Landfall, p.10
Landfall, page 10
The idea that this “good friend” was Rice’s first choice for the post sounded as laughable to Allie as the locution “intends to nominate” seemed peculiar. Why the note of hesitation or delay?
“This is a job for a communicator,” said Rice, “and Karen Hughes is a communicator par excellence.”
En français. Did Condi believe she was still in Paris? Meow, Allie scolded herself, after having the thought. She usually found herself liking the secretary of state. The self-discipline; the cinched waist; the clear and compulsive self-censorship: all of it seemed to make a statement—and maybe a more effective one than her own decades of funky, feckless rebellion.
Rice now introduced Dina Powell, the lacquered young Egyptian-American woman with whom Allie had had a few quick dealings in Presidential Personnel, the office Powell would now be leaving in order to work under Hughes. The secretary extolled Dina’s ability to speak Arabic as if it put the girl on the level of Madame Curie, before she lightheartedly returned to Hughes: “You know, Karen used to get me ready for the Sunday interview shows when I was national security advisor, so I have no doubt of her ability to alter people’s perspectives and make them see what’s really important.”
Yeah, her ability to turn the truth into treacle. This whole little rollout was too dull for words; Allie soon couldn’t keep her mind from wandering and her eyes from being drawn back to the nominee’s Brobdingnagian shoes. She thought of what Rolf had said, with a don’t-be-disappointed smile, the first time he tossed his clothes onto the floor of her room in the Rashid: You know what they say: big shoes, big feet.
Hughes herself now stepped forward to thank her “gracious” friend. She had chosen, Allie thought, just the right word for poor Condi, who seemed to have spent a lifetime offering graciousness as a kind of microwaved substitute for actual warmth. From there, however, Hughes went straight downhill rhetorically, even making the observation that international travel was so broadening, as if she were about to board a cruise ship or embark on her junior year abroad. In this new job, she promised, she would remain mindful of her identities as a daughter, a friend of the president, and a mother—no, dear God, make that a mom.
When she was through, the invited guests, Allie among them, applauded; the press might as well have, too, for all they had to do. Jim Wilkinson, Condi’s young media man, brought the nominee over to shake hands with her fellow administration appointees. “This is Allison O’Connor of the NSC,” he said, reading the name off Allie’s lanyard. The undersecretary-designate greeted her with the suspicious look one reserves for someone new, as if Allie’s Johnny-come-lateness were unpardonable, while Hughes’s own prolonged sabbatical was just another form of fealty to George W. Bush.
“Ms. O’Connor has until recently been in Iraq,” said Wilkinson, surprising Allie with this bit of homework. “She was performing legal work for the Department of the Army.”
“Thank you for your service,” said Hughes.
I was a civilian, lady. She couldn’t grasp the distinction? Even when, according to the printed bio they’d distributed, Hughes had been an army brat who spent some of her childhood in the Canal Zone?
“What exactly were you doing over there?” the nominee asked. She sounded almost accusatory.
“Assisting with the elections just before I left.”
“A great success!” said Hughes, showing some sparkle for the rubbernecking press. “It’s a story we need to be telling!”
“Well,” said Allie, “we’ll see.”
Hughes’s smile faded, as if doubt were being cast on her confirmation.
“I mean,” Allie clarified, “we’ll see if the elections turn out to be a success—long-term.”
“Freedom is always a success,” said the nominee, moving on to the next person. “Hi, I’m Karen.”
* * *
Several minutes later Condi entered her office, nearly as grand as the Franklin dining room, with the new undersecretary-designate.
“Oh boy!” said Karen, taking a look at the Lincoln Memorial through one of the immense fortified windows. “That’s something they need to see!”
The Muslims? wondered Condi, while the TV purred in the background. She always kept it tuned to CNN and dared anyone to call her a RINO (Republican in name only) for choosing the internationally minded channel over Fox, which provided the background music for most administration offices. She was determined to grow more and more comfortable in her new domain: she had prevailed over Cheney and acquired Bob Zoellick, a calm globalist, for her number two; John Bolton, the veep’s hot-headed choice, had been sent up to the UN instead.
And now she would have Karen, with whom she’d bonded during the 2000 campaign, when her friend helped alliterate them toward their delayed victory with coinages like “compassionate conservatism” and “reformer with results.” Condi had learned to let her hair down with the big Texan, even allowing Karen to see the tears come to her eyes when they traveled to Poland in ’01 and heard the military band from NATO’s newest member play “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Bringing Karen back had in fact been Condi’s idea, though her overriding motive had been to please him, the president. The way he’d lit up when she took Karen into this morning’s working breakfast at the White House! It was as if she’d arranged to have a Tex-Mex meal flown in as a surprise from home. Karen made him feel secure in a way that, Condi realized, she might never quite accomplish herself.
Karen was now exclaiming over every photo and trinket in the office; she’d just picked up an autographed football helmet from Gene Washington.
“Here,” said Condi. “Have an atlas.”
She handed Karen the same pocket gazetteer, not much bigger than a passport, that she’d given members of the traveling press corps last month, a sort of advance souvenir of all the places they’d be visiting together over the next four years.
“This will be very useful!” said Karen, apparently meaning it, as if, despite the couple of tag-along visits she’d made to Afghanistan, she wasn’t the least bit sure of where to find the exotic, message-needing places she’d be going.
Condi poured the two of them some coffee. “You’ve got some tough hearts and minds to crack.”
“Oh, they’ll come along,” Karen replied, tapping the little atlas.
“I don’t mean the people in the Middle East,” Condi explained. “I mean the career people downstairs. They still believe that Iraq is the president’s war and not the country’s. Certainly not their war.”
Karen nodded, showing confidence that this could be straightened out with some message discipline vis-à-vis the Freedom Agenda. “We need to get the extremists out of the process over there, and the liberals out of it over here.”
“Actually,” said Condi, gently putting her small china cup onto its saucer, “we need to get the extremists into the process. Over there.”
Karen seemed confused.
“The biggest mistake being made by our friends, such as Mubarak, is keeping all the Islamists out of politics. I’m not talking about the Muslim Brotherhood, but confining the more moderate opposition to the pulpits just turns the mosques into a parallel political universe, a kind of hothouse waiting to explode. It’s the same with the Saudis.”
Karen made a note on one of the blank endpapers in the little atlas. “Maybe I should speak to the Muslim Brotherhood when I go over to Saudi Arabia.”
“The Muslim Brotherhood is in Egypt,” Condi explained.
“Got it,” said Karen, who scratched out the note.
Condi didn’t want to think too hard about what she was seeing. She switched subjects. “I guess you’re going to miss waking up to the sound of doves.” The remark gave her a chance to prove she’d read Ten Minutes from Normal, the $750,000 memoir Karen had just published, in which she talked about how happy she’d been amidst the birdsong of Austin after her year or two at the White House.
“Oh, I’ll still be hearing plenty of that,” Karen assured her. “I’ll be flying home every Thursday night, more or less commuting.”
Condi, who detested even pleasant surprises—and this wasn’t one—again changed conversational course. “Confirmation is always tricky these days, but I hope you’re in by April 15.”
“I’ve been talking to Dina, while she still has her Presidential Personnel hat on, and I’ve told her not to hurry. She’ll send my papers up to the Hill in June. Robert will be done with school by then. Oh, God, by the way, thank you again for that letter to Stanford! It really did the early-admissions trick: a letter from a former provost who now just happens to be the secretary of state!”
Condi was silent.
“Starting late,” Karen continued, “will also give me a chance to go out and give a few last paid speeches before going on the poverty wages here.”
Jim Wilkinson had informed Condi that her undersecretary–designate had made a million dollars in the past fourteen months. Ten minutes earlier, Karen had made some chirpy remarks about the Kabul school she’d helped raise money for, and Condi now couldn’t help thinking that a million dollars might fund the elementary education systems of three Afghan provinces.
During the secretary’s continued silence, Karen’s eyes were drawn to the ticking of a grandfather clock.
“It belonged to Jefferson,” Condi explained.
“So many beautiful things here,” said Karen, pointing to several leather-bound volumes of the French Pléiade.
“A peace offering from Chirac,” Condi told her. “Last month.”
“Those awful people. I’m proud to say I’m the only member of this administration who ever got to renounce her French citizenship!” This was a story Condi had heard a number of times, and read once more in Ten Minutes from Normal—how Karen had been born with dual citizenship during her military father’s Parisian posting, and then routinely given up the French portion many years later.
A live shot on CNN caught Condi’s eye, and she rose to turn up the volume. A rally was taking place in Beirut, a protest against Syria’s having last month instigated the murder of Rafik Hariri, a former prime minister whom Condi had liked. Anger over the assassination had at last pushed the Lebanese into demanding that their Syrian overlords leave the country and take Hezbollah with them. The secretary’s staff had inserted a half sentence about this hopeful turn of events into her introduction of Karen, and this enormous onscreen demonstration appeared to be the most encouraging development yet.
The administration’s newly designated chief of public diplomacy, checking her phone, paid no attention to the TV. And Condi realized it wouldn’t be long before, deep down, she disliked Karen as much as Karl Rove did.
6
AFTER PALM SUNDAY; MARCH 21, 2005
White House Residence
“Bushie, Brett Kavanaugh is at the door.”
The president opened his eyes and wondered why Laura had woken him. The clock on the night table said 1:08 a.m.—nearly the halfway mark in his normal night’s sleep.
“Kavanaugh?” he asked. The staff secretary?
Still blinking himself awake, he noticed the sheaves of palm atop the dresser, sent over, he’d been told, by some local AME minister. Laura waited for him to get both feet on the floor so that she could go back to bed herself.
By now the president realized what Kavanaugh’s presence signified. The first couple had flown back from the ranch in Crawford this afternoon, when it became apparent that the Schiavo bill was coming to a vote. Given its nature, it needed to be signed immediately.
Bush stepped out into the hall, and Kavanaugh, startled by the sight of him in a bathrobe, averted his eyes for a moment.
“Sir, the House passed the legislation at 12:41 a.m.” He handed his boss the bill.
The president, putting on his glasses, walked over to a table in the hallway. “DeLay must have hopped on a motorcycle to get it over here. What was the vote?”
“Two hundred and three to fifty-eight, sir.”
“How many Republicans against?”
“Only five.”
Bush motioned for a pen, and as soon as Kavanaugh handed him one he set the document down on the little table with its premature vase of Easter lilies. He signed the bill quickly, in a single movement, not the ceremonial letter-at-a-time procedure with multiple pens he could then offer as souvenirs to supporters and “stakeholders” in the legislation. Once he’d transformed S. 686 into Public Law 109-3, he handed the paper back to Kavanaugh.
“Is Andy coming back?” the president asked. The chief of staff had been vacationing in Maine.
“Tomorrow morning, sir.”
Bush nodded. “ ’Night, K-Man.”
Back inside the bedroom, the president saw that Laura was already asleep again, her copy of Losing Battles resting on the night table.
Even after winning it, this felt like a losing battle too—a costly, brutal skirmish in the war that had been going on for years, in Florida, over poor “persistently vegetative” Terri Schiavo: a fight between her parents, who wanted to keep her alive, feeding tube and all, and her husband, who thought enough was enough. Jeb, the governor, had taken the parents’ side, even suggesting there was something fishy about the husband and the circumstances in which his wife had fallen ill. But the Supreme Court had said no to the parents on Thursday, and the following day the feeding tube had been legally removed for the third time in this long struggle. The bill he’d just signed, rammed through by the zealously right-to-life DeLay, would give the parents one more chance to put the tube back in, by allowing other federal courts, besides the Supremes, to supersede the state ones.
There was nothing about this whole medical-ethics clusterfuck that Bush liked—especially the pro-parents demonstrators, out in the hospice parking lot, threatening the life of the state judge. He’d made it clear to his staff as soon as he got back this afternoon that he wouldn’t reward those people with a picture of himself signing the bill in his bathrobe. He was sick of hearing about “assisted suicide” and “judicial murder,” sick of hearing his own press secretary talk, over and over, about the need to “err on the side of life.” Yes, that’s what he’d tried to do with stem cells four years ago—the most honest, painstaking, and satisfying work he’d done in his whole presidency. But tomorrow morning he would need a crisp answer for reporters who’d be braying to know how this bill he’d just signed didn’t violate his states’-rights inclinations, same as the way they used to ask why signing death warrants down in Texas didn’t run counter to the “culture of life” he claimed to promote. In fact, he believed his own shuffle on that one: as a deterrent, the death penalty, like a just war, ultimately saved more lives than it took. And, not that it mattered, he’d bet Ann Richards and Bill Clinton had shed a lot fewer tears over the murderers they sent to the needle.
As soon as he got into bed, he knew he couldn’t sleep. He was hungry—he’d been trying too hard to lose that last extra pound from the campaign. Terri Schiavo, of course, was starving. She wasn’t supposed to be able to feel it, but how did anyone know that for sure? A “persistent vegetative state”; dead but not-dead. Over in Iraq, the dead couldn’t even stay dead, or at least they couldn’t rest in peace. The other day in Mosul a suicide bomber had killed a police official; next thing you knew, the “insurgents” were shooting up the guy’s funeral.
On top of the desk across the room sat a memo he’d brought up from the Oval earlier tonight, something that had been caught circulating among Republicans on the Hill: This legislation ensures that individuals like Terri Schiavo are guaranteed the same legal protections as convicted murderers like Ted Bundy….This is a great political opportunity, because Senator Nelson of Florida has already refused to become a cosponsor and this is a tough issue for Democrats.
If he found out that Turd Blossom had a hand in this, he’d kick his ass back to Austin.
They were supposed to lift off from the South Lawn at 8:05 a.m. He’d be traveling out to Arizona to push the Social Security bill. After a month of such barnstorming, he was still enjoying it, but tomorrow he had to take McCain on the plane with him; he wasn’t about to repeat the home-state mistake they’d made with Baucus. Even so, John would be up his ass about torture and rendition, threatening to introduce this Detainees Treatment Act if they didn’t change the rules. And how was he supposed to debate torture with Mr. Hanoi Hilton?
He honestly believed that, like the death penalty, torture could save lives. But every so often he needed to talk it through, receive some assurance that he was correct. Laura wasn’t the right person for this: any talk of physical pain sent her mind straight back to the skidding and screech in that Midland intersection thirty-seven years ago; the sudden, sickening death of the guy in the car she hit. As soon as the thought would come to her, you’d see her eyes darken, as if a pair of black contact lenses had been put over the pupils. Until the memory clicked off she was just gone, her mind having been rushed to a secure location that nobody could find.
Still, it was Laura he wanted to talk to now; so he sighed, loudly and childishly, in order to wake her.
“You know, you could just say ‘Honey?’ and maybe shake me,” she pointed out, once she’d opened her eyes.
“I think I’m hungry.”
“Call down to the kitchen for the piece of cake you didn’t eat tonight. It’s still in the refrigerator, I’m sure.”
“It’ll keep me awake.”
She reclosed her eyes and rolled over. “Just please don’t start playing your iPod with those tinny earphones.”
He grunted his assent, and then she remembered something she’d forgotten to tell him. “Your mother called. Just before we left the ranch. Not urgent. But if you can’t sleep, why don’t you call her back? It’s only just past midnight in Houston. She’ll be up watching TCM while Gampy snores.”
