Gabriel Welsch

Rove Speaks

Time was, the President listened to me. I guess he still does, to be perfectly clear, but on this matter, he did not. We campaigned in Norfolk, and he gave a speech in Williamsburg, and it was while on the highway between Williamsburg and Jamestown, along 199, that he made the bus stop. An entire cavalcade brought to a halt by his outburst. He peered out a window, bent at the waist, the tip of his tie nearly dunked in my coffee. I could see his entire frame work into a squint. When he stood up and looked at me, it was as though he had forgotten I was sitting there. He said, “Wait here. I’m-a take a walk.”

I’d learned to expect him to say the unusual, to lean in and surprise me with an utterance, an observation. Contrary to the assertions of his detractors, he is capable of mordant wit, a deft characterization, a ribald pun. I had not, however, thought him capable of the impromptu stroll, not when he and I understood the world and its myriad dangers as we did.

When Rose and Gilder touched their ears and brushed at their sides, he straight-armed their plans. “Stay here. This is me.”

I saw the heads, too, enormous concrete busts of past American Presidents, each over ten feet in height, uplit and pale, arrayed along walkways, an army of contemplative scowls, big-shouldered and forested. It was like miniature golf or a wax museum, only larger, some perversion on history, someone’s disrespectful idea of a joke. It was, I have long maintained, completely beneath his concern.

But there he stood, leaning out beyond the front of the bus, waiting for the traffic to stop. They jammed instead. They slowed as they saw the bus. They honked and waved. Women leaned out of car windows, trying to see in the bus. None of them noticed the President standing at the front of the bus, small against the night and the highway, small when out from behind his podium or his entourage. Even if they had recognized him, they would not have expected him to actually be the President.

An RV stopped next to us. The driver, a woman in her fifties with a broad slash of lipstick across her mouth, looked right in the window at me while she laid on her horn. The man next to her, buzzcut with a cigarette, shot me the peace sign. I turned out the light above me. As I did so, I noticed the back of the President. He was jogging across the highway. The back of his suit jacket twitched with each step. He looked fit, and out of his mind. The RV had stopped all of the traffic trying to merge just beyond us, and people were so busy either honking and waving or giving other cars the finger that not one person noticed the President of the United States of America jaywalk across a major highway in the crepuscular light.

I heard our driver say into his radio, we have a situation. Rose and Gilder were white with inaction of countered expectations. The press bus was vague, choked with smoke, reeking of coffee and sweat and the unction of their own beleaguered-ness, lost behind us in the sea of cars. A tape of the opposition speaking worried at my ear. I heard the deep gurgle of someone pissing with the door open at the back of the bus. The campaign manager barked spin into his cell phone. His panic smelled like copper, like too much electricity. I wanted to strangle him with his tie.

But first things were first. Duty bound me to follow him, to find a way to cross that road. I ran when I could, my lungs savage with the effort, my legs jiggling when I had crossed. I strode into the heads, my walk looser than it had been in some time. My sclerotic blood, jangled to water by the run, surged through me. As I sought him, I could feel it.

And I could feel them. The glare of Teddy Roosevelt shot well over my head, aimed at some horizon-bound apparition long past. Franklin Pierce towered over me. The Adamses, side by side, dulled everything about them. Carter, for the first time, perhaps, looked dignified. Stone suited him. Clinton looked pained by restraint, his concrete new. I heard them hum, or the lights around them hum, more likely—but it was as though they had a hum themselves, a hum of vigilance, of the shared secret of what it meant to be statesmanlike and graven at once, to be flesh and idea embodied for so many, to be world’s master criminal and the most sacred puppet. I wondered if the President was listening.

Then I heard a tinny recording of My Bonnie Lives Over the Ocean, and decided that, come what may, we were not going to be seen here.

I found him standing before FDR. I didn’t know quite what to make of it. I noticed, then, a splatter of what had to have been piss, on the lapel of Calvin Coolidge. He wasn’t making any sense.

He absently picked his nose. His other hand jingled change in his pocket. How had he gotten money? Who gave him that?

He stood there for perhaps five minutes, and if he hadn’t felt my presence, I don’t know how long he would have continued to stand there, looking at the neck of Franklin Roosevelt. When he realized I was there, he said, “Is there anything to eat on that damned bus?”

I told him we had some bagels, coffee, a few day-old donuts from Raleigh. He said, “Do these faces look like the kind of people that eat day old donuts from Raleigh?”

I wanted to say, yes sir, every damned one of them, sir. They all did it, too, you know. But he’s not that kind of President. He is not a President willing to understand he is the man wearing the suit. He is the kind of President who will always strive to be the suit.

In Toledo, he told the people about his faith while Rose, Gilder, myself, and two lawyers watched him, waiting for the run. The local booster chair, working out of offices rented in the city’s now-abandoned sole skyscraper, told me, after some prodding, that he does know of a place with heads. Even as he said it, his voice stalled with uncertainty, not quite convinced that I had actually asked him such a thing. But I had. Everywhere we went. I wanted to know where the heads were.

In March, he made us take the bus through South Dakota, near Mount Rushmore, and while I thought it odd for him to prolong a trip for such a reason, the place is an important American monument. I thought little of it. But then, a stop at a bar an hour outside of Madison, to look at a sixteen foot sculpture of Woodrow Wilson holding a trout. The smile on the visage was deranged, made more so by his wearing a suit and hip waders. Then, in Laramie, we stayed parked at a drive in for half an hour while the President looked through binoculars at a bust of Nixon made entirely of blue corn and mounted on the front of a plumbing supply. At a miniature golf course in Phoenix, the owner let us in at dawn so that the President could putt on the green in front of William Harding spinning a windmill.

In the gritty dawn of Allentown a few weeks later, before the doors opened for a pancake breakfast, I decided to ask him point blank. He thoughtfully chewed the last bite of an energy bar before he waved at Rose and Gilder to take a few steps back. He squinted at them as they did it. When they had dropped back far enough for his satisfaction, he swallowed once, fixed an eye on me, and said, “Mathematics.”

He told me of a professor, a man retired from Boise State, who had devised a means for predicting winners of elections based on facial proportions and measurements of all two-term Presidents. Over his fifty year career, he had never been wrong. “Never,” the President repeated. Even for a man with a zeal for absolutes, the repetition that day struck me as particularly absolute, and particularly zealous.

I resisted the urge to say something then. Not out of any respect for authority, as I have always been frank with the President. Not out of any decorum, as no one was there. Not out of any sense of fealty or camaraderie, as I had little at stake concerning a friendship. He touched his own face as I grasped at words, as if the thoughtful application of finger to cheek were somehow to reveal to me the secrets of arcane mathematics and the wisdom of some crackpot in Idaho. And I was quiet because I was stunned.

Stunned that he would think he had any hand in his destiny. He was, and continues to be, a man controlled, groomed, and scripted by others. He is a spurt of artificial bluster, as if a moronic scion had stood a chance without my intervention, as if he wouldn’t have remained a coke-addled, low-end corporate failure and bail-out case. As. If. And then, as if everything I have done, every effort I have made, was useless in the face of shoddy equations and tabloid prediction skills. As if the presidency were to be decided by the same formulas that predict when the next little pop music slut will bop off to Vegas for a sham marriage.

The doors opened then, and the first of the sans-a-belt brigade waddled in for pancakes and face time with the man who would be their salvation from everything unholy and I wanted to puke.

The booster told me about a bar in East Toledo, near the hot dog place, where a street artist long-since-dead had carved a number of heads, among them presidents. They lean over the bar, yellowed with tobacco smoke and decades-old layers of Pledge, and the few tourists who still make it to Toledo are taken there to gawk by the locals. I sent a security detail there, and glared at them to keep questions to a minimum.

Sure enough, after he pressed the last hand, he ordered the bus in that direction. While I was confident the place was secured, I was still not happy about it.

You have no doubt heard already about the little town in Wisconsin, the so-called town of the Presidents, with the silhouettes. You have heard, too, how we snubbed the town with our drive through it. It may have been the thing that undid us. But it was the one victory I had in all of this.

We were eating wings and cheese curds, and the President ate with little grunting noises, little snorts of pleasure. He looked like an addict and, in between bites, he noticed me watching him. Grimacing, he said, “You can sit somewhere else.”

I told him I was in the proper place, where I had to be. He said he begged to differ, but not in those words. It had been a long trip, too many engagements, too many scuffles with the press, with reports of people blocked from rallies, with fat church leaders snarling their support at us. And after all of it, he had spent the down time of a day and a half telling me, beyond the hearing of anyone else, that we had to stop there. Each time, his breath at my ear like a desperate lover’s, reeking with coffee and bad mints, each time telling me we had to stop.

I told him no good could come of it, that we had bigger places in that very big state, and that we had priorities. As he forked in cheese curds, desperate with hunger and fatigue, while a bulky woman kneaded at his shoulders, I said, “We are driving through. Too much is at stake.”

He sat straight up and Helga stopped her probing. “The silhouettes are supposed to be exact likenesses,” he said, stretching the words at me, as if I didn’t get why he wanted to stop. “Exact.”

The driver addressed us over the intercom, telling us he was about to stop in Cuba City, President’s orders. I narrowed my eyes at him and he got that smirk-that-wasn’t-a-smirk. I stood then, pushed past Rose and Gilder, and pushed open the door to the driver. There was no ambiguity about what I told him to do. He accelerated then, and I looked ahead.

Dozens of people crowded the street ahead, including kids waving flags and sitting in red wagons, women in flag-etched bandanas and curls, men in beer t-shirts and pullovers and polo shirts with embroidered American flags and everyone wearing workboots and jeans, and fire engines with their lights spinning into the bright morning, ladders extended with flags hanging down in the sunny calm, the power line holding the single traffic light festooned with streamers. I could see the silhouettes then, each tidy and dark against aged poles, each a profile that said so much—an outline filled in with darkness, nothing revealed except for the space taken up by a face, nothing clear except for the absence where, once, there was a face. I told the driver: if you stop, you are fired, right here, in this town. If you stop, you are getting off the bus.

I heard the President behind me somewhere, shouting that I was making a huge mistake. No one else said anything. All I knew was that I had made enough mistakes. It was time to end it.

It didn’t end it. We all know that. And we went back. The President eventually had his way. But afterward, just days before the election, in Tyrone, Pennsylvania, he visited a factory that produced the dies used for currency by the federal reserve. He ran his fingers over the heads of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Truman. He even touched the face of Sacagawea, as if by then taken entirely with the mathematics of faces. When he asked the owner to leave him alone with the impressions, the man balked. Rose and Guilder assured him they would remain, but he looked unconvinced. When he turned to me, I noted the crevices in his face, the marks of business, the weight of decision, the inconsistencies of a life lived, the asymmetry of someone deep and human and conflicted. For what it was worth at the time, and for what it might be worth now, I remember then thinking that the President looked nothing like this man. And this man loved him.

I felt nothing when I lied to him then, when I said, “Don’t worry, sir. It’ll be fine.”

And as another thing we all know well, it did not stay fine. Sure, we clobbered a blue blooded droning Muppet and won the White House. The rabble have since clamored about the war and the budget, about the hurricane and our borders, and have been rankled over phone surveillance and kangaroo courts, they’ve even flipped the Congress on us—none of which concerns me. I have noted with irony that the vice president, a perennial liability, shot a man in the face, something that gravely disturbed the President. But none of those are issues of character. Those are issues of functionaries, no matter how you slice it. The President as an idea is above those things, and I aim to keep him that way. The President is an idea, even if the man within that idea doesn’t yet understand that. I have seen him spend nights flipping through the news stations, using his TiVo to pause on close-ups of faces, Pelosi, Rumsfeld, Obama—even Hussein’s and bin Laden’s. I even caught him once, unshaven and twitching from too many energy bars, pressing a measuring tape against a stilled image of Gwen Ifill from the debates. He looked at me and his face settled back into that narrow squint of his, a squint I now recognize not as haughtiness, not as some failure of intellect, but of petulance, of a refusal to be diminished to an idea. It is sad, that level of denial in someone with such potential. I told him he should put away the tape, no one should see it. He rolled it around one of his fingers, his eyes never leaving mine. I imagined all the things he wanted to say to me, and I felt like the scientist in the horror movie, confronted by the creature he had made, confronted by a thing assembled to resemble a man. I didn’t let it make me feel bad for very long.