The Last Debate Read online

  Joan said, “Please, Marge,” wanting desperately to keep this from going on. She knew Marge Willard.

  It was too late. Marge Willard said: “I think it is outrageous that you were not chosen to moderate and I will say so publicly and loudly.”

  “Good for you,” said the senator, which came out sounding condescending and drew a stern frown from Marge Willard.

  “Please don’t, Marge,” Joan said. “It will only make it worse.”

  “I disagree. These people should not be allowed to get away with this kind of crap anymore.”

  Jeff said: “Marge is right, honey.”

  That drew a sharp shut-up stare from Joan. Shut up! was what she wanted to shout to Marge and to everyone else.

  “What is your network going to do about this?” Marge asked. “They should be raising the real hell.”

  Joan just shook her head. Maybe if she refused to talk, the whole thing would peter out on its own. She was wrong again. Mary Beth Riley, the chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, was sitting on Jeff’s right. She was a former Wimbledon tennis champ who had gone on to a second stardom as a Stanford economist. She was known as someone who took no prisoners. She said now in a rising voice to Joan:

  “I think it is outrageous that the CNS network is not prepared to defend the right of its premier woman anchor to moderate this debate rather than just be a panelist. You should be moderating, and the fact that you are not is a clear case of discrimination and you know it.”

  Joan, still determined to control the damage, said only: “It’s more complicated than that, Mary Beth.” She gave Willard a pleading look. Please move it on to something else! Help!

  Willard read it and said: “The real question about Williamsburg is Meredith. Is this country really going to follow that talking buffoon over the cliff into extremism, isolationism, racism, and many other forms of fanaticism?”

  Everyone had an opinion and they carried the rest of the evening through to the dinner party’s conclusion promptly at 11:10.

  Joan and Jeff were the first to leave and thus the first to have at each other in the privacy of an automobile.

  Michael J. Howley was on an airplane thinking strange things when he received the first contact about the Williamsburg Debate.

  He was thinking about the very early morning during the 1980 campaign when somebody—probably Mashek or Dickenson—asked everybody on the press bus to write the lead for his or her own obit. They were about to get back on their snake-bit chartered jet to follow Jimmy Carter from Atlanta to Kansas City, Chicago, Des Moines, Minneapolis, Denver, Los Angeles, and finally to San Francisco. The plane, a United 727, had had a series of disconcerting mechanical problems, the latest having been a tire blowing out on landing just the night before. The idea, which not everyone thought of as a complete joke, was that it would be a thoughtful parting gesture to have some copy standing by for their respective employers when the plane went down.

  Mike Howley wrote and recited out loud on the bus:

  “The most prominent person aboard the fallen press plane was Michael J. Howley, America’s premier political reporter. His only youthful ambitions had been to be William Faulkner and to be the first boy in his high-school class to run off to Durant, Oklahoma, to get married.

  “He was thirty-four.”

  Mary McGrory topped him and everyone else with:

  “Mary McGrory, the most beautiful columnist in the world, had been a Las Vegas showgirl before falling back on a career in journalism.

  “She was twenty-three.”

  That occasion and that campaign came back to him as he looked out the window of this other jet, a regular-schedule American Airlines 757 still on its initial ascent from the Dallas-Fort Worth airport on its way to Washington National. Howley strained his eyes and his imagination off and down to the left to see Denison, Texas, the place he would have run from to Durant, the marriage capital of that very small part of the world. Nobody he loved or even knew well lived in Denison anymore, not even May Ann Brinkman, the girl he would have run off with if she would have gone, which she most surely would not have done.

  He was most likely struck by the one singeing similarity between 1980 and this election. No thoughtful person he knew, most particularly in the press, believed then that Ronald Reagan should be president of the United States, but they were all sure he was going to be. All rational people in the country as well as the thoughtful ones were now certain David Donald Meredith should not be president and were terrified by the prospect that he was going to be. The upcoming NBS–Wall Street Journal poll the office had just told Mike Howley about made that more than just a prospect.

  Howley was one of the many political reporters who had chronicled Meredith’s rise from being a small-time political-science professor to being the Republican candidate for president of the United States. Stops along the way included creation of the Take It Back Foundation, a spectacularly successful information enterprise that included book and pamphlet publishing and electronic productions. All of the enterprises—including his various radio call-in and television programs—promoted the Take It Back political philosophy for angry Americans. Take it back—the streets, the schools, the borders, the city halls, the state-houses, and, now, the White House.

  Howley had just come from an evening in San Antonio, his favorite Texas city. It was a paid lecture-series appearance before more than a thousand people in the downtown Majestic Theater, which had recently been restored perfectly and elegantly to its early-1900s Victorian presence. After he gave his standard forty-minute “Beltway Blues” speech about Washington, government, politics, and the press, he fielded questions and comments from the audience for twenty minutes. The election was all anyone was interested in, and the more he talked about it the harder it was to hide his real opinion about the disaster the election of Meredith would be for the United States of America.

  He didn’t even try to hide his increasing self-hate for the way he and his colleagues in the press had contributed not only to Meredith’s rise from the radio-talk-show fringes to the mainstream of American politics, but to most psychological, confidence, and other failings of current American society. “We have sold out to a higher purpose than keeping you informed,” he told the San Antonio people. “We now are slaves to our own glory, our own lecture fees, our own faces, our own snideness, our own bank accounts.” And I believe he meant Me. He meant himself. He was sick and tired of himself.

  Now, on the plane headed back to Washington, he thought also of his second youthful ambition. To be William Faulkner. Success in journalism had come fast and easy to Howley, maybe too fast and easy. He had always wanted to turn his mind and his typewriter and his energy from the phony fiction of Washington and the rest of the so-called real world to the real fiction of novels and short stories and maybe even plays. But there had never been time. Hemingway or somebody said only those who have to write fiction or die do it, because it’s too hard otherwise. Clearly Mike Howley hadn’t had to or die. Did he now?

  “Mr. Howley?” said a stewardess, leaning across the man in the aisle seat.

  Howley smiled in the affirmative. Yes indeed, he was the famous Mr. Howley. Do you want me to autograph your manifest?

  “I sometimes see you on ABS in the morning,” she said. “I think you are really great, but I don’t know how you remember all of that the way you do. I love your stories in The New York Herald.”

  Mike Howley continued to smile, deciding it was not worth correcting her to say that if she ever saw him in the morning it was on NBS, not ABS, and that it was The Washington Morning News, not The New York Herald, that ran his stories, the best political reporting done in America today. He could hardly wait to tell T. R. (Teddy) Lemmon, Jr., of the Herald, who did the nation’s second-best political reporting, that the stewardesses of American were mistaking him for him, and probably vice versa.

  “Here, the captain asked me to give this to you,” said the stewardess. “It came on his
radio, I think.”

  Howley thanked her, took the note (must have felt extremely important), and read:

  “Urgent that you call Mr. Hammond at 202-555-5498. I appreciate your work. The Captain.”

  Mike Howley knew Mr. Hammond. Chuck Hammond, the former Carter and Mondale guy who ran the National Commission on Presidential Debates. And Mike Howley immediately assumed Hammond wanted him for Williamsburg—most likely as the moderator.

  Howley says his first reaction was an absolute, unequivocal no. There was no way he was going to go on that Williamsburg panel. It was all showbiz, all surface, all preening, and all wrong. Journalists should not participate in debates where the candidates have any say-so at all in selecting the panelists. No, no, no. A thousand times, no. It was against Washington Morning News policy anyhow. No.

  That absolute, unequivocal no clearly changed to a probable yes after another hour or so in the air. It must have been his thinking through his real and serious fears about the election of David Donald Meredith that caused the change.

  He got off that American Airlines 757 at National Airport and went directly to the Morning News office to confront the obstacle to his going to Williamsburg.

  That obstacle was Jerry Rhome, the executive editor of The Washington Morning News.

  “Let’s go for a walk” were the scariest words a reporter or editor could hear from Rhome, who had a passion for walking. He claimed it cleansed the mind, rejuvenated the spirit, exercised the heart, and enhanced the sex drive. But it was on walks that he also did his major firing, promoting, chewing out, and praising.

  He spoke the magic words to Mike Howley a few minutes into their friendly shouting match that followed Howley’s brief telephone conversation with Hammond, confirming what he had suspected about their wanting him to moderate the Williamsburg Debate. Friendly shouting matches were Howley and Rhome’s favorite method of communication.

  “It’s too goddamn cold out there, Jerry,” Howley said to Rhome’s invitation to walk.

  “Bundle up, bundle up, you’ll be fine.”

  “I’m busy.”

  “Busy talking to me, right. You can be busy talking to me walking around the block.”

  So Mike Howley bundled up and they went outside on K Street and started walking west toward Sixteenth.

  “It’s against our policy, you know that,” Rhome said. “You helped make the policy.”

  “Change the policy.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  They turned left at Sixteenth toward Lafayette Square. The White House was visible through the trees on the other side of the park, the Pennsylvania Avenue side.

  “I think our policy is too cute, too elitist, too arrogant, too stupid,” Howley said.

  “That’s not what you thought when you signed off on it four years ago. I can remember your high-and-mighty words now. Didn’t you say it was ‘journalistic malpractice’—yes, ‘journalistic malpractice’—to participate in a debate where the candidates had a say-so in choosing the panel? Yes, yes, indeed. I remember your words so well. You really do have a way with words, Mr. Howley.”

  “I was wrong. You were wrong. We were all wrong. Pompous Perfect Mulvane was right.”

  Pompous Perfect Mulvane was Douglas Mulvane, the ANC anchorman and former Los Angeles Times political editor who had retired last year and now wrote magazine essays, made speeches, and taught graduate seminars on what he called “the downfalling of the American press.” He was the one who invented the word “clownalist” in describing Mark Southern, the then Washington bureau chief for a Chicago newspaper whose attempts to be funny on the talk-fight shows were especially ridiculous and embarrassing. The term caught on as a way of referring to a whole new class of what Mulvane called “pseudo-journalist-commentator-clowns who see and use the news as an entertainment vehicle.” Mulvane had moderated the most important of the debates four years before and had publicly argued with the News and several other news organizations who would not allow their people to participate in the debates. He claimed journalists could not divorce themselves from responsibility as citizens. Doctors and lawyers had obligations to contribute their professional services to the good of society and so did journalists. “We journalists have become the New Arrogants of American society,” Mulvane had said over and over again. It was a New Arrogant question, in fact, that had triggered Howley’s own attack on the press the other night in San Antonio.

  “Look what happened with that Caperton bitch,” Mike said to Rhome. “Pompous Perfect said if we New Arrogants stay on our high horses it’ll be the talk-show dandies who’ll take over, and he was absolutely right.” Angela Caperton, a daytime talk-show host on TTCN—Talk Talk Cable News—moderated one of the three debates in the last presidential election.

  “Mulvane, I regret to report, may be right for once,” Rhome said. “But I also regret to report that all I remember about that Ann Arbor debate was that skirt she had on. It was the shortest I had ever seen off a prostitute picket line. Every time she crossed her legs I lost track of the question, the answer, and even who was running for president and what day it was.”

  “You have just made my point.”

  They were approaching the Hay-Adams Hotel.

  “How about ducking in here for a cup of coffee or something?” Mike Howley asked.

  “Nope. You’re a candy ass, Howley. The only one worse is Tubbs.”

  Tubbs. Pat Tubbs, the News’s legendary investigative reporter who now wrote mostly nonfiction inside-Washington exposé books that were made into movies starring people like Tom Cruise and Richard Gere as legendary investigative reporters. He and Howley, the News’s biggest stars, had co-authored a “straight” book on the 1976 presidential campaign and were known to be friends and equally untouchable by Rhome and the News management.

  Howley and Rhome went on to the corner, to the light, and crossed over to Lafayette Park and kept walking.

  “These debates are nothing but television spectaculars, so why not leave it to the television spectaculars like Angela Caper-cunt, or whatever her name is, to run them?” Rhome said.

  Michael J. Howley, the man who’d wanted nothing more in life than to be William Faulkner or to run away to Oklahoma with May Ann Brinkman, saw before him a target of opportunity.

  “Stop a second, Jerry, and look at what lies before you.”

  Jerry Rhome did as he was told. “I see the White House before me.”

  “Who lives there, Jerry?”

  “A jerk named Gilliam, who thanks to the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States can’t hold his job more than the two terms he already has.”

  “Are there any jobs in the world more important than the one he has?”

  Rhome looked to his left and to his right and then to the sidewalk and up to the sky.

  “What are you doing?” Howley asked.

  “I hear the Marine Band, I think it is, playing ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever.’ I wondered where you had them stashed.”

  “Look, goddamn it, isn’t a debate—in this case, the one and only debate—between the two candidates for most powerful job in the world something more than a goddamn television spectacular?”

  “I have about decided that all politics, all government, all wars, all news, is now nothing but one huge goddamn television spectacular. That’s why Meredith, a talking spectacular, is doing so well.”

  Rhome turned back toward K Street and the News office, and Howley, gratefully, followed his lead.

  “You may not have been listening,” Howley said, “but even in that awful Ann Arbor thing some important things got said. Maybe at Williamsburg we can get Meredith to admit once and for all that he really does believe only his kind of Christians are going to heaven. Something like that …”

  “I don’t understand why nobody has drawn any more blood on that so far.”

  “Meredith doesn’t bleed.”

  “Everybody bleeds. It’s the fourth rule of journalism.”
/>   Jerry Rhome was famous for making up fourth rules of journalism. He used to say his first three were: When in doubt write around it, When in doubt leave it out, When in doubt lie. He quit saying that after some people hearing him in a C-SPAN “American Profile” interview thought he was serious, and it turned up in a lot of I-told-you-so letters and articles about the awfulness of the press.

  In a few minutes they were back to K Street and a block from the office.

  “What do I say about the policy if I let you do this?” Jerry Rhome said.

  “If I let you do this” were not words that Michael J. Howley enjoyed hearing from anybody. He and Jerry Rhome were both in their late fifties, both powers in their own right. They were known as friends, but there may have been too much of all the rest for them to be real friends, the kind Howley and Tubbs were, the kind who exchanged secrets and longings or even simple pleasantries. I was able to confirm that neither Howley nor Rhome had ever been in the other’s home except for large cocktail parties or small dinner parties held for business reasons by one or the other.

  “Tell them the truth,” Mike Howley said. “Tell them that after much consultation and experience you have now decided the no-debates policy was wrong. People appreciate people who are big enough to admit they were wrong.”

  They were at the News building’s front door.

  “I assume you will say the same thing,” Rhome said.

  “Absolutely. I was wrong, but now I am right.”

  “ ‘I was wrong, but now I am right.’ You are indeed a man of words, a smith of words. No wonder you have come so far in this, the most noble of all professions in the great democratic society we call America the Beautiful.”

  After several seconds of awkward and tense silence, Rhome said: “Why have you really changed your mind on debates, Mike? I’d really like to know.”

  “I already said, I think our policy is elite, stupid …”

  “All right, all right. Go be Mr. Moderator,” Jerry Rhome said. “Only promise me one thing. Promise me you’ll make sure Meredith loses his ass. I am not sure the country could survive that take-it-back crap of his. He’s the one who needs taking back—to the armpit of hell where he came from.”