A Woman First- First Woman Read online

  Copyright © 2019 Home Box Office, Inc.

  Text by Billy Kimball and David Mandel

  Jacket © 2019 Abrams

  Cover image courtesy of HBO

  This is a work of fiction. All of the individuals and characters in this book are fictitious. Any similarities that characters discussed in this book bear to individuals living or dead, are purely coincidental.

  Published in 2019 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931287

  ISBN: 978-1-4197-3353-6

  eISBN: 978-1-68335-411-6

  Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [email protected] or the address below.

  Abrams Press® is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

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  For Richard Splett,

  the only person who never let me down

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  FOREWORD

  A Brief History of the Meyer and Eaton Families in North America

  CHAPTER ONE

  Mornings on Horseback, Evenings at the Library—My Early Years

  CHAPTER TWO

  Confessions of a Popular Nerd Athlete—School Days . . . and Nights!

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Greatest Night of My Life—The 1984 Baltimore Junior League Debutante Cotillion

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Of Age I Come

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Adventures in the Private Sector

  CHAPTER SIX

  Climbing Capitol Hill—A Woman in the House . . . and the Senate

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A Heartbeat Away—The Vice Presidency

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Second in Command

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Meyer Era Is Inaugurated—A Blind Date with History

  CHAPTER TEN

  Crisis to Crisis—The Testing of a President

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  No “I” in “Team”—The Wind Beneath My Wings

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  On the Run Again—Campaigning in the “Real” America

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Making Even More History—The Tie Heard ’Round the World

  EPILOGUE

  A Woman in Full: Full Woman

  APPENDIX I: Legal Notice

  APPENDIX II: Tibet

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Welcome!

  I am so pleased that you have purchased this book. I hope that you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it!

  Before we get started, I’d like to issue a few caveats and establish some ground rules.

  As we know, all great literature was written quickly. There is simply no way that incredibly long books like War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, or Madame Bovary could have been written over one person’s lifetime (not to mention along with a lot of other books) were they not written fast. In writing this book, I have attempted to follow in that great tradition.

  While those justifiably well-regarded books are fiction, mine is something completely different: fact. But it is a special kind of fact that bears a bit of explanation. Because there is a trade-off between capturing the particular feel of a moment in time—especially when one is “on a roll”—and being scrupulously, tediously accurate, I have chosen to try to tell you the “larger truth” of what my impression was about what happened, when it happened, why it happened, where it happened, how it happened, and who it happened to. If there are any errors or omissions, I am sure that they are trivial, and I will endeavor to correct them for the paperback and international editions or else in another book.

  It would, of course, be deeply inappropriate for a president to write the official history of her (or his!) own presidency, due to the tendency of our human natures to ignore uncomfortable, inconvenient, and unflattering truths. So do not think for a moment that this book purports to be an official, critical biography. However, I have done my best to face the facts about myself, and I offer myself up to the reader with nothing hidden and as I really am, not as I might always wish to be.*

  Finally, in attempting to offer you “Selina unadorned,” I have included a certain amount of frank talk. I think you will find that though there is some very occasional coarse language, it is never used gratuitously and has been employed sparingly in the interest of reporting a sentiment accurately and when there were no other viable options. Nevertheless, since this book is intended for a family audience,† I have removed key vowels from the words in question so that adult readers may experience my account with w-rts and all, while children will be left with a more sanitized, age-appropriate impression along with, perhaps, some awkward questions for their parents and teachers.

  So, enjoy! I envy you the journey you are about to take through my life. I only wish I could do it all again myself and maybe change just one or two little things. See if you can guess what they are.

  * I think the work of future historians should also be taken with a grain of salt, since third parties aren’t necessarily any more reliable than the subjects of books themselves. A lot of people have a lot of agendas and are out to get other people. Never forget that.

  † Children are our future.

  PROLOGUE

  From the moment I entered the the White House, I felt like I was, quite literally, stepping into history. Not simply the history of the presidents who had gone before me, like Washington, Lincoln, etc., but the history that I was making myself and bringing with me and which I would leave behind for future generations.

  I remember the moment with crystal clarity. It was February 6, 2016, the birthday of singer Celine Dion and former Major League slugger Jose Canseco, as well as Liberation Day in the Philippines. The weather in the nation’s capital was cold and clear, with some high scattered clouds forming around sundown, and the daytime high temperature hovered around 17 degrees Fahrenheit (or about –10 degrees Celsius). Fortunately, the winds were mild, at 9 to 12 miles per hour, and from the northeast. The dew point was more or less irrelevant, since the relative humidity was an exceptionally low 6 percent.

  As I began to walk the short distance from the office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building that I had been using as vice president to the Oval Office in the world-famous “West Wing,” I reflected upon the much longer journey that had brought me to this historic moment. A journey that had begun some forty-seven years ago in rural suburban Maryland, where a little girl with the unusual and occasionally unfortunate name of Selina (it had proved just a little too close to “Smellina” for some second graders) was born and raised.

  For those of you who have never had the pleasure of visiting Eastern Maryland, Centreville is as all-American as apple pie on the Fourth of July. Our neighborhood was a true melting pot of religions (everything from Methodist to Episcopalian), races (it seemed like half the diplomatic corps lived within half a mile), and political beliefs, be they Democrat or Republican. We had bankers, we had doctors, we had businessmen, we had small businessmen, we had people who took care of horses—pretty much every profession under the sun was represented.

  Service was a way of life in our town—service to country and service t
o community. Every year, dozens of candidates would step up to run for seats on the zoning board, even though there were almost never any vacancies. Let me tell you something: If you want to see true democracy in action, just turn up on the second Tuesday of the month for a Centreville zoning board meeting. There’s so much shouting, you’ll think you’ve walked in on one of those plays where people curse at each other about real estate being put on by a theater for the deaf. But while I might wish people watched their language a bit, especially when seniors are present, I can’t fault their passion.

  At home and then at boarding school, I was taught that one simple rule, the so-called Golden Rule, would serve as a nearly infallible guide for how to be a good person and live a good life. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” it says.

  In order to apply this rule in daily life, one must learn another rule: “Decide what you want from others so that you may give it back to them in accordance with the Golden Rule.” And from the very first, I knew what I wanted from others: I wanted to be respected. I wanted to be admired. I wanted to be included. And in order to accomplish these things, I was willing to be hated and feared. “Let them hate you, as long as they fear you,” is a third famous rule. A bit less golden, perhaps, but much more realistic.

  The journey from little Centreville, a town so small that it was not served by any sort of mass transit (which, let’s face it, can bring in an undesirable “element”) to where I now found myself, partway between my old office and my new one, had not been easy. In fact, every hardship I had faced and overcome along the way was compounded by the simple fact that I was a woman. It’s often been pointed out that when a man is ambitious and assertive he’s considered strong, whereas when a woman displays those traits she’s called “pushy” or a “b-tch” or a “shr-w” or a “h-rpy” or a “n-g” or a “c-nt” or a “w-tch” or a “wh-re” or a “bl-est-cking” and so on.

  As I approached the elevators, I could not help but notice that, despite the efforts of some of the kind of pushy women that nobody, including me, likes, most of the portraits on the walls around me were of men. It was almost as if those dignitaries from days gone by—cabinet secretaries, ambassadors, senators, and, yes, even presidents—were staring at me with their beady eyes and bushy muttonchops and saying, “Go back! Go back, Selina Meyer! Go back to where you belong in the vice president’s office! A woman can’t be president! Go back!”

  (By the way, a lot of people think FDR was very open-minded and liberal, but his portrait was right there with the others, saying the exact same things.)

  It was all I could do not to turn back and retrace my steps across the quarter of the hallway from my office to the elevators that I had already walked. But then I thought of the brave women—white, black, and especially Native American—who had sacrificed so much in order for me to get this far down the hallway to the Oval Office. And, more importantly, I thought about how much I had sacrificed and how hard I had worked, how I had gotten here entirely on my own, how I had gotten here in spite of the many people in my life, including my family and staff, who through outright opposition, subtle undermining, or sheer incompetence had attempted to thwart me.

  So when I reached the elevator, I squared my shoulders, took a deep breath, and said, just audibly, “You’re on your own, Selina Meyer. Right where you’ve been all along. But you got this far. And that ain’t bad.”

  Ahead of me lay a short elevator ride, another pretty long hallway, then a short walk across the private street that runs between the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and the White House, then another hallway, and after that . . . the Oval Office itself.

  I was ready.

  FOREWORD

  A Brief History of the Meyer and Eaton Families in North America

  The story of my family is the story of America. Like her, we have known good times and bad. We have persevered, fortified with nothing more than our hopes and dreams, and seen those hopes and dreams fulfilled—but also sometimes dashed. We have known financial setbacks, we have fought wars, we have been forced to displace others from land that we ourselves wanted for the grazing of livestock. From humble beginnings, we have grown to greatness. And like America itself, we have always believed that our best times are yet to come.

  The patriarch of my father’s family, Deacon Josiah Archibald Eaton, arrived in America aboard the ship that followed the Mayflower. My longtime associate Mike McLintock likes to say that the ship was called the April Shower because, of course, “April showers bring May flowers,” although, now that he thinks about it, that joke would make more sense if Josiah’s ship had come first.

  The ship Josiah actually boarded in Portsmouth, England, on what was probably a rainy and very likely windy morning in the spring of 1623 was actually called the Good Fortune. It has proven to be my “good fortune” in writing this book that there is a long-established society of descendants of the passengers of the Good Fortune in this country who have published several exhaustive histories of the voyage and its passengers in order, perhaps, to make it clear that they were every bit as distinguished and accomplished as the passengers aboard the slightly earlier Mayflower, who have received the bulk of the publicity and about whom every schoolchild is still taught to this very day at the expense of other people who were just as good.

  To the Good Fortune Society, I am indebted for much of the history that follows, which I am using with their express permission (but with some of the words changed) as long as, in their words, I “actively promote the story of the courage and fortitude of the men, women, indentured servants, and slaves of the Good Fortune and redress the historic wrong of their having been so unjustly overlooked.”*

  Little is known for certain about Josiah Eaton before he boarded the Good Fortune. His origins have been variously described as “the town of Bakewell in the South of England,” “the hamlet of Musktide in Wales,” or “the small village of Gravesend in Cornwall.” His parentage is equally obscure; his father, Cornelius, is described in different source material as a blacksmith’s apprentice, a saddler’s boy, and something called a “bagwright,” which seems to be a now-obscure profession involving the sewing of different sorts of bags.†

  Although he is listed on the passenger manifest as a deacon, there is no extant record of Josiah Eaton having taken holy orders of any kind or receiving any religious training or having been ordained in any established church. In fact, the only contemporaneous mention of him in legal documents is a mere two imprisonments for debt, an extended bankruptcy trial, eleven prosecutions for fraud, and forty-one corporal punishments (ranging from whipping to confinement in the stocks) for poaching. In the face of this scant evidence, it is difficult to say what kind of man he was. It is possible that given the various forms of nonconformist religious fervor sweeping the Western World at the beginning of the seventeenth century, he merely conferred the title of deacon upon himself, feeling entirely justified by the new ways of religious thinking in doing so. That he was a man of deep faith cannot be doubted, for why else would he set out upon such a dangerous journey to what was, in those days, very much a New World?

  Josiah’s fellow passengers on the Good Fortune were, like their predecessors on the Mayflower, mainly ascetic pilgrims belonging to one of the many sects of that first flowering of early Protestantism, and their motivation for the arduous journey was a simple search for religious freedom. There were undoubtedly some adventurers and even some scoundrels among them, since the Merchant Adventurers investment group, who funded the voyage, would have foreseen the necessity for some practical and even ruthless men if the colony was to be sustained and to prosper.

  Josiah appears in Captain Heneage Mountjoy’s invaluable logs several times in ways that clearly indicate that he was, by the standards of the day, very much a free thinker. On July 7, 1623, for example, the captain notes that “the rogue Eaton has again caused mischiefe by malignantly setting fire to a rival churchman Horatio Underwood and berning [sic] off of his leg.
” Later that same month, on July 22, the log entry “the bosun confronted that devil Eaton after finding him again in the quarters of the unmarried ladyes having exposed his nether regions and instructed several of the women to place a kiss upon his man part” suggests that Josiah had already begun the search for a wife while still in transit.

  Finally, a violent dispute over whether the bread and wine were actually transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ at the Eucharist resulted in the death of one of Josiah’s fellow churchmen, the Reverend Phineas Forrest, and the disappearance of his slave, Cato, who was presumably lost overboard in the fray, as well as the forcible rape of three young women. As a consequence of this, Josiah reached what would become the Massachusetts Bay Colony on October 28, 1623, with his legs in chains and his reputation in tatters.

  And so it was to be a long climb up for Deacon Eaton!

  After the drama of that epic voyage, Josiah, his children, and grandchildren settled down to build new lives in early Colonial North America. In this they were aided by the cardinal virtues of Pilgrim industriousness and thrift as well as the comity and fellow-feeling that characterized these hearty bands of stalwart pioneers living in isolated settlements. Thanks also to a spirit of forgiveness as well as the bottomless need for able-bodied men, Josiah did not remain in chains long.

  It is difficult to overestimate the hardships of this time. The six generations of my family born prior to the Revolutionary War bore a total of 2,418 offspring, with each of the women giving birth to an average of ten children before dying and being replaced by a second, younger wife, who would give birth to an average of ten children, and so on and so forth. Of these 2,418 infants, 616 died before their first year and an additional 702 did not live to see ten years. After the age of ten, the mortality rates became more favorable without ever becoming actually favorable. At least 491 died in the epidemics of unexplained fevers that periodically swept the Colonies along with the constant chronic plagues of dysentery, cholera, bacterial infections of all types, and actual plague. Poor nutrition and a lack of trained physicians, not to mention general pre-Enlightenment ignorance, turned even the most minor affliction into a virtual death sentence. A hardnosed doctrinal view that death and disease were sent by God to punish sinners made caring for ill family members almost sacrilegious among certain overly zealous branches of the Eaton family.