WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 9:50 A.M.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The email story breaks twenty-four hours later, Tuesday evening.
Senate Majority Leader Susan Stroud quickly postpones the Oosay Committee hearing scheduled the next morning.
Instead, she summons a small group to her private Capitol office.
Three are there to be taken to the woodshed—Senator Richard Bakke, Congressman Curtis Gains, and Gains’s aide Tom Beyers.
Four are there to judge them: Stroud, the Speaker of the House, Senator Wendy Upton, and Senator Llewellyn Burke, the Republican from Michigan.
“I asked Lew to join us as chairman of the Armed Services Committee,” Stroud says. “And for his good sense.”
Every media outlet in the stratosphere has run with the emails, which were sent by an anonymous hacker group in Europe to the website WeLeaks. “Emails Reveal Oosay Committee Insiders See Probe as Largely Political,” reads the headline in the New York Times. A few mainstream outlets mused about the ethics of publishing stolen emails. But the emails were real, the editors concluded, and in the twenty-first century, the public, not the press, will be the arbiter of their propriety.
Stroud herself never loved this committee, everyone knew, but she had assented to it to accommodate the rising powers on the right in her party, powers that she knew in time would engulf and destroy her. But not, she thinks, today.
Bakke sits on a sofa across from Stroud. Next to him, looking as if they have been called to the principal’s office, is Gains, and beside him his chief of staff, Beyers.
On a facing sofa sits the Speaker of the House, hands cupped on his stomach, and next to him Burke. Stroud has taken an armchair.
Wendy Upton is standing at the window overlooking the National Mall, too agitated to sit. In a single glance, she can see the Smithsonian museums, the Washington Monument, the memorials to Vietnam, Korea, and World War II, the reflecting pool, and the Lincoln Memorial. Halfway down the mall on the right, in what were marshy flats at the time, Thomas Jefferson and his architect Pierre L’Enfant placed the White House, so the people’s legislatures would always look down on the country’s chief executive.
Bakke has already started talking.
“Before we go too far, let’s remember this leak was a criminal act. Private emails were stolen.” He glances at Stroud, the only person here with even nominal authority over him. “And in private there’s nothing wrong with speculating on the political impact of hearings. Indeed, I said nothing in those emails I have not said on the record.”
Chairman Gains has his eyes in his lap.
Stroud raises her hand, palm out, a signal she uses to get people to stop talking, particularly men. Bakke stops, and Stroud turns to Senator Burke.
“Lew, I asked you here because you’re not part of this committee. I wanted an outside read on the damage and what we might do.”
Burke shifts his body toward Bakke in a way that conveys respect. It is one of Burke’s gifts that he can make everyone in the room feel listened to.
“I sympathize, Dick,” he begins. “We can’t govern the country in a fishbowl, without some zone of privacy. Any more than we can govern it on cable TV.” The last remark is a gentle reminder how often Bakke is in front of cameras.
“But we need to recognize a political reality. Our party controls both legislatures, so the responsibility here is entirely on us as Republicans. We need to show skeptics we can be serious and fair, and show our faithful we can be thorough. To do that, we have to be above reproach.”
Burke wrinkles his brow in concern. “Your emails, Dick, have brought reproach on us.”
He turns to the staffer, Beyers. “And Mr. Beyers’s emails, which put his personal ambition above his responsibility, do worse than that.”
“Respectfully,” Bakke answers, before anyone can agree with Burke, “we’re ignoring the elephant in the room, which isn’t my emails. The problem is this committee has gotten nowhere.”
Bakke glances at Gains. Stroud uses the slight hesitation to interrupt.
“Mr. Speaker,” she says, “what do you think?”
She looks at the frumpy man on the sofa, third in the constitutional line of succession, two heartbeats from the presidency. The Speaker shifts his girth. He knows what the people in this room tend to think of him. It’s fine. He has learned the advantages of being underrated.
“The elephant in the room, if I may, isn’t the committee’s progress. It’s the presidential election. Young Senator Bakke here is almost certain to be a candidate. And there are some in our party who would also like to see Senator Upton here run as well. And on the other side, Senator Traynor looks like he might run. And possibly Senator Kaplan, a former comedian, God help us.”
No one laughs.
“My fear is if we let this committee become a campaign event, we all suffer. I say let’s contain the committee, focus it, and not let it turn into a fishing expedition trolling for anything bad we can find about the Nash administration.”
The Speaker is talking in code, but everyone in the room has the decryption key: he hates Dick Bakke and the new right in his party—even more than Stroud does. Every House member has to run in the next election, and if Bakke is head of the ticket, the Speaker thinks they all may suffer. So make Bakke pay for the email leak. Never let the opportunity of a good disaster go to waste.
Bakke is reading the code, too, and the code in this room, he thinks, is awful. Stroud has set him up. The only other genuine conservative here is Gains, and the congressman is terrified. The only way out of here alive, Bakke thinks—the only way the conservative movement has flowered in the first place—is to blast his way out.
“Mr. Speaker, I’m sorry. Not only can this committee’s findings be whatever we discover. They must be. If we find the Nash administration is hiding something we weren’t looking for, we have a responsibility to get to the bottom of it. If we find out they murdered someone in the White House, would we tell the American people we didn’t care because that isn’t what we were asked to look at?”
“Do you have evidence someone was murdered in the White House, Senator?” Burke says with a flash of more genuine anger than he usually reveals.
“Do you have evidence someone wasn’t?” Bakke answers.
“Is that the standard now?” Burke says. “We imagine a crime and ask the president to prove his innocence?”
Bakke smiles like a hungry crocodile. “We’re not a court. We’re a congressional committee. So let’s not fool ourselves: this is about politics. And frankly it feels to me as if you’re embarrassed by that. Even afraid of it. Don’t be. When we look back at this committee, no one will care what liberal newspaper columnists wrote. What they will wonder is one thing: Did we win the next election? Or did we lose it?”
The room is silent. For a moment, Bakke thinks perhaps he has prevailed.
“Enough.”
Every head turns.
The voice belongs to Wendy Upton, and it contains an authority many of them have not heard before.
“The problem, Senator,” she says, “is not any lack of passion by the people in this room, or some fear of politics. The problem is we used the discovery of political emails by a Democratic aide at the State Department to trigger this committee. Now, your own private emails suggest the motive behind the committee was always just to harm the president and gain ground in the next election, perhaps for your own candidacy. That makes everyone in this room, and in our party, a hypocrite. Whether the emails were private or not, whether their being stolen is illegal or not, whether anyone agrees with you or not. That is the politics of this.”
Bakke’s heart begins to sink. He has never heard the polite and careful Upton sound so venomous.
Upton moves from the window to the center of the room and the rest of the group.
“Our job now,” she continues, “is to limit the damage those emails have done.”
She looks at the Speaker.
“Sir, I know you prefer to handle these things in private, before they get out of hand. Perhaps you could do that today by asking Mr. Beyers here, whose emails have embarrassed the House, to tender his resignation this afternoon, and ask Oosay chairman Gains here to accept that resignation. That would be your acknowledgment that this committee is fair-minded and more than a political proposition.”
The Speaker is kneading his hands together in his lap as if he were feeling the idea in his fingers. “Yes,” he says. “I believe that is a good idea.”
Upton turns to Bakke. “I can’t tell you what do, Senator,” she says, “but when Mr. Beyers’s departure is announced, reporters will most assuredly call you for comment. I suspect the majority leader would appreciate your promise not to embarrass her, or yourself.”
It is a subtle twist of the knife, getting him to pledge to make Stroud happy.
Bakke’s own hard life had taught him something about defeat, and when he arrived in the Senate Aggie Tucker had given him an axiom that put it into words: never forget and never forgive and always nurse your resentments longer than your enemies do. He will remember this moment.