The Nominee

by Brian McGrory

  “I feel like a rookie reporter,” Fitzgerald said. He flashed a smile—a curious one. The skin crinkled around his eyes. “The phone rings late on a Saturday night and I take off after the story like a bat out of hell. And here I am, Jimmy Olson on the scene.”

  A pause, then Fitzgerald added with a warm, whimsical smile, “What the hell is going on?”

  Randolph walked back across the room from the windows to the sitting area and beckoned Fitzgerald into a chair at the round antique coffee table. Only a single sidelamp with a hunter green shade lit the palatial office, giving the impression they were playing out an intimate scene on a large stage.

  Randolph spoke as the two settled into facing chairs. “You’ve been a good friend to my family for a long, long time, Robert. You’re also the best, fairest, smartest newsman I’ve ever met, and because of that, I wanted you to know this first.”

  Randolph paused, drawing a deep breath, letting the air slowly descend through his windpipe and into his lungs. Fitzgerald subconsciously fondled the pen in his chest pocket.

  “I was invited down to the White House tonight by Clayton Hutchins. I met with him for about ten minutes. During that time, he offered me the nomination to be the attorney general of the United States.”

  Another pause. Then, “I accepted on the spot.”

  Fitzgerald’s eyes opened wide and his brows shot upward in surprise. He reflexively brought his left hand up to slowly rub the late-night whiskers on his cheek.

  After an awkward, silent moment, he said, his tone flat, “Well, I guess all I can say is, congratulations, Lance. Congratulations.”

  There was a pause, a sigh from the governor. He replied, “I was hoping for something more.”

  A longer pause. A horn sounded on Beacon Street, a vagrant on the Common screamed that Ben and Jerry were out to destroy the world.

  Fitzgerald stared at the burgundy rug, his eyes still wide open, nodding his head but not speaking. Finally, he said in a methodical voice, “You’ll make a great attorney general. You will. You were an outstanding prosecutor here in Boston. You’re a skilled politician. It’s in your blood and your genes. You’ll do great.”

  When he finished, he stared up at Randolph, who sat looking sternly at him.

  “That means a lot to me,” Randolph said, his voice like ice, void of any appreciation or even emotion. “Especially coming from you.”

  Fitzgerald didn’t respond. Randolph continued, “The announcement will be made in the Rose Garden Monday afternoon. The president’s thinking in nominating me is not only a recognition of my political and prosecutorial abilities, but also to attempt to create a more bipartisan administration, and to prove to the public that he does not fear any further Democratic investigations.”

  The two men locked stares again. Randolph drained his beer and said, “I’m authorized to give this to you now on a not-for-attribution basis, and would prefer you put in print that I was not available for comment. The sourcing should be an official familiar with the White House, which I guess I am now. Best that I know, theTimes and thePost won’t have this tomorrow. It’s yours alone.”

  Randolph nodded at Fitzgerald, the nod being a punctuation point, a period, or in this case, an exclamation mark.

  Fitzgerald said, with a resigned look on his face, “I appreciate that.” It was midnight, still time to make the final edition of the Sunday paper. He stood up, slowly, and walked from the governor’s office without another word, leaving young Lance Randolph alone in the dim light of the moment. His loafers clicked mournfully along the empty marble hallway and down the wide stairs until he finally reached the front door.

  Two

  Sunday, April 22

  WHY IS IT THAT A SEEMINGLYinconsequential bud on an otherwise barren elm can lighten the darkest mood, or that a simple tulip, having pierced the earth on its April ascent toward the heavens, can melt the wintriest exterior and touch the coldest soul?

  I pose these questions not out of any specific interest in nature or psychology, but only because rays of sunshine were suddenly caressing my pale, dry cheeks like the golden fingers of some generous god, allowing my heart to grow light and my thoughts to grow expansive. From where I was standing, the first light of morning appeared above the downtown skyline and cast a warm glow across the stately willows, the freshly filled duck pond, and the vibrant meadows of the Public Garden, in what felt like the virgin moments of a reluctant spring. Two weeks earlier, sixteen inches of snow had fallen on our quaint hamlet of Boston. The storm was followed by days of windswept rain that turned the blackened, crusty ice into deep puddles of unforgiving slush. And finally, meteorological salvation. Ah, but my benevolent mood gets away from me.

  “Give me that,” I said with mock seriousness, thrusting my hand into Baker’s sizable mouth to pull out a muddy, slobber-soaked tennis ball.

  No sooner had I grabbed it with my now-disgusting fingers than the fickle hound lost any semblance of interest, having directed his entire being toward a trio of squirrels playing in a nearby grove of trees. He stood frozen on the path, his right front leg delicately in the pointing position, casting an occasional sidelong glance my way to make sure I didn’t do anything typically, foolishly human to disrupt his prey. Then he lunged toward them, sending the rodents scurrying in various directions for trees. He trotted in a wide circle, a victory lap of sorts, before walking back and taking the ball out of my hand with a half jump and a slight snort. Glad I could be of nominal use.

  Rejuvenation. A renaissance, even. It was 6:30 in the morning as I peeled off my sweatshirt after a three-mile walk from the waterfront to the park and began skipping rope on an empty stretch of path. Baker roamed off in pursuit of more squirrels. My mind began wandering as well.

  Things were good. Another hour of soothing sunshine and they might actually be excellent. I had moved from Washington to Boston, inarguably the greatest city in these United States. My heart was starting to feel whole again, or at least not shattered into a trillion fragments. Women seemed to find me interesting. I found myself fascinating. And I was on the verge of breaking one hell of a great story about our governor, the young Lance Randolph, lying about his prior record as a state prosecutor. Yes, good and getting better.

  On about my fifth minute with the jump rope, it was either stop or die, so I caught my breath and began trotting around the pond toward the point of this Public Garden excursion, my meeting with Paul Ellis, who I could already see sitting on a wooden bench reading that day’s paper.

  Here, in a nutshell, is how that meeting would proceed:

  Paul: “Jack, I’d like you to come over to the front office and start acting like the newspaper executive that you’re destined to be.”

  Jack (that’s me): “No thank you.”

  That would be followed by another temporary stalemate, which would be followed by another meeting next month. And so forth. In my mind, you string together enough temporality and you’ve created permanence. Or maybe not. We’d just have to wait and see, which I guess disproves the point.

  Paul Ellis, by the way, is the publisher ofThe Boston Record, and as such, is not accustomed to hearing the word “No” with any great regularity, or even mild irregularity, as they describe it in all those TV commercials, especially from people like me, meaning people who work for him.

  Allow me to explain. My name is Jack Flynn. I’m the senior investigative reporter forThe Boston Record, a lofty position bestowed upon me after I wrote an exposé on a failed presidential assassination attempt a little more than two-and-a-half years ago. I was hurt in that shooting in more ways than one, and helped in other ways as well, but I’ll spare you the details just now. The most important detail to keep in mind is that I’m home now.

  Paul Ellis is, in the lingo of the business, my rabbi, an uncanny judge of talent who hired me at theRecord, promoted me to my current job, gave me an equity stake in the company to persuade me from jumping ship to theWashington Post or theNew York Times, and is now trying to
convince me to become his heir apparent in the publisher’s suite. That last bit is only partly out of respect for my abilities, more out of disdain for those of his younger cousin, Brent Cutter, currently the newspaper’s president and the obvious choice to be the next publisher. That’s just a theory, but my theories have a way of revolving into fact.

  All of which, of course, leaves me with a choice. I could wear monogrammed custom-made shirts and dine on catered lunches as nervous vice presidents trek to my carpeted office with promises of shaving another 2.2 percent off the bottom line, or I could run around the city and its surrounding suburbs with a Bic Click and a yellow legal pad looking for news wherever I can find it, which isn’t often where any normal person wants to be. So far, I choose the latter. Call me a moron, but I’m in love with words rather than numbers, emotion rather than profit. It comes down to how you want to live a life. Mine was being lived richer, but poorer, if you know what I mean.

  Anyway, the Cutter-Ellis family has ownedThe Boston Record for one hundred and twenty-seven years, and over that time, has created not only one of the best family-owned newspapers in America, but one of the best newspapers of any kind. They’ve done it with equal parts journalistic savvy and unabashed paternalism. I’m a case in point for both.

  “Hello, Paul,” I said as I pulled within hearing distance of him.

  Paul Ellis looked up slowly from the paper, his eyes, unusually sad, framed by uncharacteristically dark lines and grooves. His gloomy appearance stood in stark contrast to the glorious signs of spring all around us—the delicious odor of warm, fertile earth, the sun gleaming off the Hancock Tower in the near distance, the occasional self-important duck who had made his sojourn north.

  “Step into my office,” he said in a melancholic voice.

  “My god, Paul,” I said, standing over him. “You look awful. You dip into capital or something?” A little Wasp humor. Too little, apparently, because he didn’t even feign a smile.

  “Sit down, Jack.”

  As I sat, he folded up his newspaper and placed it on the bench beside him, allowing me to catch a glimpse of the banner headline: “Governor Randolph to Be Nominated U.S. Attorney General.” I all but choked on my own good mood. When did this happen? Why? How did we find out? No editor had called me, and I saw nothing the prior night on the television news.

  “Can I take a quick look at your paper, Paul?”

  The byline was that of our star political reporter, the venerable Robert Fitzgerald. He attributed the information to “an official familiar with the White House,” and the story indicated that the leak had occurred late Saturday night, which explains why I had previously heard nothing about it. The Rose Garden press conference announcing the nomination, the story said, was scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.

  “Quite a hit,” I said, almost to myself, as I immediately began a quick and silent assessment of my own Randolph information, calculating the potential impact on his nomination. I suddenly liked my position—a lot. And now was not the time to care about all those pesky focus groups telling us that no one give’s a rat’s ass about politics anymore.

  I looked up at Paul, who was staring at the ground in front of him. He looked as if he was unsure what to say, or at least how to say it.

  “Everything good with you?” he finally asked, his chin resting on his knuckles, his elbows on his knees.

  He didn’t seem to need an answer, so I replied, “They’re terrific. This is a great hit by Fitzgerald today.”

  “Let’s hope it holds up,” he said absently.

  Regarding Paul Ellis, he looked how an aging newspaper publisher should look, which is to say tall, perfectly manicured, and handsome in that unassuming, Jimmy Stewart kind of sixty-something way. He acted how a newspaper publisher should act, which is also to say, thoughtful, inquisitive, and confident. He was, quite literally, born to run the business, and did it quite well, inheriting the reins of a great newspaper from his cousin, John Cutter, and turning it into an even more reputable and profitable one. Best of all, he saw theRecord not so much as a family cash cow, but as a calling, a form of public service different than politics or philanthropy, but not for one fraction of a single second any less important or noble.

  He stared at me and said, “This isn’t a good day for us, Jack, not for me, not for you, not for this city.”

  Since I have never known Paul Ellis to be even remotely melodramatic, I kept my mouth shut and my eyes trained on him, letting him continue at his own pace.

  “We’re facing a hostile takeover,” he said, meeting my stare. “A couple of weeks back, we got what’s known as a bear-hug letter. I thought we could make the problem go away, but now our lawyers and finance guys are saying they don’t think we can ward it off. Minority shareholders rights’ and all that—if we fight it, we could be crippled by a lawsuit from within our ranks.

  “Two of the three trusts that control fifty-three percent of the newspaper were opened last year, and now the Campbell Newspaper Company has come in with an offer that none of those shareholders will want to refuse. They’re offering fifty-four a share. That’s ten bucks over Friday’s closing, a nearly twenty-five percent gain.”

  I was stunned into silence as a dozen images floated through my mind, most of which involved me without a decent job and steady income. I eventually managed to say, “Doesn’t Campbell Newspapers own theSpringfield American ?”

  Paul replied, “And theBurlington News and theRochester Gazette and theLincoln Daily Star and two dozen remarkably mediocre small and mid-sized newspapers, all of which are incredibly profitable, and none of which have ever been known for their distinguished journalism.”

  “Great. Why does a chain like that want a paper like ours, and how the hell can they afford us?”

  The sun was now fully up over the distant buildings. A couple of morning joggers huffed past us, and Baker lay in the nearby grass chewing hard on a stick. All I could think of at the moment were the Campbell newspapers I had read before—papers that almost prided themselves in dumbing down to the lowest feasible denominator, papers so filled with color, graphics, and gimmicks that they madeUSA Today look like the trade publication for the American Funeral Home Association.

  The owner, Terry Campbell, offered me a job once, and I turned him down cold. Now it looked like he’d have me in his employment after all.

  Paul replied, “My guess is that they want a flagship paper, something to give them a greater level of prestige than they now have. And I don’t think money’s really a problem for them. They sure as hell don’t pour it back into the product.”

  More silence as we both sat with our elbows on our knees, looking down. It was Paul who finally spoke: “My problem is that there are so many Cutter and Ellis cousins spread all over the country, two and three and four times removed, many of whom have never even been to Boston and probably don’t even read a newspaper. TheRecord doesn’t mean a damn thing to them. All they see is the stock price and a way to get rich off all the hard work of the people who busted their asses to make the paper what it is today.”

  I said, “I don’t know anything about finances, and the only family trust that the Flynns had was that my father would come home from work every day. But can you leverage the value of your trusts to outbid Campbell on the others?”

  “The banks have already told me no.”

  He exhaled hard and looked away for a long moment. Truth is, I was worried he might be losing it. Then, to my relative relief, he said in a firm voice, “Jack, this newspaper, our newspaper, has won twenty-eight Pulitzer Prizes, including two last year. Our reporting has sent mayors to jail, had a United States senator impeached, blocked a Supreme Court nominee from confirmation, and unveiled the darkest possible secrets about the sitting president of the United States. God only knows how many other politicians stayed straight out of fear of us. God only knows how many times we’ve given voice to the voiceless on issues ranging from bank redlining to consumer fraud. God only knows how many tim
es someone says to a friend or a colleague or a family member every single damned day of the week, ‘Did you see that story in theRecord? ’”

  He paused, then added, “And now all that’s at risk. All of it.” In a much softer voice, almost to himself: “Every damned bit.”

  And you wonder why I love the man. I mean, for chrissakes, you could have turned this speech into a television ad campaign and our circulation would go up 20 percent in a week.

  Before I could say anything, he put his hand on my shoulder and looked me square in the eye.

  “Jack, I’ve never told anyone this before, but this same jackal, Terry Campbell, tried making a run at us five years ago. We staved him off. John Cutter was the publisher at the time. I was the president. Everything was done in secret. It put so much pressure on us that John had that fatal heart attack.”

  Paul looked down now, his hand absently drifting off my shoulder, down my arm, and then gone. He added, his voice much lower, “At least I hope that’s how he died.” Then he looked at me in silence.

  I replied, “You’re suspicious?”

  “I’m overtired and overwrought and I’m probably crazy. But this thing has been nagging at me. You know Campbell’s reputation. He gets involved in bloodbaths with his unions. People have died mysterious deaths. I’ve started asking myself questions I probably didn’t dare ask five years ago. What if he had something to do with John’s death?”

  There was silence between us until Paul broke it, saying, “No, I’m just talking crazy.”

  I said, “You want me to check it out?”

  He turned to me again and nodded. “I’m not afraid, mind you. Sometimes I think that I love this newspaper so much that if I have to die for it, then so be it, and I know John felt the same way. But this battle’s going to be harder than before because of the breakup of the trusts. I want to know what I’m up against.”