The Last Debate

by Jim Lehrer

  “How much cash?”

  “That would be subject to negotiation.”

  “Let’s negotiate.”

  I had to slow this thing down. “You bet,” I said, “but first I wonder if I might use your rest room. It’s been a long drive through the mountains from Tulsa.”

  “You should have come by horse.”

  “From Tulsa?”

  “Horses were good enough for the Messiah. I will take you inside to the toilet. Inside that door here only the language of the Messiah is permitted. If you speak, sing or hum the words. Do you play an instrument?”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “Do not call me ‘sir.’ Only the Messiah is ‘sir.’ ”

  “Right.”

  I followed him inside to a room that resembled the lobby of a rough-and-ready Holiday Inn. There were several people around, some of them talking—singing—to each other. None of them resembled David Donald Meredith.

  My ears picked up the sounds of a male operatic tenor in conversation with a female responding in soft rock, a guttural-voiced C-and-W man speaking to another man who was answering in a form of talk-song. And off in the distance somebody was playing the piano, and somebody else was on what sounded to my untrained ears like a French horn.

  Nobody paid any attention to me and I followed my guy in the cowboy outfit to a door marked HALLELUJAH!

  “In there, pa’dner, hallelujah, hallelujah,” he said to the tune of something that sounded vaguely familiar. Was it from South Pacific? Or was it an old hymn I remembered singing in the Methodist church when I visited my grandmother in Vermont?

  The rest room, I hereby report, was nothing special. By now I expected everything to be special—strange. It would not have surprised me, for instance, to have found urinals in the shape of violins and cellos and to have heard Bach sonatas blaring out to accompany the sounds of toilets flushing, faucets running.

  Back outside with my cowboy a few minutes later, I realized it was time to act. Again in my reporting life, it was now or never, Chapman.

  “Would you mind giving me a tour before we do our business?” I crooned à la Sinatra to the tune of “My Way.”

  “There is nothing to see but happy singing, humming people,” he responded to the tune of “The Tennessee Waltz.” “Let’s go back outside.”

  “Have you got an extra sandwich or something for a hungry soul?” I crooned to the tune of something along the lines of “Hello, Dolly!” “I haven’t eaten a bite since Tulsa.”

  “ ‘I Haven’t Eaten a Bite Since Tulsa,’ ” he repeated. “That has the ring of a good song title. You have the spirit. You have the music.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  I looked into the man’s face—he still hadn’t told me his name—for a sign of suspicion. There might have been a flicker of something but nothing serious. Not yet. But I clearly had to be careful. It was an additional strain I did not need. All of the music-madhouse noise and this thinking and talking in the musical language of the Messiah was already making it difficult enough.

  The man strummed his guitar, motioned for me to follow him, and sang some words about food and life to a tune I did not remotely recognize.

  We walked back through the lobby. I got a better look at and listen to the people of Music of the Messiah Life and Living Center. None of them were David Donald Meredith.

  We came into the kitchen and there he was. His face was covered with a beard and his hair was long, but there was no doubt this was the man I had come to see. This was the man who came within twenty-three days, four journalist-panelists, and three “fuckings” of being president of the United States. Now there he stood cooking pots of what looked and smelled like a stew. There he stood dressed in a white T-shirt with the words THE SOUNDS OF JESUS on the front.

  We made eye contact. But I managed—it was the most difficult thing I had thus far done in my reporting on this story, I promise you—not to smile or in any way show anything. I felt it was absolutely imperative that he not know that I had recognized him.

  There was another man in the kitchen dressed in a similar T-shirt. He was Meredith’s fellow cook, apparently. To him, my host and guide said to the tune of “Jesus Loves Me”: “Feed this man a sandwich, brother.”

  A few seconds later I casually turned back to the big stove where Meredith was—and he was gone. I hoped that maybe he had left for a minute to run an errand, to go to the “Hallelujah,” to do something other than to be really gone.

  The other cook threw a piece of ham and some lettuce and tomato on a slab of white bread, splattered it all with both mustard and mayonnaise, and handed it to me on a simple white plate.

  “Thank you,” I sang to no particular tune.

  “Thank the Messiah,” he sang back to no particular tune.

  “Thank you, Messiah,” I sang.

  My cowboy friend suggested we take the sandwich outside, but I insisted on eating it right there in the kitchen, right there just standing up. “It will only take a few minutes,” I sang.

  Where did you go, Meredith? Come back here!

  As I bit into my sandwich—it actually tasted pretty good—and chewed and swallowed, I tried to come to grips with the task before me. I was fairly happy with myself. I had gained entrance to this weird place. I had established the fact that Meredith was here. Now what?

  There he was again. Meredith had returned! I had not scared him off. My hope had proved right. He had only stepped out for a few minutes. This time I intentionally avoided any eye contact. I did not want to spook him or scare him away.

  I was eating too slowly. My cowboy friend was getting impatient. And, I assumed, it would not be long before suspicion would replace that impatience.

  OK, I sang to myself. Go, Tom, go. Now or never, Chapman.

  I wiped my mouth with the piece of white paper towel the cook had provided and walked quickly and smartly to Meredith. The cowboy was caught off guard. I was there in front of Meredith before he or the other cook could react.

  I said to no tune: “Mr. Meredith, I am Tom Chapman. I am doing a book about what those four devils of American journalism did to you on that stage in Williamsburg. I want to help you tell your story, to help you take retribution against them by offering you an opportunity to punish them—”

  David Donald Meredith’s face went red. He put his hands over both of his ears. Then he used them to grab the handle of the huge iron skillet on the stove in front of him. He threw the skillet off to his left as hard as he could. The skillet and the stew went splashing and crashing. I halfway expected him to accompany it all with a few “fuckings,” but he said not a word.

  And he ran from the kitchen.

  I took two steps in pursuit and was stopped by the cowboy and the other cook. One of them grabbed my left arm, the other my right.

  In a minute or two they were joined by four or five other men, and within another minute I was carried like a shackled prisoner across the porch and down the steps and placed in the front passenger seat of my rent-a-car. The cowboy got in the driver’s seat, and two of the other men got in the backseat.

  We burned some rubber on the dry dirt of the parking area and bumped and jarred and lurched down the road back to the gate.

  I had never heard somebody cuss the way that cowboy man and his two companions did. By the time we got to the gate I had been called every vile name in the book to the tunes of a most wide and varied medley of melodies.

  But at least it was over. There was nobody else left to interview. My story may not have been finished—but my work was done.

  Or so I thought.

  14

  Carl Bob

  I had not counted on having to deal one more time with Michael J. Howley.

  He had come almost right behind me from Greece to Washington. Just ten days later he flew the same flights I did on Olympic Airways from Santorini to Athens and then on British Airways to London and on to Washington-Dulles. I have not been able to trace all of his movements, act
ions, and words once he arrived back in Washington. I know he stayed in his own townhouse in Georgetown and I know he went to the News. Did he talk to Pat Tubbs there or on the phone? Did he yell at Jerry Rhome for having talked to me? Did he raise hell with somebody for not killing my book contract, too? Did he line up some $75,000-a-hit lectures and talk to a literary agent about writing his own book? There’s a good bet he did all of that, but I do not know for sure.

  What I do know for sure is that he was in Washington for five days and six nights. I know that he spent one of those evenings with Joan Naylor, Henry Ramirez, and Barbara Manning in an attempt to shut them up. He had worked his manipulative magic on them once in Williamsburg. Now he came from Santorini for a return engagement in Washington.

  Their Longsworth D this time was a soundproof back room at Donatello, an Italian restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue at the east end of Georgetown. It was a place, my reporting afterward revealed, where Howley had eaten many a Caesar salad and linguine with pesto and drunk many a bottle of the no. 27 wine, an Italian red that came in a dark bottle with a black-and-gold label.

  He had it all again that night. Joan Naylor went for a scallops dish. Henry Ramirez ate veal scaloppine. So did Barbara Manning.

  I was back home in New York hard at work writing the night of the dinner, and I did not hear about it until several days afterward. Joan was the first to mention it at the tail end of a quick call I had made to her to double-check a small fact. She told me some of what was said among the four of them, and I was able to get more from Barbara and Henry. It was not easy, but I am fairly sure I got most of what mattered. I attribute to Howley the initial hesitancy of Barbara, Henry, and Joan to speak in much detail. He came to intimidate them into silence and he came close to succeeding.

  Barbara, Henry, and Joan said Howley phoned out of the blue and suggested a reunion of what he called “the Famous Fabulous Williamsburg Four.” None had heard a word from Howley since that Sunday night in Williamsburg. All three told me they jumped at the idea of getting together. A reunion of some kind had, in fact, occurred to each of them, and there was delight over Howley’s having taken the initiative to get it organized and done. Everyone said they could hardly wait to get together to swap hugs and pats and to compare notes, new lives, and jobs.

  The Famous Fabulous Williamsburg Four together again. Five months and three days after they had done what they had done in Williamsburg to David Donald Meredith, to the election, and to journalism.

  The evening began in the lighthearted spirit of a reunion. There was some happy updating about what had happened to each of them since Williamsburg, much of which everyone already knew.

  Henry led a cheer for Joan, the first woman in history to anchor a network nightly news program all by herself. Joan! Joan! She’s our girl! If she can’t do it, nobody can!

  There was little need for Henry and Barbara to do much updating on themselves. Americans everywhere—even on the Greek island of Santorini, no doubt—knew about Sunday Morning with Hank and Barb. Americans everywhere followed in the gossip and TV columns every move they made off the air, too.

  “Is the romance stuff right?” Joan asked.

  “No comment,” Barbara replied.

  “We don’t talk about that,” Henry said.

  Joan found that strange. No comment? We don’t talk about that? What in the hell is going on? That was the question Joan wanted to ask Henry and Barbara but did not. She really did not know the two of them that well. Or Mike Howley, either, for that matter. She was struck at that moment by the fact that their real time together was only one Saturday evening, a Sunday day, and a Sunday evening. How little time to have locked themselves together so tightly for the rest of their lives. It caused her to remember something she had read in a World War II memoir—was it by William Manchester?—about Marines in combat on Tarawa or some other Pacific island. Two minutes together under intense fire meant a lifetime together afterward if you survived. Williamsburg was a form of two minutes under fire. But they really did not know each other.

  I pointedly asked Barbara and Henry afterward about their “strange” answers to Joan. Neither would do anything but deflect me. What in the hell is going on? was my question, too.

  Howley had actually called their hand: “You’re working a scam, is that it?” he said to Barbara and Henry.

  Joan told me that neither answered the question with words. But their silence said it all. Yes. They were working a scam.

  I was already there myself by then, of course. They were still doing condom public-service commercials and going hand-in-hand to dinner, to cocktail parties, to the movies, to the Kennedy Center, to charity benefits and other public events. But it was all show, all for business and image. From what Barbara said to a friend—a source I have pledged never to reveal—an unexpected class problem developed for her. Henry, for all of his common sense and fun, was not as smart as she was. His knowledge of and interest in literature, art, music, philosophy, and similar subjects was all but nonexistent. Their different interests made for a great combination on the air but not anywhere else. I learned from more than one source—also of a confidential nature—that Henry also had a problem that caused him some shame. He apparently could not get his mother’s line about black and brown blood making mud out of his head every time he was with Barbara in a personal or intimate situation.

  The Famous Fabulous Williamsburg Four moved on to more comfortable subjects, like how being recognized everywhere had changed their lives, how being able to buy anything you wanted had changed their lives, how being the subject of countless seminars and Ph.D. theses, of constant attacks and abuse from a permanent class of press-activism attackers, had changed their lives.

  They talked for a while about the opening weeks of the Greene administration. Not bad, was the consensus. Greene had gone to a few of the older Democrats for secretary of state and some of the other key cabinet offices, but there were some fresh and diverse faces as well. He had blundered a few times, but nothing that was fatal to him or the country.

  Henry and Barbara told Joan and Howley about how each had been contacted separately—before the Hank and Barb show started—about the possibility of coming aboard as Greene’s White House press secretary. Talk about an appearance problem, Barbara said. I would have hated it, Henry said.

  “I woke up a few nights worrying that if Greene turned out to be a really terrible president, then you know who everyone—now and forever—would blame,” Joan said.

  “Wash that kind of thought from your mind,” Barbara said.

  There was not much to say about David Donald Meredith. He had disappeared into that Oklahoma commune and off the face of the political and public earth.

  “Nobody will ever get me to shed a tear for that crazy sunavabitch,” Barbara said.

  Everyone agreed with her. Whatever doubts and second thoughts any of them might have had, there were absolutely none about the unfitness of David Donald Meredith to be president of the United States of America.

  They compared stories on the mountains of mail, the speaking and autograph requests each had received. The offers of love, sex, and companionship ran second for all four to opportunities for financial investment.

  And they laughed about the latest poll results. A Hart-Divall poll done two weeks ago on a variety of current issues asked a sampling of 1,128 Americans: “After further reflection, do you believe the four journalist-panelists in the Williamsburg Debate were correct and justified in doing what they did?” The results: 64 percent answered Yes; 22 percent, No; 14 percent, No Opinion.

  “How could you have no opinion about us?” Henry said.

  “I don’t believe there are fourteen percent without one,” Joan said. “I think it’s a hundred percent with opinions and I have heard from all hundred percent of them.”

  You can say amen to that, said everyone.

  It was when they got around to talking about movie and TV mini-series offers that Joan realized what had happened t
hroughout their high spirits and give-and-take so far. In nearly two hours of talk between and among bites of food and sips of wine, Mike Howley, the man who had organized this dinner, had been almost silent. She and Henry and Barbara had been doing most of the talking.

  And as she continued to pay attention to that fact for a few minutes, she thought she caught a whiff of something, of something dark, of something that needed to be gotten on with. Mike is clearly not in the same heigh-ho reunion spirit as the rest of us, she thought.

  Barbara and Henry also had gradually become conscious of Howley’s quiet, dark presence.

  It was Barbara who finally got it out there. “Hey, Mike, we haven’t heard much from you,” she said. “You have taken a leave of absence from the paper?”

  “Right.”

  “You’re living where?”

  “An island in Greece.”

  “To write a book?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Not about us, I hope,” Henry said.

  There. That was it. A book. Joan was certain by the look on Howley’s face that this was his destination for the dinner. He had listened and waited patiently until it was time. Now it was time.

  “I want to talk to you-all about a book, that’s right,” Howley said. “But not mine.”

  He’s going to jump us, Barbara thought.

  We’re in trouble, Henry thought.

  So much for the happy reunion of the Williamsburg Four, Joan thought.

  Howley said: “We agreed in Williamsburg that we were free to tell the story of what we did as long as we did not go into specifics of what each of us said in that room and as long as we used good judgment and all of that. Do we all remember our agreement?”

  Joan, Henry, and Barbara each felt like a little child about to get whacked by Mother or the principal. The chocolate-chip cookies are missing from the jar, or the cigarettes are missing from the top of Daddy’s chest, and they know I took them. Somebody poured white paste into the mimeograph machine, and they know I did it. A dead mouse was found in the drawers of my sister or in the drawer of my English teacher, and they know I put it there.