A God in Ruins - Leon Uris [120]
“It is four A.M., Mr. President, two o’clock Rocky Mountain time.”
That got my attention. I asked for Darnell’s whereabouts. Eric had hunted him down before he awakened me. Darnell was tied up for ten minutes or so in the press room. “Hold my calls until Darnell can brief me,” I ordered.
Come on, Darnell, God dammit! That’s funny. The first time I said those words to him was when we were teenagers.
Darnell Jefferson, the first black billionaire in American history—he who sat on three dozen corporate boards, he who endowed the black community and colleges handsomely, he who personally went to Moscow as the Soviet Union was breaking up and snared the twenty best computer scientists in the country for T3, he who talked me into building a pleasure palace for my workers which became the model for all industry, he who, he who, and so forth and so forth.
Well, I’ve done damned well for Darnell…and he’s done right well for me. He is the only one whom I can trust in this vacuum I carry. I trust no one in there but him. Suppose we had never met? Suppose he had decided not to spend his life keeping my public image pure and dynamic?
On New Year’s Eve of 1999 I told him I was going to make a run for the presidency in 2004. Darnell was way ahead of me and charted out a brilliant campaign.
We rode to the White House right after the turn of the century. The care, feeding, and control of the Internet had created great answers and greater confusion.
All of a sudden the world had potentially three billion would-be writers, not only with free and unfettered access, but hidden by anonymity.
The great computer firms were bent on speed and shrinking chips. Packaging, marketing them were the berries. Competition had become slaughter house-mean and fighting off an antitrust suit the most noble form of corporate life. No one seemed to have a vision of the future, or where this electronic colossus was taking us.
Darnell took a team of experts and science writers and crafted a manuscript: The T3 Commonsense Guideline for International Internet Ethics: A Primer for the 21st Century.
I wrote the final draft and subsidized a major publisher to put it on the market. Damned if it didn’t sell over a million copies in the bookstores and another million over the various web sites. I made T3 Commonsense a must in every convention and salesroom at sweetheart prices and sent hundreds of thousands of copies to schools and universities.
Like According to Hoyle and Burke’s Peerage before it, T3 Commonsense established the rules of the road on a road sorely needing them. I had taken my first step on the golden carpet which climaxed with my election as president of the United States.
All the above may sound funny to you in light of the nation coming out of the closet by the end of the nineties. However, many of the things we let out of the closet would serve us better if they were shoved back in.
The point of this is to say, I myself, Thornton Tomtree, am a clean, moral, progressive, self-made entrepreneur.
The Four Corners Massacre was not my doing, but it happened on my watch. Darnell Jefferson and Pucky literally forced me to travel a nation in mourning and share the people’s grief.
Awkward and stumbling in the beginning, I learned the art of compassion. Even though I never personally knew or understood it. I acted it out, people responded to my “sincerity”…I never felt the depth of their anguish. Isn’t that what a leader is all about: not to go down in an ash heap, but demonstrate strength and ability to endure after a tragedy?
If a leader felt pain in every flood, hurricane, shooting, epidemic, school bus overturning…he would cave in and no longer be a leader.
Darnell and Pucky forced enough of the mundane stuff into me to help me regain my position for reelection.
Speaking of tragedy! I was gaining on Governor O’Connell in the polls, and at the Great Debate