20 NEW ADMINISTRATIONS
THERE WERE THIRTY OF them in the East Room—all men, much to his surprise— with their wives. As Jack walked into the reception his eyes scanned the faces. Some pleased him. Some did not. Those who did were as scared as he was. It was the confident, smiling ones who worried the President.
What was the right thing to do with them? Even Arnie didn't know the answer, though he had run through several approaches. Be very strong and intimidate them? Sure, Ryan thought, and tomorrow the papers would say he was trying to be King Jack I. Take it easy? Then he'd be called a wimp who was unable to take his proper leadership position. Ryan was learning to fear the media. It hadn't been all that bad before. As a worker bee, he'd been largely ignored. Even as Durling's National Security Advisor, he'd been thought of as a ventriloquist's dummy. But now the situation was very different, and there was not a single thing he could say that could not, and would not, be twisted into whatever the particular listener wanted to say himself. Washington had long since lost the capacity for objectivity. Everything was politics, and politics was ideology, and ideology came down to personal prejudices rather than the quest for truth. Where had all these people been educated that the truth didn't matter to them?
Ryan's problem was that he really didn't have a political philosophy per se. He believed in things that worked, that produced the promised results and fixed whatever was broken. Whether those things adhered to one political slant or another was less important than the effects they had. Good ideas worked, even though some of them might seem crazy. Bad ideas didn't, even though some of them seemed sensible as hell. But Washington didn't think that way. Ideologies were facts in this city, and if the ideologies didn't work, people would deny it; and if the ones with which they disagreed did work, those who'd been opposed would never admit it, because admitting error was more hateful to them than any form of personal misconduct. They'd sooner deny God than deny their ideas. Politics had to be the only arena known to man in which people took great action without caring much for the real-world consequences, and to which the real world was far less important than whatever fantasy, right, left, or center, they'd brought to this city of marble and lawyers.
Jack looked at the faces, wondering what political baggage they'd brought along with their hanging bags. Maybe it was a weakness that he didn't understand how that all worked, but for his part, he had lived a life in which mistakes got real people killed—and in Cathy's case, made people blind. For Jack, the victims were people with real names and faces. For Cathy, they were those whose faces she had touched in an operating room. For political figures, they were abstractions far more distant than their closely held ideas.
"Like being in a zoo," Caroline Ryan, FLOTUS, SURGEON, observed to her husband, behind a charming smile. She'd raced home—the helicopter helped—just in time to change into a new white slinky dress and a gold necklace that Jack had bought her for Christmas… a few weeks, he remembered, before the terrorists had tried to kill her on the Route 50 bridge in Annapolis.
"With golden bars," her husband, POTUS, SWORDSMAN, replied, fronting a smile of his own that was as fake as a three-dollar bill.
"So what are we?" she asked as the assembled senators-designate applauded their entrance. "Lion and lioness? Bull and cow? Peacock and peahen? Or two lab bunnies waiting to have shampoo poured in our eyes?"
"Depends on who's doing the beholding, baby." Ryan was holding his wife's hand, and together they walked to the microphone.
"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Washington." Ryan had to pause for another round of applause. That was something else he'd have to learn. People applauded the President for damned near anything. Just as well that his bathroom had a door. He reached into his pocket and pulled out some three-by-five cards, the way Presidents always kept their speaking points. The cards had been prepared by Gallic Weston, and the hand-printing was large enough that he didn't need his reading glasses. Even so he'd come to expect a headache. He had one every day from all the reading.
"Our country has needs, and they're not small ones. You're here for the same reason I am. You've been appointed to fill in. You have jobs which many of you never expected, and which some of you may not have wanted." This was vain flattery, but the sort they wanted to hear— more accurately, which they wanted to be seen to hear on the C-SPAN cameras in the corners of the room. There were perhaps three people in the room who were not career politicians, and one of those was a governor who'd done the me-you dance with his lieutenant governor and so come to Washington to fill out the term of a senator from another party. That was a curveball which the papers had only started writing about. The polarity of the Senate would change as a result of the 747 crash, because the control of thirty-two of America's state houses hadn't quite been in line with the makeup of the Congress.
"That's good," Ryan told them. "There is a long and honorable tradition of citizens in service to their nation that goes back at least as far as Cincinnatus, the Roman citizen who more than once answered his country's call, then returned to his farm and his family and his work. One of our great cities is named in memory of that gentleman," Jack added, nodding to a new senator from Ohio—his home was in Dayton, which was close enough.
"You would not be here if you didn't understand what many of those needs are. But my real message for you, today, is that we must work together. We do not have the time and our country does not have the time for us to bicker and fight." He had to pause for applause again. Annoyed by the delay, Ryan managed to look up with an appreciative smile and nod.
"Senators, you will find me an easy man to work with. My door is always open, I know how to answer a phone, and the street goes both ways. I will discuss any issue. I will listen to any point of view. There are no rules other than the Constitution which I have sworn to preserve, protect, and defend.
"The people out where you come from, out there beyond Interstate 495, expect all of us to get the job done. They don't expect us to get reelected. They expect us to work for them to the best of our ability. We work for them. They don't work for us. We have the duty to perform for them. Robert E. Lee once said that 'duty' is the most sublime word in our language. It's even more sublime and even more important now, because none of us has been elected to our offices. We represent the people of a democracy, but in every case we have come here in a way that simply wasn't supposed to happen. How much greater, then, is our personal duty to fulfill our roles in the best possible manner?" More applause.
"There is no higher trust than that which fate has conferred on us. We are not medieval noblemen blessed by birth with high station and great power. We are the servants, not the masters, to those whose consent gives us what power we have. We live in the tradition of giants. Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, and so many other members of your house of the Congress must be your models. 'How stands the Union? Webster is said to ask from his grave. We will determine that. The Union is in our hands. Lincoln called America the last and best hope of mankind, and in the past twenty years America has given truth to that judgment by our sixteenth President. America is still an experiment, a collective idea, a set of rules called the Constitution to which all of us, within and without the Beltway, give allegiance. What makes us special is that brief document. America isn't a strip of dirt and rock between two oceans. America is an idea and a set of rules we all follow. That's what makes us different, and in holding true to that, we in this room can make sure that the country we pass on to our successors will be the same one entrusted to us, maybe even a little bit improved. And now" — Ryan turned to the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Judicial Circuit, the nation's most senior appellate judge, up from Richmond—"it's time for you to join the team."