McCord was a bit stunned when the president told him of his conversation with his wife. He shouldn’t have been, of course. For a man whose job it is to anticipate everything, this one should have been easy to see coming. Lisa, a true believer, morphing from aggrieved wife into avenging conservative, using blackmail to keep the Corcoran presidency keeled to the right. As McCord thought about it, he realized the only surprise should have been why it took this took—six months. Why didn’t it happen earlier? he wondered. But he knew Lisa Corcoran long enough and well enough to know she that wasn’t going to play the “little woman” role for too long. And, to be honest, he wasn’t all that unhappy about it. Maybe this would give Corcoran the spark he needed to get back on his game, to regain his spirit, to realize what was at stake.
“You know, she’s right,” McCord told the president gently. “We have been drifting these last few months. We’ve been letting events push us, not the other way around. We’re not driving the agenda anymore.”
“I know, I know,” Corcoran said, exasperated. On top of all his other troubles, he now had to contend with an ambitious wife who had him over a barrel. “I don’t have the energy I used to, Jack. I seem to see things one day at a time, just hoping to get through that day and then the next and the next and the next. My life seems to be run by these damn drugs. I live from pill to pill. Politically, I have trouble seeing through to the end game now.” He paused for a second. “When I get back from Wyoming, I want an election year game plan. Not the campaign—I know how to win a campaign—but for the presidency. Where do we push, what do we emphasize, how do we frame the campaign—let that be our guide. Trade and immigration—that played well in the first campaign. Let’s bang on those issues again. We’ve been quiet on them for too long, trying too hard to get along on the Hill. And China. Why aren’t we pushing them harder on human rights? Let’s put that back to the top of the agenda. Let’s get the liberals riled up. That’s the best way of mobilizing our troops. On immigration, let the other side explain why red-blooded Americans are being pushed aside by strange-speaking foreigners. Oh yes, one other thing I’ve been thinking about. Term limits for federal judges.”
McCord’s eyes widened. This was an old chestnut, batted back and forth during the early days of Corcoran’s presidential campaign. The rabid right-wingers loved it—a good way to get all those Democratic judges off the bench and replace them with Corcoran judges. But cooler heads suggested it would be seen as an attempt to intimidate judges who now have life-long appointments and the idea was dropped. Anyway, McCord thought, now that Corcoran was president and could name his own judges, was it a good idea to put them under term limits?
“Are you sure you want to do this now, sir?” McCord asked. “After all, now you’re talking about your judges. If they get term-limited, there may be a Democrat sitting in this office to name their replacements.”
“Oh, it will never pass, Jack,” Corcoran said. “That’s not the point. The aim is to get the public riled up against liberal judges trying to thwart the policies of this administration. Remember that judge in Minnesota that knocked out our anti-affirmative action rule?”
Did McCord ever. Unable to get Congress to peal back some of the affirmative action statutes, Corcoran had gone ahead and issued an executive order doing the same thing—in effect, an end run around Congress. But the Minnesota judge threw out the order, leaving Corcoran steaming.
“You get enough tumult and controversy over a plan like this and the next Clinton judge will think twice before knocking down another one of my orders,” the president said. “It’s a subtle former of intimidation. They’ll get the message.”
McCord had to smile. Maybe this wasn’t a lost cause after all.
“Have this plan on my desk the day after Labor Day, okay?” Corcoran asked.
“Sure, boss,” McCord said, using a self-deprecating phase from their Reagan days. Corcoran smiled wanly.
Lisa Corcoran turned down most interviews. To be honest, she was afraid what she might say, fearful of an inadvertent slip. But when she learned of Kramer’s request, she did not blanche. He was writing a book, not a news story, and the book dealt with policy and political history, not gossip. She had played a role in Corcoran’s victory—why not take some of the credit for it? She knew McCord was discouraging the President’s friends and aides from cooperating with Kramer’s book, but she also knew most of his aides from the campaign and even some in the White House had talked to Kramer anyway. For the same reason. To take credit for his upset victory. Why not her? Why shouldn’t she get her just due?
So she agreed to do the interview the last week in July, several days before the first family planned to leave for Wyoming. It would be held in her office on the second floor of the White House. Her press secretary, Christina Lape, sat in.
Kramer, thrilled to get the interview, had two objectives. He wanted to know more about her behind-the-scenes role during the campaign and the pressures on Corcoran from various elements of the Right. And then there was the health issue. He didn’t feel right asking her directly about her personal relationship with the president. But there was a way to approach it from the side.
During his research, he had been able to talk to every member of Corcoran’s Senate staff but one. Yes, Kramer had stumbled upon Sally Winters too. He didn’t know as much as Scuzzy Schwartz — just that she had been particularly close to Corcoran for a low-level aide, that she had gotten sick and that had she had left his Senate staff suddenly in the middle of the presidential campaign. He knew other staffers were jealous of her closeness with the senator — she was, after all, only a glorified gofer in the office — and many were relieved when she left.
Now the president might be sick with something too, no one really knew if, what or how serious. Was there a connection with the missing Sally Winters? And perhaps the First Lady knows what happened to Sally. Kramer was doing a serious biography, of course, but this was too good an opportunity to pass up.
Lisa Corcoran turned out to be one of Kramer’s best interviews. She was cheerful and talkative, with a good memory for details. She claimed that she was the reason Corcoran hewed close to the conservative line, which of course was the reason he won the presidency. Lisa Corcoran reveled in reliving the campaign, days she now looked back on with fondness and nostalgia. The last few months had been so bleak. And those days were so long ago. If she exaggerated her influence — well, who around the president didn’t?
Slowly, Kramer moved toward Corcoran’s staff. He asked her about the role of his senior campaign aides and why they ended up where they did in the administration. Then he turned to the Senate staff. Her responses were free and easy. There seemed no need for restraint.
Finally, he asked if she remembered an aide named Sally Winters.
Lisa Corcoran froze. Her face went blank for just an instant before she recovered, smiled uncomfortably and said, no, the name didn’t sound familiar. But the initial look on her face told Kramer everything he needed to know. There was something to the Sally Winters talk after all, he told himself. He wasn’t going to let go.
“Do you know what happened to her?” Kramer asked.
“No,” Mrs. Corcoran said slowly, her reassurance suddenly gone. How much did he know? she asked herself as she frantically searched for a reason to end the interview without sounding abrupt. Where was this leading? she thought. Isn’t this a book on politics?
“Well, I understand she’s sick now,” Kramer continued. “I wondered whether the president had kept in touch with her.”
“I-I…don’t know,” the first lady said, embarrassed at her sudden inarticulateness. “I’ve never heard of her, so she must not have been very senior on the Senate staff.”
“No, she wasn’t,” Kramer said, carefully crafting his next question. “But I thought the president might be concerned about her well-being.”
Oh God, Lisa thought, he must know. That’s what this is all about. I never should have agreed to this interview, she thought. All the talk about the campaign and policy were all a ruse. How could she have fallen for this? She pursed her lips, peeked at her watch nervously, then gazed at her press secretary. There was a terrified look in her eye.
“As I said,” Mrs. Corcoran said. “I don’t know her and I doubt that the president knew she was ill. If he did, I’m sure he would have tried to help, if he could.”
“I think that’s all time we have,” Lape said, standing up. Lisa Corcoran stood up as well, but Kramer stayed seated, scribbling away in his notebook as his tape recorder kept rolling.
“Do you know where she’s being treated?” he asked.
“Who?” Lisa said.
“Sally Winters. Do you know where she is?”
“No, of course not,” Now she just wanted to get this guy out of her house as quickly as possible. “I’m glad you’ve told us about it. We’ll try to find her and offer her any help we can. We take care of our people, you know.” With that, she took a deep breath, said good-bye and strutted out, leaving Lape to escort Kramer from the White House.
Lisa Corcoran’s first call was to Jack McCord.
“Jack, another one knows, another reporter,” she said nervously.
“Knows about…”
“You know, that woman, Sally Winters.”
“Ohhhhhhh,” McCord exhaled. “You mean Kramer.”
“Yeah.”
“You know, I wish you hadn’t agreed talked to him,” McCord said.
“I know, but I felt I could handle myself. Anyway, I think he knows something about Tom.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean his illness,” she said, unable to use the word “AIDS.”
“He asked me about that girl and asked if I knew she was sick.”
“Did he just say that, ‘sick’,” McCord asked.
“Well, no, he asked if I knew that she was, well, you know, sick. That makes two of them, two reporters who know.”
“Let’s just calm down,” McCord said, unnerved as he was at this news. “We don’t know what they know. They may not know that the Winters girl has AIDS. They certainly don’t know about Tom.”
“But it’s spreading…”
“Well, two reporters is not a plague, not yet,” McCord said. “We haven’t heard anything of Schwartz for many months. I think he’s lost interest. And I think Kramer was just fishing. He’s doing a policy book, not a gossipy biography. What did you tell him?
“Nothing, really, that I didn’t know the girl,” Mrs. Corcoran said. “And I’m sure we’d try to find out how we could help her. I was just a bit stunned when he asked me about her and I think he saw that.”
“Did he ask about Tom’s appearance? Did he seem to know about his relationship to the girl?”
“No, he didn’t ask about how Tom looks or feels,” Lisa said slowly. “It wasn’t clear what he knew. But if this book he’s doing is just about Tom’s rise to power, why was he asking about personal stuff? Why would he be concerned with some minor aide who left his Senate staff years ago? Could his book really be about that?”
“Well, the book was initially was about Tom’s politics and the right-wing movement,” McCord said. “Perhaps his focus is changing.”
“Could this turn up as a story somewhere, so could this be a bombshell book that will hit in the middle of the re-election?” Lisa asked.
“I suspect if he had something, he wouldn’t wait for the book to be published,” McCord said. “Too much lead time. He’d probably free-lance a story for a magazine, to get credit for himself and publicity for the book.” The chief of staff in fact had done publicity tours for authors when he was working for a lobbying/public relations firm prior to Corcoran’s presidential campaign. He assumed Kramer’s publicists would work the same way.
“Can we find out what he knows? And can we stop him?” Lisa Corcoran’s voice trembled a bit as she spoke, which, oddly, gave comfort to McCord. Despite her increasing influence over the president, it was now clear that she was on their side. She was an ally after all. Whatever her personal feelings toward her husband, it was obvious that she didn’t want his reign to end. That boded well for the re-election campaign. If there was a re-election campaign, McCord thought to himself. If Kramer or Schwartz gets into print, Corcoran could be finished. And soon.
“To answer your questions, maybe yes, maybe, no,” McCord said obliquely. “To your second question, we can’t stop him if he wants to write a story or even his book. But maybe we can try to find out what he knows.” The wheels in McCord’s brain were spinning and even Lisa Corcoran could tell a brainstorm was near.
“What are you thinking of, Jack?”
“I think we need to keep a closer eye on both Kramer and Schwartz. I know a private detective, very discreet. I think we should ask him to keep us apprised of what these guys are up to.”
“This sounds awfully Nixonian,” Lisa said. “How do you pay for it?”
“There’s enough money in the re-election fund,” McCord responded. “We can put it down under security. One detective’s bills aren’t going to arouse much interest. We need to know if and when something is going to pop.”
“What do we tell Tom?”
“Nothing,” McCord said. “He has enough on his mind. Maybe these guys know less than we think.”