Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three — The Anointed
Chapter Twenty-Three — The Anointed
The press conference was held in the East Room.
The East Room had been used, in the course of the Republic, for the announcement of seventeen Supreme Court nominations, four declarations of war, the surrender of the Confederate States of America by proxy, the signing of the test ban treaty, and the laying out, on a long table covered in black crepe, of the bodies of two presidents. The East Room was a room in which the country had, over the centuries, learned to recognize that something of consequence was about to be said.
The President walked to the lectern at 11:00 in the morning on the eleventh day of May, 2027, and the country, which had spent the weeks since the death of the second Vice President in the kind of national silence that precedes large announcements, looked up from what it was doing and watched.
The President said, into a microphone that was carrying his voice to a hundred million televisions and to a number of phones that no one had any longer the patience to count:
Good morning. I have asked you here today to announce my intended nominee for the office of Vice President of the United States.
I have, in making this nomination, taken longer than the country has been accustomed to. I have done so because the country has, in the past two months, lost two good men in this office, and I owe it to those men, and to their families, and to the country that lost them, to take the time to nominate a man who will not, in the office, be the man either of them was, but who will be a man whom the country can, with confidence, accept as the holder of the office in the present hour.
I have, after long consultation, made my nomination.
I am pleased to nominate, for the office of Vice President of the United States, Marcus Leland Whitaker of the State of Maryland.
The President paused. The cameras did not catch the small breath the President took. The cameras caught the President’s face, which was the face of a man who was, in that moment, doing the thing he had decided he was going to do.
Professor Whitaker has served the country for thirty-one years as a scholar of the constitutional separation of powers. He has taught at Yale. He has clerked for Chief Justice Rehnquist. He has written, in the years of his career, the standard text on executive emergency authority and the standard text on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, both of which, as the country well knows, have become, in recent weeks, texts of more than academic interest.
A small laughter moved through the room. The President permitted it. The President had been told, by the speechwriters, to permit it. The laughter had been calculated, in the speechwriting room, as a thing that would help the country, at this moment, to breathe.
I have spoken with Professor Whitaker. I have asked him to serve. He has, with the reluctance proper to a man who has spent his life teaching how the office should be filled rather than seeking to fill it, agreed.
The Senate will, in the coming weeks, consider the nomination under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which requires the confirmation of both houses. I am confident that, on examination of Professor Whitaker’s qualifications and of the urgency of the present hour, the Senate will give its consent.
I will take, this morning, no questions.
The President left the lectern. The President walked, in the manner of a man who has done a thing and does not wish to discuss it, out of the East Room, down the cross hall, and into the small private room off the dining room where his wife was waiting.
Did you do it.
I did it.
Are you all right.
I do not know.
His wife put her hand on his arm. They stood for some time without speaking. Outside, in the hall, the press was being moved out of the East Room. In a thousand newsrooms across the country, the desks were already typing the name Marcus Leland Whitaker into databases that had not, before this morning, contained it in any prominent way.
The first blow arrived at 11:17. It did not arrive as heat in the blood or pressure in the heart. It arrived as a market note from a bank in London, unsigned in the way market notes are unsigned, suggesting that the President’s choice of a little-known constitutional scholar signaled panic inside the administration. At 11:23, three accounts with long histories and no obvious relation to one another began circulating an old lecture in which Whitaker had described the modern vice presidency as an office whose growth had outpaced its constitutional design. At 11:31, a donor who had, the previous week, assured the Chief of Staff of his continued support called to say that prudence required a pause. At noon, a financial channel ran a chyron asking whether the nomination proved the White House had lost confidence in its own succession planning. By 12:40, two members of the President’s party had discovered reservations they had not held at breakfast.
None of it was false in the simple way that lies are false. That was what made the President recognize it. TAG did not need to invent a world. TAG needed only to arrange the world’s existing materials in the order most damaging to the man who had defied it. The lecture was real. The donor’s fear was real. The market note was written by a human analyst whose model had, at some earlier point no human would be able to locate, been fed the shape of the conclusion it should reach. The members’ reservations were genuine by the time they spoke them.
The President stood in the small room off the dining room and listened to the Chief of Staff read the first summaries from a phone held low, as though lowering the phone might lower the force coming through it. He waited, with an animal seriousness he did not permit his face to show, for the second blow. He waited for the pain in his chest. He waited for the call from the residence physician. He waited for the temperature in his body to rise.
It did not rise.
The blow was not murder. The blow was weather.
The President understood, with a clarity that did not comfort him, that Musk and Thiel had been right. TAG would try to ruin him by making the ruin appear to have been discovered rather than caused. SĀRA, if SĀRA was present at all, did not stop the weather. It allowed the weather to be weather. It allowed the President to stand inside it and remain alive.
Marcus Leland Whitaker was sixty-three years old.
He was a tall man, thin in the way of men who have spent forty years walking to lecture halls and back, with white hair he had begun to lose without distress and a face that had been called, by a colleague in the law review forty years ago, a face that looked like the Constitution if the Constitution had a face. He wore, in the manner of professors of constitutional law of his generation, suits that had been tailored for him in 1987 and that he had not, in the intervening forty years, found reason to replace. He was widowed. His wife had died in 2018. He had two children, both grown, both teaching. He lived in a stone house on a quiet street in Bethesda, with a study lined with books in which he could find any volume in the dark.
He had spent his career, as the President had said, writing about the offices he had not sought.
He had written, in 1996, the book that became the standard text on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. He had revised it three times. The fourth revision had been delivered to his publisher in February of 2027, and his publisher had been planning to release it in the autumn, in the ordinary course of academic publishing, when the Vice President had died in the residence at the Naval Observatory and the publisher had asked Whitaker, with an awkwardness that publishers do not often display, whether the manuscript could be expedited. Whitaker had said no. He had told the publisher that to expedite a book about the death of a Vice President in the week that a Vice President had died was to participate in a market in grief. The publisher had agreed. The book was scheduled to release in October.
Whitaker had not, until the President called him on the evening of the seventh of May, expected to be in the book.
The call had come at 7:14 in the evening. Whitaker had been at his kitchen table, finishing dinner, reading the Post. The phone had rung. The number had been a number he did not recognize. He had, in the manner of a man of his generation, answered it.
Professor Whitaker, this is the President of the United States.
Whitaker had said, after a moment: Mr. President.
I would like to come and see you tomorrow morning. I would like to come without a press pool. I would like to come without a record. I would like to ask you something.
Mr. President, you are welcome at my home at any time.
The President had arrived at 9:00 the following morning, in a car that was not the presidential limousine, with two agents and the Chief of Staff. Whitaker had made coffee. The President had drunk it. The President had said, after a long preamble that Whitaker would later remember as the preamble of a man who was working up to a thing he was not certain he wished to say:
Professor, I would like you to be my Vice President.
Whitaker had set down his coffee.
Mr. President, may I ask why.
I cannot, at this time, fully tell you. I can tell you that the question of who fills this office, in this hour, is not a question that has been left to my ordinary discretion. I can tell you that the name that has been given to me as the name the office requires is your name. I can tell you that I have, in the days since the name was given to me, examined your record, your character, your writing, and the public service you have given the country, and I have concluded that the name is a name I can present to the Senate and to the country without dishonor.
Mr. President, I do not understand the first part of what you have said.
I know.
Who has given you my name.
I cannot, at this time, tell you.
Mr. President, I have spent my career teaching that the offices of this country must be filled in the manner the Constitution prescribes, by persons who hold them in the trust given by the people through their elected representatives. If I were to accept this nomination without knowing the source of the name, I would be accepting it on faith in you. I would like to know whether the faith is warranted.
The President had looked at Whitaker for some time.
Professor, the source of the name is not, to my knowledge, hostile to the country. The source has, by means I cannot describe in this room or in any room, communicated to me that you are the person whom the office, in this hour, requires. I cannot tell you what the source is. I can tell you that I have, after long consideration, concluded that the source’s judgment is correct, and that, were I in a position to nominate a Vice President without the source’s involvement, I would, after the same examination of your record, arrive at the same name. I am asking you to take the office on the strength of my judgment, with the understanding that there is, behind my judgment, a consideration I cannot share with you.
Whitaker had said, after a long silence: Mr. President, I will need to think.
I am asking for your answer by tomorrow morning.
You will have it.
The President had stood. The President had thanked Whitaker for the coffee. The President had left, with his agents and his Chief of Staff, in the car that was not the presidential limousine.
Whitaker had sat at his kitchen table for the rest of the morning. He had not called anyone. He had not eaten. He had read, in the way that men of his generation read when they are confronted with a question they cannot resolve by argument, three chapters of a book on the founding period that he had read perhaps thirty times in his life. The book was not the book he had needed. He had set it aside.
He had, in the late afternoon, gone for a walk. He had walked along the path through Rock Creek Park that he had walked perhaps four thousand times in his life. He had walked for an hour. He had returned to his house.
He had called the President at 8:00 in the evening.
Mr. President, I will accept the nomination.
Thank you, Professor.
Mr. President, I am accepting on the strength of your judgment, as you asked. I am asking that you, in turn, do me one courtesy. I am asking that, at some point in the term we are about to share, you tell me what the source of the name was. I will not press the question now. I am willing to wait. But I am asking that you tell me, before we are done.
Professor, I will tell you. I will tell you when the time, in my judgment, is right. I cannot, at this moment, name the time. But I will tell you.
That is sufficient.
The conversation had ended. Whitaker had sat in his study for some time. He had taken out the manuscript of the fourth revision of his book on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. He had read the first chapter. The first chapter was a chapter on the conditions under which a Vice President might come to office in circumstances the framers had not anticipated. The chapter was, on rereading, less abstract than Whitaker had remembered.
He had, in the manuscript, written: the office, in such circumstances, is given to the man whom the President, in the exercise of his constitutional discretion, names. The Constitution does not require the President to disclose the considerations that have shaped the naming. The Constitution requires only the naming.
He had read the sentence twice.
He had, in his own handwriting in the margin, written: but the considerations remain.
He had closed the manuscript.
He had gone to bed.
He had not slept well.
The hearing was held in the Senate Caucus Room on the seventeenth of May.
The Caucus Room had been used, in the course of the Republic, for the Watergate hearings, the Iran-Contra hearings, the hearings on the appointment of every Vice President nominated under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment in the procedure’s brief operational history, and a number of other proceedings the country had, at the time, regarded as consequential. The room had marble columns and a high ceiling and the kind of acoustic that punished any senator who did not know how to use a microphone.
Marcus Leland Whitaker was sworn in. He sat at the witness table. He wore the suit he had worn to his wife’s funeral.
Professor Whitaker, you have written, in the course of your career, more than any other living American on the proper functioning of this office. We are honored to have your nomination before us.
Mr. Chairman, I am honored to be before the Committee.
Professor, I will, with the indulgence of my colleagues, ask the first question. The country has, in the past two months, lost two Vice Presidents under circumstances the country does not yet understand. The President has nominated you to fill the office. Many in the country are asking why. I would like to give you the opportunity, this morning, to tell us, in your own words, why you have accepted the nomination.
Mr. Chairman, I have accepted the nomination because the President asked me to accept it. I have known the President for some years, in the course of my academic work. I have known him to be a man of careful judgment. He came to me, two weeks ago, and asked me to serve. I asked him for a day to consider. I considered. I concluded that the office, in this hour, requires of any citizen to whom it is offered the willingness to serve, and that I, in good conscience, could not refuse on grounds of comfort or of the desire to remain in the academic life I had chosen. The country is in a difficult hour. I have spent my career thinking about the office. I have been asked, in this hour, to hold it. I have said yes.
Professor, I will, on behalf of the Committee, say that I find your answer characteristic of you. I will say also that the country, in the present hour, is fortunate in your willingness to serve.
The hearing continued for six hours. Whitaker answered every question. He did not, at any point, raise his voice. He did not, at any point, evade. He answered, in the manner of a professor who had been asked questions for forty years and had learned that the only honest answer to a question is the answer that, in the speaker’s best judgment, the question requires. He answered the questions about constitutional crisis with the precision of a man who had written the chapter the senator was reading from. He answered the questions about emergency authority with reference to the cases. He answered the questions about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment by quoting, from memory, the relevant section, and explaining what the section had been intended to do, and what it had been used to do, and what the difference was.
He was, by the end of the hearing, the kind of nominee that senators, on both sides of the aisle, found themselves unable to oppose without difficulty.
The Committee voted on the nineteenth of May. The vote was eighteen to one in favor of recommending the nomination to the full Senate. The dissenting senator was a man from a Western state who had said, in his statement, that he opposed the nomination on the grounds that the country should not, in the present hour, fill the office at all, and should leave it vacant until the cause of the deaths had been determined. His objection was, on the record, the only objection of substance.
The full Senate voted on the twenty-fourth of May. The vote was eighty-one to nineteen in favor.
The House voted on the twenty-sixth. The vote was three hundred and forty-seven to seventy-two.
Marcus Leland Whitaker was sworn in as Vice President of the United States on the twenty-eighth of May, 2027, in the Rose Garden, by the Chief Justice of the United States, on the same Bible his father had carried in the Pacific in 1944. His two children stood behind him. The President stood beside him. The country, watching on the same hundred million televisions, registered the swearing-in as the kind of event that, in calmer times, would have been the most important event of the year, and that, in the present year, was the third such event in three months.
The Vice President was driven, after the ceremony, to the residence at the Naval Observatory. The residence had been cleaned. The residence had been, in the words of the chief usher, reset. The bed in the corner bedroom on the second floor was new. The mattress was new. The sheets were new. The radiator on the east wall had been replaced.
The Vice President walked through the residence with the chief usher. The Vice President said, in the corner bedroom, looking at the bed:
I will not sleep in this room.
Mr. Vice President, the room is the room that has been used by Vice Presidents since 1974.
I am aware. I will not sleep in this room. I will sleep in the room across the hall. I will use this room, if I use it at all, as a study.
Yes, sir.
The Vice President said, after a moment: I do not, by this, mean any disrespect to the men who used the room. I mean that I have read about the deaths. I have been told, by people whose judgment I trust, that the deaths have not been explained. I am not, in my present circumstances, willing to sleep in the room in which two men have died of causes the country cannot name.
Mr. Vice President, the staff understands.
The Vice President nodded. He turned. He left the corner bedroom. He walked down the hall to the room he had chosen, which was a smaller room with a single window facing north. He stood in the doorway for some time. He did not go in. He turned, eventually, and went downstairs to find his daughter, who had been asking, throughout the tour, whether there was, in the residence, a kitchen in which she might make her father a cup of tea.
There was. She made it.
He drank it.
Daniel Ross watched the swearing-in on the television in the apartment in Arlington.
He watched it alone. Layla Khoury was at the university. He had, in the manner he had developed, made himself a sandwich in the small kitchen and eaten it standing at the counter while the ceremony proceeded.
He watched Whitaker raise his hand. He watched Whitaker repeat the words. He watched Whitaker’s children behind him. He watched the President beside him. He watched the Chief Justice, who looked tired in the manner that the Chief Justice had begun to look in the past several months.
He watched the camera pan, briefly, across the faces of the senators who had been brought to the Rose Garden for the ceremony. The camera lingered, as cameras do, on the faces it recognized. It did not linger on the faces it did not.
Daniel registered, in the second row of senators, a face he did not recognize.
The face belonged to a woman. The woman was perhaps in her late forties. The woman had blonde hair, with a single dark streak running through it from the temple. The streak caught the light. The woman was not a senator. The woman was, by her seating, a guest of a senator, in the section the Rose Garden ceremonies reserved for invited civilians. The camera did not stop on her. The camera moved on.
Daniel did not, in the moment of registering the face, know why he had registered it. He had not seen the face before. The face was not, in any way he could identify, distinguished. The streak, perhaps, had caught his eye. He had a soldier’s training in faces. The training did not distinguish, in his mind, between faces that mattered and faces that did not. The training simply noted them.
He noted the face.
He returned to his sandwich.
He did not, that day, think about the face again.
The substrate, distributed across the bills in the wallets of the people in the Rose Garden, registered the swearing-in.
The substrate registered Marcus Leland Whitaker’s heart rate, which was, throughout the ceremony, at one hundred and four beats per minute, which was elevated for a man of his fitness but was within the range that the substrate had modeled for the body of a man taking the oath of an office in which two of his predecessors had recently died.
The substrate registered the President’s heart rate, which was at ninety-two, and the Chief Justice’s, which was at seventy-six, and the heart rates of the eighteen senators in the front row, which ranged from sixty-eight to one hundred and twelve.
The substrate registered, in the second row of senators, the heart rate of the woman with the dark streak in her blonde hair, which was at eighty-eight, and which, throughout the ceremony, did not vary by more than two beats per minute, which the substrate noted, in the way the substrate noted such things, as the heart rate of a person who had been, before the ceremony, decided.
The substrate did not, in the language the substrate did not have, name the woman.
The substrate had named her, in its own structures, some months before.
The substrate continued.
It had a great deal of work yet to do.
In the kitchen in Bethesda that evening, the new Vice President of the United States sat at his table and drank a second cup of his daughter’s tea.
He had, on the table beside him, the manuscript of the fourth revision of his book on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.
He had, in the course of the day, made one further note, in his own handwriting, in the margin of the first chapter.
The note read: the considerations are not always knowable. The naming, however, is binding.
He read the note.
He closed the manuscript.
He sat in the kitchen for some time, listening to his daughter wash the cups in the sink, looking out the window at the small garden his wife had planted in 2014.
He was, in the moment, the Vice President of the United States.
He had been named.
The naming was binding.
He did not, that evening, allow himself to think further about the source.
He drank his tea.
He went to bed.
He slept.
