Madam President (8 page)

Dale had taken a sizable risk by selecting Lucy and Richard for the “Day in the Life” special, but she wanted to do everything in her power to extend Charlotte’s second honeymoon with the press, and that included courting the journalists who were getting the most attention.

The vice president had also been a strong advocate for doing the “Day in the Life” with Lucy and Richard. Maureen had a very positive impact on Charlotte when it came to her approach with the media. She was generating a lot of goodwill herself through her “open-door” policy. There were as many reporters in and out of the vice president’s office as there were in and out of the press office. Dale privately worried that the vice president’s open-door policy would eventually clash with Charlotte’s preference for keeping the media at arm’s length, but so far, it had only served to enhance reporters’ understanding of the close partnership Maureen had forged with Charlotte. As longtime politicians who’d largely sacrificed their mothering years for their careers, both women shared a bond of wistful acceptance of the trade-offs they’d made to arrive at their positions of immense power. They’d also both endured messy chapters in their personal lives that had played out publicly because of their high-profile positions and unfaithful husbands.

Dale liked to think that Craig’s ascent to chief of staff and her promotion to press secretary contributed to the positivity that the press felt toward the administration. History suggested that Charlotte was wise to shake things up in her second term; successful second-term presidents almost always demanded staff turnover, and Charlotte was an astute student of the pitfalls of the modern American presidency.

Dale glanced at herself one last time in the mirror, and then, with her BlackBerry screen as her flashlight, she made her way toward the front door, picked up her heavy purse, threw a black cashmere sweater across her shoulders to keep herself warm inside the over-
air-conditioned West Wing, and shut the door behind her. As soon as she stepped into her building’s lobby, she noticed the van parked in front. The plan was for a CBS crew to drive in with each member of the senior staff. She tucked her hair behind her ears and went out to retrieve the crew.

“Good morning, everyone.” Dale wasn’t good at forced cheer, especially in the morning. The crew piled into her car and positioned a camera in the front seat. When they turned the camera light on, Dale was temporarily blinded.

“Do you usually stop for coffee?” one of the production assistants asked from the backseat, where he’d settled in amid the dry cleaning she kept forgetting to drop off and two gym bags that she’d packed and had never used.

“Nothing is open before five.” She tried to make eye contact with him in her mirror, but he was focusing intently on holding her pile of black suits off his lap as he jotted notes in a spiral notebook. She’d been meaning to stop at the cleaner’s for weeks.

“Do you want me to pull over and put that stuff in the trunk?”

“No, I’m fine. Will any of the other senior staff be there when we arrive?”

“Probably not, but I’m supposed to meet with Craig to go over the final line-by-line for the day,” she said, glancing in the rearview mirror again to get a better look at her questioner. He looked twenty years old.

“Are you an intern?” she asked.

“No, ma’am.”

He’d called her
ma’am.
She sighed and shook her head slightly. It served her right for asking. She stayed quiet for the rest of the drive, except to answer the twenty-year-old’s questions. Dale thought about how thankful she was that Craig was her boss. At least they could laugh about this at the end of the day. Dale knew exactly what he’d say. “The things we do for love of country and Charlotte Kramer,” he’d joke. She smiled thinking about it as she pulled into the entrance on E Street and flashed her hard pass. The guard greeted her with a nod and waved her onto the pad where the canine unit would examine her car for explosives. When the dogs were satisfied, the large steel
gate would disappear into the ground, and Dale would be free to drive slowly toward the next gate. She cherished the lengthy process and treated it as her last moment of peace before the workday commenced.

“Ma’am? Excuse me?”

“Yes?”

“Who is allowed to park in there?” The producer was pointing at West Executive Drive, the strip of coveted parking spots between the West Wing and the Old Executive Office Building that separated the most senior advisors from the rest of the presidential staffers. Dale had pulled up to the third and final entrance and was waiting for the large wrought-iron gates to swing open.

“Only assistants to the president may park in here,” she replied. His face didn’t register any comprehension, so she explained the White House hierarchy that allowed her one of the best parking spots on the White House complex.

“Assistants to the president are the most senior staffers. They have what we refer to as walk-in privileges. That means that they can walk into the Oval Office without an appointment. I mean, most of us call ahead. It’s not like we just barge into the Oval Office.” Dale laughed. She was afraid she sounded like a jerk.

Dale heard the alert on her phone that signified a new text message had come through. Relieved by the distraction, she fished her iPhone out of her giant bag. Dale smiled as she read Craig’s message. “They lit my block with stadium lights to film me walking from my front door to the SUV. You owe me many drinks,” he wrote.

She quickly typed back: “I’m driving in with Doogie Howser. Don’t complain.”

Craig shared her sense of humor, and the two of them were often described by other members of the White House senior staff as being “in cahoots” on matters large and small. And while they often sat together on long flights and at staff dinners and meetings, their relationship was purely platonic. Craig was gay. He was only partly out of the closet, but it was not enough to quell suspicions from some corners of oblivious Washington about his relationship with Dale. Privately, they laughed about the knowing winks from congressmen
and members of Charlotte’s cabinet who suspected that the two were an item. Dale wished Craig would come out more publicly, but it was something he wasn’t ready to do.

As she pulled into her regular parking spot, she thought about how wrong the reporters had been about Craig’s role in the Tara Meyers scandal. A couple of the most aggressive investigative reporters had sniffed around months earlier about whether he had played a role in leaking information to Congress and the media about the former vice president’s instability and questionable competence. Dale had felt torn about whether to take the inquiries to Craig or the White House counsel or even the president. The rumors about Craig unfairly painting Melanie as the leaker had posed a giant moral dilemma for Dale, as Melanie was the one who’d made sure that Dale had a top-notch lawyer to defend her from charges from Congress that she’d played a role in covering up the vice president’s condition. Melanie was also the one who had warned her about how ugly the West Wing would become once an investigation was under way. Ultimately, Dale had decided not to confront Craig with the allegations. She could not fathom that he was capable of what the reporters suggested. He was her closest friend in Washington and her steadfast ally. Craig had also waged an aggressive campaign to help Dale secure the press secretary job. Surely he was entitled to the benefit of doubt from her. Dale was interrupted from her thoughts again by the sound of the production assistant tapping on her window.

He had hopped out of the car to help the crew set up to shoot her walking into the West Wing.

“Are you guys ready?” she asked him.

“Yes, ma’am. Whenever you are.”

CHAPTER NINE

Charlotte

C
harlotte reached over and turned off her alarm before it went off.

“Are you getting up?” Peter asked.

“I’m going to get some reading done. I’ll go into the study so you can go back to sleep,” she whispered.

“It’s the middle of the night,” he protested.

She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “It’s almost five, and I’m about to walk into an ambush. CBS is going to be embedded with me all day. I’m not going to get any real work done. You’ll call Penny?”

“As soon as the sun comes up on the West Coast.”

“Before that, please.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Charlotte scratched Cammie’s ears, gathered her pile of papers from the nightstand, and walked down the hall to her study.

The White House staff secretary had placed a copy of her briefing book for the day in the center of her desk. The White House office of the staff secretary—a little-known and utterly indispensible group of West Wing employees—was responsible for assembling the briefing book and setting it on her desk at whatever hour it was completed the night before. The book contained detailed minute-by-minute schedules, briefing papers, final versions of speeches, and any sensitive background material
for every meeting and event on her schedule. Even seemingly spontaneous drop-by meetings on her schedule were carefully researched, vetted, and scripted to avoid any potential for embarrassment.

The actual newspapers wouldn’t be brought up until about 5:45
A
.
M
., but there was a set of news clips still warm from the copy machine that had been placed next to the briefing book on her desk. A junior staffer in the White House press office came in at two
A
.
M
. and printed off the major stories from the Web sites of all the major newspapers. The “clips” were then photocopied for the senior White House staff and also placed on their desks.

The White House butlers had placed a pot of coffee, a pitcher of warm milk, and a cup and saucer on a tray on the side of her desk. In a few minutes, one of the butlers would come in and ask her if she wanted anything to eat. She’d say “Not yet,” as she always did, and they’d come back every thirty minutes to see if she’d changed her mind, until she finally agreed to a smoothie, her one concession to Maureen’s evangelism for clean living. Charlotte made a mental note to tell Maureen about Brooke and Mark’s fondness for juice cleanses. It seemed everyone her age was resorting to extreme measures to beat back the forces of nature. Charlotte found it amusing. Self-improvement was her generation’s obsession. She just wanted to be able to sleep past five
A
.
M
. again. Maureen was always carrying around a bottle of green juice, and if she didn’t have to entertain a lawmaker or a foreign dignitary, she preferred drinking her green potions for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Charlotte could barely choke down one salad a day. Maureen also frequented spinning classes at Washington’s first “Soul Cycle” spinning club with members of her staff. Charlotte learned from Craig that Maureen had been asked to climb onto the instructor’s bike in the front of the darkened room to lead the group. Apparently, the class of sixty had gone wild. Maureen’s commitment to healthy living paid off. At five foot two and about one hundred and ten pounds, she had the body of a female gymnast. The deep lines around her eyes and mouth were the only clues to her age. At sixty-one, she had ten times the energy Charlotte had at fifty, and she seemed to outpace most of her twenty- and thirty-something staff members, too.

Charlotte tried to remember the last time she’d worked out. She
made a mental note to start hiking with the dogs again on the weekends, at least. Then she pulled out her speech and scanned her edits from the night before. After underlining the sections she planned to emphasize when she delivered the address, Charlotte set the speech aside until the speechwriters came in to make her final changes. Her hope was to highlight the areas of consensus, but there was no chance the press would amplify those parts of her speech. She could already envision the breathless live shots from her press corps as they reported from in front of the antiabortion protesters all day long. If she had any power at all, she’d use it to cure the press of its conflict addiction.

Charlotte turned to a memo from her economic advisors. No one had been able to crack the code on the right combination of spending cuts, tax relief, and government support for the unemployed, but she was determined to figure it out without alienating her own party any more than she already had. Charlotte was still in a strong position with most conservatives on national security issues. Until recently, they respected her decision to leave sufficient troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan to secure the gains they’d made over the last decade and a half and to combat the violent flare-ups in both places.

Charlotte had misgivings about taking a visible role in the abortion debate after forcing her remaining Republican allies to accept a progressive Democrat as her vice president, but it wasn’t as if she’d had much of a choice. She leaned back in her chair and thought about all that had transpired since her reelection less than two years earlier. She’d had such high hopes for her second vice president, Tara Meyers, but it had unraveled amid revelations that she’d been hiding serious mental-health issues for the majority of her political career. In a behind-closed-doors deal, designed by Craig, who’d served as her chief legislative affairs advisor at the time, Charlotte had agreed to appoint the wildly popular and experienced Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives as Tara’s replacement. The deal halted the impeachment proceedings against her and allowed her to regain her political footing.

Charlotte still felt guilty about subjecting Tara to the type of scrutiny that exacerbated her stress and brought her mental-health issues into public view. She hoped that someday they could speak about everything that had transpired, but her advisors had urged Charlotte to
pour all of her energy into moving forward with whatever she could still accomplish in her remaining years as president.

For the first time in a very long time, that included having someone to come home to. She and Peter were both doing their best to be a couple again, but she was concerned that the time they’d spent apart had rewired both of them from the people they’d been when they’d first married more than two decades earlier. They were no longer trusting individuals who made good partners. When she was completely honest with herself, she worried that they’d both become wholly self-sufficient adults with unlimited capacity for taking care of others but severely limited ability to be vulnerable with each other. Most of the time, she pushed those concerns aside and recognized that getting back together wasn’t a second chance so much as it was a last chance to be a family again. It was less romantic but more urgent, and Charlotte was committed to getting it right this time.