The Speechwriter (4 page)

5

LETTERS

O
ne Sunday night in February, Shelby, the governor's scheduler, called me at home to tell me I would be traveling with the governor on Monday to three small towns. These would not be a day's round of the usual press conferences, which would have taken place in the larger cities with bigger media markets, but a series of fifteen-­minute “talks” to local businesses. Each stop would involve a small crowd—as many as a hundred, as few as almost nobody—and two or three local journalists. The talk involved three bills the governor wanted to see passed in the legislature: one on drunk driving penalties, one on the amalgamation of two state agencies, and one on the state budget.

I was to get the day's schedule from Lewis, who would
explain my duties. These sounded complex: Motion to the governor “five minutes” when you have ten minutes before you have to leave. If you wait until you've got only five minutes, Lewis explained, it'll take him ten minutes to get away from the crowd, and when he finds out he's five minutes late he'll blame you. Remember, he said, you've got to be the bad guy. If someone's hogging the governor's attention, he doesn't want to be the one to break it off. You've got to step in and say something like “Governor, I'm so sorry, but we've really got to make the next appointment.” I was to shadow him, but not walk too closely, especially if there weren't very many people around him. Lewis said more than once, “He hates the entourage look.”

Was anyone traveling with us? It was just me, the governor, and a member of the security detail.

Richard Mitchell, the comptroller general, I learned, would be at each stop. Mitchell was one of the governor's allies. “But unfortunately,” Lewis said, “he won't be in the car with you.” I wondered what he meant by “unfortunately.”

On the way to the first event, the governor read the
Wall Street Journal
. When he was done, he folded it up and threw it into the backseat—that is, at me. I had heard that if you sat in the backseat when he was in the front, the governor would throw things at you. Not at you, exactly, just into the backseat. But he wasn't trying not to throw things at you, either. When he was working, staffers existed—physically, literally—only insofar as they could aid him. In one sense it was impossible not to admire the man's ability to fix his attention so exclusively on whatever he was doing. Still, it was unnerving to
realize that, to him, at that moment, you were a nonentity; you weren't.

This was the first of three days of these talks, and first days of anything usually went badly. The governor always needed a few practice runs before he was comfortable with what he was saying. He would thumb through the talking points and inevitably find something he disliked or some question unasked or unaddressed. When this happened he would ask the nearest staffer a question you couldn't answer. Silence was the worst possible response. It suggested to him that you were trying to make something up.

“What was the Second Injury Fund?”

“I don't know. But I'll call Stewart and find out.”

Having talked to Stewart—at that time deputy chief of staff for policy—you would try to tell the governor what the Second Injury Fund was, but he would ask another question you weren't able to answer, and soon the superfluity of your role as mediator would become apparent and he'd grab the phone from you. Stewart knew everything, and the governor depended on him a great deal, but for reasons I never quite grasped he never wanted to talk to Stewart directly unless he had to. Perhaps it made his dependence on his deputy too obvious.

The talks that day didn't go well. Not that the people hosting them cared. Owners of little stores and repair shops in small towns were happy to have the governor there and didn't care what he said. But I didn't have the knack for managing him. I couldn't bring myself to interrupt his conversations with “five minute” warnings, with the result that we left each
stop ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes behind schedule—which enraged him more each time.

He hadn't warmed to his talk yet. One of his points had to do with the difference between certain lawmakers' bold rhetoric on tax reform and their tendency to weaken reform legislation when given the chance. He wanted to say, “So we'll see if the juice was worth the squeeze,” meaning, I think, we'll see if it was worth counting on their stated intentions. The expression didn't precisely fit, and he made it worse by repeatedly reversing “juice” and “squeeze.” “We'll see if the squeeze was worth the juice.” Everyone listened respectfully, but I thought I saw two machinists exchange looks of perplexity.

Mitchell was there to talk about transparency in government. He believed, with some evidence, that state lawmakers were using parliamentary measures to hide unnecessary and, in some cases, unethical appropriations. He seemed to enjoy himself. At each stop he would draw a theme from the physical surroundings. The first stop was a warehouse in which the steel frames of small boats were built. “It's funny we're here where boats are made,” Mitchell began, with his characteristically warm smile, “because our ship of state is sinking in a sea of red ink.”

This was around the time when speculation about the governor's chances on a national ticket began to circulate. For a variety of reasons, most of them negative (he didn't have the liability of so-and-so; as a state rather than a federal officeholder he had no record on such-and-such), he was among those thought to be attractive vice presidential candidates.
“Are you interested in the vice presidency, Governor?” a reporter would ask, knowing he couldn't answer yes or no. Over the next several months he went through a series of responses. On this occasion he was experimenting with the unhappy analogy of being struck by lightning. “That's very flattering, but it's all just surreal,” he would say. “It's so unlikely. But if lightning does strike, I'd be lying if I said I'd hang up the phone.” Saying yes or no to a lightning strike didn't sound right. But at first he couldn't even get the lightning line right. “If that lightning bolt strikes,” he would say, or “If that lightning bolt falls in my direction,” or “If that ball of lightning ever does come my way.”

We were at the third stop, an establishment that sold high-end cookware, when my phone vibrated.

“Hey, it's Aaron.”

“We're in the middle of the event here,” I whispered.

“When it's over, tell the governor Jakie's calling for an investigation over the NGA thing.” “Jakie” was Jake Knotts, a state senator and a venomous critic of the governor.

“Investigation?”

“Yeah.”

“Investigation of what?”

“Just tell him it's about the NGA thing. He'll know what you mean.”

“It's funny we're here beside all these cooking pots,” Mitchell was saying, gesturing to a display of Dutch ovens.

“What's ‘the NGA thing'?” I whispered to Aaron.

“Just tell him Jakie's calling for an investigation over the NGA grant.”

“. . . this state has been cooking the books for a long time.”

“What NGA grant?”

“He'll know what you're talking about. Jakie's on the floor right now. It's already on the AP wire.”

“Knotts, calling for an investigation,” I repeated to Aaron. “About cooking the books.”

“No. About the NGA grant.”

“Sorry. NGA grant.”

When we got into the car, I said to the governor, “Aaron called a minute ago. Knotts is on the floor of the senate calling for an investigation.” Suddenly I couldn't recall why. All I could remember was that it wasn't about cooking the books.

“What's he want to investigate?”

“He—Aaron—seemed to think you'd know,” I lied.

“I don't know. I'm asking you. Why's Knotts calling for an investigation?”

“I don't know.”

“Okay,” the governor said fiercely, “you just told me somebody's saying there should be an investigation. Investigation of what? Of me? And you don't know why? I'm asking. You don't know?”

“It was in the middle of the press conference and I didn't get the details.”

“Okay, so you're going to tell me I'm being investigated, but you're not going to tell me why?”

“Oh! I know. The NGA grant.”

“What about the NGA grant?”

“Now that I don't know. Aaron said you'd know.”

“Again, I don't know. I'm asking you.”

This went on for three or four minutes. I wondered why he didn't just pick up his phone and call Aaron for the details, or tell me to. Later I would realize that he knew everything about it already and that this was his way of coping with distressing news. He wasn't trying to demean me, but when he was anxious, he needed somebody to berate, and you were nearby and a staffer you were that somebody. Being belittled was part of the job. It created a weird camaraderie among the staff: we would relay the latest episode and compare it to the “classic” ones of former times. “Nothing tops the time he lectured Lewis for getting the wrong burrito,” someone would say, and the stories would all be retold again.

The next morning in the office the air felt tense. When I arrived, the governor was already there, which was unusual. (Ordinarily he would arrive at ten or ten-thirty.) Aaron was walking up and down the governor's wing of the State House, from the press shop to the governor's office, pen and tablet in hand, as if he were waiting tables.

I gathered from Nat that the bustle had to do with Knotts's accusations. I read the reports from the AP and
The State
—the first I knew about any of it. A year before, the National Governors Association had had its annual meeting in Charleston. The governor had done a few fund-raisers to help offset the cost to the taxpayers, and that money included a $150,000 grant from the state. As it turned out, the funds raised had exceeded what was needed by a substantial figure. The governor had put the excess in the account
of Reform Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group he had founded a year before. Actually “group” is probably an exaggeration; as far as I know it was just a bank account and maybe a staffer and a laptop. The question was whether the money he raised for the NGA, which included governors from both parties, belonged to the state. If it didn't, he could presumably do whatever he wanted with the unspent portion. If it did, he was guilty of diverting state funds to what could almost be called his personal account, “a potentially serious offense,” wrote editorialists who didn't know whether or not it was serious.

Aaron had already put out a statement on the matter, but reporters were calling for more in the way of explanation and response. After a few months of listening to Aaron on the phone, I could tell when he felt at ease with the official position and when he didn't. When it was clear that we had the stronger argument, he sounded both warm and utterly self-confident—not an easy trick. But when our argument was in any way lacking, there was just a hint of uncertainty in his answers, a brittleness. His voice would go up an octave, and his phrasing became uncharacteristically bland and formulaic.

He was adept with reporters, with whom he communicated mainly by phone. He knew each one as a salesman knows his clients, and he always returned their calls. There were some he would treat tenderly, as if worried they might turn against him at some slight provocation; others he would hound into submission or shout at the way a baseball manager shouts at an umpire, not in order to change his mind
but to register a grievance in the hope of better treatment next time.

There were two or three reporters with whom he would contend as with an ornery sibling. Chief among these was Donald Hatfield of the AP. When Donald called, the two would almost immediately descend into an appalling verbal brawl over factual claims. A few reporters he thought mendacious or stupid. Some of these he would humor, owing to the prestige of their employers. His phone would ring, and, seeing the caller's number, he'd shout insults—“Oh, Cecil Sanderson, I don't want to talk to you, you bastard”—just before picking up the phone and saying, in a sunny, welcoming voice, “Governor's Office, this is Aaron. Oh hey, what's happening, Cecil?”

The reporter calling this morning was Barry Clarke of the
Post and Courier
. “He's the victim of his last conversation,” Aaron would say about him; he meant that Clarke took as fact whatever he'd been told by the person he'd spoken to before you. In this instance Clarke had spoken first to someone from an advocacy group who had said categorically that the governor had broken the law. By that morning our legal office could make a cogent argument that transferring the funds to a nonprofit was not illegal, yet Aaron could not shake Barry's confidence in the soundness of the storyline. The anguish in his voice was difficult to listen to.

“This is the end,” Nat said to me quietly. “This is it. We're done.”

Nat, I sensed, liked the feeling of impending collapse. But he was young, so an overmastering sense of irony kept him from earnestness of any kind.

“This is it, man,” he said. “Improper use of funds. We're done. Start sending out résumés.”

Mack turned from his computer screen. “You really think so?” It was the first thing Mack had said in a couple of days.

“This won't last past today,” I said. “You get impeached for taking money for yourself, not for ‘redirecting' it into some stupid nonprofit.”

“Except that ‘some stupid nonprofit' and the governor are the same thing,” Nat growled.

“Jakie's a sleazebag,” Mack said, turning back to his computer screen. “It doesn't matter what he says.” That was almost true. Jakie was a nefarious bigot and everybody knew it. You felt even he knew it. But he was also a state senator. Somebody turned on the television to watch the senate. One of the members was explaining that his bill would offer tax credits to anyone who refurbishes an abandoned rice mill. “There are so many of these ol' abandoned rice mills in my district,” the member was saying. “Wouldn't it be great to encourage businesses to use them, to make them look purdier [prettier]?” It was an open secret among lawmakers and State House staffers that the brother-in-law of the member introducing the bill was then wanting to start a business in an abandoned rice mill. Somebody had suggested the governor veto the bill and include the word “dizzy” in the veto letter. Dizzy was the brother-in-law's name.