The Last Debate (3 page)

“Let us pray,” said Meredith after arriving at the table. “Here we are again, dear Lord of us all. Here we are again asking for your guidance as we go about the business of making decisions on behalf of bringing honest, spiritual, and right government to the people of the United States of America. Help us bring love and compassion and justice and mercy to our thinking, our talking, our deciding. Help us to do right in Your name. It is in Your name that we pray. Ahhh-men.”

“Ahhh-men,” said the others. Meredith sat down, and then the others sat down. Having their daily First Light staff meetings in a church was a practice that had begun almost by accident during the primaries. Meredith had agreed to speak to a sunrise prayer breakfast in Concord, New Hampshire, and asked his staff to join him afterward for a meeting at the church. There was some press attention, followed by some praise and appreciation from the leaders of the American Christian Families Coalition, one of the most important backers of Meredith’s candidacy. Jack Turpin suggested that Meredith, only an occasional churchgoing Methodist before the campaign, develop some praying skills, and the First Light meeting-always-in-a-church was born.

This morning it was in the First Baptist Church of Cleveland, Ohio.

“The debate panel for Williamsburg is before us first,” said Turpin. He had held top positions in every Republican presidential campaign since Nixon. The Jack Kemp campaign was the only losing one he had run.

“There will be four. They, the commission, put forward four names. As could have been expected, they met all Democratic party and liberal tests. We managed over the course of the meeting to replace their one white male, one white female, one Hispanic male, and one black female with our own.”

“You don’t mean our own politically?” Meredith asked.

“No, sir. There are no four such things in the press corps of this country.”

“I didn’t think so. They all hate me.”

“Our four are four with some insurance possibilities,” Turpin said. “Mike Howley is the moderator. He’s … well, he’s Mike Howley. He’s been harsh in his criticism of everybody connected with this campaign. Not only you and me, but also the other side. Particularly of Lilly’s operation. Howley’s about as good as it was possible to get. All of the straight television types would have been much worse.”

“They all hate me,” Meredith said.

“Joan Naylor is one of the panelists. She is of television, you know her,” said Turpin. “The other two, the black and the Mexican, you do not know. Nobody knows them because they are nobodies themselves, both kids in their late twenties. If they were white, they wouldn’t have the jobs they have, much less be on this panel.”

“I have promised to rid our society of the kind of reverse discrimination that has given birth to that very kind of thing,” Meredith said. “It is one promise I promise you I will keep.”

“I say amen to that, sir.”

“All four of these people are opponents of ours and our cause, I assume?”

“Of course, yes, sir.” Turpin handed a packet of papers across the table to Meredith. “Here is what Nelson’s checks turned up on each of the four.” Nelson was Sid Nelson, a former FBI agent who was the campaign’s director of security. The Secret Service did the regular protection
work on the campaign. The campaign’s pre-Williamsburg line was that Nelson and a group of other former FBI agents who worked with him did only discreet investigative work that included background checks on potential employees.

Meredith flipped from page to page.

“Can’t the abortion of Naylor’s sister be confirmed?” he said, without looking up.

Turpin said: “No, not one hundred percent. She was sixteen. Her boyfriend paid for it. Her parents knew all about it.”

“Has it ever been in the public print?”

“Not according to our checks. The press does a poor job of reporting on the frailties of its own.”

“Yes, indeed. Fine. It could come in handy if something turns nasty on the abortion issue. ‘You have asked me about abortion, Ms. Naylor. Does the fact that your sister had an abortion at the age of sixteen present for you a journalistic conflict of interest?’ That might cause some commotion.”

“Yes, sir, it sure would. That was the idea, the insurance.”

“The Mexican? His mother is his problem?”

“Yes. She is a widow who runs a café in a small town in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. She’s been cited for liquor-law and several health-department violations, but none were serious.”

“Serving alcohol to minors and filthy food to anyone is always serious to ordinary people, Jack.”

“I realize that. That’s why he is on the panel.”

“Isn’t Howley also from Texas?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Two Texans on a panel of four. How come?”

“A conspiracy, obviously, sir.”

“Obviously. The black girl?”

“Major insurance paydirt. First, her uncle is a Black Muslim, having moved to Chicago from a small town in Georgia some years ago. Two, she rooms with a woman member of the Paul L. Greene campaign staff.”

“Are they lesbians?”

“No, sir.”

“Too bad.”

“Yes, sir. But it’s still paydirt.”

“You’re right,” said Meredith. He looked up and over at the woman at the table. She was Joanne Windsor, the campaign press secretary. “What do you think about this?”

“I think she should not be on the panel,” said Joanne Windsor. “She’s a kid, a lightweight, a standard black, as well as a close friend of the enemy.”

The three other men at the table either grunted or smiled their agreement.

“I went for her, among the weakest of the blacks, because I believed we had to have one on the panel,” said Jack Turpin. “It would surely be leaked that we had kept off all blacks.”

“How could that hurt us?” said Will Hodges, one of the other men. He was the campaign’s pollster. “The numbers show that we may not get more than two percent of the black vote anyhow. So we lose a few more?”

Turpin shook his head. “No, I think we should look upon her as serious insurance. If something goes wrong for us during the debate, we then toss out the charge that we just discovered the panel was tainted by the fact that one of the panelists lived with an official of the Greene campaign. Insurance, insurance, insurance.”

David Donald Meredith stopped reading the papers and smiled at Turpin, who went on with his self-praise.

“I wanted as many vulnerabilities as possible as insurance on all of them. Naylor and her sister’s abortion. On the Mexican, there’s not only the mother and her dirt and drunks. Nelson’s check showed him to be too young, too ambitious. He thinks he’s a brown Donaldson or Wallace, and the chances are he’ll go too far trying to nail you and make a fool of himself.”

Meredith said: “You are the best, Jack, you really are. Between you and Jesus I have the best campaign management in the history of American politics.”

“We’ll all say amen to that,” Will Hodges said.

“Howley? What about Howley?” Meredith asked. “Does he have insurance possibilities?”

“Not really. He’s a widower, no girlfriend at present. He served and was honorably discharged from the navy in the fifties.”

“Children with drug problems?”

“No children of any kind.”

“I see a reference to a bankruptcy. What is that all about?”

“His uncle ran a Western Auto store in Van Alstyne, Texas, that went belly-up.”

“Could be useful, who knows. Ordinary people don’t like people who file for bankruptcy. Why did you take him as moderator?”

“He’s part of a deal I made with CNS News. They came to me through a deeply covered third-party intermediary asking if there was anything we could do to make sure one of their anchors was the moderator. Their news programs are running third, and it might give them some much needed visibility. I told them that there was no way we would ever agree to Don Beard.”

“Amen, amen. He spits and fires with venom for me every evening. Every evening.”

“Exactly. They offered Naylor as a backup. I said no, but maybe as a panelist. They said, fine, as long as no other network anchor moderated. So we had to go with a print guy. Howley seemed the safest of them because he’s about the only one left from the old school of journalism. He’s been as bad to them as he’s been to us.”

“What do we get in exchange for this from CNS?”

“Their balls.”

“What?”

“All I have to do is simply squeeze a hint that I might tell somebody about our little transaction and we get what we want. The ultimate insurance, is the way I see it. I’m not sure anybody has had a network in that position before. When it could really come in handy is after we’re in the White House.”

“Praise you, Jack Turpin. Praise you,” said David Donald Meredith. “You really are the very best.”

It was the perfect setup for Jack Turpin. He had saved the best for last.

“I certainly can’t take any credit for it, sir,” he said, “but it is all finally coming into focus, into place.”

He handed Meredith a copy of the summary of the coming NBS–
Wall
Street Journal
poll. “Nelson acquired this from a friendly source within the
Journal
,” Turpin said.

Meredith read the news that he had pulled ahead of Paul L. Greene. Then he stood and bowed his head. Turpin and the others stood and bowed their heads.

“Dear Savior,” said Meredith in a near whisper. “You said, Follow Me and I will show you the way to glory. We did and You have. Thank You, Lord. Thank You for me, for us, and for the people of the United States of America. Ahhh-men.”

Turpin and the others repeated the ahhh-men.

David Donald Meredith had learned how to pray for the good of the campaign. Turpin and the others had learned how to say ahhh-men.

Nancy Dewey and Chuck Hammond had stayed in their conference room after the others left. They immediately placed a call to the bipartisan commission’s two co-chairmen, former Republican national chairman Paul Clancy and former Democratic national chairman Frank Durkette. They found Clancy at his law office in Minneapolis. Durkette was at his home in Bethesda, Maryland, a Washington suburb. They were all quickly hooked together on a conference line and a speakerphone.

“So what exactly have we ended up with?” Durkette asked after Hammond reported the names of the four panelists and how they were decided.

“Yeah,” said Clancy. “Is it going to work?”

Chuck Hammond said he could not guarantee anything. He said he had no problems with Mike Howley and Joan Naylor, but the other two were truly blind flying in the night. Not because they were minorities, of course, he said, but because they were so young and inexperienced.

Of course, said Clancy.

“Being on a presidential-debate panel should be a kind of reward for supreme and long service as a journalist,” Durkette said.

They asked Nancy Dewey, the person who was going to actually put the debate on the air from Williamsburg, what she thought.

She told them she was worried. “There was something about the way
Turpin came in here with his black book and took over that was not right,” she said. “Lilly was not prepared. Neither were we, really.”

Chuck Hammond disagreed. “We have limits, Nancy. We do not have the authority to push anything down their throats. It’s a stupid system.”

“We have been through that too many times already,” Clancy said. “We almost didn’t even have a debate this time.”

“It’s got to be required by law,” Durkette said. “Tie it to federal funding. If you take federal matching funds, you have to agree to at least three debates.…”

“Frank, for crissakes, save it for another time,” Clancy said. “The question, the
only
question before our house right now, is What we do about this?”

“That’s not a question. We have no choice.”

“Yes, we do. We could decide to scrub the debate. We could take the position that the selection process for the panelists did not meet our standards or criteria or something and we are pulling out.”

“Get serious, please. We’d look like fools.”

“I am not suggesting we do it. I am merely making the point that there are options.”

Chuck Hammond, after a second or two of silence, said: “We proceed? We contact the four selectees and get on with it?”

“I say yes,” Durkette said. “What about you, Paul?”

“The same.”

Chuck Hammond told me that he was the last to speak before the conference-call connections were cut. He said he said to all: “I have a feeling we are all going to regret having decided to go ahead with this thing.”

None of the others recalls Hammond saying anything at all, much less delivering such a doomful warning. I am not prepared to call Hammond a liar over something as trivial as this. But I am prepared to at least suggest it was possible he wished so badly afterward that he
had
said it that it began to seem to him as if he really did.

Whatever, he and Nancy Dewey went back to their respective offices to place the calls to the four selected panelists. Dewey called Naylor and Ramirez. Hammond notified Howley and Manning.