The Chosen One

THREE

Washington, DC, Monday March 20, 08.55

She watched as a packed Roosevelt Room rose to its feet, adults acting like schoolchildren, standing to attention at the sight of the man in charge. Everyone did that, wherever he went. She was almost used to it.

They were applauding him now, a room full of some of the most senior politicians in the country. Most were smiling wide, satisfied smiles. Sprinkled among them were a few faces she did not recognize. Women, though not dressed in the brightly coloured, tailored suits favoured by their Washington sisters. It took Maggie a moment to work out who they were. Of course. The victims. An occasion like this was not complete without victims.

She tried to sneak in discreetly, in the tail of the entourage, but still she caught the eye of Tara MacDonald, which registered surprise and irritation, noting that Maggie had entered the room with the President.

Crisply, as the applause was still subsiding, Stephen Baker began directing those in the first row to gather behind him. Knowing the drill, they formed a semi-circle, standing as he sat at the desk. Maggie identified the key players: majority and minority leaders from the Senate, whips and committee chairs from the House, along with the two lead sponsors of the bill from both chambers. Closest to him was Bradford Williams, solemn and distinguished: the former congressman whose selection to be the first African-American vice president had been notched up as yet another one of Stephen Baker’s historic breakthroughs.

‘My fellow Americans,’ the President began, setting off the loud clatter of two hundred cameras, a pandemonium of motors and bulbs. ‘Today we gather to see the new Violence Against Women Act signed into law. I’m proud to sign it. I’m proud to be here with the men and women who voted for it. Above all, I’m proud to be at the side of those women whose courage in speaking out made this law happen. Without their honesty, without their bravery, America would not have acted. But today we act.’

There was more applause. Maggie smiled to herself as she noticed there was not so much as a note on the table, let alone a fully-scripted speech. The President was speaking off the top of his head.

‘We act for women like Donna Moreno, whose husband beat her so badly she was hospitalized for two months. We act for women like Christine Swenson, who had to fight seven years of police indifference before she could see the man who raped her convicted and jailed. They are both here in the White House today – and we welcome them. But we act for those who are not here.’

Maggie glanced at the people she had joined, lined up against the far wall nearest the door, the traditional zone occupied by the senior aides to the President. It was a curious bit of choreography. On the one hand, it signalled their status as mere staff, serving at the pleasure of the President. They stood like butlers, hovering several paces away from the dining table, awaiting instructions. Everyone else was allowed to sit: even the press corps.

And yet, to be among this group was a mark of the highest possible status in Washington. It said you were close to the President, even one of the indispensables who needed to be ‘in the room’. While the invited guests sat bolt upright, their suits pressed and their hair fixed for their big day at the White House, the staffers slumped against the wall, their ties loose, as if this were no more than another day at the office. Maggie looked at the Press Secretary, Doug Sanchez, young and good-looking enough to have caught the interest of the celeb magazines: he had his head down, barely paying attention to proceedings, scrolling instead through a message on his iPhone. Aware he was being watched, he looked up and smiled at Maggie, nodding in the direction of the President and then back at her, with a lascivious raise of the eyebrows. Translation: I saw you and him arrive together . . .

‘For the women who have been attacked and not believed, even by the law-enforcement officers who should have protected them,’ the President was saying now. ‘For the wives who have been made prisoners in their own home. For the daughters who have had to fear their own fathers. Each of them is a heroine and – from today – they will have the law on their side.’

More applause as President Stephen Baker reached for the first of a set of pens fanned out on the desk before him. He signed his name, then reached for another pen to date the document, then several more to initial each page.

‘There,’ he said. ‘It’s done.’

The guests were on their feet again, the cameras clacking noisily. The President had come around in front of his desk to shake hands with those who had come to witness the moment. There were double-clasps with the congressional leaders, a hand placed on the forearm to convey extra warmth, hugs with the leaders of the key national women’s organizations and then a more hesitant, careful extension of the hand to the first of the ‘victims’ carefully selected by the White House Office of Public Engagement.

Suddenly the cameras began to whirr more insistently so that the room was lit by the strobe of a hundred flashbulbs. Several journalists were on their feet, craning to see over the photographers. Maggie could only just glimpse the source of their interest. Christine Swenson had placed her arms around the President’s shoulders and was resting her cheek on his chest. Tears flowed down her face. ‘Thank you,’ she was saying, over and over. ‘Thank you for believing me.’

‘If that isn’t leading Katie Couric tonight, I’m David Duke.’ It was Tara MacDonald, hardly glancing up from her BlackBerry.

Maggie couldn’t take her eyes off Swenson, sobbing with gratitude. Only as an afterthought did she look at the President. He had placed his arm around the woman, enveloping her in a fatherly hug – even though he was at least a decade younger than she was.

Eventually the embrace broke up, the President handing Swenson a handkerchief so that she could dry her eyes.

Now he was handing a pen each to Donna, Christine and the congressional bigwigs. It was a White House tradition, one of dozens to have acquired the status of a religious rite: the President would sign a bill with multiple pens, so that he would have at least a dozen to present as souvenirs. Each one could be said to be ‘the very pen President Baker used to sign the . . .’

Aides were now beginning to nudge the President towards the lectern, to take questions from the press. He put out a restraining hand, signalling that he was not quite ready. He carried on speaking to the women who were huddled around him, one or two of them holding up camera-phones to get a snap of the man up close. He was standing, listening intently.

Maggie could hear the woman who had his attention.

‘. . . he took his belt off and began whipping my boy like he was a horse. What makes a man behave like that, Mr President? To his own son?’

The President shook his head in weary disbelief. Phil, the ‘body man’, placed his hand on Baker’s shoulder once again: the gesture that said, We really must wind this up. But the boss ignored him. Instead, he used his height to reach over the immediate circle of women who were surrounding him, searching for the hand of one of those who had held back. Maggie had noticed her already: unlike the others, she had been too shy to introduce herself. Ordinarily, those were the people who missed out; they never got their moment with the President. But Stephen Baker had noticed her, just as he always did.

It took Tara MacDonald to impose some discipline. She strode over to the huddle and addressed not the President but the women. ‘Ladies, if you could all take your seats,’ she said in the kind of commanding voice used to bringing hush to a church. ‘The President needs to take some questions.’

This was an innovation, one that Baker himself had insisted upon. Traditionally, presidents made themselves available to the press only rarely, doing occasional, set-piece press conferences. The rest of the time, reporters might try to hurl a question but it would usually die in the air, victim to the President’s selective deafness.

Baker promised to be different. If he did a public event, it would now end with a few minutes of light interrogation. The Washington punditocracy gave this fresh, transparent approach a life expectancy of about a fortnight: Baker would soon realize he’d made a rod for his own back and quit.

‘Terry, what you got?’

‘Mr President, congratulations on signing the Violence Against Women Act.’

‘Thanks.’ He flashed the wide signature smile.

‘But some people are saying this might be the first and last legislative achievement of the Baker presidency. This was the one thing you and Congress could agree on. After this, isn’t it going to be gridlock all the way?’

‘No, Terry, and I’ll tell you why.’

Maggie watched as the President went into a now-familiar riff, explaining that though his majorities in the House and Senate were narrow, there were plenty of people of goodwill who wanted to make progress for the sake of the American people.

He then took another question, this time on diplomatic efforts in the Middle East. Maggie felt a surge of anxiety, a leftover from the election campaign when it had been her job to make sure he didn’t stumble on the subject of foreign policy. No need for her to worry about that now.

Sanchez leaned in to say, ‘This will be the last question.’

Baker called on MSNBC.

‘Mr President, I’m sorry to come to a subject that might be awkward. Did you deceive the American people during the election campaign, by failing to reveal a key aspect of your own medical history – specifically the fact that you had once received treatment for a psychiatric disorder?’

FOUR

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.