Madam President (23 page)

“Hello, Lucy, Richard. How are you guys doing?” Dale asked.

“How is the president holding up? How are you doing? I hope she’s cooking up plans to obliterate whoever did this. Is she going to stay out of the PEOC for the rest of the day?”

Dale smiled at the anchors and glanced at the four cameras filming their interaction. “She’s doing fine. I’ll try to come up and brief off-camera as soon as we get everyone back in the briefing room. Some people got stuck at the Women’s Museum.”

“We sent a crew over to film it all.”

Dale smiled again. “Are you going to be broadcasting from the North Lawn or back at the D.C. bureau?” she asked.

“Wherever they send us.” Richard shrugged as though they had no say, which Dale knew was not the case.

Dale turned and walked quickly back toward the West Wing. Something was bothering her. She turned back around.

“Lucy?”

“Yes?”

“Can I talk to you off-camera for a second?”

Lucy walked to where Dale was standing and held her hand over her microphone. When Dale didn’t say anything, Lucy unclipped the microphone pack from her belt and handed it to Dale. Dale flipped the power switch to off and handed it back to her.

“Who told you that the president had left the PEOC?”

“What? Oh, no one. I just assumed that if you were out here, you guys had maybe cleared out of the PEOC and she was back in the Oval Office because the security situation had stabilized.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s stabilized. It’s been what? Five or six hours? I think we’re a long way from stable.”

Dale always knew when a reporter was covering for a source. She pressed her lips together and stared at Lucy. Dale felt like her shrewd, skeptical self again.

“And the president is still working out of the PEOC,” she said icily.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Charlotte

C
harlotte had called off the continuity-of-government planning that would have required her and the vice president to separate. She’d also excused herself from the PEOC this time with the permission of the Secret Service.

She was staring at the draft of her remarks from the speechwriters for later that night.

“Sam, can you get Melanie on the phone again?”

“She’s on the line,” Sam replied a minute later.

“Where are you?” Charlotte asked.

“Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean,” Melanie replied.

“Do you have a copy of the remarks?” Charlotte asked.

“I don’t, but I started working on something for you a few hours ago. I know sometimes the speechwriters are kept out of the loop, and they spend all their time chasing meaningless details, so I thought it might be helpful to frame something out.”

“Send it to me, because I can’t stand what I have.”

“I just sent it to Sam.”

“Thanks.”

“What time are you going to do this?”

“Not at six, seeing as how it’s five-thirty now. There’s some talk about trying to assemble a joint session of Congress tonight, but I
think that’s going to be impossible to pull off. We may just bump it to eight or nine
P
.
M
. Is it terrible to wait that long?”

“It’s not ideal, but I understand that these things take a while to sift through. You’ll put the FBI director out before that, right?”

“Yes. Dale and Marguerite are prepping him now. He’s going to head down to the White House briefing room with Tim.”

“Good. That’s good. That will buy you some time.”

“The FBI thinks that more than two hundred people may be dead in Miami, Mel.”

“I heard.”

“How do you retaliate against someone who targets innocent families? What possible military action can come close to evening the score in the eyes of their loved ones?”

Melanie didn’t say anything.

“What was he like on September eleventh?”

“The president?”

“Yes, Melanie. The president. What was he like? Did he feel like he was in control? Because I don’t feel like I’m in control of anything.”

“I was a junior staffer. I didn’t see him on that day.”

“But you were around people who did.”

“I don’t think he felt like he had any control. But he knew right away that the country was at war. Just as you did, and after making sure that his family was safe, he wanted to be in the loop with his national security team. Unfortunately, he was stymied by technological breakdowns. Air Force One didn’t have the same video teleconference ability, and the phones kept cutting out. It was incredibly frustrating. He wanted to get back to the White House, but the vice president and the national security advisor kept urging him to stay away from Washington. You were wise to push back when they wanted to get you out of D.C.”

“Sam just handed me a note from Tim that says the second D.C. blast took out two FBI agents, a reporter from a local TV station here in D.C., two members of a CNN crew, and some volunteers who were helping the wounded.”

“It’s awful.”

“People are going to need to feel like someone will be punished.”

“Everything will be on the table, Madam President.”

“The country doesn’t have the stomach for a war. Any response will have to be surgical.”

Melanie was quiet. Charlotte wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know, but Charlotte knew Melanie would not appreciate being told what kind of strike was needed before they had all of the information about the attackers.

“We should have a clearer sense of our options in the next couple of days.”

Sam walked in again and handed Charlotte an outline and introduction that Melanie had drafted. She paused to read them.

“Mel?”

“Yes?”

“This is exactly what I had in mind.”

“Madam President?”

“The remarks.”

“They still need a lot of work.”

“I’m going to tell Dale and Craig to scrap the earlier version. We will wait for your next draft.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Melanie?”

“Madam President?”

“I’d like for you to come straight here when you land at Andrews.”

“Yes, ma’am. In the meantime, I will work on the remarks. I’ll send you something in about an hour.”

“Thanks, Mel.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Melanie

M
elanie was thankful to be working on the president’s speech instead of monitoring the videoconference. The situation remained fluid, but the next significant briefing, as far as Melanie was concerned, would come after the attackers’ bodies were identified or when the interrogations started yielding information. Melanie had access to all of the official sources of information, but being cut off from the media coverage made her feel strangely detached from the human reaction. She hoped that it wouldn’t hinder her ability to write a speech that struck a chord with the public. It would be a couple of hours before the satellite on her plane started picking up U.S. TV channels.

On September 11, watching the day’s events unfold on live TV had been a crucial part of the collective experience for Melanie and her White House colleagues. She remembered when she first saw the image of the World Trade Center tower with smoke billowing from its side. She had just returned from the daily meeting of press staffers in the West Wing. She had taken a seat behind her desk to listen as Katie Couric and Matt Lauer calmly discussed the different possibilities for the disconcerting spectacle. One of them suggested that a commuter plane could have made a tragic miscalculation. Incapable of looking away, Melanie had been staring at the screen when the second plane,
a large jet, had careened into the second tower. She’d felt a physical jolt at the moment of impact. One of her colleagues ran in to see if Melanie had seen the shocking images. A few minutes later, Melanie had been on the phone with the White House chief of staff, who was traveling with the president that day. The senior press officers were all on the road with the president, he explained. He needed her and her team to research when and how previous presidents had addressed the public and the press in the wake of terror attacks that had occurred on their watches. The chief of staff was doing what Charlotte had been doing earlier in the day: He was trying to figure out how much time they had before the president needed to speak to the nation.

Now Melanie directed her thoughts back to Charlotte’s speech. Drafting the sentences that the president would utter to the nation was a familiar exercise. She knew exactly how far to push Charlotte without making her uncomfortable. The president would want to be resolute, but Melanie would make sure that she also expressed tenderness and compassion toward those who’d endured unspeakable losses. The trick would be finding the right words to accomplish all of those things. Melanie rubbed her stomach and stretched her neck from side to side. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting in front of her laptop, but she had the main section of the speech in good shape. She needed to come back and work on the second half of the address. The way she closed the speech would determine its success or failure. What was missing from the current draft was an element that would allow Charlotte to present herself as fully in touch with the profound suffering of the day. Melanie racked her brain for an appropriate passage to provide a literary entry point for Charlotte to transition into something heartfelt. Nothing came to mind. Melanie let her mind wander to all of her favorite writers and their lesser-known works for something unexpected but profound. She sat perfectly still and looked up at the ceiling. She missed the collaborative process of working with the speechwriting team, but it was probably better that she work alone.

Melanie’s speech-crafting methods used to drive the president’s official speechwriters crazy when she was at the White House. She
would sit in front of her computer and bang out several sentences in a burst of creativity. Then she would stare at the screen intently for a few seconds, rereading the words she’d just typed. Just as quickly as she’d typed them, Melanie would delete most of what she’d written. She would think for a minute with her hands perched just above the keyboard, as though she didn’t want to waste time reaching for the computer when inspiration hit her again. She’d repeat the process over and over again. It appeared tedious to onlookers, but in all the years that Melanie had overseen Charlotte’s speeches, there was never a single instance in which a speech was delivered that didn’t completely embody the president’s thoughts and persuasions on a certain issue. While assuming responsibility for the presidential speechwriting office had been well outside the typical role of a White House chief of staff, it had allowed Melanie to get to know her new boss on a deeply personal level. It also dovetailed into Melanie’s area of expertise: communicating on behalf of the most powerful people on earth.

In her years as press secretary for Charlotte’s predecessors, she’d always felt that the ability to speak from the White House podium was about understanding your bosses’ potential and presenting an image of the person that he or she most wanted to be. Most of the time, it was a foolproof strategy. By constantly reaching for that virtue that Melanie knew to be a slight exaggeration of the actual person she worked for, she was able to manipulate internal deliberations to force an outcome consistent with the image she’d helped create. Writing for Charlotte had presented different challenges.

Charlotte’s inability or unwillingness to open up to anyone on her newly minted White House staff about what she wanted to prioritize and how far she was willing to push to get what she wanted from lawmakers had made it next to impossible to get a workable first draft for most policy addresses into the approval process. Like a lot of politicians, Charlotte usually didn’t know what she wanted to say until she saw what others thought she’d want to say on paper. Her reactions to some of the first speeches drafted for her were so visceral that several policy and personnel announcements had been scuttled at the last minute. More than a few opening statements at press conferences
had been rewritten at the last possible second. After a few dramatic speechwriting crises, Melanie had taken over.

Now Melanie printed out the current draft of the speech for later that evening and asked her military aide to fact-check the details of the five attacks with the FBI director. She dialed the CIA director to see if he was hearing anything overseas that Charlotte could work into a section about early leads. While she was waiting for him, she typed in “passage TK” to remind herself to add something powerful and memorable as a closer.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Dale

D
ale looked around her West Wing office and tried to figure out how to restore some semblance of order so that she could prepare for the on-camera briefing she’d scheduled to update the press and the public on the attacks. The TV correspondents were sitting hip-to-hip on Dale’s couch speaking into BlackBerrys and iPhones with their hands over their mouths. Several print reporters were typing on laptops on the floor of her office, and a scrum of wire reporters and bloggers were standing three bodies deep in her doorway. The wire reporters held notepads and BlackBerrys, and the bloggers held iPads with keyboards attached. Lucy and Richard were doing a phone interview from the small conference table in Dale’s office, where they’d spread out their makeup bag, several bottles of cold-pressed juices, and an assortment of personal electronics. Two nearly identical beige dresses and a white dress shirt were hanging on the back of an empty chair which neither one of them thought to move, despite the fact that more than a dozen reporters were standing or sitting on the floor. One of Lucy’s high heels had landed next to a
New York Times
reporter sitting cross-legged on the ground when she’d kicked it off. Dale watched the reporter appraise the shoe and then return his attention to his laptop.

Dale caught Brian’s eye and shook her head slightly. He smiled,
and they shared a moment of mutual disgust at Lucy and Richard’s behavior. Dale returned her gaze to her desktop computer and tried to focus on an e-mail message from the public affairs officer at DOT. The Department of Transportation had been slowly reopening various public transportation systems around the country, and Dale hoped to be able to offer an update about New York City’s subway system by the time she briefed.