It was better than any novel Rebecca Long ever wrote; better than any mystery written by an author who appealed to the popular taste; better by far than the dull biographies constructed from the lying memories of politicians trying to hide their mistakes. It was not like a book at all: more like a play, a play between acts, the audience left waiting in breathless suspense for what the curtain might reveal. Thomas Browning had resigned the vice presidency, but for a full week that was all that anyone had known. The White House, always full of rumor, had retreated into an uneasy silence, no one willing to speak even off the record; all the anonymous sources unwilling to be even that well known.
It was the reaction of people who feared the worst and did not know what the worst might turn out to be. The lights burned through the night; no one dared to leave. Arthur Connally and the other close advisors to the president huddled together, making plans and changing them, wondering what Browning was going to do next and what they would then be forced to do. The reporters who reported this did not claim it as a fact, but rather that it seemed almost certain that this was what must be going on. Secrecy bred speculation, and speculation became that kind of temporary what-if set of facts that led to more speculation still. Members of the Senate, members of the House, governors, mayors, the chairmen of the Democratic and Republican parties— anyone who held an office or had ever aspired to hold one—were asked what they thought of the vice president’s resignation and what they thought it meant.
Opinions flew as fast and furious as snowballs in a schoolyard fight, did what damage they could to the angry, flabbergasted faces of those who had, almost at random, found themselves on the other side, and then melted into what from any distance was a swirling white unintelligible haze. Up to the very moment Thomas Browning stepped in front of the cameras, the country was still debating what he was going to say and what he was going to do.
The news conference scheduled for Friday morning at ten was postponed until five-thirty in the afternoon, and instead of Washington it was now going to be held in New York. With no reason given for the change, anyone who wanted to was free to invent one of his own.
By midafternoon there was a growing suspicion that the change of location might have something to do with the trial in which Thomas Browning was alleged to have been a witness to a young woman’s murder. At five o’clock, a half hour before Browning was scheduled to appear, the network reporters who had gathered on the sidewalk across the street from his East Side apartment began live coverage by reporting the most recent rumors from unnamed sources. Browning was going to reveal what he knew about the murder and why he had kept it secret so long; Browning was going to tell everything and ask forgiveness from the family of the girl. Browning, in those familiar and meaningless phrases, was going to “try to put this behind him” and “move forward with his life.”
I laughed out loud when I heard it, this solemn invocation of blank stupidity, this mild-tempered superficiality that thinks comfort the only thing worth having and the kind of tragic sense of loss that stays with you forever, a constant affliction in your anguished soul, the unhealthy reaction of someone in need of help. I could almost see the pained expression on Browning’s face, the gesture of contempt with which he had always dismissed the mawkish sentimentality that dwells so much on what it feels because what it feels is always on the surface and the surface is all there is.
At five-thirty, Thomas Browning walked out of the apartment building on Fifth Avenue, crossed the street, and with his back to Central Park stood in front of a battery of microphones and made the short announcement that changed everything.
“Last week I resigned the office of vice president of the United States. I did this so that I could today stand before you and announce my candidacy for the office of president of the United States.”
Browning’s eyes sparkled with cheerful belligerence. A smile started onto his mouth. He placed his hands into the jacket pockets of his gray double-breasted suit and bent forward, peering at the crowd of reporters pressing toward him. His head suddenly snapped up and he threw out his right hand, waving in response to the shouted cheering madness that had begun to roll in, engulfing him in the noise. Thousands of people, brought by the news that Browning was going to be there, had come out, filling the streets, stopping traffic on Fifth Avenue for several blocks in each direction. The announcement that he was running for president, that he was running against Walker for the nomination, had excited the crowd, turning all those single faint voices into a tremendous, cavernous roar. At first it was encouragement, the crowd telling him that it was behind him, that it approved of what he wanted to do; but the noise of it kept growing, becoming more intense, building to the point of a demand, an insistence that he do what had now become their idea, that he run, that he win, and that he do it for all of them. It went on and on, a new generation of enthusiasm bred every second, expanding in every direction at once, as if the crowd itself was growing, spreading through the narrow crosstown streets, filling up the avenues, taking the city by storm. Browning stood in the middle of it, without a thought of trying to make it stop; drawing strength from it, staring back at it, smiling at it, waving at it; acknowledging its power and accepting the truth of what it said and what it wanted. I remembered the last time I had seen a crowd, a New York crowd, react like that, the last time I had seen one man draw that much single-minded, devoted attention to himself. I remembered the look on Joanna’s face that first moment she caught sight of John Lindsay that day I was with her in the basement ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel.
I think Browning had meant to make that short, two-sentence statement, announce that he was going to run against Walker for the Republican nomination, and then take questions from the press. The time had been changed from midmorning to late afternoon because, with the network news coming on live, it was the perfect time to talk in a calm, measured voice about what he had done and why. He had not anticipated the crowd and the astonishing intensity with which it had taken up his announcement and made his cause its own. He had meant to have a conversation, and now he had to make a speech.
Thomas Browning stood in the reddish gold autumn light and with nothing written out, not even a note to remind him of what he wanted to say, gave a speech that no one who heard it would ever forget. He had not had a moment to prepare, but in another sense he had been preparing all his life. Browning lived in the company of words. He used them, thought about them, weighed them, measured them; listening as much to how they sounded as what they meant, because it was the sound of them that captured the attention of an audience and held it, fascinated, as if the voice it heard was coming from somewhere deep inside itself. He had trained himself to it, memorizing long passages from famous speeches, or, as he had with Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, the speech in its entirety; pages of fine flowing prose from Gibbon and Macaulay and others of the great historians. Name a poet, and he could immediately recite at least some of the best-known lines; mention a character in one of Shakespeare’s plays, and he would begin a soliloquy as if he had for years been acting the part on the New York stage. It seemed, at least to my ignorant ear, that nothing important had been written that he had not only read but remembered, word for word. And yet, this prodigious memory of his he thought nothing like as good as it should have been. He told me once that he had read somewhere that Macaulay could recite from memory the entire Old Testament. “In Hebrew,” he added, shaking his head with the stunned disbelief of a man forced to confess a serious limitation to what he can do.
Perhaps it was because of who he was, what he had been born to; perhaps it was this desire he had to go back to the beginning of things as the best or only way to understand what had happened and what might be done about it. Whatever the reason, he had spent years training himself to do things that others thought unimportant and a grievous waste of time. There were so many things going on, they argued; so many things to know something about, so many things to do. You hired people to write speeches; you did not write them yourself. Let the speechwriters struggle with the dull necessities of finding words or phrases that send the right signal to the group or constituency you want to please. Lincoln? Churchill? Famous people of the past who wrote their own? Those were different times, and things were more complicated now. Browning never believed any of it; there was no reason he should. The people who said these things, the people who prided themselves on how busy they were staying up to date, could only look as far forward as they could look back. Browning wanted to make history; they had forgotten what history meant.
He was becoming more confident as he spoke, more at ease, talking as if this were some private conversation instead of a public speech. He had that gift of making you think that you were the only one he cared about. He could do it when there were just the two of you in the room, and he could do it when you were a part of the crowd, because Browning never talked about himself, he talked about you, or rather about what you and he could do together.
“We live in perilous times. What shall we do about it?” That was how he began one part of that remarkable speech. “Shall we—as some keep insisting—turn our back on the freedoms so many of us have fought for and died for? Shall we, in order to defeat those who would destroy us, become just like them? Shall we become a country in which no one is allowed to speak his or her mind because someone might disagree, because it might not be what someone in the government wants to hear? Have we become so unsure of ourselves that the only way we can defend ourselves is to lock up those with a different point of view? Shall we become the land of cowards and informants, spying on others in the dismal hope that it will prove there is no reason to spy on us? Shall we do this—turn our back on two hundred—more than two hundred—years of sacrifice and trial, give up the promise we once made to the world to be the ‘last best hope of freedom’ and go sniveling into the night, traitors to ourselves?”
He went on, challenging them, the crowd that filled the streets and the millions more watching it in their homes, to take themselves seriously, free citizens who would never yield to fear. There were those who could turn a crowd into a mob, seething with anger and ready to do violence to anyone who stood between it and what in its throbbing blood-blinded impulse it had to have. Browning had taken a crowd and taught it to rise above itself, become better than what each of those who stood there in the dying autumn light would have been on their own. He had given them something important in which to believe.
When it was over, when that vast, street-filling crowd began gradually to disperse, what was left was a sense of inevitability, a feeling that the future had become a well-established fact; not just that Thomas Browning would become a candidate for the presidency, but that the presidency was all but his: his by right, because no one else came close to having the courage and grace, the nerve and intelligence, the strength and foresight the presidency required. I had seen it once before, a long time ago, before I was old enough to vote, my freshman year in college, one cold dark night in Ann Arbor when John F. Kennedy stood on the steps of the student union and talked about the Peace Corps and how America could again bring hope to the world.
After giving that speech that afternoon, Browning gave another one that night in Chicago. The next day, Saturday, he visited three more cities and gave three more speeches, arguing with cheerful intensity for the kind of active vigorous government that made some Republicans wonder why he was not a Democrat and a great many Democrats wish he were. Relieved of the restraints of office, no longer required to lend his support to policies in which he did not fully believe, he seemed to look for the chance to be controversial, to say the things that, according to the traditional rules, the conventions that had come to dominate and to limit political thought, would destroy any political career.
“The president is preparing a new round of tax cuts, Mr. Vice President, and I…”
Browning bent forward, laid his hand gently on the moderator’s arm and with a gleam in his eye suggested that he might want to address him in another way.
“I’m no longer vice president. Perhaps you’ve heard: retired.”
This was one of the Sunday shows. Always pugnacious, sometimes argumentative, but only on rare occasions openly hostile, the moderator took the correction in stride. With a quick smile, he went on. “The president is proposing new tax cuts. Tell us, Mr. Browning, as someone who hopes to take the Republican nomination away from the president, do you disagree with the administration on this very important question?”
“Yes,” he said finally.
“‘Yes’?” repeated the moderator, breaking into a grin. He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head, peering intently at Browning, certain that he must want to add some modification, some cautionary condition that would leave him room for maneuver. “Yes?”
Browning stared right back at him. “Yes.”
“You’re against any more tax cuts?”
“That’s correct. And not only that, certain taxes need to be raised.”
“You’re proposing to increase taxes?”
Browning’s head came forward. His amused detachment was replaced by a look of serious engagement.
“We have schools to build; we have roads to repair; we need airports, railroads, public transportation of all descriptions; the entire infrastructure of the country needs to be rebuilt. We need police officers, firefighters; we need hospitals, doctors, nurses—a new health-care system that takes care of everyone and not just the steadily diminishing number of those who can afford to pay for it on their own. We have to pay for it—all of us; especially those who, as I have said before, owe the most because they have been given the most.”
The moderator nodded, and then lowered his eyes in a way that suggested he was getting himself ready for a particularly unpleasant task.
“There is a trial going on in New York. Your college classmate Jamison Scott Haviland is charged with the murder of a young woman, Anna Malreaux, with whom you were at that time involved. This took place a long time ago, Christmas Eve way back in nineteen sixty-five, while you were still in law school. As you know, there have been endless rumors. Some have even suggested that you knew what happened and that, for whatever reason, you have all these years kept it covered up, lied about it in fact; called it an accident when you knew it was not.” He looked hard at Browning before he asked, “Are you worried that this trial will distract attention from everything you are trying to do—make people forget that you resigned the vice presidency to challenge the president for the nomination—make them wonder what really happened and why it has taken so long for it finally to come out?”
I was watching it on television in an apartment on the other side of the park from where Browning was now a resident instead of an occasional visitor. I had more than an ordinary interest in what Browning would say.
“There has never been anything to come out,” insisted Browning. “The death of Anna Malreaux was a tragedy, a terrible tragedy. She was a remarkable young woman, one of the most remarkable people I have ever known. She fell out a window at the Plaza Hotel. It was an accident. Haviland didn’t murder her, and everyone knows it.”
“‘And everyone knows it’? But then—if everyone knows it, Mr. Browning—how do you explain the fact that your former law school classmate is now on trial for the murder you say everyone knows did not happen?”
Browning slouched forward, his gaze riveted on the moderator. “They had to indict someone. They had to put someone on trial. You can’t have a cover-up without a crime, and they have to have a cover-up, because without that they can’t get me out of the race. They’re not fools. It worked for them before.”
The moderator gave Browning a searching look. “You’re referring to those rumors in the last presidential primaries?”
“Yes, of course: the rumors that I had been involved in a murder,” he said with open contempt. “And now that I’m again a candidate, here comes that same rumor all dressed up as a formal judicial proceeding, a trial for murder. I couldn’t do anything about the rumor, but I can do something about this.”
“You’re going to testify—at the trial?”
The color in Browning’s soft round cheeks deepened and spread. His eyes were focused straight ahead, angry and intense. His mouth took on the aspect of open belligerence.
“Of course I’m going to testify.” There was a short, meaningful pause, before he added, “And after I do, I’m going to insist that there be an investigation into how and why this case was brought in the first place. Who do these people think they are? Do they really think they can do anything they like? Condemn an innocent man for a crime that not only did he not commit, but a crime that never happened? And all because they want to get me out of the way so I can’t threaten what they are trying to do to this country?”
The moderator fixed Browning with a solemn, rigid stare. “Are you saying that the president of the United States is behind this? Are you saying that the president is involved in an attempt to convict an innocent man for a murder that never took place?”
“Just how far inside the White House this goes, I’m not prepared to say. Whether the people who did this were acting on specific instructions; whether they were acting with the knowledge of others; or whether they were acting entirely on their own, are all questions that need to be answered.”
A strange expression, a kind of angry certainty, crossed Browning’s mouth.
“The people who thought that the trial of Jamison Scott Haviland was going to be about me were wrong. It is going to be a trial about them, about what they have done, about the way they have abused the power they were given.”
Half an hour after I turned off the television, half an hour after I began to wonder about how I was supposed to conduct a trial in which nothing less than the future of the presidency, and perhaps the country, hung in the balance, there was a knock on the door. It seemed strange, not that someone would come by on a Sunday morning, but that the doorman had not called first.
“Well, did you see it?” asked an ebullient Thomas Browning as he marched past me and took up a position in the middle of the marble foyer. He bent his head first one way, then the other, as if he were there to inspect the premises.
“It isn’t too bad, is it?” he asked with a hopeful glance as he took a half step to the side. With a vague gesture of his small, baby-like hand, he included the enormous living room that looked out onto the park.
“I’m not sure I needed all fourteen rooms,” I remarked as we took a couple of chairs on either side of the French doors that led to a small balcony. “And I don’t have any idea what I’m supposed to do with the cook.”
Browning sat with his elbows on the arms of the chair, both feet planted on the floor. A wry smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.
“I just thought that while you were here you ought to live as other people do in New York. Now,” he went on with an eager look, “what did you think? You saw it, didn’t you—what I said about the trial? Haviland can’t fault me for that, can he? I said he didn’t do it; I said that Annie’s death was an accident.”
His eyes were excited, intense, as if he could not wait to hear what I was going to say, what my reaction had been. A moment later his expression changed. He bolted out of the chair and with his hands behind his back began to pace rapidly around the room, weaving along in a series of consecutive half circles, starting, stopping, going first in one direction, then another.
“Everything depends on you now.” He stopped abruptly, looked up from beneath his brow, searching my eyes to make sure I understood the importance, the monumental importance, of what I had to do. “Everything,” he repeated, drawing his eyes inward. “Haviland will be a hero at the end of this: the innocent victim of a malevolent conspiracy.”
He said this with such certainty, such confidence, that for a moment I almost thought he believed that Jimmy Haviland should be grateful for what had happened to him; that he was not a victim at all, but in some manner a beneficiary, of the attempt to discredit Thomas Browning.
“It’s a terrible thing, of course; to go through something like this: to be accused of something you did not do. But it will turn out in the end. You’ll see.”
His eyes swept past the French doors, and then came back, caught by something he had seen, or something he had remembered.
“Were you there?” he asked with sudden interest. “Or were you still in court?”
“No, I wasn’t there. I wish I had been,” I admitted.
Browning nodded. “I wish you had been, too. I thought about that, about you being there. You told me once that you had been in Ann Arbor, that night in October, just weeks before the election, when Kennedy spoke. You told me how ‘electric’ it felt. That was the word you used. That was what it felt like—over there— at the edge of the park, thousands of people in the streets: electric. All the energy from the crowd, the way it starts to belong to you, and then you know you can do anything you want with it, take it in any direction you choose; but you don’t—unless you’re one of those two-bit demagogues that only know to get the blood up, turn the crowd into some senseless mob. No, you feel the force of it, all those people waiting to be told something that will let them become better than they have been, better than they have been allowed to be; and it makes you better than you were, that demand that you give them the best of what you have, that you appeal to what is best in them. That is really what they are waiting for, you know—the chance to do something brave and noble and worth remembering; something important, something of value, something that will last.”
Browning leaned against the door, and for a moment he appeared to be listening to himself, caught in the tumultuous noise of the vanished crowd. When his eyes came back around to mine, his look was sober, restrained.
“There is a chance I won’t survive this,” he said in a very matter-of-fact way. “There are people out there who think that Walker and all his right-wing friends are doing the work of God. In their demented minds I’ve become the Antichrist. You should see some of the letters. Makes your skin crawl.”
“The Secret Service?” I asked, referring to the security detail assigned to protect him.
Browning shrugged. “Some. Not as much as when I was vice president, but some. I’m not worried about it. You can’t be. You do what you have to. You certainly don’t run off and hide somewhere because some mindless fanatic thinks that God came to him in the night and told him he had to put a bullet in the devil. But at the same time, you can’t pretend that it could never happen. That’s the reason why I want you to have this.”
He reached inside his jacket for a sealed envelope that had my name typed on the front.
“If something happens to me, if they stop me, use what you find inside this any way you choose. But,” he added with a cautionary glance, “it’s only to be opened in the event of my death. Are we agreed?”
Browning shook my hand and started for the door. “I’m going to be quite busy,” he remarked in a voice now filled with brisk efficiency. “Barely a moment to spare from here on out. But I’m always available for you. Anytime you like.” With his hand on the door, he paused. “I assume you’ll want to go over my testimony,” he remarked, nodding gravely. “Just let me know.”
He thought of something.
“You remember Elizabeth Hartley? You can always find me through her. She’s involved in the campaign. You should have seen her face when I told her and the rest of them that I was going to resign. It took everything she had to hide her astonishment.” He slowly shook his head, a glint of nostalgia in his eyes. “I suppose it’s important when you’re that age to believe that you have all the experience you need and that you have nothing important left to learn.” He placed his hand on my shoulder. “Is that what we were like then, always so certain of ourselves?”
He seemed genuinely interested, as if he could not quite remember. Before I could answer, or think what it was I could answer, he shrugged his shoulders. A look of weary resignation burdened his eyes.
“I suppose we had to be. If you wait long enough, you discover that you can’t really be certain of anything, can you?”