The Last Debate

by Jim Lehrer

  “I’ll do my best,” Mike Howley said.

  And they both laughed. And they both swore to me it was all meant to be laughed at because it was clearly a joke.

  A few minutes later Mike’s sister, Janet, said almost the same thing about what Mike should do to Meredith in the debate. Only she was definitely not joking.

  “Make me really proud, little brother, and do God’s real work,” she said to Howley from Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she had gone ten years ago with her husband to co-author the successful “Cowboy Jake” detective novels set in Houston. “Make sure that awful man does not become president.”

  “I can’t do anything about that,” he said. “Don’t even joke about something like that.”

  “You’re too serious, Mike, and you always have been.”

  There weren’t any other loved ones for him to call about his moderating. His mother and father were both dead, and Janet was his only sibling. His first and only wife, his second and only love after May Ann Brinkman, had suffered from a rare blood disease since she was twenty-six years old. It prevented them from having children and it finally killed her five weeks after the 1988 election. Her name was Sylvia, and Mike loved her and had missed her very much every single day since she died.

  He also must have known for a fact that she, too, would have wanted him to figure out a way to keep David Donald Meredith from becoming president. Sylvia lived with him for twenty-seven years, but she never understood why journalists like him could never ever take sides, could never ever be partisan. He and Sylvia had had some particularly tough discussions about the subject in 1980 when the polls showed Reagan, a man she thought to be an empty-headed movie actor, was about to win.

  But Sylvia was gone. And no one had replaced her in any way whatsoever—including that of intense adviser on how Mike Howley should cover and deal with the politics and politicians of America.

  The news of his Williamsburg invitation traveled fast within his work world. Several Morning News people, mostly those he worked with covering politics, came by or called within minutes to offer congratulations. A few accompanied their good wishes with some regret over the News changing its no-debates policy, but as far as I was able to determine, there was no major protest made to Rhome or anyone else in management.

  Whatever Mike Howley wanted, Mike Howley got.

  3

  Mock-ups

  There were some press reports after the debate that alleged the four panelists had a “secret” meeting somewhere in Washington right after their selection to plot the strategy and tactics for what they did at the debate. I am convinced that did not happen. As best I can determine, there was no communication at all between any of the panelists before they arrived in Williamsburg the Saturday evening prior to the debate on Sunday. Nobody called anybody else to talk logistics or concerns beforehand. Nobody knew any of the others well enough for personal exchanges, and nobody felt compelled to make introduction calls. Mike Howley was the only one who even considered such a thing. He thought about transmitting in notes or on the phone “Welcome to the foxhole” messages to the other three but got busy and didn’t get it done.

  So they came to Williamsburg mostly as strangers and mostly ignored by their reporting colleagues. The candidates were the story then. Nobody in the working press—including me—paid any attention as the panelists had their first meeting at five o’clock Saturday in Longsworth D, one of many small conference rooms in the Williamsburg Lodge. There were also Longsworths A, B, and C. I had assumed at first that Longsworth must have been some obscure figure in Williamsburg’s Colonial past, but that was not so. The rooms were named for Charles Longsworth, a man from Williamsburg’s present who had only recently retired as president and chairman of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

  The meeting had been Howley’s idea. He mentioned it to Chuck Hammond, who got it organized. Hammond reserved the room and passed the word to the others to be there at five o’clock—if it was convenient. Hammond agreed that it might be good for all to say hello and discuss any logistics concerns before the four panelists went into private session for talk and for dinner. Then after dinner, he said, maybe they might want to walk over to the other side of the Lodge complex to the auditorium where the debate itself would take place the next night.

  Longsworth D was on the lower basement floor of the Lodge, one of two major hotel facilities run by Colonial Williamsburg within the historic area. The room had a small conference table in the center with eight upholstered chairs around it. Williamsburg Lodge memo pads and green lead pencils were on the table in front of every place. A smaller table off in a corner was set for dinner for four.

  Mike Howley had met Joan Naylor a few times when she was her network’s White House correspondent. He also had a vague sense that he might have seen this kid Henry Ramirez somewhere before but did not remember exactly.

  He was certain he had never laid eyes on Barbara Manning before. “I am scared to death,” she said almost immediately to him after being introduced. “I hope to all of my gods in all of my heavens that you are not.”

  “Bad news,” Howley said. “I am.”

  “Oh, please, Mike,” said Joan Naylor. “You have done this before.”

  “I’ve been a panelist, yes. Not a moderator. I don’t have to tell you that there is a difference.”

  No, Mr. Howley, you do not have to tell me, she thought. Was he digging me? she wondered but could not resolve because she did not know what Howley knew about what had happened. She also did not know him well enough to know if it was his style.

  “I admire everything you do, Mr. Howley, both in print and on the screen,” Henry Ramirez said. “We are in the best of hands.”

  “Please, call me Mike. I am Mike. Didn’t I read somewhere this morning that you are from Texas?” Mike asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Me, too. Denison, up on the Red River just this side of Oklahoma.”

  “I’m from south Texas, just this side of Mexico.”

  “Where?”

  “Falfurrias.”

  “I’ve been there.”

  “Hey, two Texans,” said Barbara. “Aren’t we over quota on that?”

  Everybody laughed.

  Henry did not remind Mike Howley that they had met twice out in the country on campaign trips and had, in fact, had a similar aren’t-you-from-Texas? conversation. Why say anything about it? Michael J. Howley of The Washington Morning News was an important man who met hundreds—thousands, millions—of new people every day. How could he be expected to remember every little Latino radio reporter he ran into?

  Said Henry: “I saw that they’re now estimating an audience of more than eighty million people. Can that be anywhere near right?”

  “Don’t think of it that way,” Joan said. “Do what I do every Saturday night. I see the faces of everyone in the world who loves me and I imagine that I am talking only to them.”

  Barbara said: “What if when my turn comes my mouth freezes? I sit there and I smile and then I giggle and then I cry and then I run off the stage.”

  Henry said: “My mother and the guys in my newsroom—all six of them—are certain I am going to steal the show. Not only from all of you but probably from the candidates, too. So please consider yourselves warned that you are about to be outshone by the first son of illegal-immigrant parents ever to do anything before a television audience of eighty million people.”

  “What they say around my newsroom is that if I and the rest of the people who do it for a living on the air at CNS can do it, then anybody can do it,” Joan said.

  “That’s exactly how I feel about running for president,” Henry said.

  Nobody seemed to understand what that meant, but it served as a clear signal to Chuck Hammond that it was time to get this show on the road. Hammond, a gray-haired guy with a crew cut, was known for having been a Marine infantry officer in the Korean War and having not quite gotten over it. There were several of his former-Marine kind in th
e Washington political and journalistic world, and together they formed a mutual-aid society for themselves and a group of boring storytellers for most everyone else.

  “I trust your rooms are up to snuff,” Hammond said, after having guided the other four to join him around the large table.

  Mike, Joan, Henry, and Barbara expressed happiness and satisfaction with their rooms, which were across a road in the main Williamsburg Inn, which provided the most luxurious and most expensive accommodations in the area.

  Hammond told them about the cars and drivers that would take them tomorrow afternoon from the Inn back to the Lodge for the debate. The cars and drivers would also be available to chauffeur them anywhere else they might want to go between now and then. And he gave them maps of the restored area at Colonial Williamsburg and passes to get them into any of the buildings, museums, and other attractions.

  “Feel free to wander,” he said. “Anything you need?”

  “Yeah,” said Barbara Manning. “You got some Valium?”

  They all laughed.

  “When you’re ready to order chow, dial 2–3,” Hammond said. “The menus are over there on the other table.”

  And he left them alone.

  To Barbara Manning the sound of the closing of the door behind Chuck Hammond that night was the loudest, most jarring noise she had ever heard up to that point in her life. In the six days from the invitation call till now she had worked herself up into a state of self-doubt that she said was of Shakespearean and Greek-tragedy proportions. She was way beyond the simple fears of having a locked jaw, a frozen tongue, or even throwing up on national television. She was seriously ill with doubt and fear. So seriously ill that several times during the week she came close to calling somebody and dropping out. Wait for another day, another time. Wait those few more centuries until you are ready, little girl. But each time she backed off. Nobody in her achiever family would understand. Nobody else would either. Take it, do it. And be sick. Here she was. And she was talking almost like a normal person.

  Henry Ramirez spent the week working hard on questions for the candidates and waiting for the summons from Jim Weaver that never came. Was he really prepared to go public if Weaver tried to keep him off the debate? I believe he was. Doubt was not something the kid Henry Ramirez shared with the kid Barbara Manning.

  Joan Naylor also threw herself into preparing for the debate, reading stacks of position papers, articles, book chapters, and other things that were relevant to Meredith and Greene and the issues of the campaign. She had no more conversations with Carol Reynolds or anyone else except Marge Willard about not moderating. In a long and painful phone call after the dinner party she had talked Marge out of going public. In return, she had to promise to moderate a panel on “Women Journalists Covering the Military” that Marge’s group was planning for next spring at West Point. Everyone always had an angle, a deal, Joan realized. It wasn’t just her network. In this case it was she who was trading her time, body, and mind for some peace and quiet—for the deal.

  Mike Howley, unlike the other three, declined Chuck Hammond’s offer to be driven to Williamsburg from Washington. Howley drove down from Washington in his own car, listening to some of his own CDs. Was he a country-music man? Classical? Opera? Or was he listening to recorded versions of books? If so, what books?

  A split second after Hammond left them alone in Longsworth D, Howley put a finger to his lips. Hush, please, the gesture said to his three fellow panelists. They watched in silence as he stalked about the room, stuck his right hand inside a bowl of flowers on a credenza, then peered down into the tops of lamps.

  “Hey, Mike, what’s going on?” Joan said.

  “Call it a little prevention sweep operation,” said Howley, still moving and peering and checking.

  “Bugs,” Henry said. “This man is looking for bugs.”

  “You got it.”

  Joan and Barbara exchanged this-is-crazy grimaces with Henry, who then said: “Mr. Howley, this is Colonial Williamsburg. People do not bug rooms in Colonial Williamsburg.…”

  “Mike. My name is Mike. The hotel people put us on the schedule board in the lobby. ‘Presidential Debate Press Panel—Longsworth D,’ it said for the whole world to see.”

  He got down on his knees and ran his hands along the downside edges of tables and chairs.

  “If you are saying you think either one or both of the campaigns might bug us,” said Barbara, “then I am saying, forget it. Neither side is quite that stupid, although one of them, which shall remain nameless, is damned close.”

  “I could actually imagine those fools in the Greene campaign doing something that stupid,” Henry said. “I really could.”

  “You mean that smart,” Mike Howley said, finishing his job by running a finger up and over the doorsills. “Knowing what was going to be asked would be ever so helpful, particularly to the Greene people.”

  “Yeah, but it’s the Meredith people who would be sleazy enough to actually do it,” Henry said.

  “And competent enough to actually pull it off,” Mike said. “The Greene staff would probably end up putting the bug in the wrong room or something.”

  “Well, well,” said Barbara. “Here I am in the big time of American journalism, and I am watching the biggest of the big-time journalists going around like … well, you know …”

  Joan’s hand signal caused her not to finish the sentence. Joan said to Mike: “OK, you checked it out. The room is clean. We have some work to do here now.”

  “Only twenty-three hours twelve minutes until airtime,” Henry said.

  Howley said: “With that in mind, I hope that you-all don’t mind if I assume a kind of chairman’s role here. A very informal one, just to get things moving.”

  “You’re the moderator,” Joan said.

  “You’ve done this before,” Barbara said.

  “You are our hero,” Henry said.

  Mike Howley bowed his head as if he had just been crowned king of something and said: “All right, then, thanks. First, I think we should establish some ground rules for our talking here now, tomorrow, or whenever, until this thing is over with.”

  Howley laid out a proposal that, interestingly enough, was identical to the one that opened that original panel-selection meeting back at the commission offices in Washington. He proposed silence.

  “I would like for us to agree to keep confidential now and forever-more everything we say to each other as we go about preparing for this debate. We do not write about it or report about it for our respective newspapers, magazines, or networks. We do not gossip about it in our respective newsrooms or at our respective dinner parties. We do not include it in any of our respective memoirs.”

  Howley paused for a beat. Nobody said anything. They were listening.

  Howley said: “I believe all of us must feel free to say anything that we wish to say without worrying about reading it tomorrow or any other tomorrow.…”

  “What are you worried about?” Joan asked. In light of subsequent events it reads like an amazingly prescient question. But she assured me that nothing like that was involved. She had no hints, no signs, of anything to come. It was simply an automatic knee-jerk response.

  “I’m not worried about anything in particular,” Howley replied. “But let’s say one of us floats an idea for a question or an approach that is truly off the wall. Something that is in bad taste, inappropriate, idiotic. I would not be keen on hearing you report on CNS something like ‘Mike Howley of The Washington Morning News suggested asking Paul L. Greene if he had ever had sex with a farm animal. He was talked out of it by the other panelists.’ ”

  “You are asking us, journalists all, to agree beforehand not to report on what might happen in something as important as this presidential debate,” Barbara said. “I am not sure I am comfortable with that.”

  Barbara was very proud of what she said. She remembers it as the moment she became coherent. She thought straight and actually said what she thought
in a way that was clean and understandable.

  “I think Mike may be right, Barbara,” Joan said. “We ought to feel free to say anything here among the four of us.”

  “Right,” Henry said. “But so is Barbara.”

  “This must be what it’s like when four thieves get together,” Barbara said.

  “All right, all right,” said Howley. “I won’t press the point any further now.”

  Howley had had some early misgivings about what he called “the hand he was dealt.” He meant the fact that the black and the Hispanic were really kids who had no business on this panel. Affirmative action run amuck was the way he saw it. He was fine with Joan Naylor, although he could tell she was pissed about something. He considered the possibility that she had wanted to moderate this debate and was still sore about being passed over.

  Joan Naylor, too, was not overjoyed by the presence of Henry Ramirez and Barbara Manning. Those two don’t have two weeks’ experience between them, she thought. The whole world knows why they are here. But being on a presidential-debate panel ought to be only for people who have been at this awhile, no matter what.

  Barbara Manning, though happy she was out of her coma, knew she had to be careful or she’d go too far the other way. Come on too loud, too much. Sometimes she couldn’t stop herself. It was the way she got through tough things in her life, and it always worked, and, God knows, this qualified as a tough thing in her life. White boy Howley and white girl Naylor certainly got their noses and their tails in the air over this. But why not? This is a high-nose-and-tail affair. Relax, Barbara, she told herself over and over. Relax. Everything is going to be all right. Poor old Henry Ramirez. It’s too bad they couldn’t come up with one with a little more age and experience and smarts. Hey, look who’s talking! I’ll bet that’s what the others are thinking about me right now! Well, so what? Here I am! Here he is!

  Henry Ramirez was wondering when they were going to start talking about the questions they would ask Greene and Meredith. That’s what this is all about, he thought. All of this preliminary stuff is just wasting time. Mike Howley is certainly an impressive guy. Just the way he ought to be. It’s too bad he didn’t remember me. When I get to be in his shoes I probably won’t remember every little gringo reporter from Texas who comes along to kiss my ring either. Where did they get this black lady? African American, sorry. She’s so hyper she’s about to come out of that shiny black skin of hers. It’s not that black, really. In fact, hers is lighter than mine. Hers and my skin, side by side, wouldn’t probably look that different. It’s in the eyes. And the nose and the lips. That’s where we are different. And in the brain, of course. When are we going to get down to business?