Guilt by Association (40 page)

“It’s progress,” the psychiatrist told her. “A generation ago, a woman would never have been allowed to confront such a man about his behavior. Anita Hill may not have stopped the Thomas confirmation, but she accomplished something just as important.
She opened a door that won’t be easily shut again.”

Karen pondered that for a while. “I suppose you have a point,” she conceded, “but I’m suffering from an incurable case of apathy. I don’t even know—or care—who’s going to run for President next year.”

Natalie nodded. “I understand how you feel. But it happens that we have someone right here in California that I wish would take a stab at it.”

“Why?”

“Because I think he’s a good man. It’s clear he really cares about the state and I think he cares just as much about the country,
too. I heard him speak at an AMA luncheon last month, and he was honest enough to tell us what a mess we’re in, and smart enough to show us exactly how he’d fix it.”

“What’s his name?” Karen asked. “If he runs, maybe I’ll vote for him.”

“Willmont,” Natalie replied. “Robert Drayton Willmont.”

O
n Thursday, October 24, Randy Neuburg squeezed his way past a throng of media representatives into Robert Willmont’s private office in the Old Senate Office Building, shutting it firmly behind him.

“It’s a zoo out there,” he exclaimed. “I’ve never seen so many reporters stuffed into one place before. How do you think they all knew it was today?”

Robert leaned back in his chair and grinned. “Mary Catherine told them.”

It was still the same boyish grin, but now it spread across a face that showed the erosion of middle age and the pressures of responsibility. “Handsome” had described him in his youth. At fifty-three, the more appropriate word was “distinguished.”

“Well, every single paper in the country must have sent someone hightailing it over here, not to mention all three networks and CNN,” Randy informed him. “They’ve just about finished with the lights. Are you ready?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”

They were brave words and bravely spoken, but Randy hadn’t served this man for thirteen years and learned nothing about him.
He knew that, behind the cool facade, the senator
had to be as nervous as he had ever been. Only halfway into his second six-year term, he was about to take the biggest gamble of his life.

As though he had read his aide’s mind, Robert sighed. Like a runaway horse on a slippery hill, he felt out of control. The slow, careful journey to the White House that he had plotted so many years ago had turned into a reckless dash. Somebody else was holding the reins—a group of somebody elses, actually, and he was helpless to do anything but hurtle and leap in whichever direction they chose.

“It’s too soon,” he had argued when the upstairs people approached him in the middle of summer. “My game plan was to finish up this term and then be in position for 1996.”

“Fuck your game plan,” they replied. “Now’s the time.”

“What if we can’t take him? I’m finished.”

“You can take him,” they said with easy assurance.

“But I promised my wife she’d be the first First Lady of the twenty-first century.”

“She’ll get over it.”

In fact, Elizabeth Willmont didn’t even seem to remember the promise. But then, with the little pink pills never far from reach, she sometimes didn’t seem to remember very much of anything. She regarded her husband’s consuming desire for the White House as the fulfillment of his dream, and focused all her attention on the fulfillment of her own.

Adam was eleven years old now, smart as a whip and as striking as his parents, with the flaming Avery hair and the extraordinary Drayton eyes.

“He has your cunning and my curiosity,” Elizabeth told her husband once, because she knew he was too busy to notice.

Mother and son went everywhere together—the zoo, the ballet, the Smithsonian.They hiked in Rock Creek Park and in Muir Woods,
graced the Drayton box at the San Francisco Opera, sailed Chesapeake Bay, and watched hang gliders swoop across the cliffs at Fort Funston.

“Would you like to try that?” she asked him once.

Adam, nine at the time, considered the kitelike figures and then shook his head. “It looks like fun,” he said, “but a kid could get killed doing that sort of thing.”

“What are you going to be when you grow up, young man?” his paternal grandmother asked him. The dowager socialite was past eighty and still hanging on.

“Useful,” the boy answered.

Elizabeth delighted in him. He entranced her as Robert once had and more than made up for his father’s frequent absences—absences she had long since ceased to care about.

“What would you say to closing out this century in the White House instead of starting the new one?” Robert asked her one late-August evening over dinner in Rock Creek Park.

“Whatever you think best,” she replied absently.

“God,” he exclaimed in disgust. “You’d think I was talking about buying a new car.”

Elizabeth glanced up. “Do we need one?”

Robert looked at the still beautiful but now indifferent woman across the table from him and wondered where the naive, adoring girl he had married had gone.

“Tell them it’s a go,” he instructed Randy the next day. “And let’s start testing the waters.”

Randy cleared his throat. “Uh, there’s something maybe we should talk about first.”

“Sure,” the senator replied. “Shoot.”

“Gary Hart,” the aide said.

“What about him? He was a damn fool who had a shot at the White House and shot himself in the foot instead.”

Randy leveled a look at his boss that said it all and the expression on Robert’s face suddenly darkened.

“You’re way out of line,” he snapped. “What I do on my own time is my own goddamn business.”

“In California, where you can do no wrong, maybe. But once you become a national candidate, what you do becomes everyone’s business,” Randy insisted. “And since you pay me
a lot of money to give you advice, maybe you ought to listen to some of it.”

The senator sighed. “All right, say it.”

The aide knew he would have to phrase his next words very carefully. “There are people out there who don’t know a thing about your extracurricular activities, and wouldn’t care if they did,” he said. “And there are people who do know but believe the things you stand for are more important than a minor transgression here and there.”

“I should hope so,” Robert interjected.

“But also out there are the Moral Righteous, who believe they were appointed by God to tell everyone else how to live. And sharing the ears of these paragons of virtue is the media, who don’t give a damn what you stand for or what you could do for the country or for the world. The polite days are gone, Senator. All that counts now is the story—the front-page, three-inch-head,
above-the-fold story.”

Unexpectedly, the senator chuckled. “And you want me to promise that I won’t give them the one they’re looking for?”

“A sizable group of folks have worked long and hard to get you to this point,” Randy replied bluntly. “You owe it to them—to
us
—and, yes, to the country—not to blow it.”

“Hart should have had you in his corner.”

The aide shrugged. “He misjudged both the press and the people. It was a blunder that no one, with the exception of the incumbent,
of course, wants to see you make.”

“None of that nonsense made any difference back in JFK’s time,” the senator said with a sigh. “Back then, people were able to separate what was important from what wasn’t.”

“That was thirty years ago,” Randy observed. “Things have changed since then, and you have to accept that.”

Robert was not stupid. He knew his dalliances were potentially dangerous for a politician, but he was still a man—a man with substantial needs and a wife who had lost all interest in satisfying them. It was a pity that the media were no longer as well-bred or as tolerant of the human condition as they had once been. It was going to make the next year very tedious.

“Okay, I hear you,” he said. “But there’s one thing I’m going to insist on, and I won’t compromise.”

“What’s that?” Randy asked, not sure he wanted to hear the answer.

“No Secret Service. I won’t have any official watchdogs monitoring my life—knowing what I eat for breakfast every morning,
where I keep my socks, when I take a crap.”

“What about protection?” his aide protested in panic. “You know what kind of nuts there are out there.”

“If you feel it’s necessary, we’ll hire a private firm, a discreet firm. One that will answer only to me, not to Washington.
I promise you I’ll be as good a boy as I can, but I’ll do it on my own terms.”

Randy sighed, knowing it was pointless to argue and reasoning that half a bargain was better than none. “All right. When it comes to it, we’ll decline the Secret Service. And I’ll have Mary Catherine start scouting around for the right private group.”

The senator smiled benignly. “Anything else?”

In answer, Randy placed a folder on the desk. “These are some of the areas the upstairs people have targeted,” he said. “I recommend we start testing the ones on the top page.”

Robert scanned the sheet. Locations in a dozen major political markets across the country jumped up at him.

“Looks good,” he remarked. As always, his aide was two steps ahead of him.

“I also recommend we hire a public relations firm to handle you.”

“Handle me?” Robert inquired, raising an eyebrow.

“You know, image builders,” explained Randy. “They do media strategies for politicians, all based on numbers and high-tech prestidigitation. They analyze a candidate and they figure out the best way to present him to the public.”

“I haven’t had any trouble with my image up to now,” Robert objected.

“Not in California, no,” Randy agreed. “But you’ve kept a low profile in Congress—making allies instead of enemies—
building your political base. That’s left you basically unknown across the country. So now we’re going to push your national awareness up as high as we can, make you a household name.”

“I see your drift,” murmured the senator.

“I’ve done some research,” Randy continued, “and I think that Smoeller and Dobbs is our best bet. It’s a small firm, but dedicated,
with impeccable credentials.”

“They’re not the ones remaking Willie Smith, are they?”

“No,” Randy said emphatically. “We certainly don’t want any connection whatsoever with that debacle.”

“And I don’t want to be associated with those people who went around promoting the Kuwaiti incubator scam, either.”

“Absolutely not. Smoeller and Dobbs is a firm with a spotless reputation.”

The senator appraised his aide. “One of the smartest things I ever did was to take you on, wasn’t it?”

“The true test of any leader”—Randy grinned—”is whether he’s wise enough to surround himself with his equals. Speaking of which, Ms. Dobbs will be here at three o’clock.”

Mariah Dobbs was a no-nonsense lady who looked more like a
Playboy
centerfold than the successful businesswoman she was. She displayed a short skirt over long legs, a generous curve beneath her suit jacket, intelligent gray eyes behind oversize designer glasses, and a radiant mane of gold hair.

“Given enough access, enough money, and the right buttons to push,” she said at the start of their first meeting, “I can sell anything—or anyone—to anybody.”

“That sounds encouraging,” Robert replied, flashing his dazzling smile and feeling a familiar rise in his groin.

“If I agree to take you on, Senator, we’ll naturally be spending a considerable amount of time together,” Mariah said pleasantly.
“So I think we should have a clear understanding of our relationship right from the start.”

“Certainly,” Robert murmured, shifting ever so slightly in his seat.

“I keep my professional life totally separate and apart from my personal life,” the public relations expert declared. “Which means that the only portion of our anatomies that will interact will be our minds.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Robert demurred.

“On that basis,” she went on as though he hadn’t spoken, “I plan to study your persona, in depth, over the next few weeks,
familiarize myself with your political philosophy as well as your particular strengths and weaknesses, so that we’ll be better able to promote you. Off the top of my head, however, I’d say that since a significant part of your message appears to be quite liberal, it might be prudent if the rest of you came across as being fairly conservative. I recommend white shirts,
dark suits, traditional ties, keep your hair cut short, and skip the beach this summer.”

“I can handle that,” he said. I can handle you, too, he thought. There wasn’t a woman in the world he couldn’t have, if he wanted her. Some took a bit more persuasion than others, perhaps, but it was all part of the game. It would be no different with this one.

“People are going to know that you’re a rich boy,” the public relations executive continued, “but I want them to see that you’re
using
your wealth, not just enjoying it.”

“I hear you, Mariah.” He caressed the name.

“Dobbs,” she corrected. “Professionally, I prefer to be known as Dobbs.”

“All right, Dobbs,” Robert corrected himself.

“Also,” she added, refusing to be sidetracked, “trade the Lamborghini in for something more conservative. A Mercedes is okay,
if you’re fixated on European cars, but make it black. Red is fine for a playboy, but I don’t think that’s the image you really want to promote in Peoria.”

“Okay, the Countach goes,” Robert agreed, thinking she had certainly done her homework. The Italian sports car was kept at home, in the garage at Jackson Street, where he drove
it infrequently but flamboyantly, at a hundred and ten miles an hour down the treacherous Coast Highway.

“And whenever you go out socially, I recommend that you go with your wife, or with your wife and son. We want people to see you as a dedicated family man.”

The senator shot a look at his aide. “I
am
a dedicated family man,” he asserted.

“Yes, well, that’s all I’m prepared to say for now,” Mariah concluded. “I’ll go through the background material your staff has put together and touch base with you in a week or so with a more complete proposal.”