The Last Debate Read online

  “You should be president,” she said. “They should ask you questions, not you ask them. You listen to me about this.”

  That was what she always said and it was what he always did. She told him to listen and he listened. It was his mother’s energy and drive that got Henry out of the apple and peach orchards of the Rio Grande Valley to college, to another life. Listening to her was one of the natural things of his life.

  “You ask that awful talk-man Meredith why he wants to keep our people out of this country. You ask him why we are not as good Americans as his people, gringo people. You ask him why he wants a wall and soldiers around America.

  “You ask them both about the immigration law already here. You ask them. You ask them why they are already treating us like we are not real Americans. You ask them why I have to prove I am American because I am brown, but nobody who are other colors have to prove anything. Those people with the shiny black skin who kill each other on the streets and shoot drugs on the streets and who make their babies have more babies don’t have to. Tell me why they look more American than I do. Tell me, you say to them. You ask those two men, those two famous men, that Meredith talk-man of hate and that Greene fool, what they are going to do about this. If you do not ask them, then I will not talk to you for two weeks afterward. I will talk to you only on the day after two weeks have gone by. That will be your punishment. Unless you do not want to be punished like that, you ask those people what I say to ask them.”

  Henry had placed the call, so that meant his mother, Mama Luisa to the people who came to her café in Falfurrias, would feel free to talk endlessly. It was only when she initiated the call, which was seldom, that she was careful about the time.

  “I am afraid people would think I was talking like a special interest if I did that, Mama,” Henry said. “I must ask big-league, general questions about war and peace and NATO and other big things so they won’t think I am only a special interest.”

  “We are not special interest. We are not NATOs. We are Americans.”

  “I must go now, Mama.”

  “You ask my question or I will not talk to you until the day after two weeks go by.”

  “Oh, come on now. You won’t tell me right afterward how proud you were of me? You won’t tell me how proud you are that it is your son who was the first son of illegal immigrants to be a panelist on a debate for president of the United States? I cannot believe you will wait two weeks and one day to tell me that.”

  “OK, OK. I will tell you that right after, but that is all I will tell you.”

  “That is all I want to hear, Mama.”

  “I will tell you you were the best.”

  “How do you know I will be?”

  “I know because I am your mama.”

  Henry’s second call, to Jim Weaver, the president of Continental Radio News, followed a similar theme. Weaver talked like he was not only Henry’s mama, but also his daddy and his God. At least, according to Henry he did.

  “You had no authority to accept the invitation without consulting us first,” Henry later said Weaver said.

  “How come?”

  “Because you work for us.”

  “I am not your illegal migrant worker. I am not your picker.”

  “You were asked because you work for Continental Radio. That is it. Whether you go on that panel is our call, not yours,” Henry claims Weaver said.

  “I am the one they called. I am the one who makes the call,” Henry responded.

  “They only asked you because they needed a brown face.”

  “It’s my brown face.”

  “It’s our brown face.”

  “Who do you think you are?”

  “I am the one who signs your paychecks.”

  “You should be proud of me.”

  “If you go out there and screw it up in front of all of the world?”

  “Screw it up?”

  “You’re a kid, Henry. You aren’t ready for the big leagues right now. It’s that simple. I’m going to call the commission and tell them we will send somebody else from our shop. You’re not our only minority, you know. Mathis is black. He’s been around. We have Chan in L.A. So has he. We can even give them a woman. Maggie Tobin. She’s been around for years.”

  “They want my kind of minority.”

  “Well, they ain’t getting you.”

  Henry Ramirez did not see himself as a kid. He was twenty-eight years old, a graduate of Texas A&I in Kingsville, just up the road from Falfurrias, with a B.A. in journalism. He had worked for three years as a radio reporter for KFVL in Harlingen and KMAC in McAllen before being hired as the city-hall reporter for KTRH in Houston, where he won many awards and much attention for his stories on the hard-nosed Houston police. The attention got him the job in the Washington bureau of Continental. In his six months with Continental, he had already made it to be the primary substitute for the two regular reporters covering the Meredith and Greene campaigns. He was in no mind to take seriously “You’re a kid, Henry” from anybody.

  “You can’t stop me from doing this,” he said to Weaver.

  “Goddamn it, Henry, you work for me!”

  “You can’t stop me from doing this.”

  “I am going to hang up now and call the commission,” said Weaver. “I am going to tell them I am calling on your behalf and that you have decided you are unable to accept the invitation. I will offer them one of our more experienced reporters of any color or sex they wish.”

  “You cannot do this! I just talked to my mama!”

  “You should have thought about that sooner. Henry, believe me, I am doing you a favor. Someday your day will come. But not now. It’s way, way too early. OK?”

  Henry did not answer immediately. Henry knew that he had come to what his mama called “a river with no bridge.” He reminded himself about himself. He was the real and spiritual child of two people who had the guts and the courage and the bravery to wade through the shallow waters of the Rio Grande River to find a better life. Not just once but, for his father, twelve times. Twelve times he came across illegally. Eleven times he was caught by the border patrol and returned to Mexico. His mother did it seven times before they both became legal through the 1987 amnesty law. They would not be proud of a son who folded forever the first time some immigration cop—like person put the cuffs on.

  Henry, trying to imagine he was on the radio, went to the steadiest and deepest voice that was in him. He said: “Jim Weaver, I think you should think about what it would sound like if I told people what you have just said to me and what you have just said you are now going to do to me. It would not be good for you or for the network.”

  “You can’t blackmail me, Henry!”

  “I am not blackmailing you, Jim Weaver. I am telling you something. I am telling you this would not look or sound good. If you do not want to look or sound good, then you go right ahead. If you have the convictions of what you believe, then you go right ahead. But when you do, you should know what might happen.”

  “I forbid you to talk about this to anyone inside or outside our shop!”

  “You can forbid nothing. I know the Constitution of my country.”

  “You’re fired!”

  “Add that to what this would look and sound like, Jim Weaver.”

  “You bastard! You kid bastard!”

  “You are wrong about that, too. My mother and father had been married in a church for three years when I was born.”

  Henry’s cellular phone went dead. He assumed it was because Jim Weaver had hung up on him.

  Jim Weaver, in writing through a lawyer, denied most of Henry’s account.

  But as a practical matter, the blackmail worked. Nobody—not Chuck Hammond, Nancy Dewey, or anyone else—at the commission ever received a call from Jim Weaver or anyone else at Continental Radio about the Ramirez selection.

  And Henry Ramirez, with a spirit and bravado that would have made any set of any kind of parents proud, went on with his daily job
in the Washington bureau of Continental Radio and his plans to go to Williamsburg as if nothing had happened.

  It had not been a happy twenty-six minutes and forty-two seconds for Joan Naylor in the Saturday night CNS Evening News anchor chair. A tape operator had missed the roll cue on a piece from Berlin about where all of the Cold War prostitutes had gone, and the TelePrompTer got stuck in the middle of a nine-second intro to a soft closer about the relationship between crime and being a second child.

  She also felt that makeup never got her hair quite right tonight and she hated herself for even caring.

  Now here she was alone in the office of Carol Reynolds, the Washington bureau chief. Carol had closed the door behind them, something she rarely did.

  “You’re going to be getting a call in a few minutes from Nancy Dewey at the debate commission,” said Carol Reynolds.

  “Hey, hey, it happened!” Joan said. She threw her hands up in the air and then came a feeling of well-being warmth that started in her stomach and shot right up through her body to her eyes, which immediately filled with tears.

  “Well, not exactly,” said Carol Reynolds. “They want you on the panel only—”

  “I thought I was going to moderate!”

  “Well, we lost that one. Mike Howley’s going to do that.”

  “Lost it with whom?”

  “I don’t know for sure.”

  “Did you-all push me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Beard. You went for Don Beard.”

  “We had to at first. He’s our main guy, like it or not. You were our fallback and they wouldn’t buy it.”

  “Who wouldn’t buy it?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Because you don’t know or because you can’t say?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Damn it, Carol. Damn it.”

  “I agree. Damn it.”

  “Howley? He’s mainly print. And he’s already done everything. Isn’t it time to start spreading it around a little bit?”

  “That was exactly the argument we made. But they wouldn’t budge.”

  “I had my heart set on this. I really did. It … Well, I don’t have to tell you what it could have meant.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Is this some kind of message being sent some kind of crazy way from the network?”

  “No! Don’t go anchorperson paranoid on me now.”

  Joan stood to leave. The feeling of happy warmth had been replaced with fury heat. “Well, count me out. I am an anchorwoman. It’s either moderate or nothing. I will not be just another panelist.”

  “Sit down, please, Joan.”

  “No.”

  “All right. Have it standing up. I will join you.” Carol stood. “Number one, dear friend and colleague, let’s not lose sight of what is going on here. We are talking about the one and only debate of this campaign between the candidates for president of the United States.” She handed Joan a piece of paper. It contained the advance word on next week’s poll showing Meredith moving out ahead of Greene. “This is what it is about.” Joan glanced at it and said: “I do not believe the country is going to elect that guy. I don’t care what the polls say. In the privacy of the voting booth they will not vote for Meredith. But what’s your point?”

  “This is not about Joan Naylor or Mike Howley or anybody else who goes out there and asks questions.”

  “It’s about network-news politics. That is what this is about,” Joan said.

  “I’ll ignore that. The really important point is the deal is done. We already told them you would do it.” “You had no right to do that!”

  “Oh, please. Let’s not go into rights. The fact is that this was worked out on a slot level. A slot for CNS News on the panel. All of the networks wanted one. We are the only one that got one. The other three slots are going one to radio, two to print. We are the only television. We won. We got it. We being CNS News, not you Joan Naylor. It’s that simple.”

  “That is not simple. That is awful. Who did we make the slot deal with?”

  “Oh, shit, Joan, just do it. One hundred million or so of your closest friends and fans will be watching. It is good for you and for the network.”

  “I want to know who we dealt with.”

  “Drop it.”

  “Tell me or I will not be a party to this, thank you.”

  “Yes you will, thank you.”

  The phone on Carol Reynolds’s desk rang at that moment. Within a few more moments Joan was talking to Nancy Dewey. With Carol Reynolds staring at her, she listened to the official invitation. And when Dewey finished Joan Naylor said, Fine, OK, I accept, I will be one of the panelists at the Williamsburg Debate.

  She then walked out of Carol Reynolds’s office without saying another word. She was angry at Carol and the network and the gods and devils of television. But she was also not proud of herself. She wished even then that she had merely declined the invitation politely. She didn’t because in the final few seconds she had to think before replying to Nancy Dewey, she realized that the decision to decline was also probably the decision to walk. Good-bye CNS News, good-bye chance to be the first sole principal woman anchor in the history of network television. At the age of forty-two, her opportunities for bigger and better things were here and most likely only here. CNS had spotted her on KFAA in Cincinnati twenty-two years ago and had brought her along and to national prominence. She was theirs, they were hers. There had even been a story in a recent TV Guide that the competition for viewers in the new multioutlet media world might cause the networks to scrap their perky women who were always there under what was known as the Doris Day Always Lives Here rule and go exclusively to what the article called “slink, slim, and cerebral” in their women anchor and correspondent corps. ABS had already done that with its prime-time newsmagazines. All four of them were anchored or co-anchored by women clearly chosen according to what Russell Baker in The New York Times called “their Bedroom Fantasy Quotient, hereafter and forever to be referred to only as their B.F.Q.”

  Joan told me that if she had known her network had made a deal with “that devil Meredith” for its slot on the panel, she would have definitely declined and walked. There is no way for me to evaluate such a hypothetical declaration.

  Joan Naylor did not go home from the CNS studio on Wisconsin Avenue, NW. She had a network car and driver take her directly and late to a dinner party for twelve at the Cleveland Park home of Lyle Willard and Marge Chambers-Willard on Highland Park Place, NW. Willard was a law partner of Joan’s husband, Jeff. Marge was trained as a lawyer but had spent a few years as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and then CNN before becoming what she was now, the executive director of Women in Communications and the Arts, an international study and lobbying organization.

  Joan was able to say only a brief hello to Jeff, who was already there, before Marge took her over to meet the special guest for the evening, South African novelist and activist Nadine Gordimer. Joan had wanted to tell Jeff about the debate things, but it was not possible. He was not only her husband and the father of her children, he was also her number one adviser on all professional things that really mattered. Normally she would have called and consulted with him before deciding on Williamsburg. But that had not been a normal situation in Carol Reynolds’s office just now.

  A while later at the table, and by her own account and admission, Joan did something really stupid. She told her dinner companion on the right, Senator Lewis of Missouri, about the debate invitation. The senator, without a word of reaction to her, tapped his glass for attention.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, if I may stop proceedings here for a quick moment for a special announcement,” he said. When everyone was quiet, he said: “It is with great pleasure that I announce that my distinguished and esteemed and charming dinner companion on my left, the one and only Joan Naylor, has been selected to be one of the panelists of the one and only presidential debate coming up at Williamsburg.”

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p; Joan looked across the table at Jeff, whose face was nothing but a huge smile. “Madam moderator, I salute you,” he said. If Joan had been sitting next to him she would have slugged him. If she had had a 9mm pistol she would have shot him. If she had had a baseball bat she would have hit him and his head out of Cleveland Park.

  “Here, here,” somebody else said.

  “I’ll drink to that,” said another, and there was nice noise around the table. When it died down Joan, in great pain, said: “As a matter of fact, I am not the moderator. I’m one of the three panelists. Mike Howley’s going to moderate.”

  Jeff’s smile disappeared. It was replaced by a deep color of red.

  Joan Allison Naylor and Jeffrey Alan Grayson had met at a cocktail party fifteen years earlier. She had just come from Cincinnati to Washington as a general-assignment reporter for CNS; he had just joined Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, a prestigious Washington law firm. He had graduated fifth in his law-school class at Harvard and clerked for a federal judge in his hometown, St. Joseph, Missouri. Jeff proposed marriage six months to the day after they met and they married six months to the day after that. Joan had kept her own name when they married, a natural thing to do at the time. Joan Naylor told me the only problem it caused now was with their twelve-year-old twin girls. They carried Grayson as their last name, which meant nobody knew Joan Naylor was their mother until they were told. And then that usually only confused things. Jeff very much wanted Joan to change her last name to Grayson but also very much understood why professionally it made no sense. Joan Naylor was Joan Naylor. Joan Grayson would be nobody.

  I’ll never take your last name now! was the message she was transmitting with her eyes across the Willards’ dinner table at this moment.

  “Well, well, what difference does it make?” said Lyle Willard, the perfect host. “Moderator or panelist or whatever, our Joan will be the one and only star of that one and only night.”

  “I agree,” somebody else said.

  “It’s an honor, no matter,” said another.

  “It does matter,” Marge said sternly, taking charge. “It matters a lot.”