?” says Brooks.

  “Yes, tough town for it,” Shane says.

  His voice has the familiar timbre of so many soldiers Rena has known. The words start low in his gut and sound as if they were filtered through gravel.

  “I looked up your record,” he says to Rena. “You remind me of me. Order of the Arrow.” It’s a reference to an honor society of Eagle Scouts to which Rena and Shane both belonged. “And foolishly bullheaded,” he adds. “A right and wrong complex.” That’s a reference to the end of Rena’s military career.

  Shane had spent his life rubbing against the grain, too. He was the kind of boy adults admired but most kids thought too straight—an Eagle Scout, high school quarterback, president of the Young Republicans and the Catholic Youth group. In the rebel 1970s at William & Mary, Shane had grown more religious and dutiful. He joined ROTC when others were protesting its presence on campus and wrote college editorials calling for universal mandatory government service while Nixon was ending the draft. There was a quote in Wiley’s file of Shane saying that in college he felt a growing call to public service but anguished over whether to become a priest or enter politics.

  He chose public life, becoming an intelligence officer in the air force, attending law school, joining the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He ran for Congress and four years later won a seat in the Senate from Pennsylvania after 9/11.

  In the most deliberative body in the world, Shane became even more independent. He compared the war in Iraq to Vietnam and drew fire from his own party for a speech in which he declared that “questioning the government does not embolden the enemy, it makes our government stronger.”

  Going viral was a new phrase then. Shane was among the first politicians to whom it was attached.

  James Nash’s relationship with his military was getting worse. On the eve of his reelection campaign twenty-eight months ago, he asked Shane to join his administration. Frustrated by the Senate, and about to change parties, Shane agreed.

  Critics saw an opportunist. Supporters saw a man of intellectual honesty and old-fashioned independence.

  “He’s a fount of contradictions,” Wiley’s file had concluded. “A devoutly religious spy, a soldier skeptical of war, an ambitious politician who goes to mass every morning. He’s like a chemical compound that’s inherently unstable.”

  The expression on Shane’s face in front of them now is playful and intrigued, not fearful. It reminds Rena of the first time he met President Nash. His joy in the arena seemed to grow as the events became more intense. If Wiley’s speculations about Shane are correct, there is some roiling going on underneath the secretary’s smile.

  “For a public man, you’re hard to find,” Brooks says.

  “There is a congressional investigation ongoing. I was advised that speaking to you two was unwise.” A pause. “Since this meeting isn’t on my schedule, I have to ask if this conversation is official.”

  “We didn’t know we were meeting you any more than you knew you were meeting us,” Brooks says. />
  “So, how can I help, unofficially?”

  “We’ve seen the drone footage. And we have some questions,” Rena says. “And there is an urgent deadline. We’ve been told that if we cannot resolve this quickly, the Tribune is close to breaking a story that will be far more damaging than you talking to us.”

  Shane looks surprised. They know something he does not.

  “So ask,” he says.

  There is no interview strategy, no careful winding path. They are improvising.

  “What was Brian Roderick really doing in Oosay?” Brooks asks. Shane hesitates. “It was more than meeting with moderates.”

  Shane is trying to guess what they know.

  “No, I think you could say that was the reason. But not all the meetings were public. And not all took place in the compound.”

  He is still being coy with them.

  “Where did they take place? And with whom?” Brooks tries.

  “Rod was more than a warrior,” Shane says. “He believed there was a way to win the war by helping these countries find their own way out of oblivion. That was how he believed we could defeat the enemy.”

  The secretary is recalling his friend, Rena thinks, but not answering their questions. Time to mix the chemical compounds.

  “There is no more time for this dance,” Rena says, his voice so soft Shane has to lean toward him to hear. “Let’s assume you didn’t have your friend assassinated like Senator Bakke says. What went wrong that night? What are you hiding? A failure by his security people? Their cowardice?”

  Shane’s expression hardens.

  “There was no cowardice that night. Just the opposite.”

  The memory of his lost friend seems to surface in Shane’s face.

  “Brian Roderick was the bravest man I’ve ever known. The most extraordinary soldier. The best man . . .”

  He doesn’t finish. Shane’s professional mask has slipped, just for an instant, the stress of the last months unexpectedly washing over him.

  It catches Rena off guard. And he begins to feel sympathy for his prey, for the responsibility Shane has taken on. People like Shane bear the paradox of being responsible for problems they didn’t create and no one can solve, and then being blamed for them. We salute the soldiers, ritually, but condemn those trying to keep them safe.