Landfall, p.4
Landfall, page 4
To give viewers a break, the station cut away to some news besides politics: the King Tut exhibit was being installed in New York, weeks after people had lined up to buy tickets. It would finally open next month.
“I’m determined to go,” said Allie. “If I can convince my father I’m even more miserable than I am, I can get him to send me up to New York for a long weekend with my aunt.”
Kent Hance’s toothy, beaming face suddenly filled the screen. It was sickening to realize that the cheers and the happy blasts of plastic horns were coming from inside the television, not the storefront space in which all the Bush volunteers now stood silently. It was barely ten o’clock, Ross thought. There still had to be a chance. But the smartest people here had been the first ones to start looking downcast.
“George W. Bush just called me to concede the race,” said Hance, to the loudest burst of cheering yet, “and he couldn’t have been nicer.” He was already sounding less like a farmer—there was no more need for the aw-shucks act—and more like the lawyer he actually was. The TV analyst said that he would probably end up with fifty-three percent of the vote and declared that the newcomer Bush had run a “respectable” race. Mike Childers—the losing candidate’s Lubbock driver, whom Ross had gotten to know a little—was actually crying. And the creepy guy from Slaton was now nowhere to be found. Ross waited for the TV to switch over to Bush’s main headquarters in Midland, but wasn’t sure he could stand the misery of a concession speech.
A local GOP lawyer stubbed out a cigarette on the floor and muttered, “Jesus Christ, all those Italian cardinals just elected a Polish guy pope, and we can’t elect a guy who went to school out of state.” With no alcohol-related scandal left to fear, somebody brought out two cases of beer from a refrigerator in the back.
“Do you still have that pathetic bicycle?” Allie asked Ross. “The one you tried to hide from me?”
“Yes.”
“Good, I have mine, too. Come with me.” She slipped three of the beers into her backpack.
“Where are we going?” asked Ross.
Once on his Schwinn, he followed her through the starry night, over the flat streets, neither of them ever needing to change out of tenth gear. As if to make up for tonight’s bad political fortune, the wind was at their backs. They had nearly reached Thirty-first Street when Allie turned into the City of Lubbock Cemetery and instructed Ross to dismount. The two of them climbed over a shoulder-high chain-link fence. She led the way to Section 44 of the graveyard:
IN LOVING MEMORY
OF OUR OWN
BUDDY HOLLEY
September 7, 1936
February 3, 1959
Two beer bottles rested near the marker, which was flush with the ground. Allie shook them to see if they were truly empty, then took two cans of Lone Star from her backpack. She handed one to Ross and pointed to the gravestone. “You know the greatest thing he ever accomplished?”
Ross looked at the marker. Like most Lubbockites he knew that the musician’s family had always spelled their name with an “e.” His father, once or twice, had even met the town’s favorite son.
“No,” he said, trying to sound impatient instead of heartbroken. “What was the greatest thing he ever accomplished?”
“He didn’t die here,” said Allie.
Ross took a gulp from what would be the third full beer of his life, before Allie pushed him down so that he was lying, flat on his back, atop the grave marker. It was here that she gave him his first kiss, and began singing, with surprising sweetness: Just you and I…
Part One
JANUARY 20–AUGUST 28, 2005
1
JANUARY 20, 2005
He felt uneasy, creeped out, when he noticed that Rehnquist, who’d looked like death swearing him in, had already disappeared from the platform. But the words continued to float up the teleprompter, and he wasn’t going to lose his momentum. He was about to banish anybody’s notion that this second administration of his would be going in for small ball:
It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
He’d said it. Freedom and security were one and the same, and you couldn’t have too much of either.
The applause seemed somehow to drift away instead of toward him, as if riding an easterly breeze from here at the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. He wondered who on the dais or out in the crowd knew that he’d been playing on Lincoln’s words when he just said “no one is fit to be a master and no one deserves to be a slave,” let alone knew that he’d read fully five biographies of The Linc (even he got a nickname) in the four years he and Laura had lived in the house halfway up the Mall and over to the right.
He caught a glimpse of Kerry at the end of the platform, his face looking weirdly puffed out, as if it had stolen whatever flesh was disappearing from Rehnquist’s. Too far away to see it in detail, he could well enough envision the disappointed, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger look his vanquished opponent would be exhibiting in reaction to the words just uttered—that pained expression of his, sort of a sigh that always meant to say it’s more complicated than that.
He knew Dick’s pretty opponent wouldn’t be here—the protocol never required the defeated VP candidate to show up—but he’d heard that Edwards, now out of the Senate, was still in the city, over at the Georgetown mansion he’d bought with all those trial-lawyer fees that would finally start shrinking if they got tort reform through this session.
America’s influence is not unlimited, but fortunately for the oppressed, America’s influence is considerable and we will use it confidently in freedom’s cause.
And he would use his political capital, what he’d accumulated in November by kicking Kerry’s rear in both Ohio and Florida. He would go beyond tort reform and throw himself into Social Security and immigration.
A light covering of snow stretched across the Mall like a tarp on the field at the Arlington Ballpark. Gazing upon it, and thinking for a second of the team he’d owned fifteen years ago, he felt his resentment toward last year’s foes fall away and be replaced by a surge of confidence, a sense that all things great and small were being given to him. He could hear that his delivery was smooth, the one word that had made him stumble in the rehearsals, “susceptible,” having been replaced by “prone.”
Democratic reformers facing repression, prison, or exile can know: America sees you for who you are, the future leaders of your free country.
The last shall be first. The Bible is everywhere in this speech, directly or just beneath the surface. And if the upcoming nod to the Koran seems obligatory, it also has what Kissinger—had he just seen his wheezing, shrinking hulk here?—would call “the additional advantage of being true.” He was going to re-win this war he’d already won once, because when you came down to it he had more in common with, and more insight into, the most radical Muslim who read his Koran than the unbeliever who never opened his Bible. He would wager that when everybody on this platform had bowed their heads a few minutes ago, not more than one person in ten actually started praying. The rest had just kept thinking about who they’d been able to sit a row in front of and who they’d had to sit a row behind.
He could feel it again, had to fight it, the sudden shift from merriment to irritability, from runner’s high to cramp, the flight and crash he experienced a dozen times an hour; the fast, exhausting alternation he knew he had to battle and often didn’t want to. He’d fight it now, with words that had been written for him, but words that he could also utter from the heart, the same way he had prayed, for real, during the invocation.
Head up, he speaks: America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world and to all the inhabitants thereof!
* * *
Back inside the Capitol, Barbara Bush got rid of the large red cape and heavy coat she’d worn against the cold out on the platform. Even ten years ago she would never have allowed herself to sport something powder blue underneath them, but she was only five months from eighty now, and had come to recognize the slimming effect of advanced old age as one of the condition’s few compensations. She could finally get away with lighter colors.
The president’s mother blew a kiss to acknowledge some applause a few tables away before sitting down next to the Bill Frists, the majority leader and his wife, as well as Condi Rice. As she shook hands with the man escorting the secretary of state–designate, Mrs. Bush gave Gene Washington—a TV-star-handsome ex-football player, nearly sixty—her smiling appraisal. He was, like most things in Condi’s life, a grade-A choice and achievement, at one with the childhood French lessons, the competitive ice-skating, the master’s-degree program begun at the age of twenty. More a credential, Mrs. Bush imagined, than a passionate swain.
God, another invocation. The former First Lady stood up with everyone else and bowed her head, but as others prayed she performed, through eyes still narrowly open, an inspection of the dais. She could see George and Laura to the left of Cheney and his wife and Senator Chris Dodd, who now looked as sleek and silver as his corrupt old father, Tom, whom she remembered from the days just before his fall, almost forty years ago, during her brief time as a congressional wife. Her eyes moved surreptitiously leftwards to see, at her son’s right, Trent Lott and—well, Lott’s wife; she could never remember her name. Chris Dodd and Trent headed the congressional committee in charge of organizing this enormous bipartisan luncheon, half of whose guests cordially loathed the other half. All around Bar sat not only senators and congressmen but cabinet members and Supreme Court justices, including Souter, that elfin little Earl Warren, her husband’s biggest appointive mistake, who four years ago had gone so far as to vote with the minority in Bush v. Gore. Word was he felt uncomfortable after fifteen years in Washington, as well he should: let him go back to New Hampshire and live in that barn with his mother, so that young George got the chance to appoint two justices instead of one. Rehnquist, of whom there was no sign, surely couldn’t last much longer.
The first course, a lobster salad, arrived on the tables as soon as the chaplain was through.
“I remember you telling me you don’t like to travel,” Mrs. Bush said to Condi, who had just picked up exactly the right fork.
“That’s more or less true,” the secretary-designate replied, with a smile that tried to look amused instead of cautious. “I hate being away from my own stuff.” She felt the need—Bar could hear it—to put imaginary little quotes around “stuff,” as if she might otherwise be scolded for a crude choice of word. Mrs. Bush, who had been to Condi’s apartment, could still picture the piano and the elliptical trainer and the teak-topped desk, every item seeming to seek a neat perpendicularity that the curvature of the Watergate’s walls made impossible.
“How are you going to do your job?” Mrs. Bush asked. “Without liking to travel, I mean.”
“I don’t have the job yet,” Rice reminded her, adding demureness to the smile. The president had asked her, at Camp David the weekend after his reelection, to switch from being national security advisor to secretary of state, and with a sore loser’s reflex, John Kerry had given her a prolonged, nasty grilling at the confirmation hearing. Just yesterday he’d voted against her in the Foreign Relations Committee, and despite that group’s 16–2 margin in her favor, the nomination had yet to get full Senate approval.
Returning to Mrs. Bush’s question, the still-unconfirmed secretary remarked upon the man who by now should be her predecessor. “Colin didn’t like traveling either. But he did what he had to. If things go the way they’re supposed to, next month I’ll be in Paris—and two weeks later in Brussels—with the president. Anyone would look forward to that!”
Bar noticed a genuine girlish gush, however momentary, beneath the test-marketed Muzak of Condi’s conversation. A part of the younger woman wanted her real personality to break through; she was merely afraid of it—as opposed to Hillary, several tables to their left, who despised her own real self and could scarcely remember what it looked like, having sent so many different versions of it out on so many different combat missions, before having to welcome it home always more shot up and disfigured than when it had left.
Anyway, Bar liked Condi; the whole family did, and took a certain pride in having helped to invent her. “I hear you really wanted the Pentagon, not State,” she said, without lowering her voice.
“Oh,” replied Condi, startled into loud laughter. “Don Rumsfeld wouldn’t be willing to give that up!”
George Herbert Walker Bush, having heard the exchange, turned from the Frists toward Rice. Smiling with his small, boyish teeth, he offered her a little solace: “That guy never gives anything up.” He was recalling how the current defense secretary, as a young White House staffer, had twice blocked him from getting the vice presidency: urging Ford not to take him in ’74 and then, a year later, maneuvering him into the CIA job so that he couldn’t run with Ford in ’76. Rumsfeld had always been thick as thieves with Cheney, but it was beyond “41” why his son had had to go and give him the Pentagon. Of course it could have been worse: four years ago, before Dick had settled the vice presidency upon himself, he’d floated Rumsfeld’s name for that job, a trial balloon both the elder Bushes had had the pleasure of popping.
Guessing her husband’s train of thought, Bar looked over at Rumsfeld in one of his old, shiny suits, four tables away—with the Carters. She couldn’t have devised a nicer bit of penance for him if she’d drawn up the seating chart herself.
“Who can’t you forgive?” she asked Rice. The Frists had begun to listen quite eagerly.
Condi pretended that her mouth was too full of lobster to speak.
“Trust me,” said Mrs. Bush. “You’ll come to loathe Don, if you don’t already.”
“Bar!” said the former president. “For gosh sakes!”
Condi had always been worried that Rumsfeld hated her, pointlessly and from the start: the whole Stanford academic world she came out of; the way she tried to mask and gloss over dissension within the National Security Council staff so that, by the time she reported their discussions to the president, one would have thought there’d been agreement all along. Don had once even reminded her, after she’d supposedly overstepped, that the NSA “wasn’t in the chain of command.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Bush, “if you don’t hate Don, there must be someone.”
Condi laughed and looked around Statuary Hall. “Well, I don’t see her. My senator.” She and Barbara Boxer had despised each other for ages, and Condi had long since been supporting Boxer’s opponents in California. The senator’s fear—acted out yesterday in casting the other “nay” vote in the Foreign Relations Committee—was that Condoleezza Rice would herself become an opponent, a few years from now, by running for Boxer’s Senate seat.
“She’s crazy,” said the secretary-designate.
Seeing Mrs. Bush light up, Condi warmed to the topic. “She’s got a real conspiracist streak, too.” Frist nodded agreement, and Condi elaborated. “She actually thinks we stole Ohio two months ago.”
“No kidding?” asked the former president.
Deciding she’d gone farther than she should, Rice now just shook her head and made a rueful little face. “Well, if I do get this job, I’m afraid I’ll be seeing a lot of her. The best part of being NSA was never having to come up here and testify—well, except to the 9/11 Commission.” As secretary of state, she would no longer be routinely covered by the president’s executive privilege.
“When will they wrap things up?” asked Mrs. Bush.
“I’m not sure. It could take another week—I just hope it will be over before the election.” The president’s mother, she realized, might not know that she was referring to the Iraqi election, of a National Assembly, set to take place ten days from now. When not preoccupied with Kerry and Barbara Boxer, Condi had been worrying about the twenty-six people killed in bombings the other day, and whether the ninety thousand cardboard voting booths to be used by the Iraqis would be distributed in time.
The former president saved her from having to explain to Bar that it was Iraq she had meant. “Sunnis gonna show up and vote?” he asked.
“I hope so, sir.”
“Be terrific if they do.” He flashed Condi the smile that age was turning into a bit of a grimace.
“We won’t be here if it takes another week,” said Mrs. Bush, referring to Rice’s confirmation. “Otherwise we’d love to come to the swearing-in.”
“My Watergate neighbor, Ruth Ginsburg, has promised to do the honors,” said Condi.
“Better than Souter,” said Bush. His appointee also lived in the Watergate. “Bad mistake. Bad.”
“Glad you finally admit it,” said his wife.
Frist picked up Rice’s place card and with his pen scratched out the words “National Security Advisor” beneath her name. In their place, with surprisingly neat penmanship for a medical doctor, he wrote Secretary of State. “Condi was the best campaigner we had out there last fall,” the majority leader added.
