No Way to Treat a First Lady (8 page)

Dutch Umin was in his early sixties. He had drowsy but watchful eyes and the Cheshire cat physique of a gourmet and oenophile. His vertical collection of Château Petrus made dinners at Mandamus, his Virginia mansion, memorable occasions. He collected Dutch master artwork, the source of his nickname.

He was a man of formidable intellect who had clerked for the great Potter Stewart on the Supreme Court and over the course of a distinguished career had won impressive victories for clients ranging from left-wing firebombers to cocaine-snorting major-league baseball players to international grain corporations accused of using powdered insect dung to give a popular children's breakfast cereal its distinctive crunch. But he had yet to try a single case as judge, and now by process of elimination he was—it. Overnight, he became the most famous jurist in the world. Within weeks, he would have name recognition among aborigines and Seychelles islands fishermen. He was not altogether delighted by this abrupt propulsion to celebrity. His glasses had developed a tendency to fog.

Judge Dutch Umin's first official duty in
United States
v.
Elizabeth MacMann
was to convey his dismay over the witness list that Boyce had submitted. It included 281 names, including the directors of the Secret Service and the FBI, the President of the United States, and most saucily of all, the deputy attorney general, who was prosecuting Beth. One columnist remarked that it was a wonder he had not subpoenaed Paul Revere to attest to the authenticity of the spittoon.

The atmosphere in chambers was tense. Sandra Clintick, the deputy attorney general—who had not at all hungered to have this prosecution handed to her—had taken exception to Boyce's demand that she herself testify. She was so mad that she avoided eye contact with Boyce. Never, she told the judge, had she heard of more appalling—make that atrocious—ethics. It was beyond insulting. The gloves were off, and they weren't even in court yet.

"Counselor?" Judge Dutch leaned back in his armchair, which gave off the creak of expensive leather. Knowing that the ordeal ahead would tax all his reserves, he had resolved to be as laconic as possible, even to the point of Zen.

"Your Honor," Boyce said, smiling, as if he were presenting the most reasonable proposition since Newton's last law, "one of the foundations of our defense will be that this prosecution,
ab initio"
—he turned to the deputy AG—"sorry, 'from the beginning'—"

"I know what it means."

"It's Latin."

"I know that"

"I wasn't sure they still taught Latin when you—"

"Your honor."

"Counsel."

"A significant part of our defense, Your Honor, will be that Madame Deputy Attorney General here—"

"The name is Clintick. I don't work in a whorehouse."

Boyce snorted. "I'd say
that's
a matter of opinion."

"Your
Honor."

"Counsel."

"We will establish that Mad—that the deputy attorney general is merely the smallest cog in a larger government conspiracy machine to bring murder charges against the former First Lady to further their own political agendas. Their evidence is disgraceful. Worse than disgraceful. I will annihilate it. Having done that, I will show by direct and cross-examination that Ms. Clintick conspired, along with other officers of government, to crucify Elizabeth MacMann on the altar of their own ambition. I understand, Your Honor, that this is a foul charge. I use it reluctantly, having no other recourse." When Boyce got going, his language became florid in a nineteenth-century sort of way.

Judge Umin tried not to smile. He concentrated on thinking about the crippling price he had just paid for his latest acquisition, a still life of a pear and eel by Govingus Koekkoek (1606-1647).

"I won't sit here and listen to this," said the deputy AG. "I will certainly not sit in court and listen to it."

Judge Dutch creaked in his chair. "Why don't I decide what we'll do in court?"

"Of course, Your Honor. I meant..."

Bingo. Boyce always tried to rattle them before going into court, to see where their stress points were. This one's stood out like rivets.

"I'm hard-pressed to think of a precedent," Judge Dutch said.

"I can't think of a precedent, either," Boyce interjected. "The executive branch conspiring with directors of the nation's top security and law enforcement agencies to frame the widowed wife of a president in order to conceal their own rank animosities and evil designs—"

"Steady, Counselor."

"I apologize, Judge. I forgot myself But I feel myself stirred."

"Give me something concrete, not a Patrick Henry speech."

Boyce handed him a loose-leaf binder full of press clippings highlighted in bright colors, neatly tabbed.

"As you know, Mrs. MacMann was no passive First Lady. She did not confine herself to serving tea to other wives and organizing Easter egg rolls on the White House lawn for the children of... cabinet officers."

The attorney general, father of five, had been conspicuous with his brood at the recent White House Easter egg roll.

Boyce continued. "Beth MacMann was the most substantive First Lady in our history. This did not sit well with some. On occasion, as the documents in that binder will show, Mrs. MacMann was vocally, if always cautiously, critical of the FBI and the Secret Service. The former for what she viewed as incompetence for hiring a man with the middle name of Vladimir to head up its counterintelligence operations. The latter for its hiring practices, which she viewed as discriminatory. We will contend that these two agencies, which played so critical a role in her being dragged by the hair to the dock, were predisposed to exact revenge on her by concocting the evidence against her."

"Evidence, Counsel, evidence. These are press clippings."

"With all respect, you're putting my client in a classic Catch-22 position. She cannot produce evidence without putting her accusers on the stand, yet you will not permit her to put them on the stand without first presenting evidence."

"I'll consider it. But for your client's sake, I wouldn't put all your eggs in that basket. As for calling the President to testify, visualize a snowball. Now visualize the same snowball in hell."

Boyce smiled. "I am at the mercy of Your Honor's wise and learned judgment."

There are few spectacles more pathetic than a roomful of otherwise responsible people trying to squirm out of a civic duty enshrined in Magna Carta as one of the signal boons of democracy. On the other hand, who in his right mind wants to serve on a jury?

Impaneling a jury for
United States
v.
Elizabeth MacMann
was more daunting. When the prospective jurors entered Judge Umin's courtroom with the downcast shuffle of the damned, most of them took one look at the judge, Boyce, and the deputy attorney general and uttered the same silent cry:
Oh God, no
—
not
that
case!

Boyce and his jury consultant studied their faces intently. It was easy enough to spot the ones who were horrified at the thought of spending the next year in some ghastly motel with seventeen of their "peers."

Others positively radiated delight, either at the thought of becoming part of history, or at the prospect of all those lucrative book deals.
Juror Number Five: My Story.
Film rights to Warner Brothers for seven figures. A top New York publisher had been quoted in the
Times
saying that a book by the first juror to be dismissed would fetch at least $1 million. But a juror who held out against the other jurors, either for or against conviction—
that
juror, the publisher said, could go start pouring the concrete for that dream house.

"This is a capital murder case," the judge began on the first day of jury selection. "Capital means that conviction carries a potential penalty of death. Normally a case like this could take months to try." Groans came from men and women in expensive suits who looked as if they measured their time in minutes. "But this is not a normal case, so it is difficult to predict. It could take up to one year. It could take more. Especially"—he glanced sideways at Boyce—"since an extensive witness list has been submitted by the defense." Gasps, groans, chests were clutched, bottles of nitroglycerin tablets rattled.

Boyce and his jury consultant watched the faces of the jury pool. Boyce's jury consultant was a man named Pinkut Vlonko. Before going into the lucrative business of advising trial lawyers on jury selection, "Pinky" Vlonko had been for over twenty years the CIA's top psychological profiler. His job was to figure out which of the CIA's top people were most likely to be selling secrets to the Russians or Chinese; also, to determine whether Saddam Hussein was technically a malignant narcissist or simply a fruitcake. Pinky had worked with Boyce on many cases. Between them, they had the best juror "radar" in the business. Boyce was fascinated by psychology. After being dumped by Beth, he had taken a master's degree in applied psychology.

The two of them had prepared a juror's questionnaire extensive even by their standards. It consisted of eight hundred questions. Number 11: Did you vote for President MacMann? Number 636: Are you regular at bowel movements? During his years at the CIA, Pinky had discovered that defectors and moles—switchers of allegiance—tended to be constipated.

The questionnaire had occasioned another heated session in Judge Dutch's chambers. Ms. Clintick, the DAG, had pronounced it an abomination. Boyce had thereupon produced a questionnaire used by the attorney general's own pollster when he had run unsuccessfully for governor years ago. It was 120 questions long. He'd waved it in the DAG's face. A compromise was struck. Boyce's questionnaire was trimmed to 650 questions. This was more or less the number of questions he and Pinky wanted to begin with. Boyce's rule since childhood had always been, Ask for a lot more than you need so that you end up with what you want.

Boyce's amiable but relentless grilling of the jurors, carried live on TV—Judge Dutch had decided it would be more complicated not to allow cameras in the court—led one pundit to venture that the only jury Boyce would be satisfied with would be one consisting of blind deaf-mutes with an IQ of 75. Not at all, Boyce countered cheerfully. All he wanted was "a level playing field." Was it unreasonable to seek out jurors whose minds had not been "hopelessly polluted by the daily diet of deplorable lies, innuendos, and vilification manufactured by the government's agents of smear and malediction"? If finding an unbiased jury required a little patience, who could object?

A "little patience" ended up taking four months.

"You should have been there," Boyce said. "I thought he was going to stab me with a Dutch letter opener. This is going to be fun."

"I'm glad you're enjoying yourself," Beth said.

Boyce put his hand on hers. "I'm just trying to get
you
to relax."

Beth looked anything but relaxed. She'd lost the weight Boyce had ordered her to shed. Her cheekbones were more prominent now, and the eyes had the darty intensity of someone dreaming of deep-crumb coffee cake. Looking at her, Boyce suddenly felt guilty. He wanted to pull the motorcade over and rush in and get her a chocolate milkshake.

"You okay, kiddo?"

"Fine."

"You look great, for someone who hasn't eaten in six months." The beauty magazines had tracked Beth's change in physical appearance.
Vogue
had done an article entitled "Diet of the Millennium." It quoted a leading Hollywood "aesthetic consultant"—formerly "makeup man"—saying, "If this is what killing your husband can do for you, then more women ought to considering clubbing their husbands to death."

Vanity Fair
magazine pined, "If only Natalie Wood were still alive to play her in the movie. That limpid sexuality, the steel hidden beneath the puddly dark eyes, the tragic glamour."

Variety
reported that Catherine Zeta-Jones was "desperate" to play Beth in the movie. Further, that Joe Eszterhas, the dramatically hirsute and extravagantly compensated screenwriter, was holed up in a bungalow on Maui pounding out draft number seven of his script, entitled
Spittoon.

All this Boyce had tried to keep from Beth. He needed her focused. She rolled down the window.

"Ma'am," said Hickok, the Secret Service agent in the front passenger seat. Hickok was jumpy these days. The death threats had been increasing.

Beth ignored him. The air was June—humid and sweet with moldering blossoms. She'd been a virtual prisoner since last fall in the house in Cleveland Park, under permanent surveillance by a press camp that never dropped below fifty people, even during the Christmas holidays. The house, built by a friend of George Washington, had the happy name of Rosedale but had been renamed Glamis by a pundit, after the castle in
Macbeth.

Beth left the window down. She'd be damned if they'd deprive her of a few gulps of fresh air on her way to be tried.

They drove along Pennsylvania Avenue to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia at Third and Constitution. She thought of the January day three years before when she and her husband, freshly sworn in as President, had walked past the spot, waving to cheering crowds. Normally this would be enough to make a couple happy. Not the MacManns. The night before, at Blair House, Beth picked up the phone to make a call and heard her husband on the line talking to a well-known society woman in New York, the trophy wife of a billionaire. They were making plans for an afternoon hump at his New York hotel while Beth was across town at the United Nations, addressing a conference on the role of women in the new millennium. She reflected that the role of women in the new millennium seemed to resemble the role of women in the last millennium: on the wrong end of the screwing.

She put down the phone, went into the next room, picked up a lamp, and was about to conk him with it when a vision made her stop—the vision of herself twelve hours later holding the Bible as Ken took the oath of office, looking at him adoringly, his head wrapped in a bandage. She put the lamp down. And Ken smirked. If she was dry-eyed at his funeral, she was drier still at his swearing-in.