The Nominee

Thirty-Two

WE TOUCHED DOWN AT 4:30 P.M.at National Airport, renamed Reagan National Airport, though I refuse to call it that, not because I don’t like Reagan, but only because I don’t like change. We emerged from the terminal to a stream of warm sunshine and a late afternoon breeze both inviting and fragrant — all of it in direct contrast to Marshton, my dark mood, and hell, my entire life.

This was a town I knew better than most. I settled into marriage here. I was widowed here. I broke the biggest story of my life here, watched my Georgetown house torn asunder, saw too much death and heard far too many lies, and finally, I left myself with no choice: I had to go. Yet, I’ll confess, it always feels good to drop in for a visit, if only to catch a burger and a cold Sam Adams over at the University Club grille room, where I remain a member in reasonably good standing.

Vinny Mongillo, by the way, spent the entire flight from West Palm on the AirPhone running up, I don’t know, fifteen, maybe twenty thousand dollars in charges. At one point he took my peanuts and drank most of my Coke when he thought I was dozing, and as we disembarked, every one of the flight attendants said goodbye to him by name. I don’t think they even gave me the standard, “Have a nice visit.” I obviously wasn’t on my best game.

Vinny took a cab downtown, to the paper’s Washington bureau to work the phones and see if he could develop a follow-up story to our front-page hit of that day on the governor and his suspect record. I hopped in another cab for my planned meeting with the aforementioned governor on Capitol Hill. What he wanted, I had no idea, but to say my interest wasn’t piqued would be like Vinny saying, “I’ll have the salad.” It’s neither real nor right.

I didn’t know Lance Randolph particularly well, and I liked him even less than I knew him, though it’s not lost on me that there should have been a bit of a bond between us. He followed his father into the family business of politics. I followed my father into the family business of newspapers — granted, not at as high or glamorous a level. He took over before he was fully ready. I might take over before I’m fully ready. He’s young and good looking. I’m young and good looking. Did I just say that out loud?

Give me just a little something, would you? Maybe no one’s noticed, but it’s been a trying few days.

So why wasn’t I a Randolph fan? Because I thought he had it too easy. I never believed he was forced to pay his dues. I thought he was born on third base and kept telling people he hit a triple. All of which is why I love being a reporter. You get to write what Mongillo and me wrote that morning and take the guy down a peg at one of the most critical points of his gilded life. All this and no license required.

Speaking of which, as I got out of the cab behind the Capitol, I watched a petite young television reporter, bright lights shining on her heavily made-up face, perform a stand-up for the nightly news. “Peter, Governor Randolph spent most of the day shuttling between senators’ offices, trying to mitigate further damage from today’sBoston Record report. He remained unavailable for comment, but in a White House photo opportunity with the British prime minister, President Clayton Hutchins says he sees no, and I’m quoting here, damned reason in the world — end of quote — to withdraw the nomination. As you know, Peter, the president’s relationship with theRecord has been an especially trying one. Back to you.”

As the lights went down, I felt a fleeting temptation to tap the woman on the shoulder and explain that I’m the guy who wrote that story for theRecord, and hey everyone, look at me, look at me. But not my style.

It did, however, give me a quick dose of satisfaction at having broken what was obviously deemed a national story about the president’s nominee to serve as attorney general. Having been trotting around the bowels of Florida all morning, I had been detached from the rest of the world and hadn’t realized the full impact of our work.

I met Randolph’s aide, Benjamin Bank, a nervous little chipmunk of a man in a cheap blue suit, at the southwest entrance to the Russell Building on the Senate side of the Hill. We shook hands, though I didn’t exactly pull a muscle trying to make small talk. As much as I was curious, I was also more than a little irritated by the cryptic lead-up to this meeting, and didn’t fully understand why we couldn’t have used that perfectly acceptable means of communication known as the telephone. It’s the classic act of a politician and his self-important aides, thinking that everyone will drop everything on their vaguest whim.

Still, I got bored with the silence, and blurted out, “So, Benjamin, a good day on the Hill?” I asked this suddenly as we walked together toward the Capitol. I might have sounded a little too upbeat because poor Benjamin inched toward the curb and gave me a sidelong look.

He replied, “I think the governor accomplished much of what he set out to do today, which was to make the acquaintance of a few key senators on both sides of the aisle and solidify his personal relationships here in Washington.”

Allow me to interpret that for you folks without a Master’s degree in Bullshit from the University of Buttsuck, or without a few years under your belt in DC. What Benjamin really said was, “We led the governor around by the nose and he didn’t drool on his own shirt or have a visible erection around any women under the age of twenty. We’ll call it a win and head back to Boston.” What a business.

Forgive me for revealing my mood, which grew more foul every minute that I was forced to be with someone like Benjamin Bank, who lives to lie, at least in public. And for anyone keeping score at home, I am the public, or at least its representative.

My meeting with Randolph was to take place in the Capitol hideaway office of Bill Gillis, the senior senator from Massachusetts. Ranking senators generally get two offices — their regular suite over in one of the Senate buildings and their private getaway right in the Capitol building where they might keep a couch and a soft chair for whatever occasions arise, including, well, nevermind. They often set up a little bar inside, and they hold the only key. As a fellow Democrat from his home state, Gillis played the role of Capitol Hill big brother to Lance Randolph, and as such, provided him some office space and gave him a little tour, which, knowing Gillis, probably included the Monocle for a four-martini lunch. But that’s another issue.

We climbed a wide marble stairway and clicked along an ornate hallway with washed marble floors and walls until we climbed another, steeper stairway. We zigzagged down a confusing mishmash of identical corridors, seeming, at one point, to completely double back. Finally, Bank cut in front and motioned with his hand for me to stop at a nondescript office door on our left. He knocked once, opened it a crack, stuck his face inside, and said, “Jack Flynn is here, Governor.” He stepped aside to allow me to walk through.

“Hello there, Jack,” Randolph said as I stood within the narrow confines of the tiny office. He was sitting on a hunter green leather couch with his feet up on a coffee table, reading through a sheaf of typewritten papers. He stood up slowly, shook my hand and added, “Take a seat.” I did, in an adjacent easy chair. Bank closed the door on his way back out.

“Cozy place, isn’t it,” he said, making a motion around the room with his left hand. “Christ, the Capitol dome is right over there. Had I known you got these kinds of perks, I would have run for Senate instead of governor.”

I said, “Well then, it would have helped if your father was a senator rather than a governor when he died or else you stood precisely zero chance of getting elected.”

Okay, I didn’t say exactly that, maybe because it was slightly too obvious, or perhaps just baldly impolite. But give me a break. There’s that born on third base syndrome manifest for all to see, or at least me to confirm.

The office, as I said, was small, but extraordinarily regal, very, for lack of a better word, senatorial. There was no desk, just the couch and the chair upon which I sat and a small refrigerator with some glassware on top of it shoved off into a corner. The floors were dark marble with a mosaic inside the stones, covered in part by a vibrant cranberry-colored rug. The photographs on the walls chronicled Senator Gillis’s high-points in Washington — meetings with presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Hutchins. The one small-paned window looked north with a crystalline view of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial beyond it.

“How are you, Governor?” I asked.

“I think I’m better at Beacon Hill than Capitol Hill, but give it some time,” he said, sitting back down. “Give it some time. You certainly made my life a little more complicated today.” He took his stack of papers and turned them upside-down on the coffee table, then met my gaze flush. “I’ve got theWashington Post and theNew York Times crawling up my ass. All three nets have asked for live interviews. Reporters from around the country are swarming all over the State House looking under every rock in my past, all courtesy of you.”

He said this not in any vindictive or caustic way, but almost as a detached observation, and with a shallow smile. Then he added, “Jesus, look at you. You look exhausted.”

You might logically wonder how he knew, since we’ve only met two, maybe three times before. Maybe this was my everyday look. Maybe I was anemic, or had an infant at home, or was perpetually sleep-deprived. But understand that with almost every politician I’ve ever met, there’s this sense of faux familiarity to the proceedings. At one level, I think they try to trick you into believing there’s a bond, because with a bond comes an investment, and with investment comes support, whether it be political, financial, or in my case, journalistic. At another level, they spend their days around people who are constantly nodding their heads and telling them, “Yes, sir” or “ma’am” and their nights meeting the general public at community events and chicken dinners. They live life on the surface, putting up fronts, smiling when they want to scowl, bouncing from one crowd to the next, one issue to another. For all I know, this little meeting with him qualified us as longtime friends.

“I’ve had a few things going on as well,” I said, smiling wanly.

He kept a serious gaze fixed on me. “Well,” he said, leaning back, “Unfortunately, I think I’m about to add one more.”

He paused, as if to also add drama. I regarded him for a moment. He looked younger than his forty-three years, his smooth skin void of blemishes, his dirty blond hair full and casually combed. His coat hung on the back of the door. He was in his shirtsleeves — those sleeves being unfastened and rolled up to the middle of his forearms. His top button was undone and his blue-and-green rep tie slightly loosened at his neck. He had a look, in total, as if he should be the model on a brochure for a stately Nantucket resort, pictured at an al fresco table, his face kissed by the sun, a sweater tied over his shoulders, laughing at a preposterously funny line uttered by a similarly beautiful woman in his small group — maybe something like, “Imagine if we didn’t have turndown service at the inn?”

He looked down, as if trying to figure out how to launch this part of the conversation, though I had a pretty good idea that he already knew. Just as litigators don’t ask questions without already knowing the answers, politicians rarely stray far from a practiced script. It’s just a fact of modern life.

He looked up at me with his soft blue eyes and said, “You guys were right in today’s story. You had it.”

Well, if nothing else, I certainly liked that quote. I could form an entire follow-up story off that one quote, under the headline, “Governor Admits to Embellishing Record.” I was half tempted to pull out my cell phone and call Mongillo right then and there with the glorious news of a confession.

Then he said, “I need to talk to you off the record, this whole conversation.” He looked at me expectantly and asked, “That a deal?”

“I don’t know what you want to talk about yet.” I said that with the quasi-intention of being an obstinate prick — partly because of my aforementioned mood, but partly because I wanted him more on edge than comforted by this meeting. I didn’t want him to have the impression that he was setting the terms.

“I’ll tell you, but only off the record. Trust me, once we get going, you’re not going to want to be sticking this stuff in your newspaper.” He said this almost dismissively.

Well, okay, he had me hooked. How do you say no to this? I said, “All right, off the record.”

He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped together as if in prayer.

“Look, my conviction record got inflated. I don’t deny it. I did a pretty damned good job as the Suffolk County DA. I didn’t have to exaggerate my rate. It was higher than my three immediate predecessors. It was higher than nine of the fourteen other DAs in Massachusetts. It was higher than the national average.”

He stopped and looked hard at me. He remained silent, as if waiting for something, so I gave it to him. I asked, “Then why did you inflate it?”

“I didn’t,” he replied. “Robert Fitzgerald did. Your star political reporter put the figures into the paper without ever getting authority from me, anyone in my campaign, or on my staff.”

My head began to hurt, just a gentle cracking on either side of my scalp as if a pair of holes was erupting in my two temples. Robert Fitzgerald, one of the biggest, most important names at theRecord, was by everyone else’s account, an inveterate liar.

I said, “I’m confused.”

Granted, there were probably better comebacks for me to make, but any that were grander, more sweeping, or contained greater depth, eluded me at that particular moment. I added, “Help me out, Governor.” I emphasized the word “Governor” as if I was getting in some sort of dig, but what kind, I don’t know.

He sighed and leaned back, then forward again. Outside the window, the light in the Washington sky was beginning to fade, leaving us in the descending dark of the office. The two lamps in the room remained off.

“You know, I’m sure, that Robert has some issues regarding the truth.”

I didn’t, but I was beginning to learn. So I said, “Why don’t you explain to me what you mean.”

I found myself talking to him not in the tone of respect that I normally extend to someone in a position of authority, even if I was about to put the screws to him in print, but more as an equal, and as I’ve said, an equal that I didn’t particularly like. I mean, give me a break. I’ve sat with the president of the United States. Some Chipster in an Izod shirt who got his job because of his old man hardly warrants too much of my respect.

He hesitated, looking at the floor, bridging his fingers together, then placing them on the back of his neck as if to relieve stress. Don’t for a second think I didn’t regard all of this as an exquisite act. Politicians, by virtue of the television age, are actors to their core. If they’re not, they don’t survive as politicians very long. At least with Ronald Reagan we knew what we were getting, and we got a great one at that — an actor, I mean, if not a leader, but perhaps that as well.

He looked at me again and said, “As I’m sure you know, Robert and my father were very close — a relationship that transcended the politician/journalist thing and extended deep into their private lives. They golfed together. They hunted together. My mother and father got together regularly with Robert and his wife, Eleanor.

“And as you certainly remember, Robert was uncommonly kind to my father in print.”

He paused again and averted my gaze, staring at some point on the wall over my right shoulder. By now, his face was mostly in shadow. The sun had faded from the window and the patch of sky that I could see was a vibrant red, almost the color of cherry licorice.

“Something happened to Robert after my old man was shot,” Randolph said, fixing on me again. “He lost not only his most reliable source in government, but his best friend in the world. He got lazy, I think, sloppy, desperate to make new friends in power.”

A pause again, mostly for dramatic effect, because by the look on his face, I knew that he already knew what he wanted to say.

“And he began to lie. In print. In theRecord.”

He let that hang out there for a long moment, like an ominous thundercloud having just rolled in across a distant plain.

He added, his voice softer and his tone tempered with apology. “And he lied about me. Good lies. Helpful lies. And I accepted them.”

He sat back and gazed through the silence and the shadows at me sitting upright in that chair.

“Lied about what?” I asked, my voice flat, simply inquiring.

“About my record. A couple of months after my old man died, Robert came to my house one night. I had just announced my campaign to succeed my father as governor. I was figuring out my issue stands, getting an organization together, starting in on a message. And he showed up at my door and said he wanted to talk.

“So we drank some port and he asked about my performance as district attorney, and I told him where I stood. He said, ‘You’re going into this campaign with a lot of advantages, Lance. You’ll have a lot of your father’s tried and true supporters behind you. You’ll get a sympathy vote for what happened at the school that day. You’re a handsome young man, so you’ll get some votes from women.’

“But then he said, ‘You have some baggage, too. There will be a lot of people who think you’re trying to take advantage of your father’s death for your own political gain. There will be people who will say that you’ve been riding an elevator, not climbing stairs, your entire career. There will be people who will say you don’t even deserve the Democratic nomination, never mind actually being governor.’”

Another dramatic pause. He picked up a can of Coke on the coffee table and took a long swig. “So he told me that I have to show the public that when I did a job, when I served as district attorney, that I was the very best in the state — not second best, not third best, but the very best. I had to have the highest conviction rate. I had to have the toughest reputation. I had to show the public that when I got the opportunity to serve them, I was my own man, with my own exemplary record. I had to show the public that I had earned the governorship, not inherited it. Earned, not inherited. Those, I recall, were his exact words.”

He looked at me and I kept my gaze steady on his.

He continued, “So a week later, he runs a story citing these fabulous conviction rates that I had in Suffolk County. Look, I was already pretty proud of my real rates. This ain’t Norfolk or Barnstable Counties, with a bunch of shopliftings in the local mall and the occasional wife-beater who pleads out. We have tough crimes, murders and rapes and robberies, and some top-notch criminal defense lawyers in Boston. This ain’t Charlotte, North Carolina.”

Charlotte, by the way, has an extraordinarily high violent crime rate, but I didn’t see the need to point that out to him just then, only not to break his train of words.

He continued, “But he goes and makes them better in print. He said my unpublished conviction rates for the year were likely to be the best in the state. It wasn’t as if he had to double them or anything. All he did was embellish them — make them maybe six percent, maybe eight percent better. That day the story came out, the numbers just kind of sat out there. No one complained.

“So I had a choice. Do I publicly accuse my father’s best friend, a revered political reporter and analyst for the most powerful newspaper in Massachusetts, of lying, even as he thought he was doing me a favor? Or do I sit there and live a lie that might well help me win the gubernatorial election?”

He looked at me, then down, then at me again. He said, “Well, it’s obvious what I did. And now the same newspaper that set me up is in the process of taking me down.”

I sat there silent, stunned, exhausted, just to list a few things. Here are a few others: dirty from all the sweating I did that morning in the Florida sun, aching because I hadn’t had the chance to exercise in what felt like the longer part of forever, hungry because Mongillo had grabbed my peanuts on the flight. My mind flickered over to the University Club on Sixteenth Street, specifically to the Grille Room on the second floor, where perhaps Lyle might be willing to pour me the coldest beer in Washington — just like the old days.

Back to Capitol Hill. I was thinking of what I could possibly say, when Randolph added, his tone far sharper than before, “But don’t think for a second that I’m falling alone. I go down, theRecord comes down with me. Your reporters, your editors, and especially your publishers, have been hiding Fitzgerald’s lies for years. All you people want to do is sell newspapers — first on my successes, and now on my failures. I’ll destroy your credibility, Jack. I’ll destroy your whole paper. Believe it.”

I’m not precisely sure what it feels like to have an elephant walk across your chest, but I suspected this moment might be the closest I’d ever come to knowing. So basically, let’s do a quick census of my problems: A second-rate chain is on the brink of buying my newspaper, the governor of my state is intent on destroying it, my publisher and friend is dead, his predecessor was murdered, the company president’s a traitor, the star reporter (me aside) is a recidivist liar, I’ve killed a man, and I’m hiding from the police. Oh, and my ex-girlfriend seems interested in getting back together and I can’t get my mind around it.

I asked, “Is that a threat?”

Well, dumb question, I know. Of course it was a threat. It contained threatening words likedestroy, it was spoken in a threatening tone. But I think I was just trying to buy time.

“Jack, theRecord has threatened my career during the most important week of it, when I’m about to become attorney general of the United States. I’m only telling you — promising you — that I will not fall alone.”

I asked, “What do you want?” I asked this knowing that Mongillo was back at the bureau furiously dialing for news, and all I wanted to do was call him with the word that we were dead-on right. The Fitzgerald part, I’d vastly prefer to leave out for now.

“I want you to drop the story. Obviously I know enough to realize that a retraction is out of the question. But if you don’t keep pushing it, the national press may realize it was just a one-day wonder, as Benjamin likes to call these things, and move on before any real damage is done. If you back away, I’ll put out a statement tomorrow — I’ll even give it to your paper first — acknowledging an accounting error and blaming an aide who tallied the numbers.”

I mulled this. How was I supposed to tell Mongillo and Justine Steele that a follow-up wasn’t necessary on a raging national story involving the president’s nominee to be the attorney general of the United States? Did I even have the ability to persuade them to drop it? If I did, how was I then supposed to have the paper accept and publish a statement that I knew on its face to be an utter and absolute lie?

“How do you know the publisher knew about the problem?” I asked.

He remained silent for a moment. The shadows had now given way to darkness, such that I could barely make out his features. He leaned over and switched on a lamp and we both blinked in the dim glow.

“I just know.”

“Bullshit.” You don’t often say this to the governor, never mind the nominee to the highest law enforcement office in the land. It felt neither good nor bad, because he wasn’t at that moment a politician as much as he was a raw adversary gunning for my throat, just as I was gunning for his. When they talk about politics being hardball, the ball doesn’t get much harder than this. Remind me to go to some sort of yoga class when this is all over where I can sit in a circle with mostly women, hold hands, and chant.

We were both leaning forward now, aggressive, eyeing each other in a newfound light, as well as newfound light, if you know what I mean, which I think you do.

“I have notes, or I should say, letters. I wrote to John Cutter complaining. He wrote me back saying the problem would be addressed. Obviously, it never was.”

I sucked in air, trying to prevent the appearance of gasping. He kept his eyes fixed hard on my face.

He said, more slowly now, his tone casually ominous, “If you don’t drop the story, if you insist on pushing a problem that your paper created for me, then I’ll give full disclosure to theNew York Times tomorrow, so it hits their Sunday paper.” A pause, followed by: “Think hard about that, Jack. That’s your paper, already on the block, with negative front-page exposure in theNew York Times. What’s that going to do to your reputation and future, and what’s that going to do to your newspaper?”

Good questions, though I’d prefer to be the one posing any interrogatories. To his, I didn’t know the specific answers, though I knew generally that it wasn’t good — at all.

I swallowed hard and said, “We need to have a follow-up story of some sort tomorrow. We can’t just drop it. That alone will be too suspicious.”

Already, I was talking like this was a conspiracy and I was a principal in it. I didn’t like the feeling.

He shook his head. “If you have a story, you better go out and buy the SundayTimes.”

I subscribe, but didn’t see any need to inform him of that right now.

I replied, “Let me find out what we have in the works.”

I picked up the telephone on the coffee table and dialed the number to the Washington Bureau. When Rose, the kindly receptionist, answered the phone, I asked to be connected to Mongillo, trying, I fear in vain, to keep my voice as steady and casual as can be.

“Mongillo here.”

“Flynn.”

“Where the hell are you? Peter Martin—” the bureau chief—“says you’re going to want to buy us dinner at the University Club.”

Journalists. Always angling for a free meal. “Still on the Hill,” I said. “What do you have for tomorrow.”

As I spoke, I looked up at Randolph, who was staring rigid back at me.

“Not good, my man. I have a couple of nice leads on some other possible Randolph lies, but nothing I can turn over for morning. Pretty much all we have is a story quoting other officials in Boston and DC saying they don’t think this revelation alone will derail the nomination. I was hoping you’d give me the lead from your face-to-face.”

Ordinarily I’d be furious that such a story didn’t go far enough. At this exact moment, I was elated. It would buy me another day — or more — to figure out how the hell I was going to address this hall of fame problem.

I said, “I’ve got nothing. He wanted to talk about family and clammed up when it came to him. If we get any more, hit me on the cell immediately. Otherwise I’ll be in the bureau shortly.”

I hung up, paused to collect my thoughts, and said to Randolph, “We’re running a story saying the existing revelations probably won’t hurt your chances for Senate confirmation — that according to various current and former officials. If you don’t like that, then go to hell. I’m not going to block it.”

He seemed taken aback at my wording, but quickly composed himself and said, “That’s fine. But I hope we’re clear. If you follow it in any possible way, I’m going straight to theTimes. If you don’t, things will work out fine. It’s not an offer. It’s a demand.”

As if on cue, someone rapped on the door, and Benjamin Bank poked his head inside. I swear to God, the guy was such a little rodent that if he grew whiskers, he could be a new Disney character. For all I knew, this whole grand plan, this intellectual extortion, was his idea.

“Governor, your dinner with Senator Gillis is in ten minutes. It’s important we leave now if you’re going to make it in time.”

Randolph nodded at Bank and replied, “We were just finishing up.” To me, he said, “It’s all up to you how this gets handled. We’ll give you Benjamin’s cell phone number if you have any further questions.”

Just one: What the hell am I supposed to do now? And with that ringing in my ears, I staggered alone through the halls of Congress and gulped at the fresh night air outside.