Free The Last Debate by Jim Lehrer Page A

knees and ran his hands along the downside edges of tables and chairs.
    “If you are saying you think either one or both of the campaigns might bug us,” said Barbara, “then I am saying, forget it. Neither side is quite that stupid, although one of them, which shall remain nameless, is damned close.”
    “I could actually imagine those fools in the Greene campaign doing something that stupid,” Henry said. “I really could.”
    “You mean that smart,” Mike Howley said, finishing his job by running a finger up and over the doorsills. “Knowing what was going to be asked would be ever so helpful, particularly to the Greene people.”
    “Yeah, but it’s the Meredith people who would be sleazy enough to actually do it,” Henry said.
    “And competent enough to actually pull it off,” Mike said. “The Greene staff would probably end up putting the bug in the wrong room or something.”
    “Well, well,” said Barbara. “Here I am in the big time of American journalism, and I am watching the biggest of the big-time journalists going around like … well, you know …”
    Joan’s hand signal caused her not to finish the sentence. Joan said to Mike: “OK, you checked it out. The room is clean. We have some work to do here now.”
    “Only twenty-three hours twelve minutes until airtime,” Henry said.
    Howley said: “With that in mind, I hope that you-all don’t mind if I assume a kind of chairman’s role here. A very informal one, just to get things moving.”
    “You’re the moderator,” Joan said.
    “You’ve done this before,” Barbara said.
    “You are our hero,” Henry said.
    Mike Howley bowed his head as if he had just been crowned king of something and said: “All right, then, thanks. First, I think we should establish some ground rules for our talking here now, tomorrow, or whenever, until this thing is over with.”
    Howley laid out a proposal that, interestingly enough, was identical to the one that opened that original panel-selection meeting back at the commission offices in Washington. He proposed silence.
    “I would like for us to agree to keep confidential now and forever-more everything we say to each other as we go about preparing for this debate. We do not write about it or report about it for our respective newspapers, magazines, or networks. We do not gossip about it in our respective newsrooms or at our respective dinner parties. We do not include it in any of our respective memoirs.”
    Howley paused for a beat. Nobody said anything. They were listening.
    Howley said: “I believe all of us must feel free to say anything that we wish to say without worrying about reading it tomorrow or any other tomorrow.…”
    “What are you worried about?” Joan asked. In light of subsequent events it reads like an amazingly prescient question. But she assured me that nothing like that was involved. She had no hints, no signs, of anything to come. It was simply an automatic knee-jerk response.
    “I’m not worried about anything in particular,” Howley replied. “But let’s say one of us floats an idea for a question or an approach that is truly off the wall. Something that is in bad taste, inappropriate, idiotic. I would not be keen on hearing you report on CNS something like ‘Mike Howley of
The Washington Morning News
suggested asking Paul L. Greene if he had ever had sex with a farm animal. He was talked out of it by the other panelists.’ ”
    “You are asking us, journalists all, to agree beforehand not to report on what might happen in something as important as this presidential debate,” Barbara said. “I am not sure I am comfortable with that.”
    Barbara was very proud of what she said. She remembers it as the moment she became coherent. She thought straight and actually said what she thought in a way that was clean and understandable.
    “I think Mike may be right, Barbara,” Joan said. “We ought to feel free to say anything here among the four of us.”
    “Right,”