The Last Debate (29 page)

“I don’t guess Howley said where he got them, did he?”

We had been running for about twenty minutes and were now on our sixth go-around on the quarter-mile track. Like Barbara at the Sheraton-Carlton coffee shop, Henry had also been hailed and hollered at by
won fans. I was struck by his open happiness. He loved being recognized. He loved being Henry Ramirez. He loved talking to me.

“Nope” was his answer.

“What did he say about them when he threw them out on the table in front of the three of you?”

“Forget it, amigo,” he said, not missing a step or a breath. “We’re not talking about any of that.”

“I understand Howley and Joan Naylor came to Williamsburg with this plan already worked out,” I said. It was another tried-and-true trick of the journalist trade. Say something outrageous, forcing the source to correct it and, in doing so, reveal what you are really trying to find out.

“What plan, what are you talking about?” Henry said.

“They came with the statements. They came to get you and Barbara Manning to agree to go after Meredith, to get him to blow up the way he did.”

“That’s taco bullshit.”

“How do you know that?”

“I was with them. I know them. It’s taco bullshit.”

“The old foxhole line?”

“Now what are you saying?”

“If you’ve been in a foxhole with somebody, you know them.”

“OK, OK. Call it that. Call it anything you want. I know them. They would not, did not, do that.”

“How did it come up?”

“Forget it, amigo. I have a very important breakfast to go to. Big job prospect. Big secret.”

He wouldn’t say anything more about the big secret, but he talked straight and openly about his problems with Continental Radio. He told me the story about how the president of the network threatened to take him off the panel in the first place.

“What does he think about it now?” I asked.

“He loved me not, now he loves me,” Henry said. “He wants to give me my own show maybe. He wants me to come to dinner with his fancy friends in Georgetown, he wants me to speak to the annual convention of the affiliate stations, he wants me to marry his daughter, who knows? He thinks I am wonderful, just like my mama does.”

“That must really piss you off after what he said before the debate,” I said.

“No way, José. Nothing can piss me off right now. Nothing.”

We said our good-byes, but he, like Barbara and Joan before him, did agree to see me again when I and their schedules were ready and could mesh. In the notes I wrote after he was gone, I said: “Ramirez—comfortable, at ease, charming, real.”

That breakfast Henry was hurrying off to turned out to be one of the most important of his and Barbara Manning’s lives.

They were invited through intermediaries to meet with Joshua L. Simonsen, the president of the ABS television network, and Bob Lucas, the president of ABS News. They met in a dining room of a private suite at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown.

“There are some things that cry out to be discussed honestly,” said Simonsen right at the beginning of the breakfast.

“We believe we spotted a potential in the two of you as a team to revolutionize Sunday-morning television,” said Lucas. “Revolutionizing television, one time slot at a time, is what we are up to at ABS.”

“We are interested in the possibility of the two of you, as a team, taking over our Sunday-morning slot,” Lucas said. “The approach we have there now is running third behind the other two programs in that slot. We are used to being number one in all slots, and we are used to doing what it takes to be number one in any and all slots. And we believe that it might be possible that what we need to do now to be number one in that slot is to put the two of you there, as a team. What do you think?”

“The first thing I think is that Ross Perot is not going to like that,” Barbara said.

“He is
our
problem,” Simonsen said.

“You mean you’d just up and fire Ross Perot?” Henry asked.

“Ross comes from the business world,” Simonsen said. “He understands that products and people who do not produce are replaced by people or products that do.”

“Nobody fires Ross Perot,” Henry said. “He’d come after you guys with everything he’s got. It would not be pretty.”

Lucas said: “Look, I appreciate your concern for and about Perot. He really is our problem. We want to know the level of your interest.”

Barbara and Henry exchanged large grins—possibly the largest of their lives up to that point. “For discussion purposes, let’s say we might be interested,” Henry said to the two ABS men. “What happens next?”

“We would move this discussion to the venue of agents and lawyers and see what can be worked out,” Simonsen said.

“We don’t have agents, but we’ll get a couple,” Barbara said.

“Well, well, this went a lot easier than we thought it might,” said Lucas.

“We were afraid you had been deluged with offers and opportunities since Sunday,” said Simonsen. “That is why we moved so quickly.”

“We have,” Henry said.

Both Henry and Barbara told me they had not laid eyes on each other or exchanged a word in the two days since Williamsburg. Both had been approached with “feelers” about potential job offers, but this ABS thing was the first and only joint-venture proposal. In other words, Ross Perot had cast the seeds of his own departure from his own job with his parting comment to Henry and Barbara about their looking like a team sitting there across from him.

Now, as they went from one course in their white-coat-delivered-and-served meal to another, it became clear that Simonsen and Lucas, the men who would fire Ross Perot, had some wrinkles in mind.

“Do you always use the name Henry?” Lucas asked Henry over a cherry danish thing.

“Yes, sir, I use it because that is what it is,” Henry replied.

“Would you have any problems being called Hank?”

“I have never been called Hank in my life.”

Simonsen turned to Barbara. “Does Barb as a nickname have any resonance for you?”

“Nope.”

“What are you getting at?” Henry asked.

“We’re getting at the potential attractiveness of a program titled
Sunday Morning with Hank and Barb.
”

“As in ‘Jack and Jill’?” Henry said.

“In a way, yes,” Simonsen said. “Fight fire with fire, you might say.”

Barbara fought back an urge to laugh out loud, to giggle, to scream.

Henry talked to himself, saying: Hank, Hank, Hank. Hello, I’m Hank Ramirez of
The Hank and Barb Show.
Hank, Hank, Hank. Hello, Mama, this is your son Hank. Hello, America, this is Hank Ramirez, the nation’s first son of illegal-alien parents to be a Sunday-morning talk-show co-host.

“In the interest of further honesty,” Simonsen said, “a romantic link between the two of you might also be helpful.”

“Oh, come on!” Barbara said. She thrust her white linen napkin down on the table a little harder than she intended. “This is getting ridiculous.”

“Are you saying you have no interest in me as a man?” Henry said. “Am I only a journalist to you, only someone you can ask questions at debates with?”

There were smiles everywhere now.

“We just wanted everything on the table now, right up front,” Lucas said. “The crying out for honesty is still being heard.”

Barbara said: “Look, I am as ambitious as the next little African American girl. But this is stupid … and embarrassing.”

“Sí, sí,” Henry said. “You can’t negotiate something like a romantic interest, for God’s sake.”

Simonsen said: “We realize that, believe me we do. But please, think about it from our point of view. We have a Sunday-morning slot problem because of Jack and Jill. How do you compete with Jack and Jill? You come up with your own Jack and Jill. But one with a different slant, so to speak. A Jack and Jill who are Hank and Barb, who are young, who are minorities, who are the most prominent celebrities in American journalism at this moment in time. Think about it from our point of view.”

Lucas said: “Would you be interested in simulating some romantic interest?”

“Simulating?”

“What?”

Lucas said: “It could always be our secret.”

Simonsen said: “You might say it was our un-dirty little secret.”

Barbara said she moved her chair away from the table. She was out of there.

Henry said he moved his chair away from the table. He was
adelante mucho.

Simonsen said: “We are prepared to offer you two-year, no-cut contracts that pay each of you two million dollars annually, plus guaranteed monthly bonuses tied to ratings performance. Obviously, the twenty-four-hour limo, New York and Washington apartments, and other usual network perks would apply.”

Barbara moved her chair back to the table.

Henry moved his chair back to the table.

They stayed for more coffee and a new life.

E
lection Day came to America that Tuesday as a foregone conclusion. The result in the race for president of the United States was considered a solid sure thing by the time the first in-person ballots were cast in that small town in New Hampshire where the polls open at 6:00
A.M.
, Eastern Time.

The opinion polls and the pundits of all stripes and persuasions had Governor Paul L. Greene winning by a landslide—by more than 10 percent of the popular vote, by a huge margin in the electoral votes. The debate did exactly what Mike Howley, Joan Naylor, Barbara Manning, and Henry Ramirez had in mind. It transformed the race for president of the United States.

Not only did every probable voter in America see and hear what happened, so did an extra few million nonprobables. The Nielsen ratings, which said that an estimated 132 million Americans watched all or part of the debate, also reported that most hung in there for the Virginia Room disturbance and news conference as well as many of the Jack and Jill, Ross, Norman, and other reaction broadcasts afterward. The Election Day
turnout nationally had been projected to be only about 105 million. So, as the
New York Newsday
television critic observed: “Obviously some kids and convicted felons who couldn’t vote also loved the show.”

The total effect was an astonishing reversal in the horse race. Within hours after the debate, the Hart-Divall poll of 1,789 homes showed Greene making up 15 points on Meredith. The other major media polls all reported similar dramatic ocean-liner-turning-on-a-dime change, with Greene rocketing within seventy-two hours to an 11-point—on average—lead over Meredith from a position 12 points—on average—behind him before Sunday’s debate. Every leading political pollster in America said it was historic, incredible, unbelievable. Nothing like it had ever happened before.

The debate had also turned Paul L. Greene into a whole new person and candidate. In the words of Teddy Lemmon on the front page of
The New York Herald
, Greene “came away from Williamsburg about as born-again as it was possible to get.” A new forcefulness came into his speeches. New crowds came out to hear and to see and to touch him. The post-Williamsburg news stories referred to him as being “previously underrated,” as “the stealth candidate,” “the man from nowhere Nebraska who was suddenly somewhere everywhere.” Long “second-look” profiles appeared in print and on all kinds of air, and so did the first stories ever about the possible makeup of a Greene administration.

Since the debate, there had been little said that was favorable about David Donald Meredith, the man who had everything going for him nine days before the election. The initial reports and my own reporting since bear out that he left Williamsburg in an acute, advanced state of livid that he never got over. There was angry red around his eyes, angry spit around his words, angry motions around his every gesture.

At an airport news conference in Newport News that Sunday night and at every campaign stop through the Midwest the next day, he called on the American people to join him in a national day of prayer to draw strength and guidance from God to rise up against what “those four scum who dare call themselves journalists” have done. He denied the accuracy of the individual statements read during the debate and of the general allegation that there was a violent side to his personality. By the end of the day he had to also furiously deny that his call to rise up was a camouflaged
call on some fanatic supporter to murder Howley, Joan, Barbara, and Henry. He said nothing about his use of the F-word and his violent departure from the debate stage.

Meredith continued to campaign, but the crowds were small, the rhetoric sour and high-pitched. He was seen by the reporters who traveled with him as a “mortally wounded candidate,” “a member of the walking dead,” “a shrinking giant,” “a destroyed, decaying figure,” “a morose man of tragedy.” He never again submitted to questions from any reporter about the debate, the F-word, or anything else.

The polls and the frenzied follow-up reporting showed that the abuse allegations against Meredith, reinforced by his own conduct at the end of the debate, had sticking and staying power. As Jack and Jill and the others discovered on Sunday night, most of the women who were found and interviewed confirmed what they had said in their statements. Even critics who saw the four panelists as villains saw Meredith as a bigger one. “Emotional instability of this kind in a president is simply unacceptable,” said
The Detroit News
in its editorial.
The Wall Street Journal
was the most prominent holdout. It had been almost alone among newspapers, large or small, in strongly supporting Meredith and everything he stood for before the debate. It continued its lonely stand postdebate by calling the abuse charges “an irrelevant diversion” and the cussword outburst “an understandable slip of the emotional tongue.” Women’s groups accused the
Journal
of endorsing violence against women, while Christian-right groups accused the
Journal
of endorsing public profanity.