The Chosen One (4 page)

Washington, DC, Monday March 20, 09.24

There were perhaps two seconds of frozen silence as the question cut through the air, like a missile before impact.

Every head in the room swung around to look at Stephen Baker. His posture had remained the same, he had not collapsed in a heap, nor was he shaking his fist. But, Maggie saw, he was now gripping the lectern so tightly his knuckles had turned white. They matched the pallor spreading over his face as the blood drained from it.

He began to speak. ‘Like every other candidate for this office, I released a medical statement during the campaign. From my doctor. That statement included all the details he—’ Baker paused, looking down at the lectern as if searching for a script that wasn’t there. The pause, barely a second, seemed interminable. He looked up again. ‘All the details he deemed to be relevant. And I think now is the time to attend to the business of the American people.’ With that, he turned on his feet and headed for the door, a long snake of aides at his heels – leaving behind a loud chorus of ‘Mr President!’ bellowed by every reporter with a follow-up question.

The staff scattered in every direction. Goldstein, Maggie noticed, headed straight across the corridor towards the Oval Office; MacDonald and Sanchez went in the opposite direction, to the press room. En route to her own office, one of several bunched together next to the Press Secretary’s, she hesitated, standing in the doorway, looking in at those charged with handling the media: the scene was crazed, every person on a telephone, each one of them simultaneously hammering away at a computer. She could see MacDonald and Sanchez talking intensely: she lip-read Sanchez saying, ‘The trouble is, he looked like shit out there.’

Maggie felt both out of place and useless, like a sightseer at a fire station on full alert. With a start, she remembered her meeting with Magnus Longley that morning, his threat that her job hung by a thread. Soon she might indeed be no more than a sightseer here.

She turned to leave, taking one last glance at the TV screen. The Breaking News tag along the bottom conveyed a single, devastating sentence: ‘Source tells MSNBC: President Baker received psychiatric treatment for depression.’

No wonder Baker had turned the colour of ash. The word
psychiatric
reeked of political death. People might like to brag they were liberal and tolerant these days, but mental illness? Different story. Maybe if you were a celebrity, perched on Oprah’s sofa, admitting to a few years of therapy…But
psychiatric treatment
: that sounded like electrodes, rubber rooms and men in white coats. It was
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Besides, Stephen Baker was not a movie star who could weep a few confessional tears on daytime TV and make it go away. He was the President of the United States. Americans could tolerate all manner of weaknesses in each other – especially if they were accompanied by contrition and redemption – but not in a president. They needed their
president to be above all that, to be stronger than they were. Few men ever met that impossible standard. But a nation that looked to its leader to be a kind of tribal father never stopped expecting.

Voters would be rattled by this news, whoever was in the White House, Maggie knew that. But Stephen Baker had been lionized, ever since his campaign took off in the depths of the Iowa winter. Word had spread that, at last, a different kind of politician had arrived: one who really did seem to talk straight.

YouTube clips of him telling audiences what they didn’t want to hear became cult viewing. He told farmers outside Sioux Falls that ethanol subsidies would have to stop: growing corn to make oil made as much sense as distilling the finest whisky – then using it to clean out the drains. There had been some hecklers, but most of the crowd of farmers were slack-jawed. No candidate had ever dared to say such a thing, not to their face anyway. How come this guy wasn’t pandering to them like everyone else had?

‘I hate what you say, but it took some guts to come here and say it!’ shouted one woman, as wide as a truck, from the front row. Soon they were nodding and then they began applauding, more surprised by themselves than by the candidate standing before them. The three-minute video went viral.

Soon the press was writing up Baker as something more than a regular politician. He was a truth-teller, destined to lead the American people out of a dark moment in their history. The more overheated reporters became lyrical: ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man…’ What could have been an uncomfortable report in
The New Republic
, detailing some of the battles Governor Baker had fought, and the enemies he had made, in his home state of Washington concluded by quoting Jesus: ‘Only in his hometown…is a prophet without honour.’

Yet now he had been accused of failing to level with the nation. And instead of knocking back the charge, he had paled at the very words.

Maggie was stepping into her office when she saw Goldstein heading away from the Oval and towards the press area. No matter that he was way above her in the Washington food chain, Maggie regarded Stu as one of the few unambiguously friendly faces around here. They had whiled away many long hours on the plane during the campaign, talking while reporters tapped away at their keyboards, staffers dozed and Baker sat back, his iPod headphones jammed into his ears to prevent anyone attempting a conversation. She figured that if anyone knew the truth of the MSNBC story, it would be Goldstein – the man who’d been with Stephen Baker from the start.

She walked down the corridor so that she could meet him halfway, then cut to the chase. ‘We’re in the toilet, aren’t we?’ ‘Yup. Somewhere round the U-bend and heading underground.’ He carried on walking. Given his bulk, he was advancing at quite a speed.

‘Is it true?’

‘Tell you what, why don’t
you
go over to the Oval right now, poke your head round the door and say, “Mr President, is it true that you used to see a shrink ’cause you were about to throw yourself off Memorial Bridge?”’

‘They didn’t say anything about suicide.’

‘No, Maggie, they didn’t. But check Drudge in about thirty minutes. I bet that’s where they get to.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Jesus is right.’

‘How bad’s it going to be?’

‘Well, as people used to say back when Dick Nixon was using this place to turn the Constitution into confetti, it’s never the crime, it’s always the—’

‘—cover-up.’

‘Most folks won’t mind if the President’s
meshugge -
a real loony tune,’ he gasped, his breath too short to reach the end of his sentence. She could see crumbs embedded on his lapels. ‘Just so long as they knew about it before they pulled the lever.’

‘They’ll be angry he didn’t reveal it in the campaign.’

‘You betcha,’ he said bitterly.

She couldn’t tell whether Goldstein was irritated that something he’d long known had leaked – or whether he was disappointed that the President had kept a secret from him.

‘What’s he going to do?’

‘He wants to make a personal statement. Right away.’

‘Is that a good idea?’

‘Right now, Maggie, nothing about this is good.’

It came back to her then, the brief flap during the campaign over medical records. Mark Chester, Baker’s much older opponent, had refused to disclose his, issuing a terse ‘doctor’s summary’ instead. Most expected Baker to seize the moment and release his records in full, waving his clean bill of health in Chester’s face, each rosy-cheeked detail drawing an implicit contrast with the Republican’s pale and brief account. But he had done no such thing, choosing to issue a doctor’s summary of his own. Everyone gave Baker credit for that: he had shown compassion, sparing the embarrassment of the older man.

Now, standing in a corridor of the West Wing, Maggie wondered if they’d all been duped. She had never considered that Baker might have taken the chance to avoid full disclosure not to play nice with Chester – but to cover up his own embarrassments. But it was what everyone would be thinking now. MSNBC would either have to be flat-out wrong – which would rank as one of the major journalistic
blunders of modern times – or Stephen Baker would have to come up with a damn good explanation for why he hadn’t told the truth.

She headed back to her office, sat at the computer and tried to focus on drafting an options paper on Sudan. That was what she was here to do; that was what
he
had asked her to do in a conversation that already seemed to belong to a different era. But now she understood why people always said that the White House could only deal with one crisis at a time. You were too distracted to think of anything else.

She clicked on the TV. All channels were now on the MSNBC story. CNN was interviewing a man claiming to be an expert on depression.

The blogs were obsessed. She went to Andrew Sullivan.

This could be a defining moment for the republic. Mental illness is one of the last great taboos, a subject kept in the dark. And yet one in three Americans is affected by it. Stephen Baker should be brave, tell the truth and call for an end to prejudice.

She next went rightward, to The Corner.

Normally it takes at least a few years for a Democratic politician to start falling apart. Credit to Baker for speeding up the process. Now all he needs to do is show similar alacrity and fast-track his deficit-reduction plan.

Over at the liberal Daily Kos she detected definite anxiety:

MSNBC is so far citing just one unnamed source. They’d better have proof.

She glanced up at the TV; still no more news. Time seemed to have slowed to a crawl. Her mind was wandering, something in recent weeks she had been working very hard to avoid. She was back on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, replaying the conversation with Uri in her head. As the memory unspooled, she felt the melancholy creeping back inside her, like a vapour entering her lungs. To push it out and away, she reached for the Sudan file: maybe that bulging box of memoranda and cables, all classified, would help her tell the President what he needed to do. And distract her from herself.

The TV announced a news alert. The network that had broken the story now confirmed that it had documentary evidence of Stephen Baker’s past treatment for depression. ‘MSNBC is satisfied these papers are genuine,’ the anchor declared with the portentous baritone Maggie guessed was usually reserved for presidential assassinations.

So it was true. Maggie sat back in her chair. Until now, she realized, she had held back her reaction, unsure what, exactly, she was meant to be reacting to. Now she no longer had that excuse.

She wanted to be like that blogger, full of compassion and apparently unfazed by the prospect of a president with a history of mental illness. She knew that should be her attitude, too, just as she knew she should eat organic food. But she couldn’t quite persuade herself to feel it.

Besides, she had the same attitude as the ‘folks’ Stuart had talked about. It wasn’t the crime – being depressed was surely no crime – it was the cover-up. If medical disclosure meant anything, it should have meant levelling with the electorate.

But that wasn’t quite it, either. Maggie knew it would have been risky, verging on suicidal, for a candidate to start blubbering about his time on the psychiatrist’s couch in the
middle of a presidential election – especially when his opponent had allowed him to skip the details. She knew why he hadn’t been able to come clean with the voters. But that didn’t soothe the nagging sensation she felt somewhere between her brain and her gut. For a fleeting second, the sensation formed itself into a sentence: he should have come clean with
her
.

She tried to push the feeling away, clicking again on the refresh button on
The New York Times
website, not taking in a word she read. It was, she knew, ridiculous to regard this as a personal betrayal. There had been many people far more senior than her on the campaign team; Stephen Baker was under no obligation to share the stories of his past with her. He had told her no lies. It was not as if she had ever asked the question.

And yet the nagging feeling was still there. She had jacked in her job and gone to work for him nearly eighteen months ago, in those days when his staff could fit into a minivan and the pundits said he might be a realistic prospect in the presidential cycle after next. They had run up tens of thousands of air miles together. She had eaten in his home, played with his son and daughter and chatted with his wife. She had put her faith in him. And so had the country.

The Breaking News ident was flashing again on the TV. Maggie reached for the volume control. ‘This word just into us here at CNN: the President is to make an emergency statement.’

At Sanchez’s invitation, she watched it in the press room, fighting hard not to put her hands to her face and peer through splayed fingers, the way she used to watch teatime science fiction as a child.

‘My fellow Americans,’ he began, his voice steady, his face calm and businesslike. ‘I am not here to deny what you heard
today. I am here to tell you what happened. With the frankness and candour that I should have shown earlier.

‘Long ago, in my early twenties, I hit a difficult patch in my life. I have not spoken about it before because the source of my unhappiness involved another person.

‘As you know, my mother died a few months back – in the very last week of the campaign, as it happens – so perhaps now it can be told. Though even now, as I brace myself to say these words, I tremble at the thought that I might be dishonouring her memory. But you need to hear the truth.

‘When I was a teenager, I suspected my mother was an alcoholic. It took me some time to reach that conclusion. When you’re thirteen years old and your mother sinks some vodka into her orange juice at breakfast, you don’t always notice. And if you do notice, you don’t always know that that’s not normal. That that’s not how all moms behave. But by the time I was in college, I knew for certain.

‘Once I was making my own way in the world, this knowledge began to eat away at me. Was I fated to follow in her path? To stumble the way she had stumbled? Would I too become an addict of alcohol?

‘I was laid low by these thoughts. And, yes, eventually I sought professional help. The help of a psychiatrist, among other folks. I wanted to know if my destiny had already been determined, if it was written in my genes.

‘Eventually I came out of what the poets call this “slough of despond”. But it was not the doctors who lifted me from that dark place. My mother, on hearing that I had sought help, was shaken out of her own disease. You might say it was a wake-up call. She woke up, joined AA and got sober. When she died last October, she was proud to say that she had gone twenty-four years, eight months and nineteen days without a drink. It was a great achievement. I’m as proud of her for that as she was of me for getting to the brink of
the presidency. But it was private. And I chose to honour that.

‘Perhaps that was a mistake. But now I hope you understand. Why I needed the help in the first place and why I did not rush to tell you, the American people, all about it. I cannot know how you will react to this news. But I am taking the risk that you will respond as so many American families do when they are confronted with news that disappoints. With the generosity of spirit that made us – and makes us still – a great nation. Thank you.’

Maggie stood, staring, barely daring to breathe. In the silence, she heard the sound of a single pair of hands clapping. Then another and then several more, until there was loud, sustained applause. She was sure she heard Tara MacDonald give a single whoop.

Sanchez passed her his iPhone, already open at the Sullivan blog. She only had to read the first sentence:
Stephen Baker has just reminded the American people why they chose him to be their president last fall
.

‘OK, people,’ Tara yelled, silencing the last few claps of applause. ‘We’re not out of the woods yet. Fox and the others are going to be yakking all night about “the questions that still need to be answered”. We need to be ready.’ She shot a glare at Maggie and Sanchez standing together. ‘We don’t need to be talking to each other, we need to be talking to the American people. I want a list handed to me no more than ten minutes from now, giving the names of surrogates ready to be in front of a camera heaping praise on President Stephen Baker for being brave, for being honest and for being a devoted son. Any questions?’ She didn’t wait for a reply. ‘Good. Now get to it.’

Maggie decided to take the hint and leave, mouthing a thank you to Sanchez. Tara MacDonald was right to be cautious, but Maggie had lived in America long enough to
know that the public would like what they had seen. They would not turf out a new, young president for the crime of loving his mother and worrying about the inheritance she might have passed to her son.

She was right, too. The cable networks were kind, hosting discussions about whether alcoholism was hereditary and on the usefulness of therapy. For a few blessed hours, authors of books with titles like
Please Mommy, Stop
and
Talking Makes It Better
replaced the usual political talking heads. Almost all spoke with compassion for Stephen Baker, though Rush Limbaugh had apparently taken to his microphone an hour after the President’s personal statement to ask his listeners, ‘Do we really want a whack-job with his finger on the button?’

The consensus in the White House was that Baker had dodged a bullet. Indeed, the relief lasted all the way until the next day. Except in the Baker household. Where it was about to vanish in the cruellest way possible.