The Means (11 page)

21

Mason helps his three daughters into a separate car outside Blair House. Alexandra is twenty-two. She went to Harvard and is now at NYU Law School. Price is nineteen and at Harvard. Madison is sixteen and will remain in boarding school at St. George's in Rhode Island rather than move to DC. “You girls follow behind and we'll see you at the ceremony.” The three girls are close friends and almost never fight over clothes or the bathroom or anything at all. They know they're in the same foxhole together for life and they're the only three who can ever be in it and at a young age they understand how important that is.

Mason walks forward to another limousine, helps his wife, Evelyn, inside then sits beside her so they are in the rearmost seats facing forward. The car starts the short and ceremonious drive to pick up the outgoing president and First Lady at the White House.

As Mason's political career has advanced, Evelyn has also grown. Mason's not sure how, but she already seems like a First Lady now, as if she has a unique power source that doesn't rely on his office. She seems more independent than she used to.

“John and Betty have been so gracious through the transition. It will be nice to spend some time with them this afternoon,” says Evelyn.

Mason grunts.

“And they make such a handsome couple.”

“I'm not going to let this job age me the way it did him. You've seen his skin up close. Looks like he's made out of wax.”

“Mitchell, dear, please.” He and Evelyn have been romantically distant for years, but they're good partners. Evelyn is satisfied with what she gets out of the arrangement. While Mason isn't in love with her, he likes her just fine and has convinced himself that the duration of this fondness is something close enough to love.

He puts a hand on her knee to be playful. The curmudgeon who's really soft at heart, which is the best reality of him that she can hope for and the one she's decided for herself is true. “Well, it does look a bit that way,” he says.

In addition to the two family limousines, six other cars flank them. They drive through the gates and around to a stop at the front of the house, a route almost never used on other occasions. Mitchell and Evelyn Mason step out of the limo and start up the steps of the White House.

John Hammermill opens the door as the Masons approach and he and Betty step outside so the warm greeting can be on view for the world. Mason looks over Hammermill's shoulder and through the open doorway. Later in the day the house will be his.

Mason thinks of this father and how much his father wanted this for himself. Mason makes a long inhale through his nose and lifts his chin. He is happy and what makes him happy is not that his father would have been proud of him but that his father would have been jealous of him.

There are people in DC whose profession is White House transition. These people find other work during the term, but with every new president, they manage the changeover. The Masons' furniture and personal effects are already arranged and waiting to be moved inside today.

Taking a page from Bush 43, Mason asked his wife to design the rug for the Oval Office that each new president brings. She chose a pattern of swirling red, white, and blue that is inspired by a Calder tapestry she had bought years before. Mason can't stand it but says nothing.

“Evelyn, Mitchell, it's wonderful to see you both,” says Hammermill from a few steps away, again taking the initiative of the moment. Mason is still smarting from feeling like the junior man in the room with Hammermill the night before.

Mason's eyes move from the interior of the house to Hammermill. “Good to see you, John. Betty.” The couples exchange handshakes and kisses on the cheeks.

“Mitchell, I can't tell you how happy I am to hand over the keys.” Hammermill means it. Eight years was enough. “You'll make a fine president.” This is imperceptibly less sincere.

“Thank you, John.”

“Of course, feel free to call on me at any time.”

“I'm certain I'll want to do that.” Some urgent matters in Tierra del Fuego.

“Evelyn,” says Betty, “if you ever have any questions, or just want to talk, I'm always here.”

The wives start a conversation of their own and Mason say to Hammermill, “You did it with class, John.”

This is something Hammermill has thought about before and he offers his conclusion. “Mitchell, for most leaders, leaders of any kind, success is the real measure. Every elite coach in sports is a known prick. Steve Jobs was not only a prick, he was a nut. If you're not in public service, all of that stuff is considered part of your genius. Only politicians are expected to succeed with class. The other stuff creates a scandal you need to deal with. It's an inappropriate standard for a political leader to have to do more than just succeed. It's shame you'll have to deal with it.”

Mason thinks, He's calling me a prick. Or a nut.

Hammermill goes on. “The public requires a certain amount of class for their consumption. All that really means is that you need to avoid the big scandals and to be an effective leader.” Hammermill smiles. “My feeling is that even if you are a prick, we need you on that wall, but the public won't get behind that. So you need to be careful.”

“I see you're less careful about that now.”

Hammermill appreciates that his point has gotten across. “Ex-­presidents have all the fun.”

The conversation is out of the earshot of media and the four of them know this is just an exchange for show. They could lip-sync or recite Shakespeare to the same effect. In unison they determine when enough is enough and as if hearing a silent whistle announcing halftime, they disengage conversation and make a synchronized turn to the car.

The women do the talking during the drive with politely timed laughter from the men. They take twelve minutes for the three-minute drive to the Capitol. The route is lined with gates and onlookers.

Since Reagan in 1981, the ceremony is typically held on the West Front of the Capitol. This location offers more of a stadium effect and looks over the Mall, rather than the East Portico where it used to be held, which overlooks a parking lot.

Mason looks at the crowd from the platform. Hundreds of thousands of people. He doesn't see faces, just a mash of colors and dots like the kind of pictures that if you stare at them long enough are supposed to take the shape of something in your mind. He knows the roofs are lined with snipers and the crowd is mixed with agents undercover. Thousands are on the ground to protect him but he doesn't think about security. Terrorism has been on the wane and the country seems happy and behind him.

Secret Service agents in suits stand at the perimeter of the platform. His wife stands on his left, his three daughters on his right. Mason keeps his feet planted and pointed toward the masses and rotates his shoulders to look at the temporary stands built behind him. He sees the Hammermills seated in the front row like parents at a school play while the country's governing class sits behind them.

He rotates back around and sees Marine One with motionless propellers, waiting on the lawn to lift Hammermill away to Andrews Air Force Base.

His eyes come to rest on Roberts, who approaches and places a closed Bible in Evelyn's hands. Roberts begins the swearing-in and Mason is moved by the moment more than he expected to be. He has never felt like a small thing in the universe. He always feels important within any scale, but at this moment he is distracted by a sense of history, the knowledge that he is a link in a chain connecting history to the future. He thinks of all the lives given in war to deliver this moment and of all the lives he may have to sacrifice to preserve the capacity for this kind of moment.

In this singularly humbling instance of his life, he has a flash of doubt about his abilities, his compass, his resolve to overcome adversity and be great. A moment of buyer's remorse, driving off the lot having spent all his money on the fancy sports car.

“. . . preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” finishes Mason.

Roberts nods. He shakes Mason's hand. “Congratulations, Mr. President,” he says with no smile but not in a rude way either.

“Thank you, John.”

Mason steps to the podium and a roaring crowd. He doesn't want to talk yet. He wants to let the noise come to him. He's comforted by the breeze of it as though opening the door of an air-conditioned store from a hot day.

He begins his speech by being gracious to Hammermill, who is enormously popular and of the same party. He needs to set up what will be the major challenges ahead so that it doesn't appear that his chief aim is not to screw up all the good work that was done before him, but he needs to do this in a way that is not critical of Hammermill. Domestically, he picks education reform where US global standing has continued a decades-long slow decline, and green energy which has been slow in coming for decades. With regard to foreign policy, he stresses a need for a stern but diplomatic approach to bring stability to the Middle East. This will eliminate terrorism by eliminating the breeding grounds for terrorists, in the same way one eliminates mosquitoes by eliminating the standing water of swampy areas.

The speech is plain but fine and is met with approval because the moment is met with approval. The country seems headed in a good direction and Mason is in the honeymoon of his relationship with the people.

From his inauguration speech, Mason and his wife are then to attend a luncheon at the Capitol's Statuary Hall hosted by the Democratic Speaker of the House and the Republican Senate majority leader. From there to the parade which leads them to the reviewing stand to watch the festivities. Mitchell had thought Hammermill was planning to attend both events but Hammermill approaches Mitchell on the platform as things are breaking up to offer his thanks and parting words.

“Mitchell, good luck to you. I hope to be of good use to your administration, and remember my advice last night.” Hammermill winks, which is a gesture he rarely uses and saves for when he's feeling his most clever.

“Thank you, John. I'll be calling early and often.” Fuck you.

Hammermill's detail has clearly known of his plans for some time as his path to Marine One is already charted and secure. The agents assigned to him envelop him and his wife and they start for the helicopter. At the base of the mobile staircase by the side of the helicopter stands a line of about a dozen servicemen from different branches of the military in dress uniform and at attention as Hammermill and his wife pass by and climb the stairs. The crowd cheers him on as he begins his last trip in the equipment of the chief executive.

At the last stair he looks back to the platform and Mason. It's a look that Mason thinks is saying, Communications director.

“Shit,” mumbles Mason out loud. He thinks that these days if you don't want a person to know something bad about you, you actually have to be a good person.

“Dear?”

He takes her hand and gives a squeeze. “There goes a good man.”

She gives a squeeze back and places her other arm across his chest in a quarter hug. “Takes one to know one, dear.”

22

Mason had started the day on the Lifecycle in his bedroom from 7:00 to 7:45 a.m., which is how he starts every day.

He's in the Oval Office, where he's had a new fifty-two-inch TV screen mounted on the wall and is flipping between cable news channels. He's on GEAR when Ron Stark walks into the office.

“Can't anyone stop GEAR? Those bastards are going to be the death of me.” He turns down the volume on a report about a quarter of robust job growth in India. “CNN is a snore. 24 says all things I agree with which is wonderful but not interesting. Someone besides GEAR needs to do this in a way that is fucking interesting.”

“Sir, you shouldn't bother to watch all this stuff.”

“It's the pulse of the nation, Ron. I need to be in touch with what the people are watching.”

“Let someone on staff summarize it for you. We can give you a daily report of cable news, by channel. Or five times daily. Whatever you want, but I think it would be a good idea to pull away from it a little.” The people who see the president in his office are surprised to find that he keeps the news on low volume at all times. Meetings with him are punctuated by his outbursts in response to reporting. This is particularly unsettling to generals who came to discuss military strategy. The channel is turned to GEAR most of the day, which also generates the most outbursts. Stark and other staffers have tried to dissuade the president from cable news.

“It's not the same, Ron. You know it's not. I can't get it from some report. I need to see what the people are seeing.”

“Only a sliver of the population watches cable news.”

“Cable sets the tone for the blogs, for print, for every kitchen conversation. It starts here.” He points to the TV.

“Sir, you're a news maker, not a news consumer. Let them respond to you, not the other way around.” This is as bold as Stark has been on the topic by far, but he's getting fed up and concerned.

Mason ignores the remark. He's seated behind his massive desk in a half recline with a tie and no jacket. His arm is flopped across the desk with fingers loosely around the remote as though offering it to the TV. Stark is at attention in front of the desk in a charcoal suit. Mason flips to UBS-24. “Have you seen this hot new gal on 24? Samantha Davis?”

Stark turns to the TV as though hearing an order he knows is immoral but must be obeyed. He has not seen her before and is impressed right away. Samantha Davis is doing a walk-and-talk interview along the wall of the Vietnam Memorial with Senator Paul Schmidt, who is head of the Foreign Relations Committee. Cam Ranh Bay is in the news again. Schmidt would look like her father except Samantha doesn't pro­ject daughter. She projects peer, though she's far more pleasing to look at than the old senator. “That should help their ratings.”

“Absolutely.”

“Don't even think about it, Mitchell.” He still uses the name when they're alone and especially when they're alone talking about women.

“I wasn't thinking about it.”

“Yes, you were.”

“Not in a practical sense,” Mitchell says, sounding disappointed in himself.

“Good.”

“Ron, on that score”—he mutes the TV—“we need to keep things just to Susan.” Susan Fitzgerald had been appointed communications director just after Mitchell's inauguration the month prior. “Anything more is too risky so I want you to keep women away. Just keep the young women away, I mean. You need to protect me.” He looks hard at Ron. “I'm serious. I don't want to have to deal with the temptation. Don't let any young, attractive women near me. Except Susan.”

“I think that's a good idea, sir,” says Ron, feeling like he's had the first bit of good news in a month. “I'll see to it.”

Ron steps forward and places a binder on the president's desk. It contains about fifty pages. The first two are an agenda for the day, broken into quarter-hour increments. The rest of the pages are summary information and copies of press clippings to inform the president on each of his meetings. Sometimes the president skims the binder the night before, sometimes he doesn't get around to it.

The first meeting each day is at 8:30 a.m. and is with “staff,” which typically includes Chief of Staff Ron Stark, White House Press Secretary Ted Knowles, Senior White House Advisor Armando Gomez, and Communications Director Susan Fitzgerald.

Ted Knowles is five eight and skinny with glasses and is just as smart and geeky as he looks. He always stands to his full height with a rigid back the way tall people never do. But he's the sort of geek who embraces his geekiness with good humor and so is liked by both geeks and nongeeks. He had been a politics beat journalist for the
Washington Post
, where he won the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency during the Hammermill administration. He has a wife, no kids, and is devoted to politics. Many, including Ted himself, anticipated he would rise to be editor of the paper but for reasons unknown to him, his upward climb stalled. He leveled off at politics beat journalist, though an award-winning and well-liked one.

Presidents tend to choose their press secretary from the press. Mason thought Ted's nonthreatening manner and likability would play well. Mason had also heard from Stark that the little geek had managed a number of affairs with younger women and both Stark and Mason felt it was safer to take a person like that in as an intimate.

Armando Gomez, prior to the call from Mason, was CFO for Goldman Sachs and has a net worth of two hundred million dollars, making Mason the second-richest man in the room. Gomez was raised in Brooklyn with very little money and managed scholarships for most of his education, then worked his way up at Goldman as an investment banker. He's fifty-two with young-looking skin and hair as black as ink. He's six feet and trim and feels that suits off the rack cannot flatter his trimness well enough, so all shirts and suits are made by Saint Laurie Merchant Tailors on Thirty-Second Street in Manhattan, where he's gone since before he could afford to. He's the kind of man that both Democrats and Republicans want to claim can be the product of their policy. For Mason, he checks two boxes. First, he's Hispanic. Second, he's a Democrat capitalist success story, which undermines the critics of liberal economic policy.

Despite the fancier clothes, Gomez is only a few decades removed from the younger Armando Gomez who fought on Brooklyn street corners, broke into restaurants overnight to steal food, and dealt marijuana and cocaine his last two years of high school, right up to the day his scholarship letter from Columbia arrived in the mail.

He's tough and opinionated. His background made him what he is without making him angry. Mason, he could take or leave. He accepted the position because the office of the president called upon him and he knows America is the only country where he could have gone from dealing on the street to two hundred million in personal assets as the CFO of the most prestigious bank in the world. His advice is good and unafraid, but he's not treated as an intimate.

Susan Fitzgerald is thirty-eight with blond hair and green eyes. She's not beautiful but is nice-looking and can make herself up to look close to beautiful and so she seeks affirmations of beauty from others by dressing in a seductive way and then is just good-looking enough to attract attention from the wrong sort. A man like Mitchell Mason, who has affairs.

She was a theater major at Vassar. After one year serving coffee in the West Village and failing auditions all over Manhattan, she took a job with a PR firm. She is five ten, which always made her feel awkward until she was thirty-four and met Mason for the first time in his office in Albany. He loved her height and coaxed an assuredness from her that theater directors had failed to do. She has a husband she likes and a five-year-old daughter she loves.

The affair with Mason gives her power beyond Evelyn and puts her second only to Mason himself. She has full knowledge of this power which gives her a strength that she carries around the White House like a badge. Those who know of the affair are slightly less intimidated than those who only suspect. Those who know feel that as a matter of survival they have some leverage in the knowledge they could use to defend themselves. Those who suspect are left to fear a force of unknown strength.

Stark opens the side door and the staff walk in to their seats. Mason comes around from his desk to sit in a cushioned chair at the head of a pod of furniture around a square coffee table. Across from Mason is a sofa where Ted Knowles and Armando Gomez sit. To Mason's right, Ron Stark sits in a chair. To Mason's left, Susan Fitzgerald sits in a chair.

Stark runs the meeting. “Sir, you're in the White House all day. No travel.”

“I see that,” says Mason reviewing the binder. “Looks like a lot of glad-handing and Boy Scout visits today.”

“You have Edmund Tasker at two p.m.” Tasker is the billionaire chief executive of a luxury hotel empire founded by his father. He's been an acquaintance of Mason for decades and was a large campaign donor.

“Right. Remind me. He wants France or Italy?”

“I suspect he'll settle for ambassadorship of either one. He opened hotels in Paris and Rome in the last three years. It's in your binder.”

“I met Tasker about a month ago,” says Gomez, “at a dinner party in Rye. You know he drives a Volvo? About a twelve-year-old Volvo.”

“Isn't he worth a billion?” asks Ted Knowles.

“Five billion,” says Gomez. “I like it. Shows a guy doesn't have to surround himself with toys. He can still be down to earth.”

“Down to earth?” shouts Mason. “You think it's down to earth of him to drive a beat-up Volvo? A rich guy should drive a nice car. It's ostentatious for him to think he's great enough to permit himself that crappy car. He's making a statement just as much as if he were driving a Lamborghini. It's something in the extreme.” The president smiles. “You have a lot to learn about snobs, Armando. I know about them, I come from a long line of snobs.”

Coming from the streets of Brooklyn, Gomez is uncertain about snobs. He smiles while deciding and Stark gets them back on agenda.

“Italy and France are equally available. Both would require recalling one of Hammermill's men. Both have been in for about eight years and did little for your campaign. Easy transitions.”

“Fine. I'll flip a coin,” says Mason. Susan Fitzgerald laughs, finding the casualness with such power to be amusing.

“Otherwise, a light day, sir,” says Stark.

“Good.”

“Latest poll numbers have you at seventy-one percent approval,” Stark adds, no longer waiting for Mason to ask. “That's a great number.”

“It's down eight points from inauguration.”

“That's typical as the honeymoon period ends. We can lose another ten and you're still doing great.”

“We're not going to lose another ten damn points.”

“Obviously that's not the plan, sir. I'm only saying an approval in the low sixties is historically a good number.”

“Ron, don't underestimate the momentum of reputation.” Mason takes the tone of a teacher barely keeping his patience as he tries multiple ways to explain a thing to a kid who just won't get it. He always takes this tone in meetings though, the same way he takes the chair at the head of the table to show who's the senior man in the room. “A man is never as good as his good reputation and never as bad as his bad reputation. Momentum carries it farther in either given direction.”

Nobody in the room cares for this lecture, but they have to endure it. Only Stark could stop it by claiming a time constraint but this isn't the battle he wants to choose this morning.

Mason continues, “Take Lincoln. Revered now and beyond reproach. The Emancipator. Did he believe throughout his career that to free the slaves was a moral imperative and did he make that the keystone of his policy at great peril? No. Did he think it was a good thing? Sure. Was his timing expedient? Of course.” Mason turns his head in a half circle, making eye contact with Stark, Knowles, Gomez, and finally Fitzgerald. “Lincoln's presidency is as old as the founding of the Mormon church. In the same way, his presidency has developed a myth and mystery so that people can't penetrate to the raw facts, nor do they want to. People want religion.”

Mason's body language signals he's done and that he feels he's shared excellent wisdom. The staff is uncomfortable breaking the silence because they're so far off the agenda it seems impossible to speak without acknowledging the distance.

It's up to Stark, who actually forgives his boss and friend these moments. Mason's day is so jammed full of business with strangers that he needs these respites with his team to bullshit around a little. “Sir, momentum aside, we should accept now that this administration will see numbers in the sixties and fifties. And probably forties.”

“We don't have to accept anything, Ron. Steve Jobs didn't accept that the iPhone had to be the size of a shoebox. It's time to get on the move.” Mason also stands up. He steps behind Susan's chair then circles the staffers and goes back behind his desk and looks out the window with his hands on his hips. It's a pose that reminds him of a photograph of Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis and he likes to stand that way. “Susan and I have discussed an overseas tour.” He says her name while looking out the window so any eye contact with anyone is impossible. “I'm a month in office now and it's time. A two-week trip, starting in London. We'll make stops through Western Europe.” He turns from the window to the group. “And I want to make a stop in Pakistan. The American people need to see me there.”

It's a good plan, though the mention of Susan Fitzgerald felt gratuitous to everyone. Stark of course knows of the affair. Knowles has never been told but is certain of it. Gomez has sensed a flirtation but is still of the mind that there is no affair.