CATOCTIN MOUNTAIN PARK, MARYLAND
Sunday 2 May
The day after she saw Rena and Brooks, President Upton left to spend the weekend at Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountains of western Maryland.
The lodge and cabins originally had been a camp built for families of federal workers during the Depression, until Franklin Roosevelt’s worried doctors during World War II thought the president needed somewhere nearby to get away and relax. Upton took the thirty-minute helicopter flight there Saturday morning to see a couple of friends and do a little business. She invited Quentin Phelps and his family to join her—to forge more of a bond—along with three female senators she had once considered close, two Republicans and a moderate Democrat. Maybe sharing a weekend would rekindle some trust there, too.
After Sunday brunch she met with Phelps to go over a list of possible vice presidents.
“There are some good names here,” she said of the list his team had provided. They were all moderate or iconoclastic Democrats—no one from the party’s left wing and no Republicans. That, everyone agreed, would feel like an unelected takeover of the executive branch. “But let’s get even more unconventional. Look further outside Washington.”
She thought Phelps was catering to her rather than pushing her.
She switched topics. “I’m shocked by the death of Kim Matsuda.”
“Incredible,” he agreed.
“A heart attack?”
“Too soon to be sure.”
She sensed there was something Phelps wasn’t telling her.
“Which means what?”
“Kim had discovered something. She was coming here to give Rena and Brooks a message.”
“A message about the program?”
“That’s what they’re heading to California to find out.”
She hadn’t been told.
“Is there some suspicion this wasn’t an accident?”
He gave her a worried look as an answer. So now Quent’s cherished battery project had something else hanging over it, too. Was it really possible someone had murdered the head of the program? What kind of awful mess was this secret battery becoming?
She let out a long breath. “We will talk more about this.”
Right now, she had people waiting.
Two other guests had come up for brunch and a talk: Senate majority leader Travis Carter and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Aggie Tucker. They were waiting for her by the pool, Carter slightly ridiculous in his khakis and blue sneakers, Aggie decked out as if he had just shopped at REI.
A long time ago, when they were Senate aides, Aggie had been infatuated with her, attracted by her shyness and her strength and her blond hair. Her rejection of him only seemed to have increased his ardor. But the awkwardness between them had melted over the years into a surprising friendship, one that deepened after they were elected senators.
Brunch had been a social affair. This meeting was business. She wanted to deliver a message.
They sat at a small table by the pool. Stewards offered Bloody Marys.
“We’ve known each other a long time, haven’t we?” she began.
“We surely have,” Aggie agreed.
“I hope that counts for something because I want to ask for your help.”
She glanced at Carter and could see the warning bells clanging in the Senate majority leader’s brain, ringing behind his eyes.
“And we’re happy if we can give it,” Carter answered with a hint of menace.
“When David Traynor became president,” she said, “he promised to consult with Republicans first on policy, even before talking to Democrats. It was a bold idea, but he lived up to it.”
The Senate majority leader had hated it. It had wooed some of his party members away when Traynor put things they wanted into bills.
“Yes, Madam President, but with all due respect,” Carter said, uttering Washington’s most universal insult, “David Traynor did not understand how the Senate worked.”
When they were in the Senate together, this man Carter had disdained her—a woman who was ideologically suspect and hard to keep in line. Now he was trying to wrap his mind around the inconceivable reality of her being president; and he was hardly the only one. More than a few old colleagues on both sides thought she had cheated her way there somehow, betraying her party for power. What did she believe in? They saw only disgrace, not an effort to rescue her party from losing its way.
“Aggie, when David died, you asked me what I wanted to accomplish? Who I wanted to be as president? Remember?”
“I do.”
“I told you I wasn’t free to answer that yet—that my obligation was to David.”
Aggie nodded again.
“Eventually I will add my own agenda,” she said.
She was putting it out there, the tantalizing prospect that they could influence her—that in some way they could shape the White House without having an election. She was, after all, still a Republican.
“So let me turn the tables on you,” she went on. “If you were president, if history would remember you for just one thing, what would you want it to be? What would be worth risking everything to do?”
It was a question, but also a message:
Presidents were remembered; senators, usually, were not. If history noted these men at all, it most likely would be only as characters in other people’s biographies. Perhaps even hers.
“I’m asking you seriously, Travis: if you had to risk everything, what would you want to accomplish?”
The majority leader seemed momentarily without words.
“I’d want us to be a moral nation again,” he said at last.
“Which means?”
“It worries me you do not know,” Carter said.
“I’m asking you,” she said again, trying not to lose her temper.
“We’re a conservative country, and a Judeo-Christian one. If we returned to the tenets of Christ, we would know how to solve all our problems.”
“What you really mean is I’m not conservative enough.”
“If you want to put it that way.”
“Conservative enough for whom?”
“The American people.”
Good. He had said it.
“Ahh, I think I have you there, Mr. Leader. I’m the only one here voted on by all the people.”
It was true: only presidents and vice presidents are voted on by everyone. Travis Carter was elected only by the majority of voters in Idaho.
“But the American people have chosen the Republican Party to control the Senate.”
“That’s the thing, Travis. You think I’m a political orphan. And I think I have something bigger than party. I have the people, and I intend to keep them.”
A new poll that morning found Upton had the support of an astonishing 70 percent—among them not only most independents and Democrats but also nearly half of all Republicans.
She was threatening a realignment. She was telling them that, in the politics she was creating, their party affiliation tainted them at least as much as it gave them legitimacy.
“You have six bills sitting in the Senate, all of them basically things Republican senators wanted that David gave you. If you won’t pass them—because you don’t want to cooperate with the enemy—I am very happy to see which of us is more likely to win the argument over who’s to blame,” she said.
“I don’t have the votes,” Carter said.
“No, you just won’t give them to me. If you help me, I will campaign for your reelection. I will campaign for anyone who helps get these things done. I don’t care which party they belong to. I have a unique freedom to do that. And I intend to use it.”
They had never seen her speak to them this way. In the Senate, she often waited for men to talk before she spoke up—letting them blow off their manly steam. Now she was setting the terms of the discussion, framing the questions, some of which were not questions at all but coded messages.
“Do you intend to intrude on the Senate’s internal procedures?” the majority leader asked.
There it was.
Travis’s calculus. The majority leader cared about one thing. He wanted to protect his power, which resided in the party’s cherished unwritten rules that leadership used to keep members in line—only bringing votes to the floor a majority of his own party supported. His way of protecting his members from being primaried. David Traynor had threatened to challenge those rules all the way to the Supreme Court.
Upton had been silent on the question. Her leverage lay in their not knowing her plans. And she wouldn’t give them an answer now. But she had threatened them with war nonetheless.
“Thank you for coming out,” she said. “I know it’s a long drive. I won’t keep you any longer. But before you go, please understand something. David’s death has changed everything. His wishes, which were popular, are now a national mandate. That means you need to change, too, or I think you will be run over by this.”
She left them sitting by the pool.
When she was far enough away, Aggie let out a whistle. “You know, I was a little in love with her once.”
Carter ignored him. “She wasn’t asking for our help. She was sending us a warning.”
“I believe she was.”
“Does she really think having no party helps her? That she can realign the public behind her? That she is above party?”
But there was worry in his voice when he said it.
“Maybe I am going to fall in love with her again,” Aggie said. Just to bother Carter.