The Last Debate Read online

  Henry clapped his hands together.

  Barbara said: “Amen, sister, praise the Lord.”

  “Olé, olé,” Henry said.

  “As the lawyers say, there is precedent for this,” Henry said. “Wood-ward and Bernstein. They didn’t sit by and let Richard Nixon screw the country.”

  Mike Howley said: “Please keep in mind they did what they did as reporters. What we’re talking about is a prime-time spectacular. Using our positions as journalists to publicly sandbag this guy in front of the whole world nine days before the election. We wouldn’t be acting as reporters. We’d be doing it as actors … assassins. The ultimate act by four ultimate New Arrogants.”

  “You’re not backing off, are you?” Henry asked.

  Howley replied: “I just want to make sure we all know what we’re talking about.”

  Joan said: “Look, we’ve gone this far. Let’s go a little further. Mike, you said you thought it really was possible for us to … I’m having trouble saying it … well, rig the debate so Meredith loses it. How? What could we do?”

  Mike Howley blew some air out of his mouth, settled back into his chair, and said to his three co-conspirators: “I don’t know really. I said that because I assumed we were smart enough to think of something or some lot of things. I had nothing specific in mind. Not really in mind. But let’s think. Let’s all think about it out loud.”

  But he said nothing out loud. Neither did anyone else. Barbara, Henry, and Joan were thinking. They were thinking, each in his and her own way, of something specific they might do to dictate a dramatic turn in the debate and the election.

  Finally Henry said: “Is anybody else hungry?”

  “ ‘How can you think of food at a time like this?’ is the famous line,” Barbara said.

  “Line from what?” Henry said.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  Mike Howley said: “The first thing, and the obvious thing, would be to make sure Greene knew in advance every question we were going to ask and the order in which they were going to be asked. He could get ready for the right things, which would certainly give him an advantage.”

  “How would we get them to him?” Henry asked.

  Mike Howley answered: “Come on, Henry, just think about it. We’d get it to him the same way people get things to us. We would leak it. One of us would tell somebody, who would tell somebody else, who would get it to somebody in the Greene campaign. Secrets flow uphill as well as downhill. It’s just seldom done that way.”

  “I read somewhere that the Nixon people believed with all of their heart and soul that the press panel in the first Kennedy-Nixon debate set Nixon up or got the questions in advance to Kennedy—something like that,” Joan said.

  “Now think about that as God’s work,” Barbara said. “Can you think of a better thing to do for democracy than to have tried to keep Richard Milhous Nixon out of the White House? We are confronted with an equally glorious opportunity to help our country, our people.”

  “I can’t even imagine our country without Richard Nixon,” Howley said.

  Barbara said: “My roommate works in the Greene campaign. She’s here in Williamsburg somewhere. It would be an easy go to get her the questions.”

  “We haven’t even talked about our questions yet!” Henry said.

  “As a practical matter,” Joan said, “I’m not sure giving the questions to Greene would do that much good.”

  “He’d figure out a way to blow it anyhow,” Henry said.

  “What if we leaked a phony set of questions to Meredith at the same time?” Barbara said. “He’d spend his time and worries on the wrong ones.…”

  Howley said: “Whatever we do, if we do anything, we had better decide on it pretty soon.”

  “I wish you hadn’t mentioned food a while ago, Henry,” Barbara said. “You made me hungry for a grilled-cheese sandwich. When I get nervous I always want a grilled-cheese sandwich.”

  “Vegetable soup and mashed potatoes are my nervous food,” Joan said. “I had them the night before my twins were born.”

  “A bean burrito unlike anything you can get in any restaurant is what I always want when I’m tight but can never have unless I am at my mama’s café,” Henry said.

  It was Mike Howley’s turn to identify his nervous food. “It used to be nonfilter Camels and a gin martini straight up. Now it’s a lean-meat hamburger all-the-way and a caffeine-free Diet Pepsi usually. Something like that.”

  With great energy and relief each grabbed a menu to see if what they needed was on it.

  Henry, who handled the phone job of placing the orders, was the only one who did not come close to getting the nervous food he wanted. No burritos, no Tex-Mex food of any kind, fit Colonial Williamsburg’s eighteenth-century culinary decor. So he got something called The Tazewell Club, which was a regular turkey club sandwich on something called Sally Lunn bread. He figured Sally Lunn must have been somebody special to have had a bread named after her. He had always thought his mama’s burritos sold under the name of Mama Luisa’s would make it big.

  The room-service woman said the order would be there in fifteen minutes, if not sooner, and she did not lie. Two waiters, both young black men in white coats, and a supervisor, an older black man in a dark green blazer, were there with two rolling carts, smiles, and good cheer in just under thirteen minutes.

  Henry said something to them about the wonder of their speed and service.

  “You-all are the special people here today, I can tell you that,” said the supervisor. “Special to all of America, I guess.”

  “I guess,” said Henry.

  Barbara oh, so wished they had sent three white men or three Hispanic men or three anything but black men.

  “I’ll bet we could make a bundle if we knew what you-all were going to ask those two fellas tonight,” said the supervisor as the two waiters went about the work of laying out the food on the round table in the corner.

  “Probably so,” Mike said.

  One of the waiters came over to Barbara with a menu in his hand. “One of the chefs wondered if you-all would mind signing one of our menus for him,” he said.

  “Me? Just me?”

  “No, ma’am, all four of you is what he said. If that’s all right.”

  It was all right. He took the menu from Barbara and then to each of the others.

  “You’re the one on ABS, aren’t you?” the other waiter, also finished with his work, said to Joan.

  “Nope. CNS,” she replied.

  “I’m sorry,” said the waiter. She could tell he was absolutely mortified.

  “No problem,” she said. “People have trouble telling us TV people apart.” The words just came out. She looked immediately at Barbara, who was on the verge of breaking up.

  “Well, good luck,” said the waiter, clearly ready to break into a run for the door.

  His colleagues were not that ready to go. “I can’t even imagine what kind of pressure you-all have on you,” said the supervisor.

  “It goes with the territory,” Henry said, as if he were a pitcher in the seventh game of the World Series talking to a knothole gang meeting.

  The supervisor, still smiling, said to Joan: “You-all sure are tough on the president at those news conferences. Why is that?”

  “That’s our job.”

  “Yes, ma’am. But I don’t get all of that yelling. Why do those reporters do all of that yelling?”

  “You have to yell to be heard over all the noise.”

  “It seems to me like you-all are making the noise. I don’t think people ought to yell at a president. But that’s none of my business now, is it?”

  Barbara wanted to scream: Get out of here!

  “We’ll try to do better,” Joan said. “Thanks.”

  “Sorry to do so much talking. You-all are so busy. I can’t even begin to imagine the kind of pressure you-all have on you.”

  “You just said that,” Barbara said.

  “I
did, sorry. Those reporters at the White House are not only loud, they’re also kind of snide and nasty. I don’t think they should be that way to the president. But that’s none of my business either now, is it? Call us when you’re through eating and we’ll clear everything away.”

  Nobody said anything else and in a few seconds the two waiters and the supervisor were gone.

  “The voice of America,” Mike Howley said once the door was closed.

  “Not my America,” said Barbara.

  At first they talked about each of their meals and drinks and the two waiters and the supervisor. And about Pompous Perfect Mulvane’s “Open Letter to the Press Panelists” in the Post. As Jack and Jill had already pointed out to Joan and their TV audience, Mulvane had advised the panelists to ask simple, direct questions, to avoid exotic hypotheticals, and, most important, to remember the debate wasn’t about us, the press, it was about them, the candidates.

  That subject plus the simple passing of time and circumstance soon brought them right back to the crushing business at hand.

  The television set remained on, but Norman and Ross were long gone. The TV scene and noise had turned now to a stock-car race somewhere where the sun was shining and short sleeves were worn.

  And it was only a few minutes afterward that Mike Howley brought the conversation to another major turning point.

  “I’ve been thinking about one overriding truth involved in what we’re talking about doing,” he said. “I think we have to accept the fact that we can’t do it any other way than right out front. Directly, in front of the whole world with the whole world knowing from the beginning what we are doing. The idea of leaking some questions to Greene and then going out there acting like we’re playing it straight or whatnot simply will not work. Unless one of you has an idea for a way to do it covertly—covertly, yes, that’s the word I was looking for—I don’t see it. Forget a covert action. I do not believe it is possible. The only possible way is, like I said, direct, straight. We are throwing off our traditional roles as journalists and acting as Americans concerned for the future of our country, as the ultimate New Arrogants.”

  Henry put his Tazewell Club sandwich on Sally Lunn bread down on its plate.

  Joan dropped her spoon into her bowl of vegetable soup.

  Barbara, after swallowing a mouthful of her grilled-cheese sandwich, said again the magic word: “Jesus.”

  “I hadn’t thought it that far through,” Henry said.

  “I can’t believe it,” said Joan, “but neither had I.”

  “Oh my, oh my,” Barbara said.

  Howley said: “Maybe you-all can think of another way through our questions or whatever to do it on the sly, but I can’t. We could go out there and make fools of ourselves and not accomplish a damned thing, particularly not what we really want, which is …” He stopped.

  “You’re still having trouble saying it, aren’t you?” Joan said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I’m not,” Barbara said.

  Henry said: “I am now. Now that Mike has said what he said. I had this idea that maybe we could rig the thing in such a way as to cause Meredith to screw up and lose the election, but somehow nobody would ever know what we were up to. You know, that we sat around in here and figured it out.”

  “Well, I thought that, too,” Barbara said. “We all thought that.”

  “Well, we’ve gone this far,” said Joan. “Can you take it another scary step for us, Mike?”

  Howley had managed to eat only one good bite of his hamburger and two or three potato chips. He bit into the sandwich again and then slowly chewed and swallowed it and then took a sip of his Diet Pepsi.

  Then he said: “We could go directly at Meredith. ‘Sir, it has been widely suggested by members of the campaign staff of your opponent and others that when you were a student at the University of Colorado, you lived the life of a transvestite, that you had a homosexual experience with your roommate while at the same time having a heterosexual one with the wife of the head of the English Department, that you seriously considered moving as a couple with each of them to Nova Scotia so you could pursue your relationships and avoid military service during the Vietnam War. Is that true?’ ”

  “That would do it!” Henry said. “Good-bye, Talk Man Meredith! Hello, President Greene! Hello, America!”

  “Jesus,” Barbara said.

  “Jesus is right,” Joan said. “Where did you get that story? None of our people picked up anything like that about Meredith.”

  “Come on, come on,” said Mike Howley. “That’s not true. I just made that up to make the point.”

  “Too, too bad,” Barbara said.

  “Hello, President Meredith again,” Henry said. “Some story that would be. Some story.”

  “I made it up,” Mike said.

  “OK, OK,” Henry said.

  “So the real question is what are the real questions we really could throw at Meredith in order to do him in?” Joan said.

  Do him in. Do him in. Those were the words, the words of action and conspiracy.

  “Give us some of those zingers you’ve been talking about, Henry,” Barbara said.

  The other three listened while Henry read aloud from a sheet of paper.

  “Mr. Meredith, it has been widely reported that you believe the United States is a Christian nation. Does that mean Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and those of all other faiths are either not real Americans or some kind of second-class American?

  “Mr. Meredith, is the fact that you have no blacks or Hispanics in your campaign organization a signal of your interest in and regard for blacks and Hispanics?

  “Mr. Meredith, what kind of wall would you build along the Texas-Mexico border to keep out people who look like me? Brick, concrete—or barbed wire?”

  Howley said: “Good questions, Henry. Particularly the one about the wall.”

  “Yeah,” Barbara said.

  “But, with all due respect, Henry,” said Joan, “I don’t believe they will blow the lid off, so to speak. Most of that has already been gone over. He’s already been asked most of those questions in some form or other, and he’s managed to dodge and charm and lie his way around them. The American people, I am sorry to say, have sat there and watched and listened and read while he did it. But they still want him as president—if the new poll is right. They want a wall and a moratorium on immigration and all of the rest.”

  “The poll is right,” Howley said.

  “He’s manipulated the people,” Barbara said. “He’s in the same league with Koresh and Jones and those other cult fanatics, only he’s done it to more people—enough to elect him president.”

  For a few seconds the only sound was from the television. The stock-car race had now given way to a movie starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It seemed to Joan that there was always a movie on television starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

  “Maybe we should forget this whole thing,” Joan said. “Maybe the people really do know what they’re doing and supporting. Maybe the people have a right to ruin their country. That is democracy, isn’t it?”

  “We’re back where we started?” Henry asked.

  “No,” Barbara said. “Let’s see what we can think of. I had a question for Meredith about civil rights. The bastard really does not believe anybody should have them except white males. He really did say the other day that reverse discrimination is now the real racial and gender problem in this country. Can you believe that?”

  They could all believe that. But it clearly wasn’t enough. Not to throw the election. Not to do him in.

  “It would sure help if Greene was a better candidate,” Joan said. “His poll negatives are almost as bad as Meredith’s.”

  “Worse in some areas—like ‘leadership,’ ‘presidential-like,’ ‘bearing,’ ‘charisma,’ ‘breathing,’ ” Mike said.

  “We can’t give up,” Barbara said. “We’ve come a long way. Let’s not quit now.…”
r />   “I’m not sure I’m there yet about laying it out there at the beginning the way Mike said,” Henry said. “I think we are smart enough to do it and not leave any fingerprints.”

  “I disagree,” Mike Howley said.

  Henry told me his mouth moved into shape to say Yes, sir, but the words did not come.

  “Look,” Joan said. “I had sketched out a jugular one for Meredith. Let me read it.” She looked down at some papers in front of her. “Mr. Meredith, there is a growing consensus in the country about three things. One, that you are going to be elected president. Two, that you will have done so by dividing the American people into their most self-interested groups, by appealing to their worst sides, to their fears and loathings, to what separates them one from the other. Three, that as president you will govern the nation in that same way. What is your comment?”

  Barbara clapped. Henry signaled a thumbs-up.

  “Right, right on!” Barbara said.

  “Now we are talking,” Henry said. “Olé, olé, gringo anchorwoman!”

  Mike Howley said: “I’d give you an A for content, D-minus for length.”

  Joan shook her head. “Thanks, one and all. But is it enough? If we could depend on Greene to pick up on it and for all of us to jump in—”

  “Without appearing to be piling on,” Henry said.

  “That’s the way it’s going to look no matter what, but who cares?” Barbara said.

  Again, the other three turned toward Mike Howley. Again, he was the one they wanted to hear from.

  He had them now exactly where he wanted them.

  There was a knock on the door.

  Henry, once again, did the duty, holding a shsssh finger to his mouth and going to the door.

  It was the room-service supervisor, the guy in the green blazer. He was holding a huge round tray off to the left side of his head. “Surprise, ladies and gentlemen of the press! Surprise!” He took a ta-dah step into the room. “Hot-fudge sundaes for everyone!”

  “I don’t think we ordered anything like that,” Joan said rather meekly and quietly.