Free The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear by Stuart Stevens

bland meeting room at a fancy hotel. The higher you go in politics, the more time you spend in these kinds of hotel rooms, the catered food as limp and exhausted as you feel, the coffee as burnt as you’ve been for months. It’s like running away to join the circus and discovering that it’s really run by Google nerds who sit in cubicles. But we always call them “war rooms” to feel more powerful. If you made it seem exclusive and important, people would die to be granted admission.
    “Ginny,” I said, nodding and managing a smile, trying to pretend that everything was perfectly normal, that what passed for Hilda Smith’s brain trust wasn’t staring at her like she had just landed in a spaceship and burst out singing Armstrong George’s praises.
    “Everything okay?” I asked. From the way she was glaring at me, it was clear that Ginny saw this as some kind of test I was failing. This seemed to happen regularly to me with women. Sandra said I veered radically from oblivious to clinging, without a stop for companionship. I’m sure she was right. Either I was so caught up in my own little world, which meant some goddamn campaign death struggle, or I had nothing to do but focus on her and think way too hard about how lucky I was to be the boyfriend of this famous, very hot journalist. Pathetic, really. But Ginny and I had a good time together, more or less. It was a campaign and we were having sex, but it hadn’t really been that strange kind of campaign sex that made you wish you hadn’t had sex as soon as you did.
    Ginny looked like she might hit me. “Here,” was all she said, thrusting an envelope into my hand. “I hate you,” she mouthed silently, and turned on her heel.
    “See ya, Ginny,” Dick Shenkoph mumbled as she reached the door. She turned and winked at Shenkoph, who, as always, was dressed in a rumpled black suit that looked slept in. He blushed, an odd sight on his sagging seventy-something-year-old face.
    No one said anything for a long moment after Ginny left, waiting for me to explain. Everyone in the room was wondering,
What in God’s name is in that envelope?
So was I, but I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction, and picked up where we had been when Ginny walked in.
    “You don’t like Tommy’s idea, Kim?” I asked Kim.
    “What?” she grumbled, trying to focus. Kim Grunfeld was only thirty-one or so but already had bags under her eyes. Her mother, a congresswoman from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, was a walking advertisement for cosmetic surgery, with one of those faces that looked like it had melted under a too-hot sun. Kim had grown up in the family business, and the business was politics. Nationally her mother was known as a crazy-left Democrat of the sort a family trust fund helps develop. No one in Congress really liked her. She was self-important and self-involved, a bore even to her own true believers. But to those out there who didn’t have to deal with her, she was a great champion of the left with a narrow but intense following across the country. Her father was an advertising exec who had been at various times the head of most of the big Madison Avenue agencies. One late night on a campaign bus coming back from shooting Hilda on a rainy day in Ohio, Kim had told me, “What you have to understand is that my mom is the nice one in the family.” I thought it was the saddest thing I’d ever heard. She had become a Republican out of family rebellion, an instinct I found all too understandable.
    Tommy didn’t wait for her to get worked up again. “Why is this not a good idea? This bombing is a defining moment whether we want it or not. We must poll to gauge our reaction.”
    “I’m all for polling, you know,” Dick Shenkoph mumbled, and a few people chuckled. Shenkoph had been a major pollster a decade ago, until he was caught cooking numbers in a Texas governor’s race. Instead of completing full samples of six hundred calls for weekly polls, Shenkoph had his company