Deep Six

On the President’s farm, thirty miles south of Raton, New Mexico, members of the White House press corps were spaced along a barbed-wire fence, their cameras trained on an adjoining field of alfalfa. It was seven in the morning, Mountain Daylight-Saving Time, and they were drinking black coffee and complaining about the early hour, the high-plains heat, the watery scrambled eggs and burned bacon catered by a highway truck stop, and any other discontents, real or imagined.

Presidential Press Secretary Jacob (So

The press secretary’s charm was artfully contrived — bright white teeth capped with precision, long sleek black hair, tinted gray at the temples, dark eyes with the tightened look of cosmetic surgery. No second chin. No visible sign of a potbelly. He moved and gestured with a bouncy enthusiasm that didn’t sit well with journalists, whose major physical activities consisted of pounding typewriters, punching word processors and lifting cigarettes.

The clothes didn’t hurt the image either. The tailored seersucker suit with the blue silk shirt and matching tie. Black Gucci moccasins coated lightly with New Mexico dust. A classy, breezy guy who was no dummy. He never showed anger, never let the correspondents’ needles slip under his fingernails. Bob Finkel of the Baltimore Sun slyly suggested that an undercover investigation revealed that Thompson had graduated with honors from the Joseph Goebbels School of Propaganda.

He stopped at the CNN television motor home. Curtis Mayo, the White House correspondent network newscaster, sagged in a director’s chair looking generally miserable.

“Got your crew set up, Curt?” Thompson asked jovially.

Mayo leaned back, pushed a baseball cap to the rear of a head forested with billowy silver hair and gazed up through orange-tinted glasses. “I don’t see anything worth capturing for posterity.”

Sarcasm ran off Thompson like rainwater down a spout. “In five minutes the President is going to step from his house, walk to the barn and start up a tractor.”

“Bravo,” Mayo grunted. “What does he do for an encore?”

Mayo’s voice had a resonance to it that made a symphonic kettledrum sound like a bongo: deep, booming, with every word enunciated with the sharpness of a bayonet.

“He is going to drive back and forth across the field with a mower and cut the grass.”

“That’s alfalfa, city slicker.”

“Whatever,” Thompson acknowledged with a good-natured shrug. “Anyway, I thought it would be a good chance to roll tape on him in the rural environment he loves best.”

Mayo leveled his gaze into Thompson’s eyes, searching for a flicker of deception. “What’s going down, So

“Sorry?”

“Why the hide-and-seek? The President hasn’t put in an appearance for over a week.”

Thompson stared back, his nut-brown eyes unreadable. “He’s been extremely busy, catching up on his homework away from the pressures of Washington.”

Mayo wasn’t satisfied. “I’ve never known a President to go this long without facing the cameras.”

“Nothing devious about it,” said Thompson. “At the moment, he has nothing of national interest to say.”

“Has he been sick or something?”

“Far from it. He’s as fit as one of his champion bulls. You’ll see.”

Thompson saw through the verbal ambush and moved on along the fence, priming the other news people, slapping backs and shaking hands. Mayo watched him with interest for a few moments before he reluctantly rose out of the chair and assembled his crew.

Norm Mitchell, a loose, ambling scarecrow, set up his video camera on a tripod, aiming it toward the back porch of the President’s farmhouse, while the beefy sound man, whose name was Rocky Montrose, co

“Where do you want to stand for your commentary?” asked Mitchell.

“I’ll stay off camera,” answered Mayo. “How far do you make it to the house and barn?”

Mitchell sighted through a pocket range finder. “About a hundred and ten yards from here to the house. Maybe ninety to the barn.”

“How close can you bring him in?”

Mitchell leaned over the camera’s eyepiece and lengthened the zoom lens, using the rear screen door for a reference. “I can frame him with a couple of feet to spare.”

“I want a tight close-up.”

“That means a two-X converter to double the range.”

“Put it on.”

Mitchell gave him a questioning look. “I can’t promise you sharp detail. At that distance, we’ll be giving up resolution and depth of field.”

“No problem,” said Mayo. “We’re not going for air time.”

Montrose looked up from his audio gear. “Then you don’t need me.”

“Roll sound anyway and record my comments.”

Suddenly the battalion of news correspondents came alive as someone shouted, “Here he comes!”

Fifty cameras went into action as the screen door swung open and the President stepped onto the porch. He was dressed in cowboy boots and a cotton shirt tucked into a pair of faded Levi’s. Vice President Margolin followed him over the threshold, a large Stetson hat pulled low over his forehead. They paused for a minute in conversation, the President gesturing animatedly while Margolin appeared to listen thoughtfully.

“Go tight on the Vice President,” Mayo ordered.

“Have him,” Mitchell responded.

The sun was climbing toward the middle of the sky and the heat waves were rising over the reddish earth. The President’s farm swept away in all directions, mostly fields of hay and alfalfa, with a few pastures for his small herd of breeding cattle. The crops were a vivid green in contrast to the barren areas, and watered by huge circular sprinkling systems. Except for a string of cottonwoods bordering an irrigation ditch, the land unfolded in flat solitude.

How could a man who had spent most of his life in such desolation drive himself to influence billions of people? Mayo wondered. The more he saw of the strange egomania of politicians the more he came to despise them. He turned and spat at a colony of red ants, missing their tu

Margolin turned and went back into the house. The President, acting as though the press corps were still back in Washington, hiked to the barn without turning in their direction. The exhaust of a diesel engine was soon heard and he reappeared seated on a green John Deere tractor, Model 2640, that was hooked to a hay mower. There was a canopy and the President sat out in the open, a small transistor radio clipped to his belt and earphones clamped to his head. The correspondents began yelling questions at him, but it was obvious he couldn’t hear them above the rap of the exhaust and music from the local FM station.

He wrapped a red handkerchief over the lower part of his face, bandit style, to keep from breathing dust and exhaust fumes. Then he let down the mower’s sliding blades and started cutting the field, driving back and forth in long rows, working away from the people crowding the fence.

After about twenty minutes the correspondents slowly packed away their equipment and returned to the air-conditioned comfort of their trailers and motor homes.

“That’s it,” a

“Forget it.” Mayo wrapped the cord around the microphone and handed it to Montrose. “Let’s get out of this heat and see what we’ve got.”

They tramped into the cool of the motor home. Mitchell removed the cassette holding the three-quarter-inch videotape from the camera, inserted it into the playback recorder and rewound it. When he was ready to roll from the begi