When I look back on that period, which admittedly is not very often—the pain is still there—I refer to it as the American Autostereogram. (Don’t worry, I had to look it up too.) Surprise! Believe it or not, you already know what that means. An autostereogram is popularly known as a Magic Eye. It is one of those colorful images that at a glance appears to be one thing, but if you stare at it long enough or close enough, you see the hidden image. It was right in front of you all the time.
This was the most unsettling Christmas season of my life. Almost 250 years ago, when the colonies were busy forming a nation, the powerful Russian statesman Grigory Potemkin supposedly created elaborate stage-like sets to convince his sometime lover, Catherine the Great, that great towns and villages were flourishing in the Crimea. The term, a Potemkin village, has come to mean a shiny facade being used to conceal decaying conditions secreted behind it. That was the United States. On the surface, there were signs of stabilization and the roots of real recovery. The Christmas lights and joyful Santas were hung, happy holiday jingles were bursting from every platform, the Salvation Army pots were out on every corner, the smell of Christmas pine was in the air, and people moved with holiday determination in and out of stores burdened with gaily wrapped packages. If you were just plopped down in the city, it would look like normality was returning, finally. But it wasn’t—not even close.
While the Labor Department continued to report booming economic numbers, the reality was far different. Doctored employment figures issued monthly by the administration couldn’t hide the ugly reality that millions of jobs no longer existed. The economy had essentially been destroyed by Trump’s tariff tantrums and the pandemic, and the Democrats’ attempts to breathe life into it had been smothered by the multitrillion-dollar debt they had inherited, complicated by the drought and famine that devastated the third world. International supply chains were about as reliable as the colorful paper chains third graders made out of construction paper. Wrightman’s efforts to repair the damage by lowering or even eliminating tariffs had resulted in an upturn in exports his first few months in office. The passage of the multitrillion-dollar Rebuild America infrastructure bill had buoyed markets and led to the creation of good-paying jobs, but it didn’t last. It couldn’t; those markets wrecked by Trump’s trade wars were gone forever, and the bureaucracy and environmental lawsuits stalled the largest infrastructure projects.
The healthcare system had been devastated by Trump/Pence in collaboration with the right-wing Congress, leaving too many families without health insurance or the funds to pay for medical attention when they needed it. The Biden Band-Aid, as the Democrats’ healthcare plan became known, temporarily stopped the bleeding but did little long-term to cure the problem. As a result, there was a steadily increasing number of violent attacks on healthcare facilities by people unable to afford lifesaving care for themselves or their family.
Desperate people were forced to take desperate measures, and the crime rate was soaring, aided in some cases by Uber’s new gun-rental division, which rented weapons by the hour.
To combat this crime wave while keeping unemployed workers from rebelling, volunteer militias had been transformed into paid neighborhood watch organizations under the direction of Vice President Hunter. Local merchants contracted with them for protection from predators. To encourage pride and professionalism, these militias designed their own outfits. While these uniforms were generally similar to those of state troopers, featuring gray or brown pants and shirts, high-gloss black boots, and “cowboy” hats, set off by de rigueur fake Oakley sunglasses, several militias selected clothing of a deep burgundy, supposedly paying homage to the blood spilt by American patriots in defense of our liberties. Each militia took a local name, from Olympia, Washington’s Apple Corps to Texas’s Ted Cruzers, but in general they became known as Wrightman’s Watchers. According to Breitbart, these neighborhood watch teams consisted of “patriotic Americans on the watch for those who would put our freedom in jeopardy.”
What was most stunning to me was the lack of outrage. Jackbooted bastards were patrolling American streets and nobody was screaming about it. The general attitude seemed to be that Wrightman hadn’t fooled anyone; after all, he had run promising to “Restore Order,” and that was exactly what he was doing. What did people expect him to do? As Eunice Kaufman said, dismissing the protests, “Americans should be proud to have a president who doesn’t lie to them.”
There were some objections. But when a local newspaper in Erie, Pennsylvania, referred to the Pennsylvania Brakemen as “a pseudo-military organization reminiscent of the worst days of fascism,” that militia broke into their office and destroyed their computers and workstations. Other media outlets critical of the administration, including the Pro, received anonymous warnings that the same thing might happen to them. Watching this happen, I was reminded of a story I’d read years earlier: The respected community activist Saul Alinsky had completely rejected the use of violence to achieve his political objective; when asked why, he explained logically, “Because they have all the guns.”
The fears and frustrations plaguing Americans more and more were being transformed into anger, which too often exploded into rage. Trivial encounters escalated into fights. In the recently incorporated town of Trump, Mississippi, for example, a long-simmering feud between neighbors over ownership of a two-foot-wide strip of land between their houses erupted into a furious gun battle. Family members shooting across the contested strip from windows, like defenders of a besieged fort, fired into their neighbor’s house. Three people were killed and four more were wounded, but the survivors came together and copyrighted the concept. The resulting cable program, Neighbor Wars, roughly an action version of Family Feud, which taped episodes in suburbs throughout the country substituting paintballs for bullets, became a major hit show.
There were at least a few people brave enough to stand up to Wrightman. Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth, the former Army helicopter pilot who had lost both legs when her UH-60 Black Hawk was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, led a futile effort to force the administration to reinstate all constitutional guarantees. New York Times columnist Carole Cooper created a furor when she claimed to have evidence that monthly job creation and unemployment numbers had been falsified under direct orders from the White House, although her reputation was severely damaged when she was indicted for tax fraud and subsequently fired before the release of those documents was blocked under the Secrets Act.
There were others too, but to my shame, the Pro was not among them. As much as I pushed Howie to join what we laughingly referred to around the office as the “flaccid resistance,” he refused. “Trust me on this,” he said. “We’re keeping our powder dry. Now’s not the right time,” he said. I trusted him to keep our powder dry until the right time, even if I had no idea what he was referring to. He was Howie, and that was enough for me. I wasn’t wrong.
The administration fought back with its best weapon, other than guns—patriotism. Members of the administration took every opportunity to define “real Americans” as those people who supported the president of the United States while dismissing the opposition as “misguided people who may not even understand how their attempts to undermine confidence in the government are assisting the enemies of democracy.”
The highlight of this “America first, last, and always in our hearts” campaign was the introduction of the New American Pledge. Standing directly in front of the Statue of Liberty on New York’s Liberty Island, the president asked several hundred children invited there for this ceremony to place their right hands over their heart and repeat these fifty-four words with him: “I am an American. I am born of the sacrifices of heroic men and women. I was shaped in the cauldron of liberty and justice for all. I accept my solemn duty to preserve and protect the rights of all Americans to live without fear wherever our flag might wave. I am an American.”
I have to admit on some level I admired the political skill that had enabled Wrightman to seize control of the narrative. As I’m certain it was intended to do, this pledge created a furor. Or as I referred to it in a column—to Jenny’s dismay; “Why do you always need to start trouble?”—“a führer.” It solidified Wrightman’s support among people who self-identified as patriots while painting those of us who opposed it as anti-American or even terrorist sympathizers.
When possible, I fought back with my keyboard. As long as I didn’t directly attack the Wrightman government, Howie ran what I wrote, although we noticed that Pro pieces were getting less pickup and reposting than previously. Of all the columns I wrote, it was my Christmas column that attracted the most interest. Admittedly it was controversial: I attacked Santa Claus. I wrote:
Since the 1949 publication of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, we have remained diligently alert for the appearance of Big Brother, the Stalin-like dictator who would destroy American society and impose a totalitarian structure on us. As it turns out, we have been looking in the wrong direction for all these decades. It wasn’t Big Brother we should have been watching out for. In actuality, it was Santa Claus.
We built the finest military in history to keep out the would-be Big Brothers; meanwhile we invited this jolly old man into our homes. Why not? He had a friendly smile, a delightful ho-ho-ho of a laugh, and best of all, he came bearing gifts for us all. What could be wrong with that? Not only did we welcome him, we set out milk and cookies for him!
But as we discovered too late, behind that jolly old facade lived a very different man. He wasn’t at all what he seemed to be. The warning signs were there. He moved only in the darkness and was known by an alias. While we were welcoming him, he was taking advantage of our hospitality. He learned all about us. He spied on us, compiling detailed lists. He determined who was “good” and who was “bad,” and he rewarded those people who fulfilled his expectations and punished those who took actions he didn’t approve. Without our knowledge he managed to install an extraordinary surveillance system that enabled him to determine when people were sleeping or when they were awake. He knew how to ensure our cooperation, bribing us with promises of gifts that we had already told him we wanted. It was an amazing scam …
It continued for several more paragraphs. It generated an unusual number of responses. I thought my satire was perhaps too obvious, but to my surprise, many people believed I was writing about Mark Zuckerberg.
Throughout this period, Jenny helped me maintain my equilibrium. Difficult times drive people closer, and no matter how frustrated I became, she was there almost every night to calm me down. Naturally I didn’t discuss marriage, but only because she had made it clear: one-and-done. Naturally. We did, however, visit my mother during the Christmas holidays. Let me tell you about that. It actually was a pretty big deal, because Jenny was the first woman I’d brought home in my second life.
My mother was warm and welcoming, which was not surprising. But her hearing had gotten considerably worse since the last time I’d been home. On the phone she had been able to hide it. At dinner that first night she had asked Jen how we’d met. “I was doing a hora,” Jenny had replied.
My mother was shocked. “You were a what?”
Jenny laughed. “The dance. The hora. We were dancing.”
She shook her head. “Oh no,” she said. “My Rollie can’t dance.”
Jenny agreed. “I know.”
“But he’s very good at other things,” Mom responded confidently, defending me.
That was one of the few times I saw Jenny get embarrassed. She looked at me and told my mother, “I know.”
We were lying in bed several weeks later, still laughing about it. My bruises had pretty much healed and my stitches were scarring into a facsimile J (if you had a vivid imagination). Jenny was poking me playfully, teasing me about “those other things,” when Cher interrupted us. “Rollie, there is a major event taking place,” she informed us, as she had been programmed to do.
“Cher, turn on the TV,” I said. We both sat up. CNN was showing a still image of an airplane, a Boeing 777 I thought. My first thought was that a passenger plane must have crashed. But the chyron below the image was frighteningly different: REMOTE HIJACKERS TAKE CONTROL OF PASSENGER JET.
“Oh my god,” Jenny said.
The details, as much as were known, got filled in quickly. Northern Airlines Flight 342, a red-eye from New York’s JFK to LAX, had been flying into the night at 36,000 feet when the cockpit warning system alerted the pilots that they had a problem. The plane, it was a 777, which had been cruising on autopilot, was inexplicably descending and veering off course. When the pilots attempted to regain control, they discovered that none of the flight systems were responding. That’s when they had called for help. CNN replayed the conversation between the first officer, a man named Mark Stein, and the control tower in Albuquerque. In an amazingly calm, professional voice he reported, “This is Northern Airlines flight 3-4-2 declaring an emergency. We have a complete loss of control. I repeat, this is…”
I took Jenny’s hand.
A voice had responded with equal dispassion. “Reading you clearly Northern Airlines 3-4-2. This is Albuquerque. Are you declaring an avionics failure?”
“Negative, Albuquerque,” the pilot said. “All systems A-OK. But we’ve lost the ability to control any of them. Seems like the only thing we can operate is this com system.”
CNN’s aviation expert Pete Sawyer was on the phone with Anderson Cooper. “Obviously we don’t know for sure, Anderson, but this appears to be the scenario that a lot of people have been concerned about for a long time. It looks like, and believe me I’m just speculating here, we certainly don’t know with any certainty, but it looks like someone has hacked into the flight computer and taken control of this airplane.”
Cooper handled it well. “Are you saying a hacker is flying this airplane?”
“I don’t know. But that appears to be one of the possible scenarios.”
Cooper paused to regain his composure. He coughed the tension out of his voice. “Can the pilots regain control?”
Sawyer hesitated, then answered as sensitively as he could, “There is no procedure for this.” He was silent for several seconds, then said almost as an afterthought, “I’m sure that’s what they’re trying to figure out right now.”
It was as if we had walked right into the middle of a horror film. “This can’t be real,” Jenny said, laying her hand on mine. “It can’t be.”
I began channel surfing. It was real, terrifuckingly real. Someone, somewhere, was playing with the lives of more than three hundred people. On Fox, Bill Hemmer asked their aviation expert, I didn’t hear his name, “So who is flying this airplane?”
In a soft and respectful voice, the expert responded, “God.” After letting that thought hang in the air for a few seconds, the expert caught himself, cleared his throat, and said, “Or hackers.”
One of the flight attendants, ignoring protocol, had begun texting her husband. He in turn was passing her texts along to CNN. The pilot, Captain Sanchez, had briefed the flight crew. He had laid out the situation. Then the first officer, Stein, had told them, and she quoted him, “This is really fucked up. We’re doing everything humanly possible to regain control. But what happens aboard this aircraft is up to you. You want to start a panic, go ahead, but that isn’t going to help anybody. Just do your best.”
Sanchez had then alerted his passengers, waking them to explain the aircraft was experiencing “unexpected navigational difficulties.” He had assured them this was not a serious problem and asked them to remain calm, to stay in their seats with their seat belts fastened and follow whatever instructions they were given. He promised to keep them updated but warned them they probably would be late getting into Los Angeles.
Jenny and I listened silently, doing the same thing everyone else watching was doing, fighting with our imagination, which was trying really hard to put us on that airplane.
My mind clicked into journalism. I tried to reassure her. “Look, if whoever is doing this wanted to kill those people, they could have done it already. Whatever is going on, that’s not it.”
“They still can, any time they want,” she said.
“They still can,” I agreed.
The networks began referring to this as a cyber-hijacking, which immediately was shortened to cyjacking. It appeared the entire country was being awakened by people calling friends and family to turn on their TV. The White House told reporters that the president was at his cabin and that he and the first lady were monitoring the event and joined all Americans in praying for a safe outcome.
The networks had all made the same decision not to run any commercials. That decision was pretty easy to make, seeing as how not too many companies want to be associated with an out-of-control aircraft flying at 36,000 feet. With few new facts to report, they began focusing on the pilots, Sanchez and Stein, providing as much background as possible. MSNBC got the president of the Air Line Pilots Association to say, “If you’re going to be caught in this situation, Steve Sanchez is the guy you want in the cockpit.” Sanchez had been flying for three decades and had flown every type of aircraft from carrier-based fighters to jumbo jets.
According to reports, the plane was flying in great circles, as if it had no particular destination, slowly descending. The flight crew was in direct communication with Boeing engineers, who were reviewing all procedures to try to figure out how to regain control of the computer system. A Boeing spokesperson said chief engineer Pete Schaeffer was working with Sanchez and Stein to decide on a strategy and that Boeing remained “supremely confident” in its products and its people.
I suddenly realized Jenny and I had been transfixed for almost forty-five minutes; neither of us had moved. “You okay?” I asked her.
She shook her head as she took a deep, calming breath. She couldn’t speak.
This must be driving the intel people nuts, I thought. I had absolutely no doubt they were desperately trying to get their hooks into whoever was doing this, sort of a cyber version of catching robbers in the bank. But I also figured they had no chance of identifying the hackers. Anyone skillful enough to carry this out certainly had the ability to obscure their tracks behind them.
On ABC, David Muir was reporting that Sanchez and Schaeffer were trying various techniques to work around the plane’s electronics system, but thus far nothing had worked. “There is no manual for this,” he said. “This is literally seat-of-the-pants flying. They are making it up on the spot.” He paused dramatically. “And it appears they are running out of time.”
He started his next thought but stopped suddenly and raised a just-a-minute finger. He looked down at his desk, cleared his throat to maintain his composure, and said, “We’re just getting word that they’ve made a decision. It appears that they are going to attempt to reboot the computer system.” The ABC expert was a former naval aviator and NASA astronaut, Steve Peters. “Steve, what exactly does that mean?”
Steve Peters was sitting at the anchor desk, a model of the plane in front of him. “It means just what it says, David. Just like you do at home when your computer locks up. You kick it a few times, and when that doesn’t work you turn off everything, count to ten, and turn it on again.”
Both Jenny and I had checked in with our offices. There didn’t seem to be any need for us to show up there—certainly we would be fairly useless—but we needed to confirm that. We had each received several calls. This was one of those unnerving events that made you need to reach out to other people.
“Will that work?” Muir wondered.
Peters frowned. “It’s dicey,” he admitted. “But I’ve seen it work on simulators.” After the still-unsolved 2014 loss of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, also a Boeing triple 7, he continued, engineers had gamed every conceivable problem and solution in an attempt to figure out what had happened to that aircraft. This was one of the scenarios they’d run.
“So we know it does work?” Muir asked.
Peters clearly did not want to be nailed down. “It has been successful in regaining control, yes.”
“Right,” I said to Jenny. “There’s a lie of omission. I guarantee you. He isn’t telling us about the times it didn’t work.”
“So what do you want him to say? That they’re all gonna die?”
For one of the few times in my life, I didn’t have an answer.
Muir asked, “About how long does the reboot take?”
Peters hedged, “With luck, about a minute.”
Whoa, that took my breath away. It meant that for about a minute one of the largest airplanes ever built—an extraordinary complex jumble of steel and aluminum, fabric and wires, and 330 human beings—was going to have to remain airborne without enough power to flush the toilets.
Muir asked the only question that mattered: “How long can this airplane stay in the air without power?”
“With luck, about a minute.”
The long pause that followed was broken by Muir, looking for some cause for optimism. “Sully kept his plane in the air longer than that, didn’t he?”
“That’s right,” Jenny agreed.
I had written about that. “Little more than four minutes,” I said.
CNN was still receiving texts from the plane. An incredibly subdued Anderson Cooper reported that Steve Sanchez had finally informed his passengers about their situation. “He spoke very calmly.” He shook his head in some combination of awe and admiration. “I’m reading the text here. He told them that, this is a quote, ‘I’ve got a lot of confidence in this bucket of bolts, but we need your help too. We’re all pretty nervous…’”
Cooper paused again and pursed his lips, then appeared to wipe away a tear.
“‘… but we need you to stay as calm as you can. This airplane was built to fly, not be on the ground. So just sit tight and work with me, and we’re all gonna have a hell of a story to tell our grandkids.’” Cooper just sat there for several seconds. What else was there to say?
Finally he looked directly into the camera and said, “You want the definition of courage, that’s Captain Sanchez.”
He turned to that station’s aviation reporter, Charles Modica, and asked what to expect. Modica scratched his head. “It’s going to be the longest minute of their lives,” he said. Captain Sanchez was going to shut down that plane. During that time, they would be flying blind and deaf, “as out of touch with the rest of the world during those seconds as Apollo 13 was when it went behind the moon to slingshot home.”
Completely unexpectedly, Cooper read something, shook his head in admiration, and laughed. “This is unbelievable,” he said, holding on to a sheet of paper. “We just got this text that they’re getting ready to shut down and Sanchez told the passengers he would see them on the ground…”—he laid down that sheet of paper—“and while they were waiting, they might focus on who they’d like to play them in the movie.”
Jenny sobbed.
Anderson Cooper had his hands clasped in front of him. “Captain Sanchez has just reported to ATC that he is shutting down all systems. It is exactly 2:45 A.M. here on the East Coast.” He paused, then whispered, “Godspeed flight 342.”
We held hands tightly. Neither one of us could speak.
I don’t know how Cooper did it. “We estimate that at this point Northern American flight 3-4-2, en route to Los Angeles, has been in the air without power for fifteen seconds.” Then, “Thirty seconds…”
Modica said, “It would be completely silent on board. They probably can hear the wind whistling outside the fuselage. The plane is slowing. I can’t begin to imagine what those people are thinking.”
“Forty-five seconds,” Cooper said.
“The nose has dipped by this time,” Modica said, sounding as if he was speaking to himself. “The downward descent has begun. They have no way of determining their altitude. Low and getting lower.”
“Fifty-five seconds.”
“Right about now they’re powering up.” A brief pause. Then, “The systems should be coming back online. We’re going to hear from them in a few seconds.”
Silence. Silence. Silence. “Please,” Jenny said. “Please.”
Silence. Silen … Cooper broke into a huge smile. A breath of relief exploded from his mouth as he said, “Albuquerque air traffic control is reporting that they are in contact with Northern American flight 3-4-2. Pilots Sanchez and Stein report they have regained control of their aircraft. Everyone aboard A-OK.” He paused once again and took a huge breath. “They’re coming home.” He actually laughed. “They’re safe and they’re coming home. Although Captain Sanchez told the air traffic controllers that if they didn’t mind, he’d like to put down in Albuquerque for a cup of coffee.”
Through her tears Jenny laughed. I admit it, I wiped away my own tears.
I flicked around the stations. On ABC David Muir was shaking his fist to express his joy. CBS somehow had gotten a several-second video from Boeing, showing unidentified people hugging and high-fiving each other in a control room somewhere.
I could hear people cheering in the background, although it was impossible to determine if those cheers were coming from Albuquerque air traffic control, the network studio, or, to be honest, my apartment. Most likely all three.
Sanchez and Stein landed as heroes. The entire nation rejoiced. Really, I’m not being sarcastic. Millions of Americans had been awakened in the night and lived through almost two desperate hours together. We had shared a compelling, heart-wrenching emotionally draining experience. We had held our collective breath, many had prayed, and we had cried together at the joyous conclusion.
It was an extraordinary night; one of those I’ll-never-forget-where-I-was events. For most Americans, though, where they were was in bed, which is why that blip in baby births nine months later was not a surprise. No one could get back to sleep, so like Jenny and me, we all celebrated.
On that night, America came together. (Figuratively.)
For President Wrightman, this was the victory he needed. For a brief semi-shining moment all of the economic, political, and international challenges disappeared. The United Nations passed a resolution praising the two pilots for their courage. The president invited the flight crew “and any passengers who want to join us” to the White House. Every journalist wanted a piece of the story. I got lucky; a friend of my cousin Jon’s brother-in-law worked in Albuquerque air traffic control and spoke with me about what it was like in the tower that night. I described it in a widely reposted piece:
The three air traffic controllers had an out-of-their-control airplane in their skies. They had less control over it than a drifting leaf in a storm. Within minutes they had cleared their screens of other aircraft for hundreds of miles while maintaining an unnatural calm. For the next 98 minutes they were the only communication between Northern Airlines flight …
The euphoria lasted three days, until all the feel-good stories had been published, all the crew and passengers had been interviewed. Then reality intruded: Cyberterrorists had successfully hacked into the computer system of a sophisticated passenger aircraft and taken control. It clearly was meant to be a demonstration of their capability; they could have crashed the aircraft at any point but for whatever reasons elected not to.
The world’s commercial and cargo aviation fleet was grounded. For a story I tried to figure out how many flights that included, but even Google didn’t provide that answer. I guesstimated 125,000 planes take off and land every day worldwide. It was a shaky figure, but I’m a good researcher, and if I couldn’t find a better number, no one could question it. Whatever that number, it was a scary day. Arguably it was the greatest terrorist success in history, impacting the most people, even though not a single person was killed. It reminded every American how completely vulnerable we are.
The fix was relatively simple. A second, entirely independent computer control system was added; experts compared it to loading a personal computer with both Windows and Foxfire. If a hacker compromised either one of them, the pilot could shut it down and activate the redundant system. Hacking into one system required tremendous skill and a great deal of luck; hacking into two independent systems on the same aircraft was calculated to be one in the multitrillions.
Nine days after the cyjacking, President Wrightman asked the networks for a half hour in prime time to address the nation. I’d heard rumors that this was in the works, but even I—cynic, skeptic, and wiseass that I am—didn’t believe he’d have the guts to do it.
Rather than from the casual setting of the cabin, he spoke from the Oval Office, with a bust of Lincoln and a painting of FDR visible over either shoulder, and instead of a sweater he wore a somber dark suit offset by a blue shirt and a tie speckled with red, white, and blue. “Good evening, my fellow Americans. Tonight I’m going to discuss with you a matter of the greatest importance to all of us…”
“Uh-oh, this is serious,” I said to Jenny. “He’s using his deep I’m-a-serious-guy voice.” We were at Lucille’s Ballroom. The place was completely filled and absolutely silent. Even Tommy O’Neil behind the bar had paused and was watching Wrightman’s reflection in the mirrors on the far wall.
As the Miracle of Flight 342 had proved, the president continued, the ability of our enemies to reach into our lives from vast distances had continued to improve, and unfortunately, our defenses hadn’t kept up with them. Skillfully deflecting responsibility, he continued: “The substantial damage done to our intelligence services by previous administrations has taken a terrible toll, and repairing that has been a priority of mine since the day I took office. But we are still fighting a determined enemy with an undermanned, underfunded, and somewhat inexperienced capability.” He leaned forward and clasped his hands on his desk, an action any body language coach would recommend when you want listeners to believe you’re being candid with them. “Let me be completely honest, my friends. As much as it pains me to admit this, and I have sufficient faith in each of you to know that you will understand and appreciate what I’m about to say, unless we make significant changes, we are not going to defeat these people.”
He let that warning sink in. I drained the last drops of my one glass of wine. I was beginning to see where he was going. “Holy shit,” I said to Jenny. “I think he’s really going to do it.”
He went on: “We have seen too many instances in which our enemies have used the very freedoms they have vowed to destroy to protect themselves and hide their hideous plans. Yes, thanks to brave men and women like Steve Sanchez and Mark Stein we’ll stop them most of the time, and we’ll kill a lot of them…” He paused dramatically, looked directly into the camera, and vowed, “We will kill many of them, but variations of what we’ve just experienced are going to continue taking place until this enemy is destroyed. And I’m afraid this puts all of our lives in danger. To prevent that from happening, to provide the safety that we want, I need your support.” He cleared his throat. “And I need your trust.”
A buzz rose in the bar as people realized what was about to happen. Lucille hushed the room.
In his earnest manner the president explained that it was time to either commit this nation to wiping out the scourge of terrorism or accept the reality that we will be fighting these people without resolution for the rest of our lifetimes “and our children’s lifetimes. We are at war with these terrorists in every way except officially. For too long we have been fighting this war with one hand tied behind our back. To rectify that, to take the fight to our enemy as we have never before been able to do, tomorrow I will be submitting to Congress a request for an official declaration of war against terrorism.”
The Ballroom exploded with a burst of noise. Lucille screamed, “Shut up! Just shut up, everybody. C’mon.” As the noise subsided, I glanced at Jenny. Her bottom lip was quivering, her way of releasing pent-up emotion. A dubious look crossed her face. “I don’t know about this.”
Wrightman turned in his seat to look into a second camera, a director’s interlude. “Many of you will wonder what that means and how it will affect you. The easy answer is, not very much. In most ways this is simply a legal declaration that allows your government to take greater steps in pursuit of those who wake up every morning plotting to destroy everything this nation stands for. In real terms, it will have very little impact…”
The president continued for several more minutes. It was a deeply emotional speech, delivered in a carefully rehearsed heartfelt tone. The guy could sell a Yankee cap to a Red Sox fan, I had to give him that. As he wound into his big finish, he said, “You gave me the greatest honor any American can receive when you cast your votes for me, and now I am asking you for your trust. I give you my solemn word…” He thumped on his chest to show how much he meant that. “Every step I take will be done with your personal safety and the welfare of our great nation at the forefront. This declaration will enable our fighting men and women to seek out and destroy terrorists wherever they may be hiding.”
He turned and faced camera one again. The stagecraft was really well done. “At crucial times in our history our forefathers were called upon to move boldly with courage and confidence into an uncertain future. Now it is our turn to prove the sacrifices they made for you…”—pointing directly into the camera at us—“… were not in vain.” After asking every American to call, write, email, and tweet their member of Congress to demand that he or she stand up proudly for America and the future of all of our beautiful children, he closed with an abundance of God blesses.
While he was speaking, the White House had long-tweeted to the media the official request the administration would be submitting to Congress. In it, Wrightman quoted President Woodrow Wilson’s stirring 1917 demand to Congress that it declare war on Germany: “[T]his is a war against all nations … American lives have been taken in ways which have stirred us very deeply … Our motive will not be revenge or the victorious assertion of the physical might of the nation, but only the vindication of human right, of which we are only a single champion.”
An instant after the speech ended, Lucille’s exploded in a cacophony of rings—a postmodern symphony, a clinging, clanging cry for immediate attention. Everybody sprang into action. It had occurred to me once that if babies learned to ring rather than cry, they would be a lot more successful at getting attention.
Lucille did not suffer people talking on cell phones in her place (in fact, in a pique she had been known to drown a ringing iPhone in a wineglass), but this time she didn’t say a word. This was our siren call: We were a roomful of newspeople watching news taking place that in some way was going to involve all of us.
I told Cher to call the office. Jenny and I had agreed we would never respond to a call while in a public place unless it clearly was an emergency. This qualified. Around the room people were settling their bills, giving Lucille a quick peck on her cheek as they raced back to work.
“I got this,” I told Jen, handing over my credit card. She believed paying her own bills maintained her independence. Who was I to dissuade her of that notion?
She was as wound up about the speech as I was. “What do you think this means?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Maybe everything? How about Martha? She’s not going to go for something like this, is she?”
Jenny frowned. “I don’t know. Wrightman did a great job scaring people. There’s going to be a lot of pressure on Congress to give him what he wants. I don’t know who’s strong enough to face those winds.”
The waiter, John, returned with the credit slip. As I signed it, I asked her, “What do you think you’d do?”
Jenny had the politician’s gift of physical prevarication; whatever was going on in her mind, her body language didn’t give it away. When fully dressed, I mean. “Depends,” she said finally. “There’s a political calculation, obviously.” The left side of her mouth frowned, while the other side stayed level; it was a neat trick, a perfect way of expressing her indecision. “Lincoln and FDR had that power and they did okay with it. Maybe. I mean, I guess it depends how he uses it.”
“That’s a pretty long leash to give a guy like this, don’t you think? Doesn’t it bother you at all that he’s using the cyjacking to consolidate his power?”
“Of course it does,” she said sharply. No equivocation there. But then came her thought check. “Sometimes it’s necessary.” She stood over me, not ready to leave the question alone. “We’ve never faced an enemy like this. You … you as much as anybody knows that. I had a pre-law professor who loved to quote the Greeks to show us how smart he was; one of them was Hippocrates…”
I backed Mighty Chair away from the table and spun neatly around. “The medical oath guy.”
“The oath guy,” she agreed. “But he also said that for extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure are the most suitable.”
“Desperate times,” I began as we walked out.
“Call for desperate measures,” she concluded.
I stopped and looked at her. “You believe that?” It was a question, not a challenge. After all the time we had spent together, I really didn’t know how she would answer.
“Probably not tonight,” she decided. “We’ll see about tomorrow.”
Lucille was at her table by the door. I stopped and gave her the usual peck on the cheek. “You write that that fucker should go to hell,” she said, waving angrily at the TVs. Then she offered Jenny a cheek and Jenny planted the obligatory kiss.
It was a lovely spring night. When we were outside, Jenny laughed, “Well, certainly no equivocation there.”
“If she ever gets over her shyness…”
Jen leaned over and kissed me, holding it for a second. “I’ll call you later,” she said. I watched her walk away. She knew exactly what I was doing, and without looking back gave me a single wanton twerk.
As I walked to the parking lot, I began considering the potential consequences of Wrightman’s request. There was nothing especially threatening about Ian Wrightman, nothing he’d done in his political career that caused my warning lights to start flashing. He’d staked a claim to the political middle, and as far as I knew, he had held on to that position as tightly as a sailor hugging a mast in a hurricane. There was nothing he’d done in his career that struck me as being inherently evil. But still.
Evil is real. I’d seen it close up. I laughed as easily and as often as I did because if I let those horrors live in my head, I’d never have another good day. Spend as much time as I did in the places I’ve been, and if you don’t come back as a cynic, then there’s really something wrong with you. I’d seen the things human beings are capable of doing. I’d watched passively evil people like Trump, whose own psychological problems allowed him to hurt people without regret or even understanding of the damage he was doing. I’d watched the religious fanatics, the people in the desert plotting against civilization and the Mike Pences of the first world, all of whom justified their actions by claiming allegiance to a greater good, anointing themselves vessels carrying out their Lord’s will rather than accepting responsibility for their actions.
Ian Wrightman didn’t strike me as any of them. There was a certain unctuous smoothness in his manner; but he wasn’t an irrational zealot. He was as radical as the latest polls, as religious as American politics demanded. Rather than passion, he had calculation. That made him a wild card.
I wasn’t sure it made him dangerous, but it definitely made me nervous. Being granted the powers that went with a declaration of war would essentially make him king. The powers of the president had expanded almost continuously for decades as Congress ceded more and more of their constitutional responsibilities to the executive branch. But war powers were the keys to the kingdom. He would be unchecked by traditional checks and balances. He could pretty much take whatever steps he decided were necessary. He could use the Constitution as a road map or as toilet paper. The dictatorial powers that Trump had dreamed about and reached for, he would have in his grasp. Maybe that wasn’t the level of power you wanted to hand to a wild card.
The question that rattled in my mind like a can of oil bouncing around in a trunk on a dirt road was why? Why did he need more power than he already possessed? The why had always intrigued me: Why did a billionaire need a second billion dollars? Why did dictators risk what they already controlled to gain more? I couldn’t wait to get to the office to start sorting out these thoughts. This is what we did best at the Pro: take a complex situation and run it through the mind grinder to make it easy to understand and digest. It was going to be a long night, and I expected to love every minute of it.
And then I got to the parking lot.