January 2004
I’m not sleeping. I mean I could fall asleep right now, but I’m not. How is it possible to have
both a horrible day and a wonderful day all in the same 24 hour period?
I should backtrack. Josh gave me this assignment. Normally I love it when he gives me special
assignments. It shows me that he trusts me and lets me expand from my usual day to day
business. This assignment, though, was different. It involved Presidential pardons and I
should have run screaming from the room the moment Josh told me he was dropping in on
my desk; literally.
Looking back, I think the problem was that I thought there would be clear black and white
lines in this process. The guilty, scumbag, drug dealers could stay and rot in prison, while the
‘one bad mistake but otherwise flawless record’ people would be set free and I was in a
position to make that happen. Finally, the Government would be doing something productive,
and Josh put me in charge of the whole thing; including meeting with the pardon attorney.
Boy was I wrong. These were almost all ‘1 bad mistake’ people who got screwed by the
mandatory minimums. I sifted through every piece of paper, every picture in each file until I
had them all memorized. Each one was worthy of a pardon and I was convinced that each
one would make better decisions going forward if given the chance.
Then Josh came back to tell me I had to cull the list down further and I almost lost it! How
could I promote the pardon of one of these people and turn down three others who were in
the same boat? I had a little bit of a nutty then. I told Josh Lyman that if there was more
culling to do someone else would have to do it because these weren’t case files to me
anymore, they were people; somebody’s child, wife, son, parent.
To add to my distress, one of the parents of a pardon candidate came to the White House to
speak on her son’s behalf. Don’t ask me how it happened. The Mother had a different last
name and her new husband was a huge contributor, etc, etc. Anyway, I took the meeting and
as a result ended up taking her personal plea to the President. Have you ever had someone
count on you to help save someone else’s life? It’s a very uncomfortable burden, but I couldn’
t say no to this grieving mother. I listened as she poured her heart out to me about her son
and his circumstances. Then Josh brought me to the Oval to relate that information to the
President.
It was the first time I that I felt truly scared while I was in the Oval office. There’s always, at
least for me, a little nervousness when you enter the Oval. You start thinking about who has
stood in this room and made historic decisions and it just gets to you. But this time I wasn’t
nervous about being in the room or about speaking to the President; that was all secondary. I
was scared to death I wouldn’t be able to express what that mother wanted me to so I could
help save her son’s life. I delivered her plea to the President as calmly as I could and didn’t
break down into tears.
Josh didn’t say anything more to me about it. That’s how I knew that the one pardon I had
personally pled for was not going to happen. I’m not naïve. Maybe I was at the beginning of
this job, but I’ve seen, heard, and done too much now to be naïve anymore. I realize that
decisions in the Oval office are hardly ever right and wrong, black and white. There was, I’m
sure, a lot of discussion and thought that went into the decision not to grant that pardon. I
was also slightly appeased by the fact that all the other pardon recommendations were going
through; slightly appeased. But that one that wasn’t granted plagued me.
The night the President gave his State of the Union speech I was assigned the job of bringing
all the pardoned individuals into the White House so they could meet and thank the
President. I was very happy about meeting all the people I felt I’d come to know through their
pardon applications. Then I got the phone call. It was from the one family that had been
denied this happy reunion tonight. I was told that because the pardon didn’t come through,
the young man had lost all hope and killed himself. After relaying the news to the senior staff,
I couldn’t hold it in anymore and ran outside.
I stood outside the White House gate sobbing in the cold until I felt two familiar arms wrap
around me; Josh. Once again, Josh had come to my rescue. He held me while I cried,
soothed me with his words, and calmed me enough that I could go back in and do my job. I
never would have been able to accomplish that without him.
It wasn’t until later in the evening that I found out that wasn’t all he’d done for me. Dr. Bartlet
‘let it slip’ (like I couldn’t see through that! The woman never does anything by accident) that
the only reason my original pardon list hadn’t been culled any further was because Josh had
gone to bat for each and every one of them with the President. My heart nearly burst.
We sat there on the steps together and when I said I had a headache, he motioned for me to
sit on the step in front of him and he massaged my head and neck. It felt incredible; soothing
and arousing all at the same time. I couldn’t help the quiet moans that escaped my lips while
he moved his hands over me. I also couldn’t help wishing his hands would wander elsewhere,
so before my fantasies went too far afield, I turned around and gave him an impulsive hug.
Somehow this melded into me laying my head on his chest in complete relaxation.
I’m not asleep, but Josh seems to think I am. I’m comfortable with that small deception…at
least for now.