The Last Debate Read online

  “Shouldn’t we decide who is going to ask the first question?” Henry said.

  Howley said: “Well, as a matter of fact, the moderator asks the first question. That is in the rules that the candidates’ representatives and the commission people worked out.”

  And he explained the format, which was the most traditional and most controlled of those available. The Greene camp had insisted on the journalists’ panel. The Meredith people had argued for a single moderator with a town-hall citizens-audience call-in approach—similar to the Take It Back, America one their candidate had used for seven dramatically successful years before millions on live radio and national television. Turpin—and everyone else—knew his man would “wipe the floor” with Greene in such a free-flowing format. That was why Lilly adamantly opposed its use.

  But in many ways the format was considered irrelevant. It was generally believed—and stated repeatedly on every morning, noon, and night, weekday and weekend, talk, food-fight, call-in, analysis, and clownalist show—that Greene would have a problem if he was debating an empty chair. The only unique thing about the final agreed- to setup for Williamsburg was that for the first time there would be no live audience and thus no applause, cheering, or other noise to deal with. The only people in the auditorium with the candidates and the panelists would be the television-camera people and other technicians needed to get it on the air.

  Mike Howley went through the details. The four panelists rotated asking questions. Candidate A got two minutes to answer, Candidate B a minute to respond or rebut. Then came the next question to Candidate B for a two-minute answer, Candidate A for a one-minute rebuttal, and on and on in precise rotation for some eighty-two minutes. Then each candidate had two minutes for a closing statement directly to camera. The order of everything would be determined by a drawing.

  “What if one of them says something outrageous—namely Meredith—and Greene wants to jump and slap him back?” Barbara asked.

  “Can’t happen,” Mike responded.

  “We can’t ask follow-ups?” Henry asked.

  “Nope. One of you could follow up another’s question in the next round, but that is it.”

  There was a moment of annoyance.

  “Well, this is a stupid way to do things,” Henry said. “I do not like these rules at all.”

  “I don’t either,” Barbara said, looking right at Mike Howley. “Let’s just ignore ’em. What if we go out there tomorrow night and you say to those two candidates, ‘Mr. Meredith … Mr. Greene, we are going to get out of your way. For the next ninety minutes you can talk spontaneously about the issues confronting this country today and how you differ in your approaches to them. You can do it in any way and under any rules or guidelines you like. The four of us on this distinguished panel, us distinguished New Arrogants, are going to just sit back with the rest of the American people and just watch and listen.’ ”

  “Great idea, but no way,” Joan said.

  Henry said: “Good, no way. I came here to ask some questions. I want to ask some questions.”

  Barbara said: “I guess Meredith would just start talking and preening and lying, and the governor would be made to look like a stupid ass again, as always.”

  Howley said: “Some might argue also that there’s an issue of credibility and integrity here for us. We all are here as invited guests, as professionals willing to contribute our services on behalf of voter education and edification. We accepted the terms, the rules of the debate, when we accepted the invitation. It would be professionally irresponsible to pull a stunt like that.”

  Then he said: “How about we look at the menus and order some dinner?”

  There was an immediate consensus in favor of doing so.

  I came to my Williamsburg reporting assignment in a four-door Toyota Corolla rented from Avis at the Newport News–Williamsburg International Airport. So what? you (and Howley in the Appendix) might say. Under normal circumstances I would agree that this kind of I-was-there information from a reporter is irrelevant. The problem is that as much as I abhor it, my movements and methods became a minor story within the so-called Media Critics’ world in the course of my reporting. Some unfair and nasty charges were leveled at me and they began with that rent-a-car.

  The New American Tatler magazine paid for the car. I have my Nations Bank, USAir, Visa, and other receipts—including the frequent-flyer-miles credit form—to prove it. The charge that I was brought into Williamsburg on a private jet by some sinister person or group of sinister persons and then chauffeured around in the company of armed security people affiliated with the private security firm working for Meredith is absurd, ridiculous, a lie. The snide fantasy suggestions, for instance, that appeared in Fortune, a once reputable publication, that I was part of a “still shadowy and unknown conspiracy” or “possibly the journalistic front man for an effort to subvert democratic systems” would be laughable if not so potentially damaging to me and my career. Fortune refused to print a correction and I still am not sure where all of that came from and why. But I am sure of my movements and actions in those hours leading up to the debate itself.

  I came to Virginia from Bloomington, Indiana, where I had gone in pursuit of a story we at the Tatler had preslugged “The Violence Teachers.” I had gone into it already incensed and appalled by the emotional cripples who coach big-time college basketball, the grown men who throw towels and chairs and vulgarisms at referees, fans, opposition coaches, and even their own players and members of their own families. My blood was now at a full boil over what I had found out about those foul-mouthed bully showoffs and the school administrators and alumni who tolerated and encouraged them. I hated to interrupt my boil, but I also had my obligations to my editor, Jonathan Angel, and the magazine. And the idea of going behind the scenes of a presidential debate was intriguing. The call from Jonathan about Williamsburg was a last-minute affair. He had other writers on the presidential campaign itself, but he wanted me—“somebody with your touch for irony and the personal” is the flattering way he put it, frankly—to go with an idea of doing a “behind-the-faces-and-the-postures” piece about this important event. Another rationalization for me was that a brief respite from my anger at the imbecile coaches and what they were doing to encourage and foster violence and disrespect among the young people of this country might be good for my blood pressure—and thus my health.

  The Newport News—Williamsburg airport was a pleasant surprise. It turned out to be a small architectural jewel of a place with a feel and ambience that was more like that of a museum of modern art than of an airport. There were Windsor-style chairs in the phone booths and an atrium in the center that brought the sun down on the waiting-room area filled with wooden garden benches. Across the ceiling in the main ticketing hallway hung eight-feet-tall colored banners with the arty, shadowed portraits and signatures of great Americans/Virginians of history—George and Martha Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Wythe, George Mason, Patrick Henry, John Marshall, and even Pocahontas, among others. The building itself—a brick base with silver support beams and glass halfway up and across the top—bore the mark of a famous architect. I did not take the time to check, but it would not surprise me to find that it was the work of a Pei, Johnson, Jacobsen, Venturi, or one of the other great ones. The only things lacking were customers and flights. United, American, and USAir each had only a handful of small-plane commuter flights from the three Washington airports and places like Philadelphia and Raleigh-Durham.

  I came in from Pittsburgh on a USAir 737, one of the few big-plane flights into Newport News–Williamsburg. I arrived just after five P.M. on Saturday. (Yes, I plead guilty to having flown first-class, which was in my contract with the Tatler. It is business-class for foreign flights.) I rented the Toyota and drove less than ten minutes east on Interstate 64 to the Omni–Newport News Hotel, where the Meredith campaign was headquartered. The Greene campaign entourage was only a few blocks away on the other side of the interstate
in a Ramada Inn. The plan was for the candidates to come to Williamsburg, less than thirty minutes west, on Sunday evening shortly before the debate.

  A postdebate story in The Washington Morning News (Howley’s paper, please remember) claimed I was taken immediately “like royalty” to Meredith’s suite at the Omni, where I was “massaged and messaged” and otherwise set up to do a flattering piece about Meredith, a rarity thus far in the entire national press coverage of the campaign. Not true. I went to the ninth-floor suite of Jack Turpin, a man I had never met before, and asked permission to be present when Meredith rehearsed for the debate that evening. I had been told there was going to be a full-scale rehearsal in a ballroom down on the basement level of the hotel. I knew access would be restricted and limited, but I also knew it would be a great place to begin my story, a great place to start looking for what was happening behind the faces and the postures. A reminder, please, that my prede-bate focus was solely on the candidates.

  Turpin not only said no, he said it forcefully, profanely, leaving little doubt that the decision was final. He also reminded me of the trouble the columnist George Will got into by participating in one of Ronald Reagan’s debate rehearsals. I told him I did not want to play a part, I only wanted to watch. No, he said again.

  But, as a reporter, I did not often take no for the final answer on a matter this important. I saw bearing witness to that rehearsal as a monumentally important thing to do for my story. So I arranged through other means to have access to what happened at that rehearsal. What other means? I will not say. I cannot say. The person or persons who assisted me did so only on the condition that I never reveal their involvement. I gave them my word. My word is good. Did money change hands? Yes, it did. How much? Barely four figures. Again, I was reimbursed by the Taller. (No frequent-flyer miles were awarded on this one.) So the post-debate charge in The Washington Morning News that I “paid sources for information and for access into chambers and sanctums” is technically correct. And I would do it again tomorrow if confronted with the same option: pay and get in—don’t pay and stay out. The public has a right to know what happened in that hotel ballroom. If the public’s right to know is the overriding energy behind journalism, what difference does it make whether the sources of the information come free or for a fee? In my opinion, it is a question from an argument that I believe is no longer relevant to the practice of journalism in this country.

  What happened that evening during the rehearsal was critically revealing, particularly in light of what happened barely twenty-four hours later at the real thing.

  Rusty Washburn, the former New York congressman and housing secretary, played the rehearsal part of the opponent. He had done so in the rehearsals for debates during the primaries, and although everyone, including Turpin, had thought he got a bit carried away, good luck required that he do it again for the one and only debate of the general-election campaign.

  It was a mistake. He got carried away even more this time.

  Washburn, well known as a man who saw himself as president more clearly than he did Meredith, played Greene as a candidate a lot better than Greene did.

  “You asked me about the federal budget deficit,” he said to one of four campaign aides playing the panelists. “That is important and I will address it, but I must first say that the most important issue the American people should be focusing on tonight is one of bigotry and division. The real question of this election is whether this nation can afford the divide-and-conquer politics of fear that my talk-show-meister opponent is dishing out. Fear of fellow Americans and immigrants who look different than us Euro-Caucasian whites. I say no. That is my answer to that question. And on Election Day, I believe that will be the answer of an overwhelming majority of the American people.”

  He stood behind a podium on a stage against a far wall of the room, the Rainbow Ballroom. Meredith stood at another podium some forty feet away, and the four fake reporters were behind a table facing them. It was a good mock-up replica of what the stage would be like Sunday night in the Williamsburg Lodge auditorium. The main difference was the color scheme. The Rainbow Ballroom was mostly beige, orange, and gold. Beige carpet, orange walls, and gold light fixtures.

  “Mr. Washburn,” Jack Turpin said, walking up to a spot between the mock-panelists and Washburn, “we appreciate your desire to make some points of your own, if that is what you are doing—”

  “What I am doing, my friend, is trying to be helpful by making this as realistic as possible. That is what I am doing.”

  Meredith, clearly annoyed with Washburn, said: “Realism in the case of my real opponent, Rusty, would require that you fall mute, dumb, or incoherent. If, on the other hand, you are speaking for yourself when you purport to be speaking for mock-candidate Greene, then I would suggest you speak for yourself only to yourself. The wisdom of electing me president of the United States is now in the hands of the American people. If you and your like-minds in my party do not believe in my candidacy on behalf of my party, then I would suggest that it is you who have a problem, not me. Now, if we can proceed without any more of your silly and quite offensive attacks on me.”

  Turpin backed away and another of the mock-journalists asked another mock-question. Rusty Washburn ignored it and said directly to Meredith: “One can only hope that some of the things you have said during this campaign are not, in fact, a truthful measure or indication of your real beliefs and intentions. One can only hope that once you are in the White House—which the polls now show is an increasingly likely possibility—that you will return to sanity and unity and common sense for the purposes of governing.”

  “Get this man out of here!” Meredith screamed. His face was red and his hands were grabbing the air as if in search of something he might throw at his Republican colleague/mock-opponent behind the other podium.

  Turpin led Washburn out of the ballroom. And in a few minutes the rehearsal continued with a deputy press secretary in the role of the mock-Greene.

  I wrote in my notes after witnessing the episode: “This man Meredith has a temper.”

  They were prophetic words indeed.

  But on that Saturday evening my principal concern was trying to be in two places at more or less the same time. The Greene campaign had taken over most of the Ramada, just a few minutes away. It was already almost nine o’clock when I arrived. I was afraid I was going to have missed the Greene rehearsal, but I had given the Meredith run-through top priority, mostly on the calculated grounds that it looked like he was going to win the election. Thus what lay behind his winner’s face and postures would make a more relevant story than what lay behind those of the loser. I also thought it was possible that I could get lucky. The Greene schedule called for a later start. Maybe I could do both.

  I did get lucky. I did not have to argue with anyone or offer anyone money to get what I wanted. It came easy and it came free.

  The Greene debate mock-up operation was in a large meeting room on the first floor that was named after George Mason, one of the men on the banners at the airport. He was a Virginian friend of George Washington and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Brad Lilly, whom I found having a drink in the bar when I arrived, said I could not come to the rehearsal. “No press allowed,” he said, shaking his head and waving me away.

  But a few minutes later—it was now 9:15 P.M.—I simply fell in behind him and a few of his assistants for the walk to the rehearsal room. He looked at me and shrugged as we entered the room, and I found a seat off in a corner way, way out of sight and, hopefully, out of mind.

  The first thing that struck me sitting there was the vast class difference in how these two campaigns operated. There were the Meredith people living down the road in a nine-story multistar luxury hotel hidden among trees bordering the upscale shopping and business area called Oyster Point. They were doing their rehearsal in a real, fully outfitted replica of the debate scene. Here were the Greene folks in a nice, modest Ramada Inn sprawled on a busy four-lane
road, the kind of place usually identified with station wagons full of vacationing families. Their mock-debate setup was only a few chairs and two speaker’s podiums set around a room where events such as regional insurance sales breakfasts and lunches were usually held.

  I sat there for twenty minutes before Greene appeared, accompanied by a two-man Secret Service detail. Meredith had been dressed in a dark suit with a dark burgundy tie and white shirt, exactly what he would wear at the debate itself. Greene wore slacks and a sweater.

  Greene immediately motioned for Lilly to come with him away from the others, the group of aides and others who would play the various mock-parts. Where they went was very close to where I was trying to make myself invisible by sinking farther and farther down into my aluminum and black vinyl chair.

  Neither Greene nor Lilly paid any attention to me.

  I heard Greene say: “This is ridiculous, Brad.”

  “What exactly is ridiculous, sir?” Lilly replied.

  “That debate tomorrow night is going to be absolute misery for me. Why go through it twice? Why have this rehearsal?”

  “In order to keep it—the real one tomorrow night—from being misery.”