Protect and Defend (60 page)

“That’s crazy,” Chad said. “You can’t win this.”

“Oh, I’ll
win
,” the President answered. “But how I win depends on you.
If you
don’t go all out against her, she’s got a chance. If you do, then you’ll look like Gage—another running dog of the religious right who takes down a qualified and courageous woman. Which I’ll be happy to road test for the next campaign.”

Quickly, Chad tried to assess all he knew about Kerry Kilcannon. But Kerry’s essential character offered Chad no certainty. Kilcannon was a risk-taker, unafraid of controversy, and his intuition often ran against the grain. Now, as President, he might consider it necessary to meet Gage head-on.

Evenly, Chad asked, “What part do I play in this fantasy?”

“The loyal—and temperate—opposition. I don’t expect you to support her. But if you oppose her, please do it quietly. Don’t lobby for votes—”

“Gage,” Chad interjected, “wants me to reopen hearings.”

“Fine,” Kerry said with surprising calm. “That gives you an excuse to play the statesman—as chairman, you shouldn’t head a lynch mob. And Caroline would have an opportunity to defend herself …”

“Bullshit. It would string this out for the scandalmongers— and increase exponentially the chance that the daughter gets exposed, along with our little game of footsie.” Chad’s voice rose. “If that’s what you want, I’ll make sure to sink her first …”

Kerry’s forehead was damp. Beside him, Lara moved closer.

“New hearings are a risk,” he conceded, “but they could give you cover, and me time to build support for Caroline. I’m not sure they wouldn’t backfire on Gage …”

“Wake up,” he heard Chad snap. “Gage may try to force me to kill her in committee. She could never even get to the floor.”

Kerry knew this. What was telling, and puzzling, was that Chad seemed not to sense when Kerry was fencing. The pressure of his new chairmanship, and Caroline’s secret, appeared to be fraying him to a point that Kerry found surprising.

“So,” he asked, “what would you suggest?”

“Dump her.”

Kerry gripped the telephone tighter. “Other than that.”

In Chad’s silence, Kerry felt the visceral intimacy of their contest. “You want me to keep sitting on the daughter,” Chad said at last. “You want me not to take the lead in opposition. You want a fucking lot, frankly.”

Eyes narrowing, Kerry waited for more. But Chad had finished. Coolly, Kerry asked, “And what do
you
want?”

On the other end, Chad expelled a breath. “Tell your people—especially in the Senate—to oppose more hearings. Then challenge Gage to bring this to an up or down vote, quickly.”

Briefly, Kerry pretended to consider this. “I need time to build support. Otherwise, she loses—”

“Otherwise,” Chad interrupted, “I’ll do my damnedest to beat you and win the plaudits of my party.

“That’s my price, Mr. President—no hearing, quick vote. Then you and Macdonald Gage can fight it out alone.”

Kerry hesitated, just long enough to seem reluctant. “Fair enough,” he answered.

Rolling on his back, Kerry exhaled.

“He believed you?” Lara asked.

“Yes,” he answered. “If he hadn’t, I’d have pulled her.” Taking her hand, Kerry allowed himself to feel his own misgivings. “But he misread me. So now we’ll get to live with the results.”

For an hour, the Palmers lay sleepless in their darkened bedroom, Allie curled in Chad’s arms, thinking of the daughter who knew nothing about the calculus of power and, they hoped, never would.

“I did the best I could,” Chad murmured.

Allie burrowed her head on his shoulder. “I know,” she said. “I know you did.”

“R
EMEMBER
,” K
ERRY
asked Carl Barth, “when you endorsed Dick Mason in the primaries?”

On the other end of the line, the director of the
New York
Times
editorial page was momentarily silent. “Of course, Mr. President. I wrote that editorial myself.”

“You said then that I wasn’t tough enough in defending choice. But now I’m defending Caroline Masters. I’d like your help.”

Barth hesitated. “Actually,” he said, “we’re considering a piece on that.”

“When will it run?”

“We’re not sure yet. Maybe day after tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow would be much better. If you don’t counter fast, the ground could slip right out from under her.” Kerry glanced at his notes. “In an hour, Katherine Jones of Anthony’s Legions will be faxing a piece for your op-ed section, refuting the Christian Commitment’s claim that late-term abortion is used as birth control. I expect you’ll receive a copy, and hope you can commend it to the editor of your op-ed page.”

“I’ll look out for it,” Barth promised. “I must say, Mr. President, you’re taking a very active interest in this.”

“I don’t mean to lose,” Kerry answered. “Any more than you would want me to.”

With that, Kerry got off the phone.

He glanced out the double-arched window of his private living room; through the glass the baroque structure of the old Executive Office Building, lit by winter sun, looked like a child’s gingerbread cake built to grotesque proportions. Then he scanned the list of names beside him.

The list had several columns: “Media,” headed by the
Times
, the
Washington Post
, and CNN; “Senate,” including members of Chad’s committee and the Republican moderates he needed to dissuade from committing to Gage; and “Interest Groups.” Looking up at his silent television, he saw the ad excoriating Caroline Masters running on MSNBC. Hastily, he searched under “Interest Groups” for the name he wanted, and stabbed out the telephone number next to it.

In Los Angeles, it was not yet seven o’clock. After several rings, a voice, though thick with sleep, answered with the pompous “how dare you” tone of a man whose notion of importance began and ended with himself.

“Good morning, Robert,” the President said crisply. “Too early to be out suing someone?”

In the silence which followed, Kerry had the image of Robert Lenihan—with his chaotic blond curls and the belly of a pouter pigeon—absorbing that the distinctive voice which had awakened him belonged to the President of the United States. But his surprise, Kerry knew, was merely prelude: swiftly, Lenihan would conclude that this call was just another acknowledgment of his unparalleled stature among the plaintiffs’ lawyers of America.

“Mr. President?”

“None other. I’m calling to ask you to exert your influence in a righteous cause. Within the next hour or so, I hope you’ll raise two million dollars for an ad campaign supporting Caroline Masters.” Kerry’s voice, though bantering, had a certain edge. “For you, Robert, that’s a phone call or two. Unless you just decide to write the check yourself.”

“Two million?” Kerry could hear surprise mixed with Lenihan’s calculation of the benefits, as well as the sheer pleasure of having the President in his debt. “That’s expensive fun.”

“For lesser men. But you’ve made half a billion suing tobacco companies, and now you’re after the gun manufacturers for billions more.” Kerry’s tone was pleasant, but brisk. “We’ve got Villela-McNally in New York cutting the ads, and we need to put them on the air by tomorrow morning.”

“That’s not much time …”

“I don’t have much time. The Christian Commitment is in its second day of spots, and my pollster tells me that they’re working.”

There was a brief silence, induced, Kerry supposed, by his own failure to pay more tribute to Robert Lenihan’s consuming ego. But time was short, and asking Lenihan for money was distasteful enough.

“I’ll need to reflect, Mr. President.” Every syllable dripped with self-regard. “Before you nominated Masters, you never solicited my advice. If you had, I’d have expressed my reservations about a lawyer who spent much of her career defending large corporations. Frankly, you’ve caused me grave concerns.”

“That’s nothing.” Kerry’s instinct about how to handle Robert Lenihan merged with genuine irritation. “You want to
sue the gun manufacturers. You want punitive damages. Mac Gage wants to pass laws shutting all that down, and he’s got a majority in the Senate.”

“But you can veto that, Mr. President.”

“Yes, that’s how the Constitution works. So without a friendly Supreme Court, the only thing between Gage and you is
me
. Assuming I decide that a veto serves the public interest.”

Now Lenihan sounded faintly indignant. “You’re as against guns as I am.”

“More. But some people don’t think lawsuits are the answer.

“You supported me in the general election because you had to. But you raised money for Dick Mason to oppose me in the primaries—a lot of it. So I don’t have any illusions I’m talking to a loyalist.” Kerry’s tone softened. “This is your chance to change that, Robert.”

This time, Kerry supposed, the silence suggested an element of worry. “Tomorrow,” Lenihan temporized, “is quick.”

“Not for us. We’ve got the ad company, the script, and a schedule for running spots. All you need to do is form ‘Lawyers for the American Way,’ funded with two million dollars, and Caroline Masters is on the air.” Kerry’s voice turned cool. “Then we can both consign Dick Mason to the dustbin of history.”

There was a last, brief silence. “All right,” Robert Lenihan answered slowly. “We want your friendship, Mr. President.”

Putting down the telephone, Kerry Kilcannon pondered the costs of such a call.

With or without Robert Lenihan’s help, he intended to veto Gage’s bill. More fundamentally, Kerry loathed the corrupting role of money in politics, the dishonesty of the thirty-second TV spot. But he would have to fix
that
problem later—the Christian Commitment had given him no choice. There were no spending limits on its anti-Masters campaign; the first task was to confirm her, the test of strength on which so much else depended. It was, as he had told Caroline Masters, a matter of principle—and more.

Consulting his watch, Kerry saw that it was ten o’clock.

In the East Room, Ellen Penn was presiding over a press
conference. Orchestrated by his media advisers, it featured pro-life Catholics who agreed that Mary Ann Tierney faced a medical emergency; women who might have died without late-term abortions; and a mother from Ohio—a witness in the Tierney case—whose daughter had chosen an illegal abortion over parental consent, and bled to death. But to get them the maximum exposure, his own appearance was essential.

Kerry made two more calls—to Minority Leader Chuck Hampton and Senator Vic Coletti—and then headed for the East Room.

It was elegant but sparsely furnished, and its parquet oak floor and Bohemian cut-glass chandeliers made it a classic setting for dances and receptions. But today it hosted a reprise of the Mary Ann Tierney trial; as Ellen Penn hovered protectively by the podium, a teenage girl spoke to a room jammed with reporters crowded in folding chairs or standing at the rear.

Kerry took his place beside Ellen—unnoticed, it seemed, by the girl.

“My father raped me,” she began in a near whisper.

His staff had found her, Kerry realized—the fifteen-year-old victim of rape and incest mentioned by Dr. Flom at the Tierney trial. She was slender and pallid, with circles beneath her eyes and legs as thin as sticks, and her youth seemed to have fled. Ellen Penn placed a hand on her shoulder, lips forming words inaudible to Kerry. As painful as this was to witness, Kerry reflected, it would not make pleasant viewing for Macdonald Gage.

The girl’s eyes were downcast, and she spoke in a halting murmur. “My father made me promise never to tell. He said he’d kill me …” She choked now, and then said brokenly, “After he hung himself, I ran away …

“It was too late, the doctor said. Because I was healthy, and they thought my baby was, too.”

The room was hushed; the reporters watched, transfixed, too professional to look away.
What have politics come to
, Kerry wondered; he watched, stricken as the others. “My baby’s retarded,” she said softly. “Retarded and blind …”

The girl shook her head, unable to go on. As she turned from the reporters, shamed and sickened, she also turned from Ellen.

Instead, she saw the President. She hesitated, then she went to him.

She felt like a stalk.
I’m sorry
, he wanted to say.
We shouldn’t have asked you to do this
.

But even before he heard the whir of cameras and the bustle of photographers, the President knew that this image would lead every news broadcast and dominate every paper. Perhaps
that
had been what he wanted.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I won’t let you down.” Moving closer, a reporter wrote this in her notebook.

O
N
CNN the girl closed her eyes, her face pressed against Kerry Kilcannon’s shoulder.

“There are days,” Macdonald Gage murmured, “when I still can’t believe that people buy this crap.”

Mace Taylor eyed the screen. “It’s his favorite tactic—the politics of victimhood. Sort of like group therapy, where we all get to feel someone’s pain. It’ll wear off before the next election.”

“Maybe. But he’s good at it.” Turning from the television in disgust, Gage faced his former colleague, who was sitting on the couch with a glass of iced tea in his hand. “If he makes this all about women, we’ve maybe got an image problem. For me, it’s better to take the high road, and let Paul Harsh-man trash her.”

Taylor still watched the screen. “No reason you can’t do ‘more in sorrow than in anger.’ Let our spots do the damage— we’ve got enough money from the Commitment and the gun folks to run them from now till doomsday.”

“Kilcannon will put spots up, too,” Gage answered. “He’ll dredge up the money somehow, maybe from those blood-suckers
who want to sue the gun manufacturers and need our beloved President to help them. Now that he’s committed himself, Kilcannon will go for our throat.

“The people who hate him—
them
we can count on. But there’s a whole slough of voters out there who don’t give a damn about anything but the Dow—including that thirty years of sexual license is bringing us down.” He pointed at the screen—the girl and the President, foreheads nearly touching, Kilcannon’s lips moving in silent consolation. “Before the little bastard’s through, he’ll have a lot of folks forgetting how the Tierney girl got pregnant. Or that the
real
victim is her baby.”