The Moth (11 page)

I hadn’t been asleep for more than five minutes, and was actually pretty hungover, which is why I needed the sleep, when the President’s personal aide came back and said, “The President’s in a meeting right now, and he needs you to come into it.”

Now, I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but this had practical joke written all over it, and I said, “Get lost.”

About three minutes later, he came in again and said, “Hey, the President’s in with the band U2, he’s with Bono, and they want to talk to you.”

I said, “Well, if the President wants to see me, he can walk his presidential ass right back to this room and ask me himself.”

Well, about sixty seconds later, the presidential ass showed up and said, “What is your problem? These guys want to meet you.”

So I walked into the meeting, and this guy, this rock star, Bono, comes up and gives me this big hug and says, “I really wanted to meet you.”

And I said, “Well, that’s great, Mr. Bono, but, um, why?”

And he said, “Anyone who can handle world affairs, and
Monica Lewinsky and all that, and still has time to stay out all night drinking is my kind of guy.”

Now, most people would think, you know, Bono, U2, telling you that they like your work, that’d be great. Only problem, I’d spent most of the day making sure the President
didn’t know
I’d missed Air Force One, and Bono busted me.

But after that inauspicious start, things started going pretty well. We reached a historic budget deal, and I got to talk about that. We made peace in the Middle East temporarily, and I got to talk about that.

But still looming above everything was this unresolved Monica Lewinsky investigation and what was going on in Iraq. And I’ll always remember a very bizarre plane ride on Air Force One.

We’re coming back from the Middle East, having done some peace talks, and the plane is divided into three sections. In the middle section, the President’s political advisors were all gathered. We were getting near the impeachment vote, and we were very aware of who we needed with us to avoid being impeached. And it struck me as sort of a game of political Bingo, because people were calling members of Congress from the plane, and people kept shouting out, “Congressman Quinn, we lost him!” And people would write it down—
Quinn, yes on impeachment.
And we figured out in this meeting that we didn’t have the votes, and we were going to lose.

Now, up in the front of the plane, where the President had his office, there was a meeting going on with the national security team, going through war plans for launching an attack on Iraq.

I was the only one going between the two meetings, and I do remember, in both meetings, sort of looking up at one point
and saying, “Think things are going bad in
this
meeting? You should see what’s going on in the
other
meeting.”

But when we landed that night at Andrews Air Force Base, I realized three things. One was the President was going to be impeached, and soon. Two was we were going to start a war with Iraq, and soon. And three, I was the one who was going to have to convince the public that one and two had nothing to do with each other.

About ten days later the President of the United States was facing an impeachment vote. Now, we had a pretty simple strategy for dealing with this. We said that this was all about politics—it’s partisan, the President’s gonna stay focused on the people’s business. It was simple, and people believed it—our ratings were up.

But at about eleven-thirty, the speaker of the House, Bob Livingston, went to the floor and said something to the effect of “Larry Flynt caught me, I had an affair, and the only honorable thing to do is to resign.” And he resigned on the floor, during the impeachment debate.

Now, we had a simple message, but all of a sudden, they had one that was even simpler: do something wrong, get caught, resign.

I figured we had about fifteen minutes before everyone figured that out, and a drumbeat of TV pundits would start saying the President should resign.

So I ran down to the Oval Office. The President was there with the chief of staff, John Podesta. We were waiting for a couple of people to arrive to figure out what to do.

I said to the President, “What do you think? How do you feel about this?”

And he started talking, and I realized that what he was
saying was making a lot of sense, so I started scribbling it down, and when the rest of the team arrived, I said, “We don’t need to have a meeting. This is what we’re going to say.” And as some of you may remember, the President said that it was a real shame that the congressman was resigning. That the cycle of the politics of personal destruction had to end and should end today. And that he was going to call Livingston and say, “Don’t resign.”

And, oddly, the fever that I was worried about, about the President being forced to resign, broke in that very moment. Which was good for me, because I was late for another meeting.

I had to go to a meeting where we were working on writing the State of the Union speech, and I do remember sitting in that meeting and thinking,
You know, we’re sitting here discussing health care and education—this is why we’re going to survive this. We’re actually doing the people’s business.

Unfortunately, at that moment, someone came and tapped me on the shoulder and said, “We need you out here.”

It was my deputy, and I remember looking at her and saying, “You know, if one more thing happens today, my head’s going to explode.”

And she said, “Well then, you don’t want to go into your office right now.”

In my office were some members of the President’s national security team. They had been meeting, unbeknownst to me, talking about the military action that had been going on now for about ten days.

And I went in, and they said, “We’ve completed this military action, we’ve hit everything we can, and we’re about to go to the President to recommend he make a statement calling off the military action and claiming victory.”

And I looked at them and said, “You’ve gotta be fucking
kidding me. A week ago, you had me go out and say, ‘We found out today we’re gonna be impeached, and we’re launching a war,’ and today you want me to go out and say, ‘Yeah, we got impeached, but guess what? We won the war!’ ”

They said yeah.

I said, “Well isn’t there anything we can hit again? Can we go back and hit some buildings a second time?”

The military guy didn’t think that was very funny.

I then had what we call in the business a “communications challenge,” because we had two things that we had to do in the same time space. We tried to figure out what to do, and I thought,
You know what? Sometimes the best thing to do is not worry very much about it—just go out and do it.

So first we had a hundred and fifty members of Congress—all Democrats—down on the South Lawn to stand with the President and say, “This impeachment was all partisan; it’s all politics.” It was a very simple message: this is partisan politics, Republicans suck. It all went well.

But then we had to talk about the war.

So we went inside and only ten minutes apart—same podium, just a different room—said, “There are no Republicans in this country, there are no Democrats, there are just Americans, and we have won the war.”

Then the President left, leaving me to explain to fifty waiting reporters how the two things fit together. And I think it was so audacious that we took the breath away from even the press, and they seemed to let us get away with it.

And I remember at the end of this long day, walking across the hall to my office. One of my closest friends in the White House, one of the President’s top aides, saw me come in, and I sat down, and he went over to the little bar in the office, and
he got two beers and opened them up, sat down, and put his feet up.

And I’ll never forget what he said to me.

He said, “You know, except for getting impeached, we had a pretty good day.”

Joe Lockhart
served as White House press secretary for President Bill Clinton during his second term in office. Joe currently is a communications strategist at the Glover Park Group, a leading communications organization he co-founded in 2001 in Washington, DC.

WAYNE REECE

T
ravel with me if you will to a space called the Panhandle in North Texas. Travel with me to the year 1960, fifty years ago, specifically the Saturday before Easter.

I was in my last year in seminary at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and I was also pastoring four rural churches. And on that Saturday I was agonizing to finish my sermon that I had worked on all week long, trying to get it down to the perfection that Christian preachers aspire to on Easter.

I had put in some of my own experiences and my reflections. I had also dropped in some wonderful quotations from the theologians of the day. And I was ready to preach
that
day, but I had to wait another day.

Now, that Saturday, in the evening some of the kids from the four churches that I was serving came over to prepare for an Easter sunrise service. At about nine o’clock they all went home, but one guy was left. His friend had left him behind—had
forgotten him—and Brian asked me if I could take him home to Tioga.

I said, “Sure.” I told my wife where I was going and what I was doing, and Brian and I jumped into my station wagon and we headed off.

But for me, this was virgin territory. Uncharted. I had driven these roads in the past two months, during the day, on the major thoroughfares, but I had not traveled those country roads in the dark. I got Brian to his home, dropped him, and headed back. It was about ten o’clock at night, and I was needing to get home and get to bed so I could be prepared for the four sermons the next morning.

And then it happened! I had forgotten to fill up my gas tank that day. My car started to sputter and spit, and then it died.

What do I do? I’m out here in the middle of nowhere. I can’t see anything. I wondered,
Where do I go? Who can I find?
There were no houses around. There were no gas stations.

And so, apprehensively, I got out of my car, locked it up, and started going someplace, not knowing where I was going, or when I was going to get there, and what I would find when I got there. So, I had walked almost two hours, or at least it seemed two hours. Actually I found out, when I got to the place, I’d only been gone thirty-five minutes. But I saw, in the distance, a gleaming light. And like a moth being drawn to the flame, I went to that glow. And as I neared it, I heard twanging, blaring music, and I found myself at a country roadhouse, surrounded by pickup trucks and motorcycles.

Now, I had never been in one of these, and I didn’t know what to expect. But I knew that I had to have somebody try to help me, and I wondered if I would find anybody like that here.
So I apprehensively went into the roadhouse, and over on the side there was a little room, and there were three guys, and they were playing pool. And so I thought,
Well, maybe
they
could help me, or at least they could tell someone who could help me.

Just as I walked in one guy came up to me, and he said, “Hey, I’m Eric, and do you want to play pool?”

I thought maybe they thought I could be hustled, because I had—well, I
looked
like I had money.

I said, “Well, I used to play pool when I was in high school.” And then I thought to myself,
and I had done pretty well.
But I hadn’t played for six years.

He said, “Well, would you break on a game of Stripes and Solids?”

And I said, “Sure.”

So I racked them up, went to get the cue stick, chalked it up, put talc on my hands, and stroked and cracked the rack, meaning the balls scattered. One ball went in. I stroked and hit again. A second ball went in. And then a third ball went in. And I realized that I had amazingly gotten back my youthful talent of pool!

Well, to make a long story short, I put in four more balls. There was only one ball left—the eight ball. This is the pièce de résistance in Stripes and Solids. I called it for the left corner pocket. I stroked, hit, and it went in.

And immediately, Eric said, “Oh, we’ve got a pool shark in our midst!” He was kinder than another guy, who said, “Okay, are you a pool hustler in the neighborhood?”

Well, huh, I thought to myself,
What do I say?

And Eric said, “Okay, come and sit down.” We sat down, and a couple of other guys joined us at the table, and he said, “I want you to tell us why you are in our neighborhood.” Ah, man, what could I say to these guys?

I said, “Okay, I’m the new preacher of the Tioga Methodist Church. I’m on my way back home to Sadler,” which was about thirty miles away. “I ran out of gas. I’ve got to get home because I’m preaching at four churches in the morning, and because it’s Easter.”

Roy said, “What’s Easter?” Two of the guys chided Roy, because of what he had said, but he said, “Honestly, I’ve never been to church before, and I want to know the story about Easter.”

So I thought to myself,
What do I tell Roy? Do I give him the sermon that I have prepared that was filled with illustrations from Paul Tillich’s
The New Being
? Or do I try to find new ways to tell the story, the old, old story, to the new ears of Roy?

So I thought for a moment, and then I swallowed, and started in. “Now, there was this guy named Jesus. He was born to an unwed teenage mother, and when he grew up he gathered around him twelve guys—his friends—and they were his gang, and they roamed the countryside together, and they talked about peace and justice and love and God. And they did great things. But the authorities wanted to get him, and so they tried to find ways of either capturing him or killing him.”

Well, I told a little bit more of the story, until I came down to the end, and I said, “One night, one of the gang ratted on him to the authorities. And so they caught Jesus, and the next day they hanged him on a tree, and they killed him. Two days later, some of the gang went to try to find him in the tomb where they had laid him, and he wasn’t there. And they searched around, and asked around, and finally someone said, ‘God has raised Jesus from the dead, and has given him new life.’ Now, Roy, that’s the story of Jesus, and that’s the story of Easter.”