Wag the Dog Read online

  There were a hundred different versions of that basic story floating through, sometimes zapping through, Atwater’s mind. An entire assortment of images. He was Merlin, wand and cap and gown, to the presidential Arthur. Cus D’Amato to Mike Tyson. Brian Epstein to the Beatles. Livia to the emperor Tiberius. It was his mission not merely to have raised up the king but to protect him—lo, even from beyond the grave. Like a guardian angel. Something more than mortal. A spirit that could reach from the other side. A hand that held a fiery sword, like the archangel Gabriel, come down from heaven . . . In that, there was a sort of immortality. If he could do that, he was the most cunning of them all, slicker than death.

  Enough of this, the man in the chair by the window thought. I’ve done my duty. Close to three minutes had passed. He got up to go.

  Atwater had neither moved nor spoken. His message still buried in weariness and morphine. His visitor, passing the bed, looked down at the wasted body and bandaged head. Where once the creature below him had been full of exuberant vitality, clever, bullying, sharp-eyed and sharper-tongued, now the dullness was upon him, the emptying had begun. Atwater’s hand, under the sheet, appeared clenched.

  The visitor couldn’t think of anything to say. Not to a recumbent form that neither spoke nor saw. He wasn’t that kind of guy, who spoke to people in comas, saying, in that made-for-TV style, “Yes, yes, he [or she] can hear me. I know they can.” So, whatever Lee had summoned him for would have to wait until later on, World Two, heaven or hell or Washington, D.C., in the summertime, wherever dead politicos went this millennium. He nodded and turned to leave the room.

  Inside Atwater the Merlin character arose. As if by magic, he reached beyond the dulled and sleeping senses—or perhaps opened the passage between sense and sensibility. Atwater got the message that his guest was here. “Jim,” he whispered, “Jim.”

  James Baker, secretary of state, hand on the knob, stopped. He turned. Atwater’s eyes were still closed, but his breathing was more urgent and his hand seemed to move.

  “Lee?”

  “Ahhh,” a groan, a grunt, a summons. Baker went to the bedside. Atwater’s eyes suddenly opened. The old hawk looked out. Full of cunning and ego. “Listen,” he said. “George . . .”

  “George what . . .”

  It seemed to Baker that he could see Atwater’s thoughts like waterworks turning and meshing behind Atwater’s eyes, and what he seemed to have thought was, I can speak my mind. Baker can’t take it back to the office and use it against me, because, cackle, cackle, I’ll be dead before he does. “George,” Atwater said, about the president, “is a wienie. Ambitious, conniving, vengeful, but still . . . And he’s going to blow it, Jim. If he does . . .”

  “What do you mean, blow it?”

  “I mean in the polls,” Atwater said, as if Baker shouldn’t have had to ask, as there was nothing else. “And if he doesn’t do something about it, the reelection.” It was hard, after Reagan, Reagan again, and then Bush/Quayle, smashing the opposition, to imagine that reelection could fail.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Jim said, a bland reassurance. “We’ll take care of it, Lee.”

  “That’s my job. My mission.” One hand reached out and clutched Baker, grabbed at his sleeve, held him, and pulled him closer. Atwater’s breath was bad. Foul, fetid. Jesus Christ, Baker thought, why don’t they brush his teeth or dose him with mouthwash or something. “I have a plan,” Atwater said. The other hand, the near one, came out from under the covers where it had been visibly clenched. It held a half-crushed envelope. “If Georgie blows it, you open this. This is the surefire, ultimate election winner.”

  “Hey, thanks,” Baker said politically. “I’ll tell George. He’ll be touched. You, in your condition—your thoughts are of him.”

  “Fuck that,” Atwater said. “My thoughts are of winning. Remember that, Baker. There’s only two things—winning and dying.” He cackled. “Don’t show it to him now. Don’t you even look now. Wait . . .”

  “For what?”

  “Till you’re in trouble and you need it.”

  “It’s like a magic coin in a fairy tale or something like that?” Baker asked.

  “Like that,” Atwater said.

  “Why can’t I look now?”

  “Because you’ll think”—Atwater paused for a breath—“that it’s insane. And it will frighten you. But it’s so sane, and so logical, that you won’t be able to resist it and you’ll try it out too soon . . .”

  “And so?”

  “Then it may not work anymore.”

  “Like the goose that laid the golden egg or three wishes from the genie?”

  “That powerful,” Atwater said, appearing somewhat demented. He pushed the envelope into Baker’s hands. Baker couldn’t imagine what it could be. “It’s beautiful. The president will love it. After you realize it’s not insane. Not insane at all.”

  1 Machiavelli was second chancellor and secretary of Florence from 1498 to 1512. He was frequently an envoy, though not an ambassador. Without a thorough familiarity with the period, it is extremely difficult to make comparisons between the power of his post and that of his spiritual heir. After the Medici regained power in Florence, Machiavelli never held an important office again.

  2 This is a work of fiction. Many public figures are named in the text. Politicians, celebrities, presidents, etc. Their actions as depicted here are absolutely figments of the author’s imagination and should in no way be construed as “true” or even a “fictionalization of a truth that can be told no other way.” Unless of course the reader has independent documentation that real actions are coincidental with these fictional ones. The same is true of the depiction of characters. The author has no knowledge of any real person mentioned in this book beyond what is in the public record, and even then he has chosen to treat that information with literary license—because this is a work of fiction.

  3 Atwater commented on it in his autobiography Life, written with Todd Brewster: “I recalled the maxim we had used in ’88: ‘Get inside the mind of your enemy.’ Now cancer had used it on me.”

  4 Democratic representative Pat Schroeder called him “the most evil man in America.” Reverend Pat Robertson said, “Lee Atwater has used every dirty trick known to mankind” and “the Republican campaign was blamed for planting specious rumors about the mental-health history of Michael Dukakis.” (William Greider, Rolling Stone, 1/12/89)

  “Lee Atwater, his communications director Mark Goodin and Congressman Newt Gingrich . . . worked to spread a long-standing unsubstantiated rumor [of homosexuality] designed to humiliate new House Speaker Thomas Foley.” (Time, 6/19/89)

  “From his earliest days, Mr. Atwater displayed a skill in the use of racial messages and maneuvers, a crucial part of the effort by Southern Republicans to appeal to white voters.” (Obituary, New York (Times, 3/30/91)

  Also, the New York Times Magazine (4/30/89) repeats a story—which Atwater always denied—that Atwater connived at getting a third-party candidate to use an anti-Semitic campaign against his main opponent, thus gaining the benefit without getting the backlash.

  Chapter

  TWO

  I’M AN AUTHENTIC American hero. Really. That’s what I am.

  First, you start out with that I’m basically a little guy. I don’t mean that I’m lacking in physical stature or I’m inadequate. I mean I’m kind of a regular guy. So there I am, a regular guy. Not out to change the world. Not out to be some kind of big shot. I got no ax to grind. I’m just a guy with a job to do and I try my best to do it. Well, what the job is, that’s something else of course. I’m a dick. A gumshoe. A P.I. The stuff that dreams are made of. Books, TV, movies.

  The difference between me and them, the guys you usually see on the tube, is that I’m not a small-time loner working out of a shabby upstairs over some dry-cleaning plant or a playboy with a Lamborghini who’s a detective just as another way to get his kicks. I work for a major corporation. Not Fortune 500, but not too far from
it either. Our national headquarters is in Chicago. We have offices in twenty-two U.S. cities and in fourteen foreign countries. A business, you understand, like Wackenhut or Pinkerton. Whatever a client needs, in the way of security, we do it. Alarm systems, armored cars, around-the-clock armed response, commercial guard services, we do it all. We have a sales-incentive system that runs through the whole company. Like if you decided you needed one of these many services that we do, I could make a commission by introducing you to it, even though what I am is an investigator.

  I work here in Los Angeles. Hollywood sometimes. Sometimes in the Valley. Even East L.A. Though not too much. We follow the money. So most of what we do, it’s corporate. I’ve done work for Bank of America, Gulf Oil, Toshiba, Matsushita, Hitachi, Boeing, K mart, all kinds of places. Do we do divorces? Sleazy keyhole peeking? You bet we do. But if I had to figure it, I would say that the lowest amount of money someone’s going to be fighting over, if they come to us, it would probably be a million-dollar divorce. Look at it this way. Say you just want to put a tail on your spouse. That’s round-the-clock, usually, because screwing knows no timetable. In fact, it is frequently active outside of your usual hours. I followed a guy one time, his wife thought he was an early-morning jogger. Four-thirty in the morning, he’s out there, in his Yves Saint Laurent coordinates and Asics Gel Ills. This is so early it’s like a moonlight run—what’s that line?—“I’m so horny the crack of dawn better watch out.” He comes home at six, six-thirty, jumps in the shower, then off to work. How far you think he runs? He runs about a quarter mile, that’s how far he runs. His girlfriend, she’s waiting for him on the corner. A maroon Dodge minivan, not chic at all, but functional. They do it in the van. Then she drives maybe half a mile away so he can jog back. Work up a sweat over the other sweat. Thoughtful. You’d be surprised how many divorces start with “I smelled the bitch on him.”

  I’m wandering. But I think you should have a picture of the kind of work I do, the kind of place I work for. I was talking about money. For example, in a divorce, you want to watch someone round-the-clock. We bill out, to the lawyers, at $60 an hour, per man, plus expenses. That’s bare minimum—$2,880 per day, $20,160 a week, $86,400 for a thirty-day month. You could double that, easy. On a simple WSW. WSW is Who’s Screwing Whom. So you understand that you don’t spend that kind of money investigating a divorce where there’s just a couple of hundred thousand in community property. You have to be talking about real money.

  What do I get? About $22 an hour is what it works out to, with vacation time and sick leave. And we have a decent benefits package—medical, dental, and pension. I’m told it costs the company about 33 percent over our wages.

  It’s less than real cops make. But the working conditions are better. So is the company we keep.

  The building I work in is a typical L.A. office building. A glass box with tinted windows, downtown. There’s nothing to distinguish us from any other corporation. There really isn’t. I used to keep a bourbon bottle full of tea in my desk drawer. As a joke, you know. So I could play it like a TV detective. I wouldn’t have real booze there, in the office, even if we didn’t have regular urinalysis. By the way, that’s another service we offer. Complete drug screening for your entire work force, or any part thereof, blood or urine. We test for alcohol, marijuana, all opiates, cocaine, barbital, amphetamine use. Full spectrum or targeted, it’s your choice.

  The office space is modular. Dividers, not walls. We got standard-issue desks, chairs, phones. Fluorescent lights. Not glamorous, but not seedy. The way I see it, this is an advantage. This is something your average Joe and Jane out there, they can relate to. Its very ordinariness is something refreshingly different

  Also, what I’m addressing here, right at the beginning, is the issue of credibility. Because this is an incredible story. An unbelievable story. I’ve been doing this ten, fifteen years. For the same company. I get photographed biannually. I’m bonded. You can take a look at our client list—top law firms, Fortune 500 companies, major studios, and record companies.

  I had just finished an investigation into securities theft for one of the major brokerages. I was catching up on my paperwork, transcribing my handwritten notes to the company data base from the workstation at my desk.

  Then Maggie Krebs walks in. Maggie is one of the ten most beautiful women in the world. That’s official. Right out of People magazine. You know her as Magdalena Lazlo, movie star. I know her as Maggie Krebs, divorcée. I helped her get that divorce and keep her fortune.

  Having that much high-powered glamour walk into our drab offices is not unique, but it is unusual. A lot of stars are products of their handlers—makeup people and hairdressers, wardrobe and plastic surgeons. Products of our imagination in a way. But even offscreen and dressed down, Maggie has it. Everybody watches her, men and women, when she comes down to my office.

  “Hi-ya, Joe,” she says. She looks me direct in the eye, gives me that smile, and that voice—you can read anything you want to into that voice—just the way she talked in Over the Line—and boom, you could knock me over with a toothpick. I don’t let it show, but I figure she knows what that “Hi-ya, Joe,” can do. How can she not know? It’s her business, making strong men weak and weak men strong.

  “Hi-ya, Maggie,” I say. I speak low, slow, and level. Not because I think I’m John Wayne or something, but to keep my voice from squeaking like a fourteen-year-old’s.

  She looks around. Then she leans forward: “Joe, is there somewhere we can talk?”

  “We got a conference room,” I say. I don’t have to work so hard to talk, my voice and breathing are coming back under control.

  “Hey, Joe,” she says. “You got two bits?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then why don’t you take me out and buy me a cup of Java?”

  “Maggie, there isn’t much that you could ask me that I wouldn’t do.”

  Now let me explain a bit about this little piece of dialogue. First of all, it is verbatim. That’s a gift I have, like a photographic memory, except I don’t have it for the printed word, not at all, but I do have it for the spoken word. So that when I tell you through this story that so-and-so said one thing then them-and-such said another, it’s like our transcription services department typed it right off the audiotapes.

  Second, in real life our patter isn’t always this snappy.

  Third, there is nowhere in Los Angeles, maybe in America, that I can think of that you can get a cup of coffee for twenty-five cents. It would be easier to find the five-dollar cup of coffee. Clearly, Maggie is being jovial here. In fact, I find out later, both her lines are from a script she’d been working on. There is a certain charm in having a real-life movie star run her lines on you like you’re her real-life costar. It’s a memory a lot of fellows could lie down with even when they take that final rest, if you know what I mean.

  Fourth and finally, there is something that I don’t know if she knows, but maybe she suspects, which is that all our conference rooms are wired more thoroughly than the Nixon White House. Everything that happens in a Universal Security conference room is recorded. Audio is routine. Intermittent video and real-time video are both available. So is vocal-stress analysis.

  Our personal offices and telephones are monitored, but not always recorded. The principle is “Do unto ourselves what we would have others pay us to do to their employees.” We are a shining example of life under total management supervision.

  We take her Cadillac and leave my old wreck behind. It might surprise you that a star of her magnitude would drive a Caddy, but it was a gift from GM. A promotional thing. They think the new Seville can compete with Mercedes, BMW, Lexus, and Infiniti. I think it is pretty nice. It is a convertible. She drives. The top is down.

  She doesn’t say much in the car. Just plays the radio. Country and western. That’s for me. Shows you what kind of class—and memory—the lady had. She once asked what kind of music I liked, back during her divorce action. I told her.
It was Hank Williams and Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash and Ernest Tubb and Patsy Cline that got me through the war. That’s the truth. All the guys in my platoon that listened to rock ‘n’ roll, they died. Except for two of them. Mike Galina—he’s in a veterans’ hospital still—no eyes, no legs. Paul Frederic Hight also came back with pieces missing—of his body and his mind and his heart—died five years after coming home. Accidental OD or suicide. Who’s to say? Who’s to judge? Three of the blacks lived. They didn’t listen to rock ’n’ roll either. Two of them came back junkies and I lost track. But Steve Weston, he came back straight and with his body intact. We have a drink now and again. Don’t say much. Just have a drink. He listened to C&W like me or soul, like his people. His favorite, though, is gospel.

  Also she looks over at me, smiles, and touches my hand.

  She puts the car in a lot a block off the beach in Venice. We get out and walk. She puts her arm through mine. Makes me feel six feet tall and good-looking to boot. There is a fancy espresso and cappuccino joint on the corner where you can have your refreshment al fresco and view the human comedy as it passes on the boardwalk. You don’t have to be an Angelino to know that Venice Beach is the place for viewing humanity at its most comedic. That’s the place they use in all the movies when they do the L.A. montage with the girls who roller-skate in G-string bikinis and Muscle Beach and everything.