The Last Debate (28 page)

They told me about Sam Rhodes, the movie man who had appeared mysteriously in the panelists’ holding room right after the debate. He had somehow gotten their unlisted number with all of the others and had called twice today to say Harry A. Mendelsohn was willing to consider doing her story alone if a deal could not be struck with all four of “you Americans of the hour.” There were calls from six other people claiming to represent movie and television interests. Another five came from people claiming to represent major publishing houses in New York. Jeff wrote down the information from all of them as well as many of the others. His favorite was a guy in Spartanburg, South Carolina, who wanted to bring out a “Joan Naylor of Williamsburg” line of women’s sportswear. There were three other calls wanting permission to put Joan’s and the other three panelists’ likenesses on sweatshirts and plastic raincoats.

Joan, with Jeff adding comments and information as we went along, then told me about the worst of her Monday. That was earlier that afternoon when the twins came home from school—their private Quaker school, Sidwell Friends.

She said the girls walked into the house like a double storm. They stomped and yelled and then cried. After a while Jeff and Joan were able to settle them down enough to find out what had happened.

Everything had happened. First, it was Meeting Day at school. Following the Quaker tradition and practice, Sidwell students gathered on a regular basis to sit silently in a room until somebody—anybody—felt moved to stand and talk about something—any something. This morning within the first minute a girl—“her dad’s something Republican in Congress”—was on her feet.

“I just want to say that I think what those four journalists did to David Donald Meredith last night was unconstitutional, un-American, and awful,” she said. “I think they should be disbarred from the profession of journalism and sent to Cambodia.”

Rachel Grayson stood and responded: “One of those four, as everyone in this room certainly knows, is our mom. She is none of those things.
She should not be sent to Cambodia or anywhere else except to heaven-on-earth for trying her best to keep that awful man from being president of this country. You saw how awful he is. You heard what he yelled there at the end.”

A boy both Rachel and Regina Grayson knew to be the grandson of a former Republican senator and vice president of the United States said: “Nobody elected anybody’s mom or any of those other three to decide that kind of thing. They’re like fascists or Nazis or communists who think they know what’s right for everybody else who is not as smart as they are.”

Regina Grayson said: “You call our mom a fascist, Nazi, or communist one more time, and I can tell you and everyone else in here that everything we have been taught here by the Quakers about nonviolence is going to be needed to stop me and my sister from doing to you what ought to be done.…”

And so it went all day for Regina and Rachel. Teachers, as well as students, wanted to do nothing but talk about the debate, their mother, the election, violent behavior disorders, profanity in public, and the future of the republic.

Joan and Jeff heard them out and then their own small dialogue began with their twin daughters.

“One of the kids said you ambushed him, Mom,” Rachel said. “He said that was not honorable or ethical no matter how bad Meredith was—and what bad things it got him to do. Like saying that word.”

“I guess he’s right,” said Joan. “I guess he’s right about it being an ambush. But Meredith knows himself what he did to those women and what his personality is like. The only surprise was that we brought it up during the debate.”

Regina asked: “Where did you-all get all of that stuff about his hitting those people?”

“Mr. Howley had it. He shared it with the rest of us. Once we saw it, we felt we could not let this man go on to be president.”

Rachel said: “One of the teachers—Mr. Emory in history—said he wondered if you had had the same kind of information on a Democrat, on a candidate who was not like Meredith, whether you would have sprung it on him like that.”

Joan said she looked at Jeff at that moment and they read each other’s minds. Both were saying, Whose idea was it to send these kids to Sidwell Friends anyhow?

“That is a great question,” Joan said to the girls. “I would like to say … I would like to think … I would hope that we would have.”

Rachel said: “Even if you knew it would cost the election of somebody you thought would be a great president?”

I knew what I had by now. I had some great anecdotes about personal anguish, but the real stuff was what she said about where those Meredith abuse statements had come from. Howley. Mr. Howley had them.

I waited awhile before returning to that particular point.

“How did that actually happen? When and how did he tell you he had some dirt on Meredith that involved violent acts against women?”

She held up her right hand and said: “We agreed not to talk about what was said in our meetings. Sorry.”

I said I certainly understood. I thanked her profusely for her cooperation and said I would call her again either here—she gave me her number—or at the office to talk again.

No need to push it too far now. There was time to come back to everything. All was well.

Slow, Tom, go.

Both Henry Ramirez and Barbara Manning also received threatening calls and messages. Their respective news organizations provided heightened “security awareness” in their respective offices and buildings, but nothing else was done. No security guards shadowed them around. No operatives intercepted their phone calls. Henry said he would not have accepted such services even if they had been offered. “You have to live with what you do, and if that means dying, too, then so what?” he said to me. Barbara’s attitude was similar. “I can’t worry about stuff like that,” she said. “The way I see it, I was closer to dying of fright in Williamsburg before the debate than I am of dying from some Meredith nut’s gun now.”

I had misjudged Henry Ramirez and Barbara Manning. In my plan, I saw them easily coming along with me down the road of full disclosure. A little nudge with the news of Joan Naylor’s cooperation might be necessary,
but that was it. I was wrong. I followed a difficult and circuitous path toward getting each of them to talk to me about what I wanted to talk about. They were easy on matters such as postdebate opportunities and reactions but impossible on what had happened predebate inside Longsworth D.

With Barbara I was so wrong that I almost blew the whole enterprise. She had not responded to my initial message back at Williamsburg, and it took three calls to her Washington office on Tuesday before she agreed to talk to me. We met for coffee at the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel at the corner of Sixteenth and K, a block from Lafayette Park, two blocks from the White House.

She apologized for being so difficult to get on the phone, but she said she had been busier than it was possible for any one normal human being to be. Her life-after-Williamsburg was suddenly there for me to see myself. Within minutes after she sat down, four people came over and asked for her autograph. Three others simply walked over and expressed their approval. “Right on, Barbara Manning,” a man said. “You’re a national treasure,” said a woman.

After the place calmed down and got used to her presence, she recounted to me a litany of offers and proposals similar to Joan Naylor’s. She said, for instance, all of the late-night talk shows—Leno, Letterman, Limbaugh, Koppel, Miller, Rose, Rivers, Russell, Costas, O’Brien, Wholey, Matalin and Wallace, Shields, Snyder, Quayle, and Harding—wanted her as a guest. So did Donahue, Oprah, Maury, Ricki, Jenny, Hugh, Geraldo, Ruth, Kathie and Regis, Sonya, Meg, Lefty, Bryant and Katie, Joan and Charlie, Harry and Paula, Laura and Eric, Roger and Ginny, and everyone else who talked to people on television for a living during any other time of day or night.

Magazines, including several that competed directly with her own, wanted interviews and/or photo sessions. So did newspapers from all over the country and the world. So did lecture and appearance agents and representatives. So did that man Sam Rhodes and many others with movie, book, and TV nibbles. So did product and service pushers, including several from clothing, cosmetic, and hair-care lines. There had already even been some sniffs of job offers, some of which, she said, were absolutely
amazing. There was one in particular that was particularly amazing that she could not yet talk about.

“I can’t honestly tell you that I did not consider the possibility beforehand—there in our meetings before the debate—that we would draw attention like flies for what we were about to do,” she said, “but I can honestly tell you I had no idea it would be anything like this.”

I moved in on that statement and I did so too fast, too forcefully. I told her I was interested in what led to their decision to go after Meredith the way they did.

“I understand Howley had the statements from the women,” I said. “Is that right?”

Her mouth puckered, her shoulders snapped backward, her whole body became a red flag. “Who told you that?”

“I have my sources,” I said, much too glibly, stupidly.

“We all agreed not to talk about what happened in that room. I keep my word, all right? No more questions about that. I cannot believe any of the others told you a thing about that. You’re fishing, aren’t you? Yeah, that’s it. Well, go throw your line into somebody else’s pond. They ain’t biting here.”

I had my plan. Thus the name of Joan Naylor was in my mind, in my mouth, and moving right for my lips. I was about to say something like “Joan Naylor is cooperating with me. I had a long session with her yesterday, in fact, with more coming.” Something kept those words from actually being spoken. Something I sensed and reacted to by reflex must have arisen in me at that moment to shut my mouth. Thank God for it.

Instead, I asked about her life, her career. We talked for another twenty minutes and she agreed to talk to me again as soon as she could, as soon as her life “returned to dull.”

I told her it was possible it never would.

“I’m beginning to think that, too,” she said.

Henry Ramirez, like Barbara, had not responded to my initial message in Williamsburg. When I finally got through to him Tuesday afternoon, he said he was sorry and that he remembered me from our jogging encounter
on Duke of Gloucester Street. “I was panting after Jack and Jill,” he said. “Now they and everybody else are panting after me.”

I pressed him for an appointment at any time of day or night as soon as possible, and he said he really had no time, none at all, in the next many days.

I asked him if he jogged every day.

You bet, he said. Around a track at a school in the neighborhood.

What if we run together? I asked.

Sure, he said.

And so the next morning at seven there we were running side by side around a high-school cinder track in Arlington, Virginia, the next-door Washington suburb.

After my experience with Barbara Manning the afternoon before, I went more cautiously. I began with questions about what Williamsburg had already done to his life, and he detailed the calls and the offers. Sam Rhodes had gotten through to him, too. He told me how he had gotten his wish to be interviewed at length by one of his own colleagues and about the reaction of his mother in Falfurrias, Texas. She had told him that she thought her son was the best person on that stage. She told him that everybody in the Valley, even some of the Anglos, agreed. She said there was already an effort under way to rename the junior high school in Falfurrias after Henry. That morning he had been faxed a letter inviting him to make the commencement address at Texas A&I at Kingsville, his alma mater. It was only after several minutes of chat-up like this that I backed in to Williamsburg.

“I never had a chance to look at those women’s statements you-all were reading from,” I said. “What did they look like?”

“Look like? They looked like white pieces of paper with black typed writing on them.”

“I’d give anything to see them,” I said.

“You came to the wrong man, amigo,” Henry said. “There was only one copy of each and they left with the man who brought ’em.”