The Shouting Wind
The majority of Jed Bartlet's students are making themselves well known on the state, national, and, in some cases, international levels, but most of those students were headed in that direction before they were taken under Bartlet's wing. Bruce Douglas would likely have become a noted economist without his study under Bartlet, but the association with the Nobel laureate no doubt boosted his reputation and helped him hone his theories.
But those students, making up the overwhelming majority of those that Bartlet took on, do not fall under the umbrella of the Legacy. They were and continue to be exceptional minds, but their ambitions, political or otherwise, were already more or less in place before the events that led them to study under the former President. While their academic careers were no doubt significantly affected by the Bartlet's tutelage, their lives were not as profoundly affected as the lives of those who would be inducted into the Legacy.
However, a small group of students did not harbour the ambitions that they now find themselves possessing. Or, at least, they never admitted to them before they began to study under Bartlet. And some of those students are perhaps the ones that you never would have guessed. For example, Sarah Sutherland, lead Washington Post White House correspondent, was headed to a job as the editor of a paper that devoted most of its space to the sports teams of the local high school.
There are three others. The four of us are the ones who found our lives forever altered by the small events that brought us to the notice of Jed Bartlet.
"What was that quote again?" Toby asked, peering over Sam's shoulder at the laptop. "I think that it got lost somewhere in the morass of unpunctuated rambling."
Sam sighed and turned to glare over his shoulder at Toby. "It's right here at the beginning. And there's punctuation. But beside that fact, I don't work for you any more and Mallory asked me to write the speech for her, not you."
"You might not work for me, but I wouldn't want Mallory passing out for lack of oxygen at her dad's memorial service because she can't stop to breathe for six paragraphs at a time," Toby answered. "Although how you can differentiate between paragraphs and not use punctuation is still a little beyond me."
"It's easy," Sam explained patiently. "You just hit enter and then this handy-dandy little tab button and then presto; it's done."
Toby shook his head and paced away, motioning for Sam to get back to work. "What was that quote again?"
Sam sighed again and scrolled to the top of the page. "The life of every man is a diary in which he intends to write one story and writes another."
"Who said that?" Toby asked, circling to read over Sam's shoulder again. "You've got to source it somewhere."
"James Barrie," Sam answered, pulling off his reading glasses to rub at the bridge of his nose. "And it's in there. The next sentence after the quote."
"Sentence?" Toby questioned. "You mean that big thing that stretches on for the next page and a half without so much as a comma?"
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"Do you want to do it yourself?"
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"What kind of a question is that?" Josh responded, surrendering defeat to the crumpled mess he had made of his tie and submitting to Donna's ministrations. "You know that you're the only one who can make these things lie flat."
"Then you have to stop fidgeting for ten seconds so that I can get it done," she told him forcibly, sitting him down on the bed so that she could repair the damage that he had caused. "What are you so keyed up about anyway?"
"Jack asked for some help wording something. I'm hoping that it's 895. I've been itching to get a look at the wording of that bill," Josh answered, nearly bouncing on the bed in his excitement. Sometimes it was hard to believe that he was any older than the twins.
"Calm down, Josh," Donna chided quietly. "There'll be time enough for politics after the service."
"Leo didn't want the world to come to an end while we mourned," Josh reminded her. "895 is a variation of the education package he tried to get through with Sam before he retired the last time," he added more softly. "There's no chance of it going through the Senate right now, but it has a chance in the House."
Donna's hands paused in their careful smoothing of his tie.
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"That's probably what Jack's been so anxious about since Leo died."
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"He's lost two of his heroes and now he's spending his nights drafting legislation that he thinks they would have been proud of?" Mark asked, fussing with the silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. "Something about this doesn't ring right."
Sarah stepped in to fix it for him, sighing. "I really don't know what's up with him, but he's been like that since before we even found out that Leo was sick. I thought it was just the stress of the campaign, but he started acting even weirder after that."
"But you don't deny that he spends half of his time trying to write bills that either Jed or Leo would have tried passing?" Mark asked surprisingly sharply.
"What do you mean by that?" Sarah asked, slipping back into reporter mode. She detected a story, even if she would never write it.
"It's just a question," Mark answered, backing off immediately. But Sarah's suspicions were already raised.
"They all fall within the same central-Democratic viewpoint," she parried. "It's only natural that some of the issues that they advocate coincide."
"Jack never fell centre-of-the-pack. He was always a little right of that. Alex was always a little left and you were right down the middle, when you finally got around to caring about those things," Mark countered. "There's got to be a reason that he's suddenly started advocating different politics."
"I suppose that you've got a theory," Sarah teased, fishing for information as she slipped the handkerchief back into his pocket.
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"If I did, you'd be the first to know."
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"What exactly do you mean by that, John Edward McCosham?" CJ questioned. "It's a simple yes or no answer. Have you found yourself a girlfriend yet?"
"No, ma'am," he sighed.
"You're lying," she accused him. "You only call me 'ma'am' when you're lying to me."
"I haven't exactly found what you'd call a girlfriend," Jack admitted.
CJ lowered her paper to look critically at Jack. "Don't tell me that you're accidentally sleeping with a call girl," she deadpanned, turning to look over her shoulder at Sam.
Sam, having just rounded the corner from the kitchen, looked at CJ in shock. "How did you even know I was here?"
"You are the only person I know who can manage to make dress shoes squeak even when they're not wet, Spanky," she told him, twisting back to look at Jack. "Now could one of you please explain how his statement is even logically possible?"
Jack sighed. "Tonight at Peel, nine-thirty. If you want to find out, don't be late."
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"Peel? What's a boy with a good Scottish name like McCosham doing going to an Irish pub?"
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"It's got the cheapest beer," Jack answered. "And something gives me the distinct impression that I'm going to be buying a lot of it tonight."
"You didn't tell me that you were buying beer," CJ whined, coming up from the bar with a pint in her hand. She pointed to her watch. "Nine-thirty on the dot. Now spill."
"Wait," Jack interrupted, "where's Toby?"
"Toby gets to be late, but you threaten to withhold information if I'm late?" CJ inquired sharply, eyebrows rising.
"Look, I figure that I'm going to need Toby's help. And if the two of us get into some long-winded argument about Daylight Savings Time, then I'm never going to get through this. Besides, Josh won't be here for another five minutes," Jack explained, motioning for CJ to slide into the circular booth next to Sam. "I told him we were meeting at nine."
"Boy," Toby said gruffly coming up behind CJ, "this had better be good because we've got a flight early tomorrow morning."
"What are you all doing here?" Josh asked, sauntering up. "I thought that I'd be early and have time to have a beer before you got here and started harping on me about my so-called sensitive system."
"Early?" Sam repeated in disbelief.
"Yeah, it's quarter-to."
"Sit down, shut up, and get a new watch," CJ directed, defending her beer from Josh's reaching hand. "Now spill, Jack."
"Is it 895?" Josh asked excitedly, forgetting about CJ's beer in his eagerness.
"No, but I might bring that by your office on Monday," Jack answered, gesturing for the waitress to bring him a pitcher. "I wanted some advice on a matter that's not entirely political."
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"Not entirely political?"
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"I can't even believe that you would have started the conversation like that!" CJ scolded, her voice rising.
"That was almost an hour ago, Ceej," Josh reminded her. "And four pitchers of beer ago."
"I still can't believe that he would have started this conversation of all things with that phrase," she maintained irately. "Even you weren't that bad Josh."
"I was in a completely different situation," he answered, sounding far too defensive for CJ's liking.
"You make it sound almost as though you wanted your marriage to be one of political convenience." She turned back to Jack, declaring, "Now I know why you didn't want to invite any of the Sisterhood to this little strategy session of yours."
"Alex is going to think anything is a political marriage proposal after what Bruno said, CJ," Josh responded, forgetting that CJ didn't know about Bruno's latest statement. "You know that."
"Bruno?" she repeated, confused. "Bruno Gianelli?"
Toby nodded his head solemnly, tapping the excess ashes off the end of his cigar. "One and the same."
"What does Bruno have anything to do with this?" she demanded. "And how come I've been kept out of the loop? There was a time when I was your first call."
"Bruno started doing some thinking," Josh started, explaining what he had managed to pry out of Chris Wick.
"I didn't know that he could think," CJ mumbled into her beer.
Josh ignored her and continued. "And he started recognizing some patterns. You don't get very many people switching from the UN to the House of Representatives within two years of getting their doctorates from Oxford in International Affairs."
"So he started asking questions," Jack picked up. "And he started adding things up."
"He was on the Hill consulting with some Georgia representative who barely squeaked by with a win when he happened to see her. Leo was escorting her back from lunch," Josh supplied.
"And he managed to get two and two to make four," CJ declared, all but slamming her glass down on the table. It was lucky that it was empty or Sam would have wound up wearing the contents.
Josh continued as though she hadn't interrupted. "He cornered her in her office and gave her a few choice pointers. I don't know most of them but the one that I did manage to find out was he told her flat out that a snowball had a better chance surviving in hell than she did of getting the Democratic nomination without a trophy husband."
"I'll strangle him with my bare hands," CJ growled, gripping her glass. "I'll do it. You know that I will."
"You see why I didn't ask the women?" Jack said quietly.