Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome Read Online Free PDF

away from me, holding her hand. I could hear him talking to her quietly. Most of it I couldn’t make out, but once or twice I heard him say, “Tell me what I should do. Tell me what I need to do, Margie. Tell me.”
    It was a strangely intimate moment and I felt that I had intruded on something that the President did not intend nor would want me to see. I slipped out of the room before he could notice I was there, waited a moment and then knocked on the door before entering a second time, to give the President time to prepare himself. The Secret Service agents guarding the door gave me a look when I did this but as far as I know they kept quiet about it, too. I think they understood what had happened.
    Wesley Auchincloss:
    Kenny and I came into the Oval Office at 8am the next morning and were surprised that the President already had the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Speaker of the House, and the Majority Leader of the Senate in there with him. We had been under the impression that the meeting would be the usual agenda setter between me, Kenny, and the President. The looks we got from every other member of the meeting suggested to us that they were at least as surprised to be at the meeting as we were. We found out after the meeting that the President called each of them personally at around 5am and told them to be in the Oval Office or face the consequences, “the consequences” being unspecified but dire. He didn’t call me or Kenny, I suppose, because he knew we were coming anyway.
    When we were all there, the President looked at each of us and said something along the lines of, I’ll make this simple. We’re going to find out what this disease is, we’re going to cure it and we’re going to help the people who are locked in their bodies find a way to get out, because we’re the greatest nation in the world, and if we could build the atom bomb and put a man on the moon, we sure as hell can do this.
    And then Speaker Cortez said, in that way of hers, “Well, Mr. President, that’s going to cost money.” The President said that he didn’t care. [Senate Majority Leader] Caleb Waters reminded him that he’d been elected on a platform of slashing taxes and cutting government expenditures. The President stared straight at Waters and said, and this a direct quote, “That was then.” Waters opened his mouth to say something else and the President said to him that he needed to listen very carefully, this was going to happen and that if anyone got in the way of it happening, regardless of party, regardless of position, he would screw them into the ground so hard that they would end up ass-first in China.
    Which would have been an amusing way of putting it except that I have never, not before or since, seen the President as deadly serious as he was being at that exact moment. Waters shut his mouth and waited for what the President had to say next.
    And what he said next was simple. He said to Waters and Cortez that as far as he was concerned this initiative was the sole task of the federal government from that point forward. How they wanted to get it done in their respective chambers was up to them but they had three months and no more to get a bipartisan bill on his desk, one that had more than two-thirds support in both chambers.
    Left unsaid was what would happen if the bill failed to materialize in the appointed time. I think in her autobiography Cortez said she thought the President was hinting that martial law was not out of the question. There’s not much that I would agree with Cortez on, politically or otherwise, but I think she was spot on with this one. To be blunt, the President was not fucking around with this one. It wasn’t political, it was personal.
    Duane Holmes:
    It got done. It nearly killed everyone in Congress, and everyone in Congress ended up wanting to kill everyone else, but two weeks before the deadline the President had the Haden