Power Play

‘Sure,’ he said, sensing an opportunity of his own. ‘Governor Carr always makes time for our British friends.’

I hurriedly made arrangements. Luntz greeted me at the Governor’s Mansion. He is unimpressive to look at, a badly dressed, shambling figure with scuffed shoes and an appalling jet-black wig, but what lies beneath the bad wig has made him one of the most sought-after political consultants anywhere in the United States. Luntz walked down the central staircase in the mansion towards me wearing a stained blue suit, which fitted him the way a horsebox fits a horse. We shook hands and I followed him upstairs to meet Governor Theo Carr. We sat on the porch at the back of the mansion, the three of us, drinking iced tea and chewing over world affairs.

‘To what do we owe this honour, Mr Price?’

‘Please call me Alex, Governor. I was just passing through on my way west and I thought it would be good to say hello.’

I offered to host a visit to London, guaranteeing that Governor Carr could speak to Members of Parliament, my future brother-in-law (who was then the Leader of the Opposition,) government ministers, and maybe even the then Prime Minister, Fraser Davis’s predecessor.

Carr and Luntz nodded that it would be a good idea. Of course it was a good idea. A convenient friendship was born.

‘Passing through our state capital? No way,’ Theo Carr told me as I prepared to leave. He had that famous twinkling in his eyes and a cheeky grin. ‘Delighted as we are to see you, Mr Price, no one just passes through here.’

Theo Carr was Governor of a state of ‘flyover people’–the people you fly over on the way between the east and west coasts.

‘Busted,’ I admitted, holding my hands up in mock surrender. ‘I made a point of coming to see you, Governor Carr. You are worth a deliberate detour, as they say in the tourist guidebooks.’

He laughed. ‘Yeah, like a National Park. And why might the–what’s that title again?–Minister Counsellor at the Embassy of the United Kingdom in Washington be sufficiently interested in Governor Theo Carr to make a detour?’

‘Talent spotting,’ I laughed along with him. ‘I think you might be President of the United States one day …’

‘You–and Arlo here–and my momma, God bless her,’ he interrupted with more twinkling and more of a grin. ‘Makes three of you. Just a couple of hundred million American voters to go.’

‘… and I thought we should do what dogs do in the street, and sniff noses.’

Theo Carr laughed uproariously. So did Luntz.

‘Let’s just leave it at noses,’ he guffawed, and slapped me on the shoulder. It was a Gateway Moment. Fast-forward a few years, and now here I am promoted to Ambassador and he is what the US Secret Service calls POTUS, President of the United States, and Arlo Luntz is the most highly regarded and devious political consultant on the planet. It was worth the deliberate detour.

‘We didn’t do so badly, Alex,’ Theo Carr told me at the White House reception for the Inauguration, ‘for a coupla country boys.’

In those first months of his presidency–and despite all the trouble I was having with Vice-President Black–President Carr, building on that early familiarity, always called me by my first name.

At diplomatic functions or G8 Summits he would point at me in that friendly way of his, and call out, ‘Yo, Brit Guy, how’s the nose-sniffin’ comin’ along?’

None of this bonhomie made any impression on the Vice-President. Month after month it seemed to me that Black had a moat around him, like an old-fashioned castle.

‘The drawbridge is up, the portcullis down, defences primed to repel invaders, Alex,’ Johnny Lee Ironside once told me. Johnny Lee has many talents, of course, including a fine turn of phrase. He’s loyal. Discreet. Clever. And unlike those who talk behind the Vice-President’s back, Johnny Lee genuinely admired and respected Black, yet even he sometimes called his boss by the Churchillian phrase once applied to Soviet Russia–a riddle inside an enigma, wrapped in a mystery. What makes Johnny Lee special is that he is part of a dying breed within American politics, a gut-instinct Anglophile who does not just think relations between Britain and America are the most important rock for the United States, he breathes and eats it. Once when we were talking about the aloof nature of his boss, Johnny Lee confided that he had been reading the works of Evelyn Waugh and they provided a clue.

‘The Vice-President is an Englishman,’ Johnny Lee informed me, bizarrely.

I did not understand. ‘The Vice-President is from Montana,’ I blurted out. ‘Couldn’t be further from English in every way.’ The centre of gravity in American politics had shifted from East Coast anglophiles like Johnny Lee to people like Theo Carr, Bobby Black, and Kristina Taft. They were all from the West or Midwest. Johnny Lee shook his head.

‘Your Mr Waugh says that an English gentleman understands two social states–Intimacy and Formality. Intimacy is for family, lovers, and close friends. Formality is for everybody else.’ Johnny Lee smiled. He delights in being more learned about English culture than those of us who happen to be British. ‘Whereas we colonial-American types are capable of three social attitudes–Intimacy, Formality–but also Familiarity.’

I congratulated him. It was a great insight into Bobby Black’s character. Unlike many Americans, he could not do Familiarity. Theo Carr is the administration’s backslapping baby kisser. Bobby Black isn’t.

‘So how do you explain it?’ I wondered.

‘British genes,’ Johnny Lee said. ‘The Black family is from Scotland, ‘parently.’

Ah, I thought. A useful clue to the heart of Bobby Black’s darkness. Not Englishness after all, but Presbyterianism. The Vice-President was some kind of dour Scot from the mountains of Montana, with a chip on his shoulder about the English. I filed this piece of information away for further consideration.

As Arlo Luntz tells it, friendship in Washington, like that between me and Johnny Lee, is a ‘power resource’. It enables you to get things done. The more friends you have, the more stellar the cast list at your dinner parties, the more influential you are … therefore the more friends you have … and so on, in a virtuous circle of power. Luntz is full of little observations and proverbs like this, rules for conduct in modern politics. He told me once that Washington DC Rule Number One is ‘Don’t Make Unnecessary Enemies.’ Rule Two is that ‘the bigger your friends, the more juice you have’, ‘juice’ being Washington slang for power or influence, though not always in a good way.

‘And you have plenty juice, Ambassador Price,’ Luntz said to me, almost as an aside. ‘Anybody whose brother-in-law happens to be Prime Minister has plenty juice.’

In that first year of the Carr presidency, Vice-President Bobby Black had more juice than anyone in DC, except perhaps Carr himself, and yet he routinely broke Arlo Luntz’s basic rules. Bobby Black stomped on people. He made enemies, necessary and–like Kristina Taft and me–unnecessary enemies too. His own friends were anonymous corporate types from his previous business past, middle-aged balding men in grey suits who ran oil companies, high-tech businesses and private security corporations, plus lawyers and lobbyists from what Washingtonians call ‘Gucci Gulch’–a corridor of nastiness along K Street in northwest Washington. It takes its name from the inhabitants who wear $500 tasselled Gucci loafers along with their $2,000 suits.

‘Friends in the shadows,’ Johnny Lee Ironside once told me of his boss, without explanation. ‘FOBs.’

FOBs meant ‘Friends of Bobby’. I knew some of the names. Just the names. Ron Gold of Goldcrest, the energy and private security consortium, was a long time FOB. So was Paul Comfort, the CEO of Warburton, the high-tech military and construction contractor. Warburton had somehow snagged all the latest contracts for rebuilding Iraq. This caused more bad feeling with Downing Street, much more than the public row about torture, Manila, Muhammad Asif Khan or the United Nations all put together. Fraser Davis was furious. He shouted at me on the secure line that the Americans had their snouts in the trough. More importantly, we did not.

‘British jobs are at stake, Alex!’

He demanded an explanation of how $7 billion in Iraqi contracts went to just one company, Warburton, on a no-bid basis, meaning no British firms could compete.

‘A billion dollars worth of these infrastructure projects is in the south–Basra–that’s supposed to be our bailiwick, Alex!’

‘I don’t think the Americans see it like that, Prime Minister.’

‘But … the Vice-President gave you a copy of that Spartacus document. He must think highly of you, yes? And of his relationship with the United Kingdom government? And yet he did not talk about the Iraq contracts?’

‘You know what it is like dealing with the Vice-President, Prime Minister. It’s not easy.’

I lamely tried to explain that no American firms were allowed to compete for the contracts either, and that Speaker Betty Furedi had promised a Congressional investigation into what she called the ‘Iraqi sweetheart deal scandal.’

‘But investigations in this town are like belly buttons, Prime Minister,’ I said, ‘everyone’s got one.’

Davis was apoplectic but impotent.

‘It’s just not right,’ he bellowed, ‘just not right.’

* * *

Warburton’s CEO Paul Comfort, like Bobby Black, was from Montana. They were childhood friends. People suspected something in their relationship, but could not get to the bottom of it. Campaign contributions? Soft money? I’d heard Comfort was a ‘bundler’–one of the people who ‘bundled’ contributions together from many sources and provided Bobby Black with serious and above board cash. But Gold and Comfort were just names to me. I read about them in the Wall Street Journal business pages. I knew they were members of NEST–Bobby Black’s National Energy Strategy Taskforce–set up to map out US energy policy for the twenty-first century, but you never saw them on TV, they never gave interviews, I never had the pleasure of meeting them. Men, as Johnny Lee said, from the shadows.

Johnny Lee Ironside also says that outside the White House there are five permanent Washington Tribes–Diplomats, Congressmen, Lawyers, Journalists, and Lobbyists. The Five Tribes overlap. Their people sleep with each other and sometimes marry. They play golf and poker, entertain together, commit adultery, and their children go to the same schools. Members of all Five Tribes know that, like the Carr-Black administration, the people in the White House come and go, but the Tribes go on forever. Superficially the Tribes defer to the Office of the President, and to the Office of the Vice-President, but all the time they know that the President and Vice-President will only trouble the permanent Tribes at most for eight years before being replaced by the next incumbents. The Office of the Vice-President is, of course, proverbially ‘one heartbeat away’ from the most powerful job in the world, but those of us in the permanent Five Washington Tribes feared Bobby Black, because he was much more important than that.

Here’s an example. A Wednesday morning, just after 11 a.m., six months after the Inauguration. An intruder, a deranged man from West Virginia, leaped over the White House fence and ran towards the Oval Office, threatening to kill President Carr. He set off the alarms and was stopped by the Secret Service before he could get more than twenty metres. The deranged man had a gun, an old Smith & Wesson revolver, and the Secret Service shot him in both legs. He was lucky they did not kill him immediately. The gun turned out to be empty. Not a bullet in the chamber. I was in the library of the Great House at the embassy on Massachusetts Avenue where I like to work.

CNN were live in the White House pressroom where Sandy McAuley, the Communications Director, was fielding reporters’ questions about the incident. I put my papers to one side and watched.

‘Where was the President–and the Vice-President–at the time of the incident?’ one of the reporters asked.

McAuley twitched a little. ‘Vice-President Black was at his desk in the West Wing, working on papers.’

Pause.

‘But where was President Carr?’

McAuley twitched some more. ‘President Carr was in the family quarters.’

‘Doing what?’

‘President Carr was exercising on a rowing machine in the gym.’

You could hear the intake of breath from the journalists, and a few titters of laughter. Even those of us who are not professional workaholics usually put in a few hours work in the mornings. It was just after 11 a.m. on a weekday, six months after President Theo Carr’s election, and when a nutty assassin tried to get in to the White House, the President was on a rowing machine? And Vice-President Bobby Black was in the West Wing, at his desk, working on papers? Running the country? Told you something, didn’t it?

* * *

Kristina Taft understood this quicker than anyone. She had been confirmed as National Security Adviser and called me a couple of days later. She decreed that our first private meeting would not, under any circumstances, take place at the White House. She suggested breakfast one morning at her apartment in the Watergate.

‘At six.’

I gulped. ‘Six a.m.? Sure.’

Kristina explained that she usually woke at five, sat on an exercise bike for thirty minutes, read some papers, and then left in time to get to the White House before seven every morning. I considered the private meeting a show of trust and an honour.

‘I don’t want word to get out to anyone,’ she warned me.

‘Anyone?’ I responded.

‘Especially not the Vice-President. I’ll send the help away.’

By the ‘help’ she meant her security staff as well as her maid. When we met she was alone.

‘I’m the new kid on the block,’ she said over poached eggs and muffins. From the start there were whispers that Kristina was too young for the job, and that it was not much of a job anyway–just ‘executive assistant’ to the Vice-President who was driving national security policy himself. In Washington it’s like this. You can go from being ‘up-and-coming’ to ‘has-been’ without any intervening period of success. I could feel Kristina’s nervousness.

‘Until this administration, I only ever came to DC as a tourist,’ she said. ‘You have been here for years, Alex. I need advice on how to handle it. How to get it right.’

‘Arlo Luntz will tell you that there are no second acts in Washington life. You have to get it right first time.’

‘Luntz is extraordinary.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘take time to get to know him. He’ll also tell you that the best people know what they do not know, and strive to fix it.’

Maybe that was the reason I liked Kristina from the start. That was what she was like too. In that first breakfast meeting I suppose I showed off a bit. I told her how administrations had functioned in the past. I had been in Washington for part of the Clinton years and part of the George W. Bush debacle, and I knew people who remembered Bush senior, Reagan, and Carter.

‘Who was it who said that happy families are all alike, but unhappy families are each unhappy in their own particular way? Anyway, the same is true for political administrations or governments. In my experience, they always end unhappily.’

‘Always?’

‘Always. Sometimes, like now, they begin unhappily. Unhappy does not mean ineffective. DoD, State, Justice, and the CIA are always at each other’s throats. That’s normal. That’s life. That’s power. You–as National Security Adviser–have to act as referee. Honest broker. That’s why President Carr wants you around. He trusts you to be honest and fair. Sometimes the infighting will suck in Treasury as well, but all of that’s manageable. The problem … well, I’m not sure how you can fix a problem like Bobby Black.’

‘Me neither,’ she admitted, brushing a few crumbs of muffin from her lips.

‘You want people to read novels on Muslim culture; he wants to bomb somewhere. Almost anywhere will do. There’s not a lot of give and take here, I’m thinking. He’s a problem for us too.’

‘Fiction’, Kristina shrugged, but her face remained impassive, ‘is always a kind of Lie, but it only works because it is also a kind of Truth. And it is a Truth we all need to hear, even Vice. I have been talking to Arlo about this. Arlo is in on everything, and he jumped in on my side about the reading list. It was a small thing, but it helped.’

‘How exactly?’

‘Arlo told the President that all power demands a degree of fiction. The way Arlo sees it, people in power are not supposed to lie, but they cannot tell the truth all the time either. We require believable stories, simple explanations, myths, what the newspapers call “spin”. A convenient fiction, Arlo calls it, and he says it is better than a complicated truth for most voters.’

‘The real question is, whose spin, whose fiction, or whose myth gets accepted,’ I said. ‘Whose truth or version of the truth do we trust?’

‘That’s why history always belongs to the victors,’ Kristina said, offering me another toasted bagel, which I declined. ‘Winners dictate the truth. More coffee?’

‘Please.’

‘So, anyhow … Spartacus,’ she switched tack as she poured. I watched her carefully, not sure what to make of her. She spoke fast; she thought fast; she did not suffer fools gladly, or at all. And I confess that from that first conversation she wound me into her. I would gladly have stepped inside her brain with a flashlight and have a look around.

‘Yes, Spartacus.’

‘Well?’ Her grey eyes were steady as they looked into mine. ‘You were in Northern Ireland, right? Would the Spartacus Solution have helped?’

She arched an eyebrow. She already knew my answer.

That night of the ice storm, the night I had discovered Fiona with James Byrne, Fiona had immediately packed her bags and headed to the airport in the teeth of the bad weather. She caught the overnight British Airways flight back to London. We did not say goodbye. After she left I sat in the study at the ambassador’s residence, poured myself a large whisky and read through General Conrad Shultz’s document. Page after page of it promised a relentless war on terrorists, their supporters, and the regimes that gave them space to operate.

‘Well, Spartacus is a view, I suppose,’ I told Kristina. ‘A one-eyed, one-dimensional approach–let’s kill bad people. If only life were that simple, and that all the Bad People wore black hats so we knew who they were. What we learned in Northern Ireland is that nobody is born a terrorist. We are all born as babies. So you need to have a two-or three-dimensional approach–fight, kill if you have to, but also persuade, cajole, bribe, whatever it takes to stop the baby growing up wanting to kill you …’

‘Exactly!’ she clapped her hands together and poured me more coffee. ‘Exactly! Do you think it sends the right signal when the new Director of Central Intelligence says we should treat terrorists like ancient Rome treated rebellious slaves, crucifying them on the streets? And the Vice-President buys into it? It’s just another Faith-Based Initiative–you do it and you pray to God it might work. Well, what happens when this is leaked? When some of it gets in the newspapers? You know what the reaction on the Arab street will be? “Here come the Christian Crusaders one more time.” It plays into every prejudice about us and our motives. Dinosaurs. Goddamn dinosaurs.’

Now it was my turn to shrug. ‘I don’t understand why Black and Shultz seem so determined to piss off a billion Muslims, most of whom do not want to be our enemies.’

‘Me neither,’ Kristina shook her head. I could feel her mind whirring with ideas. ‘Spartacus will tear us in two,’ she said, indiscreetly. ‘You are either for it or against it, and … I guess I’ve said enough.’

It was time for me to go. I asked to use her bathroom while she cleared the breakfast dishes. I have always been nosey about other people’s lives. At parties I sometimes open bathroom cabinets and take a peek. In Kristina’s case perhaps I was looking for signs of human habitation. Did she have a man? Why did I care? As I peed, I looked around. There were no signs of male habitation, but I noticed a polished steel cabinet on the wall. I don’t know why I tried to open it, but I did. It was locked, of course, and with no sign of a key. Perhaps Kristina expected from her visitors precisely the kind of nosiness I was demonstrating. When I came out of the bathroom Kristina walked me to the door. She gazed straight into my eyes and gave me that smile of hers.

‘Can I ask you something else?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘I hear you and Fiona split up a couple of months back.’

I swallowed. ‘I… we … have things to … work out.’

Kristina looked at me with sympathetic warmth. ‘Washington is a killer for relationships. Harry Truman said that if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.’

I laughed. ‘Harry Truman also said that if you tell someone to go to hell you should be able to see that he gets there. An observation which is lost on the Vice-President, I think.’

‘Does the Fiona thing affect your relations with the Prime Minister?’

‘No. At least I don’t think so.’

‘That’s good.’

We kissed each other goodbye, on the cheek, chastely, European style.

‘Let’s do this again,’ she said.

‘Definitely,’ I replied.

It was by now seven thirty on a Monday morning and by her standards Kristina Taft was already late for work. I wanted to see her again, even if the reasons why were jumbled up in my head. I caught a cab from the Watergate up Embassy Row, my mind buzzing from the meeting, wondering whether I should call Kristina back and if so when.

I had no time to take a decision because the moment I arrived at my desk I received a hand-delivered letter from a lawyer employed by James Byrne. I suppose I should have expected it. If anything, after I hit him, I had expected something even worse. I am not sure how he left the residence that day. After the punch to the throat he would have needed medical treatment. I assumed that he might call the police and cite me for assault, but he didn’t. What Byrne did do was to get his lawyer, Dan Feingold, to write a threatening letter. It said that I had caused ‘laryngeal trauma’. His smashed voice box, according to a specialist’s report that the lawyer had helpfully included, meant Byrne faced a permanent impairment in his ability to speak. I confess it made me laugh out loud. The lawyer’s letter said Byrne had been ‘forced to give up a lucrative career’ on the Sunday TV talk shows and would be seeking ‘punitive damages’ from me. I stared at the letter for a while and when I calmed down, I called the lawyer on the telephone number at the top of the headed notepaper.

‘Mr Feingold? Alex Price.’

‘I would rather deal with your attorney, Ambassador Price,’ he said smoothly.

‘I’m sure you would, Mr Feingold,’ I replied. ‘But you’re going to have to deal with me. I regret that Mr Byrne has a voice problem.’

‘You do?’

‘Yes, I regret it so much that I intend to drive over to his home later today to talk things over with his wife and family. I’ll apologize to Mr Byrne and explain matters in detail to his wife and four-year-old son, and then to his editor at the Washington Post.’ I heard Feingold suck in air. ‘In particular I will explain to his wife and child why I am reluctant to pay Mr Byrne financial compensation for fucking my wife in the main guest bedroom of the British Embassy residence.’

Feingold coughed into the telephone. He apologized and said he suffered from allergies. Then he said that before I did anything that could be construed as ‘harassment’ of his client, he would like to talk to Mr Byrne.

‘Of course,’ I said. Two hours later, Feingold called me back.

‘Ambassador Price, good news, Mr Byrne accepts your apology,’ he said, his voice full of defeat. ‘Everything is now resolved between you. No further action on your part is necessary.’