The Rationing

49.

HAD THE SECRETARY OF STATE BEEN DELIBERATELY excluded from our Dormigen discussions, as she would later allege? I saw absolutely no evidence of that. True, the only credible alternative explanation—that no one thought to include her—suggests an almost unfathomable incompetence. In her congressional testimony, the Chief of Staff took responsibility for this oversight, explaining that the Secretary of State would have been briefed before any meetings began in Australia. The National Security Adviser was more direct: “I just assumed she knew,” she testified.

I can attest that there was never a grand strategic plan with regard to who was in the room. One thing just led to the next. The Capellaviridae challenge was compounded by the fact that the principals making decisions always felt that a solution would present itself—that the planes headed for their targets would turn around, figuratively speaking. They believed—we believed, if I am being honest—that something would save us: an antidote, more Dormigen from our allies, or something else at the eleventh hour. Or with one call to Beijing we could make the Capellaviridae problem go away. With the China option on the table, the Secretary of State should have been involved from the beginning. In fact, she boarded Air Force One for the flight to Australia with no knowledge of the crisis the White House was trying to manage. She learned about the Outbreak only when the story went public and Air Force One started doing 180-degree turns over the Pacific.

Imagine the Secretary of State’s surprise and dismay when she was awakened abruptly, ushered into the conference room, and told for the first time that the South China Sea Agreement might be scrapped because China was the only country with enough Dormigen to save the Americans afflicted by a deadly virus. She would later write in her autobiography, “At first I thought I was dreaming. This had to be some kind of nightmare. I had spent the previous week in Tanzania and Kenya. I was still taking anti-malaria medicine. One of the benign side effects of that drug (Malarone) was particularly vivid dreams. What other explanation could there be? Would the President of the United States really withhold this information from his Secretary of State, even as we were flying to sign the most significant international agreement of his presidency?”

Yes. Though I am not convinced that “withhold” is really the right word, nor that gender had anything to do with it, as the Secretary of State has often alleged. In any event, this bad situation was made worse by ongoing turf battles between the Departments of State and Defense and a personal animus between the two Secretaries. The Secretary of Defense had been involved in the Capellaviridae meetings from the beginning, in part because of his close personal relationship with the President, but mostly because he happened to be at the White House on the morning of that first meeting. The Secretary of State, paranoid on the best of days, rejected that benign explanation. The suspicion between these two cabinet members was inflamed by political differences. The Secretary of Defense was a New Republican; the Secretary of State was a Democrat. (The President’s cabinet was a mix of independents, New Republicans, and moderate Democrats.)

To put a cherry on top of it all, the Secretary of State was highly sensitive to being treated differently as a woman. By all accounts, including everything I experienced, the President was gender-blind, in a good way. His appointments going all the way back to his early days in Virginia were always reasonably inclusive. There was nothing to suggest he would exclude a senior cabinet member from some discussion because she was a woman. (He had, after all, picked her for one of the most important jobs in the cabinet.) Having said that, I should say also that the Secretary of Defense was more, well, old school. He had been dogged with charges of sexism for much of his career, including his infamous remark (disavowed aggressively at his confirmation hearing) that women are less fit for senior military positions because “maternal instincts could cloud their judgment in the heat of battle.”[15] That is really what he said; I have watched the video.

Also, one could not help but notice that the President and Secretary of Defense—both tall, fit, middle-aged white guys—gave off a certain fraternity brother vibe. If you were to see them chuckling comfortably as they walked into a room together, you might assume they had just come from a weekly squash game. All of this is relevant if one is to understand the dynamic on Air Force One in those first hours after the Outbreak became public. The Secretary of State had gone to sleep after a light dinner, assuming she would wake up when the plane landed in Australia. As America’s top diplomat, she would accompany the President as he signed the South China Sea Agreement, arguably the most significant international agreement of the twenty-first century.

The Secretary of State had spent much of her earlier career working to reform the United Nations. She had negotiated on behalf of the U.S. for the enlargement of the Security Council and the adoption of an updated charter that breathed new life and relevance into the UN. There was serious talk that she might be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, most likely to be shared with some of the world’s other senior diplomats, for having revitalized multilateral diplomacy and repaired much of the damage done during the Trump presidency.

The reality on board Air Force One turned out to be radically different than the Secretary of State’s serene expectations. She walked into the conference room and encountered a handful of adrenaline-addled advisers trying to manage a situation that was spinning out of control. The Chief of Staff briefed her quickly on the Outbreak and the impending Dormigen crisis. We do not know exactly what was said, other than that the Secretary of State used “inappropriate language,” as she would later describe it. We know for certain that the Secretary of State quickly joined the other foreign policy advisers in making the case that the President must continue on to Australia to sign the South China Sea Agreement. Any other tack, she argued, would alter the course of international affairs in ways that would limit American influence, sell out our key allies in the region, and give a green light to some of China’s most nefarious activities.

These arguments had been made before, but the Secretary of State brought three things to the room. First, she knew the South China Sea Agreement better than anybody on the American team. She had been negotiating the most niggling details for years; she could literally recite the rise in carbon emissions that would result if the harmonized carbon tax among the signatory nations were not implemented.[16] Second, the Secretary of State was walking into the room with fresh eyes. Those of us who had been involved from the beginning were partially blinded by a “fog of war.” We had made decisions, told each other those decisions were sensible, and then made more decisions based on what we had done earlier. The Secretary of State described this as going “deeper and deeper into a maze.” That seems overly harsh given the unprecedented nature of what we were dealing with. Still, the Secretary of State brought new and much-needed perspective to the situation. We were slowly persuading ourselves that it would be unacceptable to let Americans die if the Chinese were willing to throw us a lifeline. This was a moral calculation, not a political one. The Secretary of State dismissed our reasoning almost as soon as she walked into the conference room. “By that logic, Churchill should have cut a deal with Hitler,” she said. “That would have saved English lives, right? Does anyone here believe that would have been the right thing to do? Look out the window, people. There is a reason we fought at Kiribati and Guadalcanal.”[17] By all accounts, she paused and stared intently at the President before continuing. “With all due respect, sir, your responsibility is to do what is best for the long-term interests of the country, and that may well involve extraordinary sacrifices in the short run. Abraham Lincoln was not—”

“Okay, I get it,” the President said, cutting her off. The Secretary of State’s historical references may seem facile in the retelling. The reality is that the third thing she brought into that stifling little room was a powerful intellect and unparalleled global experience. Her parents had both been American diplomats, moving from posting to posting every couple of years. The Secretary of State spoke Swahili, Arabic, and enough Hindi to delight any Indian audience. Perhaps more important, she had attended local schools in many of those postings, picking up a visceral understanding of the needs and wants of local families. She could tell humorous stories about bouts of dengue fever (Indonesia), or winning a goat in an elementary school spelling bee (Tanzania). The Secretary of State was not, however, a natural politician. Twice she had run for office, once for Congress in a suburban Maryland district and once for the U.S. Senate, also in Maryland. Both times she was trounced in the Democratic primary, having delivered long monologues on “America’s unique leadership role in the post-industrial world” that caused voters’ eyes to glaze over. She declared bitterly at the end of her Senate campaign, “Americans have stopped caring about the rest of the world.” There was a grain of truth in that, but it was also true that the Secretary of State had difficulty speaking about issues in ways that made normal people care. A Washington Post–USA Today political columnist described her stump speech: “Imagine your worst college professor. Then take away the excitement.” A YouTube video of the Secretary of State speaking about a Brazilian antipoverty program went viral, apparently because college students had turned it into a drinking game.

For anyone willing to listen, the Secretary of State offered a deep understanding of the sweeping forces of history. She did not see international affairs as a stark, ongoing battle between good and evil, as the Secretary of Defense was wont to do, but she did believe that history offered up repeated cases in which “the forces of liberalism and enlightenment must face down our darker human impulses or face the awful consequences.” She had lived in Rwanda and Cambodia, both places where the effects of genocide were still palpable. To put a fine point on all this, the Secretary of State viewed the South China Sea Agreement as a historic inflection point. She did not consider China to be an evil regime on par with the Khmer Rouge or the Nazis. Rather, she compared the Beijing government to the Soviet Union during the Cold War: an enormously powerful and influential nation that was steadily pulling the world order in a bad direction—flouting international agreements, trampling civil liberties, selling weapons to despots, despoiling the environment at a historically unprecedented pace, and demonstrating to bad governments around the globe that they could get away with it all. “The South China Sea Agreement will redirect the course of the world order, as NATO and the United Nations did after World War II,” she had told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs—one of her many appearances as she stumped for the agreement across the country.

The Secretary of State was flabbergasted that the President was seriously considering selling out the future world order to get through a short-term public health crisis. “The Dormigen shortage is, what, five days?” she asked. “Capitulating to the Chinese would be the next century.” The President respected her judgment, though he found her to be pedantic and insufficiently respectful of his domestic political constraints. Sometimes, after a sour encounter, the President would tell anyone in earshot, “She couldn’t get elected to a school board.” For her part, the Secretary of State was often impatient with the President’s lack of interest in detail and his poor grasp of history, particularly Asian and African history.

I should point out that none of the senior advisers on Air Force One had eaten in many hours. The Chief of Staff, recognizing the combined dangers of sleep deprivation and low blood sugar, asked the Chief Steward to bring breakfast. The crew on board, having expected a jubilant, unrushed breakfast upon the approach to Australia rather than a tense meal in the middle of the night, had planned an omelet station for senior staff. There was no other food readily available, so the Chief Steward directed the chef to set up a buffet, including the omelet station, in an alcove outside the conference room. This explains one of the more scurrilous charges to emerge in the aftermath of the Outbreak—that the President and senior advisers had been blithely dining on pastries and omelets while the country was overcome by plague, like Nero if he had had his own 797. Yes, there was literal truth embedded in the story. There were croissants and fresh fruit; there was an omelet station. But the reality is that the Chief of Staff was trying to feed a staff who had been working around the clock with the food that happened to be available.

As Air Force One made its final descent into Honolulu, the President told the Secretary of State, “We have not made any decision about the South China Sea Agreement.”

“What are you going to tell the country?” she asked.

“First, we just need to explain what’s happening,” he said.

“Is the Chinese Dormigen offer for real?” she asked.

“As far as we can tell, yes,” the Chief of Staff answered.

The Secretary of State said, “They are going to do everything they can to exploit this situation.”

She was correct.

50.

THE PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS TO THE NATION WAS SCHEDULED for twelve p.m. Eastern Time. For once, the administration did not have to wrangle with the networks to get them to cover the speech. Upon landing, the President was hustled to a studio at Fort DeRussy in Honolulu. Almost immediately the schedule began to slip. The President was traveling with a single speechwriter, who had been brought along to draft valedictory remarks after the South China Sea Agreement was signed. Instead, she was awakened in the middle of the night and told to write a fifteen-minute national address on a subject she knew nothing about. The President angrily rejected the first draft, which was heavy on Pearl Harbor imagery. He snarled, “Pearl Harbor was the beginning of World War II. What I’m trying to convey here is that everything is going to be okay.” The Communications Director wrote a short draft himself, but the President was unhappy with that as well, taking a Montblanc pen in his left hand and crossing out the whole first paragraph, then, as he read on, the whole second paragraph, before tossing the whole thing aside. “I need something short, straightforward, and reassuring,” he said. “Do I have to write this myself?”

Shortly after five a.m. Hawaii time, the President was ushered into a small, secure conference room at Fort DeRussy along with the Strategist and the Chief of Staff. There were still no draft remarks. The Communications Director was working frantically with the studio crew to find an appropriate backdrop for the talk, something that would approximate the Oval Office. The television studio at Fort DeRussy had a digital background; the producer could manipulate the scene behind the President with the click of a mouse, like changing screensavers. The Communications Director leaned over the producer’s shoulder as they tried out backdrops, most of which had been designed for military briefings. The first digital background showed the Pearl Harbor Memorial, with an expanse of ocean and blue sky. “That’s the U.S.S. Missouri Memorial,” the producer explained.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” the Communications Director exclaimed. “That looks like the President of the United States is on a Hawaiian vacation.” The producer clicked on his console, bringing up a new digital background: dark wood bookshelves, lined with serious-looking books, like a cozy academic office.

“Maybe that?” the producer offered.

“What are the books?” the Communications Director asked.

“Pardon?”

“The books. What are the titles of the books?”

“They’re not real. They’re just digital images.”

The Communications Director spluttered, “I understand that. I am not an idiot. But they still have titles, fake or not. Make it bigger, so I can read them.” The producer enlarged the image, so that the fake titles on fake bookshelves became readable. After a few seconds, the Communications Director muttered, “No… no… no. Clausewitz? Counterinsurgency. They’re all military books.”

“That is what we do here,” the producer said, finally pushing back. “It’s a military base.”

“This looks like the President is getting ready to invade some small country.”

“I can blur the titles so they’re not readable. It might look a little strange—”

“It will take five minutes before some douchebag living in his mother’s basement unblurs them, and that will become the story. What else do you have?” The two of them finally agreed on a simple background with the presidential seal and an American flag, after which the Communications Director asked who would load the remarks into the teleprompter.

“We don’t have a teleprompter,” the producer said.

“Jesus. Does the President know that?”

“I don’t speak to the President.”

Of course, there were no remarks to be loaded into a teleprompter at that point anyway. The President, true to his word, had begun drafting a short speech, longhand on a legal pad. When the Communications Director called the President from the studio control room to tell him there would be no teleprompter, the President read him his draft remarks over the phone. It was a short, simple speech that again emphasized the three key points we were trying to make: no terrorism attack; the virus does not spread; the Dormigen shortage is manageable.

“It’s good, but don’t say ‘terrorism,’” the Communications Director said.

“How the hell am I supposed to deny that there has been a terrorist attack without using the word?”

“You can’t say terrorism. It gives credibility to the rumor,” the Communications Director explained. The two men knew each other well enough that the President waited for the Communications Director to propose alternative language, which he did. “Just say that this is a common virus that has always been endemic to the United States. No hostile parties, foreign or domestic, have played a role in this public health challenge.”

“Isn’t that denying that it’s terrorism?” the President asked.

“Yeah, but you can’t use the word. You can’t say ‘terrorism.’”

At about that moment, the Chief of Staff, who had been talking on her own phone, handed the President a note. “Holy shit,” he said to the Chief of Staff, but loud enough that the Communications Director could hear.

“What?” the Communications Director asked.

“I’ll call you back,” the President said, hanging up.

The Chief of Staff’s note was short but powerful: “Our model now shows lower bound on deaths at 10,000.” The NIH Director had called with the first really good news of the crisis: Nations around the world, recognizing the severity of what was happening in the U.S., were willing to dig deeper into their own Dormigen supplies. She had spoken personally to senior government leaders in Australia and other signatory nations of the South China Sea Agreement to inform them of the China dilemma. If these governments wanted to protect the agreement, she told them, they needed to help render the China Dormigen offer unnecessary. Hence the note that the Chief of Staff slid to the President: With the new Dormigen pledges, the NIH model was showing a range of “excess Dormigen-preventable deaths” from ten thousand to sixty-five thousand, depending on six or seven key variables in the model (e.g., the severity of any other disease outbreaks in the coming days).

The President and his advisers were obviously focused on the lower end of that range. It was tantalizingly close to zero, as the President grasped immediately. If somehow that lower bound were to go to zero—with more Dormigen pledges or more optimistic forecasts for other variables in the model (e.g., less flu)—the President could credibly tell the nation that the situation was under control. “We have to get that to zero,” the President said.

“We’re working the phones,” the Chief of Staff said.

“I mean now. Before I give my address.”

“We’re doing everything we can,” the Chief of Staff assured him.

“It’s got to go to zero,” the President repeated. “Get the NIH on the phone and tell them the lower bound needs to get to zero.”

The Chief of Staff said, “They can’t just change the model.”

“Look, I spent five years as a consultant building these kinds of models. If you change a few assumptions, you can get the earth to spin backwards.”

The Strategist added, “It’s true. They don’t have to do anything dishonest. Just tell them to ‘reexamine the assumptions’ to see if anything may have changed. Just a fresh look.”

“We only have twenty minutes before you go on air,” the Chief of Staff replied.

“Push it back, if we have to,” the President said firmly. “I want to be able to tell the American people that we can manage this situation without any incremental deaths.”

“It’s still just the lower bound,” the Strategist pointed out.

“I understand that,” the President said. “Just make zero a possibility.”

“I will ask them to do what they can,” the Chief of Staff said, stepping out of the conference room to make the call.

They all recognized, of course, that the President would be addressing not just the American people, but also the international community, and the Chinese leadership in particular. The less desperate he appeared to Beijing, the better. While the Chief of Staff spoke with the NIH about “taking a fresh look” at their model, the President asked to be connected with both the Senate Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House. Congress was in recess, but both chambers had called emergency sessions; representatives and senators were rushing back to the Capitol to deal with the Outbreak, or at least give that impression. In a matter of minutes the President was on speakerphone with the two legislative leaders.

“You had to know this moment was coming,” the Speaker said after some terse pleasantries. “You couldn’t keep something like this from the public forever.”

“Now we need to manage the situation,” the President replied. He described his proposed remarks. “I need you both to assure me that Congress is going to be a constructive partner as we work through this.”

The Senate Majority Leader said, “The Senate is going to be like a teakettle—lots of steam getting blown off. I will do everything in my power to steer that emotion in a constructive direction. You have my complete support.” As an amateur historian and a powerful senator who knew he would never reach the White House, the Senate Majority Leader was anticipating his shining moment. If he could help steer the Senate, and therefore the nation, through this crisis, history would be kind to him. He was a man vain enough to aspire to have parks, streets, and schools named after him, but honorable enough to feel he ought to deserve it. He continued, “Send me your draft remarks and I will issue a supportive statement. The Senate is going to be mayhem for a few hours. We’re going to have to let that run its course, but we’ll eventually get down to business.”

“I think that’s unrealistic,” the House Speaker said. “The anger… My members are talking about impeachment. The nation feels like we were kept in the dark. Why weren’t they told earlier?”

“You know darn well why they weren’t told earlier,” the President said angrily. “It would have provoked the panic we’re seeing now—to no good end.”

“There is a huge trust deficit, Mr. President,” she warned.

The Strategist had been pacing around the small conference room, rolling his eyes at the Speaker’s melodramatic lamentations. Finally, he could contain himself no longer. “Can we just save all that for your campaign?” he said.

The President signaled for the Strategist to keep quiet. “Madame Speaker, when the House comes back into session, can you please try to forestall any actions that would be counterproductive to what we are trying to do here?” the President asked earnestly.

“What are you trying to do?” she asked dramatically. “I have no idea what you are trying to do. The response seems rudderless.”

The President answered, “We are gathering additional Dormigen commitments. We are continuing our work to understand the virus. We are urging anyone who is ill to seek treatment. And we are evaluating all other reasonable options.”

“Those are just talking points,” the Speaker said.

The Senate Majority Leader interjected, “I appreciate your leadership on this, Mr. President.”

“The NIH model is now showing that we might not have any incremental deaths,” the President said. “The lower bound on their estimate is zero.”

“Near zero,” the Strategist said, instinctively protecting his boss.

“What does ‘near zero’ mean?” the Speaker asked. “Thousands of people have died already.”

“From idiocy,” the Strategist said in the background.

“Preventable deaths,” the President clarified. “It means that with a little more work on our part, or a lucky break, we may get through this thing without any deaths for lack of Dormigen.”

“What about the China option?” she asked.

“We are still looking at that. There is a consensus among my foreign policy advisers that it would be far too steep of a price to pay in the long run. You heard some of those discussions.”

The Senate Majority Leader asked, “Is the China offer public information at this point?”

“No,” the President said emphatically. “And I’d prefer to keep it that way. Among other things, we don’t actually have a firm offer in hand.”

The House Speaker said, “I cannot in good conscience withhold that information from the House, or from the public. If China is offering lifesaving medicine, the public needs to know that.”

The Chief of Staff walked back into the room and thrust a piece of paper in front of the President. It had a big “0” written on it—nothing else. The President understood immediately. He said sharply into the speakerphone, “We’re now at zero deaths. I have a speech to give. All of the discussions with the Chinese are confidential. If you so much as hint at that in your public comments, I will personally have you arrested.” He poked at the console on the speakerphone, trying to end the call, but he hit the wrong button, causing a loud beeping noise. The Strategist quickly stepped beside him and hit the correct button, hanging up on the Speaker and the Majority Leader.

The Chief of Staff began explaining: “The NIH revisited their projections for the number of people who would seek—”

“I don’t want to know,” the President said, walking out of the room. “Let’s do this.”

51.

I FOUND MY WAY TO THE RADIO STATION IN PLENTY OF TIME, even before the President pushed back the time of his address. The studio was smaller and less elaborate than the CNN facility. I waited in a sitting area with three large flat-screen televisions, each tuned to a different news station. A handful of station employees stood idly watching with me, waiting for the President to appear on camera. The address was postponed another five minutes as the President’s staff (unbeknownst to the public) wrestled with the teleprompter issue, or more accurately the lack of a teleprompter. The President’s handwritten remarks had been quickly typed up, but the font was too small for him to read without his glasses. There was a debate among the staff over whether it would be better for the President to wear his glasses, something the public had never seen before and might distract from the message, or to have the speech printed in large enough font for him to read without glasses. The latter seemed an easy fix, but the font turned out to be so large that there were only a few sentences on each page, creating a strange effect whereby he had to flip rapidly through many pages while saying relatively little. “It looks like he’s reading a speech written in crayon by a kindergartner,” the Communications Director said. In the end, the President wore his glasses. The reading glasses produced no meaningful public reaction. However, the public had been so conditioned to leaders using a teleprompter that there was some comment on the fact that the President read from an actual speech, looking down at the pages and then up at the camera.

In the studio, a producer sidled up to me as I waited for the President’s speech to begin. “Have you ever done a satellite tour before?” he asked.

“I don’t even know what it is,” I said.

The producer pointed to a chair opposite a microphone in the middle of a small room surrounded on three sides by soundproof glass. “You’re going in there. I’m going to be in the booth. We’re going to do fourteen segments in about ninety minutes, mostly AM news programs, a few public radio segments. All live. If you mess up, just keep going. After you finish each interview, keep quiet and I’ll patch you into the next one.”

The President began his address and we all turned toward the televisions. Someone scrambled to find a remote to turn on the volume. The producer said to me, “When he’s done, we’re going to go right into the studio. You’ll be fine.”

I looked down at my phone as the President’s voice boomed into the room. Tie Guy had sent me another text: “Nature strikes back. Call me!” I quickly texted back that I would call him after I finished my radio interviews. Nature strikes back? Why was he quoting Huke to me?

The President’s speech was clear and authoritative, if somewhat short on artistry. There were no ringing phrases like “a day that will live in infamy” or the “axis of evil.” Instead, the President did what he had to do, explaining Capellaviridae, the nature of the Dormigen shortage, the need for anyone who felt ill to seek treatment, and most important, the ongoing government response. The penultimate draft included the line: “I will do everything in my power to ensure that no American lives are lost.” The Secretary of State had pleaded with him to remove or change the line. “It will make it that much harder to stand firm with the Chinese,” she argued. Both the National Security Adviser and the Secretary of Defense concurred.

“People have died already,” the Chief of Staff reminded him.

“Obviously,” the President snapped. “This is about the Dormigen shortage.”

“Maybe we need to say that,” she suggested.

The television networks were getting impatient, as they had already interrupted their scheduled programming for nearly half an hour. “How about this?” the Strategist offered. “I am confident that we can weather this crisis without any preventable loss of life.”

“Yes,” the President agreed.

“That’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it?” the Chief of Staff asked. “How about ‘preventable loss of life from the shortage—’”

“Too clunky,” the President said. “I’m comfortable with this. It’s what people need to hear right now. Today is about quelling the panic.”

“Sir, I think that leaves you in a better position with regard to the Chinese,” the National Security Adviser said.

The Chief of Staff, still uncertain, said, “Only the lower bound of the model shows no loss of life. Everything has to go our way.”

The President said, “The speech says, ‘I am confident we can weather this crisis without any loss of life.’ It’s about how I feel right now. I am confident that we are going to get through this without any preventable loss of life. That’s what I’m asserting.”

“Yes, that’s right,” said the Strategist.

The President, no doubt feeling a rising surge of adrenaline, said impatiently, “I’m ready. This is the speech I’m giving.” I do not believe it is a coincidence that the President was an extraordinary basketball player. He had the ability to harness his anxiety in a way that elevated his performance, rather than smothering it. He may have looked somewhat awkward reading his speech off the printed page, but his demeanor and the message were pitch-perfect. I watched with a small, nonrepresentative group of people in the radio studio, but the feeling in the room after the President had spoken was different than it had been just seven minutes earlier. The brevity of the speech gave it additional power. The President did not have the eloquence of FDR or JFK, but he explained clearly what was happening and made a short but compelling case that the situation was under control. The immediate headlines suggested a public reaction similar to mine. Even before the President was done speaking, Bloomberg posted a one-paragraph summary of the speech under the headline: “President Urges Calm, Predicts No Loss of Life in Capellaviridae Crisis.” The stock market, which had plunged more than 5 percent on the initial reports of the Outbreak, regained most of the losses.

Let me address the elephant in the room: Did the President lie to the American people? The Outbreak Inquiry Commission was equivocal on this point. The two pages in the report devoted to the President’s Honolulu address are a mishmash of ambiguous phrases and tortured use of the passive voice. My view is much clearer: The President believed he was doing the right thing by presenting the most optimistic view of the situation in that moment. As I have noted, the NIH model was showing a best-case scenario in which our existing Dormigen stocks, including the new donations, would be sufficient. One should bear in mind, too, that the results predicted by that model had been revised steadily downward ever since we first confronted the crisis. True, we had underestimated how many people would die because they did not seek medical care. There was plenty of Dormigen at that point. Was that on us? Besides, we now had the opposite problem: perfectly healthy people streaming into emergency rooms convinced they were dying. The President believed that new developments would continue to redound to our benefit: more Dormigen donations, some progress against the virus, more effective non-Dormigen alternatives, and so on. He was wrong, obviously.

In fact, the nation’s Dormigen supplies were plunging even as the President spoke. As I have noted, we all failed to recognize that the Dormigen supply was unsecured. From the moment the first New Yorker story suggested an imminent public health problem, Dormigen went missing—everything from trucks of the medicine stolen outright to doctors and nurses pocketing some pills at the beginning or end of a shift. I suppose the statement by Senator McDowell during the Outbreak hearings hewed closest to what was really happening on that morning: “The Dormigen supply was like an ice cube on a hot day. The administration blithely went about its business, even as that ice cube was melting away. It was an oversight of monumental proportions to assume that a shortage of a lifesaving drug would not precipitate theft and pilfering.”[18] One can quibble with the metaphor, but the “melting ice cube” is a good description of what was happening. The supply was quickly secured, but that process was incomplete and ad hoc. It was as if someone suddenly directed the nation’s doctors, clinics, and hospitals to implement measures to prevent the theft of ballpoint pens. How does one even begin? No one had ever thought Dormigen valuable enough to protect. To the contrary, the drug was a handy thing for doctors to keep in their pockets, for nurses to keep in the top drawer of an examining room, and so on. Even if the administration had moved more quickly to secure the supply, the pilferage might have been just as bad. The same people had the same opportunities to pocket a few pills, or steal a truckload.

When the President addressed the nation, he believed the nation’s Dormigen stocks to be far higher than they actually were. The barn door was nailed shut eventually, but by then the “ice cube” had been sitting on a warm counter for a long time. The President and his advisers, myself included, should have anticipated that Dormigen would go missing. We should have put measures in place to prevent it; on that morning in Honolulu, the President should have been more aware of what was happening. The NIH should have reacted more quickly to the early reports of pilferage, though to be fair the NIH senior staff were busy fielding calls from foreign governments making generous new Dormigen offers. Every one of those calls—two thousand doses from Qatar; five thousand doses from South Korea; eighteen thousand from Australia—was literally a lifesaver. The irony, of course, is that the NIH was bringing new Dormigen in the front door even as it was disappearing out the back.

I should make one other non-obvious point. Stolen Dormigen was not quite as disastrous as it may first appear. There is no recreational value to Dormigen; it offers no high, not even pain relief. No one takes Dormigen if they do not have to. In theory, then, every stolen dose replaces one that would have been prescribed anyway—provided the stolen medicine goes to people who really need it. Unfortunately there were twin tragedies amplifying everything else going wrong on this front: reasonably healthy people started taking Dormigen they did not need; and many sick people ended up with counterfeit Dormigen. I can only marvel at the speed with which entrepreneurial opportunists flooded the Internet with “special deals” promising Dormigen “delivered to your doorstep.” According to the Outbreak Inquiry Commission, the first of these hoaxes appeared online only ninety minutes after The New Yorker first made the Outbreak public.

I was simultaneously impressed and horrified by these hucksters. Each scam had its own ridiculous explanation for why an online vendor happened to have surplus lifesaving medicine while the rest of the country was in shortage: “Army surplus”; a “special unregulated supply from Costa Rica”; a “new patented method for producing the drug on demand”; and many others.[19] The audacity of these modern snake oil peddlers was matched only by the gullibility of those on whom they preyed. Some fifteen million people rushed to the Internet to buy Dormigen; they ended up with everything from sugar pills to decongestant tablets. (There is a modicum of good news here; a reasonably high proportion of the people who bought fake medicine did not need the real stuff anyway.) Still, there were several hundred thousand people who needed Dormigen and ended up with something else entirely.

After the President finished his address, I felt the producer pulling me by the elbow out of the crowded common area. He said, “We’re on in New York in ninety seconds. It’s a standard interview format. You’ll have about two minutes and twenty seconds. They’ll try to keep you longer, but you can’t. Cleveland will be queued up right when you finish.” He guided me to a seat in the small soundproof room. As I put on the headphones, he hustled out of the room into the production booth on the opposite side of a soundproof glass partition. Soon I could hear his voice in my headphones: “We’re on in thirty.” One of the assistants had pasted a paper sign in the window that read NYC to remind me of the market to whom I was speaking. I chuckled at the notion that I would need to be reminded of that detail. Seven or eight interviews later I found myself glancing at the sign; I had new sympathy for the occasional rock band who would yell, “Hello, Dayton!” only to be greeted by stunned silence among the fans in Akron.

There was a burst of static as the producer patched me into the New York studio, at which point I could hear the program in progress: “…joined by the administration’s top adviser on this virus. Doctor, thank you for joining us.” I have a Ph.D., but I have never referred to myself as “doctor,” so this left me temporarily flat-footed.

“It’s my pleasure,” I said.

The host began, “The President just addressed the nation, telling us the situation is under control. He made no mention of a possible terror attack. Why is that?”

“Because that’s not what’s happening,” I said. “Capellaviridae is a very common virus that has turned virulent—”

“That’s what we’re being told, but why now? How does a common, supposedly innocuous virus suddenly become deadly?”

“We are still trying to figure that out,” I said. I was not used to being interrupted midsentence.

“Then how can we be sure that this is not some kind of domestic terror attack, as is being reported elsewhere?”

“There is absolutely no evidence to substantiate those reports,” I said firmly. “None.”

“But you can’t tell me what is happening. If you’re not sure, how can you rule out terrorism?”

“This is a public health crisis; it’s not a terrorist attack,” I said. I immediately regretted using the word “crisis” and repeating the terrorism charge.

“Given we have a crisis on our hands, as you’ve said, what should our listeners be doing now?” the New York host asked.

I heard the producer’s voice in my earphones: “Forty-five seconds.”

I answered, “The administration is making progress on the Dormigen front—we are getting commitments from other countries, and we are also making progress on the virus—”

“So the government is going to solve this crisis?”

“There are experts—”

“Aren’t these the same people who got us into this situation?”

“Well, no…” I stammered without any sense of where I was going with the answer.

The producer said in my earphones: “Twenty seconds and we’re out.”

The New York host continued, “The government is supposed to have a stockpile of Dormigen and now they don’t? Am I missing something?”

“I don’t think of it that way.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t,” he said. “While we are waiting for the government to rescue us, what can individual listeners do?”

“Anyone who feels they may be ill with symptoms consistent with Capellaviridae—”

“Those symptoms are on our website,” he interrupted.

“—should seek medical attention.” I heard a click as the New York station muted my microphone, ensuring the host the last word.

He concluded the segment: “Grim news from the nation’s top expert on the virus attack. Government help is on the way. If you feel ill, head to a clinic or hospital, where there probably won’t be enough medicine to help you. This is criminal incompetence, people.”

The station went dead in my earphones. I exhaled audibly. I heard the producer’s voice, “Don’t worry about it. That guy’s an asshole. I’m going to connect you to Cleveland in about twenty-five seconds.” The assistant took down the paper sign in the window that read NYC and replaced it with CLEVELAND. “Only thirteen more to go,” the producer said.

52.

CLEVELAND WENT BETTER, OTHER THAN MY UNFORTUNATE description of Capellaviridae as “elegant.” Nashville was another jackass host who would not let me complete a full sentence. I got steadily better at steering the conversation in the direction I wanted it to go. There was a forty-five-second break between Nashville and Chicago Public Radio. I sat back in my seat, trying to calm myself. The assistant pasted CHICAGO in the window. The producer said in my earphones, “You’re doing great. Don’t let these guys get to you. They’re just sitting on their asses with a microphone. You’re actually doing something about the problem.” I nodded to acknowledge the pep talk. The producer continued, “Hey, one other thing. Bloomberg is reporting that the Chinese ambassador to the United States is going to give a news conference in Washington at two. Something about Dormigen. We’re on in fifteen.”

The Chicago host had seen the same Bloomberg report. After the introduction, she asked, “Do we know for certain what the size of the Dormigen gap is right now?”

I hedged: “I’m not privy to that information. I do know the number is a moving target and it’s moving in the right direction. My understanding, based on the President’s speech, is that we are close to closing the gap.”

“And China is apparently prepared to offer whatever Dormigen the nation may need?” the Chicago host offered. “We are told that’s what the Chinese ambassador is going to announce this afternoon. Can America breathe a sigh of relief?”

“I don’t know any of the details regarding the Chinese offer.”

“It seems fairly straightforward, no?”

“It depends what they ask in return,” I said. “As you know, the President was on his way to Australia to sign the South China Sea Agreement. The Chinese government has been consistently hostile to that collective security arrangement with our allies in the region.”

“So the Chinese government might ask the U.S. to scrap the South China Sea Agreement in exchange for the Dormigen?” the host asked sensibly.

“As I said, I’m not privy to the details.”

The host probed more deeply: “Some officials in Beijing are saying on background that the Chinese government made this offer many days ago. Were you aware of any such offer?”

“I’m a scientist, not a diplomat.”

“I understand that, but in the course of discussions about this crisis, was there any mention of an offer by China to cover the Dormigen gap?”

“Those discussions are all confidential.”

This was public radio. The host was more persistent and appreciably smarter than most of the bloviaters who had been vomiting in my headphones for the past hour. She had also found her way to exactly the right question. She continued, firmly but not rudely, “What I’m left to infer is that the Chinese government is offering Dormigen with strings attached. Is it fair to say the President may be in a position where he has to trade off American lives against our future security arrangements in East Asia?”

“We’ll know more about that at two,” I said.

At that moment, the Secretary of State was working the phones to find out what the Chinese deal was going to look like. The Chinese Embassy in D.C. had alerted the news media that there would be “a major announcement regarding a Chinese gift of Dormigen to our American friends” but had made no formal contact with their U.S. counterparts to offer the details. When the Secretary of State reached the Chinese Ambassador, he was tight-lipped about the forthcoming announcement. “This is unprecedented,” the U.S. Secretary of State shouted into the phone.

The Chinese Ambassador remained unruffled. “We would like to speak directly to the American people,” he said.

“How are we supposed to react, if we don’t know the terms of the deal?” the Secretary of State asked angrily.

“This is not a ‘deal.’ It is an act of generosity on the part of the Chinese people to cement our ongoing friendship with the American people.”

“Don’t insult my intelligence,” the Secretary of State warned. “If I want propaganda, I’ll read the People’s Daily. When are we going to know what you want?”

“President Xing will present a new U.S.-China Friendship Agreement immediately after the press conference.”

“Can you summarize for me what will be in this ‘Friendship Agreement’?” the Secretary of State asked.

“As I said, we would like to speak directly to the American people.”

The Secretary of State hung up without saying goodbye, much to the surprise of the National Security Adviser and the Strategist, both of whom were in the room with her. The Strategist asked, “Did you just hang up on him?”

“He’ll get over it,” the Secretary of State replied.

“So much for U.S.-China friendship,” the Strategist said, finding a certain levity in the situation that neither the Secretary of State nor the National Security Adviser shared.

“It’s clever,” the National Security Adviser offered. “They’re going to wave the miracle cure in front of the public and then we have to explain why we may not take it.”

“We have to get out in front of it,” the Secretary of State answered. “We need people to understand when they’re watching that there is a price to be paid. We need people to be skeptical when they hear—”

“Maybe not,” the Strategist said, almost musing to himself. The two women looked at him, waiting for him to complete the thought. “What’s the first thing you think of when you hear ‘U.S.-China Friendship Agreement’?” he asked.

“It’s the usual Orwellian doublespeak, like reading Pravda back in the day,” the National Security Adviser said.

“These guys are not nearly as good at propaganda as they think they are,” the Strategist said. “When you can shut down newspapers and arrest critics, you tend to lose the subtle art of persuasion.”

“And?” the Secretary of State asked impatiently.

“They’re ham-handed,” the Strategist explained. “They’re amateurs when it comes to the American public. They think they’re better than they are. If we let them make the first move, there is a good chance they’ll overbid.”[20]

“It’s risky,” the National Security Adviser said.

“Not really,” the Strategist countered. “We’ve got no other good options. Putting out a statement when we don’t know what they’re going to say is like punching shadows.”

Back in the studio, the balance of my interviews dealt mostly with the upcoming Chinese press conference. I got better at dodging and weaving. Also, the terrorism questions went away; there are only so many things that can be discussed in a three-minute radio interview. Between Austin and Denver, the producer spoke into my headphones. “You’ve got a little break here, almost seven minutes, if you want to use the bathroom or get some water or something.” I stood up, just to stretch, and then I remembered Tie Guy’s most recent text. I called him and he answered almost immediately. We had not spoken since the Outbreak became public. I expected him to say something about all that, but he surprised me.

“Nature fights back!” Tie Guy exclaimed.

“Yeah, that’s what you texted. What?”

“Your buddy Huke is on to something. Nobody likes dust mites, right?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“This particular subspecies of dust mite bites humans. And the bites itch.”

“Okay, so?”

“Check this out: Capellaviridae is most likely to become virulent in places that have been most aggressive in trying to exterminate the North American dust mite.” There was a brief silence as I absorbed what he was saying. “The clusters,” he added. “Remember? There are just a handful of places where the virus is common and people got sick?”

“Vaguely,” I said. “How do you know about the extermination?”

“I got lucky. We don’t have any data on who is trying to kill dust mites, but exterminators are licensed in a lot of states. There are pretty good records of the chemicals they use.”

“I’m at a studio,” I said. “I’ve only got about five minutes before I go back on the air.”

Tie Guy continued quickly: “There is a particular kind of pyrethrin that is highly effective against dust mites and not used for much else. The few places where that insecticide has been used aggressively are also the places where Capellaviridae has turned virulent. The correlation is striking.”

“Do you have any idea why?”

“Nobody likes to be exterminated,” he said, gleeful at having finally been able to share his finding. “I need resources. You’ve got to help me. The data are speaking to us. We need to listen.”

The producer was waving three fingers from the window. His assistant had pasted DENVER on the window. I gave Tie Guy the Chief of Staff’s private number. “Tell her who you are and what you need.”

53.

BOTH HOUSES OF CONGRESS WERE SCHEDULED TO COME BACK into session at four p.m. Senators and representatives were racing to the Capitol from across the country. The Speaker of the House had wasted no time in releasing a statement calling for a congressional investigation of all government actions related to the Outbreak. But what she had expected to be her shining moment in the spotlight—the launch of her presidential campaign, if the Strategist is to be believed—turned into a train wreck almost immediately. Back in Houston, Tony Perez, fake news author extraordinaire, was seeing a record number of views on his posts. Eyeballs are money, and he was doing his best to ride the story. Even as the President and staff were squashing the terrorism rumors at every turn, Perez was finding that the Latino separatist angle had legs. Ethnic tensions had been simmering in the country long enough that any story positing an Anglo-Hispanic rift, with a political conspiracy throw in, was bound to get clicks. In his fourth post of the day, Perez “fed” the story, a term he described as adding just enough new detail to get the original readers to come back, while attracting new ones. He did so with a “bombshell revelation”: The likely first president of the Estado Latino Nuevo would be America’s most prominent and powerful Latina politician—the Speaker of the House (“according to sources close to the Speaker”).

The Speaker summoned reporters to the Capitol expecting them to bask in the glow of her leadership. She had prepared short remarks blasting the President for “turning over America’s health to greedy corporations” and for his administration’s “complete lack of transparency.” She had rehearsed fulsome pledges to “explore every option for managing this crisis.” But she would never get that far. Not long after the Speaker said, “Good afternoon,” reporters began yelling questions about Latino separatism. CNN’s top political reporter shouted over the din, “Have you accepted the offer to become the President of Estado Latino Nuevo?” The question was ridiculous—but devilishly so, as the layers of falsehood embedded within it were guaranteed to throw the Speaker on the defensive. No one in the mainstream media gave any credence whatsoever to the separatist story, let alone the notion that the Speaker would lead the breakaway Latino republic. But the Capitol Hill reporters were clever enough to recognize the Speaker’s political ambitions. The press conference was a solid signal that she was trying to build a reputation beyond the Beltway. (The Strategist was not the only one who saw this as the beginning of her presidential campaign.) The assembled members of the press did not really want to know if the Speaker of the House was cavorting with Hispanic separatists. What they wanted to find out was how she would react when the accusation was leveled against her.

“That report is absolutely false,” the Speaker said emphatically.

“Did you turn the offer down?” the CNN reporter followed up.

“There was no offer,” the Speaker said.

A grizzled male reporter yelled from the back, “Would you consider such an offer?”

CNN and most other stations were covering the Speaker’s press availability live, anticipating the drama. The President, the Strategist, and several other senior staff watched in the conference room on Air Force One. The Strategist chuckled maliciously. “She is so fucked. Maybe this is when she’ll finally tell America that she’s not even Hispanic.”

A female reporter for Telemundo asked, “Would you support a separate state for America’s Latino population, if the region were to vote to secede?”

The Speaker ignored the question. She said, “The reports of any terrorist attack—domestic or otherwise—are entirely false. The whole notion of some breakaway Latino nation is completely ludicrous.”

A BBC reporter asked loudly, “Would you still consider yourself the most important voice for America’s huge bloc of Hispanic voters?” The question was reasonable, but it tossed the Speaker into more difficult terrain, as she now had to walk a fine line between dismissing the Latino republic story and protecting a political career built on identity politics.

“My job is to represent all Americans,” the Speaker said.

“That’s not technically true,” the BBC reporter challenged. “You were elected in a congressional district that’s predominantly Hispanic, and the Democrats, who installed you as Speaker, have made repeated attempts to single out Hispanic voters—”

“I speak for all Americans.”

The BBC reporter was dogged. “You have repeatedly emphasized that American Hispanics are different, apart. How does that not create fault lines in the nation?”

The Speaker said dismissively, “I think that characterization is entirely wrong.”

“You gave the first ten minutes of your speech at the Democratic National Convention in Spanish,” the BBC reporter said, prompting loud laughter from his media colleagues.

On Air Force One, the Strategist looked at his watch. “Five minutes in, and she’s still digging out of the hole.”

The President added, “She’s finally learning she’s not as clever as she thinks she is.”

The Speaker changed the subject. “Here’s what’s important: Americans need to understand that there is no terrorist attack—none. Not domestic, not international. This is a common virus that has turned potentially deadly and we are seeking to understand that. In the meantime, I am working aggressively with the administration to solicit Dormigen commitments from around the world. I’m confident we can manage this crisis without loss of life.”

On Air Force One, the President said, “Isn’t that nice: someone gave her our talking points.”

The House Speaker took one more question. Her presidential hopes may have survived but for that last question. An NPR reporter asked, “The Chinese Ambassador will be speaking shortly about the Outbreak. The expectation is that Beijing will offer the U.S. enough Dormigen to cover our shortfall in exchange for diplomatic concessions, perhaps scrapping the South China Sea Agreement. Could you please comment on that?”

The Speaker took a deep breath, nodding to acknowledge the importance of the question. “Our number one priority right now is saving American lives,” she began. “If the Chinese government is offering assistance, we ought to take that offer very seriously.” The comment seemed relatively anodyne in the moment. It felt entirely different when played over and over again juxtaposed against the later remarks of the Chinese Ambassador. Note to self: Never say that an offer ought to be taken seriously before you have seen the offer. But that was still several hours away. The House Speaker had more immediate headaches. As members of Congress arrived in Washington, they were in no mood to have her “steer” their deliberations, whether she was leader of the chamber or not. Over on the Senate side, the Majority Leader had been correct when he predicted that legislators would have to “blow off some steam” before any real business could get done.

Even after America’s political realignment—with the splitting of the Republicans into the New Republicans and the Tea Party, and the President’s election as an independent—the political parties were still basically tribal. The first imperative was to support one’s tribe and bash the other. This had two immediate implications. First, the President, having been elected as an independent, had no tribe. Members of Congress—left, right, and center—heaped abuse on every aspect of the President’s existence, from his CEO wife (which had somehow led to the Centera fraud) to Air Force One flying in circles over the Pacific. He had no legislative defenders. The Senate Majority Leader, the President’s closest ally on Capitol Hill, did not pile on to the abuse, but he did not stop it, either. At one point he stepped out of the Senate chamber to call the Chief of Staff to reassure her that “tempers would soon cool.” The paradox is that for all the venom heaped on the President from every political direction, he remained significantly more popular than Congress, both during and after the Outbreak. His address that morning had gone a long way toward insulating him from congressional criticism, which was perceived (rightly) as petty and self-serving.

Second, the criticism itself was neatly organized along tribal lines, as if each political party were responding to a different crisis. Members of Congress seized on the Outbreak to reinforce their preexisting political beliefs. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party hammered away at the Centera fraud, accusing the President of “privatizing American government.” The Outbreak offered one more bullet to fire at corporate greed. The warehouse fire that made the Centera Dormigen necessary got nary a mention, nor did the inconvenient fact that Dormigen had been invented—$1.5 billion in private research and development spending—by the greedy private sector they were now blaming for a shortage of Dormigen.

The Tea Party, ostensibly reacting to the same crisis, blasted “yet another example of extreme government incompetence.” The government had fumbled its responsibility to keep the American people safe. By this logic, responsibility for the Outbreak lay with government bureaucrats who had failed to offer adequate oversight. It was time, Tea Party leaders opined, for government to “get out of the drug business entirely.” No one took the remarks seriously enough to ask if “getting out of the drug business entirely” included eliminating the government patent protection at the heart of all private investment in the pharmaceutical industry. The Tea Party proposed additional tax cuts, which would somehow induce the private sector to fix this problem that government had created.

Ironically, the far right and the far left found common ground in calling for swift and severe punishment of the Centera executives. For the progressives, this was a no-brainer. The time had come to get serious about punishing corporate malfeasance. Meanwhile, the Tea Party made a more tortured argument about how prompt prosecution would enable the private sector to reach its full potential. Really the rhetoric had the feel of frontier justice. Almost immediately after the Outbreak became public, the Texas attorney general, a Tea Party standard-bearer, issued a warrant for the arrest of the Centera CEO and CFO on capital murder charges, alleging that Goyal and Swensen had “knowingly brought about the deaths of Texas citizens.” The Centera CEO and CFO were already in federal custody on numerous federal fraud charges. The Texas attorney general, a former software executive who had spent $25 million of his own money to win a special election only six months earlier, argued that the federal charges were insufficient because they did not carry the death penalty. The progressive caucus, typically staunch opponents of capital punishment, found an exception in this case and encouraged the Texas murder indictment.

It is worth pointing out—just to recognize the absurdity of what was happening—that no one had yet died from a lack of Dormigen. The supply was projected to run out, but there were still stocks readily available. People had died from Capellaviridae because they had failed to seek treatment. People had died because upon hearing news of the Outbreak they got in their cars and drove at high speeds to inhospitable places. And people had died because they bought dangerous counterfeit Dormigen. I do not want to minimize these casualties, but I do want to emphasize that no person—in Texas or anywhere else—had walked into a health facility suffering from an illness that could be treated effectively with Dormigen and had died because he or she was refused that Dormigen. Not one. As a result, the grand jury that was convened in Texas to issue the capital murder indictments immediately dismissed the charges. To prosecute an individual for murder, you need to show that someone was killed, even in Texas. Still, the Texas attorney general got the headlines he was looking for. Eighteen months later he was elected governor. As I write, he is being discussed as a possible presidential candidate.

The New Republicans and the centrist Democrats offered more nuanced remarks, criticizing the administration but also calling for revisions to America’s system for procuring essential drugs. The senior Senator from New Jersey, a New Republican known as one of the wonkier members of the Senate,[21] had introduced a bill several months earlier to update the patent system and provide safeguards when government drug production was outsourced to private firms. The bill attracted only one cosponsor and never got a committee hearing. The Outbreak obviously breathed life into his proposed reforms—but just a little. Only four reporters showed up for a briefing he offered to explain the picayune details of his proposed overhaul. (The summary of his bill ran to eight pages, single-spaced, with five additional appendices.) Three of the reporters literally ran out of the conference room when word spread that the House Speaker was imploding elsewhere in the Capitol.

The frenetic partisanship came to a temporary halt shortly before two p.m. Eastern Time, as the Chinese Ambassador prepared to give his statement. The major American media outlets (and others around the world) covered the news conference live, giving the Beijing leadership exactly what it had hoped for: an opportunity to speak directly to the American public, without interference from America’s politicians or diplomats. They would quickly learn that live news conferences in democratic countries carry risks, as well as benefits.

The President was working the phones on board Air Force One when the Chief of Staff walked into his office. “There’s one more thing,” she said after he hung up with the Prime Minister of New Zealand.

“You know how much I hate that phrase,” he said. “What?”

“Cecelia Dodds,” the Chief of Staff answered.

“Oh, for God’s sakes, what does she want? I already gave her the Medal of Freedom.”

“It’s more what she doesn’t want,” the Chief of Staff said.

“Look, I don’t have time for puzzles—” He stopped as it dawned on him what Cecelia Dodds did not want. “She’s sick,” he said, “and she’s refusing Dormigen.”

The Chief of Staff nodded yes. “She’s in a Seattle hospital.”

“Capellaviridae?” the President asked.

“I don’t think so,” the Chief of Staff said. “It’s a respiratory infection of some sort. Doesn’t matter: she’s refusing Dormigen that could be used to save another life.”

“But we haven’t run out,” the President insisted.

“We might,” the Chief of Staff replied. “And if we do, she wants there to be one more dose for someone else.”

“For real?”

“Have you forgotten the hunger strike?” the Chief of Staff asked. Cecelia Dodds had refused food to force the Senate to ratify an international agreement on climate change. The group of senators holding up the treaty vowed they would not buckle in the face of “the bullying tactics of a washed-up hippie.” After seventeen days, during which global opprobrium rained down on them while Cecelia Dodds consumed only water with drops of lemon juice, that is exactly what they did.

“How old is she?” the President asked.

“Seventy-one.”

He sighed. “I ran for office to make things better. I really did. And now I’m going to be the one who kills Cecelia Dodds.” After a moment: “We can’t convince her…” His voice trailed off because he knew the answer.

Cecelia Dodds did not compromise her principles. She had emerged in the post-Trump era as the nation’s most effective voice for social change, someone with a unique ability to bring people together while simultaneously pushing them forward. She was a tiny, innocuous-looking woman with short gray hair. If you were to see her in a bus station—which you might, because she did not own a car—you would instinctively assume she was visiting grandchildren and needed help finding the right departure gate. Oh, so many people had underestimated her. Like the CEO of Ringlen Electronics, who made the mistake of appearing with her on a PBS news program after she announced an environmental boycott of their air-conditioning units. “I just don’t understand, why can’t you invest a few extra dollars per unit to minimize their climate impact?” she asked. That was part of her effectiveness—a rhetorical style that bordered on naïve. She did not yell; she did not level accusations. She buried people with her humility.

“A few dollars per unit adds up very quickly,” the CEO explained.

“I have never thought of it that way,” she said.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” the CEO said patronizingly.

“I suppose by the same logic,” Cecelia Dodds said, “for just a few extra dollars per unit, consumers can buy a competitor’s product that is much better for the environment.”

“That’s not how I look at it,” the CEO replied quickly.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” she offered.

The exchange was legendary, and also representative of her insistence on the difference between making noise and making a difference. Ringlen stock was down 11 percent before the CEO left the studio. He was fired the following Monday. By Wednesday the company had announced plans for a new line of environmentally friendly air conditioners. And the next week—this was typical, too—she invited the fired CEO to lunch to have a discussion of why she felt so passionate about environmental issues. It wasn’t personal. The two of them later developed a close personal friendship; the CEO (his views on climate change having evolved) served on one of her nonprofit boards. College campuses were awash with merchandise bearing Cecelia Dodds’s hortatory motto: love, share, include, & improve.

When Dodds traveled to Washington, D.C., for the Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony, she took an Amtrak train from Seattle and then rode to the White House on one of D.C.’s shared bicycles. The President described her that evening as someone who “leads by example like Mahatma Gandhi; forces change like Nelson Mandela; and holds us to account against our own values like Martin Luther King.” Now she was in a Seattle hospital in serious condition suffering from an infection that could be treated successfully with a single dose of Dormigen—a dose that she would not accept.

54.

THE STRATEGIST HAD ARRANGED FOR SEVERAL FOCUS GROUPS to watch the Chinese Ambassador’s statement.[22] He was able to convene reasonably diverse groups in five cities across the country. He predicted, correctly it would turn out, that public reaction to the Ambassador’s talk would be extremely important in shaping the President’s response. Each of the focus group participants would have a dial during the talk that he or she could turn to register approval or disapproval throughout the speech. Zero represented the strongest possible negative reaction; one hundred was the most positive response. The data were collected and averaged in real time, so the Strategist would have instantaneous feedback to everything the Ambassador said, from beginning to end.

The Chinese Ambassador spoke from behind a large wooden desk at the Chinese Embassy in Washington. He was a middle-aged man in a nondescript gray suit and blue tie. He looked like an avuncular, undistinguished Chinese guy who could be a high school chemistry teacher or the father of your college roommate. He stared intently into the camera and began, “Good afternoon, people of the United States of America.”

The President was watching the address in the conference room on Air Force One with his senior advisers. The Secretary of State said, “Okay, we know the remarks were drafted in Beijing. That’s probably good for us.” The others in the room understood her point without further elaboration. The Chinese Ambassador had been educated in Britain; he spoke fluent English, albeit with a slight British accent. He would never have used such an awkward introduction if he had written the remarks himself, or even if he had had significant latitude in editing them.

The Strategist was looking down at a laptop computer. “Wow, they really don’t like him. He’s at fifteen. That’s the lowest I’ve ever seen anyone at the beginning of a speech.”

“The people of China would like to extend our best wishes to Cecelia Dodds,” the Chinese Ambassador continued. “We hope a speedy recovery will be possible.”

“That’s rich,” the Secretary of State muttered. Cecelia Dodds was a persistent critic of Chinese human rights violations.

“Look at the flags,” the President said. There was a Chinese flag on the Ambassador’s right and a noticeably smaller American flag on his left. Many focus group participants would comment on this slight to America. In fact, it was an accident. The Chinese diplomats were not able to find a suitable American flag in the embassy that morning but felt one should be displayed during the speech, out of respect. A low-level embassy staffer was dispatched to a hardware store to buy an American flag; the fact that it was noticeably smaller than the Chinese flag—and the attendant reaction that caused among American viewers—was the result of the limited choice in flags at the Dupont Circle Ace Hardware. (If the Outbreak had occurred nearer to the Fourth of July, history might have unfolded differently.)

The Chinese Ambassador delivered banal prefatory remarks, long on rhetoric about “our two great nations.” The Strategist reported, “They’re warming up to him a little. But not much.”

When the Ambassador reached the heart of his talk, he spoke without looking down at his prepared text: “China extends to our United States ally a hand of friendship. We are prepared to offer your great nation all the Dormigen necessary to get through this public health crisis. In exchange, we merely ask that the United States treat China with the respect a great nation deserves. The time has come for America’s imperial aggressions in the Pacific region to end. The time has come for your President to return to your country [my italics added] and pay attention to domestic concerns, rather than meddling in the Chinese sphere of influence.”

The Strategist said, “Chinese sphere of influence? I hope they will at least execute the speechwriter. This is awful.”

The National Security Adviser interjected, “Did he just suggest that Hawaii is not part of the United States?” This curious feature of the talk was later dissected in minute detail. The Ambassador had clearly declared that the President should return to the United States, even as Air Force One sat in Honolulu. The officials who drafted the speech in Beijing knew that the President was in Hawaii. Even the most insular among them was aware that Hawaii is part of the United States. So what happened? The most likely explanation is a translation error—that what was intended to be “return to the mainland” or “return to the continent” was somehow mistranslated as “return to your country.” We are not privy to any Chinese account of what happened. In any event, this choice of language turned out to have monumental significance, since, as the National Security Adviser realized in the moment, the speech implied that Hawaii is not part of the United States. What might have passed for an innocent mistake was perceived more menacingly because of the language about a “Chinese sphere of influence” in the Pacific. And then there is Pearl Harbor. The sad reality is that a shockingly high proportion of Americans believe that China played some role in the attack on Pearl Harbor. This point came up in four of the Strategist’s five focus groups, the most common belief being that China and Japan had been allies during World War II and had collaborated to attack Pearl Harbor.

The Chinese Ambassador’s speech contained no specifics in terms of what would be asked of the U.S. in exchange for the Dormigen, though Americans watching clearly perceived that the cost would be significant. The phrase “holding us hostage” came up repeatedly in the focus groups, along with “bullying” and “taking advantage of our crisis.” The Chinese Ambassador concluded his remarks by saying that he would personally deliver a new “China-America Friendship Agreement” to the White House. He finished with two lines that would loom large over the next twenty-four hours. Perhaps these two sentences were a gratuitous flourish added by a speechwriter. Maybe they were dictated by President Xing, who was supposedly a huge fan of American westerns. In any event, the Chinese Ambassador stared intently into the camera and said, “Your president has a decision to make. He must refuel his plane and fly west or east.”

As the speech finished, the Strategist stared at his laptop. “He never got above twenty-one. I’ve never seen numbers that low. Never. I worked on the defense team for a guy who shot three cops in Boston. That guy’s testimony got to twenty-three. The Ambassador finished at seven. Seven!” Focus groups intensely disliked the final two lines of the speech because they were dismissive of the democratic process. The language was clearly drafted by someone with an autocratic mind-set. While it was technically true that the President alone could decide whether Air Force One flew on to Australia or turned back for Washington, the American public—not to mention Congress—was not keen on being told that they had no say in the matter. The whole speech was an unmitigated disaster, but the “west or east” challenge turned out to be particularly significant.

55.

THE CHIEF OF STAFF WAS TRYING TO GET THE PRESIDENT TO go to sleep, if only for a few hours. The window between the Chinese Ambassador’s speech and his delivery of the so-called “Friendship Agreement” to the White House provided a short stretch during which the President might nap. However, the Australian Prime Minister had been trying to reach him since the crisis broke and she was patched through to Air Force One. The President took the call in his private cabin; the Secretary of State and the National Security Adviser joined him, along with a junior aide to take notes. “Mr. President, I am deeply sorry to hear about the public health crisis,” the Australian Prime Minister began. “I appreciate the dilemma this has created for you.” Her political fortunes were tied up in the South China Sea Agreement, which was extremely popular in Australia, both because of its collective security arrangements and also because it curbed Chinese overfishing and other behaviors that were harming Australian commercial interests.

“I appreciate your generous gift of Dormigen,” the President said.

The obvious question, of course, was what to do about the South China Sea Agreement. The Australian Prime Minister said that there would be no problem pushing back the signing ceremony for several weeks, or even a month if necessary. She explained, “Obviously our primary concern is that the treaty remain intact with the U.S. as a signatory.”

“We have every intention of honoring that agreement,” the President said.

The Secretary of State added, “We fully understand how important this treaty is to the future of the Pacific region and we are doing everything we can to deal with this situation without compromising our long-term interests.”

The Australian Prime Minister replied, “I think we all know the strings that will be attached to the Chinese Dormigen offer.”

“Yes,” the Secretary of State acknowledged.

The President said, “That bit about flying ‘east or west’ was a nice touch, huh?”

“How has the speech been received?” the Australian Prime Minister asked.

“So far it appears to be a complete bomb,” the President said. “The Chinese Ambassador was perceived as bullying and opportunistic.”

“I’m not surprised. Still, it’s going to be very hard to turn down the Chinese offer if it means American lives will be lost.”

“We’re anticipating the Chinese will ask for the moon,” the National Security Adviser interjected. “Paradoxically, that could make our decision easier.”

“But you have no hint of the specifics?” the Australian Prime Minister asked.

“Not yet,” the President said. In fact, the U.S. had intercepted a large volume of communications between Beijing and the Chinese Embassy in Washington, most of which suggested that China would demand a near-complete withdrawal of U.S. forces in South Korea, Japan, and elsewhere in the region.

The Australian Prime Minister said, “While respecting the delicacy of your situation, what I am hoping to hear, Mr. President, is that you are still committed to the South China Sea Agreement. Might it be possible for you to make a public statement to that effect, even if it were conditional on the contents of the China offer?”

“Let’s draft something,” the President said, looking to the Secretary of State, who nodded agreement.

“That’s great to hear, Mr. President,” the Prime Minister said. “As I said at the outset of the call, the timing of when we sign the agreement is less important than your firm commitment to it.”

“Of course,” the President said. “Can we speak privately for a minute?” This was not unusual. The business of the call having been accomplished, the two leaders would be able to talk without aides listening in. We know that the President and the Australian Prime Minister spoke for roughly another three minutes. There is no record of what was said, and both leaders have been strikingly reticent about the details. Based on subsequent events, however, we have a pretty good idea what the President proposed.