34 - Washington, D.C.
President Quaid no longer trusted the legal advice he was receiving from his Attorney General.
“The Queen is too soft,” he told Carol Cabot, of the Boston Cabots, the real Cabots as far as her family, descendants of the English explorer John Cabot, who arrived in New England before the Mayflower immigrants, was concerned. She laughingly referred to herself as the product of a mixed marriage. “My father was Boston money,” she told friends. “My mother was Philadelphia money.”
Cabot was President Quaid’s legal counsel. She was a lawyer with only one client, the President. The Attorney General’s job was to enforce the laws of the United States. The President’s Legal Counsel’s job was to look out for the interests of the President and tell her client how to do whatever it was the President wanted to do, but do it legally, or at least without getting caught.
Carol Cabot was general counsel for TransWorld Energy Corporation when Quaid first ran for President, unsuccessfully. She’d been an early supporter back then, and made sure that her employer was generous to both his unsuccessful first campaign and his second, successful one. In the four years between those campaigns, Cabot got to know and respect Quaid. She enjoyed being counsel to the President. Besides, she expected that during his final year in office she would be appointed to a high federal court, perhaps even the Big One.
With that expectation in mind, her unspoken rule was that it would not hurt if what she advised the President to do was what he himself wanted to do.
President Quaid was angry that it was McQueeney’s assistant, Wilson Harrison - he’d learned later was his name - and not the Attorney General herself who first suggested labeling the thousands of Jews taken into custody as “enemy combatants.” The more President Quaid thought about the idea, the better he liked it.
“They are certainly ‘combatants,’ right?” he told Cabot. “They steamed into Boston harbor in those ships armed to the gills with military weapons, looking for a fight. Haven’t we been shitting our pants for years that somebody would try sneaking military weapons into the country on some old tramp freighter? Well, that’s what they did. I’ve got no problem calling them combatants, any more than old Bushie Two did for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, who he squirreled away in Guantanamo. Somebody comes at a U.S. soldier with a weapon and he’s a ‘combatant,’ no doubt about that.”
“On the other hand, Mr. President, these folks are, or more accurately, were Israelis,” Cabot said. “You are going to make an awful lot of people uncomfortable labeling all Israelis, or former Israelis ...”
Quaid interrupted. “I don’t know what to call them myself,” he laughed. “How about, persons-who-used-to-be-citizens-of-Israel or allies-now-enemies-formerly-known-as-Israelis.
“Let’s refer to them for the sake of this discussion as ‘stateless Jews,’ if that is all right with you, sir,” Cabot was trying to steer the President back on path. She continued, “The fact of the matter is that just about all the people on those two ships were at one time Israeli citizens, in fact, many of them were or still are U.S. citizens. It is a bit of a legal step to refer to such people with the word ‘enemy,’ sir. As your legal counsel, I have to caution that doing that would be something of a stretch, as a matter of law.”
The President sat in his high-backed leather chair and glared across his desk at his counsel.
Cabot knew her client well enough to appreciate that he did not like to be told that he shouldn’t do something he’d already made his mind up to do. That appeared to be the situation now, she realized.
“I’ve been getting different legal advice on that issue, gotta tell you Carol,” President Quaid said. “Let’s bring somebody else into the discussion.”
The president pressed a button on his phone. The door to the Oval Office was opened by a Secret Service agent.
“Send that young fellow in, will you, please,” the President said.
Wilson Harrison walked confidently into the Oval Office. Cabot took in the perfectly pressed blue suit, the glistening black wingtips, the carefully striped tie. He went out and bought a whole new outfit to meet the Boss, she thought. Probably maxed out his VISA card.
Carol Cabot sensed this man was a fellow wolf circling the still-warm carcass of a deer she’d just taken down. This is my client, she thought, keep your claws off him.
She smiled warmly and held out her hand.
“Carol, do you know Wilson Harrison?” the President asked. “Wilson’s been chatting with me a bit about this whole enemy combatant thing. I wanted you to hear what he told me yesterday afternoon when we had a little chat, one on one.” The President put his hand on Harrison’s back and steered him toward Cabot. The two lawyers shook hands with all the warmth of heavyweight boxers about to start the first round. This was far from the first time some ambitious lawyer had made moves to steal her one and only client from Cabot.
“OK, young man, go ahead with what you told me yesterday,” Quaid said.
“Mr. President, as soon as the Attorney General first briefed us, the senior staff at Justice that is, about this mass arrest that was going to happen, I took it upon myself to explore alternative arrangements for the continuing detention of those persons we would be taking into custody, especially since I was not assigned any specific role in the process personally.” Harrison addressed President Quaid. The President appeared oblivious to the subtle interplay between the two lawyers as they took each other’s measure and prepared to circle and do combat.
The President was the prize.
“As I told you yesterday, Sir, when we met privately,” Harrison looked knowingly at Cabot, delivering the clear message from one lawyer to another that “I met with your client and you didn’t know about it.”
“When we met yesterday, Mr. President, I said that I’d looked into how the courts have treated the concept of enemy aliens, I mean, enemy combatants, and I was quite encouraged.”
President Quaid raised his hand, interrupting.
“Well, Carol here is worried about calling people who might even be American citizens, if they hung on to their citizenship when they moved to Israel, as enemies. How we gonna deal with that, Harrison?”
“That is no problem, Mr. President, as would become obvious from even the most cursory examination of the case law.” He glanced at Cabot, whose face was turning ever so slightly red. “President Bush, the second Bush, he called anybody who looked cross-eyed at an American soldier an enemy combatant, Sir, and he got away with it every time.
“Years before that, FDR used the term when eight German saboteurs were picked up on Long Island in World War Two. And one of them, a guy named Hans Haupt, was a U.S. citizen, from Chicago, Mr. President. The FBI arrested him as a German agent. And FDR called him an enemy combatant. He had no issue calling an American citizen arrested in this country an enemy combatant.”
Cabot had enough. She knew the rules of this game. If she agreed with his legal analysis, he gained a point. She had to take him down a notch. “Maybe FDR didn’t have a problem, but how did the courts treat it? What did the Supreme Court say? That’s what really counts,” she said.
Harrison was ready. He smiled at her, then turned to the President, confident enough to take a step closer to him.
“The Supreme Court let the case go forward. Ex parte Quirin the case was called. Its at 317 United States Reports page 1, if my memory serves me, Counselor. You ought to take a look at it. The Supreme Court gave its stamp of approval to everything the President did, calling an American citizen an enemy combatant,” Harrison said smugly.
“Quick justice, too. The court heard the case one day and decided it two days later. And then a week later, FDR hung him as a spy.
“Dead.”
The President nodded to the young man, then glared at Cabot.
“That’s the kind of legal advice I like to receive,” Quaid said.