The Last Debate Read online

  “He’s caught us, is that it?” the candidate asked his campaign manager.

  “Yes, sir—and then some,” the campaign manager replied. “But it could be a blip, an air bubble, a quirk, a bad batch.”

  “Batch? A bad batch of what?”

  “Voters, poll respondents.”

  To Lilly and the others in the room it appeared for a split second that Governor Paul L. Greene of Nebraska was going to break out—or down—into laughter. But it passed and instead he stuck it right back and into Lilly. He said: “Maybe the stories will say the candidate of the great Brad Lilly, the Democratic party’s political-consultant prince, has fallen seventeen points in the polls in seven months. Maybe they’ll leave me out of it altogether.”

  Lilly was overcome with a marrow-deep disgust for his candidate for the first time since the campaign began. All he wanted at that moment was out of there. Out of this room, this Holiday Inn, this Rapid City, this world. He moved on to the next piece of business, the debate panel, feeling it would only take a few seconds.

  It didn’t work because of Joan Naylor.

  “She is unacceptable to me,” Greene said. “That is it and that is final.”

  “I really am sorry, Governor, but we did not realize you had such a huge problem with her,” said Lilly. “She’s not any worse than the others—”

  Greene interrupted: “You heard her the other night, Brad. You heard her call me ‘the man who is rapidly writing his name in the political histories as the single worst campaigner of all time.’ ”

  “Those weren’t her words. She was quoting somebody.”

  “She lied about that the way they all do. They were her words. She said they were spoken by a ‘veteran Democratic mover and shaker who asked to remain anonymous,’ but I do not believe that. They were her words. She spoke them to the American people. And she did not even have the guts to say they were her own words. She ducked. She is a coward. She is not somebody I want on this debate panel.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I will not answer any questions asked by her during the debate or on any other occasion ever as long as the both of us shall live.”

  “I hear you.”

  Brad Lilly was a campaign pro who had worked in the Udall, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Kerrey, and Clinton campaigns. He was not close enough to Greene to say what his new disgust led him to want to say, which was: Oh, knock it off, please. You’re going to lose anyhow, so what difference does it make who is on this goddamn panel?

  Almost as if he had been reading Lilly’s mind, Greene said: “If the new poll is right, it may mean I might lose this election, possibly by a landslide that will make Goldwater, McGovern, Mondale, and Dukakis look like winners. So somebody could reasonably ask, What the hell difference does one woman on a debate panel matter? Well, the answer is that it makes a difference to me.”

  Yeah, and that is really some tough, smart answer, thought Lilly.

  Lilly reminded himself that the election was now less than a month away and looked around the hotel suite for some help. Anderson and four other campaign operatives were there, each in his own way trying his best to make himself invisible. Lilly claims most everyone in the campaign at this particular time was trying to be invisible.

  Lilly looked right at Marvin Al Garrison, the campaign press secretary. “Tell the governor, Marvin Al, what kind of shit would hit the fan if we go back to the debate commission now and try to get Joan Naylor scrubbed from the panel. Tell him, Marvin Al, please, sir.”

  Marvin Al, a man from Alabama already not happy in his work, stepped forward to say: “They would kill us, Governor. I mean kill.”

  “Who would?” Greene asked.

  “Everybody. The women, the networks, the editorials, the talk shows, the polls, the carrier boys, the truck drivers, the Ph.D.’s, the R.N.’s, the shrinks, the skunks, the punks, the clownalists. Everybody.”

  “So? How much deader can I get than I already am? You can’t kill a dead man, Marvin Al. He’s already dead.”

  Now, there is wisdom for you, thought Lilly. He said: “Marvin Al is right, Governor. It would probably even get the debate itself canceled. The other side would raise hell and pull out. If they didn’t, the other three panelists—you know how these pompous asses hang together in moments of public phoniness—would probably refuse to participate if Naylor is dropped. Nobody would come forward to replace them.…”

  “Why didn’t you run these names by me beforehand?”

  “There were so many other matters on the plate, it just slipped through the cracks. I didn’t see any serious problems with any of them except for Howley, whom I detest, as you know. But the chances of getting anybody better were doubtful. But, at any rate, I did not want to bother you with such details. You have so much more important things to do. But clearly that was a mistake.”

  “I thought the arrangement was that we had an opportunity to vet the panel,” Greene said. “I thought nobody got on without our approval.”

  “True. I did the approving at a meeting yesterday with Turpin and the commission’s people. Turpin came with a lot of information about the possible panelists. I meant to get some together, but there simply wasn’t time. I blew that, too, I regret to say.”

  Greene was sitting in an overstuffed chair in the center of the room. He swiveled it halfway around to the right and then back around to the left.

  “Maybe Joan Naylor is right when she says I am the worst candidate there has ever been for president of the United States,” he said quietly. “I guess it is only appropriate then that I have a campaign staff that is a perfect match. Isn’t that what Mike Howley wrote about you-all a few days ago, Brad? Didn’t he say something about the only thing worse in my campaign than the candidate might very well be the campaign staff?”

  “He said something like that, yes, sir.”

  “It was exactly like that, Brad.”

  The three men and one woman around the large Sunday-school classroom table stood when David Donald Meredith came in. That was what they always did every morning at the First Light staff meeting, at the beginning of their workday at the highest levels of the Take It Back With Meredith For President campaign.

  “Let us pray,” said Meredith after arriving at the table. “Here we are again, dear Lord of us all. Here we are again asking for your guidance as we go about the business of making decisions on behalf of bringing honest, spiritual, and right government to the people of the United States of America. Help us bring love and compassion and justice and mercy to our thinking, our talking, our deciding. Help us to do right in Your name. It is in Your name that we pray. Ahhh-men.”

  “Ahhh-men,” said the others. Meredith sat down, and then the others sat down. Having their daily First Light staff meetings in a church was a practice that had begun almost by accident during the primaries. Meredith had agreed to speak to a sunrise prayer breakfast in Concord, New Hampshire, and asked his staff to join him afterward for a meeting at the church. There was some press attention, followed by some praise and appreciation from the leaders of the American Christian Families Coalition, one of the most important backers of Meredith’s candidacy. Jack Turpin suggested that Meredith, only an occasional churchgoing Methodist before the campaign, develop some praying skills, and the First Light meeting-always-in-a-church was born.

  This morning it was in the First Baptist Church of Cleveland, Ohio.

  “The debate panel for Williamsburg is before us first,” said Turpin. He had held top positions in every Republican presidential campaign since Nixon. The Jack Kemp campaign was the only losing one he had run.

  “There will be four. They, the commission, put forward four names. As could have been expected, they met all Democratic party and liberal tests. We managed over the course of the meeting to replace their one white male, one white female, one Hispanic male, and one black female with our own.”

  “You don’t mean our own politically?” Meredith asked.

  “No, sir. There are no f
our such things in the press corps of this country.”

  “I didn’t think so. They all hate me.”

  “Our four are four with some insurance possibilities,” Turpin said. “Mike Howley is the moderator. He’s … well, he’s Mike Howley. He’s been harsh in his criticism of everybody connected with this campaign. Not only you and me, but also the other side. Particularly of Lilly’s operation. Howley’s about as good as it was possible to get. All of the straight television types would have been much worse.”

  “They all hate me,” Meredith said.

  “Joan Naylor is one of the panelists. She is of television, you know her,” said Turpin. “The other two, the black and the Mexican, you do not know. Nobody knows them because they are nobodies themselves, both kids in their late twenties. If they were white, they wouldn’t have the jobs they have, much less be on this panel.”

  “I have promised to rid our society of the kind of reverse discrimination that has given birth to that very kind of thing,” Meredith said. “It is one promise I promise you I will keep.”

  “I say amen to that, sir.”

  “All four of these people are opponents of ours and our cause, I assume?”

  “Of course, yes, sir.” Turpin handed a packet of papers across the table to Meredith. “Here is what Nelson’s checks turned up on each of the four.” Nelson was Sid Nelson, a former FBI agent who was the campaign’s director of security. The Secret Service did the regular protection work on the campaign. The campaign’s pre-Williamsburg line was that Nelson and a group of other former FBI agents who worked with him did only discreet investigative work that included background checks on potential employees.

  Meredith flipped from page to page.

  “Can’t the abortion of Naylor’s sister be confirmed?” he said, without looking up.

  Turpin said: “No, not one hundred percent. She was sixteen. Her boyfriend paid for it. Her parents knew all about it.”

  “Has it ever been in the public print?”

  “Not according to our checks. The press does a poor job of reporting on the frailties of its own.”

  “Yes, indeed. Fine. It could come in handy if something turns nasty on the abortion issue. ‘You have asked me about abortion, Ms. Naylor. Does the fact that your sister had an abortion at the age of sixteen present for you a journalistic conflict of interest?’ That might cause some commotion.”

  “Yes, sir, it sure would. That was the idea, the insurance.”

  “The Mexican? His mother is his problem?”

  “Yes. She is a widow who runs a café in a small town in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. She’s been cited for liquor-law and several health-department violations, but none were serious.”

  “Serving alcohol to minors and filthy food to anyone is always serious to ordinary people, Jack.”

  “I realize that. That’s why he is on the panel.”

  “Isn’t Howley also from Texas?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Two Texans on a panel of four. How come?”

  “A conspiracy, obviously, sir.”

  “Obviously. The black girl?”

  “Major insurance paydirt. First, her uncle is a Black Muslim, having moved to Chicago from a small town in Georgia some years ago. Two, she rooms with a woman member of the Paul L. Greene campaign staff.”

  “Are they lesbians?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Yes, sir. But it’s still paydirt.”

  “You’re right,” said Meredith. He looked up and over at the woman at the table. She was Joanne Windsor, the campaign press secretary. “What do you think about this?”

  “I think she should not be on the panel,” said Joanne Windsor. “She’s a kid, a lightweight, a standard black, as well as a close friend of the enemy.”

  The three other men at the table either grunted or smiled their agreement.

  “I went for her, among the weakest of the blacks, because I believed we had to have one on the panel,” said Jack Turpin. “It would surely be leaked that we had kept off all blacks.”

  “How could that hurt us?” said Will Hodges, one of the other men. He was the campaign’s pollster. “The numbers show that we may not get more than two percent of the black vote anyhow. So we lose a few more?”

  Turpin shook his head. “No, I think we should look upon her as serious insurance. If something goes wrong for us during the debate, we then toss out the charge that we just discovered the panel was tainted by the fact that one of the panelists lived with an official of the Greene campaign. Insurance, insurance, insurance.”

  David Donald Meredith stopped reading the papers and smiled at Turpin, who went on with his self-praise.

  “I wanted as many vulnerabilities as possible as insurance on all of them. Naylor and her sister’s abortion. On the Mexican, there’s not only the mother and her dirt and drunks. Nelson’s check showed him to be too young, too ambitious. He thinks he’s a brown Donaldson or Wallace, and the chances are he’ll go too far trying to nail you and make a fool of himself.”

  Meredith said: “You are the best, Jack, you really are. Between you and Jesus I have the best campaign management in the history of American politics.”

  “We’ll all say amen to that,” Will Hodges said.

  “Howley? What about Howley?” Meredith asked. “Does he have insurance possibilities?”

  “Not really. He’s a widower, no girlfriend at present. He served and was honorably discharged from the navy in the fifties.”

  “Children with drug problems?”

  “No children of any kind.”

  “I see a reference to a bankruptcy. What is that all about?”

  “His uncle ran a Western Auto store in Van Alstyne, Texas, that went belly-up.”

  “Could be useful, who knows. Ordinary people don’t like people who file for bankruptcy. Why did you take him as moderator?”

  “He’s part of a deal I made with CNS News. They came to me through a deeply covered third-party intermediary asking if there was anything we could do to make sure one of their anchors was the moderator. Their news programs are running third, and it might give them some much needed visibility. I told them that there was no way we would ever agree to Don Beard.”

  “Amen, amen. He spits and fires with venom for me every evening. Every evening.”

  “Exactly. They offered Naylor as a backup. I said no, but maybe as a panelist. They said, fine, as long as no other network anchor moderated. So we had to go with a print guy. Howley seemed the safest of them because he’s about the only one left from the old school of journalism. He’s been as bad to them as he’s been to us.”

  “What do we get in exchange for this from CNS?”

  “Their balls.”

  “What?”

  “All I have to do is simply squeeze a hint that I might tell somebody about our little transaction and we get what we want. The ultimate insurance, is the way I see it. I’m not sure anybody has had a network in that position before. When it could really come in handy is after we’re in the White House.”

  “Praise you, Jack Turpin. Praise you,” said David Donald Meredith. “You really are the very best.”

  It was the perfect setup for Jack Turpin. He had saved the best for last.

  “I certainly can’t take any credit for it, sir,” he said, “but it is all finally coming into focus, into place.”

  He handed Meredith a copy of the summary of the coming NBS–Wall Street Journal poll. “Nelson acquired this from a friendly source within the Journal,” Turpin said.

  Meredith read the news that he had pulled ahead of Paul L. Greene. Then he stood and bowed his head. Turpin and the others stood and bowed their heads.

  “Dear Savior,” said Meredith in a near whisper. “You said, Follow Me and I will show you the way to glory. We did and You have. Thank You, Lord. Thank You for me, for us, and for the people of the United States of America. Ahhh-men.”

  Turpin and the others repeated th
e ahhh-men.

  David Donald Meredith had learned how to pray for the good of the campaign. Turpin and the others had learned how to say ahhh-men.

  Nancy Dewey and Chuck Hammond had stayed in their conference room after the others left. They immediately placed a call to the bipartisan commission’s two co-chairmen, former Republican national chairman Paul Clancy and former Democratic national chairman Frank Durkette. They found Clancy at his law office in Minneapolis. Durkette was at his home in Bethesda, Maryland, a Washington suburb. They were all quickly hooked together on a conference line and a speakerphone.

  “So what exactly have we ended up with?” Durkette asked after Hammond reported the names of the four panelists and how they were decided.

  “Yeah,” said Clancy. “Is it going to work?”

  Chuck Hammond said he could not guarantee anything. He said he had no problems with Mike Howley and Joan Naylor, but the other two were truly blind flying in the night. Not because they were minorities, of course, he said, but because they were so young and inexperienced.

  Of course, said Clancy.

  “Being on a presidential-debate panel should be a kind of reward for supreme and long service as a journalist,” Durkette said.

  They asked Nancy Dewey, the person who was going to actually put the debate on the air from Williamsburg, what she thought.

  She told them she was worried. “There was something about the way Turpin came in here with his black book and took over that was not right,” she said. “Lilly was not prepared. Neither were we, really.”

  Chuck Hammond disagreed. “We have limits, Nancy. We do not have the authority to push anything down their throats. It’s a stupid system.”

  “We have been through that too many times already,” Clancy said. “We almost didn’t even have a debate this time.”

  “It’s got to be required by law,” Durkette said. “Tie it to federal funding. If you take federal matching funds, you have to agree to at least three debates.…”

  “Frank, for crissakes, save it for another time,” Clancy said. “The question, the only question before our house right now, is What we do about this?”