The Speechwriter (16 page)

“Yeah, I guess that's a big part of it,” he said. He leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling. “I'm always looking for language that's—I don't know.”

“Language that's what?”

He kept looking at the ceiling. “I don't mean just language, just words. It's more than words. It's conceptual. It's real. I always find myself trying to communicate something—larger.”

“Larger” was one of the words on my list. He used it all the time. Sometimes he spoke of the “larger issue” or the “larger question,” but usually it was the “larger notion.” Sometimes he spoke of “this larger notion” of something or other in a way that made sense (“this larger notion of serving others”), but at other times it prefaced some noun phrase that couldn't be described as a “notion” at all, far less a “larger” one (“this larger notion of fairness and minimizing the tax burden on the job-creating businesses and hard-working people across this state”; “this larger notion of how well automotive companies are able to compete with counterparts elsewhere in the world”). The phrase had long been the source of jokes among staffers. “Why larg
er
? Larger than what?” When we drafted a release or a press statement and weren't sure if he would approve it, someone would say, “Stick ‘a larger notion' in there and it should be fine.” I remember someone saying that if the governor ever wrote a book about God, it should be called “The Largest Notion.”

“Larger?” I said.

“Yeah. I know that sounds weird. And I don't know what I mean by it exactly. It's just—I feel there's something—larger—you know, just bigger—bigger than what I'm able to communicate in words. That's what I'm after.”

Strange things happen toward the end of an administration. One of them, in my case, was admittance to the gift room.

Politicians receive more gifts than you can imagine. Admirers send books and framed photographs and, at Christmas, specialty food items. Appreciative crowds show their gratitude to the guest speaker by presenting him with a hand-carved letter-­opener or a small sculpture by a local artist. When I had traveled with the governor, I got stuck carrying the things back to the car or the plane, usually a T-shirt or a “golden” shovel (for ceremonial groundbreakings) or a giant pair of scissors (for ceremonial ribbon cuttings). Sometimes he got something genuinely interesting. At a town meeting inside the warehouse of a small metalwork company the employees presented him with a state flag they had fashioned from a sheet of copper—a three-by-five-foot rectangle with the shapes of a palmetto tree and a crescent moon cut out of it—a beautiful object in its way, and one I would have liked to have.

Ethics laws dictated that all gifts had to be recorded, along with their approximate value, and a list of them deposited with the requisite agency at the end of the year. If you were the staffer who brought the gift back to the office, you had to do this. Sometimes the governor would tell you to keep them; I got several T-shirts this way and one variety pack of floor polish. But usually you had to make up values—$10 for a T-shirt, $20 for a book, $100 for an original sculpture or a copper flag—fill out the paperwork, and give it to June for depositing in the gift room. I imagined a closet-size room somewhere in the governor's mansion crammed with decorative pillows and model cranes and framed photographs.

With a few weeks left in the term, June came into the press office and invited me and two colleagues to this room. It wasn't a closet in the governor's residence at all; it was a huge room in a dreary government building adjacent to the State House. The room was lined with tables, each covered with trinkets and gadgets and baseball caps and books. There were shot glasses, books of postcards, novelty lighters, tote bags, stacks of
Fireproof
DVDs, and innumerable coffee mugs. We were told to take anything we liked. My attention inclined to the books, but I was disappointed. There were books about counties and agricultural methods and chiropracty and the textile industry. An entire section was devoted to marriage. There were books about Baha'ism and the 1984 presidential election and a variety of foreign cities, almost all of them inscribed to the governor, but nothing I was interested in.

I did pick up a few things: a baseball cap, a beer koozie advertising some private boarding school, a white golf shirt with the BMW logo on the sleeve, a print from the National Gallery of Ireland, a tartan tie, and a ballpoint pen made of wood. I loaded them into a tote bag bearing the words Universität Stuttgart, also from the gift room. If I had to estimate the combined price of everything in that room, say for insurance purposes, I would guess $50,000. If you added the things the governor had kept for himself and his wife and sons—the great sheet-metal flag, for instance, was not in the room—as well as the hundreds of things he had regifted over the years, the combined worth must have been $100,000 or more.

A large room full of token mementos, well-meaning but
frequently inappropriate gestures, and lame attempts at ingratiation: you could interpret it as a small manifestation of modern democratic politics—full of waste, insincerity, and comic impropriety. (Did someone really think this governor would appreciate a cigarette lighter made to look like a 9mm handgun?) On the other hand, although these gifts were not extravagant—nothing I saw would have been likely to influence a policy decision—many of them had an understated quality. The tartan tie is made from clearly superior fabric, and the ballpoint pen, I later discovered, contains a laser pointer.

We did all the things a political office does on the way out. We sent out press statements about the need to continue reform; the boss traveled around urging tax reform; he quietly backed a candidate in the race for governor. My project was to put together an “accomplishments list,” an improbably long document listing the administration's achievements in misleadingly straightforward language. (“We achieved the largest recurring tax cut in state history.”) He was keenly interested in this product and badgered me relentlessly about the wording of its hundreds of items. “We've got to tell the story,” he would say. “Nobody else is going to tell it for us.” Which I guess was true.

With a few days left, the constant need for talking points finally ended. Those of us who hadn't left yet were interviewing for jobs elsewhere. Nat would go back to the upper Midwest to work for a large multinational corporation whose
public-relations arm needed help in crisis management. Stewart found a place in the highest echelon of the state department of education. Some of my colleagues left to make large amounts of money “consulting,” whatever that means. I was interviewing for a position with a small nonprofit group, and eventually took it. A few months later I would admit to myself, then more gradually to Laura, the distance I had allowed my old job to place between me and my wife.

Pictures had to come down from the office walls, desks had to be cleaned out, and the stacks of newspapers and notebooks and manila folders and old executive budgets had to be stored in boxes or thrown out. Hundreds of pages of the governor's handwritten notes for speeches, together with the note cards he used to deliver them, all had to be put in boxes and sent to the archives. It felt good to seal them up with industrial boxing tape and send them away, like burying a hateful relative.

The last time I saw the governor was early one weekend morning before the inauguration of his successor. I'd come in to fill out some remaining paperwork and box up a few items. When I got there, the door to his office was open. I looked in. Most of the furniture was gone. Boxes were everywhere. His office had been full of baubles given to him by admiring citizens and sundry companies and organizations: a toy crane, a replica passenger jet, a small palmetto tree made exclusively of bottle caps. Until a few days before, there had been framed
pictures everywhere: pictures of the governor with his family, of the governor with other famous politicians, of the governor with various hardhat-wearing dignitaries holding shovels at groundbreaking ceremonies. Now the walls were bare, the pictures packed away. His desk was gone. A great stack of books he'd been intending to read was gone too.

The governor was there, alone as far as I could tell. He sat on one of the remaining chairs looking at a few of the pictures that hadn't yet been stored away. He held one in his hands and gazed at it silently. I couldn't make it out and wondered if it was a picture of his sons or his wife. He looked at it for a long time. When he put it down, he just sat silently.

Was he at last pondering the ruin he'd created? Maybe in part, but I doubt he thought of it as ruin. The word suggests finality, and I was sure that this man would not accept any form of finality until his heart stopped beating. He had been ready to pick up the pieces almost as soon as he'd strewn them on the ground; resigning may have been an option for a few days, but leaving the public sphere never was. I was sure of it. When people asked me what he planned to do after leaving office, I would say I didn't know but expected he would start figuring out what office to run for next. That would get a laugh, but I meant it, and I knew I was right. Men like him think of achievement and victory, not of failure, and when they fail disastrously their first thought is not to repair the damage but to gauge how far it is to the next victory. Of course this isn't a new insight. Politicians have dishonored themselves and embarrassed their families and allies many times before, and their staff—sometimes in books like this one—have expressed shock and dismay at the way their chiefs have wanted to make it all go away with a few insincere apologies. Why do we continue to trust these men?

Let me ask that question in a more pointed way: Why do we trust men who have sought and attained high office by innumerable acts of vanity and self-will? When a work colleague makes a habit of insisting on his own competence and virtue, we may tolerate him, we may even admire his work, but his vanity is not an inducement to trust him. Why, then, do we trust the men who make careers of persuading us of their goodness and greatness, and who compete for our votes? Catherine Zuckert makes this point powerfully in an essay on
Tom Sawyer
. Tom, remember, is brave and clever and has a firm sense of the right thing to do, but he is animated mainly by a hunger for glory. He is, in short, the essence of an able politician. “People like Tom Sawyer serve others not for the sake of the others,” writes Zuckert. “They serve because they glory in receiving glory. . . . We should reward such people with the fame they so desire—if and when they perform real public services. But we should not trust them.”
II
I feel the force of that last sentence now: we go badly wrong when we trust them. Indeed much of the hand-wringing commentary about the loss of trust in government resulting from Vietnam and Watergate is simply, I now think, a failure to appreciate the simple truth that politicians should never have been trusted in the first place. They may be lauded when they're right and venerated when they're dead, but they should never be trusted.

I say all this confidently now, but it wasn't that long ago that I thought the answer to all our social and political problems was to elect the right people—good people with the right ideas and the courage to act on them. Before I went to work for the governor, I thought he was one of the right people. And he was. He did what he said he was going to do, he took his duties seriously, he behaved himself in public with charm and decorum, he did not fear criticism, and he had realistic views of what government could and couldn't accomplish. He was everything a politician should be—a politician in the best sense of that word, if it has a best sense. After two or three weeks of working for him, though, I knew something was wrong. It wasn't that I thought he should have been the same thoughtful political leader in private that he was in public; the difference between public persona and reality is a valuable and inevitable one. Rather, I found it unnerving to discover such a stark difference between the personality he presented to the public and the one to which he subjected his staff. I remarked on this difference many times to my wife during that first year. We often laughed about it, but I think we both knew it signified something terrible—not just about the governor but about the world, or at least about democratic cultures in which political leaders often function as celebrities and even heroes. What that something was came to me much later, when I glimpsed the depth of his self-absorption. Here was a man who shattered his ambitions and humiliated his family and friends by pursuing his own petty, myopic desires. And yet in his ruin he could not find more than the paltriest shred of genuine self-criticism. I believe he wanted to feel a deeper remorse, but he looked inside and it wasn't there. All he found was more of himself.

And if that was true of him, it wasn't true only of him. It was true to one degree or another of all politicians. So the axiom on which I had unconsciously based my thinking for years—that what we needed was to elect the right people, good people, smart and wise and principled people—had been a delusion. That's probably putting it too strongly. We should want to elect wise and principled people, but once you think of them as wise and principled, you trust them, and at about the time you trust them, they undermine your trust and you've got to find someone else. So I realized that the men in whom I had placed my hopes could at any moment fall victim to vain impulses and self-addiction and so make clowns of themselves and ruin the causes for which they claimed to fight.

I must sound hopelessly naïve. Hadn't I noticed that politicians are prone to vanity, and that vanity frequently unmakes them? Yes, I had noticed. But I had thought of it mainly as a joke. Now I realized it wasn't a joke. It was the most important thing.

Self-regard isn't a foible to which some politicians are vulnerable. It is the peculiar and deadly flaw of modern democratic politics. Let me explain what I mean, briefly. There have been essentially three ways of arranging a constitutionally limited government, three ways of placing men under the authority of other men according to preordained laws. The first is by submitting to a constitutionally limited monarch. Subjects love or at least respect the king because of who he is: he is theirs, just as his father was before him. If the king is a fool or a tyrant, he is still the king and entitled to reverence, though not to obedience in every respect; only if he breaks the bond between himself and his subjects entirely can he be thrown out. The second is by establishing some form of meritocracy. No political entity can achieve complete meritocracy because merit, although we know it when we see it, or at least we think we do, is too hard to define and impossible to predict. Greater or lesser forms of meritocracy existed (in the English-speaking world) from the time of Oliver Cromwell to the mid-twentieth century. It was Cromwell who rejected the practice of appointing aristocratic and royal favorites and pursued the principle that men should be chosen according to their capabilities rather than their blood ties and social connections. During this era meritocracy mixed with both democracy and aristocracy, sometimes tending in one direction, sometimes in the other, but the essential idea was government by people qualified to govern. That ideal was still at least theoretically practicable in Western democracies until the principle of universal suffrage began its ascendency. At our nation's founding, remember, the idea that everybody should have the right to vote was the crazy dream of a few radicals; in most places only property owners could vote, state legislatures elected U.S. senators, and electors chosen by legislators elected presidents. What's left to us now is the third form of constitutional government: giving authority to men and women chosen by simple majorities. Since we don't believe in hereditary royal authority, and since we've accepted the idea that virtually everyone should have the vote, we have no choice but to confer power on those who can persuade most of us that they'll use it well. Successful politicians are people who know how to make us think well of them without our realizing that that's what they're doing; they know how to make us admire and trust them.