Voters have an affection for maverick outsiders that’s almost as strong as the contempt felt for mavericks by Washington insiders. Things did not go smoothly for Kal Wilson when he and his renegade administration arrived inside the Beltway.
By the fourth year of his term, the man’s star was flickering. “Unorthodox” had been redefined as “inept.” His administration had brokered a cease-fire in the Middle East but been blamed for Central America’s instability, particularly the countries bordering the Panama Canal.
Wilson’s main adversary had been Juan Rivera, a man I came to know well during my years in the region. Rivera was a Fidel Castro-style revolutionary who publicly, and repeatedly, outmaneuvered the American president, contributing to the perception that Wilson was weak.
When Wilson changed the phrase “global fascist awakening” to “global fascist fundamentalism,” it was perceived as a ploy to boost his approval rating. When he stopped referring to terrorists as “Muslim extremists,” insisting that “Islamicist killers” was more accurate, he drew fire from both parties in our politically correct Congress.
It got worse when a reporter from Al Jazeera television asked him to explain the difference between “Islamicist killers” and “Zionist killers”-an impossible question because of the way it was couched-but Wilson answered, anyway.
Zionists, he said, believe a Jewish state should exist in the world. Islamicists, he continued, believe that the world should exist as an Islamic state.
“Are they both killers?” the reporter pressed.
Wilson bulled ahead. “An interesting distinction. Killing women and children at a bus stop or in a Nazi concentration camp-or at the federal building in Oklahoma City, for that matter-should be referred to as ‘murder.’ They aren’t acts of war. They’re acts of cowardice.
“So ‘fascist fundamentalism’ would be a more accurate term when used generally. ‘Islamicists’ would be the specific that describes murderers who use religion as a shield.”
Kal Wilson, the “freethinking dove,” was vilified as a bigot and a warmonger, and he effectively alienated fundamentalists of all faiths.
It had something to do with a bounty being offered for his head.
The silhouette dozing in the front of the canoe was the president of the United States…
As my mind lingered on the complex personality that was Kal Wilson, I sometimes paused to remind myself what the man had achieved, trying to counterbalance his unpresidential snoring.
Why wouldn’t he snore? He was human… one of six billion members of our species who, at that very instant, were inhaling or exhaling, making respiratory noises, as the earth orbited through the silent universe that blazed above our canoe.
He was flesh and finite; an ordinary man. As a man, though, he had lived an extraordinary life.
Wilson was among the youngest men ever elected to the presidency. He’d upset an incumbent, served one turbulent term, then shocked the country by not running for a second.
“Our reasons,” he said, “are personal”-the plural “our” referring to his wife, who, he often said, was the smarter half of their two-person presidency.
At a news conference, a famous anchorman referenced Wilson’s fifty-seven percent approval rating, before pressing, “Is it because you and the First Lady fear that you’ve polarized the American people?”
Wilson’s reply was measured and presidential-he never lost his poise in public.
Offstage, though, an unseen microphone caught what he whispered to his wife: “What I fear is polarizing the American press by smacking one of those pompous assholes in the face. Most of them are spoiled brats born with silver spoons up their asses. That’s why feeding people a line of crap comes so natural.”
Like most presidents, Wilson had run-ins with the media. But his “spoiled brat” line so endeared him to the public that the media retaliated by attacking as a pack. “Personal reasons” wasn’t explanation enough for not running, so the press speculated. Theories made headlines based on shock value, not fact, and they ranged from the offensive to the grotesque.
Wilson never fired back, though. A distant descendant of Woodrow Wilson, he’d become an expert on the office long before he held it, and he was fond of stiff-arming reporters by quoting his predecessors instead of allowing his own words to be twisted. He remained in the background, refusing comment on world affairs, and taking pains not to second-guess the current administration.
An example: Wilson, a track star and boxer at the Naval Academy, made headlines by winning his over-fifty age group in a Chicago triathlon, but then quit the sport. Characteristically, he offered no explanation, but friends said it was because he felt it wasn’t in the nation’s best interest to divert the spotlight from a sitting president.
Even out of office, Kal Wilson remained presidential. He stayed cool -cold, some said. The exception was when he denounced the media for not running the Danish editorial cartoons that sparked riots.
Tomlinson was wrong when he told me the incident was after Wray Wilson’s plane had crashed but right about the former president becoming more outspoken in the weeks after her death.
Wilson began using the term “Islamicists” and “Nazis” as synonyms.
He referred to the Islamic cleric who offered a bounty for his head as a “failed paperhanger” who didn’t have the courage to look an enemy in the eye-an obvious comparison to Adolf Hitler.
In an interview with BBC television, Wilson warned that the United Kingdom, Holland, France, and Germany, through their policies of appeasement, were “providing the knife and whetstone” that Islamicists would use to cut Europe’s throat.
He said, through the “dangerous charade” called “political correctness,” the United States was doing the same.
Both political parties began a subtle process of distancing themselves from Wilson. Newspaper editorials hinted that his thinking had become “unsound” as a way of explaining why they now refused to quote the man.
“Even former presidents sometimes need editing,” an editorial suggested.
“Censorship through intimidation,” Wilson responded, “is the first objective of tyranny. Once accomplished, the truth is easily perverted to serve the tyrant’s goals.”
For the first time in his career, Kal Wilson was criticized for behavior that was unpresidential.
Did Wilson believe there was a link between the million-dollar bounty and the former First Lady’s death? In the next few days, I would find out.
That was one reason I’d felt disappointed when I thought the trip was canceled. Another was that it was my chance to find out how Wilson was different. It interested me as a biologist and as a man. Extreme environments catalyze extreme adaptive mechanisms. By virtue of having inhabited the White House, Wilson was unlike other men.
But how?
I thought about it as I banged the canoe through the Intracoastal’s rough water into the slick, moon blue shallows. It was a question made more interesting because the man was a few feet away, motionless but no longer snoring.
Had the office elevated him? Or only isolated him?
Both, I guessed.
All U.S. presidents are awarded a place in history, but the spatial corridor is limited-eight years or less. What happened before is historical context. What happens afterward is postscript. A president’s life is defined by the office, then cast in bronze, often long before the man’s death. Typically, the life of a former president consists of a long, polite silence that ends with a bugler’s farewell.
Did ex-presidents chafe at inactivity? At the perception they are the walking dead?
Maybe that’s why Wilson was determined to spend his final days as a free man. He was a cool one, sometimes cold. But history’s bronze statue still had a beating heart, a warrior’s soul. A river flowed beneath the ice.