I hate what you say, but it took some guts to come here and say it! shouted one woman, as wide as a truck, from the front row. Soon they were nodding and then they began applauding, more surprised by themselves than by the candidate standing before them. The three-minute video went viral.
Soon the press was writing up Baker as something more than a regular politician. He was a truth-teller, destined to lead the American people out of a dark moment in their history. The more overheated reporters became lyrical: Cometh the hour, cometh the man What could have been an uncomfortable report in The New Republic, detailing some of the battles Governor Baker had fought, and the enemies he had made, in his home state of Washington concluded by quoting Jesus: Only in his hometownis a prophet without honour.
Yet now he had been accused of failing to level with the nation. And instead of knocking back the charge, he had paled at the very words.
Maggie was stepping into her office when she saw Goldstein heading away from the Oval and towards the press area. No matter that he was way above her in the Washington food chain, Maggie regarded Stu as one of the few unambiguously friendly faces around here. They had whiled away many long hours on the plane during the campaign, talking while reporters tapped away at their keyboards, staffers dozed and Baker sat back, his iPod headphones jammed into his ears to prevent anyone attempting a conversation. She figured that if anyone knew the truth of the MSNBC story, it would be Goldstein the man whod been with Stephen Baker from the start.
She walked down the corridor so that she could meet him halfway, then cut to the chase. Were in the toilet, arent we? Yup. Somewhere round the U-bend and heading underground. He carried on walking. Given his bulk, he was advancing at quite a speed.
Is it true?
Tell you what, why dont you go over to the Oval right now, poke your head round the door and say, Mr President, is it true that you used to see a shrink cause you were about to throw yourself off Memorial Bridge?
They didnt say anything about suicide.
No, Maggie, they didnt. But check Drudge in about thirty minutes. I bet thats where they get to.
Jesus.
Jesus is right.
How bads it going to be?
Well, as people used to say back when Dick Nixon was using this place to turn the Constitution into confetti, its never the crime, its always the-
-cover-up.
Most folks wont mind if the Presidents meshugge- a real loony tune, he gasped, his breath too short to reach the end of his sentence. She could see crumbs embedded on his lapels. Just so long as they knew about it before they pulled the lever.
Theyll be angry he didnt reveal it in the campaign.
You betcha, he said bitterly.
She couldnt tell whether Goldstein was irritated that something hed long known had leaked or whether he was disappointed that the President had kept a secret from him.
Whats he going to do?
He wants to make a personal statement. Right away.
Is that a good idea?
Right now, Maggie, nothing about this is good.
It came back to her then, the brief flap during the campaign over medical records. Mark Chester, Bakers much older opponent, had refused to disclose his, issuing a terse doctors summary instead. Most expected Baker to seize the moment and release his records in full, waving his clean bill of health in Chesters face, each rosy-cheeked detail drawing an implicit contrast with the Republicans pale and brief account. But he had done no such thing, choosing to issue a doctors summary of his own. Everyone gave Baker credit for that: he had shown compassion, sparing the embarrassment of the older man.
Now, standing in a corridor of the West Wing, Maggie wondered if theyd all been duped. She had never considered that Baker might have taken the chance to avoid full disclosure not to play nice with Chester but to cover up his own embarrassments. But it was what everyone would be thinking now. MSNBC would either have to be flat-out wrong which would rank as one of the major journalistic blunders of modern times or Stephen Baker would have to come up with a damn good explanation for why he hadnt told the truth.
She headed back to her office, sat at the computer and tried to focus on drafting an options paper on Sudan. That was what she was here to do; that was what he had asked her to do in a conversation that already seemed to belong to a different era. But now she understood why people always said that the White House could only deal with one crisis at a time. You were too distracted to think of anything else.
She clicked on the TV. All channels were now on the MSNBC story. CNN was interviewing a man claiming to be an expert on depression.
The blogs were obsessed. She went to Andrew Sullivan.
This could be a defining moment for the republic. Mental illness is one of the last great taboos, a subject kept in the dark. And yet one in three Americans is affected by it. Stephen Baker should be brave, tell the truth and call for an end to prejudice.
She next went rightward, to The Corner.
Normally it takes at least a few years for a Democratic politician to start falling apart. Credit to Baker for speeding up the process. Now all he needs to do is show similar alacrity and fast-track his deficit-reduction plan.
Over at the liberal Daily Kos she detected definite anxiety:
MSNBC is so far citing just one unnamed source. Theyd better have proof.
She glanced up at the TV; still no more news. Time seemed to have slowed to a crawl. Her mind was wandering, something in recent weeks she had been working very hard to avoid. She was back on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, replaying the conversation with Uri in her head. As the memory unspooled, she felt the melancholy creeping back inside her, like a vapour entering her lungs. To push it out and away, she reached for the Sudan file: maybe that bulging box of memoranda and cables, all classified, would help her tell the President what he needed to do. And distract her from herself.
The TV announced a news alert. The network that had broken the story now confirmed that it had documentary evidence of Stephen Bakers past treatment for depression. MSNBC is satisfied these papers are genuine, the anchor declared with the portentous baritone Maggie guessed was usually reserved for presidential assassinations.
So it was true. Maggie sat back in her chair. Until now, she realized, she had held back her reaction, unsure what, exactly, she was meant to be reacting to. Now she no longer had that excuse.
She wanted to be like that blogger, full of compassion and apparently unfazed by the prospect of a president with a history of mental illness. She knew that should be her attitude, too, just as she knew she should eat organic food. But she couldnt quite persuade herself to feel it.
Besides, she had the same attitude as the folks Stuart had talked about. It wasnt the crime being depressed was surely no crime it was the cover-up. If medical disclosure meant anything, it should have meant levelling with the electorate.
But that wasnt quite it, either. Maggie knew it would have been risky, verging on suicidal, for a candidate to start blubbering about his time on the psychiatrists couch in the middle of a presidential election especially when his opponent had allowed him to skip the details. She knew why he hadnt been able to come clean with the voters. But that didnt soothe the nagging sensation she felt somewhere between her brain and her gut. For a fleeting second, the sensation formed itself into a sentence: he should have come clean with her.
She tried to push the feeling away, clicking again on the refresh button on The New York Times website, not taking in a word she read. It was, she knew, ridiculous to regard this as a personal betrayal. There had been many people far more senior than her on the campaign team; Stephen Baker was under no obligation to share the stories of his past with her. He had told her no lies. It was not as if she had ever asked the question.
And yet the nagging feeling was still there. She had jacked in her job and gone to work for him nearly eighteen months ago, in those days when his staff could fit into a minivan and the pundits said he might be a realistic prospect in the presidential cycle after next. They had run up tens of thousands of air miles together. She had eaten in his home, played with his son and daughter and chatted with his wife. She had put her faith in him. And so had the country.
The Breaking News ident was flashing again on the TV. Maggie reached for the volume control. This word just into us here at CNN: the President is to make an emergency statement.
At Sanchezs invitation, she watched it in the press room, fighting hard not to put her hands to her face and peer through splayed fingers, the way she used to watch teatime science fiction as a child.
My fellow Americans, he began, his voice steady, his face calm and businesslike. I am not here to deny what you heard today. I am here to tell you what happened. With the frankness and candour that I should have shown earlier.
Long ago, in my early twenties, I hit a difficult patch in my life. I have not spoken about it before because the source of my unhappiness involved another person.
As you know, my mother died a few months back in the very last week of the campaign, as it happens so perhaps now it can be told. Though even now, as I brace myself to say these words, I tremble at the thought that I might be dishonouring her memory. But you need to hear the truth.
When I was a teenager, I suspected my mother was an alcoholic. It took me some time to reach that conclusion. When youre thirteen years old and your mother sinks some vodka into her orange juice at breakfast, you dont always notice. And if you do notice, you dont always know that thats not normal. That thats not how all moms behave. But by the time I was in college, I knew for certain.
Once I was making my own way in the world, this knowledge began to eat away at me. Was I fated to follow in her path? To stumble the way she had stumbled? Would I too become an addict of alcohol?