All characters belong to Aaron Sorkin, John Wells Productions, Warner Bros., & NBC. Title/lyrics by Ben Folds. This is part of a Project.
Please send feedback. The Ascent Of Stan Violet
And you wonder why your father was so resigned
Now you don't wonder any more
Once you wanted revolution
Now you're the institution
How's it feel to be the man?
The wall curves away under the flat of my hand. Other men stood here, years and decades ago, men of stature, men of intellect, and discussed potentialities and event horizons. Some said no, several said yes, and in the end a few of them went to war. I won't sugarcoat it. They didn't go themselves. They sent my father; they sent my best friend.
I could do that.
I turn back to my desk. I knew, of course, that there was no red button here, no red phone. I wish there were, sometimes. It would be nice to have flashing lights and warning sirens. Nice, if everything was marked that clearly, and disasters didn't happen instead in tiny, deadly increments. Like cracks in ice.
There's a door on the left, and two on the right if you include the French doors that frame the winter afternoon. "Whoever occupies the Oval Office is illuminated by that office." Jack Valenti. Today that illumination is poor: circles of gold by the lamps and the gray glow washing in through the windows. All the lights are on and it's dark in here.
I'm supposed to be reading about Pell grants and tax-free IRAs, about making college universal. Two paragraphs below that I'm proposing strategies for getting fourth- and eighth-graders up to the national standard. And that made sense to someone--Toby, Sam, I don't know. I circle it in blue ink and make a question mark in the margin. This draft is littered with them. This year was littered with them.
There'll be three special guests at the speech; that's good. It's still my favorite part of the job, the schoolchildren, the Girl Scouts and the Little League. Soccer teams, sewing circles, lifesavers and lives saved. Something else my father and best friend could've taught me: it's nice to know what you're fighting for and against.
Charlie coughs politely, standing at the threshold of the inner right-hand door. "Mr. President?"
"He's here?" Charlie nods and I take off my glasses. "Send him in."
As Hoynes comes in, I stand up, keeping my hands on the surface of my desk. He stops across from me, hands in his pockets, leaning back as he nods. "Sir."
"John." I wish he wasn't so tall. I tilt my head toward the window. "Cold out there?"
Stupid, to fumble for a topic of conversation, and come up with one as weak as the weather. He shrugs. "A little."
"You're going home next week."
"I'm going to Houston, yeah. Then up to Michigan. Ohio, too, if we're on schedule--"
I know the schedule, of course; it was mine first. "I'm signing the Brownfields bill tomorrow."
"The Brownfields Restoration and Small Business Protection Bill," Hoynes intones. "I'll probably have to do some talking about it."
"Is that a problem?"
He takes his hands out of his pockets and rubs his jaw. "I would've liked to make this trip without feeding both the environmentalists who think we spend our weekends personally hunting down the spotted owl--"
"It's a moderate bill," I say.
"And the CEOs," he continues, "who are sick of our government taking the money they rightfully stole in the first place."
"You know, they weren't going to wait for an excuse to bash us." I roll my chair aside a few inches and walk around the desk to face him. "It was passed by a bipartisan vote, John."
It's quiet for a few seconds, and we're looking each other in the eye. He looks down first, at the carpet, and then back at me. "I'm gonna be carrying it around when I'm out there," he says. "That's all I'm saying."
No one ever means it when they say that. But I take a few steps back toward my side of the desk. "Know the nice thing about an election year?"
"What's that?"
I spin my chair around and sit down. "It ends in November."
"I used to love 'em." He's not even smirking when I look up. "Some of the best years of my life have been election years."
"Yeah?" I tap my pen against the arm of the chair. "Where were you in 1966?"
Hoynes wrinkles his forehead, looking at me like I've lapsed into Latin. "Junior high."
It's true, I realize, as he makes his way out. He's been in politics longer than I have, but for all that, he's pretty young.
In 1966, Hoynes' most pressing concerns were baseball cards, algebra and the inside of a cheerleader's sweater. Simple things, not yet blotted out by the clouds overhead. There was lightning striking Southeast Asia, Ohio and Alabama, San Francisco and New York. And there was thunder in London, where I was living when Johnson started sending American boys to war.
I called home. Not my parents' home, not right away--I called Abbey in Boston. She said hello and I couldn't help smiling, because it was always good to hear her voice.
I said, "I think I ought to go."
It took a little while before she understood. We went a couple rounds of conversation, before we started to say the things that mattered. "But you don't believe in it," she said. "You said so, last month. Last *year.* You said--"
"I know what I said," I told her.
"You said America isn't supposed to be there, that it's about economics and not about what's right--"
"That's not what I said."
"That is what you said!"
"No." I took a deep breath. "America is a revolution, a new idea; it's not an empire. It's not Rome. We shouldn't stand for what Rome stood for, crushing the rights of others, protecting the wealth of the few rather than the freedom of the masses--that's the Roman hawk, not the American eagle. That's why we don't belong in Vietnam."
There was silence, apart from a few pops of static on the phone line. My desk was by the door, and I remember hearing music--Eleanor Rigby--from the hall. Then Abbey sighed. "That's exactly what you said."
"I have a verbal memory," I pointed out. "You're a visual learner, that's why you'll be a good doctor."
"Jed, you're a pacifist." She was worried, and I hated how it made her sound. "You don't believe in violence, and you don't believe in this war."
"Yeah."
"So," she said, "why?"
I thought about that for a moment.. "I could get a deferment," I said slowly. "It wouldn't be that hard. I'm a student. I've got money, I've got connections. But I do that, and some other guy goes in my place. Stan from Topeka, who doesn't have my family and my advantages, who doesn't get my chance. I don't believe in that either."
"Of course not," she said, almost laughing. "Stan from Topeka?"
I would have shrugged if she could see me. "There's an argument to be made for duty."
"And for pacifism." She paused. "It's late there. You should go."
"Yeah."
I could hear her holding her breath. I was holding mine too. "Don't go," she said. Then she added, "Goodnight."
We said the things you say when you love someone and you don't talk to them enough. Then we hung up. I remember resting my head in my hands and looking out the window. It was dark, and it was starting to rain.
I know more now, about that war, about this country. I know more about that decision. It mattered what Abbey wanted, and what my mother said later. It also mattered that my father never spoke about the war he fought, not in my childhood and not as one man to another. All of it mattered, but I made up my own mind. I always have.
I raise my eyes from the draft--I've read the same paragraph maybe five times now, and it's still nowhere--and I look at the door to my left. Leo's office is on the other side. He doesn't talk much about his war, either. And I've never asked him why it took us thirty years to become close and honest friends.
Between Leo's office and mine there's a hallway, one that doesn't show up on the floor plan, and it leads to my smaller office, and the kitchen and dining room and bathroom back there. It's small and guarded; that's privacy. Beyond reflected light.
I still make decisions alone, for myself and for others. And I don't call myself a pacifist these days. You don't get elected to this office that way, and if you did, it would change you.
Outside the windows, the gray is turning to blue--the sun must have set. I read something once, in an Audubon Society book I was scanning in a hotel room. I don't remember where we were or when it happened, but I remember this: March 13th, 1904. Five million Lapland longspurs, flying north in their annual migration, were caught in the crosswinds of a blizzard. I've been in serious storms before. I know how they hit, how the snow flies at you, how it stings when every flake is edged with ice. Everything gets swept into the storm, swallowed in it, until all sense of direction fails. Until everything is white, and the cold that bites through flesh and into bone, like teeth, like needles, like bullets--
The birds froze to death, falling in multitudes on the Indiana stubblefields. I imagine the earth was buried by them; casualties of the storm.
"Mr. President?" I turn my head and Charlie's there, standing in the right-hand doorway. "Your pictures with the ambassador from Peru are in five minutes," he says.
I'd forgotten that until he says it. "Thanks," I say, taking my glasses off again. "You know what I'm doing tomorrow?"
Charlie's eyebrows quirk up a little. "I know most of the things you're doing tomorrow, sir. Which one are we talking about?"
"I'm signing the Brownfields Bill. Which is actually the Brownfields Restoration and Small Business Protection Bill, which is one of many ways of saying everyone has compromised their goals so we can all smile on camera, which is one of many things that's wrong with this place." I stand up, pace around the desk. "You know why I'm signing it?"
He'll say no, and I'm ready to tell him about birds and ice. About being swallowed by the weather.
"Yes," he says.
"Really." I stop where I'm standing, in the middle of the room, and look at him. "Why's that, Charlie?"
"Because--well, compromise is progress. Because if it makes any difference at all, even in one field somewhere, that helps."
He sounds sincere, looks it, too. I point at him. "You're getting pretty full of yourself, you know."
Charlie grins, wide and warm. "Yes, sir."
"This isn't 1904."
I've lost him there, but he barely blinks. "No, sir."
"I'm gonna sign that bill." I take a step forward. "You know who I'm signing it for?"
"No, sir."
I'm signing it for you. "For Stan in Topeka," I say.
There's another almost-blink, his forehead starting to wrinkle. He checks it and his smile holds, and it's too hard not to smile back. "Yes, sir."
"Let's go take pictures."
As I follow him out, I look around the office. The walls curve, cradling the lamplight, making shadows into circles. There's a door on my left. There's a door on the right--two, counting the French doors that blow open when the wind is wrong. And there's a door in the middle, and that's the one we go through, when we go.