Shining City

by Tom Rosenstiel

  “He has to say it. And he has to mean it,” says Rena.

  “Agreed,” Brooks answers.

  “I have to hear him say it.”

  “Agreed, Peter.”

  And they have to tell everything. Especially why he had kept it a secret till now. “Nothing new can leak from anywhere else after this,” Rena says.

  Then let the country decide. It is their only play.

  Except one thing: the rumors about the woman who spent the night on her way to Canada. Whoever she was, it was unproven, but also toxic.

  “Peter, we need to coordinate this with the White House. You hear me? This is not something we do on our own.” More allusions to his history.

  “I’ll talk to Carr,” he says.

  It will have to be on the phone. There is no time to meet in person.

  “Call me after,” Brooks says. “I’ll meet you at Madison’s apartment.”

  They had not been allowed to prepare for this. They had gathered most of the facts. But they hadn’t lined up ahead of time and had ready what everyone would say. Madison’s two friends, a judge and a Justice Department official, had buried themselves too deep, too long ago, to be willing to go public. It would have been exposed that they had lied and been engaged for years in a cover-up. So they are improvising more tonight than they should be.

  “How do we justify holding it back till now?” Carr asks.

  “We tell the truth.”

  Madison was always willing to acknowledge the antiwar activity. Two of the friends involved were not. He honored that. They have changed their minds now because of the attempt to attack Madison. The journalist Henry Weingarten, who was part of the group, will vouch for this.

  “And they will change their minds?”

  “Randi is handling it as we speak. If not, Madison may tell us he will withdraw.”

  “Okay, go,” the chief of staff agrees.

  Give the man credit. He is a decider.

  “Do you want it to come from the West Wing?” asks Carr.

  Rena, surprised, had expected Carr to demand they release it. Give the White House separation and let Rena and Brooks take the heat.

  “No,” Rena says. “We’re the investigators. We found it. We released it. That makes it more direct and less political.”

  “We can carry this,” Carr says.

  “No. We’ll do it. It will infuriate Albin to know he caused this. I think he doesn’t play well angry.”

  “You a student of Josh Albin now?”

  “A condition of the assignment you gave me.”

  “I didn’t give you this assignment, Peter,” Carr says.

  An honest acknowledgment from a notorious liar?

  “I know.”

  “I was opposed to Madison’s nomination, Peter. A Californian doesn’t get us much politically. We already have that state. And I have never been convinced one man can change the dynamics of the Court. I think you change the Court by putting more liberals there. It’s math, not psychology.”

  They have entered new territory. Carr is leveling with him. Band-of-brothers bonding in a crisis? Or does he want something?

  “To be blunt, we have a year before the president loses most of his influence. And I didn’t want to use what’s left of his political capital on a court nomination. If we can get a moment of bipartisanship, I want to use it for an economic package to rebuild manufacturing. Or a broad climate package that will change the course of the planet.”

  “You changed your mind?”

  “A loss is a loss. Now that he’s nominated, we need the guy confirmed.”

  “I will talk to Madison,” Rena says.

  Carr could still be lying to him. But Rena’s job now is to persuade Madison to reveal everything and to make him understand it’s this or nothing.

  Dropping out now has all kinds of implications Madison would hate, including suggesting that protesting the war is something to be ashamed of.

  They have to find a journalist to do one story that everyone else has to follow. And do it tonight. It would be best if it breaks first thing in the morning—with a prepared statement ready. They can’t risk Albin breaking this first, though Rena doubts the activist has enough information anyway.

  At Madison’s apartment, Brooks has already secured the judge’s assent. Rena interviews him for a statement, recording it on audio, not on camera. Nominees do not appear on camera. Brooks takes care of “informing” Madison’s “co-conspirators.” They could now try to remain anonymous, or they could back Madison. It shouldn’t take them long to realize the gratitude of the president for helping their friend get on the Supreme Court is worth more than keeping their secret.

  Rena gets a statement from Madison.

  “Do you think you did something wrong vilifying the soldiers who fought the war?”

  “Of course,” Madison answers.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that in California in April?”

  “Doesn’t it go without saying? If anything, we’ve overlearned that lesson. We honor our soldiers now so assiduously I wonder if we mean it.”

  Matt Alabama agrees this is a story about the smear tactics of Washington, not a scandal about Madison, but says he can’t do the story himself. He and Rena are too close. Rena and Brooks pick Jayne Haver of the New York Times instead, a national affairs correspondent who, while respected, tends to be sympathetic to the Nash administration. Haver, too, sees the piece much the way Brooks explains it.

  Rena and Madison collaborate on a written statement. Henry Weingarten, the journalist in Los Angeles, agrees to a statement as well. The other two men agree to be named and offer the briefest statements for now. Silence would sound like guilt, Brooks has persuaded them.

  In three hours it is done.

  “In 1970, when I was a seventeen-year-old sophomore in college, I, like the majority of the American public, was opposed to continuing U.S. involvement in the now decade-long war in Vietnam. Along with some other sophomores, I was deeply influenced by the writings of the American philosopher Henry David Thoreau and the idea that if you found a law or policy that you disagreed with that you had an obligation to oppose it by breaking that law. We took ourselves enormously seriously. We called ourselves the New Walden Project, in honor of Thoreau’s book Walden. We imagined ourselves very important. We were serious, frightened, inspired, and naïve. We engaged in activities that violated the law on purpose, that were part of the theory of civil disobedience of symbolic lawbreaking as a form of free speech. At the University of California, Berkeley, we spray-painted the windows at an ROTC recruitment office and a recruiter’s car. We made contact with groups trying to help people avoid the draft. I was even detained once by an army representative who caught us spray-painting an army recruitment property. We were never arrested. I think he thought we were ridiculous.”

  Reluctantly, Rena is quoted, too. He is the eyewitness, in effect, that Madison’s team had been contacted by a reporter about this, who had told him that critics were out there peddling outrageous tales of secret communist cells and a conspiratorial cover-up. There was no cover-up.

  The story will break tomorrow in the Times and on a network morning program. There is much to do still to make sure that what they’ve set in motion tonight works as planned tomorrow.

  As they are finishing up the work in Madison’s apartment, an exhausted Randi Brooks pulls Rena into the kitchen for some privacy. “A mole, Peter? In our office? We need to face this.”

  She looks at Rena, into his calm, resolute dark eyes, his delicate, sharp-angled face. He looks tired but also energized by what has happened. “I know. Starting tomorrow,” he says. “Not tonight. No distractions tonight.”

  She gives him a worried look.

  Just before 11:00 p.m., after Rena is back at his row house in the West End, Alabama calls, the nightly review.

  “A prediction?”

  “Been around too long for those,” Alabama says. “But you’ve done well today.

  “T
hen I guess we’ll know tomorrow.”

  “It may take more like three or four days.”

  “Lovely.”

  A good deal of what Rena has learned about politics has come from listening to Alabama. The older man seems to enjoy the role.

  “You know I wasn’t sure whether Nash might bail out on Madison,” Rena tells his friend. “I even wondered if this whole nomination was a setup.”

  “Oh, I didn’t doubt Nash,” Alabama says. “But I figured some of his people hated this pick. My guess is the ambivalence you sensed wasn’t Nash, Peter. It was division around him.”

  Alabama has sensed all along what Rena hadn’t really understood until tonight after talking with Carr. If some of Nash’s people were opposed to Madison, that also explained why the president had sought outsiders to run things.

  Rena mixes a martini after he and Alabama are done and slips Moanin’ by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers onto a turntable. Blakey was a rare bebop leader, a drummer—a driver of the beat. Like Ellington, he led from underneath.

  The vodka slides, chills, and burns. As he begins to relax, he realizes he is still wearing the basketball clothes he wore to meet Albin.

  How did the conservative find out about this? Rena believes he knows the answer, though he doesn’t have the evidence. It’s almost the only explanation, however—they have a leak in-house. He has no idea who.

  He tries to make the next three sips of the martini go slowly to appreciate them.

  The doorbell is ringing.

  Victoria Madison is standing in his doorway in running shorts and a sweat-soaked sleeveless T-shirt. And a shy smile.

  “I was feeling nervous, so I took a late run and I . . . found myself here.”

  She is a charmingly bad liar.

  In running rather than dress clothes, blinking perspiration from her eyes, Vic looks younger, Rena thinks, as she might have as a teenager.

  He swings the door open the rest of the way for her. Her wet shoulder brushes against his as she passes.

  “There anyone with you?” he asks.

  “Like who?” she says with surprise. He has started this badly.

  “Like reporters following you.”

  “Oh, no. We’ve become sufficiently familiar and uninteresting again.” Camera crews hovered, even around the apartment, their first days in Washington.

  “I’ll get you a towel,” he says. She follows him into the den and waits there.

  “I’m having a drink,” he says when he returns, seeing her looking at his. “Would you like one?”

  “Oh, God, no. Water would be great, though.” She looks at Rena’s glass. “That looks like a martini.”

  “Guilty.”

  “A martini and jazz? Like something out of a Playboy ad from the 1960s,” she teases. “‘What kind of man reads Playboy?’”

  Rena blushes.

  “I wouldn’t have guessed jazz.”

  “For my father, an immigrant from Italy, American jazz was, well, the most American thing there was. He listened to it in Italy. Much more than pop music when we moved here. So that was the music in the house.”

  She scans the books, the picture of Katie and his father. She is reading his house, reading him.

  “Peter,” Vic says, suddenly serious. “Do you think Dad’s nomination will survive?”

  “The next couple of days will tell us.”

  “This bothered you from the start, didn’t it? The war protests,” she says.

  What should he tell her?

  That he lobbied against her father’s nomination? That he thought her father’s attitude about his anti-Vietnam protests was offensive? Why doesn’t he want to tell her the truth? Why is he so afraid of disappointing her?

  “What bothered me was hiding it.”

  That much is absolutely true.

  “I think it means nothing,” Vic says. “So revealing it should mean nothing.”

  Head tilted upward, her smoke-gray eyes are fixed on him, her expression searching his. She isn’t talking about how this will play politically anymore. She is talking about what things should mean to him.

  He holds her gaze and nods. I understand.

  “Let’s get you that water.”

  In the kitchen she measures the layout, the pots hanging above the small island, the German knives.

  “Randi says you are a gourmet cook.”

  “I’m out of practice.” He barely cooks anymore. Not since his divorce from Katie. Not for one person. “But my grandmother taught me during summers in Italy. So my father and I wouldn’t starve.”

  He hands her the water. She downs it in a single gulp. Then she holds it out to him for more.

  “You’re thirsty,” he says.

  “You have no idea.”

  As he reaches for the glass, they brush against each other again. She looks at the dark spot made on his shirt.

  “I’ve left a mark.”

  “Yes, you have.”

  A demure smile, a retreating expression, just for a moment.

  “Dad and I went to another Washington dinner last night, at Senator Burke’s.”

  His former boss Llewellyn Burke seems to be everywhere.

  “The senator told me your story.”

  “I didn’t know I had one.”

  She circles and moves closer. “Oh, that is very male,” she says accusingly.

  “Better than the alternative.”

  She shakes her head. “You’re trying to get me to tell you what he said. Men love to hear about themselves.”

  “Am I?”

  “I will placate your male ego, then, and tell you what Burke said. And you can tell me which parts are lies.”

  “All the bad parts.”

  She smiles in a way that suggests those are the best parts.

  It bothers Rena, though, that Burke has told her this story. His personal debt to the senator is enormous—the man gave him a new career, first out of loyalty to Katie because their families knew each other, and then, after the marriage collapsed, to Rena. This particular story, however, isn’t the senator’s to tell, or really even Rena’s.

  “You were at the Pentagon in charge of a top army investigation unit. The army was about to assign a general to head Southern Command. But there was a problem. Rumors of a history of sexually harassing women under his command.”

  Rena gave a promise he would never tell this story. He never has. Burke learned it elsewhere.

  “The general was too important to be scandalized,” Vic continues. “He’d been repeatedly promoted. A scandal would tarnish the army. A sign-off from you, the top internal investigator, would give him a clean bill of health.”

  She pauses, waiting for Rena to say something.

  “But you didn’t do that. Did you?”

  She moves closer to him.

  He holds his ground, barely.

  “You tracked down the loose ends, interviewed many of the women yourself—and became convinced that these were more than rumors.”

  She studies his face, more serious now, less flirtatious.

  “And then, somehow, you persuaded the general to resign . . . after all those years. Senator Burke said you took the general’s daughter to see him. She told him these women were daughters like she was. And you barely said a word.”

  She has moved so close he is leaning against the kitchen island.

  “He resigned, but without a whiff of scandal. And the general actually was grateful. He began apologizing to the women, owning up to what he had done. Making amends. You got the general to resign and like it.”

  She pauses now, looking at him.

  “But you had ruined what was a rising military career before you were thirty-five. Senator Burke offered you a job on his staff.”

  He can feel the heat from her body.

  “You’re not going to tell me whether this story is true, are you?”

  “Senator Burke’s a good storyteller.”

  “I thought the army liked initiative.”
r />   “Initiative that fulfills its objectives—not redefines them.”

  “You didn’t know that before?”

  He wants to take hold of her. He has wanted to take hold of her for months.

  “The military is a paradox. It’s filled with idealists trained in obedience,” Rena says. “It’s a difficult combination.”

  She touches his hand, and Rena feels an electric shot run up his arm. He closes his own over her fingers.

  “Yes, contradictions. To begin with, for someone who is supposed to be such a great investigator, you really are an idiot.”

  “It’s the core of my charm.”

  “Allow me to disabuse you.”

  She tugs at the neck of his T-shirt. “I have had to run over here, literally, for us to be alone.”

  She’s right.

  “You really know nothing about women, do you?”

  “I didn’t have many around much when I was young.”

  “That is a terrible excuse.”

  “Well, I know nothing about women.”

  Vic puts her hands around his neck and pulls him toward her.

  “We’ll see.”

  She tastes of salt and sweat and it’s wonderful. They tug and pull, finding each other beneath clothes, feeling where their bodies match. She is lean and strong. Hungrily, against the island in the kitchen. Rena has imagined this moment. He knows now Vic has, too.

  They are lying on the bed later, their faces close, no more pretenses. “Difficult, but not a complete idiot, perhaps,” she says with a smile.

  Then she props herself on her elbows. “Can I ask you another question?” she says, serious, feeling like talking.

  “I think we’re past seeking permission to ask questions.”

  “How come your father never remarried?”

  She thinks his father was a widower, like her own. Or divorced.

  “Because my father was still married.”

  “I thought . . .”

  It is a night for revelations, Rena guesses.

  “So did I,” he says. “I was told my entire childhood that my mother was dead. But it was a lie. One my father told me, and my grandmother and my aunts in Italy, where I spent my summers, my whole family.”

  “Oh, Peter.”

  “She abandoned my father and me when I was just over a year old.”