An Excerpt from The President’s Counselor
Un Sueño
Monsignor Paul Procella, a priest from a small parish in Texas that happens to be named after a flame-haired harlot, is ambling down the carpeted, hushed hallways of the most important floor in the U.S. Department of Justice. It is the first Thursday in February 2005. He is on a private tour of one of the most heavily guarded buildings in America, because he knows someone who knows someone. The priest, a beloved fixture at his tight-knit church in a city named Humble, has come to Washington in the dead of winter because the son of one of his parishioners is being sworn into high office.
There is a secretary sitting at a desk in one hallway.
A sign on the desk reads “Office of the Attorney General.”
Never shy, the priest approaches the secretary.
“Is it okay if we just walk around?”
She raises her head: “Oh yeah. It’s open today for anyone who wants to.” So the priest, who presides over Saint Mary Magdalene’s Church, strides deeper into the inner sanctum of America’s Justice Department, the headquarters for the nation’s battles against terrorism and crime. Ahead there is a large conference room area—burnished, beautiful—and the priest decides to steer inside. The room is anchored by a large table with chairs around it. The room, and the way it is appointed, suggests a clear heaviness, an intense gravity. This is where the aching nightmares of 9/11, the bloody war on terrorism, and the toxic CIA leaks would be analyzed, pondered, debated.
And then Monsignor Procella suddenly notices that there is someone in the room. There is a small, frail, seventy-two-year-old lady sitting by herself in a chair. She is not at the big table. She is off to one side as if she wouldn’t deign to take her place at the center of the room. She is quietly staring and is very much alone—the smallest figure in the U.S. Department of Justice’s conference room. That day, all over Washington and on the editorial pages around the country, the elected, the appointed, and the self- anointed seers of politics and power are immersed in their versions of what they consider to be the great issues. And that day the white-hot flashpoint—The One Great Issue of The Day—concerns the old woman’s son. He is The Issue.
Not far from where she is sitting, her first son is being accused of torturing people with the power of his pen—but also being lauded for his loyalty, his clear thinking. He is being labeled a traitor to his culture—but also as an inspiring role model for young people, for immigrants, in pursuit of the American Dream. He is being vilified for embodying the most hideous tendencies of the United States—and he is being praised for embodying this country’s unparalleled, boundless opportunities. The priest looks down at the unlikely woman occupying the Department of Justice room. The emptiness and silence are even more dramatic when weighed against the fiery events and statements searing her son up and down the corridors of power in Washington.
“Maria,” gently asks the priest, “what are you doing?”
The old lady, who had once been a migrant worker in Texas, who had once stooped over in hot, dusty fields and picked cotton, who had never gone beyond a sixth- grade education, realizes she is not alone. The priest and the mother of the new attorney general of the United States look at each other. It is 1,416 miles from Maria Gonzales’s $35,600 wooden home on narrow Roberta Lane in Humble, Texas. And not much has changed at the house since she and her late husband helped to build it in 1958. The neighborhood still has no sidewalks, no curbs. Every front yard still has a weed-riddled ditch to carry away the scummy mosquito-infested sludge that always accumulates in that dank part of southeast Texas. Directly across the street from her home, one of the other old wooden houses in the neighborhood has literally fallen down—it looks as if it just sighed one day, gave up, and simply collapsed into a Gordian knot of beat- up boards, rusted wires, and jagged glass.
“Well, I just got tired of walking and so I just sat down,” the old lady finally says to the priest. She was glad her parish priest had also come to Washington to see her son sworn in. “I’m going to sit in here and rest a while.”
The priest marveled at her. He once thought he knew pretty much all that there was to know about the Gonzales family and their world on Roberta Lane. The widow Maria is beyond faithful at Santa María Magdalena. She is at the church three, sometimes four, times a week. She is omnipresent inside the ever-growing Mexican-American congregation: there are thirty-five hundred families in the church; about a thousand of them are Hispanic; about three hundred of those families speak mostly Spanish, and sometimes Maria is the only one they talk to. She is one of those short, calm, older Mexican- American women who seem to always, well, to always just be there. Maria speaks only when spoken to. She is never openly questioning—never. Her loyalty is never articulated—it is just so damned evident.
“She’s involved in various groups, but she’s not a leader of any of them. She would not do that. Everything she does is in a support role,” the priest tells people.
Just a few weeks earlier, the priest had been leafing through some magazines at his church and he came across the news that President George W. Bush had nominated someone named Alberto Gonzales to be the next attorney general. He read deeper into the story. There was mention of the fact that Gonzales had grown up in a place called Humble and that his mother still lived there in the same wooden house that he had grown up in. The president of the United States had mentioned Humble, Texas—and he had told the world where Maria lived, back in that same small two-bedroom house.
The priest quickly called the Rosewood Funeral Home in Humble. He knew that’s where Maria had worked for decades as a housekeeper. It’s where Procella had gone to pray for so many of his deceased parishioners over the years. The funeral home owner picked up the call from the priest:
“Do you know we have a new attorney general named Alberto Gonzales?” asked the priest.
“Yeah, isn’t that nice?” replied the funeral home owner.
“Did you know that is Maria’s son?” said the priest. He had assumed the funeral home owner would know about it—the funeral home owner’s brother had been a U.S. congressman for many years.
“No, she hasn’t said anything about it,” answered the surprised funeral home owner.
The priest hung up and called Maria at her home. She answered the phone.
“Maria, Alberto is named attorney general,” the priest began.
“Yes,” Maria replied. “He’s a very good boy.”
She was surprised that when she traveled to Washington, Alberto was there to meet her at the airport. She wasn’t expecting that. When he was younger, Alberto did the interpreting for his mother and father when they would have to come visit him at high school. Alberto was the only one in the family to ever move away. He was the only one of Maria’s eight children to go to college. Of course, he had stopped speaking much Spanish a long time ago. Both of his wives were Norte Americanos—white women. He had a mustache for a while when he came to Washington, but some people said the mustache made him seem very Mexican. Now it is gone. In Texas, he had been Catholic, of course—the family had been wedded to the Catholic Church, to Santa María Magdalena. But now he worshipped at a big “evangelical” Episcopal church in Virginia. He once talked about his summers picking cotton as a small boy, and he had lived in that tiny white Texas house where Maria still lives—he lived there with nine other members of his family crammed into two bedrooms, without hot water and without a telephone. He refused to let his friends visit because he was embarrassed. But now he had just sold his sprawling home in Virginia for $700,000. He didn’t bother applying to college when he was leaving high school. But he wound up graduating from Harvard Law School. He used to beg rich people to buy Cokes from him when he was a kid. But now he plays golf with Ben Crenshaw and the president of the United States.
When Maria saw Alberto standing and waiting for her at the airport, she could also see that there were four somber but wary men hovering nearby in their pressed, neat suits. She had seen this before and she did not question it: “Alberto has to have escorts. Alberto has to have someone drive him,” Maria tells people. Her son has spent exactly one decade—his entire public life—affixed to, adopted by, the Bush Dynasty. Now her
Alberto has bodyguards.
For ten years he has been George W. Bush’s abogado—his lawyer, his counselor. And she knows that his enemies deride him as being no different than Tom Hagen, the Robert Duvall character in The Godfather—the low-key but wickedly efficient and unquestioning consigliere sent on his awful missions for the Bushes, the WASP Corleones. He is, they even say, more than the President’s Counselor—he is the enabler for crimes against humanity, for war crimes, for crimes against the very things America stands for and was founded upon.
At the White House, his best friend, Presidente Bush, will tell anyone that Maria’s son is the ultimate manifestation of the Bush family’s most treasured sobriquet—he is a good man. When either the elder George Bush or the younger George Bush wants to admit someone into their fold, when they finally determine that someone is deemed to be an unflinching loyalist—someone worthy of steering the family’s ambitions—that person is literally described as “a good man.” George W. Bush simply says that Alberto Gonzales is a good man.
But deep inside the dizzying orbits of power and hubris, Gonzales has also somehow remained as hidden as his mother inside his conference room. For most of the twenty-first century, he has been the most politically important Hispanic in America—and yet he has managed to remain, as even his admirers say, an “enigma.” He is the nation’s most senior law enforcement officer. And the family priest thinks sometimes Maria’s son is more like his mother than anyone realizes. “I see her at the funeral home.
She usually opens up in the morning. She’s a caretaker, so she cleans, and you would think that is a menial job, really, but that is her work. She’s very, very pleased with that and very, very loyal. She’s low-key. You would never pick her out of a crowd. She is a person who certainly does not draw attention to herself.
“She’s not going to be the person that tries to take over a group or anything of that nature. But . . . she will do anything she can to help others.”
Of course, her son has done almost anything he has been asked to do by the family he owes his public career to. It is something both his critics and his allies can agree on. He is unquestioningly loyal to the Bush Dynasty. There is a reason a large picture of the elder George Bush and the younger Bush, walking together, was hanging on a wall inside Gonzales’s office at the White House.
His critics, fierce and united in their hatred of him, say the problem is that, yes, he will do anything for the Bushes: He will attack the Clinton White House, even though the Clintons have left. He will quickly sign off on the paperwork that allows the execution of dozens of prisoners in Texas. He will construct the legal template allowing a nation to go to war . . . a template that will ultimately reveal the fact that a handful of weak-willed American soldiers exult in torture and humiliation. He will offer his written opinion that some of the internationally recognized moral codes for how captured enemy combatants should be treated are “obsolete” and “quaint”—and human rights proponents around the world would label him a torturer. He will wield the pen and the legal muscle that will protect and shield the men who help run the Bush White House—Senior Adviser Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney. He will help write the controversial Patriot Act and endorse a domestic spying program that some say violates the essential civil liberties that define America. And on an acutely narrow and coldly pragmatic level, Maria’s son will have more to do with the election of George W. Bush to the presidency than many of the others affiliated with his so-called Iron Triangle of advisers: Her son will protect George W. Bush from having to reveal his criminal record—and, thus, he will ensure Bush’s ascent to the Oval Office.
His allies, his friends such as the president, also say he will do anything for the Bush family and America: He will be the steadfast lawyer for the White House, someone whose allegiances are never driven by naked ambition. He will behave in the same way that George Bush once characterized Laura Bush—he will be the “perfect” political partner, someone who will never steal the limelight or speak out of turn. He will do the taxing work, the soul-searching work, of finding the righteous legal and moral certitude to follow the letter of the law and put human beings to death in Texas. He will fight the war on terror by monitoring and tracking possible enemies—in any way possible. Yes, he will shield Cheney and Rove—but he will shield them from blatantly partisan inquiries lodged by vindictive, bitter Democrats. And yes, in the muddled and paranoid post-9/11 world, he will offer the president and his country some fresh, sage advice on how to combat the new, shadowy terrorism. He will even set in motion a wholesale conservative revolution by scouring the country for qualified legal minds, for men and women who will strictly interpret the words of the founding fathers, men and women who he will tell the president of the United States to appoint to the highest courts in the land.
One thing is clear to his enemies and his supporters: Maria’s son has already taken his chair alongside the other men and women in the pantheon of the Bush Dynasty, the men and women who have put their lives in service to the family and kept it entrenched in the highest offices in America for sixty years straight.
Back in the Department of Justice room, Maria is still sitting and visiting with her parish priest. She had told the priest something earlier. It was something she dreaded, feared, for her boy. She knows her son has many enemies, that things are different than they were for him on Roberta Lane: “I know they are going to grill him,” Maria Gonzales confessed to the priest. “I hate to see him go through that.”
They were calling him the architect of torture, someone who had made an easy leap from endorsing the execution of dozens of people in Texas to affirming America’s right to gather and extract information from both its enemy prisoners and its citizens in any way possible. Too, there were the supporters, the ones who were saying he would make grand American history and become the first Hispanic to be named to the U.S. Supreme Court. Sometimes it all seems as evanescent as a dream, or like something that had happened so quickly it could never be measured. In Humble, his angry, drunken father and his sweet, young brother died in separate but horrible ways. Their lives were in many ways wasted, each died with ponderous questions, and now they were buried side by side at the funeral home and cemetery where Maria still reports to work every morning to clean. Surrounded by death, she is literally with her deceased husband and son every day. Sometimes she checks on their grave markers, rearranging the flowers and tidying their simple stones.
Only one of her eight children, Alberto, ever went to college. Three never even graduated high school. Maria watched Alberto, never saying a thing, as he began to spin away from the family. No one ever left Humble and what it meant, implied, except Alberto. It was always unspoken but really not unexpected that it would somehow be Alberto. He moved with a preternatural compactness, a physical way that seemed to suggest he was always processing and weighing and measuring. It was beyond methodical, it was painstaking. And it was in solid contrast to her husband, his father, and the way that man drank and drank as if it would soften the hard edge of all the limitations he must have felt. It was como un sueño, like a dream, and now she was sitting in the big, heavily guarded Department of Justice building her son had come to work in. It was cold in Washington. The wind was howling outside. The room seemed immune not just to the elements but to everything out there.
Her son once got up in front of a large crowd, including his mother and all the family members he had left far behind, and said this: “Like my parents before me, all of my hopes and dreams are in my children.” Her son liked the way that sounded, and her son liked that quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great American transcendentalist who preached self reliance’s superiority over lockstep authority: “What lies behind us, and what lies before us, are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
And when Maria came to see him in Washington, she would get up at dawn, like she had done for his hungover, ex—migrant worker father over and over again for decades. Back then, back when they spoke only Spanish to each other, Maria would be there at daybreak stuffing a paper bag with tortillas and beans so that her husband could eat something with his grime-covered hands during a break at a miserable construction site.
Now her first son would come down to the kitchen in the big house and his mother would be there in the kitchen already. She’d be up at dawn for her son, like she had been for her husband back in Humble. He knew his mother was serving him, like she had served his father. “Only I wasn’t going to a construction site. I was reporting to the White House to advise the president of the United States.”
Now in Washington with her Humble parish priest looking on, the mother gathers herself to go meet her son, the abogado.
Together, she and her son will go see his client—el presidente de los Estados Unidos.
My Library
