Wiley and Brooks hadn’t connected everyone arrested at the rallies yet to Filipaldi or the dirty tricks firm. Brooks had no doubt that in time they would find more connections. But they had what they needed most—the fact that Rebecca Schultz had hired Filipaldi, at least in the past. And within a few hours they had found she had done so in more than one campaign.
So the TV correspondent Matt Alabama’s suspicions, Rena thought, had been right. The campaign rally riots were engineered. And now they knew Rebecca Schultz and Wilson Gerard had probably done the engineering.
Money corrupts, Rena thought. It was just that simple. He felt that corruption in every inch of Gerard’s home, in the private marshland to the bay, the Renaissance desk, the paintings on the walls. He saw it in the look in the man’s gray eyes when Rena had challenged him. When was the last time Gerard had been defied?
A soldier, Rena had been trained in the discipline of commitment to something higher than self. In Gerard’s eyes, Rena had seen something he didn’t recognize at first. Self-regard in its purest, most naked form.
Wealth would always be power. But it had become something bigger, twisted, and even dangerous, which we hadn’t fully recognized while we were busy extolling the virtues of the new economy and the prosperity we worried the country was losing. We were enabling the wealthiest, hoping they would save us and lead us to a new world we didn’t understand. And now those same billionaires, left and right, were financing a new populism in both parties to protect themselves against the backlash that was certain to come because they could not save us. The irony was comic.
After
Sunday
March 8
Forty-Eight
Peter Rena sat on the patio of Senator Llewellyn Burke’s house overlooking the Potomac River at the Chain Bridge.
Burke’s wife, Evangeline, was in the kitchen making salad and talking to Randi Brooks.
Another week had passed. It was now something once called the weekend.
And Rena was still trying to process everything that had transpired in the days since. Three days after he had seen Wilson Gerard, Jeff Scott had all but swept the first Super Tuesday primaries, winning seven states, including California and Texas. Dick Bakke had taken only two.
The allegations against Wendy Upton had never come to light.
The day after those primaries, Upton and her chief of staff, Gil Sedaka, had met with Richard Bakke and his strategist Bobby Means in a secret meeting in D.C. “You waited too long,” Bakke told them. “But I couldn’t have offered it to you anyway. I need to move right, not left. And you would have been miserable.” In his recounting of the meeting, Sedaka told Rena and Brooks that Bakke looked haggard and had lost his voice.
Wendy Upton had wished Bakke well. And, at least in Sedaka’s telling, Bobby Means, his eyes briefly clinging to the chief of staff’s, appeared to be disappointed.
Did Jeff Scott have a role in hiring Gray Circle and trying to smear Upton? Rena didn’t know for sure, but he doubted it. Jack Garner, Scott’s campaign manager, swore to Brooks he did not. The scheme to hire Gray Circle to entrap Upton in a sexual encounter posed too many risks for Scott’s candidacy, Garner argued. And Brooks believed him. Scott and Garner, she said, were too canny to have condoned it. Rena wasn’t sure. But he would never be able to find out without revealing Upton’s secrets. And they were not his secrets to tell.
Two days after meeting with Bakke, Upton ran into Scott in a private aviation terminal in St. Louis. The governor was gracious, smiling, and triumphant. He could afford to be. In a few days, six more primaries would be held, and Scott’s nomination appeared all but inevitable.
THIS MORNING, however, something else had occurred. Wendy Upton had agreed to join David Traynor as his running mate, creating the first cross-party ticket since 1864.
Burke had an iPad streaming television news on the patio and the story was playing continuously.
“With this partnership, we are taking a first step, but a real one, to realign our country, fix our politics, and find a common ground our nation seems to have lost,” Traynor said in the clip replaying over and over. Traynor was standing in front of Red Rocks, the picturesque venue so popular with Colorado politicians.
Standing next to Traynor, Wendy Upton struck a more confessional tone. “I did not come lightly to this. You will hear, in the next few days, cynics scoff that a Republican has crossed the aisle to join a Democrat. They’ll call it crass ambition. Some will call it political suicide.” Traynor was grinning as he listened to Upton.
“And this is risky,” she admitted. “I made friends angry with me this morning. But many more have told me our country is in trouble and we need to lock arms in common cause and put our smaller differences aside. That was how our country was born. It is also how, at moments of crisis in our history, it has been renewed.”
Conservatives were calling the move desperate and naïve. “It has the whiff of unreality and wishful thinking,” the editor of The Week Ahead had written in a blog post.
“Vice presidential picks rarely help,” the editor of The National Perspective had written. “Does Traynor’s stunt with Upton suggest a new way in politics—or that he has no principles? Or maybe she is not really a conservative.”
The first noises from the left sounded similar. “Traynor’s electric slide toward the vague middle is a move progressives should reject, an echo of another time, in the end a cynical gesture,” The Next Wave had already editorialized.
There were a few sounds of praise, mostly from what remained of media that tried to be nonideological. “This might just change the paradigm, if Democrats respond well. If Traynor survives the primaries—and it remains to be seen if this gambit helps or hurts in his battle against Maria Pena—the early calculation has to be that this gives the ticket an enormous advantage in the general election,” Stanley Turn had written in the New York Times.
On the new Matt Alabama’s program—his network had given him an interview and public affairs show on its new digital streaming channel—Rena’s friend used the last eight minutes of today’s show to talk about what he had seen on the campaign trail and how this ticket could be a small step in the right direction. The video of Alabama’s editorial was getting traction on social media.
Upton’s candor had helped, the acknowledgment that her decision risked making her “a political orphan.” Analysts seemed to like the sacrificial tone. Her career had been in ascendance. She didn’t need to take this risk.
“Many in my own party will never look at me the same,” she’d said. “Democrats may never fully trust me—unless I become one of them. But I am not leaving my party. My conservatism is a matter of principle, bred into my bones. I am making this alliance because I sense in Senator Traynor’s candidacy a third way. And something in our country needs to change.”
The rhetoric was uncharacteristically lofty for Upton, Rena thought. But perhaps, given all that had happened, that was to be expected.
He especially had liked the fact that standing next to Upton was her sister, Emily. There was something about that image, the two of them together against that large stage, two sisters against the world, that Rena found moving. It wouldn’t mean much to most people. It was just something Upton had said she wanted. Brooks had loved it, too. Rena thought perhaps she had even suggested it.
Llewellyn Burke seemed pleased as well, Rena thought, though his mentor never confided how he felt, and Rena wouldn’t ask. He imagined Burke had his doubts about David Traynor. But Rena thought that much of the maverick Democrat’s message—about taking on entitlements, confronting climate change, and reforming government—aligned with the “compassionate conservativism” Burke believed in.
Whatever Burke’s private thoughts, the risk Upton had taken this morning changed things. People like Burke, if they had the courage to do so, had another place to stand now. Burke could endorse Upton and Traynor, and repudiate things in his own party Rena knew he disapproved of. But Rena honestl
y didn’t know whether that would happen. To go with Upton, people either had to take a stand on principle—which was rare in politics—or they had to gamble that enough Americans wanted to recenter and recalibrate where the country was heading. Upton was trying to change the dynamic. Now they would see if anyone else would join her.
HE HEARD A YELL from the kitchen.
“What the . . . Lew!”
Evangeline Burke came outside quickly.
She was holding her phone. She held it out for Burke to read. The news alert read FBI arrests GOP strategist Rebecca Schultz and conservative funder Wilson Gerard. There was a picture of Gerard in handcuffs walking out of his Long Island estate.
A billionaire in a perp walk.
This would be the story everyone would see. Worldwide.
“Did you know?” Evangeline asked Rena.
But the operative just looked back at her in silence, his endlessly dark eyes confirming nothing.
Rena and Brooks had debated it all week. Peter had argued their discovery that Gerard had paid men to disrupt the campaign rallies of rivals in both parties was separate from the deal they’d made with the financier to keep silent to protect Upton. Brooks had finally agreed, and they had called the attorney general, Charles Penopopoulis.
President James Nash had been particularly incensed. “The integrity of our elections matters. If the government does not intervene and hard, we are culpable, too.”
The director of the FBI was also persuaded. “Make a goddamn statement,” he’d instructed his agents. “Arrest the SOB. Walk him out, cuffs in front where the fucking cameras can see them. Then arraign him. He’s got all the money in the world to fight it. But that goddamn picture will live forever.”
It was part of a new ruthlessness in Rena that Brooks noticed—and worried about.
Llewellyn Burke was looking at his wife.
“Did you know?” she asked him. He shook his head. “Absolutely not,” he answered. “But I know how persuasive Peter can be when he puts his mind to it.” Evangeline thought she detected a grin concealed on her husband’s face.
Rena, however, had already wandered off. He was standing at the edge of the gorge, at the fence line overlooking the river raging below. Then he felt his phone vibrate with a text. He hesitated to break the mood, a moment of triumph, and then pulled the device from his pocket.
It was Walt Smolonsky, whom Rena had sent to Texas from Arizona to try to tie up one last loose end. Rena had wondered who had thrown the brick at Richard Bakke through the window at the restaurant in Dallas. He had a theory. Senator Bakke was already suspicious about the campaign violence, Alabama had said. Why would the first rioter have worn a Bakke T-shirt to beat up someone at a Pena rally? It felt manipulated from the beginning.
“Good guess,” read Smolo’s text.
Rena had been right about something: Bakke had hired someone to throw the brick at him, to make Bakke a victim before whoever was disrupting the campaign made him a villain.
Another text followed. “Can’t prove it, though.”
It didn’t matter. Bakke was headed back to the Senate. No one cared what a losing candidate did.
Rena put the phone away and turned back to the river, staring for a long time into the gorge at the swirling violence below, the water churning as if it were trying to claw back up into the mountains where it came from, to reverse its history and return to its source, rather than tumble east, past the capital city, and vanish into the sea.
Acknowledgments
The more fiction I write, the more I recognize how much “made up” stories are a shared effort. The list keeps lengthening. There are friends who help me puzzle out and fix the problems in my stories; others who sit down with me and tell me their real-life stories so I can be sure my make-believe ones are true to life; those I have never met but discovered in my research who sat down with reporters and historians and told their own stories. Then there are those who edit, design, market, social market, copy edit, and do all the rest of what must happen for a book to live in the age of ones and zeros.
To anyone whose work brushes against the public good, a plea: Please think about history. And share what you know, even if you only do so at the very end of your career or your life. That is how the rest of us will know the truth.
For this book, Oppo, many old friends and many new ones were essential. I had to learn about the parts of campaigns that were invisible to me as a reporter. I also had to learn how modern campaigning has changed since I was out there as a scribe and then a campaign book writer. My old friend political-consultant Jim Margolis was open about the best and worst moments in his career, which began in college. He has been at the top rank of political consulting for four decades, and only fiction could contain many of his tales, for they could never be told on the record. Joe Trippi was also generous and candid with his insights about when campaigns have gotten into trouble and the psychology of those who want to hold the nuclear football. Joe is a remarkable mix of insider cunning and outsider wonder. My friend Drew Lippman offered wonderful insight into the relationships that form between political leaders and trusted staff. Drew is a born storyteller, and he can speak with equal force and intelligence about books, films, policy, strategy, or morality. Nice trick. Jon Haber was also generous with his insights about the mysteries of the Hill and the chemistry there between aides and bosses. Mike McCurry, who has been implicated in my life for the past forty-eight years, has fine stories to tell as well. He is too loyal to tell the best of them. Nonetheless, his sense of how Washington works is impeccable. Still others sat with me and asked not to be named.
There are countless other friends and colleagues who are reflected in this book whose insights I gained from the years on campaigns—years that stretch from Jesse and Hymie Town to Gary Hart and the condo, Dukakis and the Tank, Clinton and the letter (and then another letter and another), learning from Lee Atwater, jousting with Roger Ailes, to the doleful campaign march of Robert Dole, a politician whom I like a good deal. There are too many friends and sources and rental cars and chartered flights to name or even remember. For a novelist they all became moments from which to learn.
On the political side, that list includes Michael Murphy, Frank Greer, the late Lee Atwater again, the late Michael Deaver, Mandy Grunwald, James Lake, David Gergen, Charlie Black, Ari Shapiro, the great Marlin Fitzwater, Paul Begala, David Axelrod, the late Tony Blankley, and many others. I cannot count all the people I am leaving out.
On the journalist side, the list of those I have known and spent countless hours with is even longer. I will protect the guilty. But I want to recall some late names who early in my career were generous with their time and sincere and uncynical about trying to understand the mystery of elections: David Broder, Jack Germond, R. W. “Johnny” Apple, and Jack Nelson, to name only a few. What would they think of the parade now? While they may be remembered as oligarchs, they also considered themselves guardians in the best sense of the word. And there are many current friends from whom I still learn: Dan Balz, Jules Witcover, Karen Tumulty, E. J. Dionne, Ron Brownstein, David Shribman, to name a few. My friend Bill Kovach is my model for me in many things. And when it comes to understanding politics, no matter how celebrated Jeff Greenfield becomes, he will be underrated. And Jim Wooten, again, who will see himself here I hope, again.
Janos and Rebbeca Wilder were my fact-checkers and guides about Tucson—and teachers about how to be great people.
I am very grateful to the National War College at Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington, D.C., where I had the privilege and honor to be asked to do lectures on media to national security officers.
I also want to thank the growing community of writers I have come to know, for their support and for their superb work. Don’t fear for book writing. It is, in its own right, in a golden age. To my friends around the country, new and old, who have read my books and offered their love and support.
The largest possible debt goes to my great friend John
Gomperts, who reads my drafts, bad, worse, and better—and is getting very good at it.
More thanks than I can express go to Zachary Wagman at Ecco, my partner and teacher (my young Yoda), and to the whole Ecco team: Meghan Deans; Miriam Parker; Kapo Ng, who designed the cover for Oppo; Sonya Cheuse; Caitlin Mulrooney-Lyski and the publicity department; and, of course, Daniel Halpern—thank you, Daniel and everyone, for your faith in me.
To David Black, the man who has my back and my loyalty in return. Some bonds are deep and go beyond work. And to everyone at the David Black Agency: yowza.
Above all, to the three women who make the music of my life a quartet: my wife, Rima, and my wonderful daughters, Leah and Kira (now my marketing master as well)—the “core four.”
About the Author
TOM ROSENSTIEL is the author of Shining City and The Good Lie, both featuring Peter Rena. He’s also the executive director of the American Press Institute and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He lives in Maryland.
WWW.TOMROSENSTIEL.COM
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Also by Tom Rosenstiel
Shining City
The Good Lie
Copyright
OPPO. Copyright © 2019 by Tom Rosenstiel. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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