Sixty Days and Counting

With Chase now in office the new administration’s activity level was manic but focused. Among many more noted relocations, Diane and all the rest of the science advisor’s team moved into their new offices in the Old Executive Building, just to the west of the White House and within the White House security barrier.

So Frank gave up his office at NSF, which had served as the living room and office in his parcellated house. As he moved out he felt a bit stunned, even dismayed. He had to admit that the set of habits that had been that modular house was now completely demolished. He followed Diane to their new building, wondering if he had made the right decision to go with her. Of course his real home now was the Khembali embassy’s garden shed. He was not really homeless. Maybe it was a bad thing not to have rented a place somewhere. If he had kept looking he could have found something.

Then Diane convened a week’s worth of meetings with all the agencies and departments she wanted to deal with frequently, and during that week he saw that being inside the White House compound was a good thing, and that he needed to be there for Diane. She needed the help; there were literally scores of agencies that had to be gathered into the effort they had in mind, and many of them had upper managements appointed during the years of executive opposition to climate mitigation. Even after the long winter, not all of them were convinced they needed to change. ‘They’re being actively passive-aggressive,’ Diane said with a wry grin. ‘War of the agencies, big time.’

‘Such trivial crap they’re freaking about,’ Frank complained. He was amazed it didn’t bother her more. ‘EPA trying to keep USGS interpreting pesticide levels they’re finding, because interpretation is EPA’s job? Energy and Navy fighting over who gets to do new nuclear? It’s always turf battles.’

She waved them all away with a hand, seemingly un-annoyed. ‘Turf battles matter in Washington, I’m sorry to say. We’re going to have to get things done using these people. Chase has to make a lot of appointments fast for us to have any chance of doing that. And we’ll have to be scrupulous in keeping to the boundaries. It’s no time to be changing the bureaucracy too much; we’ve got bigger fish to fry. I plan to try to keep all these folks happy about their power base holding fast, but just get them on board to help the cause.’

It made sense when she put it that way, and after that he understood better her manner with the old guard technocracy they were so often dealing with. She was always conciliatory and unassuming, asking questions, then laying out her ideas more as questions rather than commands, and always confining herself to whatever that particular agency was specifically involved in.

‘Not that that’s what I always do,’ Diane said, when Frank once made this observation to her. She looked ashamed.

‘What do you mean?’ Frank asked quickly.

‘Well, I had a bad meeting with the deputy secretary of Energy, Holderlin. He’s a hold-over, and he was trying to disparage the alternatives program. So I got him fired.’

‘You did?’

‘I guess so. I sent a note over to the president describing the problem I was having, and the next thing I knew he was out.’

‘Do people know that’s how it happened?’

‘I think so.’

‘Well – good!’

She laughed ruefully. ‘I’ve had that thought myself. But it’s a strange feeling.’

‘Get used to it. We probably need a whole bunch of people fired. You’re the one who always calls it the war of the agencies.’

‘Yes, but I never had the power to get people in other agencies fired before.’

To change the subject to something that would make her more comfortable, Frank said, ‘I’m having some luck getting the military interested. They’re the eight-hundred pound gorilla in this zoo. If they were to come down definitively on the side of our efforts, as being a critical aspect of national defense, then these other agencies would either get on board or become irrelevant.’

‘Yes, maybe,’ Diane said. ‘But what they are you talking about? The Joint Chiefs?’

‘Well, to an extent. Although I’ve been starting with people I know, like General Wracke. Also meeting some of the chief scientists. They’re not much in the decision-making loop, but they might be easier to convince about the science. I show them the Marshall Report they did internally, rating climate change as more of a defense threat than terrorism. It seems to help.’

‘Can you make a copy of that for distribution?’

‘Yes. It would also make sense to reach out to all the scientists in government, and ask them to get behind the National Academy statement on the climate for starters, then help us to work on the agencies they’re involved with.’

‘Sure. But they don’t decide, and there’s management who will be against us no matter what their scientists say, because that’s why they were appointed in the first place.’

‘There’s where your firing one of them may have an effect.’ Frank grinned and Diane made a face.

‘Okay, fine,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s time to talk to Energy then. If they’re scared that they’ll lose their funding, that’s the moment to strike.’

‘Which means we should be talking to the OMB?’

‘Yes. We definitely need the OMB on our side. That should be possible, if Chase has appointed the right people to head it.’

‘And then the appropriations committees.’

‘The best chance there is to talk to their staffs, and to win some new seats in the mid-term election. For Chase’s first two years, it’ll be a bit uphill when it comes to Congress.’

‘At least he’s got the Senate.’

‘Yes, but really you need both.’

‘Hm.’

Frank saw it anew: hundreds of parts to the federal government, each part holding a piece of the jigsaw puzzle, jockeying to determine what kind of picture they all made together. War of the agencies, the Hobbesian struggle of all against all – it needed to be changed to some kind of dance. Made coherent. Lased.

In his truncated time off it was hard to get many hours in with Nick any more, as Nick was often busy with other people in FOG, including a youth group, as well as with all his other activities at school and home. They still held to a meeting at the zoo every third Saturday morning, more or less, starting with an hour at the tiger enclosure, taking notes and photos, then doing a cold-certification course, or walking up to the beaver pond to see what they might see. But that time quickly passed, and then Nick was off. Frank missed their longer days out together, but it wasn’t something that he could press about. His friendship with the Quiblers was unusual enough as it was to make him feel awkward, and he didn’t want them wondering if he had some kind of peculiar thing going on about Nick – really the last thing that would occur to him, although he enjoyed the boy’s company greatly. He was a funny kid.

More likely a suspicion was that Frank might have some kind of a thing for Anna, because there was some truth to it. Although it was not something he would ever express or reveal in any way, it was only just a sort of heightened admiration for a friend, an admiration that included an awareness of the friend’s nice figure and her passionate feelings about things, and most of all, her quick and sharp mind. An awareness of just how smart she was. Indeed, here was the one realm in which Frank felt he must know Anna better than Charlie did – in effect Charlie didn’t know enough to know just how smart Anna was. It was like it had been for Frank when trying to evaluate Chessman as a chess player. Once while waiting for Nick to get ready, Frank had posed the three-box problem to Anna, and she had repeated his scenario carefully, and squinted, and then said ‘I guess you’d want to change to that other box, then?’ and he had laughed and put out his hands and bowed like the kids on Saturday Night Live. And this was just the smallest kind of indicator of her quickness – of a quality of thought Frank would have to characterize as boldly methodical.

Charlie only grinned at the exchange and said, ‘She does that kind of thing all the time.’ He would never see the style of her thought well enough to know how to admire it. Indeed what he called her quibbling was often his own inability to see a thrust right to the heart of a problem he had not noticed. She had married a man who was blind in exactly the area she was most dashing.