The Last Debate Read Online Free Page B

it?”
    “I say yes,” Durkette said. “What about you, Paul?”
    “The same.”
    Chuck Hammond told me that he was the last to speak before the conference-call connections were cut. He said he said to all: “I have a feeling we are all going to regret having decided to go ahead with this thing.”
    None of the others recalls Hammond saying anything at all, much less delivering such a doomful warning. I am not prepared to call Hammond a liar over something as trivial as this. But I am prepared to at least suggest it was possible he wished so badly afterward that he
had
said it that it began to seem to him as if he really did.
    Whatever, he and Nancy Dewey went back to their respective offices to place the calls to the four selected panelists. Dewey called Naylor and Ramirez. Hammond notified Howley and Manning.

2
The Williamsburg Four
    B arbara Manning never even had a glimpse of a daydream about being on the Meredith-Greene debate panel. “I was still way, way back there in the back of the bus for those kinds of fantasies” was the way she described her state of professional mind at the time.
    She was twenty-nine years old, ten months into her job at
This Week
, still into the trauma of matching news with coherent words and sentences under what she heard somebody once call “everybody pressure”—meaning doing it for a huge national readership rather than a small local one. She had worked her way to Washington and the magazine from the South Bend, Indiana,
Journal
and the Chicago
Sun-Times
, where she had learned the basics of making real what she had learned at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism’s special fast-track graduate program for minority journalists. But she was still getting her footing on the weekly newsmagazine track.
    So when the call did come from Chuck Hammond, she was not only not expecting it, she almost didn’t take it.
    “An important person named Hammond on line two for you, Barbara!”
    “No calls!” said Barbara.
    “He said it was urgent!”
    “Nothing is more urgent than this piece!” she said.
    The man she was shouting with was Mel Renfro, her boss, the political editor of
This Week
magazine. It was almost five P.M. , which meant she had less than thirty minutes to get her story about the way poor blacks were afraid of what might happen to them under a Meredith administration, a case she had already made ten or twelve times in print before, but it could not be said often enough. Her desk and computer were part of the politics cluster in the center of
This Week
’s Washington bureau office. Renfro sat in the center and shouted at people.
    “This is!” he shouted at her now.
    Barbara was terrorized by him and by deadlines, the coming of which in her weekly life everybody said she would eventually either get used to or perish from. She remained uncertain which was going to happen first.
    “Barbara Manning,” she said into the phone.
    “Chuck Hammond, Barbara,” said the male voice on the line. Barbara? she thought. Why are you calling me Barbara? I don’t know you.
    “I’m director of the National Commission on Presidential Debates,” said Chuck Hammond.
    “Yeah, right?”
    “We would like for you to be one of the four press panelists at Williamsburg next Sunday. What do you say?”
    “Me? This is Barbara Manning.”
    “I know who you are.”
    “You want me?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “Man, you must really be into affirmative action at your place.”
    Chuck Hammond was tempted then to respond honestly to her honest response but decided against it. He did not think it would have been helpful for him to say what he really believed, i.e., It is the height of stupid affirmative action to have you, kid, on the panel. He said nothing.
    Barbara was truly confused by the call, the invitation. She took a few breaths. It made no sense. Me? You want me? Little old Barbara Manning, granddaughter of Maude Frederick Manning of Perrin, Georgia? You want me?