Chapter Forty-six

THE SURPRISING THING about James Grosvenor was that he was highly intelligent, personable and modest – in other words, a man far removed from the typical politician. Nobody had intended, least of all himself, that he would ever become the President of the United States.

He had been a businessman for nearly all his working life, the major part of it spent taking over distressed manufacturing companies and turning them around. Call him old-fashioned, but he believed in American industry, the skill of American workers and that hardworking men and women deserved a living wage and decent health care. One thing he didn’t believe in was unions – if capital conducted itself properly, there was no need for them. Needless to say, his employees repaid him with their loyalty, and their productivity rates were always among the highest in the country.

The success – and the wealth – that followed his approach allowed him to take over ever larger enterprises and gave him a media profile as a man committed to saving the nation’s industrial base. Phoenix Rising was the name given to the segment about him on 60 Minutes. Shortly after it appeared he was offered the job of Secretary of Commerce and, having enough money and happy to take on a new challenge, he accepted. For a self-made man, government administration and its endless bureaucracy was a revelation, but he was not a man for turning and he made such a success of it that when the Secretary of Health was swept aside in a corruption scandal he moved to that department.

His wife had died from breast cancer and he brought to the department a fierce commitment that hadn’t been seen for years in the musty building on Independence Avenue. He was widely seen as championing the rights of ordinary citizens – much to the anger of the powerful health-care lobby – and that only served to raise his public profile even higher. Two years later he was asked to take the second slot on a presidential ticket. The candidate was a woman – the first ever to stand for the highest office on behalf of a major party – and Grosvenor knew that he had been selected to balance the ticket with a strong male presence.

None of his friends expected him to accept, but he and Anne had never had any kids and he found it harder and harder to fill the hole left by her passing. His answer was to work harder and find even greater challenges. Beneath the energetic exterior, he was a sad man – a decent one too.

After two days’ careful thought he accepted but, in the private counsels of his own mind, he didn’t give himself or the candidate much chance of prevailing. Nor did the polls. The country had already elected a black president, but accepting a woman as commander-in-chief just seemed a bridge too far at that stage of the country’s evolution.

Then, while speaking at a rally in Iowa ten weeks before the election the candidate suffered a brain aneurysm. If the images of her crumpling to the stage and suffering a grand seizure weren’t bad enough, the next four days as she lingered on life support while her family kept a bedside vigil were even worse.

Throughout it all, Grosvenor maintained not only his own schedule but undertook the majority of her engagements too, virtually single-handedly keeping the campaign alive. At every opportunity he spoke of how he had handled his own wife’s illness and reminded the audience of what was really important in all their lives – good health, long life, the love of others. For once in a political campaign, it sounded genuine.

He had always been witty, a kind of twinkly, handsome man, and the polls tightened. But the real turning point came on the night the family decided to take the candidate off life support. Grosvenor was at the hospital and, after it was all over, he stepped outside a side door to get some air. Moments later, the candidate’s husband joined him, both of them thinking they were completely unobserved.

But somebody was watching – a hospital worker, probably – and whoever it was captured the scene on a cellphone camera. Grainy, recorded at a substantial distance, it was an indistinct video but certainly clear enough to see the candidate’s husband break down and start to cry. After a pause, when it was clear the man couldn’t master his emotions, Grosvenor reached out, put his arms around the man and held him close for several minutes.

Two men, neither of them young, standing outside a hospital, one of them a candidate for vice-president and supporting the other in his time of anguish, was such a human, unscripted moment that, minutes after the anonymous camera-person uploaded it on to the Internet, it went viral. For the duration of the film clip, the electorate saw behind the curtain of image and spin, and what they recognized in the man who stepped to the front of the ticket was, I believe, a person not too different from themselves.

On the first Tuesday in November it wasn’t a landslide, but Grosvenor – perhaps the most unlikely candidate in modern American politics – won enough to get him over the line. ‘I’m Lyndon Johnson – without the assassination, ’ he told friends just before the inauguration.

But the one question nobody could answer – the one completely hammered by his opponent during the campaign – was whether James Balthazar Grosvenor had the steel necessary to handle a full-on crisis.

All of us – the nation, the world, the man himself – were about to find out.