The Last Debate

by Jim Lehrer

  “There is no way to prevent that. I have my briefing books. I will read them again tonight.”

  Lilly said nothing and Greene then said: “I realize you might think, and I might even agree, the problem isn’t briefing books. But even if we’re both right, there is nothing I can do about all of that now. It is too late to have a personality transplant, which is what most everyone seems to think I need.”

  “Sir, may I be blunt?” Lilly said.

  “I never knew you needed permission for that. Have you given any further thought to what you might do after the campaign? I know about the book, of course. And maybe your becoming a commentator—I hope not a clownalist.”

  “Governor, please! Goddamn it, sir, this thing is not over yet. It really is not. You really could go out there tomorrow night, land some blows, throw it open, and still pull this out. That talk-show con man Meredith is not only not qualified to be president, he is a menace to this country. He is evil, sir. He would seal off our borders and turn us inward and on each other. He would divide this country up into little pieces and turn us into a form of the Balkans. He has no unifying vision for this country. He looks out at a crowd of people and he sees different interests, different races, different everything. He is evil, I promise you, he is evil. He must not be the next president of the United States. You are the only one who can stop that from happening. Please, go out there and take him on. Call him evil, call him a menace. Challenge him on that stupid goddamn Take It Back shit!”

  Paul L. Greene was shaking his head.

  “You are shaking your head,” Brad Lilly said. “Please don’t shake your head. Please, sir. Please!”

  “Brad, the decision on who is the next president will be made by the voters. They know all there is to know about Meredith. If they want a talk-show con man to run their government, if they want to turn their country into an island, there is not one thing I can do about it. Attacking him, calling him names on national television tomorrow night, is not going to change anything. He is what he is, but they already know it.”

  “But they might … well, get to know more about you, sir.”

  “I am not somebody who makes personal attacks on people. That is not me, that is not the person I am, so it is not the person I want people to know.”

  “There is no other way. You take him on or he’s got it.”

  “I know that.”

  “If you know that, then why … Well, how can you not do something more than what you have done?”

  “I do not want to be president that badly, Brad.”

  “The issue is the country, sir, not you!”

  “Scrub the rehearsal. Why don’t you meet me for breakfast in my suite in the morning?”

  Brad Lilly gave Paul L. Greene a kind of salute with his right hand and they said good night.

  Greene walked away and out of the room.

  Lilly then saw me. “You didn’t hear any of that.”

  “Was that a question?”

  “No, a statement of fact.”

  “It’s too late for that,” I said.

  “It’s too late for everything,” he said.

  4

  Saturday Night Live

  It was after eleven-thirty by the time I finally arrived at Colonial Williamsburg itself and checked into my reserved and guaranteed-late-arrival (I have my Visa receipt) room at the Williamsburg Lodge. If I had been an all-knowing reader of fortunes and futures, that’s where I would have been all evening, of course, hovering mostly around Longsworth D in search of morsels, hints, and signs of what was to come.

  What happened in that room and elsewhere among the four panelists that Saturday night is difficult to parse specifically as to how it influenced the final decisions and results. But, if nothing else, that time together clearly helped develop the relationships and set the stage for what was to happen at their pivotal Sunday meeting and thus in the debate itself. Of that, I am certain.

  While they ate dinner at the small round table, Henry Ramirez tried a couple of times to get into a discussion of the specific questions they would ask Sunday night. The other three deflected him. They wanted to eat in relative peace. There was time, there was time, Howley said.

  So they talked about other things, journalism things, mostly.

  Joan asked Howley if Jerry Rhome was really as obsessively nuts about walking as he was reported to be. Yes, indeed, said Howley. But he offered no details and used careful phrasing. Joan told me she suspected Howley had been burned a few times by an innocent remark about Rhome or someone else at the paper coming back to him a few days or weeks later as something very different—and critical. She said she, also the victim of rumors and lousy reporting, very much sympathized with Howley. “Every reporter should be the subject of at least one negative story to see how it feels,” Joan Naylor said to me. “I think journalism schools should require students to write hatchet jobs on each other as part of their training.”

  Mike Howley asked Barbara Manning about the rumor that This Week was thinking about turning itself into a daily from a weekly to compete head-on with USA Today. She said she was stunned and appalled at the thought, which was completely new to her.

  Henry Ramirez then opened up a journalistic can of worms that Mike Howley probably could have done without.

  “How does your appearing on NBS This Morning work?” Henry said to Howley. “You really do swing from both sides. Print and TV. Straight reporting and commentary. I like that and I would like to do that myself someday. How does that work?”

  Howley’s face said more than his words. And the message was that of embarrassment, uneasiness. He answered it straight: “I have an arrangement to come on every Wednesday morning through the course of the campaign, and I am on-call, depending on my schedule, to do so on other mornings following a special event or unscheduled news event.”

  “There must be good money in that.”

  “Not bad.”

  “Who picks the other two people who are on there with you?”

  “The network people. Producers.”

  “I notice you give your opinion a lot more on TV than you do in your newspaper stories. How’s, that work?”

  Howley answered: “Well, it just seems that way because it’s television. It seems more dramatic and different and opinionated, I guess, than it really is.”

  Barbara said: “You really let it rip on that Saturday-night program you do, Marv and Company. That is some food fight.”

  Henry said: “It sure is. That looks like fun the way you-all toss your insults back and forth. Now that is a real show. How does that work?”

  Joan was enjoying watching Howley squirm a bit. Print journalists make a lot of weather criticizing television while making a lot of money appearing on it. Howley surprised her by telling the truth. “I do it for the money,” he said to Henry. “Pure and simple. That is why I do it. That is how it works. I am not only not proud of that, I am often ashamed of it. Now, we probably should wrap this up and move back to the other table.…”

  “What kind of laptop do you travel with?” Henry asked.

  “I have a Dell, but I’m thinking about getting one of those little Gateway HandBooks,” Mike Howley replied with what was probably absolute delight in having the subject changed.

  Henry said: “One of the guys in our office has one. They are terrific. Two-point-nine-four pounds, two-fifty-MB hard drive, eight-MB RAM. It’s got a backlit seven-point-six double-scan VGA screen. MS-DOS is preinstalled. So is Microsoft Word software, but my friend put in his own WordPerfect six. I’m going to get one as soon as I get to be rich and famous.…”

  “Enough about this,” Mike Howley said. “If everyone is about finished, what do you say we move back to the big table and get to work?”

  Joan could not remember the last time she’d had such a good time. She was beginning to really love that Henry Ramirez, that radio kid from Texas.

  This brown boy ain’t bad, thought Barbara. Ain’t bad at all. He’s got a set of ‘e
m on him, that is for sure. But Mike Howley bothered her. He shouldn’t be able to have it both ways, to play Mr. On The Other Hand in print and then go be Mr. Opinion on television. This Week magazine would never let me do that. But, of course, who am I? I ain’t no big-cheese white man.

  Henry was loving being Henry in that room. Here he was in high cotton, as they said in the Valley, sitting here eating a big dinner—he had ordered the Grilled Black Angus Rib Eye Steak with Fresh Mashed Potatoes and Ale Battered Onion Rings—and talking shop with two of the biggest names in American journalism, Mike Howley and Joan Naylor. The black-girl-who-wasn’t-really-black was even making a contribution or two.

  Back at the large table, in front of their Williamsburg Lodge pads and pencils, Mike Howley said:

  “I am taking the attitude that we are all in this together. And that means that we should as far as possible work out our approach, our strategy and our questions, together. No secrets, no surprises. Do our best to act as one. Do our best not to compete with one another. Do our best not to see this as the great journalism ask-off. Do our best to cooperate, coordinate, conglomerate, coagulate, collude, conspire.”

  Collude? Conspire? Joan and Henry say Howley was smiling when he said all of that. Barbara didn’t notice any smile.

  Howley said: “So, in that spirit, I hereby open the nominations for an opening question. I will ask it, but I want your help in deciding what it might be, what it should be. OK?”

  Henry did not like what was happening, and Howley clearly read that in Henry’s face. Howley said: “What’s the matter, Henry?”

  Henry, thought Henry. Mike Howley finally called me by my name. Henry. He knows my name now. He said: “Well, Mike, you are the man of experience here and all of that, but I have spent a lot of time, I mean a lot of time, working on some real zinger questions. I thought that we were each to do our own thing and let the chips fall where they may. I have absolutely no problem telling you-all what I am going to ask, but giving one of mine away for one of you to ask … well, I am not sure that is what I had in mind. But, like I say, you are the boss.”

  “Nobody’s the boss here,” Howley said.

  “What if we just tossed out possible subjects for a first question?” Joan said. “Would that be a problem for you, Henry?”

  “Oh, no. Certainly not. In fact, I am not sure the other is. I’m just trying to do what Mike said we should at the very beginning, which is talk straight and open.”

  Joan said: “Well, I don’t mind getting things started. I don’t see how you can start with anything other than the deficit. And what he—either he—really plans to do about it. That creep Meredith—sorry, I know I shouldn’t talk that way—has said the only way to really do something is to eliminate whole federal agencies and departments and start over again to rebuild the government from scratch on a need basis. The problem is he will not say which whole agencies and departments he would eliminate.”

  Mike Howley lowered his voice, put it into preacher velvet, and said à la Meredith: “Certainly, my lady-reporter friend, I will be delighted to lay out the departments and agencies I would eliminate. First and foremost, in Jesus’ name, would be the Immigration and Naturalization Service. There won’t be any immigrating or naturalizing in the Meredith administration. Number two, the Congress of the United States. We could certainly do without them. All they do is take God’s name in vain and drink alcoholic beverages and have sex with their employees of all sexes, most of whom are political hacks and hackers with terrorist or transvestite backgrounds. Number three would be the Supreme Court. All they do is take God out of our government and our lives. We sure as the Lord is everywhere do not need the Federal Reserve Board. That would be number four. All they do is jack up interest rates and print too much money for the godless spendthrifts in our midst to spend. Number five would be the Department of State. The American people are sick and tired of worrying about the rest of the world. They want to worry only about themselves for a while. Close down the Department of State until we need it again, which might be in ten or fifteen years, depending on how we do on taking care of only ourselves.”

  Everybody was laughing. Joan had had no idea Mike Howley had a sense of humor. She was delighted. So were Henry and Barbara. Some of my own reporting about Howley’s early years bore some surprising results along this line. His regular TV viewers and column readers might be stunned to know that he was known in high school as a cutup and even had a George Gobel stand-up comic routine he did for his fraternity brothers in college.

  Barbara, also a person with a performance sense of humor, got into it. She said, also in a deep Meredith-like voice: “And God in heaven knows we can surely do without the Department of Defense. All they do is make war, and God in heaven knows that now that godless communism is no more, we sure as hell is down there do not need to make any more wars. No siree, hallelujah! Except on our own people who are not white and Baptist and self-righteous and male like I am. And we got the pole-leece to do that. Yes siree, hallelujah!”

  “The rivers,” Henry said, not doing that well in his mock-Meredith voice. “Dam up the rivers. Kill the rivers. All they’re used for is for wetbacks to swim across to sneak into this country illegally so they can get on our good Christian Anglo welfare and baby-sit our good Christian Anglo children and empty our good Christian Anglo Porta Pottis and pick our good Christian Anglo fruits and vegetables and wash our good Christian Anglo dirty dishes. Get the government out of the river business once and for all. Out, out, out.”

  “Hey, hey,” said Joan. “I think we have uncovered a hotbed of contempt for David Donald Meredith, and shame, oh, shame on us all!”

  “You can say amen to that,” Barbara said, mimicking the Meredith entourage’s favorite line.

  “Is it not so that all Americans who walk with a limp should be shipped out of the country and fried in the flames of Jesus, Mr. Meredith?” Henry said, as if at a news conference. “You can say amen to that,” he responded, as if he were Meredith.

  Joan said: “We had better be careful. The guy we are mocking and maligning here, friends, is going to be the next president of the United States.”

  She did it again. It stopped the playing this time.

  “When it happens I may have to move to Mexico, from where my forefathers and foremothers, as well as my real mother and father, came,” said Henry in his regular voice. And that—emigrating to Mexico, he thought but did not say—would make him the dumbest son of illegal immigrants in the history of the United States of America.

  “Africa, here I come,” said Barbara in her normal voice.

  “I can always go back to Denison, Texas,” Mike Howley said in his usual voice. “What about you, Joan? Is there an ancestral home for white women anchorpersons to return to?”

  Joan Naylor did not like the question, did not like the way it was asked, and, suddenly, did not like the sunavabitch who asked it. Not funny, Mike Howley, she thought.

  In a burst of angry sarcasm, she said: “I was born in a log cabin in southern Illinois, daughter of illiterates who were too stupid not to throw away their girl children and keep trying until they came up with a boy, a male, a man, a real person.”

  Now the smiles were completely gone from all faces.

  “Hey, I pissed you off,” Howley said. “Sorry. That was not my intention. We’re all going to need each other very much.”

  “You did piss me off and I accept your apologies,” said Joan, intentionally ignoring Howley’s last statement. “To get on with the business at hand a bit. The problem, and I mean the problem, is thinking—seriously—about what kind of answer such a question about cutting federal agencies would get from Governor Greene. God, watching him and listening to him is painful. So, so painful.”

  Howley then said: “I may try to write a book about what happened to him. How a guy can go from being a successful, if quiet, governor of a state like Nebraska to a national candidate like him is more than I can understand. Most people rise to the occ
asion. He has fallen.”

  “He has the worst set of loser staff people I have ever come across, for one small thing,” Joan said.

  “I agree and have written same,” Howley said.

  “You can’t blame him on his staff,” Barbara said. She swears she said it without her friend-roommate Barbara Hayes in mind. It’s not terribly important, but I do not believe her. It may have been unconscious, but I believe her concern for her friend was there.

  “The only Hispanic guy in the campaign barely knew who I was,” Henry said. “I bet he does now.” Then he looked right at Joan and said: “I think you are wonderful on the air and I have always admired you in every way and I am honored to be on this panel and at this table with you, but I must respectfully say that I think asking about the deficit right off the bat would be a terrible mistake. It would put everybody to sleep. The groans all over America would be deafening, I really do think so. Everybody out there cares about the deficit, but they don’t want to talk about it anymore. It makes them drowsy. I promise you, it makes them drowsy. It makes me drowsy.”

  Joan Naylor felt her shoulders tighten. She also felt it was time for a little Journalism 105. “We are in the care business, Henry, not the No-Doz business.”

  “I don’t think I think so.”

  “Well, think again. We are all paid to go out there in the middle of issues and events and people and to decide, in our best judgment, what is important. That is all our job is, when you cut all of the rest away. We are not entertainers, Henry. We are not in the business Meredith was in before he took up politics. We are not out there counting groans, keeping people awake. If we can’t stay awake ourselves, then possibly we are not in the right line of work.…”

  She told me she caught Howley’s eyes in a glance his way. They were full of wondering laughter.

  But all he said was: “Why don’t we go over and look at where it’s all going to happen? We can resume this in the morning. There’s plenty of time. We’ll be fresher then.”

  Nobody disagreed.