The Last Debate Page 16

  Meredith said nothing. He kept his head down.

  Joan said: “I have another statement here from a woman named Isabelle Anne Mathews. She was working as a passenger service agent for USAir in Charlotte when you came to her gate to catch a flight to New York’s La Guardia Airport. She states you arrived a few minutes after the door had been closed, and the plane was about to leave the gangway—already retracted from the door of the plane. She says you demanded that she stop the plane so you could get aboard. When she refused, she claims you slammed your hard-edged leather briefcase against her legs. An airport security officer was called. You were detained but then released. Your comment, sir?”

  Meredith still did not raise his head.

  Joan said: “Here is a statement from a waitress in the restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in the Buckhead section of Atlanta. She claims you turned over a plate of food on the floor and stabbed the empty plate into her groin area because you said the food was not properly cooked. Your comment, sir?”

  Meredith was still neither looking nor talking.

  Joan was through. Mike Howley nodded to Henry Ramirez.

  Henry said: “The question, in summary, Mr. Meredith, is would you care to confirm or deny or comment in any way to the American people at this time on the apparent fact that you have a tendency toward violent behavior—”

  Henry did not finish the question because the force of the hatred and loathing that was in David Donald Meredith’s face and body stopped him. It leapt out of the television set like a crazed animal. Stand by. Here it comes.

  Meredith said: “How dare you question me, you … Mister … whoever you are, wherever you came from.”

  “Henry Ramirez is who I am, sir. My mother is named Luisa and she owns and operates her own café in Falfurrias, Texas. She and my father, who was a fruit picker, came to the United States from Mexico as illegal aliens forty-three years ago. They became American citizens and they are Americans. I, their son, am a native-born American who works for Continental Radio News. Now you know who I am and where I came from, sir.”

  Meredith took the bait solidly in his mouth and hooked himself to political death.

  He said to Henry in a manner soaked with contempt: “I already knew all I wanted to know about you and your kind, thank you.”

  “That I wouldn’t argue about,” said Henry. “When you looked down at me you saw only a little Mescan, I bet. A wetback, a spic, the very kind of person you do not want more of in this country. What right does he have to be here, to ask me—big-gringo-shot talk-man me—questions about anything? He probably even smells like grease and salsa and corn chips. That is what you knew about me. That is what you thought about me.”

  I could tell the reporters in the Virginia Room wanted to cheer again. But there wasn’t time. There wasn’t a way to make any noise, to interfere, to interrupt.

  Meredith said: “Tell us about the liquor and health violations that your mother has committed in that café of hers.”

  In the control room Turpin was the only one who spoke. Not everyone heard him, in fact, because his volume was so low. Those who could hear reported his words to be: “No, not that. Don’t bring that up. Not now. It’s too late for that. No, no, no.”

  “What do you want to know about them?” Henry said to Meredith. I was then only vaguely aware of how old this kid radio reporter from Texas was. But I was struck now with how well he was handling himself in an extremely difficult situation. I could not, sitting there in the Virginia Room at that moment, have imagined a more difficult one.

  Governor Paul L. Greene said: “This is getting nasty. Is this relevant to anything that matters?”

  Mike Howley ignored the duly nominated Democratic candidate for president of the United States and said to Meredith: “Did the Nelson and Associates detectives provide you that information about Henry Ramirez’s mother and her restaurant, Mr. Meredith?”

  “I don’t know.…”

  “Please do not tell us it is common knowledge,” Henry said.

  Howley gave Henry Ramirez a glance that any fair-minded and well-trained observer would have had to describe as intimidating. Shut up, Henry, it said. Howley said nothing to Henry, speaking instead to Meredith. He said: “Is there anything else about any of the four of us you would like to put on the table at this time?”

  Meredith waved him off with a flip of his right hand.

  “All right then. If we could continue—”

  Howley did not get to finish the sentence. Meredith looked up and right at him and said: “I know Joan Naylor’s sister had an abortion when she was sixteen. I know you come from a family of deadbeats, Howley. I know that! I know about your uncle’s bankruptcy! I know everything!”

  Here now was one of several turning points in the event. My careful and repeated watching of the videotape of what happened, augmented by intensive and extensive interviews with others, have convinced me that Meredith might have still survived if it had not been for what Howley engineered right then.

  Howley did not respond. And with his eyes and body language he kept the other three from doing so, too. The result was a terrible scene for Meredith. There he stood, his anger and rage virtually out of control, contrasted with the four reporters who were silent, calm, and under control. They were the ones of peace and serenity. The contrast and the silent moments that went with it were crushing to Meredith. I felt it watching. Others elsewhere said they felt the same way.

  What we all saw was the spectacle of Meredith’s face filling up and over with an unbearable, unmanageable hate. It seemed much longer, but by my clock, it was only six seconds before it all came out the top.

  Meredith screamed: “Enough! No more!” He sounded like a man with a sword, an arrow, a javelin, a butcher knife, in his chest.

  David Donald Meredith shook his right fist, first at Henry, then at Barbara and Joan, and then at Howley. “Each of you will be sorry for this. You will be tried and convicted and imprisoned for an act of revolution, the crime of illegally and immorally seeking to interfere with the legal process of a democratic presidential election. The trial might not be in a formal court but in the court of the American people, the court of public opinion. It will be done. I promise you. Each one of you. I promise that to your faces and to the faces of every person who is hearing and watching this anywhere in this country and in the world.” And he bowed his head.

  Nancy Dewey’s camera went immediately to Mike Howley. I detected—others told me they did, too—a hankering in Howley to respond, to defend, to fight. But it clearly passed. Howley’s restraint, his silence, decided the day. He was a Mister Roberts. Meredith was a Captain Queeg.

  The camera was on Barbara when she reached her right hand to her right and put it gently on Henry’s left. Henry returned the squeeze.

  Out in the control room there was also silence.

  Chuck Hammond found himself thinking about what he was going to say to the press and the commission members and to God and all others when this was over. He had a thought about the certain fact that no matter what finally happened, he and Nancy would from this evening on be known as the two people who produced the Greene-Meredith debate, maybe the most incredible single event in the history of presidential politics, of television, of life.

  Jack Turpin at that moment saw himself with an AK-47, spraying shots around this control room, and then around that stage out there, and then in the press “spin” room, in the newsrooms of the networks and America’s largest newspapers, and then at people in Safeways and Hechingers, in airports, bus depots, and train stations. He admitted to me that if he had been examined by a team of psychiatrists and psychologists at that moment, they would surely have found him to be insane, to be unable to distinguish right from wrong. He was certain that any jury of his peers would have found him innocent of mass murder or any other crime on grounds of justifiable homicide, if not of temporary insanity.

  Brad Lilly was running names through his mind. Names of possible cabinet memb
ers for the Greene administration and top assistants he might hire for his staff at the Greene White House. Let’s see now, we’ll bring Schlesinger back in for Defense, give State to Bradley, put Rohatyn in Treasury, make Cutler attorney general—no, White House counsel. Wonder if I could get one of the old press hands to come in as press secretary. Hey, what about Howley? He’d be terrific. If not him, how about that Joan Naylor? A woman press secretary would be great. That Barbara Manning would be something, too. The first black press secretary. Not bad. Of course, that Chicano kid was pure dynamite. Why not make some history for the Hispanics? Didn’t he say he was the son of illegal immigrants or something? Hey, hey, hey. And maybe we could wipe out crime and drug use, eliminate poverty and unemployment, rebuild the education and health-care systems. Hey, hey, hey. Hello, I’m Brad Lilly, the White House chief of staff. President Greene asked me to call you and tell you to do what I say or he will close down all military bases, post offices, and roadside parks in your state. Got that, Senator Helms? Senator Moynihan? Senator Gramm? Senator Kerrey? Senator Nunn? Senator Dole?

  And then came the awful ending.

  David Donald Meredith tore the microphone out of the podium in front of him.

  He threw it with force toward Howley, barely missing his head.

  Meredith picked up the wooden podium with his two hands and raised it over his head.

  “No more of this!” he shouted. “No more!”

  He threw the podium at the panelists’ table. It crashed to the floor before it got that far and splintered into several pieces.

  He screamed: “God will fucking punish all of you for this! You will fucking die! You will fucking perish!”

  David Donald Meredith then turned to his left and exited the stage at a dead run.

  It was 6:28, Eastern Standard Time.

  8

  Riots

  Barbara Manning later described the stage, the space David Donald Meredith left behind, as airless. “Nobody was breathing in or out—not even Jesus is God Himself.”

  Every careful listener—including me—picked up a slight quivering in Michael J. Howley’s voice when he spoke to camera the closing words:

  “Well … I told the candidates that each had the right and the power to end this debate whenever he wished. Mr. Meredith has just exercised that right. There is nothing more that needs to be said … other than to thank the two candidates and my fellow panelists … and to say, from the Williamsburg Lodge in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, I’m Michael J. Howley of The Washington Morning News.… Thank you and good night.”

  Paul L. Greene, clearly the happiest man in the world at that moment in time, leapt toward the panelists’ table. He went for Howley with arms outstretched. Howley stepped to the side in time to deflect an embrace. That was a television and/or still-photo shot he must have decided he did not want sent around the world. Greene ended up only with Howley’s right hand in both of his. Greene shook it like it was a handle on an old-fashioned water pump.

  “You have changed the course of America here tonight,” said the Democratic candidate for president. His eyes were filled with tears. “What you have done is what the Minutemen did at Concord, Jefferson did in the Declaration of Independence, Armstrong did on the moon. I salute you. I honor you. I treasure you.”

  Greene did the same to Joan’s right hand that he had done to Howley’s. And then he did it to Barbara’s and to Henry’s. Nancy Dewey and her technicians had turned off the microphones but not the cameras. All of this was being seen on C-SPAN and several of the other broadcast entities that were carrying the event throughout the country and the world.

  “You are American heroes, yes indeed you are,” said Greene, as the four panelists pulled themselves away from him and headed for a break in the curtains in the rear of the stage.

  Chuck Hammond, Jack Turpin, and Brad Lilly beat them to that spot, coming the other way.

  “Congratulations,” Lilly said. “You are at this particular moment the four most important people in America.”

  Hammond, Joan, Henry, and Barbara claim Turpin said: “If it takes me the rest of my life and all life on this planet and the rest of my energy and all energy, rest assured, you four will pay for what you did out there just now. Rest assured. Please, please, rest assured. You are Oswald. Ray. Sirhan Sirhan. You are assassins. You must be punished. You will be punished.”

  Turpin denies he meant anything he said as a threat to anybody’s life.

  The four panelists kept their heads and their tongues down. And they walked right on by Turpin, Lilly, and Hammond through the curtain.

  Hammond called after them: “In a few minutes the Secret Service is going to open it up back here. A tidal wave of your friends and colleagues in the press is going to come down on this place and you four people unlike anything that has ever been seen. Think about how you want to handle it. You have about two minutes to think. Buzz me on extension four fifty-two. I’m here to serve. I’ll set you up a news conference, whatever.…”

  Mike Howley acknowledged the offer with a smile and a wave and, with the others, kept walking.

  Tidal wave. A tidal wave was coming, Hammond said. They all four heard that. A tidal wave was coming in two minutes. What ever happened to the thunderstorm? Henry thought. Is a tidal wave worse than a thunderstorm? Barbara asked herself.

  They opened the door of Longsworth D, their room. There was a man inside, there was a man inside their sanctuary, there was a man in there!

  “Let me be the first ordinary American to say, simply, Thank you,” he said to Howley, Barbara, Joan, and Henry. “Thank you for coming to the aid of your country at its most excruciating moment of need. Not since the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor has there been a moment like there was tonight.”

  Japs bombed Pearl Harbor? thought Joan. What is this? Who is this?

  The man who said this was tanned, old, and dressed impeccably in a dark blue suit, shiny gold silk tie, white cuff-linked shirt, and a toupee of bright red hair.

  “Who in the hell are you?” said Howley. He and the others were now inside. The door was closed behind them to keep away the tidal wave.

  “My name is Sam. Sam Rhodes. I appear before you four American heroes now as the representative of Harry A. Mendelsohn himself.”

  Harry A. Mendelsohn?

  “The man who made Dawn Now Productions what it is today.…”

  Dawn Now?

  “Harry authorized me to offer the four of you one million dollars each for the rights to your story. Plus a piece of the back end for foreign rights, videocassettes, T-shirts, baseball hats, doll replicas, whatever. He envisions a made-for-TV movie for CNS, a deal I heard him confirm on the speakerphone just now while I was on the other line. They’re talking five nights during a sweeps week. One of you can write the screenplay. All four of you can write the screenplay. It’s your call. Everything is your call. The whole world is your call. What do you say?”

  “We say, Good-bye,” Mike Howley said, moving Sam Rhodes toward the door.

  “Harry’s already got a working title,” Sam said. “ ‘Williamsburg II.’ Get it? History was made here once, now twice. The man’s a genius.”

  And then Sam Rhodes was gone. The door was closed.

  “How in the hell did he get in here?” Joan said. “Guys like him are always in here,” she said, answering her own question.

  A tidal wave was coming!

  Howley said: “Before another second ticks away, let me say all of you were absolutely fantastic out there tonight.”

  He shook Henry’s hand.

  Barbara hugged Joan.

  Henry hugged Joan, and Howley hugged Barbara.

  And then Howley hugged Joan, and Henry hugged Barbara.

  “You were incredible, brown boy,” Barbara said.

  “So were you, black girl,” Henry said.

  A tidal wave was coming!

  “I can’t believe it worked,” Joan said. “He blew his cool. He blew it all.”

  “J
ust like you said he would, Mike,” Henry said.

  “ ‘Might,’ ” Howley said. “I said he might. If we got lucky.”

  “We got lucky, all right. ‘Fucking.’ The man of God and goodness yelled ‘fucking.’ I could not believe it!”

  Henry said: “Three times! He did it three times!”

  Barbara said: “How are the Christian-families people going to take that? He’s a goner! We did it!”

  Howley said: “The question now is what do we do about those awful jackals of the press? Hammond said we’ve got two minutes … less than that now.”

  “I should call my newsroom,” Henry said. “I love the idea of somebody there having to interview me. ‘Mr. Ramirez, tell us how you did it, why you did it.…’ ”

  Barbara said: “This Week is going to want an exclusive, the real story from me.…”

  Joan said: “My folks are going to be knocking that door down in a minute.…”

  Mike Howley, still in control, said: “First, do we agree to talk?”

  Yes, yes, the other three nodded.

  “But nothing about what was said in Longsworth D,” Howley said. “Can we agree in blood on that?”

  Again, the other three nodded. Sure.

  Howley said: “OK, then, what if we let Hammond set up a quick news conference first. Then we can go our separate ways with our own people.…”

  So agreed. Howley’s control remained firm and complete.

  Or so he must have believed.

  Within a second after Howley said his good night the Virginia Room erupted. There was hollering and shouting and people up and running like a mob for the door. The San Diego woman on my left was one of the few who stayed seated. She phoned her office. The Kansas City Star man said to me: “Let’s go.”

  “Where to?”

  “Who knows? Where everybody else is going.”

  I followed him out from behind our small table into a narrow aisle. We were immediately hit with the force of moving bodies behind us, almost picked up off the floor and swept away as if by a roaring current of a river flooding out of its banks.