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"The willingness to be violent is a force multiplier," Libby said afterward. "That's the reason why the Mafia has been so successful over the years. Those boys are just like everyone else, except they're willing to be violent."

Libby was crazier quiet, I realized, than she was manic. And she was very thorough. She was not going to let it go at that. The confession was not going to be enough, she was certain. The perfidy had to be plain. It had to be demonstrated. And so she sent Sailorman up to Washington to trail Ted Koppel around in an unmarked van and tap his car-phone conversations. This proved an inspired bit of whimsy. On the way into work that Tuesday, Koppel called his producer and said the following:

"What do you want to do tonight?"

"Do you want to do the Stanton thing?"

"I think that's sexier than Bosnia."

"What sort of guests should we have?"

These were spliced together with appropriate responses from the Cashmere tapes-and played on Nightline that Wednesday by Daisy, who was this week's designated hitter, after Arlen's pitiful display (and after Marty Muscavich once again demurred, thereby arousing Susan's suspicion-was he entirely loyal?-and, ultimately, ensuring himself a one-way ticket to Palookaville).

Daisy, however, was irresistible. She seemed tiny, funny, enthusiastic-she had all the qualities of a very precocious child. Only she could have gotten away with actually playing the Koppel-Cashmere tape, surprising him with it. Only she could have had him laughing after the last exchange:

TED: What sort of guests should we have? CASHMERE: How about your wife, sugar?

"Now, this . . . obviously . . . has been concocted," Koppel said, chuckling a bit nervously: no man wants to raise even the appearance of lasciviousness, and Libby-bless her heart-had shown how easily such appearances could be manipulated. "You did this to make a point. Right?"

"Yeah. Isn't it a stitch?" Daisy burbled. "I mean, can you imagine anyone taking that sort of thing seriously?" Then she moved for the kill: "And yet the outcome of an American presidential campaign may be influenced by this sort of garbage. Shouldn't you guys in the press be ashamed of yourselves? Don't you owe Governor Stanton an apology?"

People were jumping up and down on the sixth floor of the Hampton Inn. Richard was beyond words: "Canyajust . . . Canyajust . . . Nevahbelieveit . . . y'knowhattamean?"

Jack and Susan came out of their suite, walked down the hall, hugging people and smiling. Down by the elevator landing, where there was a larger space and people could gather, Stanton said a few words: "I want to thank you all for sticking with us, for working in hard, through all this." His voice was hoarse, his face red, his eyes watery.

He was in a gray nylon jogging suit, with blue stripes and green piping and had no shoes on. He was, I noticed, blimping up-all those late nights with Danny Scanlon were raking their toll. He had an arm slung over Susan's shoulders. (She was smiling and had an arm around his back.) "Now we have less than two weeks to go before this election, and we have to work hard-we have to get this thing back on track. But I know that with your help and God's good grace, we'll do what needs to be done. This hasn't been easy for us"-he looked down at Susan. "It's been pretty awful." He stopped, he was beginning to get a little misty. "But-we're-still-here!"

"You want to do the Stanton thing?" Daisy asked later that night, trying to bring her voice down to Koppel level.

"It's sexier than Bosnia," I replied, gathering her in.

But not that much sexier. Daisy was effusive and animated, but distracted. She wasn't quite with me. She was out there, in the world now. We had regressed to campaign sex.

George Will's question when the Stantons were interviewed on the Brinkley show-which I hadn't heard, of course, and hadn't even wondered about, and only found out about later when I read the transcript-proved prescient: "Whatever the facts of these incidents, your arrest in Chicago and this . . . unfortunate business involving Miss . . . McLeod, do you think it's possible the American people might conclude that you are more trouble than you're worth? They usually expect a bit more stability and dignity in a president." Yeah, well. I soon found myself wondering if old George might be right. We had been badly damaged. We were so out of touch, so completely removed from reality that we'd expected our rousing rebuttal to the Cashmere fiasco on Nightline to take care of it: if life were a movie, it would have. As if Libby's remarkably flagrant and heroic efforts were enough to turn the tide; as if Sailorman's electronic parlor trick-the Koppel-Cashmere Tapes-really meant anything; as if a "confession" from a sleazebag lawyer could erase the image and, especially, the awful woman's name-or change the impressions left b
y t
he tapes, some of which, I had conveniently forgotten, were real. The affair had happened. (Even if it hadn't, there would have been the presumption of guilt--he was a politician.) But we'd allowed ourselves to be convinced that because some of it wasn't true, none of it was. We had allowed Susan to convince us of that. It was a lawyer's trick, and she was a fine lawyer.

But that conviction did not exist very far beyond the edges of our little campaign, our little world. I actually expected the movable zoo would dissipate after we destroyed Cashmere's credibility. I needed to believe we'd get back to the game Jack Stanton was so good at, the game we'd been winning before the craziness began. But nothing had changed; indeed, it grew worse.

Most Americans didn't watch Brinkley or Nightline (or the evening news, for that matter). They were just beginning to hear about us, in ways we couldn't predict or control--a joke on Leno or, more likely, their morning drive-time radio program; a rant on some call-in show; and, of course, it was now there on every supermarket checkout line in America (where the National Flash headline--seDucED AND BETRAYED BY STANTON-loomed in all its stupid, garish enormity). Cashmere's credibility or lack of same didn't matter; she was assumed a slut. But Jack Stanton was a presumptive president. He had to be more than credible, he had to be above suspicion. We could destroy Cashmere and still be destroyed by her.

I thought about this, but not for long. Right at that moment, we were deep into New Hampshire--and the rules were somewhat different there than in America, or so we thought. We were known in New Hampshire. We had, a few weeks earlier, been awesome there, about to run away with this election. People--political people--had made commitments to us, had put their reputations on the line, had bought in; they were continuing to work. But, even there, we were beginning to lose altitude. Leon was tracking every night and we were drifting down, having reached a peak of 37--after the second debate, to 34, on Monday night, after Cashmere's press conference, to 32, on Tuesday, 31, on Wednesday, 29, on Thursday. It was slipping away. And Jack Stanton was sick. The weather had warmed some; it was rainy and slushy on Thursday--and we all felt like wet flannel. We rushed in and out of overheated buildings all day; from hot and sweat
y t
o chill and damp. His eyes were glassy, his face was red; he was running a fever. We plied him with cough drops and hot water with lemon and honey; but he was dragging. He did a Kiwanis lunch in Manchester and had nothing going for him. He slumped in the van and fell quickly asleep as we headed for an after-school Drug-Free America rally in Nashua. We had trouble rousing him. He looked at me, blinked and croaked, "Can you get me one of those hot toddies, Henry? How much more of this we got today?"

At the Drug-Free America rally-which consisted of lots of kids from different schools brought together at the largest gymnasium-auditorium in the district-he began to cough and couldn't stop. "'Scuse me a second," he wheezed. "Someone get me some water?" The water didn't help. He began to shudder, the water was cold and he was chilled. He barely finished; the audience didn't ask questions-it seemed an act of sympathy. Bart Nilson, who was next on the program, caught Jack offstage. "Look, Jack, you want some advice from a guy who spent his whole life campaigning in the north country?" He put a solicitous arm around Stanton's waist. "Take it down for a couple of days. Get your strength back. You could run yourself right into the hospital."

There was a warmish, foggy mist in the night air as we came out of the auditorium; it fuzzed the absurdly tall gooseneck lights in the parking lot; it felt like airborne perspiration. Stanton leaned against the van, his head resting against his arm. Suddenly, he buckled and heaved. "Mitch-take the governor!" I said. Then I turned around to make sure none of the scorps had caught this. Rob Quiston, the AP guy, was about fifty feet away, approaching the wire van. Most of the other scorps had stuck around inside, since all the candidates were scheduled to appear at the antidrug dog and pony show. "Hey, Henry," he shouted, "what's going on? Sounds like someone blew lunch?"

"Ray Lefebre," I said, naming one of our New Hampshire people traveling with us that day. "He's got the flu."

"How's the governor?" Quiston asked.

"He's got it too," I said. "But he's okay."

He was out cold. Laurene was already on with Richard. "He wants you," she said.

"How bad?" Richard asked.

"Pretty bad," I said. "In fact, I'm kinda scared about this. We should get him to a doctor. Bart Nilson just told him to take a few days off." "Bart'd like him to take the rest of the fucking campaign off," Richard said.

"Naww, it wasn't like that," I said, realizing how sappy it sounded (though Bart's empathy had seemed real). "But listen, Richard. We gotta talk about this. We may have to take him down for a few days." "We got less than two weeks here," Richard said. "We have that stupid fucking fund-raiser in Los Angeles on Monday. Whatever possessed you to schedule that fucking thing? So let me see, we take him outta here for the weekend, then he's in LA Monday, he's not back until next Tuesday. We're losing altitude, we got twelve days left and you want to take us out of here for one third of those days?"

"We may not have much choice," I said. "Can you get a doctor in there to meet us?"

"How far you out?"

"Half hour."

"Hey," he was screaming into the staff room, "we got any doctors up here we can trust?"

The doctor, whose name was Myron Milburn and who looked like a doctor, said Governor Stanton had a pretty serious case of bronchitis, that he had to rest. "And I told him--and he understands this--that he is in danger of pneumonia, if he doesn't lie down and stay down for a couple of days. He won't be of much use to you anyway." He was talking to me and Richard and Brad Lieberman and Lucille--as if we were forcing Jack Stanton to do this, as if we were using him somehow. "He's lost his voice. So no talking for forty-eight hours. Doctor's orders."

Susan said we would go home. And so we did, early the next morning. The team scattered--Howard and Lucille back to New York; Richard, Arlen and Daisy to Washington. Brad Lieberman stayed up in Manchester, organizing a door-to-door drop of Jack Stanton videotapes. I went back to Mammoth Falls with the Stanton
s a
nd Uncle Charlie: it felt as it had in the beginning--and the memory of our early days together, the hope and warmer weather, was profoundly depressing.

We arrived in Mammoth Falls around midday on Friday. It was as if the campaign were over, as if we'd lost. It was a time of day we'd normally be in overdrive, moving from lunch to lunch--we were doing three a day by that point, doing press interviews between stops, making decisions between interviews, moving too fast to be conscious of anything except the moment, the flow, the great whoosh. But the airport was gray and empty. A car--a limo, not the governor's Bronco--was waiting for us on the tarmac.

He walked out of the plane between Susan and Uncle Charlie, wearing his nylon track suit, a blanket slung over his shoulders. He didn't have his usual "Hi, I'm here! just off the airplane from someplace terrific" face on. He wasn't working. His face was blank. He didn't look for me to say good-bye; it was as if I were no longer a part of his life.

"Well, I think I'll head over to the office," I said.

Susan glanced back at me, shrugged, smiled. "We'll call," she said.

An eternity passed, a whole day. The rest of us talked; we kept in touch. We talked about buying more airtime; we talked about what we had on the air. We talked about restructuring the campaign, stripping away the deadwood after New Hampshire, if there was an after--New Hampshire. We talked about replacing Arlen with Daisy; we needed a change of pace.

Late Saturday, Susan called: "Call everyone. We'll meet at five P
. M
. tomorrow at the Mansion."

"How's the governor?"

"Better. Not great. Henry, we've got to figure out a way to get back on top of this thing."

And so, the following evening, we moved all the fruitless, frustrating conversations we'd been having to the governor's mansion. He sat in a wing chair in the study, in striped pajamas and a light blue terrycloth robe. He was still coughing; his eyes were glassy and red-

rimmed; his skin was blotchy. He had some of his voice back, though. "We just have to work," he said, pounding his fist on a wing. "We have to work, work, work."

"Thing is," Richard said. "We gotta figure out how to seem less . . . political. I'm worried that the folks parked with Harris are gonna stay there, and some others gonna join 'em. Thing is, all this shitstorm has made people even more sick of politics than they were--and that works to that asshole's benefit. Sick of politics? 01' Natural Forces just as sick as you are."