We're with Nobody

by Alan Huffman

The administration’s lack of transparency is no surprise, considering the availability of executive privilege, but we’ve arrived at the presidential library in College Station, Texas, hoping we’ll get lucky and catch a glimpse of something substantive regarding a man being considered for an appointment by then-president George W. Bush. The prospective appointee, known affectionately as XXXXXX, had served as an aide to the elder Bush, and our hope is that the staff of the newly opened library is unprepared for the likes of us and might let the archived memos slip through. In fact the staff is unprepared, but we end up being denied anyway, passive-aggressively, no doubt as a result of a directive from above.

  We’re interested in four hundred boxes of files, only a handful of which have been opened for public review, and so we request access to the entire collection, which totals about forty-five hundred pages. After we receive our blacked-out copies, President George W. Bush issues a controversial executive order limiting public access to presidential archives. As a result, Bush also effectively closes his own gubernatorial files, which he had stashed in the presidential library rather than in the state archives, where they would have been available to scholars, journalists and the general public. Though President Barack Obama later rescinded the executive order, and the Texas state archives took the position that the gubernatorial files are state property, subject to the state’s open records law, be forewarned: If you visit the presidential library in hopes of learning about the inner workings of the administration of Bush-the-elder as president, or Bush-the-younger as governor, you may want to have a backup plan. Otherwise you could be forced to spend your time chatting with a sweat-stained German tourist, which is what I do while Michael handles the dirty work of upsetting the records clerk.

  Before arriving in College Station, we researched XXXXXX in various cities across the Midwest and along the Eastern Seaboard. It’s now late in the season, and we’ve made the last leg of our journey, a seven-hour road trip from Jackson, in my silver roadster. Michael and I figured a road trip would be a nice intermission from the tedium and inconvenience of air travel and cheap rental cars. We’d be just like the two guys on the old Route 66 TV show who roamed the United States in a drop-top Corvette, searching for adventure, never knowing what might unfold in the next town along the way. Except it didn’t really work out that way for us.

  Even when there’s something to sink your teeth into, presidential appointments are notoriously difficult to derail. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings were notably contentious, focusing on allegations that he’d made unwelcome sexual comments to a subordinate attorney, yet he was confirmed anyway. In our case, it was apparent that our research was going nowhere long before we arrived at the presidential library. Even the road trip was a disappointment. The summer sun was blazingly hot with the top down, and because Michael and I are middle-aged guys with thinning hair, we lacked the cinematic appeal of the hunky young Route 66 guys. Plus, the highway department was in the process of repaving long stretches of I-20, which resulted in tar splatters on my shiny silver fenders, and after many long days together Michael and I were starting to get on each other’s nerves. A side effect of trafficking in negative information is that it sometimes rides right alongside us in the car, with the inevitable result that Michael starts intentionally smacking his gum because he knows it annoys me. As we drove across Texas, I could hear his gum smacking over the roar of the highway wind.

  Once at the presidential library, we spend several hours going through the indexes, compiling a list of documents we want to review. It’s monotonous work, and when it comes time to approach the clerk with our request, I wander off to chat with the touristischen, who is dressed in the modern equivalent of lederhosen—maroon pants pulled too high, with fanciful stitching on the back pockets. As he and I discuss the landscape of America, I notice Michael occasionally glaring at me from his station at the counter, where a phalanx of staffers has gathered around the bewildered clerk to engage in familiar document-request sortie. At one point the German, discussing air travel, blurts out the word “Lufthansa!” very loudly, and everyone at the counter looks at us accusingly. The truth, meanwhile, is preparing to run for cover.

  Irritation, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing in our line of work. It’s one of the tools of our trade. Michael and I are driven by our irritation with mendacity and secrecy, and energized by the displeasure of recalcitrant records clerks. But we have different approaches to using that tool, which sometimes causes the interpersonal dynamics of Huffman & Rejebian to be fraught with peril. In short, we tend to irritate each other. We have managed to achieve a kind of détente, whereby we ignore each other’s transgressions in service of the greater goal. But the truth is, like it or not, our differences serve the job well. Michael tends to be more organized and focused, less interested in the extras of whatever political drama we’re following than in the key players and supporting actors, with the result that he may miss what to me are interesting and telling asides. I’m more likely to come back with something unexpected, such as when a random, rambling conversation with a retired logger revealed that a powerful congressman had facilitated the lucrative transfer of thousands of acres of national forest land to an old friend. Then again, I sometimes miss key dialogue, and my only takeaway is “Lufthansa!” Our different approaches to doing the work make it less likely we’ll miss something.

  As in any human intercourse, certain characteristics that are annoying or counterproductive in one application serve other purposes quite well. Petty attention to detail is useful when it results in important documentation; it’s bad when it leads to painstaking concealment of the truth. It all comes down to what a person chooses to do with the tools at his disposal, which, fortunately, is something that can also be documented. A redacted document is revealing for what it refuses to say.

  Politics is the engine of history, and its documentation provides the only permanent record, which is crucial considering that even on a good day the political world is characterized by barely controlled chaos. What people say and do, as reflected in the record, illustrates their fitness to lead during good times or bad. If, by chance, society should break down, as it did after Katrina, who would you want to lead you through the postapocalyptic landscape? Would it be someone who redacts memos? It would pay to look closely at what your potential leader chose to reveal—or conceal—and what they actually did compared with what they said or didn’t say. Would you want your tribe to be led by a mayor who grants municipal contracts to political donors, or a waitress with the audacity to break into a flood-ravaged school and begin preparing meals on an open fire for hundreds of survivors? Would you choose as a leader a person who spent an inordinate amount of time in careful exposition, using buzzwords and entertaining yet unaccountable anecdotes, or someone who spoke honestly and only when he or she had something meaningful to say? Would you want someone who beat up his girlfriend in an airport terminal, or someone who rushed to her aid? Someone who feared public revelation, or was honest and forthright? And how could you tell the difference?

  Even after years of researching political misdeeds, Michael and I are amazed by the lengths to which some candidates—on both sides of the political aisle—will go to get elected, and by what they will attempt to conceal or redact, or will publicly say, often in contradiction to the public record or in gross violation of logic. If a candidate has something to hide, it’s very risky to try to conceal it, and if what he attempted to conceal is brought to light, how he responds is always telling. The days of closely controlling and containing information are gone. There are a host of carefully calculated institutional barriers, such as dazzle camouflage and time-honored subterfuge, which, like an old, drunk liar of a friend, will never, ever go away, and it does sometimes look like facts are going out of style. But facts have staying power, and sometimes the very act of concealing or attempting to conceal them is its own revelation.

  Considering what can often be found in candi
dates’ records, it probably should come as no surprise that some of them attempt to keep the public in the dark. For Michael and me, the worst case of political solipsism was the candidate who was running on a family values platform, which included something he called “empowerment of parents,” who nonetheless made personal loans to his own campaign and simultaneously reduced his daughter’s child support payments to a mere $22.50 per week. He never mentioned this, of course, but it was there in the public record and he had no way to legally prevent its discovery. Whether the guy rationalized that winning would put him in a better position to support his daughter or was driven by blind, selfish ambition, he had a choice to make regarding his campaign finances. He chose poorly.

  I can imagine how this revealing scenario began. The guy was probably behind in his fund-raising efforts and found himself wondering, “Do people not realize how expensive it is to run for office? Do they not understand how much is at stake?” Perhaps it was time for the campaign to send out direct mail and there was already a stack of unpaid bills from printers, the phone company and the local newspaper. As he searched for a means to make up the difference, he realized he had some money of his own that he could loan to his campaign, as candidates often do, though it wasn’t much and there was still the matter of the freaking child support. What to do?

  “Make the loan,” the miniature horned candidate on his shoulder exhorted him, while the tiny winged candidate on his other shoulder gazed out the window. So he made the loan and stole from his daughter. He shirked his responsibility as a father to save his campaign, and unfortunately, it paid off. He was elected. Someone, somewhere, dropped the ball. We didn’t hear until later, back at the office, that he had won. It mattered a great deal to us that the wrong guy won, because his offenses were so offensive. Finding the truth can be arduous, or it can be as simple as taking the time to peruse a routine public record. Either way, there’s no guarantee anyone will care.

  Any candidate can pay lip service to campaign positions, but the underlying question, as he sits in repose under a sunlamp, or spends an evening sipping expensive wine with a lobbyist for a hazardous waste disposal company in a dim Capitol Hill bar, or exchanges an aching glance with an intern who sports one of his own campaign buttons, is what sort of documentable details may be discerned from the incremental decisions he or she has otherwise made—the contracts they’ve signed off on; the votes they’ve cast or missed; the political deals, big and small, they’ve been party to; the telling comments they’ve made in official memos. It isn’t necessary to catch someone in flagrante delicto, though that’s always nice, or to find that they’ve received an outright or even a technically legal bribe. You can find out a great deal of what you need to know through the public record, assuming no one has tampered with or censored it.

  This is not to say that a candidate’s history of late payment of taxes or his use of a derogatory term in a private meeting precludes him from being a good leader. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone says things they wish they could take back. Everyone redacts his public life to some degree. As Michael and I probe the recesses of candidates’ lives I often wonder what details might be used against me if I were running for office. Promiscuity? Thriftlessness? That episode involving the Dutch guy in the Sahara Desert, the subsequent confrontation with the FBI and my not-entirely-flattering article about counterterrorism efforts for the Washington Post Magazine? Does my penchant for blithely sending untold tons of aluminum beer cans to the county landfill, rather than recycling them, undermine my avowed support for environmental causes, despite the fact that I’ve covered endangered species and once went on a Sierra Club outing involving a sailboat and a group of people who droned incessantly about birdsongs, which compelled me to wander off down the beach to go skinny-dipping in the blue-green waters of the Gulf of Mexico alongside a family of porpoises? What about the time my dog bit a neighbor lady and I afterward told a funny story about it, numerous times, at parties? Could I be portrayed as insensitive, perhaps even a public nuisance? Do such details indicate my unfitness to serve as a political leader? Yes, absolutely they do. That’s not the role you want me to play in our postapocalyptic tribe or in the proving ground of everyday life.

  What you want from people like Michael and me is the ability to document and discern, to stand in the shadows of the campfire under the bridge and judge the behavior of current or prospective leaders, based on factual evidence. If we see the guy saying something that contradicts what he has been observed to do earlier in the day, we will let you know. Perfidy is like theft or any other criminal behavior: The tribe may be able to make use of it, occasionally, such as during a violent conflict—otherwise, no, and particularly not among the leadership class of a moderately functional civilization.

  In his song “New Test Leper,” R.E.M. front man Michael Stipe sings, “Judge not lest ye be judged/What a beautiful refrain.” And it’s true. It is a beautiful refrain. But does that stop us from judging? It most assuredly does not. We all judge. It’s how we decide what to do every day, whom to follow, with whom to align ourselves or how to attempt to lead. The politicians we elect will pass and enforce laws governing almost every aspect of our lives, and we’ll be judged by our compliance. Considering that, does it not matter what they say and do behind the scenes?

  Does it not matter when we uncover how a district attorney dropped or failed to file as many criminal cases as he prosecuted; was plainly subjective in deciding who went to trial, sparing people with whom he was closely associated; had a record of softness—and not in a good way—regarding the prosecution of crimes against women; and, along the way, fought against a proposed facility for mentally ill and chemically dependent men because of its potential impact on residential property values in the area? While this guy was DA, one of every six people tried for murder walked away free after their trials, including, in one case, a man charged with stabbing his cousin seventeen times. According to one editorial in the local paper, the acquittal rate suggested that either more people were getting away with murder in the county or more were being wrongfully accused. Seriously: real guy. That’s the kind of stuff we find.

  This DA had also reduced the charges for a man who’d shot a teenager with a 12-gauge shotgun for trampling his lawn, which touched off a near riot in the neighborhood. An angry crowd gathered in front of the shooter’s house, resulting in the beatings of several people, including a police detective and a TV news crew. Thanks to the DA, the shooter received probation. The DA had also declined to prosecute police officers who had transported two intoxicated Native Americans in the trunk of their squad car, which resulted in injuries.

  Would such a person make a good leader? Our conclusion was that he most assuredly would not, unless it could be demonstrated that society would benefit from letting well-connected rapists go free and ignoring men who sought treatment for clinically sanctioned problems too close to our homes. At the very least the DA appears to be a documented asshole.

  The same goes for the candidate we researched who claimed to be a proponent of campaign finance reform yet championed Tom DeLay, the Texas pest exterminator who later resigned from Congress over alleged violations of campaign laws and money laundering, as well as disgraced lobbyist (and that’s saying something) Jack Abramoff, who pled guilty to three felonies related to the defrauding of Native American tribes and corrupting public officials. What sort of campaign finance reform would a candidate who admires such men have in mind, do you think? This same guy also claimed to be against the expansion of government regulation, yet authored legislation that did more than any previous law to enable the government to infringe on personal privacy. And he publicly railed against gambling while taking money from the gaming industry. Who, we might ask, would such a candidate represent?

  Then there was our opposing candidate in Ohio, who publicly stated his opposition to abortion in all forms, including emergency contraception (the so-called morning-after pill), who was also against state-sponsored gambling an
d who supported increased accountability of elections practices—yet who owned stock in companies that produced the morning-after pill, slot machines and voting machines. How might such a candidate be expected to represent his constituency, and to reasonably adhere to his stated personal convictions? What might his actual position be on growing sales of morning-after pills? What company would likely be his preferred source for voting machines, and how might he respond to claims that the machines were faulty, and that therefore the election itself had been thrown into doubt?

  The annoyance Michael and I feel over redacted or otherwise hidden truths isn’t confined to our opposition research, and it’s not merely the result of pathological dissatisfaction. Curiosity is one of the tools of the trade—curiosity about what lies behind the black bar covering the memo text, under the dazzle camouflage, even beneath the ruins of an old farmhouse far out in the country. Such is our love of uncovering hidden truth that we are attracted to any sort of site disturbance, whether it is a political controversy or an archaeological dig. In his spare time, Michael is an avid relic hunter, probing historical ground with a fancy metal detector. He’s not the guy searching for lost wedding rings on the beach; he’s on a quest to discover clues from the past that illuminate life in any time.

  Toward that aim he has spent countless hours probing the ground at my house in rural Mississippi, where he located a Union army camp from the Civil War. He’s uncovered a small museum’s worth of artifacts from just beneath the surface. Like disjointed, quivering memories, they are clues to the tumultuous past, to lost moments and lost lives: bullets, buttons, buckles, rings and other arcane detritus. Occasionally, he finds items that are not always readily identifiable, such as a lead weight dropped from the hem of a woman’s hoopskirt, but in other cases he finds artifacts that are oddly telling, such as a minié ball bullet carved into the shape of a tiny penis, evidence of the sorts of pastimes the soldiers engaged in around the campfire.