“Uh-huh.”
The Chief of Staff ran her hand through the paper clips, letting them slip through her fingers. “Are you sure security cleared this?”
“It’s from an elementary school outside of Chicago.”
“I think we’re fine on office supplies.”
“It’s based on a documentary,” the intern explained. “I looked it up online. There’s this film about a group of elementary school kids who collected six million paper clips, one for each Jew killed in the Holocaust.”
“And this?” the Chief of Staff said, pointing at the box.
“I’d bet it’s about forty thousand, one for each person who will not get Dormigen—”
“Of course.” They both stared at the box for a while. “That’s a lot of paper clips,” the Chief of Staff said softly.
“Do you think the President will want to see it?” the intern asked.
“I do,” she said. And then, “He should, in any event.”
Later, when the President returned to the Oval Office from a meeting in the situation room, the Chief of Staff was waiting for him, along with the open box of paper clips that had been wheeled on a cart up from the basement. The President noticed the box immediately. “What’s that?” he asked.
“It came from an elementary school near Chicago,” the Chief of Staff answered. There was a brief silence as the President waited for the balance of the explanation and the Chief of Staff decided how to couch it. “There’s one paper clip in the box for each person who would be denied Dormigen—”
“Like the documentary,” the President said.
“Yes, exactly,” the Chief of Staff replied. He still surprised her on occasion, despite their many years working together. The typical day in the White House was a blur of fifteen-minute meetings; the President survived by exercising good judgment and knowing just enough about a lot of things. It was the opposite of her experience in academe, where her colleagues could spend hours drilling down on the most obscure of topics. She would sometimes forget that the President was a reader and a film enthusiast; it was his escape. After his divorce, he spent a long stretch alone in Washington. There had been a lot of media buzz in those years about his antics as one of the nation’s most attractive bachelors, but the reality was that he retired most nights to his tiny apartment with a book or a film. Even in the White House, with the First Lady traveling frequently, he would do the same, after the Chief of Staff had gone home to her husband and teenagers. On occasion, the President would invite authors or directors to dinner—not the famous ones, as he had no particular affinity for celebrities, but a historian or an accomplished filmmaker. The Chief of Staff should not have been surprised that he had seen an obscure documentary about schoolchildren who collected six million paper clips, even though she was.
“Leave them here,” the President instructed.
“In the middle of the office?” she asked.
“Somewhere everyone can see them,” he said. The paper clips were different sizes and colors: big, little, metallic, green, blue, bright pink. There was one paper clip resting on top with a sticky note attached to it. The President was not wearing his glasses when he picked it up, so he could not read the tiny elementary-school handwriting. But he knew what it said: Cecelia Dodds. In subsequent days, when staff members would ask about the box, or make jokes about buying paper clips in bulk, he would explain their significance.
Not long ago, when the President was in the final months of his term, he visited the students who had done the Dormigen paper-clip project at their elementary school in a Chicago suburb. The President spent nearly an hour and a half talking to the student body and answering questions, an unheard-of amount of time for a presidential visit. “Your project was a crucial reminder for me during the Outbreak of how our decisions would affect real people,” the President told the assembled students, most of whom were too young to appreciate the significance of what they were hearing. “That didn’t make it easier—harder, probably. But we needed that. We needed a constant reminder that the decisions we were making would affect real people and families—thousands and thousands of them,” the President explained.
The event garnered a great deal of national and international attention. To that point, the President had said relatively little about his decisions during the Outbreak. There was speculation that his elementary school visit would prompt some newsworthy reflection. By then, however, the President was thoroughly fed up with the media. He ordered the student assembly closed to the press, except for two reporters from the school newspaper, the Springhill Chronicle.[31] The balance of the media—over a hundred photographers, videographers, pundits, writers, and bloggers—were relegated to the school parking lot while the President spoke inside. Then, in a moment of delicious irony orchestrated by the President, one of the student writers for the Springhill Chronicle was deputized to give a pool report for the global media assembled outside.
“It’s going to be a pool event,” the Communications Director told the traveling White House press corps, smirking visibly. (When events were space-constrained, or when a large group of reporters might disturb an event, such as a visit to the bedside of a wounded soldier, the Communications Office would choose a single reporter and cameraperson to cover the event and share information and photos with the rest of the “press pool.” However, the reporter designated for such responsibility was not usually an eleven-year-old writer for the Springhill Chronicle.) After the event, the President stood on a patch of grass outside the school, smiling and silent, as eleven-year-old Dan “Bucky” Riegsecker reported dutifully on what had been said inside. Correspondents from the New York Times, the Washington Post–USA Today, Home Depot Media, and all the major cable news stations—notebooks out, cameras rolling—lapped up the tidbits Bucky tossed their way.
78.
THE PHONE RANG AT THE U.S. AMBASSADOR’S RESIDENCE IN New Delhi around midnight. It was Sumer Patel requesting a meeting as soon as possible between the Indian Prime Minister and the U.S. Secretary of State. “The Secretary of State is in Bahrain,” the Ambassador told Patel.
“It’s just three hours away,” Patel pointed out.
“Yes, that is fortunate,” the Ambassador agreed. “I can’t say for certain, but given the urgency of the situation, the Secretary of State might be able to get here in the morning.”
“Yes, that would be perfect, if you can arrange it,” Patel said.
“This is her top priority,” the Ambassador assured him. The details for the meeting were fixed. The Ambassador immediately phoned the Secretary of State, who was attending a banquet hosted by the Royal Family. The paperwork for the flight to Delhi had already been prepared for this contingency; a pilot and flight crew were standing ready. The Secretary excused herself from the banquet, which had gone from tedious to excruciating over the course of the evening. And so, less than two hours after the Communications Director had issued the press release announcing a “scientific breakthrough” with regard to Capellaviridae, the Secretary of State and the Strategist were on an Air Force jet bound for India.
Upon landing in India, the Secretary of State found herself with a curious problem: she had no entourage. The American Secretary of State does not travel alone; no one on the Indian side would believe that she had been in Bahrain for meetings without a large complement of aides. The fact that she was traveling with the President’s top strategist and pollster would raise even more questions. The Indian Prime Minister was vain and self-interested, but he was no fool; if word leaked that the Secretary of State had been loitering in Bahrain without all the usual hangers-on, he would suspect a scheme. (Political schemers are, of course, most adept at detecting scheming by others.) The Ambassador solved this problem by “loaning” the Secretary of State eight embassy staff members, all with the requisite security clearance. “Follow her around, look obsequious, and don’t say anything to anyone,” he instructed them. Those eight “staffers” can now claim to be a footnote to one of the most famous negotiations in modern diplomatic history—as fake lackeys.
31
Some of the questions for the President, as reported by the