He coughed again. He used that cough, Charlie realized, as a kind of punctuation mark to show when he was moving from one idea to another. “This is also the logic behind my new system of community farms. But in the Tennessee Valley, some men have grown rich by keeping most farmers poor and backward. They are trying to bottle up the bill authorizing the dams and the electrical industry so they can hold on to their control of them. I wanted to talk to you on the radio tonight to ask you to urge your Representative and Senator to support the Tennessee Valley electrification project. This is your government. Its leaders have to listen to your will. If they don’t, we will throw them on the ash-heap of history, where they belong. Thank you, and good night.”
“That was President Joe Steele, speaking from the White House,” the announcer said. “We’ll be right back after this important message.”
The important message plugged a brand of coffee that, to Charlie, tasted like Mississippi mud. Lighting a Chesterfield, he asked Esther, “What did you think of the speech, sweetie?”
“Let me have one of those, please,” she said. He tossed her the pack. After she lit up, she went on, “I noticed something interesting at the end.”
“Like what?”
“He said ‘your government.’ He said ‘the leaders will listen to your will.’ But then he said we would throw them out if they didn’t. Not you would-we would.”
“Are you sure?” Charlie asked. “I didn’t catch that.”
“I’m positive.” Esther nodded emphatically.
“Okay,” Charlie said. His wife was nobody’s dope. He wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with her-well, no, she was pretty enough that he might have wanted something to do with her, but he wouldn’t have wanted to marry her-if she had been. He did a little thinking himself. “Probably just political talk. He doesn’t want people going after Senators by themselves or anything. That’s too much like the Bonus Army.”
“Maybe.” Esther’s cheeks hollowed as she sucked in smoke. She didn’t sound a hundred percent convinced, but she didn’t argue about it, either. She was easy to get along with. Charlie tried to be the same way, but he had more trouble with it than his wife seemed to.
Whatever Joe Steele meant by switching between you and we, the speech did what he wanted it to do. It scared the living bejesus out of the people in Congress who were trying to block the bill.
That amused Lazar Kagan. The President’s moonfaced aide and Charlie met for lunch at a little Italian restaurant a few blocks from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Charlie ordered spaghetti and meatballs; Kagan chose lasagna. As they started to eat, Joe Steele’s underling said, “I would have got the spaghetti, too, only I never have been able to twirl it worth a damn.”
Charlie eyed him. He decided Kagan wasn’t kidding. “It’s not that important,” he said. “You could just cut up the noodles and eat ’em with your fork. Plenty of people do-it’s easier. I sure wouldn’t care.”
“You might not,” Kagan said, “but the waiter would laugh at me behind my back. So would the dago who runs this joint. If you can’t do it so it looks good, you should do something else instead.”
That made Charlie eye him again. Kagan seemed perfectly serious. “Is that the kind of thing you tell the President?” Charlie asked, a hint of laughter in his voice so Kagan could laugh, too, and tell him he was full of baloney.
But the Jew nodded. “Not that I need to tell him very often. He’s the one who taught me that. Take the Tennessee Valley bill. The President wanted people to let their Congressmen hear from them, right?”
“Sure.” Charlie nodded, too. “So?”
“So. . You haven’t heard this from me, you know. This doesn’t go in your next story. This is background.”
“Sure,” Charlie said again, not without some reluctance. Yes, you heard things off the record. That was part of the business. If you broke one source’s trust, you risked losing all your sources. If your source had the President’s ear, you risked more than that. Sometimes you had to take those risks. More often, you were a sponge. You soaked up what you heard. It might flavor what you wrote, but it wouldn’t show up there.
Lazar Kagan ate lasagna as daintily as a cat might have. Dabbing at his full lips with a napkin, he said, “So we make sure the reactionaries hear from the people. The people don’t have good handwriting and they don’t spell very well, but they sure know what they want. They want dams and electricity in the Tennessee Valley, that’s what.”
“Wait a minute.” Charlie stopped, a twirled forkful of spaghetti in tomato sauce and Parmesan cheese halfway to his mouth. “Are you telling me you cooked up some of those letters?”
“I didn’t say that. You said that,” Kagan answered, which was what any sensible official would have said in place of yes.
“Well, no wonder it’s background.” Charlie would have been more surprised had he been more shocked. Yes, it was a cheap trick. Yes, it was a sleazy trick. No, it wasn’t a new trick. The ancient Greeks had probably used it, scratching their messages on potsherds with nails. Charlie found the next question to ask: “So how’s it working?”
“Just fine, thank you very much. They’ll report the bill out of committee day after tomorrow. And that isn’t background. You can use it.”
“And help make it come true.” Charlie knew the mysterious ways in which politics often moved.
“Well, maybe. With a little luck.” Kagan’s voice was bland.
“Why are you telling me?” Charlie asked.
“The President likes you,” Lazar Kagan said. When Charlie let out a startled yip of laughter, the Jew nodded. “He does. He thinks you give him a fair shake. That’s all he wants, for people to give him a fair shake. He wishes your brother would do the same thing.”
Which meant what, exactly? Make your brother come around and we’ll keep feeding you good stories? Something like that, anyway. Carefully, Charlie said, “Mike writes what he writes, that’s all. We quit trying to make each other do stuff about the time we started to shave.”
“I have a brother, too. He’s a tailor in Bakersfield. So I know what you mean,” Kagan said. “I was just telling you what Joe Steele thought.”
“Thanks. It’s good to know,” Charlie said, which was bound to be true in all kinds of ways.
* * *
The Tennessee Valley program was the last important bill to go through Joe Steele’s special session of Congress. Almost everything the President proposed passed. Although none of Joe Steele’s aides would admit it, even off the record, Charlie had the feeling that the few bills which failed were ones the President offered just so they could fail. That was a mark of a smart, sly politico-give the lawmakers a few things they could shoot down and they wouldn’t worry so much about the rest.
And what did pass was enough and then some. Wall Street operators screeched that the new rules squeezed them like anacondas. So did construction companies in the road- and dam-building businesses. So did union bosses who didn’t fancy federally ordered cooling-off periods interrupting their strikes.
You could tell whose ox was being gored by the bellows that came from it. A gored ox might gore back. A gored construction-company executive reached for a lawyer instead. That produced less blood and more noise.
Almost before the ink dried on some of Joe Steele’s legislative signatures, Federal judges started ruling the bills unconstitutional. Naturally, Federal lawyers appealed those rulings. Charlie had never found Federal lawyers particularly appealing, but he knew where they got their marching orders.