The Last Debate (33 page)

That force had no effect, interestingly enough, on two members of the news media—Jim Weaver of Continental Radio and Carol Reynolds of CNS News. They were no Jerry Rhomes.

Weaver refused all of my requests for an interview about his predebate threats against Henry Ramirez. He finally agreed to receive questions in writing. I submitted seven questions that were based on Henry Ramirez’s account of what was said in the phone conversation and afterward. What I got back was a faxed statement from somebody named Jeffrey Walling, who identified himself as general counsel for the Continental Radio Network, West Hollywood, California. Here is that statement in its entirety:

“Jim Weaver acknowledges that he expressed his displeasure with Henry Ramirez’s failure to consult with his supervisors in regard to the Williamsburg Debate panel invitation. Mr. Weaver categorically denies the tone and substance of everything else. The issues raised concern sensitive personnel matters that cannot be discussed without violating the privacy standards Continental Radio considers essential to a healthy and delicate employee-employer relationship. Mr. Weaver and all others at Continental Radio have the utmost respect and regard for the professional capabilities and personal attributes of Henry Ramirez. He is a credit to our network and to America.”

Carol Reynolds would not speak to me about anything, including the process that led up to Joan Naylor’s selection for the panel. She acknowledged only that she was involved. “The rest is privileged inside information,” she said. I asked her how she as a professional journalist would react to someone who said that to her as a justification for not answering a legitimate inquiry. “I do not consider yours legitimate,” she replied.

I spent an important afternoon with Brad Lilly.

We met in his tiny half-furnished office in a large suite of offices on K Street in downtown Washington. The sign on the main door said
FOUNDATION FOR THE STUDY OF AMERICAN POLITICAL HISTORY.

“This has all the looks of a CIA front,” I said to break the ice.

Lilly was in no mood for any jokes about his current station in life. “It beats sleeping on the grate outside,” he said.

Then, speaking mostly in a tone of annoyed resignation, he told me
everything I wanted to know. I took him through the panelist-selection meeting, the control-room chaos during the debate, and all of the other small predebate events with Greene that I thought were pertinent. I was impressed with his memory for detail, his feeling of responsibility toward helping to keep “the historical record straight.”

I was surprised by his willingness to tell me how he was fired. He said Greene did it to him during the ride in the limo from Williamsburg to the Newport News–Williamsburg airport right after the debate.

He said Greene’s first words to him after the limo started moving away from the Lodge were: “I don’t want you to get on the plane with me. I want you out of this campaign, out of my sight.”

“I was crushed beyond belief,” Lilly told me. “Here we were, the favored recipients of the most glorious gift in the history of presidential politics. I was higher than I had ever been before in my life. Political and personal sugarplums were dancing in my head like Roman candles. And here he hits me—bam! It’s all over. Good-bye, sugarplums. Good-bye, everything.”

Lilly said he asked Greene why and he got a one-sentence answer: “I want no more of your loser mentality.”

Greene would not even respond to Lilly’s protest that it was him—Greene—who had the loser mentality before the debate. “Let’s not talk about it anymore now or evermore,” said Greene.

Lilly appealed to Greene’s decency and sense of fair play, saying: “This will humiliate me in front of the world. I will be ruined forever.”

Greene did not respond. Lilly said he suddenly knew what it felt like to drive a Volkswagen into a six-feet-thick concrete wall. This man was not budging. There had been a crash and he—Brad Lilly, professional political campaign manager—was the crash-ee. So he turned to the details.

He said to Greene: “What will you say to the press about me, about my leaving?”

“I will say I want to take the campaign in a new direction.”

“A new direction? The debate just did that! ‘Fucking’ just did that!”

“You are a hired gun. Hired guns are hired and they are fired. And, please, don’t think I have forgotten about your book. Write what you want.
You were going to anyhow. You were going to write that I was a loser, a fool, a whatever. Well, now you will be writing about the next president of the United States, so it will definitely improve your sales.”

Then, Lilly said he said to Greene in a fit of anger and stupidity, “You can’t fire me.”

Greene said: “After what happened back there tonight, I can do anything I want. Out, go.”

Out, go. After a good two to three minutes of absolute silence between them, Lilly said he came back with what he admitted to me was nothing more than the plea of a desperate man.

“Governor, could you give me some time—until after the election? I will stay out of the loop, out of command, out of everything, if you wish.”

“How about out of my sight?”

“It’s a deal.”

Lilly said Greene honored the commitment and he was saved the jarring humiliation of being fired right then on the spot, but it leaked, as everything does, and he was, in his words, “only half humiliated instead.”

Then I decided to toss a phony grenade. I said: “I would love to know any details you can give me on how you-all got on to Meredith’s violent side, how you found the women, got their statements, passed them on to the panelists—all of that—”

Lilly did not let me even finish the question. “You must think I am some kind of idiot, Chapman.”

“Well, I know it’s confidential stuff, but it’s all over now. Why not give me a lead or two at least?”

“Here I sit in this shithole closet of an office because I had nowhere else to go. My guy won. But he fired me, disowned me, ruined me—my network-commentator possibilities, my book contract, my consulting opportunities. I took this because they were willing to give me the use of this tiny desk, this phone, and this fifteen-year-old computer if I would write them a paper on the campaign. Now you come in here insulting my intelligence, screwing around with me. Please, buzz off. I have enough problems.”

The man was clearly upset. I said: “Are you saying you did not know about those statements until they were read during the debate?”

“Yes, goddamn it. Yes. That is what I am saying. I can promise you they would have gotten out a helluva lot sooner than they did if I had.
We had heard the same rumors everyone else heard about Meredith’s so-called violent side. But we never had the interest or the resources to run them down. The governor didn’t believe in that kind of campaign stuff anyhow. Go ask Howley or somebody who knows. Leave me alone.”

I told him Howley had thus far refused to talk to me, and the other three panelists—again, thus far—had said they did not know where the statements came from.

“Have you asked Turpin?”

“Turpin? How could he know?”

“He had those Nelson thugs working for him. He knew everything.”

Turpin had reluctantly agreed “in principle” to an interview at some unspecified time in the future but had turned down all my approaches since. I made a note of Lilly’s suggestion but without much faith in its value. First, it made no sense that Turpin or any other Meredith people would have had anything to do with acquiring those statements from the women and/or giving them to Howley for the debate. Second, if they knew who did, they would be screaming bloody murder about it on
Jack and Jill
and all the other shouting spots on all the other networks from sea to shining sea.

If I had been doing a different kind of book, one that concentrated on the candidates and the campaign rather than the debate and the panelists, I might have said something more to Lilly. I might have said it must be an unbearable hell to have come as close as you came to the ultimate prize in American politics and have it snapped away. Tell me about it.

I didn’t say any of that. I simply asked a last question: “I guess it would not make sense to ask if there is any way you might be able and willing to help me get an interview with Greene?”

“You’re right,” he said. “It makes absolutely, one thousand percent, all the way, full house, shithouse no ‘fucking’ sense.”

I thanked him for his cooperation and left his tiny little office and future.

Within two days Jennifer Gates produced a recording of a recording that she thought I ought to hear. She said various cross-checking and cross-referencing
and other attempts did not produce a name to go with that unlisted phone number I had given her. So she took direct action. She simply dialed the number. After the fifth ring an answering machine took over. She hung up and called it back with her phone on
RECORD
. That made it possible for me to now listen to an arrogant male voice say:

“Hello, this is Pat Tubbs. Neither Mary nor I am able to take your call now. Leave a message at the tone and we’ll get back to you. I promise.”

Pat Tubbs.
The
Pat Tubbs of
The Washington Morning News.
Pat Tubbs, one of the richest and most famous investigative reporters in America. The man who ran presidential candidates and cabinet officers and Supreme Court nominees and all kinds of other public figures back to where they came from—or to jail.

Why was Mike Howley talking to Pat Tubbs so long on that Saturday night before the debate?

I decided to call Pat Tubbs right then and ask him. I assumed he would not take a call from me, so I told the woman who answered his phone that I was Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. I had read in one of the gossip columns that Tubbs was working on an “inside the Fed” exposé book and Greenspan had thus far refused to talk to him.

He came on the line immediately and I quickly told him who I was and asked my question.

“What were you and Howley talking about that Saturday night before the debate?”

“I do not
answer
questions, you lying asshole, I
ask
them” was his answer, delivered in the gruff, arrogant style that was his famous trademark.

Then he hung up the phone with a loud smash, another of his famous trademarks.

T
he birth of
Sunday Morning with Hank and Barb
was announced in the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Massachusetts Avenue. It was a Washington news conference—cocktail party pageant catered and attended by the most expensive of their respective kinds.

There were an army of well-dressed waiters, many baskets of flowers and trays of drinks, finger sandwiches, hot snacks, and sweets fit for a prince and princess—if not for a king and queen. The nation’s print and electronic press sent its top radio-TV, media, show-business, feature, and gossip people. One television critic, speaking most satirically, called it “another eye-watering, momentous development in television, that electronic marvel that remains the greatest potential for good ever invented.” The network spokespersons and press releases, speaking seriously, called the teaming of an African American and a Hispanic on a regular national program “a historic first.”

Barbara Manning and Henry Ramirez had been dressed and otherwise prepared by a network team of designers, makeup experts, and others from New York. Henry wore a dark blue double-breasted suit—the
first double-breasted suit he had ever had on his body. Barbara, her hair sparkling and perfect, wore a light blue suit.

There were several to-the-point questions asked of them and the network executives on hand.

“How do you know it’ll work?” was the toughest.

“We don’t,” Henry said. “But I agree with the people here who hired us—it is sure worth a try.”

“Seriously,” said a reporter, “what makes you two think you can whip Jack and Jill?”

“We’re not out to whip anybody,” Barbara said. “We’re just going to do our best and hope and pray we don’t make fools of ourselves.”

That brought some laughter from throughout the room.

“Are you really worried that might happen?” somebody asked. “That you might make fools of yourselves?”

Barbara was afraid she had already made a fool of herself just standing there in a thousand-dollar suit. She honestly believed there was every good chance that she and Henry—Hank and Barb—would last one Sunday and one Sunday only, just as Mark Southern, the original clownalist, had done.

Henry answered the question. “Barbara is the modest one on this team. Obviously, we know we can and will do this, and do it successfully, or we wouldn’t be out here now, and out there beginning two weeks from this Sunday.”

Henry swore to me that was not just talk. He really did have a terrific feeling about what he and Barbara were going to do. “It seemed as natural as music with salsa,” he said. I resisted the urge to say I had always believed it was chips, not music, that went with salsa.

Henry and Barbara and all of the others who stood on a small stage for the brief question-and-answer period declined to say how much the new team was being paid or disclose anything else about their contracts. Neither Henry nor Barbara would give
me
the details either. All I knew—know—was what came out at that first Four Seasons breakfast about two million dollars a year guaranteed for two years, no matter what, and a lot of limo and apartment perks. Not only did Henry and Barbara clam up on the details in my later conversations, the agent from William Morris who ended up negotiating their final ABS contract wouldn’t say anything
either. Neither would the people at the network on an official basis. But I was told unofficially by someone who claimed to know that the contract had what this person called “an unprecedented ratings escalator.” If Hank and Barb caught and overtook Jack and Jill, the amounts of money that would go to Henry and Barbara, according to my source, were of “Sawyer-plus dimensions.” I asked if a figure even as high as ten million was out of the question. The answer was a simple no.