Landfall, p.27
Landfall, page 27
“So who would it have been?” Camilla asked Charles. “The black sheep.” It was a nervy question to pose, given that her own dark wool had so recently been bleached to something lighter.
Charles’s syllables turned to a mush of mumbling, scarcely audible inside the Blue Room’s din. “Black sheep? Our family? Rather hard to say. Fergie, I suppose. Was she still on the scene in—when was this? Ninety-one? Ninety-two?”
Nancy was carefully appraising the former Mrs. Parker-Bowles, this horsey homewrecker. You had to grant some esteem to any woman who could make a man leave a wife fourteen years younger than herself. Even so, Nancy had never thought Diana to be that beautiful—the nose was too big. And dumb? She could hear herself posing the question in Joan Rivers’s voice. Please! That night Diana had been here, at the start of Ronnie’s second term, dancing with Travolta and lighting up with a sudden, evident sexuality. Nancy could remember thinking: Honey, you’re barking up the wrong tree—again.
She could tell that Camilla liked her, maybe because they both belonged to the sorority of second wives, though Jane Wyman was so far in the past that fewer and fewer people remembered any of that. With demure mischief, Nancy now drew the duchess’s attention first to Laura Bush’s burnt-orange dress and then to Condi Rice’s red one—clearly both de la Rentas—and finally to Oscar himself, a guest tonight, standing beneath a portrait of William Howard Taft that made the designer look all the more elegant and slender.
“Do you think the two ladies chose their dresses together, as a little surprise for him?” she asked Camilla, before realizing that the duchess didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking about, and probably didn’t even know who’d designed what she was wearing herself. Just as well, thought Nancy: that boxy jacket over the wide taffeta skirt made her look like a Dutch door. Oh, well. She supposed there was less likelihood than she’d imagined of something simpatico developing between them.
Looking for a different subject altogether, Camilla said, “A genealogist has informed me that I and the president’s mother, Mrs. Barbara Bush, are eighteenth cousins, once removed.”
Strike two, thought Nancy.
The duchess took the prince by his elbow. “Time to move you about,” she said, propelling him, not gently, in the direction of the secretary of state.
“A pleasure to see you again,” the prince told Condoleezza Rice. “Will you be playing the piano for us later? On the way in Mr. Ma told me that you’d performed with him once.” Like de la Renta, Yo-Yo Ma was here in something of a dual capacity: he was a guest, but he’d also be playing the cello for them after dinner.
“I accompanied him, very badly, at a ceremony for medal-winners in the arts, back in 2002,” Condi said, surprising the prince with her precision. She realized he could hardly be expected to match this exactitude about his own forty-year blur of ribbon-cutting apprenticeship. He could also, she worried, detect a trace of longing in her phrasing, back in 2002. That time before Iraq, those months of emergency unity after 9/11, a period for which she was already nostalgic in the way that ordinary Brits, folk a generation older than the prince, liked to sit around on Christmas watching movies about the Blitz.
“Mr. Straw, the foreign secretary,” Charles reported, “had a bang-up time at that restaurant in Tusca—”
“Tuscaloosa,” Condi explained. “Jim ’N Nick’s Bar-B-Q.”
“He met your aunts,” the prince added.
“He did indeed.” Condi politely turned her attention to the duchess. “Did you enjoy Anacostia?” Earlier today Camilla and Charles had visited a charter boarding school in one of the city’s poorer neighborhoods.
“Oh, very much so,” said the duchess. “The children were quite game. They’d ask one anything.”
As the three of them chatted, Condi thought about the barnstorming through Alabama, a trip Jim Wilkinson had been determined to have her make, to build her up in the media in support of an eventual run for office. She hated herself for having gone along with it, for letting herself be, even more than usual, the sunny voice of moderation and competence and racial transcendence—another Colin with the female angle added for good measure. She’d allowed herself to stand in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in front of the stained-glass window still pocked with a hole from the bombing; an hour later she’d extolled George Wallace for having built up the tech sector of state public education.
No, she would never cross over to the electoral side of politics. People told her that was the only way to achieve real independence, earned autonomy, in the political world she’d chosen to conquer step by step, rung by rung, as if moving through Iraq: clear, hold, and build—how she’d described America’s stick-to-itive strategy to the Foreign Relations Committee a couple of weeks ago. No, if Charles Windsor here could inherit his one lifelong job, she could be appointed to all of hers. The ballot box, the great prize of the civil rights movement, would turn her into Pandora if she approached it: the world’s evils might not escape from under its lid, but every compromise and stifling and self-suppression to be performed would fly out and devour her with shame.
She had learned, long before becoming the nation’s chief diplomat, simultaneously to conduct one discussion with the live people in front of her and another with the forces in her head. The First Lady now approached, with a polite “May I?”, unaware that it was this other, internal discussion she was really interrupting, not the one Condi was having with Charles and Camilla.
“The duchess was telling me about the school visit she and the prince made today,” Condi explained to Laura.
“We brought a great many books from home with us. Made a little donation,” added Camilla.
“Oh!” cried Condi, turning directly to the First Lady. “That reminds me! I haven’t thanked you for my e-reader!”
“When we had the Book Festival back in September,” Mrs. Bush explained to the royal couple, “Secretary Rice told me that she’d never really done much reading for pleasure.” It was true, said Condi. She’d been reading all her life, but almost always as a matter of study, the book in one hand and a pencil in the other.
“Why an e-reader, then?” asked the prince. For weeks Condi had been wondering the same thing.
“You can’t underline and annotate it,” Laura explained. “Can’t turn it into work.” She was certain that Condi had never yet even booted up the device. If she had, she would have noticed that it had been stocked for her with six novels.
As Mrs. Bush excused herself to greet the mayor of Washington, Condi noticed Rumsfeld coming toward her. He’d been leading General Honoré around the room like a prize horse, as if to claim credit for recent success with that Occupation, the one of New Orleans, but the general had now set off on his own, and the chairman of Sotheby’s had captured Charles and Camilla. There was no chance of her escaping Don.
And he was angry; the tiny eyes were shooting lasers instead of the usual twinkles. He was still, she knew, irked about her recent Senate testimony, her clear, hold, and build trinity, which he would have heard as stressing the military over the political, and which would have sounded like forever to him.
“Sending Zelikow back to Iraq for a fourth trip?” he asked her. “I’ve heard as much.”
“I’m still waiting for the Pentagon to do something about what he found on the third one,” she answered, referencing Phil’s discovery that the IEDs going off in Iraq were deadlier than ever because Iran was supplying the insurgents with new parts—a donation the Shia mullahs were not really making to the Sunnis, but in behalf of chaos.
“You should have emphasized the handover, not the ‘building’ we’re doing,” said Rumsfeld.
The bicycle seat, again, thought Condi. “I guess I was just trying to speak ‘the common language of the heart,’ ” she said, scornfully employing one of Karen’s dippier expressions.
“You appointed her,” said the defense secretary.
Mocking the phrase just now had been a terrible slip, Condi realized, a revelation of her own doubts about Karen—something Don would undoubtedly try using to his advantage. “The president appointed her,” she lamely replied. Her anger, at Don and herself, swelled. “Have you had a handshake with the prince yet? You can add a picture of it to your collection.”
He knew of course that she was making a reference to Saddam; Rumsfeld was the only one in the administration who’d ever met the dictator and been photographed doing it, back in ’83, during Reagan’s tilt toward Iraq. And yet, thought Condi, Don had been the first to urge a move against Baghdad, the morning after September 11. Just as he was now the one who wanted out the fastest.
She detested him, and because she did she found herself, at moments, actually liking him: he was the rare person whose respect she didn’t crave and whom she didn’t want to please. In that sense he was like her new e-reader—an object on which she didn’t have to perform any work. As he walked away, she looked over at Dick and felt the same curious affection. The president was approaching his veep, and in Bush’s eyes Condi detected anything but affection. Things between those two grew worse by the week, with the president lately angry over Dick’s lukewarm public defense of Harriet. Neither Cheney nor Rove had wanted the nomination to be made, but as the weeks of the White House counsel’s agony wore on, only Andy recommended that the boss stop the bleeding and shut things down before she was mortified by a televised confirmation hearing.
Condi turned away, but wondered what was being said across the room.
“So how do you see this playing out?” the president asked through especially pursed lips.
“Karl could give you a better reading of that,” Cheney responded.
“I want to know what you think.” Half the press still believed he was Dick’s Jerry Mahoney doll. But if they looked a little closer they’d see some wooden-teeth marks on Dick’s neck. He almost wondered if Cheney, once Harriet’s nomination was made, had wanted a crash-and-burn spectacle, one that would make a point about the need for conservative purity, the sort of thing that Dick and his brainiac friends in the Federalist Society thought essential. (God, was he getting as paranoid as Nixon? A moment ago, at the sight of Roberts taking a drink from a tray, he’d wondered if the only reason the new chief justice had extolled Harriet—which he had—was that he wanted to shine all the brighter.)
Dick knew his question about things “playing out” referred to a story in this morning’s Post by one of the two Danas (Priest? Milbank? he could never keep them straight). The article had drawn attention to all the “black-site” prisons the CIA had set up in other countries over the past four years, and then revealed the “rendition” of second-string terrorists to jails in Morocco and Jordan and some dubious old East Bloc countries turned allies, what Rumsfeld liked to call New Europe.
Yes, Bush thought, a few days after 9/11 he had signed the order allowing all of that. Those little partnerships had begun to sprout and shift—Thailand was in, Thailand was out—and before you knew it, things had been going on for years, the arrangements becoming a very regular, very irregular government program. The number of terrorists swept up had grown with the funds available; it might as well be fucking Medicare Part D.
Now it was all in the Post’s glaring light of day, and there was no getting around the fact that it was Dick who’d let this get out of hand. Condi had been trying to put the damned thing on a sounder legal footing and been thwarted by Cheney and Don all along the way. And then last month Dick had backed him into a corner by trying to exempt CIA guys from torture prosecutions. Ninety votes against that in the Senate! Now, just to stand firm, he might have to veto the whole Pentagon budget, which wouldn’t even reach his desk if it didn’t keep the CIA guys accountable. No, he didn’t think “enhanced interrogation” was torture any more than Dick did; he had no illusions about the people they were fighting. But if you listened to Dick—or to the two Danas, for that matter—you’d conclude that those techniques were the things we were fighting for, an end in themselves instead of a nasty, regrettable means toward something good.
He motioned for Rumsfeld to come join them. “Work this out,” he told both men. “Even if you have to bring in Pelosi and Reid and kiss McCain’s ass. Work it out.” Otherwise it was going to be the levee that broke and let the whole Freedom Agenda drown.
He started walking down the hall with Cheney and Rumsfeld, the three of them on their way with everybody else to the State Dining Room, and he was getting an over-the-shoulder look of disapproval from Mother, who wanted him to know he should be paying more attention to his non-administration guests. From her point of view his little gab with Dick and Don was like reading the paper at the breakfast table. He shot her his own comically wounded look, and hoped the expression would also convey a little assertion: You know, by now I’ve been doing this longer than you and Dad did it.
Rumsfeld seemed to want to make the most of this unexpected moment, good party manners or not.
“Would you like to hear from Ms. O’Connor over in Iraq? Directly?” the secretary asked the president.
“Sure,” said Bush. “You can tell her I’m already hearing from her boyfriend, the Weatherman. Getting plenty of visionary advice from him.” Some of it had come the other day: The waters have washed away a lot of illusions here, Mr. President. I’ve begun to think we should delay the guidebook; wait until we can produce a book about a whole new city that’s been remade more justly than the one before. He’d almost replied to this with a joke—something like, “Hey, you’re at the Arts endowment, not Faith-Based Initiatives”—but decided he didn’t want to alienate the guy more than he already had. And he was eager to know where Ms. Allison O’Connor fit into his story.
Rumsfeld looked curious, as if with this reference to a “boyfriend” he’d just been tossed an “unknown unknown” that needed to be turned into something else.
“The Weatherman?” Don asked as they entered the dining room.
“A nickname,” the president answered. You figure it out.
He sat down to a bowl of celery broth and shrimp, across from the Prince of Wales, whom he’d started to think of as POW. He wondered if Charlie would start plucking the little crustaceans from the soup, fearing they’d suffered some inorganic mistreatment. On his right he was delighted to have David Herbert Donald, the author of maybe the best of all the Lincoln biographies he’d read in this house. He introduced the prince to “Professor Donald, from Harvard,” who was here with his daughter-in-law.
“Professor Emeritus,” Donald corrected; a gentle joke about advancing age.
“Like President Emeritus over there,” said Bush, pointing to his father and resisting the envy that overcame him whenever he was feeling sorry for himself. He wasn’t envious of the neat and successful little war against Saddam that Dad had conducted; it was the chance that 41 got to watch all those Communist dominoes fall into place as New Europe, after someone else had given them the push.
It was a mean thought, but he was in a mean mood. He shifted his gaze from Dad to Mother, who was giving Jenna’s new boyfriend the third degree. Already impatient for them to clear away these green, drowned shrimp, he turned to Professor Donald and asked: “Is it too late for me to grow a beard?”
The historian hazarded a guess as to what was bothering his host. “This morning’s paper?”
Bush answered with a barrage of rhetorical questions, the sort Lincoln himself always used: “Didn’t Lincoln suspend habeas corpus just when he was issuing the Emancipation Proclamation? Were those two things a contradiction? Or was the first maybe necessary to the second?”
“Well,” said Donald, “he suspended habeas corpus just before he took big losses in the midterms.”
Bush scowled, as if his guest had overstepped. But he quickly banished the facial expression and said, “Touché.” Then he darkened again, with the thought that Lincoln had issued both those sweeping legal commands only when he was realizing he knew as much as his officers about what worked, and what didn’t, on the battlefield. God knows he wasn’t feeling that himself.
“ ‘A streak of ruthless determination,’ ” he finally said.
“Pardon?” asked Professor Donald.
“I’m quoting you—about Lincoln.”
“Oh,” said Donald, cautiously, wondering if the president was really going to enter into a discussion of those black sites.
“I’ve got it, too,” said Bush. “But it comes and goes.”
“Then it can’t be ruthless,” Donald reasoned.
“Or useful,” Bush added.
22
NOVEMBER 16–17, 2005
One Observatory Circle, Washington, D.C.
Dr. Kissinger’s limousine proceeded along Massachusetts Avenue, passing the Vatican embassy. POPE HIDES PEDOPHILES read the banner held by a solitary man on the sidewalk, the same man Kissinger had seen the last time he passed here on his way to someone’s memorial service in the National Cathedral. In fact, he’d seen this protester dozens of times before that; for years. Whether the fellow was noble or crazy, it was hard to tell; but his persistence was unsettling. A kind of Buddhist monk who never burnt out.
As his car went through the gates of his destination, Kissinger looked at the observatory dome beside the vice president’s official domicile. He wondered for a moment whether the daily sight of it, and a sense of the astronomers’ celestial business, impelled Cheney to take a long, semi-cosmic view of things. The pinpoint pictures of a spy satellite were one thing; but a useful proportionality might be supplied if they were laid next to pictures made by a telescope photographing the whole of the heavens.
