Charlotte Kramer: Madam President Part 5

"I worry all the time that something is going to happen."

"Me, too, but this little baby is going to be fine."

"I know."

"Get some sleep."

She hung up and touched her stomach. Brian was overly concerned, but Melanie had to give some thought to her travel schedule and the hectic pace she'd always maintained. She had spent her entire adult life working harder and longer than everyone around her. She couldn't imagine doing these jobs any other way. She finally understood why so many women felt forced to choose between their careers and their families. Melanie couldn't comprehend what full-time motherhood entailed. She only had a few friends who were mothers, mostly former White House colleagues who dropped out of politics and talked about being swallowed whole by the production of taking care of a newborn and then by the playdates and toddler cla.s.ses that followed. It sounded daunting, but after everything they'd been through to get pregnant, she couldn't envision handing her precious little baby over to a stranger.

Melanie also felt the baby might provide a graceful transition out of government. Surely no one would fault her for stepping away from public service after nearly two decades to raise her child? Melanie rubbed her stomach again and realized that she was famished. She pushed herself up from the table and headed back toward the conference room in search of the cheese tray.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

Dale Dale slid her iPhone out from under her pillow and watched the time change from 3:59 to 4:00 A.M. She gave up on sleep and thought about how she would have given anything to magically transport Warren across the river to his own bed so she wouldn't have to get dressed in the dark. After carefully extricating herself from his embrace, she balanced her iPhone and BlackBerry on top of her iPad and tiptoed to the bathroom. Once inside, she scanned the e-mails that had come in during the four hours she'd been unplugged. While she waited for an attachment from one of her deputies to open, she glanced at her reflection. Marie Claire magazine had flown in a colorist and a hairstylist to give her a new haircut and highlights for the photo shoot they'd done of her the week before. Her dark brown hair had a great bouncy shape, and a fresh batch of chestnut-colored strands made her skin look less pale. As the face of the administration, she was getting plenty of attention for her appearance, but it wasn't the kind of attention that did her any good at all at the podium. She hoped the "Day in the Life" production would be the catalyst for people seeing her as more than a spokesperson; she wanted to be viewed as an influential presidential advisor.

Dale thought she heard Warren stirring. She stuck her head out the bathroom door to check. He'd rolled onto his back and was snoring. She closed the door and finished her hair and makeup with more care than usual and then padded into her closet to get dressed. She selected a black Jil Sander dress that her personal shopper from New York had sent down the week before. Its exquisitely cut shape, fabric, and construction would be lost on the Ann Taylor enthusiasts on the White House staff, but she felt more like herself when she adhered to her fashion-addicted New York ways.

Lucy would appreciate the dress. Lucy Edinburg and Richard Thompson, CBS's hot new evening anchor team, had been Dale's pick for the "Day in the Life" special.

She had selected Richard and Lucy over the other network anchors she knew better because everything they did these days was generating tons of buzz. They were being hailed as the saviors of network news for figuring out how to make the evening newscast the most-watched twenty-four minutes of television again.

The rise of Lucy and Richard at CBS represented a final nail in the coffin of Old Journalism. Lucy was a former Fox News anchor, and Richard a beloved fixture at ESPN over the previous three decades. Neither one of them had ever reported from a combat zone, covered a presidential campaign, or done a turn as a White House correspondent. They were skilled conversationalists who managed to endear themselves to viewers by sharing just enough of the details of their personal lives to prove that their challenges and headaches were the same ones that everyone else faced. Their guiding philosophy was that viewers wanted the news delivered by people who managed to inform them without talking down to them. When Lucy underwent invasive fertility treatments at the age of forty-two, she did so with a camera crew in the room. Similarly, Richard did a weeklong special on difficult-to-diagnose ailments that focused on his own symptoms of low energy and weight gain. He subjected himself to several different medical exams, and the series culminated in a visit to an endocrinologist who diagnosed him with "low T" on the air. The reality-television aspect of their newscasts was only one part of their successful formula. Despite a twenty-year age difference, they had the kind of chemistry that made you feel you were peering into someone's breakfast room on a Sunday morning to listen to them read the best parts of the newspaper to each other. Whether or not their off-air relationship was as cozy as their on-air presentation suggested was a topic of endless debate, but most people in the news business figured that they were simply maximizing every tool at their disposal to attract viewers.

While at Fox, Lucy had built a loyal audience by railing against the mainstream media and conducting tough interviews with politicians and so-called experts. Like most of the women who appeared on Fox News, Lucy was blond and looked more like a beauty queen from the South than a woman who'd lived in New York City for more than a decade. Since she'd made the move to CBS, she'd traded sleeveless teal and fuchsia mini-dresses that looked like they'd been sewn onto her for sophisticated suits in black, navy, and off-white that were expertly tailored. She'd also cut back on the Botox injections and stopped wearing false eyelashes.

Richard added whatever gravitas the team possessed. He was the one who was most likely to apologize to a policy expert or a foreign leader if Lucy asked a question about twerking. With a thick head of silvery blond hair and a permanent suntan, Richard was one of the most likable people on television Dale had ever seen in her life.

Their path to success started a little more than a year earlier, when they were paired up for a weeklong pilot at the third-place morning show. Management was throwing everything against the wall to see if anything would stick, and Lucy and Richard were instructed to be themselves. What happened was pure TV magic. Lucy was irreverent and feisty, and Richard was funny and relaxed. Together, they interviewed celebrities, senators and congressmen, victims of a tornado, and other journalists. Since they'd never covered any official government beats, they leaned heavily on the network's correspondents at the White House, the State Department, and the Defense Department and, at times, kept them on for an entire newscast. If a celebrity meltdown or weather story was dominating the news, they talked about that and ignored the network correspondents at the White House, State, and DOD. Their approach had plenty of detractors, particularly among the Washington, D.C., circles of elite journalists and pundits, but it attracted viewers from every important demographic. Richard and Lucy quickly turned their show into the hottest thing in television news. After a nine-month streak on the morning show, they'd taken their freewheeling, teleprompter-free gabfest to the evening news hour, and that program had moved from dead last to second place in only a few short months.

Dale had taken a sizable risk by selecting Lucy and Richard for the "Day in the Life" special, but she wanted to do everything in her power to extend Charlotte's second honeymoon with the press, and that included courting the journalists who were getting the most attention.

The vice president had also been a strong advocate for doing the "Day in the Life" with Lucy and Richard. Maureen had a very positive impact on Charlotte when it came to her approach with the media. She was generating a lot of goodwill herself through her "open-door" policy. There were as many reporters in and out of the vice president's office as there were in and out of the press office. Dale privately worried that the vice president's open-door policy would eventually clash with Charlotte's preference for keeping the media at arm's length, but so far, it had only served to enhance reporters' understanding of the close partnership Maureen had forged with Charlotte. As longtime politicians who'd largely sacrificed their mothering years for their careers, both women shared a bond of wistful acceptance of the trade-offs they'd made to arrive at their positions of immense power. They'd also both endured messy chapters in their personal lives that had played out publicly because of their high-profile positions and unfaithful husbands.

Dale liked to think that Craig's ascent to chief of staff and her promotion to press secretary contributed to the positivity that the press felt toward the administration. History suggested that Charlotte was wise to shake things up in her second term; successful second-term presidents almost always demanded staff turnover, and Charlotte was an astute student of the pitfalls of the modern American presidency.

Dale glanced at herself one last time in the mirror, and then, with her BlackBerry screen as her flashlight, she made her way toward the front door, picked up her heavy purse, threw a black cashmere sweater across her shoulders to keep herself warm inside the over-air-conditioned West Wing, and shut the door behind her. As soon as she stepped into her building's lobby, she noticed the van parked in front. The plan was for a CBS crew to drive in with each member of the senior staff. She tucked her hair behind her ears and went out to retrieve the crew.

"Good morning, everyone." Dale wasn't good at forced cheer, especially in the morning. The crew piled into her car and positioned a camera in the front seat. When they turned the camera light on, Dale was temporarily blinded.

"Do you usually stop for coffee?" one of the production a.s.sistants asked from the backseat, where he'd settled in amid the dry cleaning she kept forgetting to drop off and two gym bags that she'd packed and had never used.

"Nothing is open before five." She tried to make eye contact with him in her mirror, but he was focusing intently on holding her pile of black suits off his lap as he jotted notes in a spiral notebook. She'd been meaning to stop at the cleaner's for weeks.

"Do you want me to pull over and put that stuff in the trunk?"

"No, I'm fine. Will any of the other senior staff be there when we arrive?"

"Probably not, but I'm supposed to meet with Craig to go over the final line-by-line for the day," she said, glancing in the rearview mirror again to get a better look at her questioner. He looked twenty years old.

"Are you an intern?" she asked.

"No, ma'am."

He'd called her ma'am. She sighed and shook her head slightly. It served her right for asking. She stayed quiet for the rest of the drive, except to answer the twenty-year-old's questions. Dale thought about how thankful she was that Craig was her boss. At least they could laugh about this at the end of the day. Dale knew exactly what he'd say. "The things we do for love of country and Charlotte Kramer," he'd joke. She smiled thinking about it as she pulled into the entrance on E Street and flashed her hard pa.s.s. The guard greeted her with a nod and waved her onto the pad where the canine unit would examine her car for explosives. When the dogs were satisfied, the large steel gate would disappear into the ground, and Dale would be free to drive slowly toward the next gate. She cherished the lengthy process and treated it as her last moment of peace before the workday commenced.

"Ma'am? Excuse me?"

"Yes?"

"Who is allowed to park in there?" The producer was pointing at West Executive Drive, the strip of coveted parking spots between the West Wing and the Old Executive Office Building that separated the most senior advisors from the rest of the presidential staffers. Dale had pulled up to the third and final entrance and was waiting for the large wrought-iron gates to swing open.

"Only a.s.sistants to the president may park in here," she replied. His face didn't register any comprehension, so she explained the White House hierarchy that allowed her one of the best parking spots on the White House complex.

"a.s.sistants to the president are the most senior staffers. They have what we refer to as walk-in privileges. That means that they can walk into the Oval Office without an appointment. I mean, most of us call ahead. It's not like we just barge into the Oval Office." Dale laughed. She was afraid she sounded like a jerk.

Dale heard the alert on her phone that signified a new text message had come through. Relieved by the distraction, she fished her iPhone out of her giant bag. Dale smiled as she read Craig's message. "They lit my block with stadium lights to film me walking from my front door to the SUV. You owe me many drinks," he wrote.

She quickly typed back: "I'm driving in with Doogie Howser. Don't complain."

Craig shared her sense of humor, and the two of them were often described by other members of the White House senior staff as being "in cahoots" on matters large and small. And while they often sat together on long flights and at staff dinners and meetings, their relationship was purely platonic. Craig was gay. He was only partly out of the closet, but it was not enough to quell suspicions from some corners of oblivious Washington about his relationship with Dale. Privately, they laughed about the knowing winks from congressmen and members of Charlotte's cabinet who suspected that the two were an item. Dale wished Craig would come out more publicly, but it was something he wasn't ready to do.

As she pulled into her regular parking spot, she thought about how wrong the reporters had been about Craig's role in the Tara Meyers scandal. A couple of the most aggressive investigative reporters had sniffed around months earlier about whether he had played a role in leaking information to Congress and the media about the former vice president's instability and questionable competence. Dale had felt torn about whether to take the inquiries to Craig or the White House counsel or even the president. The rumors about Craig unfairly painting Melanie as the leaker had posed a giant moral dilemma for Dale, as Melanie was the one who'd made sure that Dale had a top-notch lawyer to defend her from charges from Congress that she'd played a role in covering up the vice president's condition. Melanie was also the one who had warned her about how ugly the West Wing would become once an investigation was under way. Ultimately, Dale had decided not to confront Craig with the allegations. She could not fathom that he was capable of what the reporters suggested. He was her closest friend in Washington and her steadfast ally. Craig had also waged an aggressive campaign to help Dale secure the press secretary job. Surely he was ent.i.tled to the benefit of doubt from her. Dale was interrupted from her thoughts again by the sound of the production a.s.sistant tapping on her window.

He had hopped out of the car to help the crew set up to shoot her walking into the West Wing.

"Are you guys ready?" she asked him.

"Yes, ma'am. Whenever you are."

CHAPTER NINE.

Charlotte Charlotte reached over and turned off her alarm before it went off.

"Are you getting up?" Peter asked.

"I'm going to get some reading done. I'll go into the study so you can go back to sleep," she whispered.

"It's the middle of the night," he protested.

She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. "It's almost five, and I'm about to walk into an ambush. CBS is going to be embedded with me all day. I'm not going to get any real work done. You'll call Penny?"

"As soon as the sun comes up on the West Coast."

"Before that, please."

"Yes, ma'am."

Charlotte scratched Cammie's ears, gathered her pile of papers from the nightstand, and walked down the hall to her study.

The White House staff secretary had placed a copy of her briefing book for the day in the center of her desk. The White House office of the staff secretary - a little-known and utterly indispensible group of West Wing employees - was responsible for a.s.sembling the briefing book and setting it on her desk at whatever hour it was completed the night before. The book contained detailed minute-by-minute schedules, briefing papers, final versions of speeches, and any sensitive background material for every meeting and event on her schedule. Even seemingly spontaneous drop-by meetings on her schedule were carefully researched, vetted, and scripted to avoid any potential for embarra.s.sment.

The actual newspapers wouldn't be brought up until about 5:45 A.M., but there was a set of news clips still warm from the copy machine that had been placed next to the briefing book on her desk. A junior staffer in the White House press office came in at two A.M. and printed off the major stories from the Web sites of all the major newspapers. The "clips" were then photocopied for the senior White House staff and also placed on their desks.

The White House butlers had placed a pot of coffee, a pitcher of warm milk, and a cup and saucer on a tray on the side of her desk. In a few minutes, one of the butlers would come in and ask her if she wanted anything to eat. She'd say "Not yet," as she always did, and they'd come back every thirty minutes to see if she'd changed her mind, until she finally agreed to a smoothie, her one concession to Maureen's evangelism for clean living. Charlotte made a mental note to tell Maureen about Brooke and Mark's fondness for juice cleanses. It seemed everyone her age was resorting to extreme measures to beat back the forces of nature. Charlotte found it amusing. Self-improvement was her generation's obsession. She just wanted to be able to sleep past five A.M. again. Maureen was always carrying around a bottle of green juice, and if she didn't have to entertain a lawmaker or a foreign dignitary, she preferred drinking her green potions for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Charlotte could barely choke down one salad a day. Maureen also frequented spinning cla.s.ses at Washington's first "Soul Cycle" spinning club with members of her staff. Charlotte learned from Craig that Maureen had been asked to climb onto the instructor's bike in the front of the darkened room to lead the group. Apparently, the cla.s.s of sixty had gone wild. Maureen's commitment to healthy living paid off. At five foot two and about one hundred and ten pounds, she had the body of a female gymnast. The deep lines around her eyes and mouth were the only clues to her age. At sixty-one, she had ten times the energy Charlotte had at fifty, and she seemed to outpace most of her twenty- and thirty-something staff members, too.

Charlotte tried to remember the last time she'd worked out. She made a mental note to start hiking with the dogs again on the weekends, at least. Then she pulled out her speech and scanned her edits from the night before. After underlining the sections she planned to emphasize when she delivered the address, Charlotte set the speech aside until the speechwriters came in to make her final changes. Her hope was to highlight the areas of consensus, but there was no chance the press would amplify those parts of her speech. She could already envision the breathless live shots from her press corps as they reported from in front of the antiabortion protesters all day long. If she had any power at all, she'd use it to cure the press of its conflict addiction.

Charlotte turned to a memo from her economic advisors. No one had been able to crack the code on the right combination of spending cuts, tax relief, and government support for the unemployed, but she was determined to figure it out without alienating her own party any more than she already had. Charlotte was still in a strong position with most conservatives on national security issues. Until recently, they respected her decision to leave sufficient troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan to secure the gains they'd made over the last decade and a half and to combat the violent flare-ups in both places.

Charlotte had misgivings about taking a visible role in the abortion debate after forcing her remaining Republican allies to accept a progressive Democrat as her vice president, but it wasn't as if she'd had much of a choice. She leaned back in her chair and thought about all that had transpired since her reelection less than two years earlier. She'd had such high hopes for her second vice president, Tara Meyers, but it had unraveled amid revelations that she'd been hiding serious mental-health issues for the majority of her political career. In a behind-closed-doors deal, designed by Craig, who'd served as her chief legislative affairs advisor at the time, Charlotte had agreed to appoint the wildly popular and experienced Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives as Tara's replacement. The deal halted the impeachment proceedings against her and allowed her to regain her political footing.

Charlotte still felt guilty about subjecting Tara to the type of scrutiny that exacerbated her stress and brought her mental-health issues into public view. She hoped that someday they could speak about everything that had transpired, but her advisors had urged Charlotte to pour all of her energy into moving forward with whatever she could still accomplish in her remaining years as president.

For the first time in a very long time, that included having someone to come home to. She and Peter were both doing their best to be a couple again, but she was concerned that the time they'd spent apart had rewired both of them from the people they'd been when they'd first married more than two decades earlier. They were no longer trusting individuals who made good partners. When she was completely honest with herself, she worried that they'd both become wholly self-sufficient adults with unlimited capacity for taking care of others but severely limited ability to be vulnerable with each other. Most of the time, she pushed those concerns aside and recognized that getting back together wasn't a second chance so much as it was a last chance to be a family again. It was less romantic but more urgent, and Charlotte was committed to getting it right this time.

She looked up at the clock and contemplated crawling back into bed for a few minutes. The sun wasn't up, and already she was looking forward to dinner with Peter, Brooke, and Mark. She remembered that Craig would be in the office early because of the "Day in the Life" shoot. She picked up the phone on her desk and asked the White House operator to connect her to his direct line.

"Top of the morning, Madam President," he chirped.

"Obviously, you're being filmed right now. You never sound that happy to hear from me without half a dozen cappuccinos in you."

"I started caffeinating early, Madam President."

"Call me when you shake the television crew."

"Yes, ma'am. About five minutes."

"In the meantime, can you send someone up to my study in the residence to pick up the final edits to this morning's speech?"

"I'll pick them up myself, Madam President."

"That isn't necessary."

"On the contrary, it's completely necessary."

The film crews were not allowed into her private living quarters.

"See you in a minute."

"Thank you, Madam President. I owe you."

CHAPTER TEN.

Melanie Melanie paced the conference room and tried not to look as impatient as she felt. The videoconference between Baghdad and the White House was supposed to have started at six-thirty A.M. Washington time. It was almost seven, and the president still hadn't arrived in the Situation Room. Melanie looked around for her travel aide. He appeared instantly.

"What's going on?"

"The president made an off-the-record stop in the cafeteria in the Old Executive Office Building with the CBS film crew and was delayed by a group of summer interns who wanted pictures with her."

Melanie nodded and turned to the group of military trainers, state emba.s.sy staff, and local political officials. They didn't seem particularly bothered by the delay, but it irritated Melanie that the White House had kept them waiting. She waved her hand to get everyone's attention.

"I'm sorry, again, for the late start. As you all know, the president has a lot of demands on her time, and even with the help of an army of staff, you can't always make the trains run on time." This was precisely the sort of thing that furthered the impression of America as an arrogant superpower. It sent a clear signal that Charlotte's time was more valuable than theirs. Melanie was embarra.s.sed for herself and for the White House.

Seconds later, the TV screen at the front of the room came to life. There was Charlotte smiling warmly from the White House Situation Room.

"Good morning - actually, it's afternoon for all of you, so good afternoon to you all, and I apologize for being late. It's entirely my fault that we're running behind on our end."

Melanie remembered that the camera in the room was beaming her face back into the situation room in D.C., so she returned the president's smile and waited a second to speak so that she wouldn't get cut off in the delay.

"Thank you, Madam President. We are looking forward to our discussion today. We are honored by the partic.i.p.ation of several of the very best partners we've had since our efforts here began many years ago."

Melanie scrutinized the shot of the Situation Room and noticed the vice president, the secretary of state, the president's national security advisor, the White House chief of staff, and a few other policy advisors seated around the conference table. She almost gasped when she saw that Richard and Lucy were sitting directly across from the president at the table. A few of the partic.i.p.ants in Baghdad noticed the look of surprise on Melanie's face and looked around nervously.

Melanie was supposed to open the call with an overview of the goals that the group had settled on for the year ahead. She glanced down at her notecards and started to speak.

"We have a.s.sembled a group that includes some of Iraq's brightest new leaders. These men and women are on the front lines in terms of making sure their country is in the hands of true patriots and modern thinkers and not those who wish to see Iraq descend into violence. Today, Madam President, we're looking forward to hearing from them about the status of the fight against ISIS, which security and political measures have been productive, and the opportunities for greater collaboration on the security front and the political front. I think we'll all be able to make better-informed decisions after our discussion today, and many more like it."

"Thank you, Madam Secretary. I'd like to direct the conversation to your a.s.sociates in the room and ask all of you what you're seeing that concerns you and what you're seeing that gives you confidence about the path ahead. Melanie, perhaps you can make sure that everyone gets a chance to share their observations with us," Charlotte offered.

Melanie and the group had done a run-through, and they were prepared for Charlotte's invitation. Melanie introduced the first partic.i.p.ant, Azeeza Maloof, the head of Iraq's Women's Affairs department. Her predecessors were a.s.sa.s.sinated, and before Azeeza accepted the appointment, the position had been unfilled for nearly a year and a half.

Charlotte listened intently as Azeeza spoke about the threats that had been made against her and her family. When she was finished, the president praised her for her courage and determination. Melanie could see that Charlotte was completely focused on Azeeza, but she noticed that Lucy had pa.s.sed the president a note in the middle of Azeeza's recounting of having to move her family from their home because ISIS terrorists lit their house on fire one night while she and her children slept inside.

It took Charlotte a couple of minutes to see the folded piece of paper in front of her, but once she did, she read it and then folded it up again and placed it under her notepad. Melanie started to introduce the second partic.i.p.ant, but Charlotte interrupted.