Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (15 page)

 
          
 
The meeting would last exactly one hour. The
President would point to each writer in turn and ask for complaints, comments,
suggestions. The words of each response might vary from individual to
individual, but the substance was identical: It was difficult—nay, impossible—to
do the job the President wanted without more contact with the President.

 
          
 
To each the President would reply, "Damn
right. That's why we're here today."

 
          
 
Whatever time was left over the President
would devote to reminiscences about his childhood or his time in the Senate or
Great Men He Had Known—"So you'll have grist for your mill and know what's
behind this fella you call the President."

 
          
 
It was a completely predictable ritual.

 
          
 
Within a week after the meeting, each writer
would receive a photograph of the assemblage taken by the President's personal
photographer, a Pakistani named Naj who had worked for the USIA for two
decades. The President would have inscribed each picture with the most coveted
of phrases:

 
          
 
"To : With gratitude from his friend and
President,

 
          
 
Benjamin T. Winslow."

 
          
 
To Burnham's knowledge, none of the writers
had ever met alone with the President. Why now? Why him? He wasn't even the
senior writer, or the most important. He rarely got big foreign-policy speeches
to sculpt. That was Butterworth's ken. And McGregor got to enunciate all the
economic thunderclaps.

 
          
 
"What have I done?" he suddenly
cried aloud.

 
          
 
"What? Nothing." Dyanna was
smoothing his lapels and checking his tie. "You'll be fine, Mr. Burnham,
Honey. Okay. Now go!”

 
          
 
Something didn't feel right. His hands. His
hands were empty. "Get me some papers!"

 
          
 
"Papers? Newspapers?"

 
          
 
"No! Papers papers! Documents! You can't
walk around the West Wing without papers. Everybody's always got papers.
Otherwise you look like a butler."

 
          
 
Burnham didn't remotely resemble a butler, but
Dyanna wasn't about to argue. She dipped her hand into the IN box and plucked
out a proclamation and a State Department proposed first draft of a
Presidential greeting to some visiting poo-bah. Then, for icing, she tore two
message slips off a pad, ticked the box marked "urgent" and scribbled
on one "Margaret Thatcher—please call soonest" and on the other
"Andrei Gromyko returned your call." These she stapled prominently to
the top sheet of a yellow legal pad which she placed atop the other papers, all
of which she thrust into Burnham's hand as she propelled him toward the door.

 
          
 
'"Go for it, Mr. Burnham, Honey,"
she said, as she held the door for him. "It's first down and goal to
go!"

 
          
 
What is going on? Burnham shouted at himself
as his shoes clattered down the marble corridor and he unconsciously checked
his collar buttons, his tie, his shoes and the shoot of his cuffs. Why am I
here? I'm just a nice boy from the Northeast who does what he's told as best he
can. I should have stayed in
New York
. Journalism's an honorable profession.

 
          
 
He pushed through the swinging door and walked
down the ramp to West Executive Avenue, the thin ribbon of concrete that
separated the White House from the Executive Office Building and provided
parking spaces for the small armada of White House staff cars and for the
private vehicles of about three people in the solar system, including Evelyn
Witt and, should he for some reason choose to drive himself to work rather than
wait to be picked up at home, Mario Epstein. It was here on West Executive
Avenue during times of Deep Crisis that the Secretaries of State and Defense
were seen on television disembarking from their limousines and marching somberly
into the West Basement, because that was the quickest route to the Situation
Room, the nerve center from which the first salvos of Armageddon would be
fired—before everybody who was worth saving boarded the aircraft that would
take them into the bowels of a Maryland mountain.

 
          
 
As always, a phalanx of GM sedans sat, nose-in
to the curb, engines idling so the government chauffeurs could enjoy air
conditioning while they dozed or read or composed screenplays that would free
them from the drudgery of driving bureaucrats who treated them like old
furniture through the sclerotic
Washington
traffic.

 
          
 
Striding purposefully across the avenue,
pretending to read a draft proclamation for White Cane Safety Day, Burnham
looked up just long enough to glance at the sedans and wonder if it was
possible that this meeting with the President would result in his being
initiated into some new knighthood so exalted as to entitle him to what was
called "portal-to-portal"—meaning that a black sedan picked him up at
the house every morning and returned him there at night. Not bloody likely. True,
things were a lot better than in the days of the Carter Proletarian Presidency,
when the higher you were ranked the more ardently you had to pretend to embrace
the plebeian ethic, and Cabinet Secretaries, for Christ's sake, were driving to
work in Volkswagen Beetles. But better or not, one still had to be several
rungs closer to
Olympus
than Burnham was to get portal-to-portal.

 
          
 
Besides, this cozy little fantasy was founded
on the assumption that he was being summoned to receive good news.

 
          
 
Burnham opened the door into the West
Basement. It was dark in there, and cool, and the air conditioning made a
soothing noise that reminded him of staterooms on ships at sea.

 
          
 
A few feet ahead, on the left, one door this
side of the one marked "Ladies," was the door to Warner Cobb's
office. To the right, down a short staircase, was the White House Mess, which
was—but only in the Second Sitting—the most exclusive luncheon club in
Washington, where delicious, inexpensive (subsidized) meals were served in
opulent surroundings to the princes of the White House royal family: Special
Assistants, Special Counsels, the President's private secretaries, the
Vice-President (who had had to fight off an attempt to stick him in the First
Sitting), and, when a whim led him to break bread with those who served him,
the President himself. The Second Sitting sat from
1:00
to
2:00
.

 
          
 
The First Sitting, of which Burnham and the
other writers were members, sat from
12:00
to
1:00
. Burnham, pleased though he was to have
been awarded the perk, rarely attended. The membership of the First Sitting
was, in general, about as much fun as mononucleosis. Second- and third-level
myrmidons on the White House staff were exactly what they should be: second-
and third-level functionaries who did one job with mechanical precision, be it
advancing presidential voyages, sifting political requests, flying the
presidential planes or operating the White House social office.

 
          
 
Burnham didn't consider himself above the
others, he existed apart from them.

 
          
 
The other writers could be jolly companions,
but they didn't have to go to the Mess to see one another. Much more lively was
to go out into the world, where one didn't have to speak in a murmur while scanning
with one's ears the other conversations in the room in search of White House
gossip.

 
          
 
Warner Cobb's battery of secretaries sat
somewhere in the White House, but Burnham had no idea where. They could not
have been in or near Cobb's two-stall office, of course, since it was barely
big enough for Cobb alone, and there was nothing nearby but the remains of the
ladies' room and a narrow corridor. This arrangement was not ideal for Cobb,
but it suited the writers just fine: If they needed to see Cobb, no secretary
barred the door; with no anteroom before his office, he could not command them
to wait in the anteroom. If he was in, he had to do business with them without
resorting to status games.

 
          
 
Not that Cobb was the kind who enjoyed such
petty juvenilia, but you never knew. Big offices with anterooms and lots of
secretaries had a way of turning any head. It was like giving a loaded pistol
to a child and telling him not to shoot it. He'd have to try it once or twice,
and once he saw how much fun it was, there might be no stopping him.

 
          
 
Cobb was an unpretentious man trying to do an
impossible job for which he had had no training, for which there was no such
thing as training—that is, to maintain a productive, even creative, dynamic
between a President who thought all writers were either left-wing
rabble-rousers, right-wing messiahs, snobs, natives of New York or Boston or
San Francisco ("Hotbeds of assholes, and I can prove it!"), or out to
get him, or any combination of the above, and six professional writers who were
skilled at articulating matters of policy and politics, who knew the tricks of
rousing and holding an audience, who agreed generally with the stated aims of
President and party, who had been respected—even lionized—in their prior
occupations and who were therefore unaccustomed to, and unhappy at, being
considered by their employer (the President had offered both appraisals several
times) "as useless as a spare prick at a wedding" and "a
necessary evil—like farting."

 
          
 
Burnham listened at Cobb's door before he
knocked, a courtesy to avoid interrupting phone calls. He heard Cobb's old
Royal clacking away, so he knocked and opened the door and went inside. Cobb
was bent over the typewriter, the bald spot on the crown of his head gleaming
like a new dollar, and he held up a finger that said "Be with you in a
minute" and continued to coifipose one of the myriad memos he sowed about
the federal government each day—suggesting ideas for presidential remarks, for
groups who should be addressed, for organizations that would serve well (if
unwittingly) as conduits for new proposals, for things that needed saying and
things that should be left unsaid.

 
          
 
And for new acronyms.

 
          
 
The President was in love with acronyms. If a
program was marginal in substance, it was made worthy, in the President's eyes,
by slugging it with an acronym. He liked NORAD and the DEW line, was nostalgic
for the WACs and a strong supporter of NATO, SEATO and CENTO. He signed a bill
changing the name of the Naval facility on
Andros
Island
by the Tongue of the Ocean to TOTO. He
wanted young people to train for government service in YONGOV, wanted
businessmen to hire the handicapped through BUSCAP, and lobbied for a
Gerald-Ford-like economic slogan that, unlike Ford's Whip Inflation Now (WIN),
would attack all the gremlins in the economy. But he abandoned the effort when
he found that no one could pronounce the acronym he had proudly fashioned for
Whip Inflation Now and High Interest Rates Too For Rising Employment
(WINAHIRTFRE).

 
          
 
Cobb finished typing and spun in his chair to
face Burnham. "Hi," he said.

 
          
 
"This is a joke, right?"

 
          
 
"Nope."

 
          
 
"What, then?"

 
          
 
"I don't know. The boss called me bright
and early and said, and I quote, 'Get me the fella wrote the O'Leary thing.'
And I looked on my list, and lo and behold! It was you. Lucky you."

 
          
 
"What O'Leary thing? What ... oh. That?''
Days ago, last week sometime, Burnham had written a couple of hundred words for
the President to deliver at a surprise appearance at a dinner for Mary O'Leary,
a former Oregon State Attorney General whom the President had nominated for a
federal judgeship. Burnham had been instructed to keep the remarks short and
free of controversy, and to begin them with one or two soft jokes—not
thigh-slappers but mildly amusing one-liners to establish fellowship with the
audience. All this Burnham had done. Or thought he had.