TUCSON, ARIZONA
Monday 5 April
At the moment the Constitution of the United States called for the transfer of power to a new leader, Wendy Upton was in Tucson, having lunch at a restaurant owned by friends.
A cordon of Secret Service agents entered the private room where her party was seated. The detail’s lead agent bent down and whispered into the ear of her chief of staff, Gil Sedaka.
“Madame Vice President, I need a moment,” Sedaka said, rising from the table. The agents ushered Sedaka and the vice president to an alcove by the kitchen.
“The president has collapsed in Pittsburgh,” Upton’s lead agent, Leslie Decker, said. “Though this has not been announced publicly, he has just been pronounced dead by doctors at the hospital. It appears to be a stroke or heart attack. We need to return to Washington immediately.”
Before Upton could respond, Sedaka suggested, “Let’s get you sworn in right here. Now. So there’s no gap. So there’s continuity of government.” The legal term.
Then he whispered: “And no one raises any crazy constitutional doubts about party. Or anything else.”
Upton looked at Gil and nodded. She was numb, but the look on Gil’s face, anxious but determined, began to help her focus. She was still too much in shock to register any emotion properly, but she was not afraid.
She had never really contemplated being president. People had urged her to run, but she had never allowed herself to seriously imagine what it would feel like. Now she had no time to consider whether she was ready or not. It was simply happening to her.
And so the forty-seventh president of the United States, the first woman president in U.S. history, was given the oath of office by Pima County magistrate Polly Rodriguez at Rebecca’s Downtown Kitchen Bar in Tucson, Arizona, at 1:27 Mountain Time, seventy-eight minutes after David Traynor was pronounced dead by doctors in Pittsburgh. A local TV station shot video. A photographer from the Arizona Star took photos. The restaurant’s patrons, asked to step outside, lined the windows along the sidewalk and looked in. They could see through the glass the familiar pantomime of a presidential swearing in. There was shock, people taking video, and a smattering of uneasy applause.
Sedaka and the new president were led out through the restaurant’s kitchen. Her motorcade, now enlarged by the presence of local law enforcement, drove to a secure facility at the airport. There Upton and Sedaka waited. She had asked some people from her old Arizona staff to fly to Washington with her and she didn’t want to sit there waiting on the plane. Too cramped. Too LBJ. Gil was staring at her. They had known each other for decades; been young Senate aides together. It was Gil who had urged her to seriously consider Traynor’s unlikely VP offer. She’d considered it political suicide. Now she was president.
Gil’s expression had changed. Unlike a half hour ago, it was etched now with anxiety. The moment had sunk in, and he was contemplating all that would follow. Seeing Gil’s fear, however, seemed to snap Upton into focus. Her mind seemed gloriously sharp, and she felt as if she understood, in that instant, what was required of her. She could see it—the next few days, even the next month—as if they were luminously clear, like the horizon above the ocean on a cloudless day.
“Gil, call the White House historian and find out everything Lyndon Johnson did when Kennedy was killed. Hour by hour, the first few days. And Truman, when FDR died. And Teddy Roosevelt, when it was McKinley.” Protocol and precedent, she was thinking. They would reassure the country—and the world—that America had been through this before and survived. That was job one, to reassure the country.
She began making calls through the White House switchboard: first to the First Lady, Mariette Traynor, then congressional leaders and cabinet members. When her plane was ready to return to Washington—any aircraft carrying the president of the United States becomes Air Force One by default—she and Sedaka had the beginning of a plan. Upton had summoned some trusted staff from her former Senate Arizona office to join her, including her closest friend from law school at the University of Arizona. By the time they landed at Andrews four hours later, the White House switchboard had logged more than 40,000 incoming phone calls and 180,000 emails from people around the country.
She issued her first official presidential orders from the air. She would ask Traynor’s full cabinet and most of the West Wing staff to remain, including chief of staff Quentin Phelps. Sedaka would become his deputy. The new Upton administration must look like the old Traynor administration as much as possible—for now.
While still in flight, she crafted a brief public statement, influenced by those of the vice presidents before her who had inherited the office while wearing black. It was seven sentences:
“This is a tragic day for people all over the world. The grief Mariette Traynor and her family suffer is everyone’s suffering. Their sorrow and their love is our sorrow. Let that sorrow and love unite us. Our task now is simple: to be our best. That is what our country needs from all Americans today. For my part, I pledge to honor the American people, our country, this office, and the memory of David Traynor. May this sad day be remembered in all the days to come for the grace and courage America showed the world.”
“Release this now,” she said, “but I need to say something on camera when we land. People need to see they still have a president.”
Sedaka called Bill McGrath, the GOP consultant in Washington who had helped them fight off the threats made against Upton the year before—another Republican, like Upton, who found himself adrift in a party he barely recognized.
“Yes, a statement on camera when you land,” McGrath told Sedaka. “On the tarmac with reporters, something memorable and brief. But take no questions. She should not formally address the nation as president until after David Traynor’s funeral. Let the country grieve. When that’s over, then she points the way. Not before.”
Sedaka was struck by how much confidence consultants—who did not actually have to say these words on camera—always had in their advice.
“I can help draft something,” McGrath said, “and send it to you before you land.”
After landing and saying a few words on the tarmac, Upton went first to the White House to see Mariette Traynor. The First Lady had been visiting schoolchildren in Washington when she learned of her husband’s death. She had quickly retreated to the White House and remained in seclusion. Now the two women met alone in the mansion’s private rooms. Upton noticed the First Lady had put on a new dress and fresh makeup.
“We should make a plan,” Upton said. “For David’s sake.”
Four days of official mourning, she suggested, with a state funeral in the Capitol on the final day. Mariette, dazed but still herself, agreed.
“You should stay here, in the White House, until the funeral is over.”
For the rest of her life Wendy Upton would remember Mariette Traynor’s desolate response.
“You can have this place,” she said. “I’ll leave tomorrow.”
“No,” Upton said. It came out more sharply than she wished. Somehow, however, she was sure: as long as David Traynor’s body was in the city, his widow, and not his unelected successor, must occupy the White House. The country would never forgive her if she evicted Mariette from her home. “I’m sorry. Please. Stay here until you head to Colorado.”
“I’ve known nothing good here,” Mariette Traynor said. This woman, so competent, so accomplished in her life in business, was a public ornament in the White House, and had at times been targeted by people who wanted to attack her husband.
“I hate politics,” Mariette Traynor said. “Almost every word is a lie. But I loved David. Now I just want to take his body home.”
“Just a few more days,” said Upton. “Please.”
The First Lady pushed a discreet button on the side table and an aide appeared through a door. The aide was there to escort the new president from the room. She had been dismissed. Mariette rose, signaling that Upton should leave. The new president reluctantly stood but she did not move. Then she heard Mariette Traynor say, “All right.”
“Thank you.”
The long motorcade next made its way to Quentin Phelps’s house in Chevy Chase, Maryland, just outside D.C. It was a gesture, she knew, her going to him. It should have been the other way around.
Phelps, in torn blue jeans, a look in his eyes a thousand miles away, stood in the corner of his living room, as far from this moment and Upton as he could get.
“I need you to stay, Quent. David would want it, too.”
Phelps turned away from her, like a boy who couldn’t bear the idea of something he’d been asked to do.
“For his presidency to have meaning,” she said.
Then, though it was unlike her, Upton crossed the room and wrapped her arms around him. They held each other for a long time, his surprise turning to tears. Before today they had never done more than shake hands.
She felt guilty exploiting his grief. But she did need him. So did the country. For the moment, she believed, her needs and the country’s were the same.
But she wasn’t really begging Quentin Phelps in order to preserve David Traynor’s legacy. She was worried about something else. If Phelps fled from the White House, much of the West Wing staff and even some cabinet members might follow, and that would frighten the country even more. Turmoil was her enemy. She needed Traynor’s people around her to project that the government, and by implication the country, was stable. She didn’t leave Phelps’s house until he agreed.
THE NEXT FEW DAYS WERE A BLUR, ENDLESS AND TOO SHORT. They had to jump-start a new presidency and plan the ceremonial end of the old one.
She also had to win over Traynor’s people and decide who among them she trusted. She felt like a stepmother marrying into a large and suspicious family. She found herself relying on an unexpected group—a few of Traynor’s top aides, some of her own, and a couple close friends whose judgment she trusted. There were Phelps and Sterling Moss; Gil, naturally; and two others she kept turning to: Senator Llewellyn Burke of Michigan, the calm bipartisan-minded backscenes player; and Bill McGrath, the consultant Gil had called from Air Force One. She also began to include Randi Brooks, the political fixer, who seemed to know what needed to be known about everyone in Washington and who had no problem being candid. She had asked for Brooks’s partner, Peter Rena, but Gil had said the former soldier was still “radioactive.” Upton never mentioned to Brooks that she had intended to use Rena as a private bridge to Republicans, but that the cyberattacks had quashed the plan. She had never found a consistent or adequate replacement. She had requested that Peter keep it confidential. She assumed Brooks knew nothing about it.
Until Traynor was buried, McGrath had cautioned her that small symbolic gestures were the only kind people wanted her to make. But they should be frequent, so that people knew she was making decisions. She would keep Traynor’s desk, “the Roosevelt,” built for Teddy in 1902, rather than replace it with the older and more impressive “Resolute” most of her predecessors preferred. The Traynors’ beloved photographer, Toni Albion, would stay. So would his press secretary, a glib, witty redhead named Siobhan Walsh.
Mariette Traynor’s people planned the funeral, just as Kennedy’s family had done for Jack. But the ceremonies inevitably would reflect on her, Upton knew. When Mariette asked an obnoxious Hollywood movie director to help plan everything, McGrath and Moss found common ground resenting him. Hollywood people, they agreed, were usually naive and heavy-handed about politics. Upton still felt like jumping out of her skin at the way people fretted about the symbolism of her every movement. She wanted to govern the country, she thought, not stage a four-day movie—let alone a four-year one.
Traynor’s body lay in state for two days in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda to allow Americans to say farewell. A state funeral in the National Cathedral on Wisconsin Avenue. Then the funeral procession wended its way back down to Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, around the Mall and back up Independence Avenue, a route that allowed an estimated eight hundred thousand more citizens to say goodbye. A horse-drawn carriage pulled the casket, followed by a riderless stallion. The family trailed on foot, with the new president and the former First Lady, the two most influential women in the country, side by side, occasionally clasping hands.
The homages to Kennedy’s funeral were obvious, but the procession didn’t cross the bridge to Arlington. Traynor had never served in uniform and the family wanted him buried in Colorado. So the procession turned at the Lincoln Memorial and concluded its journey at Union Station. From there a special train bore the late president’s body slowly west. Americans lined the tracks to say farewell, draping flags on railway bridges, following the train in their cars where the roads neared the tracks, standing ten deep where the tracks allowed them. The journey recalled the final rail trips home of Lincoln and FDR—just as the Hollywood movie director had predicted. And somehow the pictures suggested that the nation in grief had returned, at least for a moment, to what were remembered as simpler times, when we did not hate each other so much.