Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

The appointment was unpopular. The issue was less Hagen ’s associates-he was hardly the only politician in that era with such associates-than his brief tenure as a Nevada resident. Also, he was a political novice with no record of public service. Every newspaper in the state, without exception, criticized the choice and gave the controversy prominent coverage. The primary added further complications. The late congressman had been running unopposed. Lawsuits abounded, but the November general election was shaping up as a contest between Tom Hagen and a dead man.

To build power, sometimes one must control those who seem the least powerful. This was the secret of the Corleones’ ability to control judges. Though corruption and venality thrive in all classes of men, the normative judge-the public might be relieved to know-is more honest than the normative human being. In practice, judges are difficult and expensive to control. However. Cases are typically assigned “randomly” by a clerk of court who’s paid no more than, say, a normative Spanish teacher. A person who controls ten percent of such people and a majority of the judges is vastly less powerful than one who’s sewn up most of the clerks and a few strategically placed judges afflicted by cynical natures, bad habits, or dark secrets.

Newspapers work the opposite way. Some reporters can be swayed by a free lunch, a forgiven gambling debt, even a glass of ice-cold beer. But most have a crusading streak and a fixation on whatever strikes them as news that overrides their loyalty to anything. Happily, they are also excitable, eager for newer news, toward which they follow one another like lemmings. To control the news, one needs influence at the top. The public has a short memory. If a story goes away after a few days and is replaced by something new, the public wants not closure to the old but newer details about the new. Or something newer still. Control those who control those who decide how long to cover a story and where it goes in the paper, and you control the news.

After a few days, a magnetic, strange-looking man in black leather and blacker sideburns-a popular music sensation from Mississippi, a white boy screaming Negro songs-came to Las Vegas for the first time. Hagen was supplanted on the front page and in the public’s imagination by gleeful news of the hillbilly sensation’s poor performance and speculation about whether this signaled an end not just to the young hick’s career but also to the whole vulgar, allegedly Communistic fad known as “rock and roll.” The day Hagen was sworn in and flew to Washington to assume his duties, the only mention of him in any Nevada paper was a story by one dogged reporter from Carson City, who, from the wilderness of an inside page, tried to sort out the legal battle over the congressional contest. The late congressman’s party was beset by infighting and injunctions and seemed increasingly unlikely to be able both to pick a candidate and to get that candidate onto the ballot in time. Congressman Hagen was faring better. Though he’d been appointed to office well after the filing deadline for the November ballot, he’d submitted all the necessary petitions and paperwork within a week of the announcement of his appointment. The clerk of the court was quoted as saying that, under the circumstances, the request by Hagen ’s lawyers to grant him the necessary extension promised to be “a routine matter.”

The Dons and their top men were acting more and more like the top men in corporations or governments. This, Hagen knew, was what Michael thought he wanted: to be legitimate. Michael was continuing down this road without Hagen ’s advice. Until it was sought, Hagen would keep his reservations to himself.

Unlike Hagen, Michael had never worked for a corporation. In this business, who gets hurt who hasn’t brought it on himself? It’s rare. But in “legitimate” businesses? Before Hagen had quit to go to work for Vito Corleone, he’d spent his final months as a corporate lawyer working on “acceptable death rates”: How many innocent people would have to die various ways in various crashes of cars manufactured by the firm’s client before the fully expected lawsuits justified the cost of installing safer, more expensive parts. Babies, high school kids, pregnant women, brilliant young white men with high salaries: all researched, all calculated, all written down in the report he filed the day he quit. What did those people do to bring on their deaths?

The government was worse, which Hagen knew long before he took office himself. Remember “Remember the Maine ”? All a big lie concocted so the United States could go to war under false pretenses and the men in charge could make their rich friends richer (including the newspaper moguls who self-servingly spread the lie in the first place). More people died in that trumped-up war than in every Mafia conflict put together. It’s only the negative stereotypes about Italians that make people think they’re a threat to the average Joe. The government, on the other hand, wages nonstop war on the average Joe, and the suckers just eat their bread, go to their circuses, and keep on pretending they live in a democracy-a lie so cherished they can’t grasp the self-evident, that America is run entirely via backroom deals involving the rich. In almost every election, the richer candidate defeats the poorer candidate. When the poorer candidate wins, it’s usually because he’s agreed to be a stooge for people richer than the ones who backed his opponent. Go ahead, try voting the bastards out. See what happens. More to the point: see what doesn’t. That ought to be his slogan: Hagen for Congress. See What Doesn’t Happen.

Hagen doubted that the world had ever seen a better racket than the American government. It’s hard to sue the government, for example, and even if you win, so what? Here’s a million bucks. Then they raise taxes two million. Plus, with businesses, someone somewhere has to buy their crummy product. What are people supposed to do about the government? It’s yours, it’s you, you’re stuck with it, end of story.

For years, Hagen had been working out deals with politicians, looking into their dead eyes and seeing what soulless opportunists those men had become, long before Hagen ever set foot in their offices to explain whatever mutually beneficial arrangement they would have little choice but to accept. These men-and, very occasionally, women-accepted without objection, thanked Hagen, shook his hand, smiled those public-servant smiles, and told him to come back anytime. If Hagen ever looked in the mirror and saw that look in his own eyes, he might just have to put a bullet between them.

He’d never expected to hold elected office outside the state of Nevada (and was reluctant even to do that), and he never would have if not for the unforeseen opportunity provided by his predecessor’s death. The people of Nevada seemed as alarmed to find Tom Hagen in Congress as he was to be there-though less alarmed than his wife, Theresa. The criticism of his appointment, even after it had died down, was too much for her. She was concerned about the effect it would have on the kids. And the idea of being a Washington wife gave her the creeps. “You always seem to get what you want,” she’d told him, “and I know you well enough to know you never wanted this.” He tried to deny it, and she saw through him. She needed time to think about all this. She took the kids and went to spend the summer with her folks at the Jersey shore.

Perhaps it was precisely because Tom Hagen had gone into this so grudgingly that his arrival in Washington was such a shock to his system. As his taxicab crossed the Potomac, it hit him, really, where he was, who he was. As realistic as Hagen was about what went on in that city, the sight of the Lincoln Memorial put a lump in his throat.