Oppo

by Tom Rosenstiel

  Dedication

  For the Ravenswood Gang

  Epigraph

  Just keep stirring the pot; you never know what will come up.

  —Lee Atwater

  And the Boss said, “There is always something. . . . Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.” Two miles more, and he said, “And make it stick.”

  —All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren

  I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality. . . . I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.

  —Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Cast of Characters

  Prologue: Toyota Center Arena Houston, Texas

  Day One: Monday: February 24

  One: Dirksen Senate Office Building Washington, D.C.

  Two

  Three

  Day Two: Tuesday: February 25

  Four: The Capitol Building Washington, D.C.

  Five: Baltimore, Maryland

  Six: McLean, Virginia

  Seven: Tucson 1983

  Eight: Dallas, Texas

  Nine: Offices of Rena, Brooks & Associates Washington, D.C

  Ten: Georgetown

  Eleven

  Twelve: West End

  Day Three: Wednesday: February 26

  Thirteen: Rena, Brooks & Associates Washington, D.C.

  Fourteen: Tucson, Arizona

  Fifteen: Dallas, Texas

  Sixteen: Capitol Hill Washington, D.C.

  Seventeen: Tucson, Arizona

  Eighteen

  Nineteen: Nashville, Tennessee

  Twenty: Washington, D.C.

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Day Four: Thursday: February 27

  Twenty-Three: Houston, Texas

  Twenty-Four: Washington, D.C.

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six: Washington, D.C.

  Twenty-Seven: Tucson, Arizona

  Twenty-Eight: Washington, D.C.

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty: Washington, D.C.

  Thirty-One: Richmond, Virginia

  Day Five: Friday: February 28

  Thirty-Two: Gray Hawk Hunting Lodge Ogemaw County, Michigan

  Thirty-Three: 1820 Jefferson Place Washington, D.C.

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight: 1820 Jefferson Place Washington, D.C.

  Thirty-Nine: Easton, Maryland

  Forty: Austin, Texas

  Day Six: Saturday: February 29

  Forty-One: Washington, D.C.

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  After: Sunday: March 8

  Forty-Eight

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Tom Rosenstiel

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Cast of Characters

  RENA, BROOKS & ASSOCIATES

  Peter Rena, partner

  Randi Brooks, partner

  Ellen Wiley, head of digital research

  Arvid Lupsa, digital researcher

  Hallie Jobe, investigator

  Walt Smolonsky, investigator

  Maureen Conner, former Senate aide

  Jonathan Robinson, political communications

  Ang Liu, new investigator

  Samantha Reese, former army ranger, security consultant

  REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES FOR PRESIDENT

  Richard Bakke, senator from Kentucky

  Curtis Gains, congressman from Florida

  Janice Gaylord, cosmetics magnate

  Jennifer Lee, governor of Georgia

  Jeff Scott, governor of Michigan

  Tony Soto, senator from Nevada

  DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES FOR PRESIDENT

  Omar Fulwood, congressman from Philadelphia

  Jonathan Kaplan, senator from New Jersey

  Cole Murphy, congressman from Ohio

  Maria Pena, governor of New Mexico

  David Traynor, senator from Colorado

  OTHER NOTABLE CHARACTERS

  Wendy Upton, Republican, Republican senator from Arizona

  Gil Sedaka, chief of staff to Senator Upton

  Bill McGrath, GOP political consultant, unaffiliated

  James Nash, president of the United States

  Emily Upton, sister of Senator Upton

  Matt Alabama, senior political correspondent, ABN Network

  Prologue

  Toyota Center Arena Houston, Texas

  Quiet came over the auditorium like a great intake of breath.

  The arena, designed for basketball, was a vast, Texas-size gaboon of light, shadow, and sweat. Twenty thousand souls were gathered inside. And just now, as if with a single beating heart, they’d all become silent at the same moment.

  The effect was galvanizing. We are one.

  Just as it was night after night.

  Onstage, warm-up speaker Titus Glover, the likable sidekick from a popular sitcom, paused for the silence to become total. Then, in a voice ragged from so many days on the road, he called out: “WE WILL . . . !” And held the mike toward the crowd to respond.

  “BE HEARD!!!” twenty thousand answered back.

  They’d been waiting for this moment. It signaled Maria Pena, finally, was about to appear.

  Glover called to them again: “WE WILL!”

  “BE HEARD!!!!”

  Fifteen seconds, Glover knew, was a good length for this kind of call-and-response to last. Long enough for momentum to build but not slip. The monitor facing him at the foot of the stage counted down the time.

  At zero, the high-tech curtain behind Glover came to life, revealing that it was also a video screen. The nice effect prompted a murmur of pleased surprise from the crowd. Now people saw images of themselves, shot in the last few minutes, faces full of emotion, expressions of hope, fists raised, voices chanting, close-ups and long shots. The crowd cheered in recognition of itself.

  Now the video image switched to a volcanic eruption, the earth bursting forth into fire. The crowd applauded, knowing what came next: the magma would flow onto a prairie, a geologic miracle of computer generation, and the prairie would burst into flames.

  It was prairie fire, sweeping across the land, a new movement being born. The images were metaphor. The metaphor is us. We are the prairie fire.

  “WE WILL!” the crowd called to itself.

  “BE HEARD!!!”

  About three-quarters of the way toward the back, a man in a blue ball cap and a black T-shirt with the words BAKKE IS RIGHT printed on it moved in behind a man and woman in their early twenties. Her T-shirt read CLIMB A ROCK. The boyfriend, a tall skinny kid, had on hiking shoes. His T-shirt read HAVE A HAPPY DAY.

  “WE WILL!”

  “BE HEARD!!!!!!”

  The man in the ball cap stared at the couple. They were standing near a portable speaker tower set up for the event. It was ideal.

  “Hey, dickhead, don’t you want to be heard?” he asked the kid.

  “What?”

  “Why aren’t you chanting? Don’t you want to be heard?”

  The young man tried to look away.

  “I asked you if you want to be heard, asshole.”

  The woman next to the skinny guy turned toward the man in the ball cap.

  Oh, yes, the woman, the man in the ca
p thought. Isn’t that just perfect?

  “Hey, man, you’re being the asshole,” she said to him. “What are you doing here anyway if you support Dick Bakke for president? You do know this is a Democratic rally, don’t you? Asshole!”

  “Oh, you’re a pistol, aren’t you? I’d like to get a better look at your ass,” the man in the ball cap said.

  “What did you just say? What did you just say to me?”

  The man in the ball cap saw the rage in her eyes and was amused. Now the beanpole boyfriend was facing him, too.

  “I said I don’t think your asshole buddy here really wants to be heard.” He grinned at them. On the face of the scrawny boyfriend, the frozen look began to thaw out into some half-assed manly resolve.

  “Hey, dude, we’re not looking for trouble,” the kid said. He glanced at the BAKKE IS RIGHT T-shirt the man in the ballcap wore and added, “We’re here to listen and cheer for Maria Pena. But if you’re supporting Bakke, you’re welcome to be here. Our country needs to come together. We all want to be heard.”

  A pause to count to three. Make the kid think he’s getting through. Then the man in the ball cap said:

  “Well, you look to me like you’re too afraid to be heard, you piece of shit. So let me give you the 411: freedom doesn’t come free. You have to fight for it. The fact you don’t know that means you don’t deserve it.”

  The skinny kid turned away and looked back at the stage, trying to ignore him.

  “Don’t turn your back on me, you douche bag,” he told the kid. “You want to be free but you don’t want to do anything to earn it. You want other people to win your freedom for you. You make me sick!”

  He gave the kid a push from behind.

  “Hey, man, why don’t you just fuck off?” the woman said.

  And she gave him a little push back. Which was just what he wanted.

  He grabbed the skinny guy, not the girl, and spun him around so they were facing each other. Then he pushed the kid—hard. But while he did so, he held onto the young man’s sleeves to make sure the kid didn’t fall. Instinctively, the kid grabbed the man’s arms to help keep himself upright. Now, clinging to each other, the two men appeared to be wrestling. The man in the ball cap pulled the skinny kid toward him, harder this time, setting his weight as he did it.

  As the two men were about to topple over, the man in the Bakke T-shirt pushed the skinny kid expertly away, with just enough force that the kid landed on his feet. The man who pushed him, however, had propelled himself backward into a crowd of people behind him. They, in turn, toppled into the portable speaker tower. The tower tottered, then fell. And as it went down, the man in the ball cap screamed at the skinny guy and the girl: “What the hell’s wrong with you two?”

  Then the chaos and the screaming started and the arrests began.

  Day One

  Monday

  February 24

  One

  Dirksen Senate Office Building

  Washington, D.C.

  The senior senator from Arizona got a droll smile on her face and leveled her eyes at her chief of staff.

  “May I ask you a purely tactical question?” Wendy Upton said.

  Gil Sedaka knew something was coming. “Sure,” he answered. “That’s what you pay me for.”

  “How do you stop middle schoolers from acting like idiots?”

  She had that deadpan look even Sedaka had trouble reading.

  “You can’t,” he said. “Or I never could. Charlotte is better at that.” Charlotte was his wife.

  Upton shook her head. “No, you have daughters, Gil. These are boys. They’re dumber than girls and easier to outwit.”

  “Who are we talking about?” he asked.

  She handed him her phone. On it was an email. “John Bosun and Phil Decker,” she said.

  Bosun was the senior U.S. senator from Wyoming and Decker the junior senator from Alabama.

  “Christ, Wendy,” Sedaka chided his boss. “Double caffeine this morning?”

  She was usually irritated by blasphemy, but she let this one go. “You see what they snuck into the tax bill?” she asked instead, pointing to the email. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  Around midnight last night, in a procedural sleight of hand, the honorable gentlemen Bosun and Decker had slipped an amendment about women’s health into a tax bill for next year. The amendment invoked two changes: The first, a sop to insurance companies, would remove mandatory health insurance coverage for certain tests needed only by women. The second, aimed at satisfying religious interest groups, would allow employers to remove any medical procedures or tests from their insurance plans if they framed their objection on religious grounds. And there was no review. It gave employers carte blanche to cut medical coverage.

  Sedaka made a sour face.

  Neither amendment would become law. They both knew that. President James Nash, the Democrat in his last year in office, was already going to veto the bill because of other riders he objected to. But before he did so, Senators Decker and Bosun wanted to force Democrats to be on record voting to raise taxes and deny people religious freedom—in an election year. At least that’s how their campaign ads would portray it.

  That was governing now in the Senate of the United States. Or at least a large part of it. Engineering meaningless votes designed to create fodder for campaign attack ads.

  “It’s a middle schooler’s trick,” Upton was saying. “Like sticking a ‘kick me’ note on a shy kid’s back.” The anger in her voice surprised her. There was sadness, too. “It will get a laugh from their friends for ten seconds and then get them in trouble.”

  But she would stop it. From inside their own party. She shifted in her chair and looked out her window, as if she could see the rest of the country through it.

  “All that stupid amendment will do is antagonize Republican women whose votes we need. Just so these boys can please a bunch of people whose votes we already have. And they’re doing it at the worst possible time.”

  It was a presidential election year. After the endless prologue, the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary had finally happened, followed by Nevada and South Carolina. In the next three weeks, seventeen states would hold primaries or caucuses, all but deciding the presidential nominations in both parties.

  The Bosun and Decker amendments weren’t even going to benefit the special interest groups they were designed to please, Upton thought. They were just symbols. What angered her was their cruelty and misogyny. The amendments might offer the illusion of lowering premiums, reducing government’s role in health care, and protecting religious freedom. They came, however, by denying women health services. And the misogyny was strategic. Upton’s party, the GOP, increasingly relied on the passion of male voters, not women—particularly in primaries.

  “Bosun and Decker are assholes,” she heard herself say.

  She almost never cursed, which made the remark more striking. She was offended. Angry. Her soft hazel eyes blazed.

  “But,” she added, “they’re also not the sharpest minds in the U.S. Senate.” Something quick, even sly, formed around her mouth, there and then gone. Most people other than Sedaka would have missed it. “They’ve overreached,” she said. “And we’re going to stop them.”

  “Draft an alternative amendment,” Sedaka said. “And undercut theirs.”

  “You are correct, sir,” she said with a smile. It was an old joke between them, a line from when they both were young. Ed McMahon, the late TV talk show sidekick, used to say it when his boss, Johnny Carson, made a quip and Ed wanted to make sure the audience laughed. He would guffaw and give the joke an amen: You are correct, sir. When Upton and Sedaka were young Senate staffers together, they’d learned that as kids they had both loved Ed’s subtle, underappreciated role, which they considered vital to Carson’s success.

  “We need something, Gil, that creates a safe haven so senators don’t have to vote for this Decker-Bosun monstrosity. Craft some language that affirms
both women’s health and religious freedom.”

  Upton could see Sedaka already writing language in his head. Their alternative amendment would be a symbol, too, she knew, but at least it would replace Decker and Bosun’s misogynistic ones with something better—something that didn’t trap people into stupid positions to please the far right. That helped Bosun and Decker fund-raise. But it did not help women. Or even most Republicans.

  “The Common Sense Caucus will be pissed,” Sedaka warned. The Common Sense Caucus was the name of the hard-right wing in the Senate.

  “We will explain to those colleagues,” Upton said, “that these amendments would hurt Republicans running in tight races more than they would hurt their Democratic opponents.”

  “I’ll talk to legislative counsel,” Sedaka said. That was the office in the Senate that made sure the language in bills accomplished what was intended. “Will Farley might be good, too,” he added. Farley was Senator Llewellyn Burke’s best bill writer.

  “I want a woman on it,” Upton told him. “Elizabeth Jensen will have ideas.”

  Jensen was chief of staff for Senator Sandra Mims of Maine.

  JUST THEN, Sedaka’s phone began to do a little shimmy dance across Upton’s desk. He’d left it there when he came in that morning and sat down. The phone was lying on his car keys, not flat on the desktop, and as it began to vibrate with a call, it moved and sang in vibration, “vittt, vittt,” as if it were celebrating.

  “Sedaka,” he answered. No need for first names, or even which senator he worked for. Few ordinary citizens ever talked to a U.S. senator these days—or chief of staff. Not unless they were very well connected or had bundled enough money for the privilege.

  “Gil, it’s Sterling Moss calling. How you doin’?” Moss talked so loudly, even Upton could recognize his voice.

  Sterling Moss was the campaign strategy guru for Senator David Traynor, a guy running for president in the other party.

  “Stir, what’s up?” Sedaka said, using Moss’s famous nickname, “Stir,” as in “stir the pot.”

  “I’m busy trying to win the presidency, dude,” Moss said. Sedaka held the phone away from his ear so they could both hear.

  Why was David Traynor’s political strategist calling her chief of staff, Upton wondered? She and Traynor had little in common, other than that they both leaned from different directions toward the political center—to the extent there was a center anymore. During Traynor’s two years in the Senate, they’d barely done more together than exchange pleasantries.