“Sir, we never don’t let you do anything,” Price said.
“No, you’re pretty subtle about it,” Ryan allowed. “You know that I’m too considerate of other people, and when you tell me about all the crap you people have to go through so that I can buy a burger at Wendy’s, I usually back off … like a damned wimp.” The President shook his head. Nothing frightened him more than the prospect that he’d somehow get used to all this panoply of “specialness,” as he thought of it. As though he’d only recently discovered royal parentage, and was now to be treated like a king, hardly allowed to wipe his own ass after taking a dump. Doubtless some people who’d lived in this house had gotten used to it, but that was something John Patrick Ryan, Sr., wanted to avoid. He knew that he was not all that special, and not deserving of all this folderol … and besides, like every other man in the world, when he woke up in the morning the first thing he did was head to the bathroom. Chief Executive he might be, but he still had a working-class bladder. And thank God for that, the President of the United States reflected.
“Where’s Robby today?”
“Sir, the Vice President is in California today, the Navy base at Long Beach, giving a speech at the shipyard.”
Ryan grinned a little sideways. “I work him pretty hard, don’t I?”
“That’s the Vice President’s job,” Arnie van Damm said from the door. “And Robby’s a big boy about it,” added the President’s Chief of Staff.
“Your vacation was good for you,” Ryan observed. He had a very nice tan. “What did you do?”
“Mainly I laid on the beach and read all the books I haven’t had time for. Thought I’d die of boredom,” van Damm added.
“You actually thrive on this crap, don’t you?” Jack asked, a little incredulous at the thought.
“It’s what I do, Mr. President. Hey, Andrea,” he added with a slight turn of the head.
“Good morning, Mr. van Damm.” She turned to Jack. “That’s all I have for you this morning. If you need me, I’ll be in the usual place.” Her office was in the Old Executive Office Building, just across the street, and upstairs from the new Secret Service command post, called JOC, for Joint Operations Center.
“Okay, Andrea, thanks.” Ryan nodded, as she withdrew into the secretaries’ room, from which she’d head down to the Secret Service Command Post. “Arnie, get some coffee?”
“Not a bad idea, boss.” The Chief of Staff took his usual seat and poured a cup. The coffee in the White House was especially good, a rich blend, about half Colombian and half Jamaica Blue Mountain, the sort of thing that Ryan could get used to as President. There had to be some place he could buy this after escaping from his current job, he hoped.
“Okay, I’ve had my national security brief and my Secret Service brief. Now tell me about politics for the day.”
“Hell, Jack, I’ve been trying to do that for over a year now, and you still aren’t getting it very well.”
Ryan allowed his eyes to flare at the simulated insult. “That’s a cheap shot, Arnie. I’ve been studying this crap pretty hard, and even the damned newspapers say I’m doing fairly well.”
“The Federal Reserve is doing a brilliant job of handling the economy, Mr. President, and that has damned little to do with you. But since you are the President, you get credit for all the good things that happen, and that’s nice, but do remember, you will also get the blame for all the bad things that are going to happen-and some will, remember that-because you just happen to be here, and the citizens out there think you can make the rain fall on their flowers and the sun come out for their picnics just by wishing it so.
“You know, Jack,” the Chief of Staff said after sipping his coffee. “We really haven’t got past the idea of kings and queens. A lot of people really do think you have that sort of personal power-”
“But I don’t, Arnie, how can that be?”
“It just is the truth, Jack. It doesn’t have to make sense. It just is. Deal with it.”
I do so love these lessons, Ryan thought to himself. “Okay, today is …?”
“Social Security.”
Ryan’s eyes relaxed. “I’ve been reading up on that. The third rail of American political life. Touch it and die.”
For the next half hour, they discussed what was wrong and why, and the irresponsibility of the Congress, until Jack sat back with a sigh.
“Why don’t they learn, Arnie?”
“What do they need to learn?” Arnie asked, with the grin of a Washington insider, one of the anointed of God. “They’ve been elected. They must know it all already! How else do you think they got here?”
“Why the hell did I allow myself to stay in this damned place?” the President asked rhetorically.
“Because you had a conscience attack and decided to do the right thing for your country, you dumbass, that’s why.”
“Why is it you’re the only person who can talk to me like that?”
“Besides the Vice President? Because I’m your teacher. Back to today’s lesson. We could leave Social Security alone this year. It’s in decent enough fiscal shape to last another seven to nine years without intervention, and that means you could leave it to your successor to handle-”
“That’s not ethical, Arnie,” Ryan snapped.
“True,” the Chief of Staff agreed, “but it’s good politics, and fairly Presidential. It’s called letting sleeping dogs lie.”
“You don’t do that in the knowledge that as soon as it wakes up, it’s going to rip the baby’s throat out.”
“Jack, you really ought to be a king. You’d be a good one,” van Damm said, with what appeared to be genuine admiration.
“Nobody can handle that kind of power.”
“I know: ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power is actually pretty neat.’ So said a staffer for one of your predecessors.”
“And the bastard wasn’t hanged for saying it?”
“We need to work on that sense of humor, Mr. President. That was meant as a joke.”
“The scariest part of this job is that I do see the humor of it. Anyway, I told George Winston to start a quiet project to see what we can do with Social Security. Quiet project, I mean classified-black, this project doesn’t exist.”
“Jack, if you have one weakness as President, that’s it. You’re into this secrecy thing too much.”
“But if you do something like this in the open, you get clobbered by ill-informed criticism before you manage to produce anything, and the press crawls up your ass demanding information you don’t have yet, and so then they go make up stuff on their own, or they go to some yahoo who just makes up bullshit, and then we have to answer it.”