The co-pilot delivered the drinks and disappeared into the cockpit. The plane tore down the runway and lifted into the sky moments later.
Through wispy clouds Dorn picked out the bright spike of the Washington Monument, the pale lunar glow of the Capitol, the Rayburn office building, the White House.
He got a clear view of Dulles and, beyond that, snaking red arteries of tail lights—the cars like corpuscles being pumped out from the city’s heart each evening before being sucked back to its chambers beginning before dawn. A half moon hovered over the right wing, illuminating the folds of the Blue Ridge.
He identified Interstate 66 and Interstate 270. West Virginians could thank two of his colleagues for them—United States senators who understood that the highways would serve as neural pathways connecting their mountainous, nearly impassable state to the outside world. One had grown northwest toward Fairmont, Morgantown and Wheeling (where one of the senators lived) and the other had branched west and south toward Beckley and Charleston and Huntington (where the other senator lived), not coincidentally passing White Sulphur Springs and the Greenbrier resort, home of the government’s Cold War emergency capital. Those highways, Dorn devoutly believed, represented true public service, the kind of service he would deliver when he succeeded one of the senators, who was retiring.
The roads, he had to acknowledge, had come at a price. They had slashed through the mountains and bled the state of people—whole communities which seeped from the hollows and flowed out the hillbilly highways to the factories and cubicles in far-away cities. Over the past few decades, the population of the state had actually declined. But the highways also nourished new development—vacation homes, wood chip mills and ski resorts crucial to further growth. And, it could be argued, the roads brought an infusion of federal spending that spawned many new government jobs for the state. And incumbent congressmen could now drive home from Washington in hours instead of days, facilitating their repeated reelection and, therefore, their seniority on important committees. He was an example.
Dorn was grateful he no longer had to make the drive very often. He was well into in his eighth term in the U.S. House and he had done it plenty of times in the early years. But as easy as the interstates made things, why drive when courtesy of some corporation or lobbying group, he could be at Chuck Yeager Airport in Charleston two hours after leaving his House office building and at his retreat on the river an hour after that?
Or, if traffic was particularly light, Dorn reflected as he sat on his front porch watching the river the next morning, in forty-five minutes.
He called his retreat Possum Island.
The actual Possum Island was a spit of land that broke the surface of the Ohio River about fifty miles south of Winston. Dorn had spent his favorite times there as a boy, poling a log and plywood raft across a shallow channel that separated the island from the West Virginia side, catching crawfish that hid in the detritus that collected on the downstream shore, climbing the tall beech trees that grew in the island’s center, watching the endless procession of river traffic—barges mostly, heaped with symmetrical hills of coal. Much of what he knew about the river came from observing the island—how it could be a mile long and a quarter mile wide with flat muddy banks extending even further into the riverbed in the fall after a dry summer; how it could shrink to the size of a football field in the late spring when the melting snow in the mountains and the ice in the Monongahela and Alleghany tributaries flooded the river basin; how, inevitably, the island grew longer every year—no matter what the season—as the grains of rich topsoil eroded from upstream farms caught and collected on the island’s north end.
He had adopted the Possum Island name for his splendid compound because the location overlooked the island proper and because of what the retreat recalled for him. It was his refuge and his touchstone to real life, life outside the Beltway, a place to think.
It seemed like the perfect place to spend a few days working out the details of his campaign’s first television commercials—commercials that would immediately thrust him into the position of front-runner. Unfortunately, there was an array of problems. Not surprisingly, Richey was in the middle of them.
Conceptually, things were perfect. The plant itself, everyone had agreed, was exactly the right backdrop, a strong visual connection to Dorn’s major campaign theme of economic liberty. That, after all, was where it had all started. As a young representative, Dorn had called in some of the few favors he was owed and arranged passage of a local bill that allowed Recovery Metals to shortcut several onerous and unnecessary environmental regulations and build a facility near Winston. Jobs had been created. The facility and the town of Winston had prospered. Along with recruiting a three hundred-job defense facility for another county in his district, the legislation was one of Dorn’s proudest achievements as a public servant.
Soon, lawyers discovered Dorn’s bill permitted a number of facilities in every state to take a self-policing approach to many regulations. Savings on environmental control equipment and improved profits soon followed. Right behind them were political contributions, access to corporate jets, and luxurious vacations for Representative and Mrs. Dorn. Encouraged, he had begun to give speeches on the topics of individual and economic liberty—ideas more powerful than any fanatical religious or totalitarian movements, he liked to remind his audiences.
His timing had been good. The public, fed up with an over-governed, politically correct economy, had responded to his demands for lower corporate taxes and a rollback in government. And too much government was a problem worldwide. Others had taken up the call. The Liberty Agenda, as the movement he championed had become known, was gaining international traction. The plant was the perfect symbol of all that.
Not only that, his aides had learned that by happy circumstance the next week represented the tenth anniversary of the plant’s groundbreaking. Given that he was responsible for its existence and that it was about to be the lynchpin of his effort to achieve higher office, Dorn did not find it at all surprising when his consultants reported that the good folks at the plant had been happy to integrate their celebration with the congressman’s effort—quickly agreeing to erect a stage in front of the facility’s least unattractive side and to shut the entire operation for an hour the following Monday so every worker on the day shift could leave to attend as happy, dedicated workers, the whole tableau a picture of progress.
The news media had already risen to the bait. CNN was dangling the possibility of live coverage in exchange for an exclusive interview with the congressman following the event.
But, as always, there was the unexpected. Folding chairs, flags, red, white and blue bunting—even long tables to display his campaign literature—all had been reserved for the upcoming River Days celebration. Replacements had to be trucked in from Charleston and Cincinnati.
While ultimately accommodating, management had been unusually greedy during discussions about how long and how prominently the company logo would be displayed during the campaign commercial. Vince Bludhorn, the plant attorney, had insisted on at least one-eighth of the screen for a minimum total of six seconds during the thirty-second spot. The campaign’s ad agency, which had scrambled a top-flight production crew on short notice, agreed in principle but insisted on final creative control. Dorn had been forced to end the discussion in a way that satisfied no one—telling the agency that he, not the agency, had creative control and telling the folks at the plant, as he had learned to do so artfully on the Hill, that he was personally committed to their point of view and that he would do his very best but could make no promises.
Now, the problem was that there weren’t enough blacks employed at the plant, at least on the day shift, to reflect the new ideal of a racially diverse America. Women were adequately represented and so were Hispanics. But not the blacks.
Most of his aides, he believed, were competent. Manipulative, backstabbing, self-promoting,