Charles Wheelan - The Rationing

For anyone willing to listen, the Secretary of State offered a deep understanding of the sweeping forces of history. She did not see international affairs as a stark, ongoing battle between good and evil, as the Secretary of Defense was wont to do, but she did believe that history offered up repeated cases in which “the forces of liberalism and enlightenment must face down our darker human impulses or face the awful consequences.” She had lived in Rwanda and Cambodia, both places where the effects of genocide were still palpable. To put a fine point on all this, the Secretary of State viewed the South China Sea Agreement as a historic inflection point. She did not consider China to be an evil regime on par with the Khmer Rouge or the Nazis. Rather, she compared the Beijing government to the Soviet Union during the Cold War: an enormously powerful and influential nation that was steadily pulling the world order in a bad direction—flouting international agreements, trampling civil liberties, selling weapons to despots, despoiling the environment at a historically unprecedented pace, and demonstrating to bad governments around the globe that they could get away with it all. “The South China Sea Agreement will redirect the course of the world order, as NATO and the United Nations did after World War II,” she had told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs—one of her many appearances as she stumped for the agreement across the country.

The Secretary of State was flabbergasted that the President was seriously considering selling out the future world order to get through a short-term public health crisis. “The Dormigen shortage is, what, five days?” she asked. “Capitulating to the Chinese would be the next century .” The President respected her judgment, though he found her to be pedantic and insufficiently respectful of his domestic political constraints. Sometimes, after a sour encounter, the President would tell anyone in earshot, “She couldn’t get elected to a school board.” For her part, the Secretary of State was often impatient with the President’s lack of interest in detail and his poor grasp of history, particularly Asian and African history.

I should point out that none of the senior advisers on Air Force One had eaten in many hours. The Chief of Staff, recognizing the combined dangers of sleep deprivation and low blood sugar, asked the Chief Steward to bring breakfast. The crew on board, having expected a jubilant, unrushed breakfast upon the approach to Australia rather than a tense meal in the middle of the night, had planned an omelet station for senior staff. There was no other food readily available, so the Chief Steward directed the chef to set up a buffet, including the omelet station, in an alcove outside the conference room. This explains one of the more scurrilous charges to emerge in the aftermath of the Outbreak—that the President and senior advisers had been blithely dining on pastries and omelets while the country was overcome by plague, like Nero if he had had his own 797. Yes, there was literal truth embedded in the story. There were croissants and fresh fruit; there was an omelet station. But the reality is that the Chief of Staff was trying to feed a staff who had been working around the clock with the food that happened to be available.

As Air Force One made its final descent into Honolulu, the President told the Secretary of State, “We have not made any decision about the South China Sea Agreement.”

“What are you going to tell the country?” she asked.

“First, we just need to explain what’s happening,” he said.

“Is the Chinese Dormigen offer for real?” she asked.

“As far as we can tell, yes,” the Chief of Staff answered.

The Secretary of State said, “They are going to do everything they can to exploit this situation.”

She was correct.

THE PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS TO THE NATION WAS SCHEDULED for twelve p.m. Eastern Time. For once, the administration did not have to wrangle with the networks to get them to cover the speech. Upon landing, the President was hustled to a studio at Fort DeRussy in Honolulu. Almost immediately the schedule began to slip. The President was traveling with a single speechwriter, who had been brought along to draft valedictory remarks after the South China Sea Agreement was signed. Instead, she was awakened in the middle of the night and told to write a fifteen-minute national address on a subject she knew nothing about. The President angrily rejected the first draft, which was heavy on Pearl Harbor imagery. He snarled, “Pearl Harbor was the beginning of World War II. What I’m trying to convey here is that everything is going to be okay.” The Communications Director wrote a short draft himself, but the President was unhappy with that as well, taking a Montblanc pen in his left hand and crossing out the whole first paragraph, then, as he read on, the whole second paragraph, before tossing the whole thing aside. “I need something short, straightforward, and reassuring,” he said. “Do I have to write this myself?”

Shortly after five a.m. Hawaii time, the President was ushered into a small, secure conference room at Fort DeRussy along with the Strategist and the Chief of Staff. There were still no draft remarks. The Communications Director was working frantically with the studio crew to find an appropriate backdrop for the talk, something that would approximate the Oval Office. The television studio at Fort DeRussy had a digital background; the producer could manipulate the scene behind the President with the click of a mouse, like changing screensavers. The Communications Director leaned over the producer’s shoulder as they tried out backdrops, most of which had been designed for military briefings. The first digital background showed the Pearl Harbor Memorial, with an expanse of ocean and blue sky. “That’s the U.S.S. Missouri Memorial,” the producer explained.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” the Communications Director exclaimed. “That looks like the President of the United States is on a Hawaiian vacation.” The producer clicked on his console, bringing up a new digital background: dark wood bookshelves, lined with serious-looking books, like a cozy academic office.

“Maybe that?” the producer offered.

“What are the books?” the Communications Director asked.

“Pardon?”

“The books. What are the titles of the books?”

“They’re not real. They’re just digital images.”

The Communications Director spluttered, “I understand that. I am not an idiot. But they still have titles, fake or not. Make it bigger, so I can read them.” The producer enlarged the image, so that the fake titles on fake bookshelves became readable. After a few seconds, the Communications Director muttered, “No… no… no. Clausewitz? Counterinsurgency. They’re all military books.”

“That is what we do here,” the producer said, finally pushing back. “It’s a military base.”

“This looks like the President is getting ready to invade some small country.”

“I can blur the titles so they’re not readable. It might look a little strange—”

“It will take five minutes before some douchebag living in his mother’s basement unblurs them, and that will become the story. What else do you have?” The two of them finally agreed on a simple background with the presidential seal and an American flag, after which the Communications Director asked who would load the remarks into the teleprompter.

“We don’t have a teleprompter,” the producer said.

“Jesus. Does the President know that?”

“I don’t speak to the President.”

Of course, there were no remarks to be loaded into a teleprompter at that point anyway. The President, true to his word, had begun drafting a short speech, longhand on a legal pad. When the Communications Director called the President from the studio control room to tell him there would be no teleprompter, the President read him his draft remarks over the phone. It was a short, simple speech that again emphasized the three key points we were trying to make: no terrorism attack; the virus does not spread; the Dormigen shortage is manageable.