The Last Debate Read online

Jill came at Joan in a full rage.

  “I assume the first thing you did after the debate was take a shower?” she asked.

  The camera, up close on Joan, revealed without question that she had no idea what Jill was getting at. “A shower?” she said. “I’ve been waiting down the hall to come on your program.…”

  “To wash off the dirt and slime of what you and your three co-terrorists did to David Donald Meredith?”

  Now Joan knew what was going on. And she was up to it. “He did the worst terrorism on himself. I would think that you and the other Meredith supporters have had reason to take a lot of such showers during this campaign—and another after what he did tonight.”

  Ms. Perky had decided she was not going to take any shit from the likes of Jill of Jack and Jill.

  Jack said: “Great answer, Joan. Absolutely perfect.” He sent one of his traditional scowls toward Jill. Then back to Joan, he said: “But. But, but. As much as I abhor Meredith, Joan, and was as repelled as anyone by his profane fit there at the end, I must say the idea of four journalists interposing themselves between the candidates and the voters the way you-all did tonight gives me serious pause. I like the end result—exposing Meredith for what he really is—but I wonder about the means. That is my question.”

  It was, of course, no such thing as a question. But again, Joan was there. “We did no interposing,” she said. “The voters of America will make the final decision on Election Day. They will make their own judgments about the candidates and about what happened here tonight.…”

  “It was outrageous what you did,” Jill said.

  “You are welcome to your opinion just like every other voter, Jill,” Joan said.

  “Whose idea was it? Whose idea was it to take the electoral process into your own hands?” Jack asked.

  “We all made it and we made it together.”

  “Why won’t you answer Jack’s question?” Jill said.

  “She did, darling Jill,” Jack said, turning to face his wife/co-host.

  “She did not, darling Jack.” Swiveling back to Joan, she said: “We hear it was Howley. We hear he browbeat the other three of you into doing it.”

  “That is not right. We were together. Nobody browbeat anybody into anything.”

  Jill said: “Are you proud of what you did, Joan Naylor?”

  “I don’t know if ‘proud’ is the word.…”

  “Would you do it again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is this the kind of thing we can expect from journalists now? Deciding for the voters who should win or lose?”

  Jack said to Jill: “Come on, darling Jill. As Joan said, the voters still make the final decision. Nothing that happened here in Williamsburg changes any of that.”

  “Wrong, wrong, wrong. Everything changes because of what happened here in Williamsburg.”

  Jack said to Joan: “I do have one last question. We asked you here this morning if any bombshells were coming tonight and you said no. Why did you tell us that?”

  “It was an honest answer,” said Joan. “Nothing along the lines of what we did had even been discussed by then, much less decided on.”

  “What would you say to someone like me who confesses to having a hard time believing that?” Jill said, her voice full of loathing and contempt.

  Said Joan: “I would say only that there will always be people—well-meaning, fair-minded, serious people even—who have trouble believing the truth.”

  Jack thanked Joan. My attention turned to another monitor showing Ross Perot’s program. There came a shot of Barbara Manning and Henry Ramirez sitting side by side. Perot was interviewing them.

  “Those women’s statements didn’t just drop down from the big statement goose in the sky, did they?” Perot asked.

  “No gooses were involved,” Henry said.

  “OK, then, where? How did they get into your hands a while ago to use as bludgeons against Meredith?”

  “They came to us from a legitimate source, one we trusted,” Barbara said.

  “Isn’t all that really matters, Ross, is whether they’re true?” Henry said. “Do those women exist and do they stand by their stories?” Henry loved calling Ross Perot, one of the richest men in the world, by his first name.

  “Good point, good point, good point,” said Perot. “In closing, I must say you-all look like a smart couple sitting there together. Have you given any thought to being a team?”

  “Football or otherwise?” Henry popped back.

  “Otherwise, otherwise, otherwise,” Perot said.

  “Good,” said Barbara, “because I have never played football in my life.”

  I stayed in front of the TV monitors in the Virginia Room for a few more minutes. I was hoping to find somebody interviewing Mike Howley. But Jack and Jill had gone to a focus group of journalism students at the University of Missouri; Schwarzkopf was doing what they called on his show a “Sea-to-Sea Dialogue” with twelve experts around the country on male-against-female violence; and Perot went back to taking calls on what he called “The Perot People Party Line” about how the electorate was reacting to Meredith’s use of the F-word. Nobody was even promo-ing an upcoming interview with Michael J. Howley.

  I wondered where he was and what he was doing. And a few minutes later—after we were allowed our freedom again—I left the Virginia Room determined to find out.

  I decided to go by way of the scene of the crime. Maybe there was something there in the auditorium and on the stage that I could use later to set a mood or an atmosphere.

  Not only were the candidates long gone, but so was most everyone else. There were TV technicians rolling away cameras and unstringing lights. Several men on ladders were taking down the golden eagle high in the back. But the light blue carpet was still on the stage, and so were the table and chairs for the panelists and the red, white, and blue bunting. Greene’s podium remained in place. Meredith’s was there on the floor in its pieces, right where it landed and splintered. I wondered if someone was going to think of saving it for the Smithsonian or some political-science museum. That is where it belonged. I looked around for the microphone Meredith had tossed at Howley. I couldn’t find it.

  There were no security or other kinds of people to question or stop me, so I just walked around like I belonged there. I stood where Meredith had stood and looked down and over at the table where Howley, Henry, Barbara, and Joan had sat. What must it have been like to stand here and take what he took? Then I moved to Greene’s podium. What must it have been like to have stood here and been given what he was given? I sat in Howley’s chair. And then in each of the others’. I looked where each of them must have looked when they spoke the words that threw one candidate for president of the United States into an F-word rage and the other probably into the White House.

  I was reminded of a story a Dallas newspaper reporter wrote after he went back to the assassination site at Dealey Plaza well after midnight on the day President Kennedy was shot. The reporter said he could hear the faint sounds of gunshots and screams and motorcycles and screeching tires. And he swears he picked up a faint smell of gunpowder.

  In this case, I heard the screaming voice of a wounded candidate for president and I picked up the faint smell of political sweat—and death.

  I went back across to the Inn in search of Howley. Twenty or thirty people were gathered around a small television set in a corner of the lobby. I heard the voice of Jack and then Jill interviewing Doug Mulvane, the man they called Pompous Perfect. He proclaimed this “journalism’s darkest hour,” and he called “on every journalist in America who cares about the future of his or her noble profession to stand up, speak up, shout out, and be counted, to condemn what those four people did under the sacred cloak of journalism on that stage in Williamsburg tonight.”

  A woman at the Inn’s front desk said Howley had not checked out, but she refused—politely but firmly—to give me his room number. The doorman told me he had not seen Howley leave the In
n since he returned shortly after the debate ended. But he said there were several other doors besides the big front one here at the lobby. Said the doorman: “Everybody’s been looking for him. He’s more famous than Patrick Henry around here right now.” Spoken, I thought, like a well-trained man of eighteenth-century Williamsburg.

  Another person—a source not affiliated with the Inn who must remain unidentified—assisted me in obtaining Howley’s room number. It was 3255, down a long hallway on the second floor.

  I went to it and put my ear to it. There was no sound of a television or anything else. It was only nine o’clock. It seemed inconceivable to me that Howley could be sitting quietly in his room reading a good book or staring silently off into space. There was simply no way in the world a normal mortal could resist watching and listening to all of the Jacks and Jills, Normans and Rosses, of the world chew over and spit out what they thought of what he had just done across the street to a candidate for president of the United States.

  I knocked on the door. I put my ear back against it. Not a sound. I hit it a couple more times. Again, no response. The man was clearly gone or dead. Dead? Was it possible that Michael J. Howley, overcome with profound second thoughts about what he had wrought, had ended his own life? Was that possible?

  At that moment I caught sight of a maid, a young woman, working her way with her cart of clean towels, chocolate mints, and the like on her “turn-down” rounds. I ran to her and pulled on her something I saw Richard Widmark do once in a movie.

  “Pardon me,” I said in my most worried voice. “I left my wife alone in the room a while ago after we had an argument. Now I can’t raise her. I’m worried, frankly. Could you quickly open the door to see if she’s in there—and all right? I hope she hasn’t … you know … hurt herself.”

  The woman, easily deceived because she was a caring person, ran with me to 3255 and opened the door with her master key.

  It was empty. Not only of Michael J. Howley or any other person, but of any sign of Michael J. Howley or any other person. There were no clothes in the closet or in the chest of drawers. There were no toilet articles in the bathroom.

  “Oh, my God,” I exclaimed. “She’s run away. I can’t believe that.”

  “You’ll find her and everything will be just fine,” said the maid as we left the room together. “I’m sorry.”

  I thanked her and headed back down the hall to the lobby.

  Go, Tom, go.

  I had a pretty good idea that the other three panelists—Joan Naylor, Henry Ramirez, and Barbara Manning—were still over at the Lodge, probably being interviewed on somebody’s television or radio show or by a print reporter.

  I went first to the area where the Jack and Jill show was still originating. Private network security people were everywhere, at every door. I went to one of them, a young man dressed in a two-tone blue uniform and holstered pistol, at the main door, and identified myself correctly and then lied about my purpose. I told him I was to be a guest on Jack and Jill’s program.

  “Through that door,” he said, pointing me in the right direction.

  Inside the door sat a young woman in a dark red blazer with the CNS logo on the right front lapel pocket. “I’m here with a message for Ms. Naylor about her car,” I said.

  “She’s still in the green room, I think,” said the young woman, again pointing me in the right direction.

  The green room is what all television organizations call the places guests wait for their turn to go on the air. In this case it was a small meeting room that had been equipped with many chairs and much food and drink. It was teeming with people, most of whom I did not recognize. But there she was, Joan Naylor, sitting over in a corner talking on the phone.

  I went to where she was, and when she hung up I reintroduced myself from that morning at breakfast and told her my real purpose. I wanted to talk to her at length about what had happened and why.

  She said: “I love your magazine. I feel I owe you for that wonderful story about me. But you’ll have to stand in line. The whole world wants to talk to me, it seems. Call me in Washington next week. I’m on my way there in a few minutes myself now.”

  “Do you happen to know where Mike Howley is?” I asked.

  “I have no idea. If he’s not at the Inn he’s probably gone back to Washington.”

  She looked off at one of the two TV monitors in the room. Jack and Jill were interviewing four reporters—two men, two women—who had been in the Virginia Room during what they called “the journalists’ disturbance.” Jack asked them: “Were you scared for your lives?” Yes, a lot, said one of the women. Yes, but not much, said one of the men. The other two said, Not really. “How do you explain that kind of barbaric behavior by people who spend most of their time lecturing other people about theirs?” asked Jill. None of the four had an explanation. One of them, a woman, said: “It served as a good reminder of how human we all are.” “Human?” said Jill. “I think that’s hardly fair to the rest of us, to paint us all with that brush. I think it is unfair to suggest, for instance, that a roomful of doctors or dentists or candlestick makers would have reacted the same way.”

  Joan Naylor shook her head and said to me: “This is all too much to take in, isn’t it?”

  I agreed with her.

  “Were you in that room? Was it that bad?”

  I told her I was there and it was that bad.

  “This is all too much to take in.”

  And she smiled and picked up the phone to make another call.

  Henry Ramirez and Barbara Manning were not in this green room. I was able to gain access to those of Perot and Schwarzkopf as well as those of PNN, PBS, and three others. They had been there, been on the air, but were now gone, and nobody knew for sure where.

  I went back into the Virginia Room, thinking it was possible they had gone back there for individual interviews. I thought it might also be well for me to return to the scene of that crime as well, the place where “the journalists’ disturbance” had occurred.

  There were only a few reporters left at the work tables and computer terminals and telephones. None of them were interviewing Henry Ramirez or Barbara Manning. I looked at my watch. It was now only 9:45.

  All of it had happened so fast. The debate began, there was the explosive ending, the mêlée, and the aborted news conference in this room, and now it was over. It really was a thunderstorm.

  I went to a phone and had the Colonial Williamsburg operator ring the Inn room of Henry Ramirez. There was no answer after eight rings. I hung up and did the same to Barbara Manning’s room. Again, no answer.

  I felt they were probably both still in Williamsburg and I had a hunch they were together. That was probably because of the power of the suggestion contained in that little closing with Ross Perot. Otherwise, otherwise, otherwise.

  I tried to think where they might have gone to be otherwise or anything together on this important night in their lives. A quiet corner in a quiet bar for a quiet drink? A stroll under the moonlight through the eighteenth century?

  Back at the Inn, I left written notes at the front desk for each of them. I said to both that I wanted very much to get together with them back in Washington as soon as possible. I made a plea for their cooperation in meeting my magazine’s serious and substantial commitment to “doing your story and doing it thoroughly and well.”

  Back in my room at the Lodge, I turned on the television. Jack and Jill were still on the air. And so were Ross and Norman and it seemed like half of the rest of the Western world. If you were awake, opinionated, voiced, and available, you could express yourself on what the four panelists did and why, on the F-word, on what it all meant for Meredith, Greene, the press, and America, and on most anything else you had on your mind if it was even vaguely related to Williamsburg.

  Everyone said afterward that there had never been anything like it in the history of television and news and public affairs and talk, and I do not quarrel with that conclusion. I finally
went to sleep at two o’clock in the morning because my channel switcher, ears, eyes, and mind were worn out. So I did not see it all live, but over the next few weeks I did either watch videotapes or read transcripts of just about everything that was broadcast that night.

  Jack and Jill, for instance, may not have honored their commitment to stay on the air until they got to the bottom of it, but it wasn’t because they didn’t try. They did not sign off until 3:22 A.M., Eastern Time, almost nine hours after they went on the air immediately following Howley’s debate good night. A world-record 114 guests were heard before it was over, and that did not count the many ordinary people who simply called in to scream something—several only some version of the famous F-word.

  Ross Perot was on the air for seven hours and twenty minutes, giving-and-taking with ninety-three guests, most of whom condemned what the press panel had done. Perot himself was also critical of the panelists, after a while calling the whole thing “Debate-gate” and predicting it would do to the press what Watergate, the original “gate,” did to Richard Nixon.

  Norman Schwarzkopf, the first former four-star general to have his own talk show, did a mere six and a half hours with only seventy-one guests, most of whom were with him in loving what had happened. He praised the four panelists for “taking the bull by the horns,” for “going for the high ground,” for “pulling off a journalistic Desert Storm.”

  All three of the major shows, as well as the many others on cable and elsewhere, divided the emphasis between the panelists-press angle to the story and the specific charges against Meredith and his behavior on the stage.

  Tape replays of Meredith throwing the microphone and then the podium and screaming the word “fucking” and walking off were repeated in various speeds of slow motion time after time after time. Several family, youth, and religious channels on cable bleeped out the bad word in their replays. Pundits on all channels had an awkward time talking about the potential impact of Meredith’s profane departure. Some tried to do it without actually saying the word, but not all were so squeamish. David Snider, the PNN analyst, broke new ground and held it by referring all night to it as “the ‘fucking’ thing.”