“Okay, I get it,” the President said, cutting her off. The Secretary of State’s historical references may seem facile in the retelling. The reality is that the third thing she brought into that stifling little room was a powerful intellect and unparalleled global experience. Her parents had both been American diplomats, moving from posting to posting every couple of years. The Secretary of State spoke Swahili, Arabic, and enough Hindi to delight any Indian audience. Perhaps more important, she had attended local schools in many of those postings, picking up a visceral understanding of the needs and wants of local families. She could tell humorous stories about bouts of dengue fever (Indonesia), or winning a goat in an elementary school spelling bee (Tanzania). The Secretary of State was not, however, a natural politician. Twice she had run for office, once for Congress in a suburban Maryland district and once for the U.S. Senate, also in Maryland. Both times she was trounced in the Democratic primary, having delivered long monologues on “America’s unique leadership role in the post-industrial world” that caused voters’ eyes to glaze over. She declared bitterly at the end of her Senate campaign, “Americans have stopped caring about the rest of the world.” There was a grain of truth in that, but it was also true that the Secretary of State had difficulty speaking about issues in ways that made normal people care. A Washington Post–USA Today political columnist described her stump speech: “Imagine your worst college professor. Then take away the excitement.” A YouTube video of the Secretary of State speaking about a Brazilian antipoverty program went viral, apparently because college students had turned it into a drinking game.
For anyone willing to listen, the Secretary of State offered a deep understanding of the sweeping forces of history. She did not see international affairs as a stark, ongoing battle between good and evil, as the Secretary of Defense was wont to do, but she did believe that history offered up repeated cases in which “the forces of liberalism and enlightenment must face down our darker human impulses or face the awful consequences.” She had lived in Rwanda and Cambodia, both places where the effects of genocide were still palpable. To put a fine point on all this, the Secretary of State viewed the South China Sea Agreement as a historic inflection point. She did not consider China to be an evil regime on par with the Khmer Rouge or the Nazis. Rather, she compared the Beijing government to the Soviet Union during the Cold War: an enormously powerful and influential nation that was steadily pulling the world order in a bad direction—flouting international agreements, trampling civil liberties, selling weapons to despots, despoiling the environment at a historically unprecedented pace, and demonstrating to bad governments around the globe that they could get away with it all. “The South China Sea Agreement will redirect the course of the world order, as NATO and the United Nations did after World War II,” she had told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs—one of her many appearances as she stumped for the agreement across the country.
The Secretary of State was flabbergasted that the President was seriously considering selling out the future world order to get through a short-term public health crisis. “The Dormigen shortage is, what, five days?” she asked. “Capitulating to the Chinese would be the next century.” The President respected her judgment, though he found her to be pedantic and insufficiently respectful of his domestic political constraints. Sometimes, after a sour encounter, the President would tell anyone in earshot, “She couldn’t get elected to a school board.” For her part, the Secretary of State was often impatient with the President’s lack of interest in detail and his poor grasp of history, particularly Asian and African history.
I should point out that none of the senior advisers on Air Force One had eaten in many hours. The Chief of Staff, recognizing the combined dangers of sleep deprivation and low blood sugar, asked the Chief Steward to bring breakfast. The crew on board, having expected a jubilant, unrushed breakfast upon the approach to Australia rather than a tense meal in the middle of the night, had planned an omelet station for senior staff. There was no other food readily available, so the Chief Steward directed the chef to set up a buffet, including the omelet station, in an alcove outside the conference room. This explains one of the more scurrilous charges to emerge in the aftermath of the Outbreak—that the President and senior advisers had been blithely dining on pastries and omelets while the country was overcome by plague, like Nero if he had had his own 797. Yes, there was literal truth embedded in the story. There were croissants and fresh fruit; there was an omelet station. But the reality is that the Chief of Staff was trying to feed a staff who had been working around the clock with the food that happened to be available.
As Air Force One made its final descent into Honolulu, the President told the Secretary of State, “We have not made any decision about the South China Sea Agreement.”
“What are you going to tell the country?” she asked.
“First, we just need to explain what’s happening,” he said.
“Is the Chinese Dormigen offer for real?” she asked.
“As far as we can tell, yes,” the Chief of Staff answered.
The Secretary of State said, “They are going to do everything they can to exploit this situation.”
She was correct.
50.
THE PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS TO THE NATION WAS SCHEDULED for twelve p.m. Eastern Time. For once, the administration did not have to wrangle with the networks to get them to cover the speech. Upon landing, the President was hustled to a studio at Fort DeRussy in Honolulu. Almost immediately the schedule began to slip. The President was traveling with a single speechwriter, who had been brought along to draft valedictory remarks after the South China Sea Agreement was signed. Instead, she was awakened in the middle of the night and told to write a fifteen-minute national address on a subject she knew nothing about. The President angrily rejected the first draft, which was heavy on Pearl Harbor imagery. He snarled, “Pearl Harbor was the beginning of World War II. What I’m trying to convey here is that everything is going to be okay.” The Communications Director wrote a short draft himself, but the President was unhappy with that as well, taking a Montblanc pen in his left hand and crossing out the whole first paragraph, then, as he read on, the whole second paragraph, before tossing the whole thing aside. “I need something short, straightforward, and reassuring,” he said. “Do I have to write this myself?”
Shortly after five a.m. Hawaii time, the President was ushered into a small, secure conference room at Fort DeRussy along with the Strategist and the Chief of Staff. There were still no draft remarks. The Communications Director was working frantically with the studio crew to find an appropriate backdrop for the talk, something that would approximate the Oval Office. The television studio at Fort DeRussy had a digital background; the producer could manipulate the scene behind the President with the click of a mouse, like changing screensavers. The Communications Director leaned over the producer’s shoulder as they tried out backdrops, most of which had been designed for military briefings. The first digital background showed the Pearl Harbor Memorial, with an expanse of ocean and blue sky. “That’s the U.S.S. Missouri Memorial,” the producer explained.