The Kennedy Moment

by Peter Adamson

  Jane had begun to say something blandly complimentary about the manuscript when Robie, still looking out of the window, interrupted mid-sentence. ‘We need to cut to the chase here, Ms Mir. Jane and I agree it needs a little restructuring. Not to put too fine a point on it, the relationship between Jefferson and this Sally girl needs to be front and centre; the rest can follow any which way.’

  Seema’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly as Clyde Robie turned to look at her, placing the heels of both hands on the windowsill behind him. ‘Journalism school day one. Grab line up front. Work in the backstory once they’re hooked.’

  Seema turned to look at Janie, suspecting a previous conversation in which it had been decided that Clyde Robie’s presence was necessary to lay all this on the line. The editor attempted a smile and laid a soothing hand on the manuscript. ‘It’s just a question of the order, Seema.’

  ‘I’m afraid I have to say it’s a little more than that.’ Robie had turned to the window again. ‘We need to have the thing fleshed out. Pun intended.’

  Seema opted not to reply. In the silence, he feigned interest in something going on in the street below. ‘Again, not to put too fine a point upon things, we need to be a lot more specific about the sexual relationship. I gather she was sixteen at the time?’

  As Robie continued to look out of the window, Seema ignored the question. Behind the desk, Jane was raising a ‘what can I do?’ eyebrow. Eventually the publishing director turned to face her, eyebrows raised in anticipation of an answer.

  Seema gave him a small smile. ‘There’s a problem with what you’re suggesting, Mr Robie. The relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings is not the subject of my book.’

  Robie raised both hands in the beginnings of exasperation but something in Seema’s look forestalled interruption. ‘And so it will be given the place it demands in the perspective of what the book is about, which, as you know, is the lives of individual members of the Hemings family who served as slaves to the Wayles and Jefferson families for the best part of a century.’

  Clyde Robie’s smile suggested that he intended to be patient, confident in having the whip hand. ‘You don’t seem to quite grasp the import of what’s being said here, Ms Mir. The fact of the matter is you’re not the only one working this particular seam. To be absolutely straight with you, I’m not sure Gammer & Duce will still want to publish if you’re all round-the-houses on this one while someone from Columbia or Princeton goes for the jugular on Jefferson and this Sally girl. And that’s what we feel is very much likely to happen.’

  From being a teenager in Karachi, Seema had known herself to be accommodating, malleable even, up to a point. But when the point was reached, mildness was liable to give way to something altogether steelier. She sometimes thought it had been learned from her father, a military man who had been fond of drawing lines in the sand. Lines like the one Clyde Robie had just crossed. She smiled again as she addressed both publishing director and editor, her voice still low. ‘I will write the book I set out to write, Mr Brodie. The one outlined in my original proposal and summarized in some detail in our contract, which I’m sure you’ve read. Whether Gammer & Duce wish to publish or not is of course up to you.’

  On the street outside, she slung her bag over her shoulder and headed back up Broadway. The meeting had cleared her mind of one trouble. But the greater indecisiveness remained. Michael had already been in town for several days. And there had been no call.

  11 | Can we take a walk?

  Washington DC, Monday, January 26th, 1981

  On a bitterly cold January day, Michael Lowell checked his coat and found a booth overlooking a bleak Pennsylvania Avenue. Judging by the torn plastic banquette and the tired menu wedged into a condiment set, Paul had not chosen the place for its fine dining.

  In normal circumstances there were few things he would have looked forward to more than lunch with the man who had been both colleague and friend since the two of them had graduated together from med school. Paul had been part of the original USAID effort to combat smallpox and measles in West Africa and of the US Centers for Disease Control team working on the global smallpox-eradication campaign. Five years as director of the Epidemic Intelligence Service and two more as head of infectious disease had established him as the country’s leading virologist, and it had been no surprise to anybody when he had been appointed principal deputy director of the CDC with responsibility for most aspects of its scientific work.

  Always with an eye for the chance to meet if ever their travel plans threatened to intersect, the two of them usually managed to get together three or four times a year either in Geneva or somewhere on the Eastern seaboard. Both were now what DA, their old boss, would have called ‘shiny pants’ epidemiologists as opposed to the ‘shoe leather’ kind of their earlier years, and on more than one occasion their respective institutions had been known to turn a blind eye when the friendship between the two men had led to bureaucratic corners being cut.

  But the circumstances on that day in January 1981 were not normal.

  He discarded the straw from his glass and took a sip of iced water, adding to the chill in his insides. This was not how it should be. He should have been feeling the usual pleasurable anticipation, not this heavy dread. He looked up from the table to see the snow beginning to drift again, the bunting flapping from the streetlights, the lunchtime crowds starting to hurry. He checked his watch. The flight from Atlanta had probably been delayed by the weather. Either that or there were long lines on the expressway from National. He settled down to wait, occasionally glancing across towards the entrance to the Pennsylvania Avenue Metro.

  When he had called before Christmas to ask if Paul might be in DC towards the end of January, he had known that something was wrong. They had arranged the lunch, but Paul – usually a man of few words – had seemed reluctant to end the call. Eventually Michael had tried to sign off by going over the arrangements once again.

  ‘You’re sure you’ll be in town?’

  ‘Yeah, unlikely there’ll be a change now.’

  ‘Good. So, the place on Pennsylvania Avenue around 12.30?’

  ‘Fine.’

  But still there had been nothing in Paul’s tone to signal a signing off.

  ‘Mike, there’s something else I wanted to just let you know beforehand.’ The ‘Mike’ was the clue that something important was coming. ‘Checked myself into Hopkins last week. Saw Phil Fossy, remember Phil?’

  Michael had felt a chill spread down his arms to his hands. Phil Fossy had also been a contemporary at medical school, but what leapt into Michael’s mind was not a face but a fact: Phil Fossy had become a leading oncologist. On the other end of the line, Paul did not wait for an answer. ‘Yeah, old Phil. Anyway, tumour. Pancreas. Not good.’ The silence had stretched to many seconds.

  Now, waiting for Paul to arrive, the snow beginning to settle on the mountains of discoloured ice and slush that lined the sidewalk, Michael wondered again what he could say. And behind the immediate concern another question nagged: could he, should he, still go through with it? Could he still ask Paul what he had planned to ask when he had called before Christmas? He sipped again from the glass of iced water. Paul would probably just tell him that he was out of his mind. If so, he would accept it. Accept that he had lost his balance somewhere along the way. And that would be that. But was it right even to ask? For no reason at all, Seema Mir came flooding into his thoughts. Her self-possession; the way she had of tilting her head almost imperceptibly when asking a question; the lilt of that now barely perceptible accent; the pleasure of listening to that low, gentle voice. He was a rational man, an epidemiologist, a scientist; and his heart ached for her.

  A sharp tap at the window startled him. Michael raised a hand, feeling the pleasure instantly inundated by the ice water of concern as Paul Lewis pushed through the revolving door, stamping the snow from his shoes and pulling off his coat.

  It was more to find a way of talking
about the cancer than in the hope of discovering any unexplored avenue that Michael asked the routine questions and checked all the possibilities, knowing that Paul would not have missed anything. For the first time since his father’s death, he found himself experiencing that sickening lurch of the professional suddenly becoming the personal, the opening up of vast depths of impotence under a professional expertise onto which so much power is projected. And at every lurch and churn he was reminded of how much more intensely Paul himself must be experiencing the same journey. He had asked about Anne and the boys, and, though the voice had remained steady, the sadness in his friend’s eyes had been immeasurable.

  Lunch was consumed almost without being tasted, and when coffee came Paul leaned back in the booth and slapped the palms of both hands gently on the table. ‘Okay, Mike, that’s it. Just gotta cowboy up here, as my old man would have said. Let’s talk about something else. What happened in Oxford? You get to see her?’

  Michael looked away. What else could be talked about that would not seem trivial, unreal, irrelevant? One of his own father’s relished expressions had been ‘apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?’

  ‘Yes, I saw her.’

  ‘So spill. How did it go?’

  ‘Nothing doing.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She’s not interested.’

  ‘In getting together?

  Michael nodded.

  ‘Have you asked her?’

  ‘Asked her what?’

  Paul clicked his tongue impatiently. ‘I don’t know, asked her for a date, whatever it is you kids do these days.’

  Michael smiled. He and Paul were exactly the same age, though Paul and Anne had married soon after med school and had two teenage boys. He looked out of the window and pointed upwards towards a building on the opposite corner. ‘Isn’t that where the old Peace Corps office used to be?’

  Paul followed his look. ‘Sure is. Had my interview with Shriver right there, third floor corner. Those days he interviewed us all personally. Arrived an hour late and apologized with the biggest shot of whisky I’d ever seen. Next thing I knew I was on my way up to Columbia for two weeks’ intensive on tropical medicine. Two weeks! Imagine that today.’

  ‘I know. Give us a Kelty pack and a copy of Manson’s and we thought we could solve all the problems of the world.’

  ‘Until we got there.’

  ‘You ever think about that time?’

  ‘Yeah, thought about it more just recently.’

  Michael hesitated for a moment. ‘Hélène’s still out there. Gave me a rough time in Oxford.’

  ‘Gave you a rough time?’

  ‘Yeah, seems we’ve become complacent about the millions of kids dying from measles and the rest.’

  Paul pushed out his lower lip. ‘She’s probably not wrong.’

  ‘No. And it got to me when I went back to Geneva. Desk stacked with stats, all the new immunization data for the WHA. All the usual zeroes on the end. Hélène, bless her, sees a kid’s face in every one.’

  ‘That way madness lies, as the man said.’

  ‘True, though. Anyway, what’s happening in Atlanta?’

  Paul again pushed out the lip and put his head to one side in a familiar gesture that brought Michael a new wave of sadness.

  ‘Usual stuff. Except we might have something weird coming down the line. Some very odd PCP clusters popping up in New York and California. Same for Kaposi’s. So right off you’d be thinking immuno-suppression, but the really weird thing is it looks like it’s targeting homosexual men.’

  Michael frowned. ‘Targeting how?’

  ‘No idea. Anyway, keep it to yourself. Could cause the mother of all panics. Not to mention offering yet another opportunity for the media to demonstrate its sense of responsibility. And anyway, what we can say about it right now amounts to zilch. Not even going to be in the MMWR for a while yet. Tell you more when I know. Anyway, from the few to the many, how’s immunization going?’

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘You got the eighty per cent thing agreed.’

  Michael grimaced. ‘Yeah, if resolutions were vaccinations I’d be out of a job.’

  For another half hour, the two talked about the global immunization programme they had helped set up in the wake of the success against smallpox. There was no need to explain any of the difficulties. Paul had been the one who had warned him when he had first taken the job that expectations for the other vaccine-preventable diseases were wildly unrealistic. No one knew better that there was all the difference in the world between a one-off effort to ring fence a specific outbreak of a viral disease and a permanent system of routine immunization.

  Michael finished his coffee and returned the mug to the table. ‘Thing is, it always ends up like some late-night college talk about putting the world to rights – the one where everybody ends up saying all we really need is the political will and is there any more wine in that bottle.’

  ‘Yeah, we’ve all been there.’

  The snow in Pennsylvania Avenue had almost stopped, the crowds becoming more leisurely. Outside the window of the diner a maintenance vehicle had stopped to attach one end of a ‘Welcome Home’ banner across the street, the city preparing for the return of the fifty-two hostages from Iran.

  ‘Yeah, but somehow I can’t help hearing DA saying “C’mon guys, let’s find a way to end-run this”.’ Both men smiled at the memory of the man who had been their boss for seven years and who had managed to find a way round, over or through every obstacle that stood in the way of eradicating smallpox. As a badge of honour it could hardly have been more discreet, but both men were wearing the tie-pin in the shape of a bifurcated needle that DA had presented to the members of his team.

  ‘Different proposition, though. There probably isn’t any end-run this time.’

  ‘Marathon not a sprint and all that. Thing we’re not short of here is sports metaphors. Talking of which, I hear talk of a touchdown on destroying the stocks.’

  Paul pulled a sceptical face. ‘Don’t hold your breath. DA’s pushing, but AMRIID will for sure have the final say and they want to play hardball with the Sovs. Obviously we’re not going to toss ours in the autoclave unless we’re sure they’ll do the same. But if there’s going to be any trust involved it won’t even make first base. It’s not just the new guy. Carter was the same at the end. And Defense has also started asking who else out there apart from Koltsovo might be holding a little something back. The French have been suspect from day one, but now they’re talking about North Korea and Iraq, for God’s sake. And they may have a point. So, no, bottom line is, I’m not expecting to be asked for the pass codes any time soon.’

  Michael sat head down, staring at the plastic folder in which they had left the tip. Eventually it was Paul who spoke. ‘I’m real sorry you’re frustrated with the programme. Anything I can do at the CDC end?’

  Michael raised his head and met his friend’s eyes, almost unable to bear the friendship and the bravery he saw there. ‘Paul, there is something else I wanted to ask you. Something that came up before I knew about the cancer.’

  It was Paul Lewis’s turn to realize that something serious was coming. He waited for Michael to go on.

  ‘I don’t even know if it’s right to mention it.’

  ‘Anything. You know that.’

  Michael smiled, hardening the muscles of his jaw, pressing his tongue hard into his palate.

  ‘It’s not something we can talk about here.’ He knew he was near to tears and looked away from his companion towards the revolving door where a newly arrived couple were brushing snow from coats and jackets.

  ‘Can we take a walk?’

  12 | Why this blood-buzzing anxiety?

  New York City

  Toby Jenks checked in to the Algonquin late in the afternoon of Thursday, January 29th. As soon as he had kicked off his shoes he picked up the phone and requested the number of the Tudor Hotel on 42nd Street. Put through, he as
ked to be connected to the room of a Dr Hélène Hevré, recently arrived from Abidjan. He waited. London to a brick the mini-bar was in that prissy little reproduction sideboard.

  The phone continued to ring as he stared at the framed embroidery map of the world above the bed. It would have been mad to go visit her. Fish out of water. Big fat pink bloke in Africa. Face like a dropped pie. The ringing continued in an obviously empty room. No, New York was more him; the old girl might be a bit down on her luck at the minute but the place still had the old buzz, still made every day feel like it could be a new start. He imagined a well-wrapped-up walk in Central Park, strolling hand-in-hand down Fifth Avenue, stopping in Rockefeller Plaza to watch the skaters strut their stuff, warming up with a cosy hour nibbling blinis in the Russian Tea Rooms, maybe even a candlelit dinner in the Rainbow Room. Or perhaps, who knows, a blissful weekend at an old colonial inn somewhere in the Berkshires, all wainscoting and wood fires. He sighed as the phone continued its empty ringing. None of this was in the slightest bit likely to happen.

  What was quite likely to happen was involuntary redundancy, to go with the entirely voluntary divorce he had agreed to with a dismal absence of drama the previous weekend. At least with the agency he had tried, making his big pitch the week before to no avail. The suits had just sat there, not buying it, Chairman grinning like a shot fox, none of them capable of untangling them selves from the old mind-set. Two minutes in, it had been obvious he was on a loser. He had floundered on for another five, arguing for a new kind of agency … integrated with its clients’ overall business strategy … building a brand image for the long haul … instantly recognizable corporate identity in the public mind … long-term emotional link with the consumer more important than selling an individual product … an agency of the future. Useless. Fact was, most of them, the lift didn’t go to the top floor.