Which would have been an amusing way of putting it except that I have never, not before or since, seen the President as deadly serious as he was being at that exact moment. Waters shut his mouth and waited for what the President had to say next.
And what he said next was simple. He said to Waters and Cortez that as far as he was concerned this initiative was the sole task of the federal government from that point forward. How they wanted to get it done in their respective chambers was up to them but they had three months and no more to get a bipartisan bill on his desk, one that had more than two-thirds support in both chambers.
Left unsaid was what would happen if the bill failed to materialize in the appointed time. I think in her autobiography Cortez said she thought the President was hinting that martial law was not out of the question. There’s not much that I would agree with Cortez on, politically or otherwise, but I think she was spot on with this one. To be blunt, the President was not fucking around with this one. It wasn’t political, it was personal.
Duane Holmes:
It got done. It nearly killed everyone in Congress, and everyone in Congress ended up wanting to kill everyone else, but two weeks before the deadline the President had the Haden Research Initiative Act on his desk. 300 billion dollars allocated for medical and technological research and treatment for that first year, officially, and unofficially, whatever it cost to get things moving. It ended up costing three trillion dollars by the end of it. That’s a hell of a lot of money.
It got done for two reasons. One, there wasn’t anyone in the US who wasn’t affected by the syndrome. Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative, hippie and gun nut, atheist and evangelical, it didn’t matter. Someone in your family got sick. One of your friends got sick. One of your co-workers got sick. You got sick.
Two, and I say this as a member of the loyal opposition, President Haden simply would not take no for an answer. He worked to pack the Congressional hearings with witnesses who would appeal on both sides of the aisle—the day [former NBA star and Basketball Hall of Famer] Marcus Shane came to testify I don’t think I’ve seen so many grown men and women act like children scrambling for autographs. And then Shane talked about how the disease had locked in his kid and I saw [Senate Appropriation Committee Chairman] Owen Webster—that heartless bastard!—openly sobbing into his microphone. That’s when any doubt I had that this thing was going to get done evaporated.
There were a few holdouts. David Abrams, who was then a backbencher representative, made a lot of noise on the radio talk show circuit about the cost and the threat of new taxes and the expansion of big government and so on, and even took a few swipes at the President, despite them being of the same party. I understand Haden let it slide by until Abrams made a crack about the First Lady to a Tulsa talk show host. By the end of the day, as I understand it, Abrams was having a very intimate discussion with the NSA, and they showed him some pictures they had or something, and then that was the last anyone heard of Abrams until the act passed. He even voted for it and everything.
Thomas Stevenson:
I can’t say that I have any recollection of the NSA ever meeting with David Abrams at the time. You might ask him. I would be interested in what he has to say on the matter.
Neal Joseph:
Look. At the end of the day, it came down to this: the President wanted his wife back. He was willing to do anything to make that happen. And he was President of the United States, which meant he was able to do anything to make it happen. As a side effect, millions would ultimately benefit from the decision, but make no mistake. Benjamin Haden was being purely, entirely and unabashedly selfish. He loved his wife, he was lost without her, and he wanted her back. End of story.
Could you blame him for it? Could anyone blame him for it?
PART THREE
THE MOON SHOT
Irving Bennett:
The Haden Research Initiative Act was sold to the public as a “moon shot”—as in, we went from Kennedy saying we would go to the moon to Armstrong setting foot on it in nine years because we decided as a nation that we would, and we put the resources and willpower to work. President Haden made it clear that he wanted the same unity of purpose here. And of course everyone got behind it because the syndrome touched everyone’s life to a greater or lesser extent.
But it didn’t change the fact that the first year of the HRIA was complete chaos. National unity of purpose is fine, but when it comes to spreading $300 billion around, logistics and a solid plan is better. And it was clear that at least at the outset, no one had a plan on how to apportion the money, to allocate resources for research and development, or to set concrete goals. The US government basically threw all that money into the air and yelled “go” to whoever grabbed it.
Haden and the rest of the government quickly realized that, and Haden in particular was incensed. He may have forced the creation of one of the biggest social programs in the history of the United States, but he still had “skinflint Republican” in his bones. The idea that his signature legislative achievement would be seen as a call to slop the pigs was something that outraged him. He sicced [Attorney General Gayle] Garcia on several companies and C-suite executives—including ones who had contributed to his election, an unheard of thing in any political era—and eventually people took the hint.
By the end of the first year things had settled out into four main buckets. One was simply for the medical maintenance of all the people who were afflicted, who weren’t already covered by insurance, plus more federal backstopping for the insurance companies, who were screaming bloody murder about costs. Of the three left, one was for research into a vaccine, one for research into the brain, and the one for mobility and community research. Find a cure, communicate with the victims, get them reintegrated back into the world. It was the brain research that took off first.
Ida Garza, Former Deputy Programs Coordinator, HRIA, Department of Health and Human Services
My job was to coordinate research across several different private companies, the CDC, and other divisions of Health and Human Services and various public and private universities, with a focus on brain research. And it was a nightmare. Primarily because each of these groups were used to shielding their intellectual property from the outside world, until such time as they could file patents or otherwise move to protect their work.
The thing with the HRIA was that as a condition of receiving funding, all the work, including work in progress, had to be submitted to a searchable database so that everyone else receiving funding could see the work and use it to advance their own work—because above anything else, we had a mandate to get advances and therapies to the patients as quickly as possible. The HRIA still allowed for patent filings, but everything, everything, was cross-licensed for the length of the patent, for a statutory fee that went into effect only after a product went to market.
This simply wasn’t the way things had ever been done before, and so I had to deal with CEOs and chairpeople calling me up and yelling at me that they were leaving money and profits on the table. I would remind them of just how much HRIA funding they were shoveling into their companies and that they knew what the conditions were on that money. They would respond with baffled silence. Occasionally one would threaten to go over my head and talk to the Secretary, or, God forbid, the President himself.