“Would you like me to tell you about Hiram Green?”
F
or those few archconservatives old enough to still remember, Hiram Green was the only real governor California had ever had. Green had exercised the veto more often than any governor in history and, better yet, had used it to keep higher taxes off the backs of the productive rich and public money out of the hands of the undeserving poor. Only an unfortunate series of scandals involving some of his closest friends and most trusted advisers had prevented him from winning election to a second term.
The former governor spent part of nearly every day in his offices in a small white stucco building with a dusty red tile roof on a palm-lined street not more than a block off Wilshire Boulevard. After he lost the governorship, Hiram Green could have joined any of a dozen of the larger law firms in Los Angeles, but he had even less interest in earning money for other people than he had in making it for himself. He had never worried about things like that. The same friends who had financed his political career bought him a house he liked in Beverly Hills and made all the arrangements for his partnership in a firm where, it was understood, he would never have to practice law. Set into the varnished black door, a polished brass plate listed the names MARTIN, SHIFKIN, TOMLINSON AND GREEN. But no one who came to see Hiram Green came looking for legal advice.
I had taken an early morning flight down from San Francisco and arrived a few minutes before my scheduled appointment. There was no one else in the waiting room and no one at the desk behind the sliding glass window where the receptionist should have been. Tw o off-white sofas faced each other across a hand-knotted Oriental rug that covered part of the gleaming hardwood floor. On a glass coffee table, a dozen magazines were meticulously arranged in two perfectly parallel columns. Disturbing the order by picking one up to read would have been an act of malice. I wandered over to the far wall to examine more closely a watercolor hanging in an elaborate gold gilt frame.
“It was my wife's favorite,”said a voice pleasantly. Hiram Green placed his hand gently on my arm. “I'm sorry to keep you waiting.”
I turned toward him and we shook hands. He was taller than I was, not much, just an inch or so, but for someone already in his eighties, it was surprising. He must have been well over six feet tall in his prime.
“I'm glad you were able to come by,”he remarked, as if this meeting had been his idea. “Let me show you around.”
It quickly became obvious that there were few things the old man liked quite so much as showing someone around his office for the first time. His picture was everywhere: on the walls of the hallway that led down the center of the building; in the library; in the conference room, the copying room, in the coffee room; in every corner and cranny, pictures everywhere; pictures in black and white, pictures that depicted the political history of California, and in some cases of America and the world, for the last fifty years and more. It was as if nothing important had ever happened in the last half century that had not in some way involved the ubiquitous Hiram Green. In one framed photograph he was shaking hands with Barry Goldwater, and in another photograph, right next to it, with Richard Nixon; and then, next to that, with Ronald Reagan; and, a little farther on, with George Bush. The faces of the famous changed, but in every picture the face next to it was always the same; sometimes a little younger, sometimes a little older; sometimes wearing a dark suit, sometimes wearing a light one; but always the same face, with the same look, year after year after year, as if he had spent a lifetime—more than a lifetime—staring into a camera, mesmerized into immortality the instant in which everything froze forever onto a single frame on a roll of a photographer's film.
Listening to Green's endless monologue, I walked beside him, watching his head, with its thinning strands of gray-white hair combed straight back from his domed forehead, bob up and down, like a crow pecking methodically at an insect trying to hide.
“Nixon was brilliant,”he explained, nodding toward a photograph taken when the then-young congressman was running for the Senate against Helen Gahagan Douglas, the wife of the film actor Melvyn Douglas. “Brilliant,”Green repeated as if he had known Nixon intimately. “But he never learned the difference between being a congressman and being president.”
Green shook his head, whether from regret or something close to disdain it was impossible to tell.
“No class. When you get right down to it, no class at all,”he said, shaking his head even more emphatically.
We had not taken more than two steps when he stopped again and pointed to another photograph, one in which he was shaking hands with a beaming Ronald Reagan.
“Reagan had class,”he observed with a shrewd smile.
He paused to let me consider the comparison he had just drawn between two Republicans, both of them from California, one of them driven from the presidency, the other long since retired. He held up his finger and looked me in the eye.
“But he was not brilliant,”he said as if it were a secret he seldom shared. “Not even close.”Green shrugged his shoulders. “It's too bad we don't have somebody with Nixon's mind and Reagan's manner. Well, who knows, perhaps one day we will.”
He started to say something more but seemed to think better of it. Then, as if he had decided I could be trusted after all, he went ahead.
“And it won't be Augustus Marshall, though God knows the arrogant son-of-a-bitch thinks he's destined to one day be president. Christ,”he muttered as he led me into his private office, “anybody who gets elected to anything in this state thinks they're destined to be president.”
Green gestured toward a dark blue wing chair sitting at an angle to the front corner of his large walnut desk. Resting his head against the back of the maroon leather chair from which he had doubtless brokered some of his biggest deals, he looked at me, sizing me up in his mind, trying to determine how I might in the end be made more useful to him than he would be to me. It was moments like this, I realized, that made him glad to be alive. At an age when most other men were either in their dotage, saliva running out of their mouths and most of their memory out of their minds, or enjoying their last days in the tranquil embrace of family and friends, beyond the harm of fortune or the dangers of ambition, Hiram Green, fully lucid and forgetting nothing, continued to act as if the only important object of existence was the next political maneuver, the one he was just about to engineer, the one no one else had either the daring or the wit even to try.
“I think I know why you wanted to see me,”he said finally, measuring as he spoke the effect he produced.
“I'm the defense lawyer in the Fullerton murder case. It would help to have some background on some of the major figures,”I said as noncommittally as I could.
Green smiled pleasantly. “And someone suggested I could tell you what you need to know about the governor?”
“Yes.”
“Because of how much I despise the bastard,”he said, the smile still on his face. “Don't be embarrassed, Mr. Antonelli,”he said, stroking the sleeve of his gray cashmere jacket. “Augustus Marshall betrayed me. It's nothing to feel bad about. When you've spent as many years in politics as I have, you learn that sooner or later everyone betrays you. Jeremy Fullerton, as I'm sure you already know, was fairly famous for that kind of thing. But he was a Democrat. I never knew him. I knew Marshall. Knew him? I practically invented him. But he betrayed me, and he did it the way they all do it. Shall I tell you how it happened?”
I could have said no, and he would have told me anyway. It was part of who he was. You have to be important to be betrayed by someone powerful or famous.
“It was on a Saturday morning, pretty much like this one,”he said, though today was not Saturday, “a dozen years ago or so. I had invited Marshall over to discuss a little arrangement I wanted to make with him. You see, the attorney general— Arthur Sieman—perhaps you remember the name? No? Well, anyway, Arthur Sieman was brilliant.”Suddenly Green laughed. “Unfortunately, that was not the only thing he had in common with Nixon.”
Though it had taken place a dozen years before, the old man proceeded to recount the conversation he had had with the man who was now governor as if it had ended just a few minutes before I walked in the door.
“At first he didn't really want to admit what we were here to talk about, alone in my office on a Saturday morning,”Green began. “They're all like that,”he explained. “Ambitious men who try to hide their ambition. Finally, after I told him at least twice that he knew very well what we were here to talk about, he admitted—but only with a show of reluctance, you understand—that he thought it probably had something to do with 'this attorney general business.' ”
Green looked at me, a smile of cynical detachment spreading across his worn-out mouth. “ 'Yes, of course,' I said. 'We've had our eye on you for some time now.'
“ 'I've never thought of myself as a politician,' Marshall began as he shifted around in his chair, crossed one leg over the other, and leaned forward. They all do that,”Green explained, “when they want to look really sincere.”
“ 'I think I could be a good attorney general, but I could never bring myself to compromise on the principles in which I believe.' ”
Green raised his eyebrows. “Do you have any idea how many times before I had heard that same pious disclaimer? I can't count that high.”
“ 'We don't want you to compromise on anything,' I told him. 'To the contrary, we want you to become the spokesman for the principles we share, Republican principles, principles the attorney general has betrayed.'
“Then I told him the truth—or something close to it.”
Green closed his eyes and saw it all over again: the endless cycle of duplicity that, whether he knew it or not, had given meaning to his life—the long succession of betrayal and revenge.
“ 'Arthur Sieman started out just like this,' I said to Marshall. 'Right here. He was sitting where you are now. He had never run for office, and I don't think he had ever really considered it. In a lot of ways he was just like you—a successful attorney, and about your age. He was interested, but reluctant—just like you. And he was afraid—just like you're afraid—that if he got into politics he would be forced to compromise, forced to let go of the things he believed in. He was completely sincere. He was also an idiot. No,' I said before he could object, 'I don't think you're an idiot. Far from it.' ”
Green opened his eyes, a subtle smile lurking at the corners of his mouth. “I remember wondering at the time if he was going to be like everyone else and immediately accept as an unquestioned truth what was after all only a flattering lie. You would have thought I would have realized a long time ago that there really are no exceptions to the rule that vanity is universal. At least I haven't come across any. Have you, Mr. Antonelli?”
We exchanged a meaningful glance and in the silence he knew my answer.
“ 'No,' I told Marshall, 'you are much more intelligent than Arthur Sieman. You see, what Sieman really feared—though he didn't know it then and doesn't know it now—is that there was nothing he believed in so strongly he wouldn't give it up the moment it became even the least bit unpopular. Anyone can believe deeply in whatever almost everyone else seems to believe; almost everyone does. But you aren't like that,' I assured him. 'You aren't like that at all. So, no, Mr. Marshall, we don't want you to compromise on your principles. That is the one thing we expect you never to do. Never.'
“Marshall sat straight up, looked me directly in the eye. 'You can count on that, Governor.'
“As you can imagine, Mr. Antonelli,”said Green dryly, “that was a challenge I was not about to take up. I turned instead to more practical matters. I told him money would not be a problem. We could raise ten, twenty million—whatever we needed. And we had the right people to run the campaign. All he had to do was be the candidate. Then I put it to him directly. 'Well,' I asked, 'would you like to be our candidate?'
“There was no hesitation, not the slightest. He wanted it, all right, wanted it as much as anyone I had ever seen. Then I gave him the bad news.
“ 'You do understand that you have no chance of winning?'
“He didn't want to believe it. 'I know it's a long shot,' he replied. 'But I certainly wouldn't say that I don't have a chance.'
“ 'No, you don't,' I insisted. 'No chance, no chance whatsoever. None.'
“I tried to explain to him what I thought I had already told him: Arthur Sieman had given up every conservative principle he had ever supposedly had to curry favor with the public. He was the most popular politician in California, and the goddamn fraud would have sold his mother for a vote.”
Green said it in a way that made me think this willingness to succeed at any price was something he envied.
“Sieman was animal-shrewd. I told Marshall that. I told him that Sieman would say whatever was most expedient at the moment and that when he said it, he believed it. Sieman had the greatest capacity for self-deception I had ever seen. At least,”he added, lifting his eyebrows, “until I met Augustus Marshall.”
A thin, sardonic smile settled on the old man's mouth.
“Sieman was all surface: there was nothing underneath. I think there was once, but it died, or got lost, or something. The surface was all there was anymore, and the surface reflected everything around him so perfectly that everyone saw what they wanted to see and heard what they wanted to hear. It was a form of genius, really.”
Green thought of something. He looked at me as he scratched his chin.
“In a lot of ways, but in that way in particular, Arthur Sieman was just like Jeremy Fullerton. One was a Republican, the other was a Democrat, and one was supposed to be a conservative, while the other was a liberal, but those were just labels they used because they had to say they were something. They were both always inching their way toward that big amorphous middle where the only thing important is whether you can make everyone feel good.”