Despite what Corcoran and McCord thought, Lisa Corcoran wasn’t sure she wanted to remain the loyal wife anymore, not after what her husband did, even if he was sick. In fact, the past six months had been surreal for her. She felt a strange combination of anger and compassion that left her emotionally frozen. She couldn’t forgive Corcoran, but neither could she leave him. As First Lady, her public relationship with her husband was political, not just personal, so anything she did had political consequences. And despite her frequent feelings of rage, she could not bring herself to do anything that would bring him down. At the same time, she couldn’t get over the pain of his infidelity and the illness he concealed. Every day she walked through her carefully choreographed schedule and her public chores, a smile plastered to her face. Privately, she doted on her daughters. In the evening, she and the president barely talked. Their last substantive conversation had been a few weeks ago when he told her that his T-cell count had dropped and that he officially had AIDS. She barely reacted. Usually, they ate at different times and slept in different rooms. He spent the evening reading papers and documents, sometimes playing with or reading to the kids. He rarely went out. He didn’t have the energy. But they weren’t a family anymore. She viewed him as a boarder who worked downstairs and came up to sleep at the end of the day.
She knew her little charade couldn’t last forever. Like McCord and the president, she had thought about the coming campaign and wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. Privately, she hoped Corcoran wouldn’t run. Then whatever she did—and she wasn’t sure what that would be—would have no political consequences. Just personal ones. She hadn’t been approached about her role for the campaign, but she told herself if he did run, she wouldn’t be forced to campaign, spending a year giving phony waves and smiles to the faithful. She knew there would be pressure to help, but she had resolved not to cave in.
At the same time, though, she was concerned about the impact of the president’s illness on his administration. She too had noticed the drift and the lack of focus in the last few months. Her friends, both Republicans and conservatives, had reached out to her with their worries. She wasn’t sure if she could do anything about it. After all, she and the president barely had a relationship anymore. Then one day at a luncheon a woman she respected suggested she persuade the president to name a woman as secretary of defense. That would make her the first woman to run that normally male preserve.
The current defense secretary was stepping down soon, everyone in town knew, and the jockeying for his successor had already begun. One of his deputy secretaries, Lucy Mercer, was a former defense aide on the Hill who had spent some time as an executive for an aerospace company. There had already been some private lobbying on her behalf by some Republicans on the Hill. “It would be a coup,” the woman told Lisa. “Only you can get the president’s ear in the right way.”
Lisa Corcoran usually blanched at such suggestions. She remembered all the bad publicity Hillary Clinton got for pushing her husband to name women attorney general. She wasn’t going to be like Hillary, she had said loud and often during the last presidential campaign. Corcoran had even campaigned against Mrs. Clinton, saying his wife would not be making policy in the White House. Lisa was a key political adviser, insiders knew, but a private adviser, not a public one. Moreover, Lisa was reluctant to be just one more person lobbying the president on an appointment. Instead, back when they were talking to each other, she and Corcoran talked about issues and strategy as confidants—just as they had since they first met. Corcoran had used her as a sounding board, a way to measure his instincts about this person or that policy. Now, of course, they didn’t talk at all.
Still, the idea of a woman defense secretary intrigued her. She had met Mercer and liked her—and knew she would never get anything more than lip service consideration for the job. This was one of the “majors,” a top cabinet job that was always filled by a heavyweight. It usually went to former senators or defense industry executives. Women need not apply.
So Lisa Corcoran filed the idea away. The secretary hadn’t stepped down yet; there was no need to act.
Then Lisa got a call from an old friend in the right-to-life movement. There was a bill in Congress that would increase funding for overseas family planning grants. That meant abortions, she knew, and it was usually something the president would reject in a flash. But the friend said the president’s people were strangely quiet on the bill and there were fears it would slip into the budget and be signed into law.
This was part of a larger pattern, the first lady had noticed, of an aimlessness on the president’s part. Because of his illness, she believed, Corcoran was letting down the conservative cause; he was merely occupying the presidency, not using it the way he had his first two years in office, the way he promised during the campaign, the way he had dreamed of during his days in the Senate.
She wished there was a way to wake him up, to surmount his fears of mortality, to remind him why he had been elected. The thought of talking to him sickened her—the anger had not been dispelled, even over these many months—but he was still the man she loved. She may not be able to salvage their marriage, but maybe she could save his presidency.
She wasn’t sure how, or even if, she should talk to him about it. But then the President approached her about the idea of a vacation.
It was a Sunday night. The kids were in bed and Lisa was about to put on the late night news. She was even a bit startled when he walked into the White House living room to talk to her. He told her the idea of a vacation together would be a good idea both personally and politically. As a family—what there was of it—it would be good for them to get away from Washington, spend some time with the girls. They loved horses and this would be great for them. As for the political side, they needed to give the public a sense of normalcy to their relationship, to show that nothing was wrong, even if that was a lie.
She listened and she thought. How mean should she be. After all, he was going through emotional turmoil himself, the pain from the drugs, the thought of dying, the dreams for his administration and a conservative era slowly crumbling before him. Still, she couldn’t forget what he had done to her and their marriage. She knew. This was the time to act.
“If you want me to go with you to Wyoming, the cost won’t be cheap,” she said slowly.
“Huh?” Corcoran stared at her with a quizzical look on his face. He wasn’t sure what she was getting at.
“There are things that are happening in town here that are making our political friends unhappy,” she went on. “I think you need to get back on track, remember why you’re here.”
“I’m not quite sure I’m following you…”
“Well, there’s a bill that’s about to be put in the budget—overseas family planning—you know what that means. Washington sponsoring abortions all over the world. Why aren’t you stopping it?”
Corcoran sighed. It wasn’t that easy, he started to say, there were other things in the budget he needed, he couldn’t get everything he wanted…
“You can stop this one.”
“Yes, I can stop it. In fact, I’d love to stop it, but it’s not the only—”
“Tom, I said you can stop this. You can put your foot down and say: This is not going into the budget.”
“Lisa, it’s not that easy, it’s—”
“Do you want to go to Wyoming by yourself?”
There was silence.
Suddenly, President Tom Corcoran realized that the price of domestic tranquility had just become very expensive. At that moment, power in the White House shifted. Lisa Corcoran, not Tom Corcoran, would decide the fate of his presidency. She had had that leverage, of course, for the last six months. Now she was using it. He wasn’t in a very good position to bargain.
“Okay,” he said quietly. “I’ll kill the bill.”
He looked at her plaintively for a few seconds, then turned to leave.
“Oh,” Lisa added. “One more thing.” Corcoran stopped in the doorway. “When the defense secretary steps down? Lucy Mercer would be a great candidate.”
Corcoran winced. He now had a co-president. He had to talk to Jack in the morning. This could get out of hand.
While Scuzzy Schwartz was out chasing the Kardashians and her Hollywood friends, other reporters had picked up the scent that something was amiss at the White House. The clues had been few, so none had made much progress. But one reporter had more time than most to devote to the project. He was Buzzy Kramer, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author, a bookish sort with dark hair and thick spectacles to match. He had won his Pulitzer a few years back—a feature story on life in a Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Strip written for the magazine section of the Philadelphia Inquirer. The fame from the prize enabled him to quit the paper and get a book contract. His first book was similar to his prize-winning story, a year in the life of a poor family in the Philadelphia inner city.
But he had started out as a political writer and wanted to get back to politics. So he persuaded his publisher to underwrite an unvarnished look at Corcoran, not a polemic – though Kramer hated Corcoran’s politics — but an examination of the political forces that allowed such a divisive figure to become president.
The publisher wanted to release the book the following summer, around the time of the political conventions, a year away. Corcoran and his aides weren’t cooperating with the book — Kramer was just another snooty liberal reporter to them. But that was okay. Many of his friends were talking, hoping to take credit for their role in Corcoran’s rise to power.
Kramer had heard the rumors about the president’s health and at first given them little heed. His was a substantive book on policy, not a gossipy behind-the-scenes look at the White House. But Corcoran had certainly lost his focus in recent months and Kramer wondered if there was a health connection. He had filed an FOIA request with the White House for Corcoran’s medical records, but they revealed nothing. But he still thought there was a connection. He just wasn’t sure what it was.
With these questions in the air, Kramer and his girlfriend, Suzie Langston, a top press aide to the Senate Democratic leader, went to party one weekend that summer in Ocean Grove on the Maryland shore. It was given by a couple of reporters at The Post who shared a summer home at the beach. There were a lot of Capitol Hill people there—in fact, except for the casual clothes, it looked like any other Hill cocktail party—and Suzie Langston and Buzzy Kramer saw many familiar faces. The windows were open, the house had a nice beach front view and in the last dying hours of sunlight, there was an easy breeze rustling the curtains and rattling the wind chimes. As Suzie, a lithe woman in her early thirties, glided toward the hors d’oeuvres, she overheard several reporters chatting in a corner. At first she picked up only snippets. Lisa Corcoran. The president’s depressed. Capital Tatters.
“I hear they sleep in separate bedrooms, now.”
That’s old news, Suzie thought to herself as she leaned toward the conversation.
Someone mentioned Gloria Guggenheim, one of the reporters who wrote Capital Tatters. “Gloria was saying the other day that Lisa Corcoran’s afraid to sleep with the president,” the person said. “One of the First Lady’s friends says she doesn’t want to get a disease.”
Hoots and laughter.
“Corcoran? You gotta be kidding,” said one reporter. “He’s so straight he probably needs a priest’s permission to get a hard-on.”
“What’s she afraid of—hoof-in-mouth disease?” another joked.
“It took her all this time to wise up?” said another.
One reporter was more pensive. “Why haven’t we written that?”
“Too sensitive—it’s just raw scuttlebutt,” said another. “Besides, how could you prove it? Lisa Corcoran wouldn’t admit anything like that. How would you even ask her?”
Buzzy could ask her, Suzie thought to herself, Buzzy could do that. He had nothing to lose. She didn’t know if he had asked for an interview with the First Lady yet. But she knew Lisa Corcoran was on his list. Now would be as good a time as any.
As the couple drove home that night, Suzie mentioned the conversation to Buzzy. In fact, Kramer said, he had approached the First Lady’s staff for an interview several months ago. He knew she had been a key adviser during the campaign, arguing against compromising with the Republican moderates and keeping his message to the right. She had opposed some of the moderate language suggested for the platform on abortion and was opposed to Linda Amster as Corcoran’s running mate. She had even lobbied against some phrases in her husband’s acceptance speech aimed at softening his rougher edges. “We won this nomination to change America, not to change Tom Corcoran,” she was quoted in one of the news mags at the time. “We’re not going squishy soft at crunch time.”
His request for an interview had gotten a noncommittal response. He decided to take another run at her.