Shining City

by Tom Rosenstiel

  After a moment, Randi Brooks reappears and takes Rena’s arm.

  Apparently she has been watching him.

  “Making trouble?”

  “Trying not to.”

  “She doesn’t like you.”

  “Who?”

  “Cutter. You’re unreliable. Too bipartisan.”

  “What about you?”

  “We’re old friends. So she absolutely abhors me now. I’m a traitor for working with you.”

  Rena looks at her. She is only half-kidding, he realizes. Maybe less than half.

  Together they scan the gathering crowd. Many of the seats have been reserved for elected officials, senators, House members, the Justices, the cabinet. Behind that section are seats filled with lobbyists, lawyers, and interest group leaders. The press is here, too, or what remains of it. Their fall in influence in a decade is breathtaking. Rena does not try to engage the reporters he sees, but a few catch his eye. Matt Alabama is talking to Gary Gold of the Washington Tribune, a relentless character with several friends on Rena’s staff. Rena nods.

  Alabama wanders over. The assembled crowd has swelled to full size. The day is glorious, clear and mild, a rarity for Washington in spring. April tends to alternate from cold and wet to notoriously hot every other day.

  “The armies eye each other from across the field,” Alabama says. “There gather the defenders of the helpless.” He nods in the direction of Deborah Cutter, who is huddled with about a dozen other progressive interest group leaders and a couple of less judicious members of Congress.

  “And there the enemy,” says Brooks, moving her eyes to another knot of people. In the center of the group, barely visible, Rena can see Josh Albin, a man who has managed somehow to remain at the epicenter of conservative activism for more than two decades, from the Reagan Revolution to the Bush neocons to the Common Sense rebellion. A neat trick of agility.

  “The hard Right gathers under the oaks,” Brooks says. “And the hard Left there under the elms. The flesh eaters and the bleeding hearts. A feast.”

  “No, Randi, they are soldiers in the great battle for the future. It is waged each night on cable,” Alabama says.

  “I remember when real leaders stayed off television,” says Brooks.

  “Ahh,” says Alabama, “the days of the closed door and the compromise deal. Today victory is found in the public eye, where you can raise money for a campaign PAC,” says Alabama.

  Justice Hoffman’s son Elliott comes to the microphone and asks people to take their seats. The memorial service is quick. Justice Goldstein speaks about their time on the Court as rivals who had grown old together. Justice Miriam Drier, the next most liberal judge, tells personal stories. So does Anthony Shackelford, a former Hoffman law clerk who went on to become commissioner of the National Football League, and then Cory Hundstrom, the president of Harvard, another former clerk. They talk about Hoffman’s intellect, his ferocity, his guts. Yo Yo Ma plays a Bach cello sonata. Paul Simon sings the judge’s favorite song, “Sounds of Silence.” The poet laureate reads verse. Washington knows how to do memorials.

  The last speaker is President James Nash. His seven minutes are pitch perfect, funny, eloquent, and moving, about the law, Court relations, and Hoffman’s indomitable personality. He offers no clue about what he will look for in a replacement.

  As Elliott Hoffman is closing, Rena feels a touch on his elbow. Someone near enough to whisper. “Mr. Rena, if you have a minute.” A young man—with solemn aide-to-an-important-person’s body language—holds out an arm and sweeps it in the direction of a large black car parked under an overhanging oak tree about forty yards away. “Spencer Carr wants to know if you might be willing to share a word with him,” the young aide says.

  Outside the security perimeter, the rear passenger door to the town car opens and Rena slides in.

  Carr offers a chilly nod and hands Rena a plain piece of white paper, not White House stationery. The paper bears five names without titles, apparently typed on an IBM Selectric typewriter rather than a computer. That means it did not exist on a server. No record.

  “Five names, Peter. You’re vetting the last one.” Carr’s tone is irritable. He wants to make one more show of his disapproval of using Rena for this.

  Rena takes the list. They never had a choice. He and Brooks knew it this morning without saying a word.

  Carr adds a stare and then some helpful advice: “Don’t fuck this up.”

  Nine

  1:05 P.M.

  Washington, D.C.

  The first hours in any investigation are the richest.

  Your mind is more open and your vision clearer. You haven’t formed opinions and, with them, blind spots. Rena calls them “the magic hours.”

  He and Brooks believe in making the most of them. They assemble everyone, break into teams, and give people just a few hours to produce a “flash report.” That initial burst of effort—perhaps five hours—usually gathers three-quarters of what an investigation will learn. It also surfaces the gaps.

  If they want to use the magic hours today, they have to move fast. What remains of the afternoon after Hoffman’s funeral is jammed. In twenty-five minutes Rena has a call with Wally Lescher, the general counsel of the NFL team in Philadelphia, who wants him to look into charges that a star tight end was involved in a killing at a New Orleans strip club. Then there is a meeting with food conglomerate Daniels Ford Mifflin, which wants to do background checks on possible new CEOs for a high-end natural foods grocery chain it just bought. And Belinda Cartwright is waiting for Rena to return her call.

  They stand at Brooks’s desk looking at the list from Carr.

  “Why five names? If we’re only vetting one?” Brooks asks.

  “A game,” Rena guesses. “Carr says they have given lists to other vetting teams, each with five names. But every list is different.”

  “If any names leak, they’ll know who to blame,” says Brooks.

  Rena nods.

  “You really think there are other vetting teams?”

  “Who knows?” Rena answers.

  Brooks scans the list. There are the usual names speculated about in the media:

  Laura Joiner, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in St. Louis, very liberal, African American, from Tennessee.

  Patterson Doherty, Eighth Circuit as well, a Nash law school classmate, fellow Nebraskan, appointed by Nash’s Republican predecessor, pretty conservative.

  Tyson Moore, U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, Boston, in her forties, perhaps too young.

  Amanda Cross, Second Circuit, New York, on lists for years, and maybe now at sixty-three too old.

  Three of the four had been Hoffman’s clerks.

  Then she looks at the last name.

  “Edmund Roland Madison, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, San Francisco,” she says. “Shit, Pete.”

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing but trouble.”

  The conference room of Rena, Brooks & Toppin is the fourth-floor attic of a mid-nineteenth-century row house. Rena and Brooks had leased the townhouse, at 1820 Jefferson Place, more for history than convenience. Theodore Roosevelt and his family had lived here during the Harrison administration, when Roosevelt was working for the Civil Service Commission. The charm of that connection may have meant less to their employees, who are spilled over the narrow house’s four floors. But Washington, D.C., was a city of anonymous thirteen-story office buildings adorned in a brass and marble style that suggested high Soviet Union or maybe low Donald Trump. At least “1820,” as everyone called it, was different.

  Rena and Brooks had met seven years earlier when they were Senate investigators, after he had to leave the army and Senator Burke, a friend of Katie’s family, offered him a job. He was prepping Burke for a hearing on drugs in Olympic sports, a kind of one-day sham hearing designed for nothing other than cable airtime. Rena decided to give it seventy-two hours to find something new, maybe force the hearings into something
substantive. Everywhere he turned he came across the trail of the lawyer for the Democrats, who was usually a step ahead of him.

  When he tracked her down, Rena found a brassy ultraliberal who cursed like a sailor and tended to think most Republicans were shitheads. He also found an unlikely kindred spirit, a natural, obsessive digger. Skill and craft bound them despite ideology.

  They began to make a habit of collaborating, at first without telling their bosses. When Burke suggested four years ago that if Rena created a consulting firm—and was paid a market rate rather than a federal salary—it might calm some of Katie’s family’s concerns about him, Brooks was the first person Rena asked to join him.

  They partnered with Raymond Toppin and his firm Toppin & Associates. “Top,” a lawyer and former presidential aide, was mostly a one-man advisor for hire, a broker who knew how to get antagonists to shake hands. Rena and Brooks brought in new people, expanded the business into investigations, crisis management, and communications strategy as well as strategic advice. Sometimes they even did security or surveillance work, subcontracting with Rena’s ex-military friends. You just had to be careful about whom you worked for. Top had retired a year later.

  The business had thrived. Their gang of lawyers, ex-cops, ex-FBI, and database hunters were good at getting at things quickly, including details that people wanted to hide. Clients tended to come to them when their situations were especially serious—or had gotten especially bad. They were known for their candor. They were used to working fast.

  They assemble the team for ten minutes. “Here’s the name we’re vetting,” Brooks says after she and Rena outline the assignment. “All I can tell you is this: Edmund Roland Madison is an iconoclast. He’s got conservative impulses on some issues, a libertarian streak, and liberal, even far-left ideas, on others.”

  Iconoclast was code, everyone in the room knew, for the idea that he would have no natural constituency. People would support him to help Nash. But if there were the slightest problem, those same people would be quick to bail.

  They break into three teams—one to look at Madison’s writings, his legal opinions and scholarship; a second to look at anything Madison may have written outside the law; a third to look at his personal life. “We will reconvene at five,” Brooks says.

  Three and a half hours later they are back in the attic conference room.

  The people around the table are mostly friends Rena and Brooks collected from their years in Washington. There is Walt Smolonsky, a bearlike former police detective and Senate investigator, a few years older than Rena. And Hallie Jobe, a former FBI agent whom Rena had known in army intelligence, who had acquired a law degree at night along the way, quiet, conservative, the daughter of a black minister in Alabama, one of the most disciplined and driven people Rena had ever met—including the driven crazies from Special Forces.

  Jonathon Robinson, their media specialist, is a former Senate press aide and attorney. Maureen Conner is a lawyer, quick, scholarly, sharp-tongued, a tiny wisp of a woman in her fifties with short hair and a hook nose.

  Next to her is Ellen Wiley, their chief computer sleuth, a matronly woman with owlish glasses on a chain and a quietly shrewd manner. To Rena, the former librarian of the New York Times’ Washington bureau is as much the soul of the operation as anyone, the most creative hunter of facts using databases he has ever met. In the office, a computer search is called “a Wiley.”

  Next to her is Arvid Lupsa, Wiley’s protégé and odd-couple workmate. He is thin and has a goatee, a Romanian accent, and a genius for writing code. From what Rena can glean, Lupsa’s social life proves that geeks are not just cool now but sexy.

  “Tell me, who is Roland Madison?” Brooks asks.

  Wiley, who worked Madison’s personal background with Smolonsky, begins the resume:

  Edmund Roland Madison, known as Rollie, born 1952, raised in San Francisco; graduated University of California at Berkeley, class of 1972, at age twenty.

  “Skipped grades,” Smolonsky adds. “Back when they did that.”

  Harvard Law School, 1975. Supreme Court clerk for Justice Fulton. Then two years at the solicitor general’s office in the Justice Department.

  Madison had spent most of his career as an academic, ten years at Harvard, fourteen at Stanford, the last six as dean. He has been a federal judge for five years.

  “The Senate already confirmed him once, five and a half years ago, for the federal bench. What can we learn from that?” Brooks asks.

  “Won’t help him much,” Wiley says. “Committee hearings lasted an hour. He testified for like fifteen minutes. He and four others at the table. Utterly noncontroversial.”

  Madison had been appointed to the federal bench by Nash’s Republican predecessor when Nash was president-elect.

  “A package deal,” Conner recalls. “President Lee got to pick a couple of judges whose appointments were stalled in exchange for appointing a couple of names Nash wanted.”

  “I remember that,” Brooks says. “New spirit of cooperation.”

  “Yeah, that worked,” says Smolonsky.

  “So we start from scratch and assume nothing,” says Brooks.

  Conner spots “a wrinkle” in Madison’s resume. Between Stanford and the federal bench, he served briefly as a Superior Court judge in California. That is a conspicuously modest judgeship for a former Stanford Law dean on his way to the federal appellate bench.

  “Was he forced out as dean at Stanford and needed a spot to land?” Hallie Jobe asks.

  “And he wasn’t on Superior Court long before going to federal appeals,” Conner notes. “Just eighteen months.”

  “We’ll find out why he left Stanford for a not-so-fancy gig,” Wiley promises.

  Lupsa describes Madison’s nonlegal writings. “Guy has a remarkably wide-ranging mind and he’s an amazingly prolific writer,” Lupsa says with a thick accent but precise diction, the blend of a childhood in communist Romania and a college education in math and computer science at Princeton.

  “He’s written for all kinds of magazines—everything from Runner’s World, to Outside to Science, and some blog called PCH,” Lupsa says.

  “That a drug, PCH?” someone asks.

  “It’s a highway,” Jobe answers. “Pacific Coast. The blog is about an open state of mind.”

  “Oh, great. Sounds like a marijuana blog,” says Smolonsky.

  A Stanford Law alumni magazine profile after Madison was named to federal appeals described him as “a man of such breadth of interests and depth of knowledge—from history to the constellations—that he seemed as close to a Renaissance intellect as you could find in the twenty-first century—inventive, connected to the past, quiet, moral, and abstract.”

  “How would they know that he was moral?” Jobe says. The ex–FBI agent speaks in a clipped monotone that people sometime mistake as humorless.

  “Journalists can look into your eyes and tell,” Robinson says.

  “He’s written thirteen books,” Lupsa continues. “On everything from sailing to legal history to hiking the California coastline to astrophysics.”

  “What the hell is astrophysics?” asks Smolonsky.

  “Astronomy.”

  “When did they change the name?”

  “He even wrote a book on being a single father,” Lupsa says.

  “He’s a widower,” Wiley explains. “Wife died twenty years ago. One child. A daughter. Grown. Also a lawyer.”

  “He is a true public intellectual,” Lupsa says admiringly.

  “Swell,” Brooks moans.

  A public intellectual means a long paper trail, or a lot of provocative ideas that can be used to attack him.

  A paper trail is what did in Robert Bork, the conservative law professor whose hearings helped politicize the nominating process in the first place in the 1980s. Since the Bork hearings, ironically, presidents had tended to pick people who wrote less, who tailored their resumes toward advancement rather than scholarship and intellectual
curiosity. It was part of the politicization Nash had talked about.

  “Legal philosophy?” Brooks asks.

  Conner, a lawyer, takes over the narrative, with help from Jobe and Robinson, summarizing not only Madison’s legal writings but that of other legal scholars about him.

  “What you see,” Conner says finally, “is a guy searching for a less ideological approach to the law. He talks about stripping away contemporary politics and scholarship, and looking for what he calls ‘a more essential American truth.’”

  “A what?” Smolonsky asks.

  “It may be a bit nuanced for you nonlawyers.”

  “Explain it to us anyway,” Rena says.

  “Madison is arguing that the Constitution was the ultimate consensus document and not nearly as ideological as people make it out today,” Conner says. “The colonies were about as different from each other as countries would be today. And they were frightened about almost everything after splitting with England. The only way they would approve the Constitution is if it stuck to the handful of things on which everyone agreed.”

  “Can you say it even plainer than that?” Smolonsky says. “So I can understand it.” This was one of Smolonsky’s ways of playing dumb and exposing the holes in what other people were saying.

  “So what Madison sees in the Constitution is a set of essential American ideas that stand out for their lack of political ideology,” Jobe translates. “He argues that the Constitution points mostly to protecting and expanding liberty and opportunity, and that the clearest way to apply the law today is to shed ourselves of current political ideas about original intent. Others writing about him say he is pointing to a new paradigm of legal interpretation that they call ‘essentialism.’ It’s kind of a third way, beyond current politics, beyond loaded terms like original intent or strict constructionism or judicial activism.”

  “So he’s a compromiser?” Smolonsky says.

  “No. In fact, he writes about some of the biggest mistakes in legal history occurring when people tried to forge compromises on controversial issues of the day. The Dred Scott decision that defined blacks as property, he argues, was an attempt at finding a compromise between pro- and anti-slavery positions,” Conner says.