“That’s your job,” the President said unhelpfully. The Chief of Staff called the meeting back to order, but no more than three minutes later the Communications Director interrupted, “Sorry, can I have five minutes alone with the President?”
“You just had twenty,” the President said. “Unless you can get me a million doses of Dormigen, we need to be right here.”
“I agree with the President,” the Speaker of the House said. “We still don’t have a grasp on what’s happening here.”
“Give me five minutes,” the Communications Director insisted. “I can kill this nuclear story right now. Can we talk with the First Lady?”
“What does she have to do with this?” the President asked, genuinely puzzled.
“Five minutes, everybody. Sorry,” the Communications Director said.
I was not privy to the subsequent meeting. I admire the First Lady for her willingness to play a role in a very clever misdirection scheme. Then again, no one ever doubted the First Lady’s toughness. The Communication Director’s plan can best be described as media tai chi. “You cannot fight a story, no matter how ridiculous it is,” he told me later. “You can only redirect the frenzy.” Buried in the news that day was another story—made up wholesale by some Internet troll—that the President was having an affair with a South American diplomat. The story had no legs whatsoever. The page had ninety-one views when the Communications Director stumbled across it. It was wedged between a headline proclaiming that a cream made from avocado pits could cure skin cancer and another alleging that the former Federal Reserve Chair had stolen two tons of gold during his tenure—purloining bars one at a time from the vault under the New York Federal Reserve Bank, hiding them under his desk (which was in Washington??), and eventually sneaking it all out in the family minivan.
Later that afternoon, the Communications Director released a statement proclaiming, “The President and First Lady have a rock-solid marriage,” and that any reports of extramarital affairs were “damaging and unsubstantiated.” Every press person immediately recognized the “nondenial denial,” which in media-speak means that the Communications Director had not denied the affair. He had merely described it as “damaging and unsubstantiated,” which means, “Yeah, it’s true, but my boss made me say something.” Over the next hour, the original South American affair story had fifty-two thousand hits, at which point the server went down.[6] At about the same time, the Washington Post–USA Today reported that a “senior White House official” had “acknowledged the possibility” that the President was embroiled in a salacious sex scandal with “a member of the foreign diplomatic corps.” The genius of this misdirection was twofold. First, the nuclear story went away. (The cameras on the White House lawn were disassembled almost immediately and dispatched to camp out at various embassies across Washington.) Second, the mainstream media could pass off this sex scandal as real news, rather than just salacious gossip, because it involved a foreign diplomat, no doubt a spy. Obviously, the public has a right to know if the President is giving up national security secrets in exchange for sexual favors.
The news “analysts” quickly pieced the story together: the nuclear situation was just a cover for the President’s sexual misdeeds, which were so serious that he had assembled the top officials in the government, including the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader, to discuss the possibility of his resignation. When this rumor frenzy was at its peak, the Communications Director leaked a photograph of a voluptuous, ethnically ambiguous, thirty-something woman to a Spanish-language television network. Much like that first iconic picture of Monica Lewinsky in the beret, this lovely Mediterranean or Arab or Hispanic woman became the face of the crisis. The press camped out at the twenty-plus embassies most likely to have a sexy spy with a vaguely olive complexion. In reality, the photo was computer-generated: a composite of several attractive celebrities, including a Lebanese jazz singer and a Brazilian soccer star, all melded together by a young computer whiz at the NSA. It was just an unfortunate coincidence that the computer-generated photo bore a stunning resemblance to Maria de la Campos Rivera, the head of the political section at the Colombian Embassy. Telemundo made the discovery, after which the press corps followed her doggedly. This turned out to be doubly tragic, since she was, in fact, having an affair with the married Cuban ambassador.
Roughly 60 percent of the American population still believes that the President was passing secrets through this Colombian mistress to the Cubans. That is ten times the number of Americans who can correctly locate Saudi Arabia on a world map.
32.
BACK IN THE CABINET ROOM, WE STILL HAD NOT ADDRESSED the two most contentious issues: China and a possible “rationing plan” for Dormigen if we were to come up short. Before we plunged into that, the Chief of Staff updated us on assorted other small developments. The U.S. military had identified a stash of Dormigen in Germany, some forty thousand doses, that would be shipped back stateside immediately. The Canadians were monitoring their Dormigen usage on a daily basis; demand was falling short of their projections, so they shipped us a hundred thousand doses and projected they might be able to donate more in the coming days. The better news came from a working group at the Centers for Disease Control. Doctors there had lowered the likely fatality rate for those sickened by Capellaviridae to a range between 0.5 to 1.1 percent—which they described as “on par with a virulent strain of the flu.” The earlier estimates were based on data from victims who had not sought treatment. Those who showed up at a hospital were likely to do better, even without Dormigen. The CDC experts wrote in a short memo, “If victims are treated with fluids and antibiotics to deal with possible secondary infections, the likely fatality rate would be appreciably lower than our earlier estimate.” The report also noted that the pattern of fatalities would be similar to a bad flu: the very old, the very young, and the immunocompromised. Our intuition was confirmed: the early fatalities—clusters of college students and young, otherwise healthy men—were not the most vulnerable populations; they were the ones who were too stubborn to seek treatment.
Despite the protestations of the Strategist, we had abandoned “the number” and were now working with a “likely range” of deaths. Experts typically use confidence intervals when projecting outcomes. “The number” had been a bizarre and artificially precise construct. Still, I would emphasize how important it was in those early days to quantify the risk we were facing. We should be grateful to the Strategist, his personal foibles aside,[7] for his unwillingness to bury his head in the sand. The dominant sentiment in those early meetings was denial, which was the worst possible response.
Our range had settled at seventy-five thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand likely deaths. “Most of these people are going to die anyway,” the Strategist said.
“So are we,” the Acting HHS Secretary said.
“You know what I mean,” the Strategist said. “Most of these people are very sick to begin with. You read the CDC memo.”
“Not the very young,” the Acting HHS Secretary replied.
“Right,” the Strategist conceded. “But we can give them the Dormigen we have.”
The Chief of Staff interrupted the exchange. “Hold those thoughts,” she said. “We need to talk about China first.”
“That Dormigen offer is still on the table?” the Senate Majority Leader asked.
“Of course it is,” the President answered. “This is the best thing to happen to them since the British left Hong Kong.”
6
Unfortunately, the former Chair of the Federal Reserve was also forced to deny that he had stolen two tons of gold, a rumor that dogs him to this day. As anyone who has served in Washington knows, these kinds of rumors can never be fully scrubbed away, no matter how outlandish they may be. I remember a college-educated friend telling me at a bar mitzvah years later, “Of course he denied stealing the gold. What else was he going to say? They never searched his house. Why not? Because all these guys are crooks. They’re in cahoots.” I considered telling him that it’s hard to get a search warrant based on an Internet rumor, but instead I just excused myself and went to the bar.
7
The Strategist was arrested in D.C. for solicitation eight months ago, and then again for the same offense three weeks later in Buffalo, New York. This made him a target for late-night comics, not merely for the prostitution arrest, but because it happened in Buffalo. He later made a compelling argument that prostitution should be legalized. (You can watch the YouTube video.) Like so many other things he argued, it was eminently sensible once you stripped the emotion away from the issue.