THE “DON’T LOOK” story is one of the primal stories. God let Lot leave Sodom. God said, “Don’t look back.” Lot’s wife looked back and was turned to a pillar of salt. Orpheus went to hell to bring his wife back from the dead. Hades, god of the underworld said, “Don’t look back until you’re out.” Orpheus looked and he lost her. Pandora, the first woman on earth, had a box. She was warned to keep it closed, but she opened it and all the troubles of mankind came out. When a story is that pervasive and that basic, there is a reason. Every culture, in its collective wisdom, has a knowing that there are things that are not meant to be looked at. They appear, in the stories, as magic things or mythological things. But we all know that these stories are parables, teachings by example, which we hear in childhood, or at least in a childlike state of mind—learn at our mother’s knee, so that we can take them as general rules to carry with us, to guide us through our lives, so that we may survive.
James Addison Baker III, secretary of state, was Texas-born and Princeton-educated. He knew his Bible and he was familiar with the classic pagan myths. A part of him responded to the atavistic warnings.
But Baker was a Rational Man in a rational mode. To the extent that he acknowledged the supernatural, the paranormal, the mythological, in public or in private—exclusive of Christianity, of course—it was derisively. As in “Poor Lee, the drugs took him over the edge,” or “Hey, a brain tumor—you understand. He gives me this envelope like it’s Pandora’s box and says, ‘Don’t look!’ ”
So of course he opened it upon stepping out of the sickroom door. This, at least, was efficient use of time. He still didn’t have his cellular phone, a state paper to read, an aide by his side to consult with or give orders to. The walk to the elevators and the ride down was the perfect 420 seconds in which to fit in Lee Atwater’s last memo, a dying man’s attempt to influence events from beyond the grave.
He read, at first, in silence.
James Baker was, and had been for a long, long time, a public man and automatically maintained a severe censorship over the most casual public utterances. It has been said that “Baker is incapable of expressing passion.” That “when you sit across from Baker, it is like looking at a length of black silk . . . stillness . . . occasionally . . . a rather wintry smile. He controls the conversation with perfect sentences, perfect paragraphs, perfect pages.”6
He pushed the elevator button while still reading. When the elevator arrived and the doors hissed open, he stepped inside without looking up. He was aware that he was not alone. A green-gowned orderly and a patient on a rolling bed were there, as well as whatever surveillance and security systems were operating. And still he said, “Jesus fucking Christ.” It was sotto voce, but definitely audible. “Atwater’s fucking in-fucking-sane,” he said.
Then he said, but not aloud, This is one piece of paper that must never, ever see the light of day. This must be destroyed. He was right. All the walls that separated reasonable conduct from freedom to think, meaningful conduct from irrelevant actions, dangerous speaking versus necessary speculation, private versus public, had been breached. The military, for example, spent a lot of time producing “what if” scenarios. What do we do if “there is a Russian counter-counterrevolution and they launch missiles at Moldova, Ukraine, and Berlin”? If “there is violent civil unrest in the United States”? If “China goes to war with Japan”? Anyone with a grain of sense would consider that to be sensible speculation so that when the unthinkable does happen there is some sort of plan. But no! When one of those papers was leaked by some asshole liberal do-goodie, the media reacted as if the president was personally planning to open concentration camps to detain everyone who hadn’t voted for Richard Nixon back in 1968. When a man in power told a dirty joke or stuck his dick in the box of some foxy Pandora or expressed his exasperation with some person or group in ethnic terms, that was material that could destroy a career, even an entire regime. Especially if the other side had a Lee Atwater who knew how to use it. This memo, or whatever it should be called, was pure madness. To admit that anyone in this administration had ever even had the thoughts that Atwater had written down would destroy them all.
Nevertheless, James Baker did not burn it, or tear it into tiny pieces and eat them, or head for the nearest shredder. He put the memo in his pocket. And kept it.
6 Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman, The Fabulous Bush & Baker Boys, New York Times Magazine, 5/6/90.