LUCK. IT SEEMED as if luck had played a big part in this campaign. More than in most. Anne Lynn Murphy had to count herself lucky, very lucky, to be the Democratic nominee.
After she came home from Vietnam she was restless and unsettled. A lot of her friends were drinking a lot and smoking a lot of reefer. It was worse among the combat vets, but it was happening with the nurses, too. Nobody was understanding it too well or even acknowledging, in those days, that there was a special problem.
She needed something to get involved in, something to hang on to, that would keep her from going there with them. She applied to medical school and was accepted and once she was in she realized that she could get lost in the work, she had to get lost in the work, and that she liked that. It was her way out. Once she graduated she liked the insane hours of her internship. By then it had become clear that there was something going on, generally, with Vietnam vets and what used to be called shell shock in one war and combat fatigue in another was now renamed PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and that gave her a name to go with the symptoms scattered like shrapnel through the veterans. A name helped because it allowed her to put it in a category and make a categorical decision. She could either continue to hide in a frantic work schedule or she could find some quiet time to face herself She became a country doctor, up in Idaho.
A TV producer in Boise decided it would be nice to have a once-a-week medical advice segment on the local news. He knew Dr. Murphy, liked her, and asked her to do it. He later asked her to marry him and she did that, too.
But before their personal life had gone that far, the segment had become quite popular. Popular enough that the station gave her a half-hour show on Sunday, stuck between God and football, which turned out to be a pretty good place to be. She became a local celebrity. The show got syndicated and she became known nationally, in a relatively very minor way. More important, she developed the TV manner, the Oprah, Donohue, Reagan, Clinton thing: conversational, personable, caring, unflappable, able to take direction and yet able to improvise, very sincere with a mild, mainstream sense of humor that never gave offense.
Local Democrats recruited her to run for Congress. Even the survivalists liked her because her medical advice stressed self-reliance and she explained how to take care of wounds if you were alone in the wilderness. Her opponent helped her out by accosting a ranger in a men’s room at a state park. Idaho is not Massachusetts and it did not go down well.
Then a Senate seat opened up and she won that, too, with relative ease. Being one of the few women in the Senate got her more attention than she might have received otherwise, plus she continued with her TV show, sometimes from DC, sometimes from back home, framed by high mountains and tall trees.
She saw a shot at running for the presidency. She managed to make it seem as if a groundswell of public opinion—her viewers, her fans, the women of America—had all talked her into it and sent her money unsolicited. There was some truth in that. Indeed, she inspired a devotion that was close to worship.
But a woman who lifts herself out of the ranks of nursing and puts herself through med school and turns herself into a national celebrity and turns that celebrity into election to the United States Senate is not some passive cork bobbing in the sea and carried along by a mystery tide. Underneath all that good-natured, easygoing, TV chatty persona, there was a ferocious ambition. Hidden, like Eisenhower had hidden his, so you didn’t feel the greed and the grab and the vainglory coming off him, yet every time you turned around there was that moonfaced man holding the prize.
So she ran.
There were eight contenders for the Democratic nomination. Murphy came in a close third in New Hampshire. Senator Neil Swenson was second.
On February 3, Swenson won Arizona, Delaware, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, as well as running a close second to the favorite son in South Carolina, to become the front-runner.
Murphy didn’t do badly. She won North Dakota and came in second in the southwest, Arizona and New Mexico.
Win Davidson, the governor of Michigan, picked up scattered support, in addition to winning Missouri.
Four days later, Davidson won his home state and Swenson won in the state of Washington.
It was a horse race until March 2, Super Tuesday, when Swenson won California, Connecticut, Maryland, New York, Ohio, and Rhode Island. That put him 428 delegates short of the magic number, 2,161, which would clinch the nomination.
After that, the money dried up for everybody but Swenson. Only Davidson and Murphy stayed in against him.
The media, which tends to sing together like a choir, said Davidson was a fool to keep going and divisive to his party, but Murphy, although she could not win, showed lots of “grit.”
Swenson was already thinking past the convention to the campaign against Scott and now he wanted to “build bridges, unite, and fight the common enemy.” In April, after the Pennsylvania primary put him within twenty votes of the nomination, he made the extraordinary gesture of inviting the other two to travel on his campaign plane with him to the next two sets of primaries, Indiana and North Carolina, followed by Nebraska and North Carolina. Some pundits said this was a sort of audition for Murphy and Davidson: let’s see who can play nice and I might make that one my candidate for vice president.
Tired and broke. Murphy accepted. But then Oprah herself invited her onto the show and of course she had to say yes to that, so she went to Chicago instead, on a commercial flight.
Neil Swenson’s plane went down, with Swenson and Davidson on board. There were no survivors.
The last man standing was a woman. Anne Lynn Murphy.
Gus Scott thought about luck differently than most people.
Born rich into an influential family, a lot of people would have said that he was born lucky. But, in point of fact, most of the people he knew and that he grew up with had been born rich, too. What had become of them? Some took the well-worn route to Wall Street and collected more and more, some became junkies and lived just to score, some felt guilty about their goodies and became social workers to do good deeds, some became drunken monkeys and went swinging in the trees.
But Augustus had gifts, in addition to his luck, and it was those gifts that made the luck worth having.
First of all, he had the gift of being comfortable with all his good luck. That was more unusual than it seemed. A lot of kids, for example, would not have felt that they were really, really winners after their dad put the fix in. Even if they were happy with it as ten-year-olds, normally, when they got to be thirty or forty, and looked back, they would feel, somewhere inside, that the achievement was diminished by the knowledge that it was not earned. Not Gus. He thought of it, to this day, as a great, great season and he kept the trophy in the Oval Office and he pointed it out to people and used it as a starting point for any number of talks about the virtues of old-fashioned America and self-help and how sports promoted teamwork and character building and we needed more of that kind of private volunteerism and less welfare.
Second was that other people took care of things for him. His father first. Then strangers like Byron Tompkins. And the fellows who got him into the National Guard, instead of going to war. After that, the men he went into business with who saw to it that he made money even when the companies he was involved with went bankrupt (a vacation time-share company, a soybean futures syndicate, and a Yugo dealership). Then, when he went into politics, more people threw money at him.
A peculiarity of the bellicose Scott administration, with its three wars, was that virtually all of the key players, who had been of age to go and fight in Vietnam, had avoided Vietnam. The vice president had used college, marriage, and teaching deferments. The House majority leader had used college and then grad school. The majority whip, that pugnacious pest exterminator Rodney Lumpike, used a college deferment. Then the draft lottery came along and he got a good number, so he dropped out and went into business. When he went into politics and he was asked about his military service, he explained that he’d wanted to go to Vietnam but minorities had all rushed in and taken all the spots and there’d been none left for him.
Like them, Gus wasn’t the type to run off to Canada or apply for conscientious objector status or to go to his induction in drag. But if you were a rich kid, and you ran out of deferments, there was one other really great place to hide out from the war. The National Guard.
Nowadays, with a volunteer army, the Guard does get called up. But in those days, with the draft, it was the best-kept secret in war evasion. They never got called into combat, the duty was light—two weeks during the summer, one weekend a month the rest of the year—and the discipline even lighter, so light that if you didn’t show up, it didn’t matter all that much and you could get on with your life, get a job, party, start a business, go into politics.
Because of that, there were one- and two-year waiting lists. You needed pull to get in before your draft board snatched you up and tossed you into General Westmoreland’s meat grinder. Of course, Scott had that kind of pull, like Dan Quayle and Don Nickles, who both went on to the Senate, and the Futter boy who was now governor of Ohio.
The really strange thing about this is that it was one of the Fog Facts.
That is, it was not a secret. It was known. But it was not known. That is, if you asked a knowledgeable journalist, or political analyst, or a historian, they knew about it. If you yourself went and checked the record, you could find it out. But if you asked the man in the street if President Scott, who loved to have his picture taken among the troops and driving armored vehicles and aboard naval vessels, if you asked if Scott had found a way to evade service in Vietnam, they wouldn’t have a clue, and, unless they were anti-Scott already, they wouldn’t believe it.
In the information age there is so much information that sorting and focus and giving the appropriate weight to anything have become incredibly difficult. Then some fact, or event, or factoid mysteriously captures the world’s attention and there’s a media frenzy. Like Clinton and Lewinsky. Like O. J. Simpson. And everybody in the world knows everything about it. On the flip side are the Fog Facts, important things that nobody seems able to focus on any more than they can focus on a single droplet in the mist. They are known, but not known.
There Scott was, running for reelection and the polls said it was going to be tough, very tough. Before there was an official opposition candidate and the Democrats were still beating up on one another in the primaries, the polls put him dead even with Swenson. And the computer simulations said that Swenson would get a bounce after the convention, three or four points, maybe as much as six points, and then it would be up to the president to claw his way back into the lead.
Well, the famous Scott luck held. If you wanted to look at it that way. Fifteen people had died. Including some secret service guys. Scott felt particularly bad about them. He liked the secret service guys. They were always good for some touch football.
Of course, there had been a flurry of speculation and all sorts of far-out conspiracy theories. Which is why Scott had put the full resources of the government into an intensive, rush investigation of the crash. Rather than have just the FAA look into it, which would have taken months and would not have covered the terrorism angle, he had called on the office of Homeland Security, which could bring to bear the resources of the CIA and the FBI and local police in addition to the FAA.
Byron Tompkins, the director of Homeland Security himself, had taken personal, hands-on charge of the investigation.
The Democrats took huge advantage of the tragedy and turned their convention into a giant tear-jerking memorial service. Coming into that convention, Anne Lynn Murphy had been twenty-two points back. But as the convention went on she rose steadily and once she was nominated, she got the usual bounce.
Two hours after her nomination, Byron Tompkins was able to announce the result of the investigation into the Swenson plane crash: a combination of bad weather and radar malfunction had caused the crash. In short, an act of God, not of man. The news swept the headlines and airwaves.
Murphy disappeared from the media for two full days. Her rise in the polls stalled. She’d come within seven points of President Scott, but that was it and she hadn’t moved a point closer since.
Gus couldn’t help it if he was lucky.