The Last Debate (9 page)

Howley paused for a beat. Nobody said anything. They were listening.

Howley said: “I believe all of us must feel free to say anything that we wish to say without worrying about reading it tomorrow or any other tomorrow.…”

“What are you worried about?” Joan asked. In light of subsequent events it reads like an amazingly prescient question. But she assured me that nothing like that was involved. She had no hints, no signs, of anything to come. It was simply an automatic knee-jerk response.

“I’m not worried about anything in particular,” Howley replied. “But let’s say one of us floats an idea for a question or an approach that is truly off the wall. Something that is in bad taste, inappropriate, idiotic. I would not be keen on hearing you report on CNS something like ‘Mike Howley of
The Washington Morning News
suggested asking Paul L. Greene if he had ever had sex with a farm animal. He was talked out of it by the other panelists.’ ”

“You are asking us, journalists all, to agree beforehand not to report on what might happen in something as important as this presidential debate,” Barbara said. “I am not sure I am comfortable with that.”

Barbara was very proud of what she said. She remembers it as the moment she became coherent. She thought straight and actually said what she thought in a way that was clean and understandable.

“I think Mike may be right, Barbara,” Joan said. “We ought to feel free to say anything here among the four of us.”

“Right,” Henry said. “But so is Barbara.”

“This must be what it’s like when four thieves get together,” Barbara said.

“All right, all right,” said Howley. “I won’t press the point any further now.”

Howley had had some early misgivings about what he called “the hand he was dealt.” He meant the fact that the black and the Hispanic were really kids who had no business on this panel. Affirmative action run amuck was the way he saw it. He was fine with Joan Naylor, although he could tell she was pissed about something. He considered the possibility that she had wanted to moderate this debate and was still sore about being passed over.

Joan Naylor, too, was not overjoyed by the presence of Henry Ramirez and Barbara Manning. Those two don’t have two weeks’ experience between them, she thought. The whole world knows why they are here. But being on a presidential-debate panel ought to be only for people who have been at this awhile, no matter what.

Barbara Manning, though happy she was out of her coma, knew she had to be careful or she’d go too far the other way. Come on too loud, too much. Sometimes she couldn’t stop herself. It was the way she got through tough things in her life, and it always worked, and, God knows, this qualified as a tough thing in her life. White boy Howley and white girl Naylor certainly got their noses and their tails in the air over this. But why not? This is a high-nose-and-tail affair. Relax, Barbara, she told herself over and over. Relax. Everything is going to be all right. Poor old Henry Ramirez. It’s too bad they couldn’t come up with one with a little more age and experience and smarts. Hey, look who’s talking! I’ll bet that’s what the others are thinking about me right now! Well, so what? Here I am! Here he is!

Henry Ramirez was wondering when they were going to start talking about the questions they would ask Greene and Meredith. That’s what this is all about, he thought. All of this preliminary stuff is just wasting time. Mike Howley is certainly an impressive guy. Just the way he ought to be. It’s too bad he didn’t remember me. When I get to be in his shoes I probably won’t remember every little gringo reporter from Texas who comes along to kiss my ring either. Where did they get this black lady? African American, sorry. She’s so hyper she’s about to come out of that shiny black skin of hers. It’s not that black, really. In fact, hers is lighter
than mine. Hers and my skin, side by side, wouldn’t probably look that different. It’s in the eyes. And the nose and the lips. That’s where we are different. And in the brain, of course. When are we going to get down to business?

“Shouldn’t we decide who is going to ask the first question?” Henry said.

Howley said: “Well, as a matter of fact, the moderator asks the first question. That is in the rules that the candidates’ representatives and the commission people worked out.”

And he explained the format, which was the most traditional and most controlled of those available. The Greene camp had insisted on the journalists’ panel. The Meredith people had argued for a single moderator with a town-hall citizens-audience call-in approach—similar to the Take It Back, America one their candidate had used for seven dramatically successful years before millions on live radio and national television. Turpin—and everyone else—knew his man would “wipe the floor” with Greene in such a free-flowing format. That was why Lilly adamantly opposed its use.

But in many ways the format was considered irrelevant. It was generally believed—and stated repeatedly on every morning, noon, and night, weekday and weekend, talk, food-fight, call-in, analysis, and clownalist show—that Greene would have a problem if he was debating an empty chair. The only unique thing about the final agreed- to setup for Williamsburg was that for the first time there would be no live audience and thus no applause, cheering, or other noise to deal with. The only people in the auditorium with the candidates and the panelists would be the television-camera people and other technicians needed to get it on the air.

Mike Howley went through the details. The four panelists rotated asking questions. Candidate A got two minutes to answer, Candidate B a minute to respond or rebut. Then came the next question to Candidate B for a two-minute answer, Candidate A for a one-minute rebuttal, and on and on in precise rotation for some eighty-two minutes. Then each candidate had two minutes for a closing statement directly to camera. The order of everything would be determined by a drawing.

“What if one of them says something outrageous—namely Meredith—and Greene wants to jump and slap him back?” Barbara asked.

“Can’t happen,” Mike responded.

“We can’t ask follow-ups?” Henry asked.

“Nope. One of you could follow up another’s question in the next round, but that is it.”

There was a moment of annoyance.

“Well, this is a stupid way to do things,” Henry said. “I do not like these rules at all.”

“I don’t either,” Barbara said, looking right at Mike Howley. “Let’s just ignore ’em. What if we go out there tomorrow night and you say to those two candidates, ‘Mr. Meredith … Mr. Greene, we are going to get out of your way. For the next ninety minutes you can talk spontaneously about the issues confronting this country today and how you differ in your approaches to them. You can do it in any way and under any rules or guidelines you like. The four of us on this distinguished panel, us distinguished New Arrogants, are going to just sit back with the rest of the American people and just watch and listen.’ ”

“Great idea, but no way,” Joan said.

Henry said: “Good, no way. I came here to ask some questions. I want to ask some questions.”

Barbara said: “I guess Meredith would just start talking and preening and lying, and the governor would be made to look like a stupid ass again, as always.”

Howley said: “Some might argue also that there’s an issue of credibility and integrity here for
us.
We all are here as invited guests, as professionals willing to contribute our services on behalf of voter education and edification. We accepted the terms, the rules of the debate, when we accepted the invitation. It would be professionally irresponsible to pull a stunt like that.”

Then he said: “How about we look at the menus and order some dinner?”

There was an immediate consensus in favor of doing so.

I came to my Williamsburg reporting assignment in a four-door Toyota Corolla rented from Avis at the Newport News–Williamsburg International Airport. So what? you (and Howley in the
Appendix
) might say. Under
normal circumstances I would agree that this kind of I-was-there information from a reporter is irrelevant. The problem is that as much as I abhor it, my movements and methods became a minor story within the so-called Media Critics’ world in the course of my reporting. Some unfair and nasty charges were leveled at me and they began with that rent-a-car.

The New American Tatler
magazine paid for the car. I have my Nations Bank, USAir, Visa, and other receipts—including the frequent-flyer-miles credit form—to prove it. The charge that I was brought into Williamsburg on a private jet by some sinister person or group of sinister persons and then chauffeured around in the company of armed security people affiliated with the private security firm working for Meredith is absurd, ridiculous, a lie. The snide fantasy suggestions, for instance, that appeared in
Fortune
, a once reputable publication, that I was part of a “still shadowy and unknown conspiracy” or “possibly the journalistic front man for an effort to subvert democratic systems” would be laughable if not so potentially damaging to me and my career.
Fortune
refused to print a correction and I still am not sure where all of that came from and why. But I am sure of my movements and actions in those hours leading up to the debate itself.

I came to Virginia from Bloomington, Indiana, where I had gone in pursuit of a story we at the
Tatler
had preslugged “The Violence Teachers.” I had gone into it already incensed and appalled by the emotional cripples who coach big-time college basketball, the grown men who throw towels and chairs and vulgarisms at referees, fans, opposition coaches, and even their own players and members of their own families. My blood was now at a full boil over what I had found out about those foul-mouthed bully showoffs and the school administrators and alumni who tolerated and encouraged them. I hated to interrupt my boil, but I also had my obligations to my editor, Jonathan Angel, and the magazine. And the idea of going behind the scenes of a presidential debate was intriguing. The call from Jonathan about Williamsburg was a last-minute affair. He had other writers on the presidential campaign itself, but he wanted me—“somebody with your touch for irony and the personal” is the flattering way he put it, frankly—to go with an idea of doing a “behind-the-faces-and-the-postures” piece about this important event. Another rationalization for me was that a brief respite from my anger at the imbecile coaches
and what they were doing to encourage and foster violence and disrespect among the young people of this country might be good for my blood pressure—and thus my health.

The Newport News—Williamsburg airport was a pleasant surprise. It turned out to be a small architectural jewel of a place with a feel and ambience that was more like that of a museum of modern art than of an airport. There were Windsor-style chairs in the phone booths and an atrium in the center that brought the sun down on the waiting-room area filled with wooden garden benches. Across the ceiling in the main ticketing hallway hung eight-feet-tall colored banners with the arty, shadowed portraits and signatures of great Americans/Virginians of history—George and Martha Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Wythe, George Mason, Patrick Henry, John Marshall, and even Pocahontas, among others. The building itself—a brick base with silver support beams and glass halfway up and across the top—bore the mark of a famous architect. I did not take the time to check, but it would not surprise me to find that it was the work of a Pei, Johnson, Jacobsen, Venturi, or one of the other great ones. The only things lacking were customers and flights. United, American, and USAir each had only a handful of small-plane commuter flights from the three Washington airports and places like Philadelphia and Raleigh-Durham.

I came in from Pittsburgh on a USAir 737, one of the few big-plane flights into Newport News–Williamsburg. I arrived just after five
P.M.
on Saturday. (Yes, I plead guilty to having flown first-class, which was in my contract with the
Tatler.
It is business-class for foreign flights.) I rented the Toyota and drove less than ten minutes east on Interstate 64 to the Omni–Newport News Hotel, where the Meredith campaign was headquartered. The Greene campaign entourage was only a few blocks away on the other side of the interstate in a Ramada Inn. The plan was for the candidates to come to Williamsburg, less than thirty minutes west, on Sunday evening shortly before the debate.

A postdebate story in
The Washington Morning News
(Howley’s paper, please remember) claimed I was taken immediately “like royalty” to Meredith’s suite at the Omni, where I was “massaged and messaged” and otherwise set up to do a flattering piece about Meredith, a rarity thus far in the entire national press coverage of the campaign. Not true. I went
to the ninth-floor suite of Jack Turpin, a man I had never met before, and asked permission to be present when Meredith rehearsed for the debate that evening. I had been told there was going to be a full-scale rehearsal in a ballroom down on the basement level of the hotel. I knew access would be restricted and limited, but I also knew it would be a great place to begin my story, a great place to start looking for what was happening behind the faces and the postures. A reminder, please, that my prede-bate focus was solely on the candidates.