Ultimatum

by Matthew Glass

  Why hadn’t Olsen predicted this? Surely, when he suggested making a threat of sanctions, it should have been obvious the Chinese would come back as hard as they could to test him out, a new president, to see if they could make him blink. It certainly was obvious now it had happened. That was the kind of thing he and Wu and the other China experts at State should have understood. Maybe they did, Maybe Olsen actually wanted this to happen as a way of escalating the process even faster.

  Was it the case that he was being manipulated by his own secretary of state? Was that possible?

  Perhaps he really had made a mistake in appointing Olsen. If he put his pride aside, maybe Alan Ball was right. Yet when he looked back on it, the thing that stood out was that he had chosen to follow Olsen’s advice straight down the line. If Olsen was the wrong man, why had he done that? Surely he wasn’t so weak in judgment, even in foreign affairs, to be overly influenced by his secretary of state against the reality of the situation? If he was, how could he safely lay claim to the presidency?

  He had gone with Olsen. And right now, apart from being more explicit about the decision to make the threat of sanctions, he still couldn’t find the point at which he should have decided to go the other way. Which meant that fundamentally he was in line with Olsen. And yet look where that had got him.

  He gazed at the peak of Towers Mountain in the distance. The mare, as if sensing his preoccupation, had stopped.

  Why had he followed Olsen’s line? He had only one answer. Urgency. That was the thing Alan Ball didn’t seem to get. Maybe he should have taken Ball with him to San Diego to see what could happen in California after four years of drought. Olsen, whatever else you said about him, got it. And Ball just didn’t seem to.

  Joe Benton felt it strongly. As president, it was his responsibility not to prevaricate around the issue, but to face it. The need for action was urgent. History would judge him harshly if he failed to respond. In all this mess, that was the one thing he was certain of.

  And yet if you act too hastily, he knew, project yourself beyond the limit of your credibility, then you lose the ability to have any effect at all. Anyone who had ever exerted any kind of power successfully knew that.

  But there was no option to act slowly here. The way to recover his credibility had to be through action, not by retreating to the edge of where it extended already.

  Suddenly he became aware that the horse had stopped walking. He leaned down and ran his hand over the horse’s flank. “What do you say, Martha. Huh? What do you say, girl?” He straightened up. “Come on,” he said, and at a slight pressure from his knees, the mare walked on.

  Joe Benton’s way with any serious problem had always been to work through it, once he had gathered views, more by going away and thinking it through than to talk it out. But at times even he reached a point from which the only way to progress was to talk, when he was so deep or so lost in it that he needed someone else to help haul him back above the landscape to get perspective. He had reached that point now. He tried to think of the right person. It couldn’t be anyone who was involved in the process, not even John Eales. Marty Montag, the long-serving ex-senator from New Hampshire, had been a mentor to him. But he would have to tell Marty everything, and he didn’t feel he could do that. What about Gartner? There was no one else in the world who could appreciate what he was going through like an ex-president. But he didn’t respect him, nor Shawcross, who had preceded him. Shawcross had always struck him as complacent and lazy, favored by a global upswing that did more for the economy than any of his policies, smugly governing through an immense appetite for delegation and a stubborn willingness to postpone dealing with any of the major issues the country faced. As for Gartner, he was crafty, altogether darker. Maybe it was hubris, but Joe Benton didn’t want to expose himself to either of those men.

  He respected Currie, who had preceded Shawcross, and he probably would have called the ex-president if it was possible. But Pat Currie was far gone into the world of Alzheimer’s. That left him without any ex-presidential counsel he could call on.

  It left him with only one person.

  ~ * ~

  Heather made coffee after he came in from his ride. She sat on the sofa beside him.

  Joe sipped the coffee.

  “So are you going to tell me what’s on your mind?” said Heather eventually. She took his hand and looked at him questioningly. “Is it California? It was awful, wasn’t it?”

  Joe nodded. “Thanks for coming with me. It made a difference. To people, I mean.” He was silent, reflective. “How are you finding it? When we agreed I’d run I knew this was going to be asking a lot of you, but I don’t think I realized how much.”

  “It’s fine, Joe. You know, it’s not often you get to spend twelve thousand dollars wallpapering a room.”

  Heather was redecorating the White House, as new first ladies traditionally do, and the usual ridiculous allegations were coming out in the right-wing press.

  Joe smiled.

  “It’s fun.”

  “I know it’s hard work.”

  “Well it is hard work. That’s true. And there are things like California. Even there, you can’t really do anything, but just being there makes a difference to people, like you said. And that’s worthwhile.”

  “I appreciate it, honey. I want you to know that.”

  “You know, it made me think, maybe I will give up my job.”

  “No!” Joe looked at her, aghast. “There’s no way we’re going to let those—”

  “Joe, hold on a minute. It’s not because of them. I’m just not sure there aren’t more things I’d like to do as first lady. I’m beginning to think I could achieve more that way.”

  “I’d hate to see them push you out.”

  “They’re not pushing me out.”

  “I’d hate for them to think so.”

  Heather nodded. She didn’t say anything to that.

  “I’m sorry, honey. I’ve got no right to say that. It’s your choice. I don’t want to play politics with your life.”

  “Well, I haven’t decided.” She paused. “Maybe I’ll leave it a little longer. Maybe next year.”

  Joe nodded. Heather nestled into the sofa, drew up her feet and pushed her toes under Joe’s thigh. She wriggled them.

  “What about you, Mr. President?”

  “What about me?”

  “Like hearing ‘Hail to the Chief every time you walk in a room?”

  Joe smiled. “That’s something, isn’t it?”

  “So?”

  “So what?”

  “So you get them to bring us here and then you go riding for four hours by yourself.” Heather raised an eyebrow. “I know you, Joe.”

  Joe frowned. The frown got deeper. At last he took a deep breath.

  “It’s confidential, Heather.”

  Heather rolled her eyes.

  “Really, honey. About a half dozen people in the whole country know about this.”

  Heather’s expression turned serious. Joe had told her confidential information before, plenty of times, when he was a senator. But this sounded as if it was on a whole new scale.

  “You sure you want to know?”

  She wasn’t. But she nodded anyway.

  He told her. Starting at his first meeting with Gartner, all the way through to the Chinese action in response to his clumsy threat of sanctions. When he stopped, he looked at her sheepishly.

  She was deep in thought.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t mention anything before. You know... I couldn’t.”

  Heather shook her head quickly, dismissing the thought.

  “I’m boxed into a corner. Two months in, I’ve thrown out a challenge to the only other major power in the world, and they’ve met me. If it’s a bluff, they’ve called it.”

  “Is it a bluff?” asked Heather quietly.

  “It wasn’t. But doesn’t look like I thought it through carefully enough. So maybe it is.”

  “That’s bad the
n.”

  “I didn’t set out to bluff them.”

  “But maybe that’s what you’ve done. Don’t bluff if you’re not prepared to get called, Joe Benton.”

  Joe didn’t reply. He found himself wishing he’d spoken to Heather sooner, as he knew he would. When he talked to her like this, she was always logical, objective. Just as he needed her to be. Comforting came later.

  “Joe, you knew the Europeans wouldn’t support you. You said that’s what Ogilvie told you. Well, all that’s happened is the Chinese have shown you that.”

  “No, they’ve shown me they know it as well.”

  “Same difference.”

  “They’re saying they knew it all along, so my threat was empty.”

  “Why? Are you saying it’s only a real threat if the Europeans join us. We won’t go it alone? Are you saying the United States won’t go it alone?”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “But that’s the question, isn’t it? If we won’t go it alone, it’s a bluff. If we will, it isn’t.”

  Joe nodded. That was exactly how it was.

  “What are our options?”

  “Well, we go ahead, I guess, or we back away. If we back away, we do it with some kind of secondary action.” Joe paused, thinking over all the discussions he’d had with Eales and Ball and Olsen over the past days. “We show some kind of aggression to send the message that we’re backing off on this but that doesn’t mean we’re going to be weak on anything else.”

  “What kind of aggression?”

  “Something peripheral.”

  “Another Iraqi-Syrian thing?”

  “Maybe something closer to home. We could make some kind of show of support toward Taiwan, but that might be a little too inflammatory. They might interpret that the wrong way. There’s aid to Korea for the ex-North. They can always use more of that, and the Chinese hate it when we do anything to build Korea up. Or those contracts the Chinese government awarded . . . Apparently there were some quite advanced memorandums of understanding with some of our companies and we could challenge what they did on those. That might be kind of smart because the Chinese could give on that as a way of letting us know they’ve got the message.”

  “Which is?”

  “That we hear them on the big issue, and we respect them on that, but they better respect us as well.”

  Heather didn’t look impressed. “Doesn’t sound like you’re asking for much respect.”

  “If we keep going, if we go it alone, Heather, I don’t know what that means. I don’t think any of us knows what that means.”

  “What about talking with President Wen?”

  “No one seems to think that’s a good idea right now. Not even Alan.”

  “What do you think?”

  “You know, I actually don’t see how it’s going to help. Wen must have authorized what they did. If he didn’t, he could reverse it.”

  “But surely it helps to talk?”

  “That’s what you’d think. But they all tell me no, not right now.” Benton smiled ruefully. “When Alan and Larry agree, you’ve got to think there must be something in it.”

  “Things are bad between them?”

  Joe shook his head and laughed. “Honey, I don’t know which one I’d fire first. Alan came to me and told me I should sack Larry.”

  Heather stared at him.

  “He said it straight.”

  Heather frowned. “So if you did take some kind of action—I mean in relation to China—when would they be expecting you to do it?”

  “Soon, I guess. Soon enough for it be clear that what we’re doing is a response, that we’re not prevaricating. It’s nearly two weeks already. If we look like we’re prevaricating, that just makes us look weak again.”

  Heather was silent. She drew her knees up under her chin, hunched her shoulders, frowning in thought, holding her coffee mug in both hands.

  “If I keep going with this, it’ll be what the Benton presidency ends up being about,” said Joe quietly. “That’s my fear.”

  Heather nodded.

  “Nothing else will matter.”

  Heather looked up at him. “What else does matter, Joe? You ran against Gartner saying it was finally time for someone to stop telling lies, to admit we faced a problem and it was going to hurt but if we worked together we could get through it and come out the other side a better country. And the American people trusted you to do that, to tell them the truth, to deal with it, to lead them through it. And that hasn’t changed. It just turns out the lies have been a little bigger and the truth is a little harder.”

  “A lot harder.”

  “So does that mean suddenly you stop trying to deal with it? Because suddenly it’s too hard? To me, it seems like it’s the opposite. The harder the truth, the more important it is to grapple with it. If the situation is as bad as you say, if action is needed as urgently as you say, then ... I don’t know, personally, Joe, I’d rather see you try and fail than not try at all. I don’t give a damn about the Benton presidency. I give a damn about Amy and Greg and the kind of world their kids are going to grow up in.”

  Joe gazed at her for a moment. Then he drew her to him.

  “So you don’t think I’m an awful president?” he said eventually.

  “I think you’ll get better.”

  Joe drew back and looked at Heather in mock dismay. Heather smiled.

  “You’ll have to make the case, Joe. You’re going to have do something, and you’re going to have to sell it to the American people.”

  “I know.”

  “When?”

  Joe shrugged. “I hate even having to think about this. We’ve got the health summit this week. That’s what I want to be doing, Heather. Things that are going to make people’s lives better.”

  “You can still do that, Joe. This isn’t stopping you.”

  “Not yet. That’s the one thing we’ve got on our side, none of this is out in the open. We’ve still got control of the public agenda.”

  ~ * ~

  Wednesday, March 23

  East Room, The White House

  The president stood in front of the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington in the East Room, the oldest object in the White House. On his right were five of the key people from the health care sector who had taken part in the daylong summit on health that he had just chaired. On his other side stood the secretary of health, Mary Lawson, the surgeon general, Eric Boulier, Jodie Ames, and the chairs of the House and Senate health committees.

  Adam Gehrig opened the press conference by reading a communiqué from the summit. It stated that the group was committed to reform and the participants would be putting in detailed responses to a series of measures that Secretary Lawson had proposed. Jacqueline Russel, president of the American Medical Association, and Bill Overton, representing the Association of Managed Funds, both of whom were in the group on the president’s right, had fought bitterly over the wording “commitment to reform.” They had wanted something like “willingness to explore reform” or “interest in continuing improvement in patient care” or something even more meaningless. So had the Republicans from Congress. Joe Benton had rammed the wording through. He was committed to reform. If they weren’t committed to reform, they were going to have to get out of his way.

  In the past days, the furor over the loss of the Chinese business contracts had abated. Jodie was confident that today the journalists would be engaged in the issue at hand. As an inducement to get them to stick to the matter, she had offered the prospect of another presidential press conference within two weeks with a general scope. The first question, from the Washington Post correspondent, was right on the money, asking if the president could summarize the reforms that had been discussed during the day. The president certainly could. They were the reforms Joe Benton had been calling for all through his campaign: universal coverage obligation through managed funds supported by a levy on sales of tobacco, fast foods, motor vehicles and other major cau
ses of morbidity and mortality; guaranteed access to pharmaceuticals through centralized purchasing at state level; development of competition through genuine transparency of fees and outcomes of physicians and health funds; and a program of targeted investment by federal government to provide hospitals and other infrastructure in key locations of need, in particular the Relocation states. “And I have to say,” concluded the president, “there was a remarkable degree of support around the table for each of these measures.”