Shining City

by Tom Rosenstiel

  “What’s the difference between a compromise and a third way?” Smolonsky demands. Jobe regards Smolo with irritation. There is occasional tension between Rena’s two top street investigators, Smolonsky the sloppy but charming ex-cop and Jobe the efficient and driven former FBI agent who had made it not only being African American but also a woman.

  “Any of these controversial decisions look like trouble?” Rena asks.

  “Well, that’s the thing. In finding his new way, he has staked out positions that annoy both sides,” Conner says. “He is distinctly conservative on guns, for instance, and things like protecting religion rather than keeping religion out of public events. But he seems liberal on free speech, race, and discrimination.”

  The room has gone silent.

  “His iconoclasm is a key point to press on tomorrow in your research,” Brooks says. “Where could it make trouble?”

  “Ellen, do you have those lists I asked for?” Rena asks Wiley.

  Ellen Wiley hands him copies of three long lists, which Rena passes out. “These are the class lists of people in Madison’s year at Berkeley and Harvard and the faculty lists from Harvard and Stanford law schools. I want everyone to go through these carefully and tell me if you have any friends on them, anyone you know.

  Some called this “cohort asset assessment.”

  It’s the technique of finding people in an investigation with whom, by luck, you have a past connection.

  “If there is anyone you know here, call them and talk to them confidentially. What we’re looking for is personal behavior that could get him in trouble. But you need to get them to promise confidentiality,” Rena warns.

  “Will they stick to that?” asks Robinson, the former Senate aide who was a new hire. Rena thinks he may use him to help with Belinda Cartwright.

  “If you’re scary enough,” Jobe answers.

  The White House wants an initial status report by Friday night, two days from now. They will meet again at the end of the day tomorrow, then begin drafting memos.

  Rena looks at Robinson and Maureen Conner.

  “Jon and Maureen, I want you to develop an attack memo, all the reasons Madison would be bad for the country. Hit it hard. Nasty, but serious. All the bad stuff in the worst possible light. Let’s see what it looks like.”

  “On the opposition research,” asks Eleanor O’Brien, Rena’s new assistant, “do you flag only anything you think the Right will use against him? Or do you flag anything the Left might use, too?”

  Not a bad question, Rena thinks. Smart kid.

  “Forget the Left,” Brooks says, who is about as far to the political left as anyone in the room. “They won’t stab Nash in the back in public. Only in private. Whatever they have, they will bring to the White House.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right,” says Robinson.

  “We need to hear back from Hallie,” says Rena.

  “Hallie?” Smolonsky asks.

  “I’m heading to Stanford to talk to faculty about what Madison is like. I’m leaving for the airport in thirty minutes.”

  “Faculty will talk and talk. Catty knife-in-the-back talk,” Conner says.

  “I’m telling them I’m from the MacArthur Foundation. Investigating giving Madison the Genius Prize.”

  Jobe is such a striking figure, a young black woman, military upright, impeccably polite, it seems impossible to people that she would ever be putting them on. It’s one thing that has made her such a good investigator.

  “Little old for a MacArthur, isn’t he?” Wiley observes.

  “We’re making a statement,” Jobe says. “About aging and creative thinking.”

  She’s already in character.

  “Listen,” Brooks commands. “We operate as if Roland is the nominee and this is the final check. That means scrub within an inch of his life.”

  “Twenty-four hours, gang,” Brooks adds.

  “One more thing,” Rena says. “Don’t pretend to know more than you do. Look for holes. We’re not just trying to tell the White House all we know. Knowing what we don’t know may be the most important thing we identify.”

  When the meeting is over and Rena makes it down the stairs to the first floor, Stephanie Hampton, the receptionist, holds up a phone message for him. Hampton has stayed late, waiting until they broke up. Rena and Brooks find having a human being answering the phone a good thing for a sensitive business.

  Belinda Cartwright, Hampton says, is holding for him on line two.

  “How long has she been doing that?”

  “About ten minutes.”

  A sign of panic.

  Rena takes the call in his office.

  “Congresswoman.”

  “Thank goodness, Mr. Rena, I thought no one in town would talk to me.”

  She is being shut down.

  “Busy day. Hoffman’s funeral,” he says. Trying to make her feel better without lying to her.

  “I want to take you up on your offer to help me with a press conference. I’m ready, Mr. Rena, to give up the seat.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You said I should tell the truth.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to help me find the words to do that.”

  “Good.”

  “I want to say that even if I have to resign, that I didn’t create this situation. That I am a victim. That I am doing this reluctantly.”

  Rena sighs. “No, Congresswoman. I won’t help you do that.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The next thing you say publicly can have only one message—that you understand that what you did was wrong.”

  “You said tell the truth. I want people to know how I really feel.”

  “How you feel is not the truth. They’re just your feelings.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The truth is that you engaged in a cover-up. Unless you acknowledge that, you will be regarded as either a fool or a liar.”

  “You can be a very impudent man, Mr. Rena.”

  “I’m told it’s my best quality.”

  It’s the first time he’s heard her laugh.

  “This is hard,” he goes on, “because it’s so different from the rest of your life. This doesn’t feel like you.”

  He has seen this before—in other successful people who made terrible choices.

  “But at a certain point you were not the victim anymore. You were an accomplice.”

  “How does it help me to say that?”

  “If you show people when you resign that you understand you were wrong, they will want to forgive you.”

  “What did I do wrong?”

  Merda, Rena thinks in Italian.

  “Congresswoman, here is what I want you to do. Imagine how the people who are disappointed in you see this. Don’t try to persuade them. See it their way. Spend a half hour doing this. Then write down how they see it. Five sentences. Then sleep on it overnight and look at it again. When you are ready, call me back.”

  “This is going to help me?”

  “Leaders understand how their people think, Congresswoman. This is an exercise in leadership.”

  He stays to read through the Madison files Wiley has ready so far, which are saved in a security-encrypted server.

  Just before 9 p.m., he realizes he’s worked through dinner. Now he’s too tired to eat. Tomorrow will be long, too.

  At home he mixes a vodka martini rather than make dinner. He slices some Gouda and takes the cheese and the martini to the den. His cell phone rings. Matt Alabama is calling to ask about Rena’s day; it’s a ritual to which his friend is faithful.

  Though two decades apart in age, they had become friends when Rena was a Senate aide and Alabama covered Congress. “You’re a rare breed in this town,” Alabama had said in a bar one night, back when Alabama was still drinking. “A pragmatic idealist. We’re almost extinct. When members of the species meet, they need to help each other survive.”

  Mentors and self-appointe
d tutors had played a large role in Rena’s life, a soccer coach in high school, a history professor at West Point, many people in the army, Llewellyn Burke in the Senate. Alabama had become a tutor of a different sort. Of what? Getting older? Losing wives?

  “You see my piece?” Alabama asks.

  He must feel insecure about his story on Hoffman’s funeral, Rena thinks. For all his accomplishments, Alabama still agonizes over every story. He feels a sense of responsibility, a desire to do justice to what he covers. It was one reason he hadn’t been jettisoned as network news shrank, became sillier, and then as all of journalism imploded. Rena makes a point of recording and watching his friend’s stories.

  “Just got home. I’ll take a look.”

  There is a long comfortable silence, the kind almost reassuring among close friends.

  “You okay, Matt?”

  “Too many funerals. They’re starting to take their toll.”

  Maybe his old friend is becoming more idealist than pragmatist, Rena thinks. He was a passionately empathetic man, poetic and emotional, which made him particularly good on television, but he felt too much.

  “Hoffman was a towering figure,” Alabama continues. “Wonder if someone that big could get through now.”

  “Maybe these guys are just towering in retrospect.”

  Rena hears a soft, short chuckle over the phone.

  “Maybe,” Alabama says. “But I don’t know if Nash has it in him to aim high.”

  Rena cannot reveal being hired by the White House. Washington lives are compartmentalized.

  Rena looks at his martini and worries that Alabama might drink tonight.

  “You feel like a walk? I could drive over.”

  “No, if you just got home, you’re working on something. How you doin’?”

  “In the middle, as always. Fixing other people’s problems. Being pulled on both sides.”

  “Be careful to keep your arms in their sockets.”

  Rena laughs.

  “Night, brother,” Alabama says.

  “Night, Matt.”

  His phone is ringing again. His partner.

  “Wiley just emailed me,” she says. “A transcript of a speech at a small law school in Arizona. Madison’s asked about legalizing drugs, and he leaves the door open.”

  Rena and Brooks spend two more hours looking through the record, scanning for statements to mitigate the remark about legalizing drugs, material to make that one look like a random instance of thinking out loud. “Jesus, Peter,” Brooks says over the phone, “you know this is just the first day?”

  Rena thinks about that and tries to imagine the days to come.

  Ten

  10:45 P.M.

  Washington, D.C.

  Before he leaves the office, Gary Gold scans the stories about the funeral of Justice Julius Hoffman already posted online. Other papers have more up than the Tribune does. Jesus Christ, why can’t the damn paper do even the most basic digital things right?

  Now the judicial spectacle will start again, he thinks, the jostling among the groups over who should be picked, the breathless idealization of the president’s selection from the president’s media machine, the cartoon criticism from the other side depicting the person as a dangerous freak. The press will be complicit in all of it. The whole nomination game can get empty and cynical fast.

  Maybe he could make a difference—or the Washington Tribune could. He’s the best investigative reporter the Tribune has, isn’t he? Well, along with Jill Bishop on national security. The paper might be diminished, but it is still the most important media outlet in the world’s most important city. Yes, he’d like a piece of this story. When the thing starts to move, he’d like to take a whack at digging into the nominee. Make the man or woman into a real person. And find out if there is anything to find out. Find out what becoming a great judge is all about. Assuming they pick a great judge.

  He will need to select the right moment. Good way to stay on page one in between deep dives.

  Yeah, he thinks. He will talk to Fiske, investigative editor. No. Hamilton, Fiske’s boss.

  Eleven

  Wednesday, April 15, 6:33 A.M.

  San Francisco

  He parks and looks around. There is a spot here where the rocks jut out into the bay and the fishing is supposed to be good. Truth is, the fishing hadn’t been good here for a long time. People who fish are nostalgic. That makes them predictable. That makes them susceptible and weak.

  “You gonna do a guy, it’s better in a wide-open space,” Bird used to tell him. “Where a guy feels safe.”

  He can still hear Bird’s voice in his head.

  There’s hardly anything to do in a cell but talk about how to commit more crimes when you get out.

  Rumor was Bird had killed for money in the real world. He was big enough that you could believe it and he had dead gray eyes.

  Whatever he did outside, he sure knew a hell of a lot about how to kill people.

  “No matter what, you gotta know guns are stupid. Traceable. Guys think they’re safer ’cause you can be further away. But guns just get you caught. Leave powder. Every gun leaves a signature inside the barrel.”

  Yeah, Bird.

  They talked about it for years.

  How it was easier to kill people close up. “People think you must know the guy.”

  And use whatever is around. A rock. A lamp. Things you pick up at the scene aren’t traceable.

  How finding the right place, the right scene, was critical. Some place they go a lot. And where you can see who can see you.

  See the patterns. Learn their habits. Find the spot. Case the spot. Know everything about it. Then pick your time.

  He could recite it in his sleep now.

  And “hygiene.” So you leave no traces. The cleanliness of killing.

  “You keep your head shaved. Scrub your scalp that day, so no flaking, and you oil it up, so no dryness. And then you wear a hat on top of that. . . . And you always wear gloves.”

  They talked about vengeance, too. Bird used to say, “With enough time, a man dreams of revenge.” He liked that. Yeah, a man dreams.

  Had Bird ever done it? Or just dreamed it?

  Well, he is doing it. He gets out of his car and surveys the terrain, a long stretch of bay front, north of the airport, south of the city. It’s so early he has the place to himself. He gets out and sees a spot where he can throw a line into the water and also see a fair amount of the shoreline without being conspicuous. He could fish there for as long as he needs and no one would think about it. Or notice him. Just a guy. He walks over to where he would stand and fish to know exactly what he would see from there. Yes, he could wait right here.

  Only he won’t be waiting for fish.

  Twelve

  4:00 P.M.

  Washington, D.C.

  The conference room of Citizens for Freedom is already crowded.

  The room is famous both for the meetings held here and the cheapness of the furnishings. The conference table is four rectangular folding tables pushed together surrounded by plastic stackable chairs.

  Josh Albin, the founder of Citizens for Freedom, has a theory about office furniture. Albin has theories about a lot of things. When he arrived in Washington in the 1980s to challenge the Republican establishment, Albin decided cheap furniture wasn’t a sign of being poor. It was a sign of conservative virtue. It showed that he and his group weren’t just Republicans. They were insurgents driven by a cause—cutting taxes and shrinking government. Most Republican conference rooms were plush, with ten-thousand-dollar polished burled wood tables and padded leather chairs; they spoke of money and power. Albin wanted his offices to speak of commitment and revolution, and if people gave money, he wanted to them to know it would be spent on the work, not on the décor.

  And thinking it has made it so. Albin has turned shabby folding tables, cinder-block bookshelves, and metal chairs into a badge of honor. A quarter century since coming to Washington, he could aff
ord almost anything. But when people see the conference room, they remark on its modesty, and the story of Albin’s views on opulence and commitment is retold.

  The legend of Josh Albin grows. Movements are more than ideas. They also require leaders.

  Albin has a theory about that, too. At Harvard in the early 1980s, he’d come to hate entrenched establishments. Harvard was so marinated in liberalism, he thought, it seeped into everything, like a stale odor in an old house the residents stop noticing. People at Harvard mistook their liberalism for intelligence and conservatism for ignorance. That, Albin is famous for telling people, is the only thing of value he learned in Cambridge.

  The line always generates laughter and applause—though, of course, it isn’t true. Albin uses it when he is telling people how they must fortify themselves against haughty self-satisfaction. Never bask in your accomplishments. Always question. Keep your ideas something living, changing. Never let them stultify into dogma.

  As new insurgents have come to the party over the last twenty years—the Common Sense crowd is just the latest—Albin has managed to remain among the rebels. One reason was the Pledge. Any Republican elected to Congress must sign it, promising to do nothing to grow the size of government. Nothing. No new taxes. No earmarks. Absolutism. Even the Common Sense crowd loves his most famous aphorism: “I want to shrink the government so small that it can fit in a toilet. Then I want to flush it.”

  The conscience of the political Right, the enemy of compromise is dressed as he always is, the signature look forever mentioned in media profiles: a daily white carnation in his lapel, black cowboy boots. He is not tall, five feet six, but with his silvery blue eyes and blond beard, he cuts a striking figure people remember.

  “Okay, everybody, we’ve got a major operation to plan here, and a country to change, so let’s settle down,” Albin says. He lifts his eyebrows momentarily to signal that he is kidding.