The morning after Brad Whitford took home the Emmy for his sensational performance in “Noël,” John Spencer was walking down a street on the Warner Bros. lot. He spotted Brad and Aaron sitting in the back of a golf cart. As he approached the two freshly minted award winners—the previous evening Aaron had landed yet another Best Drama Series Emmy—John got the feeling they’d just been talking about him. He was right.
Offering a preview of a story he and Tommy had been discussing, Aaron said, “We’re working on a script for you. It’s gonna be your year soon.”
As John revealed on the DVD commentary he did with Aaron and Tommy, “That’s the first time I heard of this episode: ‘Bartlet for America.’ ”
For the lucky few who knew John Spencer, the following observation won’t exactly bowl you over: Multiple times during that DVD commentary rewatch of “Bartlet for America,” he couldn’t stop himself from blurting out his admiration for someone on-screen. At the very start, just seconds into the episode in fact, the first person to make an entrance elicited this uncontainable response from John: “I love this actor.” It was the guy playing FBI Special Agent Mike Casper, aka Clark Gregg (aka Phil Coulson, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.).
Minutes later, David St. James appeared on-screen as the shadowy congressman Darren Gibson. He hadn’t even spoken yet, he hadn’t said a single word. “This guy was extraordinary,” John raved. “He was wonderful. A silent killer.” And don’t get him started on Joanna Gleason. (“I can’t tell you the joy that was!”) For Joanna, the feeling was mutual. “John connected like no other actor with whom I had ever worked. He made you think—made you feel—before speaking.”
But let’s pull back a moment—or rather, pull up, for the thirty-thousand-foot view. Like “Noël,” this West Wing episode is more focused on a specific character than most, and this time the focus landed on Leo. Thanks to President Bartlet’s years-long lie of omission—he had been keeping his multiple sclerosis diagnosis to himself (plus another sixteen people)—Leo is being dragged before a House government oversight committee to testify about what he knew and when he knew it. That’s the cover story, anyway. What the opposition party is actually planning is to take POTUS’s best friend and chief of staff out for a spin and dig into his past struggles with addiction, pills, and Johnnie Walker Blue. To be fair, being in a hotel room passed-out drunk right before your candidate’s presidential debate isn’t “illegal,” but, then, neither is subjecting an honorable man to personal and professional humiliation, so…off we go.
In addition to tracking Leo’s journey through his congressional testimony, we bear witness to a flirtation with Joanna’s Jordon Kendall, the lawyer representing him. “When the camera rolled, and Leo asked what my plans are for Christmas Eve,” Joanna remembered to us, “I felt such emotion. It was Leo and Jordon—all business but lonely—connecting.” In the meantime, Agent Casper keeps us posted on some church bombings in Tennessee, and we take a trip, via flashback, to the great state of New Hampshire for a series of check-ins with:
“Governor” Jed Bartlet—remember him?
Jed’s old pal Leo, who has a slogan, a grand plan, and a bar napkin he’d like to share.
Younger, fresher-faced versions of C.J., Toby, Josh, and Sam, fifty percent of whom team up to chest-pass a basketball through a Bartlet campaign office window.
Oh, also—Aaron brings back Delores Landingham and nobody thinks she’s a ghost!
So, sure, there’s a handful of other storylines driving this episode, but when you give the GPS a closer look, it’s clear that all roads lead back to Leo and that damn congressional hearing. For the moment, though, let’s return to the beginning. Actually, no—before that.
Even prior to production on “Bartlet for America,” the creative team around The West Wing knew this story would be different. Deeper…more meaningful…personal. Given John Spencer’s openness about his own addiction and recovery, there was already a lot of “there” there. As Tommy told us—he directed this one, too—“Bartlet for America” struck a nerve before the process had even begun.
“Just talking to John about what it was going to be, he burst out crying. I was like, Fuck! I don’t want him to do that yet!” Tommy looked at John. “I shouldn’t have told you about this.” But there was no reason to worry. For John, the narrative ground the episode would dig into was extremely rich. Being so moved before filming didn’t mean his emotional stores would get “used up.” From our time working with John—in scenes in the Sit Room or brushing shoulders through the bullpen—it was evident he was an actor with an impossibly deep emotional reservoir. He wasn’t going to run out of tears. “In the end,” Tommy recalls, “he did the scene the same way. He just kept finding more and more stuff.”
On the day Aaron, John, and Tommy sat together to rewatch “Bartlet for America” for the season 3 DVD, Tommy clocked a line of dialogue from the first two minutes of the episode. He turned to Aaron, noting “the power of a scene you wrote a year ago…in ‘Noël.’ There was never a reference since, ’til this moment, a year later. But there was not one viewer who didn’t understand that reference.”
JOSH
I’m gonna help you, ’cause you know why?
LEO
’Cause you walk around with so much guilt about everybody you love dying that you’re a compulsive fixer?
JOSH
No, Leo, no. It’s ’cause a guy is walking down the street and he falls into a hole, see?
The first day of filming “Bartlet for America,” John Spencer made his way onto the set of the congressional hearing room, where viewers would spend a sizable chunk of the episode, and was blown away. “I remember seeing this set for the first time, this set was incredible!” To meet production needs, The West Wing had taken their show on the road for this one, setting up shop at a different studio. “We were using the set of the series The Court,” John recalled. (MELISSA: The Court was a short-lived legal drama starring Sally Field.) “It was a huge feature [of the episode], filled with background artists, and vast. You really felt like you were in court!”
Standing there, right hand raised, John discovered something new. “This was,” he revealed, “where I first found out [Leo’s] middle name was Thomas.” Yes, much to the good-natured chagrin of costume designer Lyn Paolo, who had embroidered the monogram L.B.M. on the chief of staff’s dress shirts, from that line on, L.T.M. it was! (“We did have to change Leo’s shirts,” Lynn told us. “I remember John not wanting to, as he was rather attached to his previous monograms!”)
While “LTM” had his hand in the air, Aaron had his head in the past. It’s safe to say the writer loved a West Wing flashback, and we’re right there with him. “Flashbacks…” Aaron says, “when we would go back to before they were in the White House…became a sanctuary for me. Because the four years I was writing the show [were] the two years before and the two years after September 11…when everything changed. It was nice to be able to take the characters back to before September 11. There was a real freedom there.”
When the show would transport us back to the Bartlet team’s pre–White House days, you could sense the “before-times” energy on-screen. “I look at these flashbacks,” John Spencer once said, “and we look younger. We look a little more…innocent.”
In that idea, Aaron saw a simple explanation. “You don’t have literally the weight of the world on your shoulders,” he pointed out. Exactly. At that point, they weren’t in the White House yet. The characters exuded what Aaron refers to as a “childlike optimism.”
From the days and nights shooting the origin story of Leo pushing Jed to run for president, a couple of stories stand out. In that first flashback—the conversation between Leo and then Governor Bartlet—there was one word Martin Sheen apparently didn’t know how to pronounce. “Valium.” He got there eventually, but for a while during shooting it was kind of touch-and-go. Rewatching the episode, John joked to Aaron and Tommy, “Guess who taught him how to say it!” Then, with a similarly sly smile in his voice, Aaron quipped, “Uh, John, there are any number of us who could’ve taught him how to say it.”
Then there was that famous bar napkin. The gold-medal winner for West Wing artifacts—with the Paul Revere knife taking home the silver—is the napkin on which Leo wrote those three little words: “Bartlet for America.”
LEO
I’ve been walking around in a kind of daze for two weeks and everywhere I go…planes, trains, restaurants, meetings…I find myself scribbling something down.
In classic Sorkin form, the reveal of that would-be campaign slogan is unspoken, arriving only visually, when Leo sticks the napkin on an empty easel in the room. It’s a beautiful moment. A perfect West Wing moment. Getting there, though, wasn’t quite perfect. “I remember not being able to stick that up for several takes!” John said. Luckily for everyone involved, literal stick-to-itiveness (and a little more spit) got the job done.
That initial foray into the past provided a glimpse at Jed Bartlet’s first steps on the road to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Traveling back to the present, “Bartlet for America” dealt head-on with the hard realities of addiction. “In ‘In the Shadow of Two Gunmen,’ Aaron says, “we saw that Leo was the one who had gotten the posse together. I don’t think it’s coming as too much of a surprise to us that Leo was the one who got Bartlet to run in the first place. I just think that what makes it particularly poignant in ‘Bartlet for America’ is the point that Bartlet makes in the very last moment of the show: that this very powerful guy, who is capable of doing so much, literally through force of will and skill and talent, getting all these people together, getting this man elected, couldn’t not drink the scotch in his hotel room. That glass of scotch was absolutely his undoing. And, to anyone who’s familiar with addiction or alcoholism, the sad tragedy is that it doesn’t discriminate. It certainly doesn’t discriminate for skin color, gender, economic status, IQ. And it has nothing to do with being strong-willed or weak-willed.”
John Spencer put it another way. “A person powerful in any other situation…can be powerless against something in a cup.” Nowhere was that truth more self-evident than in Leo’s hotel room with the two donor CEOs and the sixty-year-old scotch they brought in to seal the deal.
That slippery-slope sequence—for Leo, one drink with a group becomes ten drinks by himself—was one John had no issue tapping into. “As an actor,” he said, “addiction…is not a foreign place for me; it’s an easy place to get back to in my mind. I’ve raided convenience bars. When I ran out of the vodka I turned to the scotch and finally ended with the Bailey’s Irish Cream.” What struck John was how Leo cannot take his eyes off that glass. “All through the conversation, it’s back to the glass.” (Watching Leo take that fateful sip of Johnnie Walker Blue, Aaron couldn’t help narrating the catastrophic moment: “And a million people leap to their TV screens, ‘Oh noooo!!’ ”)
The tale of that downfall, told matter-of-factly by Leo to the lawyer by his side, represented a central love story of the show, Jed and Leo:
LEO
The President was at the debate site, walking the stage. A podium is a holy place for him. He makes it his own, like it’s an extension of his body. You ever see a pitcher work the mound, so the dirt does exactly what his feet want it to do? That’s the President. He sees it as a genuine opportunity to change minds—also as his best way of contributing to the team. He likes teams. I love him so much…
As lovely and moving as the scene was, Leo’s recounting of the moment he fell off the wagon posed a challenge for the director. “We’re coming out of something enormously powerful,” Tommy said to John. “From an actor’s point of view, you’re telling that story straight through. When we came back, you hadn’t had some metamorphosis, you already knew that truth. Yet we as an audience had a massive metamorphosis.” Initially, Tommy couldn’t quite figure out how to shoot the Leo-Jordan sequence coming out of the flashback. What he eventually realized is this: “I was trying to make more of it than it was.”
Spencer never forgot what made the difference that day. It was a piece of direction similar to the one Tommy had given him for his “guy falls into a hole” speech at the end of “Noël.” He reminded John that it was actually a pretty simple scene. “ ‘You’re telling a story.’ That’s the note you gave me.”
Meanwhile, there was still the matter of those vindictive House committee members. Enter: Cliff Calley (Mark Feuerstein), aka the first guy not named Josh we ever liked for Donna. As House majority counsel, he confronts shady congressman Darren Gibson, who had the goods on Leo (and was in the hotel room with the Johnnie Walker Blue).
CLIFF CALLEY
This is bush league. This is why good people hate us. This, right here. This thing. This isn’t what these hearings are about. He cannot possibly have been properly prepared by counsel for these questions, nor should he ever have to answer them publicly. And if you proceed with this line of questioning, I will resign this committee and wait in the tall grass for you, Congressman, because you are killing the party.
After the hearing reconvenes (and just before Congressman Gibson is set to resume his questioning of Leo), the chairman of the oversight committee, Congressman Joseph Bruno, cuts him off, abruptly shutting the hearing down. Leo gets up, relieved and a bit stunned by the sudden reversal. With Margaret close at hand, he walks out in a daze. His private, personal demons will, it appears, remain private and personal. And, with that, “Bartlet for America” heads off toward its emotional closing moments.
We follow Leo on the long, solitary walk back to his office, where he finds his best friend—not the president, but Jed—waiting for him. “I have a present for you,” Jed says. It’s the napkin Leo gave him all those years ago—“Bartlet for America” scribbled in pen—except now it’s framed. Soon, Jed walks out, leaving Leo alone with his gift.
Overcome with emotion, the framed napkin in his hand, Leo sinks into his chair and begins to weep. We get a little emotional. And so does Aaron, during the DVD rewatch, while sitting next to Spencer. “Well,” he says, “that’s what they give Emmys for, John.”
Barely able to get the words out, John manages a sweet, broken reply. “And that’s the kind of writing and direction that an actor waits most of his career to have.”
In that moment, after listening to John Spencer rave for almost an hour about actors and acting, about Aaron’s writing and Tommy’s direction; after listening to his boundlessly effusive spirit as it related to every element that went into making this episode of television, we were transported back to our time with John on The West Wing. Witnessing him again, armed as always with compliments and a passion for the work, was a little eerie and a lot heartwarming. This, we recognized, is the man we knew. The depth of kindness and humanity in Leo McGarry was mirrored by John every day of his life on the show. That spirit, which so profoundly resonated with us, was reflected in the final words of the episode, delivered by his best friend, Jed:
“Merry Christmas, Leo. That was awfully nice of you.”