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There was much laughter and then applause. Susan Black threw her head back and hooted with amusement in that easy Montana way of hers. So did the Prime Minister. Mike Myers laughed too, and then said ‘Groovy, Baby,’ in his best Austin Powers accent, so everyone got the joke. I stared over at Bobby Black, who was sitting opposite Mike Myers. His lopsided grin was fixed on his face. He turned his spoon towards his tiramisu dessert, did not look at me, and said nothing. My own tiramisu tasted of sulphur. There was to be no change in the pattern of helicopter emissions over the next year.
When the guests left at ten o’clock, the hour that most Washington events finish, I said goodbye to the Vice-President and Prime Minister, and had a few words with Kristina. Then Johnny Lee Ironside and I headed outside for a beer on the porch. The night was still warm, though we were heading towards autumn. The last moths of the year danced around the garden lights.
‘Clusterfuck,’ he replied, using one of his favourite words.
‘Unbelievable. Does he mean it about making British citizens of Pakistani origin apply for special visas?’
‘First I heard of it,’ Johnny Lee said, sucking on a bottle of Sam Adams beer. ‘Doesn’t mean to say it won’t happen.’
We began talking about the eccentric ways of those we were paid to serve.
‘I mean, Davis and Black,’ Johnny Lee went on, ‘two men, great on their own, who just can’t stand each other. You know what the Vice-President said to me the other day?
He said the British are even more of a pain in the ass than the French. You hear me? How does anyone handle that?’
I swallowed a few mouthfuls of beer and asked Johnny Lee whether he thought the Vice-President of the United States and the British Prime Minister–men who spend their whole adult lives seeking the highest levels of power and then obtain it–were truly different from the rest of us.
‘You bet,’ Johnny Lee said, pulling the beer bottle from his mouth. ‘Different as spare ribs from a spare tyre.’
‘But how come?’ I persisted. ‘Do they start different or do they become that way because of the job?’
‘The rich are different from you and me,’ Johnny Lee suggested, ‘because they have more money. Presidents and Prime Ministers are different from you and me, because they have more—’
‘Juice,’ I said. ‘They have more juice.’
‘Hang-ups,’ Johnny Lee contradicted, with a laugh. He made a sign with his finger at the side of his head to suggest mental illness. ‘More psychoses. Frickin’ nut jobs. All of them.’
‘Okay, nut jobs,’ I agreed. ‘But does power attract nut jobs, or does it create them?’
‘Hmmm, we’re getting in deep here, brother,’ Johnny Lee nodded vigorously, grabbing yet another beer. ‘For my money, they start off fucking weird. They might get weirder, sure. But they always start off fucking weird. You never really know them, you know?’
I disagreed. After years of watching government ministers close up, members of Parliament, prime ministers, Congressmen and presidents, I had concluded that normal people do want to serve their country, but they became peculiar when they achieved power.
‘I have never met an evil politician,’ I said, ‘but I have met plenty who are delusional. The chief delusion is that they need to stay in power otherwise the country will go to hell.’
Johnny Lee laughed.
‘In this town,’ he gestured with the beer-bottle neck towards the lights of Washington DC, ‘politics attracts freaks just like your light here attracts bugs. Normal folks have lives. Abnormal folks have political ambitions. Normal folks go to bars. Abnormal folks go to political meetings. My mama always told me politics is just show business for ugly people.’
‘Then your mama was as cynical as you are,’ I scolded him. ‘Plenty of decent people enter public service, but it twists them inside out. It’s like living in a fishbowl or a cocoon.’
Now it definitely was the beer talking. It was near midnight and I was getting drunk. I poured us two fingers of Jack Daniels over ice.
‘Fishy-bowl? Co-coon? Ambassador Price, I do believe you are talking what we Washington Tribesmen call bullshit.’
‘No, no, hear me out,’ I protested, passing him the whisky. ‘Hear me out. A fishbowl because people in power have no privacy any more. None. Everything Vice-President Black or President Carr or Prime Minister Davis says or does, is written down, photographed, recorded, and dissected. They got blamed for the great food they ate at the IMF banquet, right? Because half the world is going hungry. But if Davis or Carr refused to eat the fancy food set in front of them, they’d get blamed for lousy gesture politics, a stunt that makes no difference to the poor. Politicians can’t win, Johnny Lee. The press asked President Reagan about a cancerous polyp in his colon, for God’s sake.’
Johnny Lee took a sip of the Jack Daniels. ‘United States media–finest in world,’ he responded, jabbing the whisky glass at me. ‘Our journalists have a goddamn constitutional right to peer up the president’s ass.’
A doctor or psychologist would say that Johnny Lee and I were engaged in ‘relief drinking’ as a way of dealing with stress. Like me, Johnny Lee was in theory married but in practice separated. The rumour was that his wife, Carly, had remained in Charleston to pursue her career as a lawyer, but mostly–or so I was told–to pursue her golf instructor, her tennis coach, her pool boy, and various other diversions. Johnny Lee and I never discussed this, or Fiona leaving me. Some things are best left unsaid.
When you are married to the younger sister of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, you cannot afford a scandal. When you are the Chief of Staff to the Vice-President of the United States, you cannot get a divorce until it is politically acceptable to get one. The two of us argued in good-humoured drunkenness until Johnny Lee got up to leave. I walked him to where his car and driver were waiting. He burped.
‘So what we gonna do, Alex? We can’t go on trying to keep your man and mine apart. And we can’t get them together without worrying about it coming to a fistfight. So what we going to do?’
Suddenly, standing unsteadily in the embassy driveway, I explained an idea I had been turning over in some dull recess of my brain. Johnny Lee listened and said it sounded like a ‘neat idea’. He burped again and told me we should sleep on it and talk in the morning. We said goodbye and I sat on the porch for another half-hour, having one more beer and one more whisky, thinking through the idea. Early the following day, when I still had a pounding head and a bad stomach, Johnny Lee Ironside called and said he had been thinking over my idea, and we should try to make it work. I had suggested–though it would take months to organize–that we should invite Vice-President Bobby Black to Scotland for a private visit, to shoot grouse in the Highlands with members of the British royal family. He could explore his roots, and along the way meet the Queen and key members of the British government, including the Prime Minister. He and Fraser Davis would be told that mutual self-interest meant they had to kiss and make up. Had to. Imperative. They would be instructed to joke about their rough words at Chequers and to insist that, despite the occasional differences, they were truly the best of friends.
‘Let’s do it,’ Johnny Lee said. And so we did.
EIGHT (#ulink_c121bc31-97fa-5299-b4a8-97eb0cb35625)
Plans involving heads of state, kings, queens, presidents, vicepresidents and prime ministers are like plans involving oil tankers. They take a long time to execute. The idea of bringing Bobby Black over for a kiss-and-make-up trip to the Scottish Highlands took a while to ferment, and then required agreement from everyone you can think of: the Office of the Vice-President, the White House, the State Department, Downing Street, the Foreign Office, and Buckingham Palace.
The date was eventually set for the October of the Carr administration’s second year, two weeks before the mid-term elections when most of Congress is up for re-election. It seemed a long way in the future, but just the fact of the acceptance by Bobby Black helped improve relations between London and Washington. The Vice-President was interested. Enthusiastic. He asked Johnny Lee to get him books on grouse shooting. He knew that the birds fly at speeds of up to eighty miles an hour and he wanted to prepare himself as best he could. He commissioned family research from a genealogy company and instructed Johnny Lee that he needed to visit churches in the Aberdeenshire area to find graves of his ancestors. Perhaps most importantly, the plan to require British citizens of Pakistani origin to apply for special visas if they wanted to travel to the United States was quietly dropped.
‘At least for now,’ Johnny Lee Ironside told me. For me, ‘for now’ was good enough.
Susan Fein Black’s desire for the trip also helped. She quickly realized that the Queen was genuinely interested in horses and called me one evening to ask if Her Majesty would like to know about Mrs Black’s own rare-breeds programme for horses on her ranch in Montana. I said I would find out. It is one of the curiosities of the world that the more republican the country, the more fascinated the citizens are about the British royal family. After all their exertions to get rid of the monarchy, you might have thought Americans would be different, but they are not. Susan Black sounded unbelievably girlish on the phone.
The plans for the trip to Scotland started to develop. The Blacks were to go shooting, they were to have tea with the Queen–informal–and then come to a dinner–formal–with Her Majesty, other members of the royal family, and the Prime Minister. Then Davis and Black were to spend a whole day together trying to work through all their differences. Well, as I say, that was the plan.
The biggest thaw in US–UK relations came when I heard from the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Hamish Martin, that the Queen would be delighted–(‘absolutely delighted, Alex,’)–to hear about the Montana rare-breeds programme, and Her Majesty wondered if, instead of joining her husband on the shoot, Mrs Black would care to visit a horse-breeding bloodstock facility near Balmoral in the company of the Queen herself.
(‘Very, very informal,’ Sir Hamish whispered to me.)
When I phoned the Naval Observatory to relay this request, a secretary passed me over to Susan Black in person, and I could again feel the excitement in her voice. I imagined her turning cartwheels across the floor. A little royal stardust had been sprinkled on the visit. Even the dark heart of the Vice-President began to melt under its influence.
Over the next months, as I spent more and more time organizing these few days in Scotland, things with Kristina changed completely. From the moment Fiona had left me I had been busy and lonely, although the busy part usually helped me forget about the lonely part. I soon realized that, at every stage, seeing Kristina seemed to help. Perhaps it was that my friends and family were all in London, hers all in California. Whatever the reason, we became closer and closer. She confided in me how she continually felt sidelined. She had been specifically forbidden by Bobby Black from playing any part in his National Energy Security Taskforce, even though it dealt with areas–the Arab world and Iran, mostly–in which Kristina spoke the main language and had special experience.
‘It’s like I’m the National Security Wife,’ she told me bitterly, biting energetically at a bagel with cream cheese at one of our regular breakfasts. ‘I get allowed to dress up and look good, but when it comes to anything important, the men go talk somewhere else. I need to find a way around this.’
We both knew there was no way, not unless Kristina was prepared to take on Bobby Black directly. But that would be a battle she was destined to lose.
‘Can’t the President…?’ I wondered.
‘He doesn’t want to lose his impeachment insurance,’ Kristina joked. She was helping herself to scrambled eggs. I said I didn’t understand. She rolled her eyes in mock exasperation.
‘We have a Democratic Congress, Alex,’ she explained, her eyebrow arching skyward, ‘you with me so far? The Democrats are hoping to pick up seats in the mid-terms, big time.’
I nodded. The American political process, to outsiders at least, seems like a series of permanent elections. Presidents are elected every four years, but Congressional elections take place every two years, and in the ‘mid-terms’ all of the House and a third of the Senate is up for re-election.
‘Arlo Luntz says the polls look bad and that Bobby Black is to blame. Vice is very unpopular, Arlo says. A vote-loser. And the Democrats are claiming he was at the heart of the corruption in the Iraq contracts. They say there were kickbacks from Goldcrest and Warburton to the Carr campaign. But even under a flaky liberal like Speaker Betty Furedi, no Democrat will ever impeach President Carr, no matter what he does wrong, if they know he will be succeeded by President Black.’
I must have looked stunned at this impeachment talk. ‘Theo Carr hasn’t done something really bad, has he?’
‘It’s a joke, Alex,’ Kristina laughed, and I felt her hand gently on my arm. She paused for a moment and scowled. ‘Kind of.’
I laughed too, as much at my own inadequacies as at her humour. She poured me a fresh black coffee. I always had gossip to trade, and Kristina usually listened more than she spoke, but that morning it was like some kind of therapy for her to get it all out.
‘Luntz told me he advised the President to make sure Bobby Black goes to Scotland on your shooting trip in the run-up to the mid-terms,’ Kristina told me. ‘Says the further Vice is away from the campaign, the better. I even think Arlo wants the President to drop Bobby Black from his own re-election ticket, but that’s real tricky.’
For me this was all heady stuff. Knowing who was up and who was down at the White House was a key part of my job. I had some gossip of my own to trade.
‘Vice enjoys being thought of as the President’s Dark Side,’ I said. ‘Did you know that?’ Kristina looked at me, stunned. ‘What do you mean, enjoys?’
‘Johnny Lee Ironside told me. We have a few beers from time to time. We talk.’
I had mentioned the Congressional hearings into the Iraq contracts to Johnny Lee. The Vice-President had been described in all kinds of ways, usually beginning with the prefix ‘Un-’–uncooperative, unforthcoming, unreliable, unwilling to appear before the Joint House and Senate Investigative Committee, and then–when he was subpoenaed and had no choice but to appear, he pleaded executive privilege, refusing to say on what basis the contracts had been awarded to Warburton, except that it was a ‘national security matter’. He was declared uncommunicative and unhelpful.
‘That shit makes his goddamn day,’ Johnny Lee laughed. He told me the Vice-President routinely asked his staff to search out any negative comments in newspapers that suggested he represented President Carr’s ‘Dark Side’, so he could have the best ones framed for his Ego Wall. An ‘Ego Wall’ is the wall in the private office of any Washington politician dedicated to the qualifications and citations that mean the most to the Big Political Beast–military honours, photographs showing the Big Beast shaking hands with a past president, a world leader or Hollywood movie star, plus university degrees and military citations.
‘You want to put the Boss in a good mood,’ Johnny Lee Ironside had told me, ‘tell him some pinko Democrat bedwetter like Hurd or Furedi called him a mean SOB: that’ll do it. The sun comes out all over Planet Black.’ Johnny Lee giggled like a schoolboy. ‘Ma-aaan, he Baaa-aaaad!’
Kristina looked at me, fascinated, as if I was reporting on a new species of ape from the African jungle or an alien civilization discovered on a distant planet.
‘Un-fucking-believable,’ was all she said. Then she traded one further important piece of insider gossip. She handed me a draft speech that Vice-President Black was about to deliver at the US Naval College at Annapolis, Maryland, to a class of midshipmen. I pushed my scrambled egg to one side and started to read.
‘The next stage in Spartacus,’ Kristina suggested.
‘All options remain open’, the Vice-President was scheduled to say, ‘when dealing with Iran.’ In case journalists were too stupid to get the point, he added, ‘Including military options. Neutrality on Iran’s nuclear programme is immoral. The programme itself is immoral. It has to be stopped. It is a threat to Israel, to other countries in the region, and to world peace. An Iranian regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons is a nightmare for the entire world. The administration of President Theo Carr will end the nightmare. We will do so by all necessary means.’
‘Oh, fuck,’ I said. ‘All necessary means’ is the phrase diplomats use when they want to threaten a war. ‘We need to tone this down.’
Kristina nodded.
‘He’s getting ahead of where the President is,’ she said. ‘Vice says that unless we are prepared to at least threaten an attack, the Iranians will not take us seriously, and the Israelis will go ahead anyway, with extreme prejudice.’
‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘The Israelis would need to fly through Jordanian and Iraqi airspace. If you didn’t want them to do so, they couldn’t.’
Kristina shook her head impatiently. ‘That’s not my point. Once Vice makes public any kind of threat against Iran, we will end up going to war. I know how he operates. He will argue that our credibility is at stake and we have to follow through. It’s like World War One–you have train timetables and you start mobilizing your soldiers and in the end you can’t stop the war even if you want to. But that’s not the worst. The Israelis are letting it be known that the bunker-busters that we supplied them cannot get the job done.’
Bunker-busters are bombs or missiles capable of causing an explosion a long way underground.
‘Exactly,’ I said, ‘which is why negotiations are the only way …’
She interrupted again, very impatiently. ‘Which is why there are those within the Israeli government who are talking about Canned Sunshine.’ My jaw dropped. ‘Canned Sunshine’ is a military expression for a nuclear bomb. ‘They are calling for nuclear pre-emption.’
‘Nuclear pre-emption?’ I blurted out. ‘That’s … that’s like committing suicide because you fear dying. They couldn’t possibly drop a nuke …’ She waved me quiet.
‘Vice says Spartacus applies to states as well as to individuals, and if ever a regime needed to be crucified, it’s the Iranians. He wants to hit them after the mid-terms. Or to get the Israelis to do it.’
‘Oh, fuck,’ I said.
‘And if we do go in, we will call on all possible support from all our allies. Which means you, Alex.’
I didn’t feel like eating breakfast any more. I drank my coffee and left to return to the embassy, where I called Downing Street immediately on the secure line.
‘How do we feel about being sucked into war with Iran?’ I said to Andy Carnwath.
‘What the fuck do you mean, Alex?’
I explained about Canned Sunshine. For once Andy Carnwath could not think of any expletives appropriate to the information.
Later that night, around midnight, I was lying on my bed reading a book, sipping whisky and water and listening to a CD of Charlie Parker. Kristina called me on my private cellphone.
‘You’re up late,’ I said.
‘You got time to talk?’
‘Of course.’
I pushed the book I was reading to one side. It was called Sleepwalking to Hell, a recently published history of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis, written by Kristina’s former lover, the University of California history professor Stephen Haddon. A liberal, I guessed, with a strong libertarian streak. Haddon argued that the transition from a sophisticated and prosperous Weimar democracy to a Nazi dictatorship was not one catastrophic leap. It was a series of little steps.
Any one of these steps might seem sensible by itself because the German people wanted to escape Bolshevism, anarchy, and economic collapse, but taken together they led decent people inexorably towards the Nazis. Haddon wrote in his preface that it could happen again. Terror produced terrified people, and terrified people made bad decisions.
‘Is that jazz?’ Kristina said.
I turned it down.
‘Charlie Parker.’
‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘Just perfect.’
Kristina was on her way home. President Carr and the First Lady, Rosa Carr, had invited her to the private White House movie theatre to watch a film with the Carr family, Bobby Black and his wife Susan, Arlo Luntz, and a couple of Democratic senators that Theo Carr had decided he should get to know better. The senators were on the Armed Services Committee, and Carr was still after more money for the Pentagon budget. It was a huge mark of confidence in Kristina to be invited to share private time with the President, and she was bubbling with enthusiasm. I wasn’t really listening. I had something I had been meaning to say, and that night I said it.
‘Instead of going home, Kristina, why not come here right now. Spend the night with me.’
She giggled. Then the line went quiet.
‘You mean it, Alex?’
‘Yes, I mean it,’ I said. ‘I have meant it for months.’
NINE (#ulink_2149a87e-9361-5936-806c-0903e93675c3)
The visit of Bobby Black to Scotland took so long to organize I sometimes thought it would never happen. But it did happen, almost exactly two years after he and Prime Minister Davis had their first row at Chequers and just two weeks before the US mid-term elections which, yet again, all the experts, polls, and pundits claimed were going to offer a very sharp rebuke to the Carr administration. In preparation for the shooting trip, Vice-President Black insisted that the visit be kept as private as possible, and that his entourage be as small as possible. I spent hours on the telephone with Andy Carnwath in Downing Street and Sir Hamish Martin at Buckingham Palace fixing exactly who would meet Bobby Black at which point, who would shoot grouse, when he would meet Her Majesty the Queen, when Susan Black would go off to see the horses, and when Fraser Davis would turn up. I also talked repeatedly with Lord Anstruther, who was a Junior Defence Minister in Fraser Davis’s government and whose estate was right next to the royal estate at Balmoral.
Anstruther had agreed to host the visit, though if he had realized exactly what he was in for, he would have told me to get lost. I tried to explain that when the President or Vice-President of the United States moves anywhere, it is rather like a medieval pope moving around Christendom–up to a thousand staff, journalists, hangers-on, advisers of all kinds–but, until Anstruther experienced it, I don’t think he quite understood how big a ‘small entourage’ really was going to be. In the week before the visit I had called the Prime Minister to warn him, yet again, that it must not fail.
‘We cannot afford a repeat of the row at Chequers,’ I said. ‘You and Bobby Black are fated to like one another, whether you want to or not.’
Fraser Davis was very positive. He asked me to go over the arguments he should use with Bobby Black to deflect him from a confrontation with Iran without causing a row, and the kinds of things he should say if the question of special visas for British citizens of Pakistani origin were to be raised.
‘We say it is unfair, unworkable, discriminatory and the twenty-first century equivalent of the Jim Crow laws,’ I said. Then I reminded the PM that the policy details were not significant. What was significant was the tone. The policy would come right as long as he was nice. Very nice.
‘But I’m always nice, Alex,’ Fraser Davis replied, sounding rather hurt. I could imagine his wet, pouty lip. ‘As you well know.’
‘It has taken us months to bring this off.’ I refused to be deflected. ‘We mustn’t blow it. You mustn’t blow it.’
