Converting the speech from Leo-isms to Bartlet-isms wasn't very difficult. It helped that she'd always liked the President, and it helped even more than he had a recognizable, characteristic way of digressing from one topic to another. Addy was proud of the finished product, even though it was a page longer than McGarry's version. She printed them both; Leo's for herself and Bartlet's for Leo, placing her copy deep in her largest drawer under a pile of pencils, pens, and seven extra staple packages that had been there when she took possession. Staples were a running joke in their work area, an item people teased each other about using as currency. Anyone snooping would be more interested in the staples than what was underneath.
She didn't expect to see Leo when delivering the folder, but he would give a speech she wrote for him today, so Addy dressed in her favorite work outfit. It was a teal skirt and blazer combination matched with a deep chocolate blouse. She always got compliments on the ensemble, and by Margaret's expression, that would bear out here at the White House, as well.
"Wow, it's too much to hope you got that outfit somewhere I could afford to buy my own version, huh?" Margaret said appreciatively. "Did you get the shirt dyed to match your hair?"
Addy laughed. "No, but wouldn't it be cool if that was a thing?"
"Oh, it probably is, but they wouldn't let anyone at our income level know," Margaret said sagely.
At lunch, Addy was so off-balance that she admitted to Donna that she used everyone's first names in her head but not out loud, which made Donna whip out a small notebook to jot that down.
As the day wore on the daytime workers thinned out, replaced by reporters. After Addy was given some packets to distribute with information about the various planned remarks at the dinner that evening, one of her desk-warren colleagues remarked that she'd seen some guy hovering near Addy's desk.
Her immediate thought was that it had been Ziegler, but that was nonsense, because he wasn't 'some guy,' he was the Communications Director. She didn't want to examine why her first thought was to think of him, so she took a few minutes to look at the paper she would be handing out to the reporters. As expected, it was a summary of the key points to be brought up by various speakers, along with a word for word copy of both planned speeches.
The reporters assigned to cover the leadership dinner started to pack up to leave, so she got up to ensure everyone got their copy. As she walked past some recognizable faces, Addy heard something that made her breath stop.
"Hey, Brad?" It was Danny Concannon. He had one arm stuffed into his overcoat, but had let the strap of his leather satchel fall from his shoulder. "Have you heard anything about the President maybe giving a speech tonight, instead of McGarry?"
The other man shook his head, but Concannon stood there frowning for a minute or two before pulling his arm out of his coat and hanging it back over the back of his chair. Addy started to inwardly panic, but hurried to complete her task. Concannon's instincts were razor sharp, and if he'd decided not to go to the speech, he had to have a solid hunch.
There was no way he was right, though. The more she thought about it, the easier it was to conclude that Concannon was trying to bait a story, either by sowing doubt about who would give the speech, or looking around to see who had a reaction to what he said. She'd have to keep a tight rein on her emotions and stay away from the press room for the rest of the night if she didn't want to accidentally confirm anything for him.
To that end, Addy made her way back to her desk as soon as she was finished, mind racing about what kind of story he might have his eye on. By now, everyone had heard at least one of Ziegler's rants about the Majority Leader's informal announcement, certain it was the start of a presidential bid. Challenging a sitting president for the nomination was controversial, something one had to test the waters for, and this was classic testing the waters. Since it was their waters which were being tested, the White House would be under strict scrutiny.
Addy groaned inwardly. Her current reaction was exactly what the reporter probably hoped for, something to preoccupy the 'guilty party's' mind with anxiety so they made mistakes he could catch and follow up on. It was all moot, too; Leo was going to give the first speech, which, while some of her best work to date, wouldn't even merit a mention by tomorrow's news. She was stressing out over nothing!
"Well, it's not nothing to me," she whispered to herself, running a smoothing hand over her hair before getting up. Addy made her way over to the bank of screens at the back of the press room. Even though there were cameras at the event, it wouldn't merit a showing on any of the networks unless something newsworthy happened.
Before she could finish that thought, the image of a familiar pundit intoning dour stats from the recent election gave way to a wide shot of a ballroom full of tables arrayed around a dais. Seconds later, the view tightened to a man standing at the podium in the center of that dais, gesturing as he spoke passionately to his audience.
It was President Bartlet.
"Turn it up," someone called out behind her. "I thought it was McGarry tonight?"
"It was," she said, somewhat breathlessly. She turned the old-style dial and stepped back into a growing crowd of staffers and reporters. An excited murmur traveled through the group, overlaid by Bartlet's confident delivery.
The President was giving her speech!
Addy twisted her hands in front of her, hopefully out of Concannon's view. She noticed the president was looking down more often than usual, but that made sense. His personalized version was turned in only a few hours ago, probably too late to be put on the teleprompter without more people being clued in to such a change. After watching for a while, she realized that the President always looked down when he got to a personalized moment. He was a gifted public speaker, so the transitions between Leo's speech on the teleprompter and his version on the podium were seamless. She, Leo, and Bartlet were probably the only ones who could predict when he would look down.
The speech had already been in progress when the feed cut in, so there were only a few minutes left. Leo had expressly told her not to mention his request to Ziegler, but the communications director would definitely be looking for her. If he showed up himself, that would be unusual enough for reporters to pick up on, but it would be equally fraught if she got a message to report to his office and anyone noticed. Addy melted back into the crowd, meaning to slip out and head straight for the communications director's office, but she did get to hear the applause at the end of the President's remarks.
It sounded unusually enthusiastic to her biased ears.
Addy was still grinning when, halfway through the warren of hallways, she saw him speed-walking in her direction. Ziegler stopped when he caught sight of her, jerking his head back the way he came. She nodded.
"Did you see the-" Lyman yelled from nearby.
"On it!" Ziegler interrupted. He actually stopped short to wait for her, gesturing for her to precede him into his office before he shut the door behind him. Addy almost laughed- this was still somewhat about Leo, and once again the door to Ziegler's office was closed.
She didn't want to waste his time. "I know what happened."
He was already barking out, "What happened?" so her quick response earned her a direct look, his head tipped to the side in pleased surprise. Addy launched into her explanation, hoping like hell she could be as articulate as the moment demanded.
"After I gave him the speech, Mr. McGarry asked me to rewrite it, customized to the President," she said, her hands clasped tightly together to stop them from trembling. Ziegler was standing too close for comfort, his intense brown eyes focused entirely on her. "He framed it as an exercise, as if he might have some future project for me but needed to know I would be skilled enough to complete it. He-"
"Why didn't you come to me with it?" he interrupted. He was speaking in a deceptively gentle tone, but she got the impression that the answer was important to her continued employment.
"Mr. McGarry told me to keep it out of your hair," Addy told him truthfully.
"I don't have that much hair!" Ziegler exploded, throwing one hand into the air as he crossed the room to hurl himself into his desk chair. He started searching through the papers on his desk.
She didn't know how to react. The White House Chief of Staff was indisputably senior to the Communications Director, but Addy had worked on enough campaigns to know there were undercurrent levels of courtesies to follow. She hadn't worked there long enough to learn all the unwritten rules yet, but it was obvious she had violated one. Addy searched for something to tell him that was valuable to make up for her misstep. One thing she knew for sure was that an unannounced Presidential speech was a big deal. The implications were worse if it had been planned but still unheralded, especially if someone could prove it.
"Sir, the altered speech wasn't on the teleprompter," she said.
That got Ziegler's attention. "Are you sure? How do you know?"
"He looked down at the pages on the podium-"
"That's standard. Backup for if the technology fails," he interrupted impatiently, all visible interest in what she had to say falling away. Ziegler grabbed a folder marked with the words 'Updated Congressional Staff, 2000' in large black letters and started flipping through the pages.
Addy wanted to protest that he stopped her before she was finished, that she wasn't an idiot, that he should give her more credit. Instead, she calmly repeated herself in hopes that Ziegler would listen, this time.
"He looked down only at the personalization points. They weren't glances for effect- I've watched the President's speeches enough to recognize the difference in cadence."
Ziegler let the folder close and leaned forward. "Go on."
"I think Leo-" Addy broke off, horrified. She rushed to apologize but Ziegler shook his head in a short, jerky motion. "I think Mr. McGarry took all of the personalized parts and cobbled them together into a single page for the podium. When President Bartlett got to one of those sections, he looked down to read his version." She risked a smile. "He's incredibly skilled as an orator. If I hadn't written the speech myself, I wouldn't have caught-"
"You're saying he looked like he was going off on a tangent?" Ziegler interrupted.
"His version is different. I wrote it like the speech itself was interrupting a story he was trying to tell. The Chief of Staff's version was framed as though the things in the speech reminded him of various anecdotes."
There was a perfunctory knock at the door before it swung open to admit Lyman.
"Toby, CJ's not calling back and I've got the press who didn't head over to the ballroom screaming about why they don't have a copy of the-"
He broke off and looked between Addy and Ziegler. Ziegler was looking at Addy with his eyes narrowed speculatively. She could almost see the wheels turning at breakneck speed inside his head.
"Toby?" Lyman repeated.
Ziegler sprang back to life. "Tell them it was extemporaneous. The parts that weren't on their version," he said, swiping a palm over his face and finishing up by scratching at his goatee. He stood up and smiled, straightening the folders on his desk while not looking up.
"Are you sure?" Lyman asked. He pointed over his shoulder. "They're not going to like it if we-"
"What do you think Leo's play was, Miss Blair?" Ziegler broke in, interrupting Lyman without even glancing his way.
Addy froze, momentarily wishing she could fob the question off on the giant book that was still resting on its shelf across the room. She straightened her shoulders and met his eyes, instead.
"I think it's a response to the press conference yesterday. Chief of Staff rescheduling for Chief of Staff rescheduling, but this one is much stronger. Instead of a sore throat for their guy-"
"It's our guy giving a pointed speech about leadership and working toward party goals," Lyman finished for her. "I like it. I'll tell CJ, I think she left to get here ahead of the rest of the press corps." He spun on his heel and jogged out. Addy watched him leave with wide eyes.
"But, I'm nobody! Don't the two of you need to-" The rest of the sentence got stuck in her throat.
"It was a good assessment," Ziegler said, shrugging past her toward the open door.
"But I'm wrong!" Addy protested. "He gave me the speech assignment over 48 hours ago!"
"He wanted it in his back pocket," he said, on his way through the doorway.
Her adrenaline high was starting to peak. If Ziegler was right, Leo McGarry had trusted her enough to let her in on the shrewd political move everyone in Washington was talking about. Suddenly, she frowned.
"What about the Minority Leader? If everyone's buzzing about the President's speech-"
"He's old friends with Leo," Ziegler interrupted, pausing to take some slips of paper from his assistant without looking at them. "The press were only really there to goad Bartlet into going off on a tangent after the event, anyway. Now they'll actually write about both speeches, instead." He started walking away.
"They weren't going to do that before?" Addy asked, following behind him.
"Do you remember reading about this event in anything but internal memos?"
"Well, no," she admitted. They walked in silence until she realized he was walking her back to her desk. Everything about the past few days made Addy feel like she was struggling not to drown in a much bigger pool than she'd ever swam in before. "I'm a peon," she said, a bit defensively.
"You're-" Ziegler frowned, scratching his neck. "Okay. Don't talk to anyone."
"Hey, Toby, nice speech," Danny Concannon said, leaning out of the doorway of the press bullpen.
"This is me not talking to anyone either, you'll notice," Ziegler said pointedly, still looking at her.
She nodded, and he stomped off toward CJ's office.
"He mad Sam's getting credit for his speech?" Danny asked her with an easy grin.
"I'm not talking to you," Addy said.
"Okay."
"Addy, will you hand these out?" Carol called out from across the room, holding up a stack of papers still slightly curled from the printer.
They were a rehashed list of objectives in bullet point form, with a note at the bottom that the exact text from the President's speech would be late. It was the kind of job she would have expected to be given before being embroiled in the whole speech intrigue with Ziegler and McGarry.
The only relevant part of the new page was the note about the speech, but that was the beauty of it- by the time someone wrote out a logical explanation, any outside-the-beltway reader would be bored stiff.
The problem is, Addy would have rather been the person writing the rephrase than the person handing them out, because of all the people in the room, she was the one with the most information about what had really happened. Hell, Danny Concannon had just seen her talking to senior staff. He'd been there when Ziegler had admonished her to stay quiet, which could prompt him to ask a few well-placed questions to discover she'd been in his office.
Addy didn't want to give him another bite of the 'Addy Blair is Up To Something' apple, but begging off from a mundane task would be another hint that something was going on. The crazy part was, right now she was more shaken by Toby Zeigler's faith in her assessment than the fact that the President of the United States had just delivered a speech she herself wrote, but neither of those things were something you could say to a White House reporter of Concannon's caliber.
He could tell something was up, though. Why had Zeigler walked her back? He had to know that would pin a target on her back, so that must have been the object. Sure enough, Concannon wandered over when she stepped into the press room to start distributing the 'please don't be mad, we'll get you the text of the President's speech ASAP' pages.
"You gonna hand those out silently, then?" he teased.
"Mmhmm."
"That's a shame, because I was hoping you'd help me out."
I bet you were, Addy thought to herself.
"See, I mentioned to Sam about McGarry's speech before he left, and he said he didn't write it," Danny said.
He was actually following her as she went desk to desk, leaving the page at each one. Everyone else was clustered around the tv sets at the back watching the rest of the longer speech. She'd given them all a copy, but they probably no longer trusted that the text was accurate.
"And just now, Toby didn't talk to me when I complimented him on the speech," Danny continued. Addy ignored him and counted up the copies she had left. She wondered if Carol printed out a set number, or if she ought to track down and hand off each page. "You have seven left, right?" Danny asked her.
She did, but she wasn't supposed to talk to anyone.
"Do you think there's a second room you don't know about?"
"Is there something you need?" Addy asked him.
"Yeah. I need one of those papers, and a copy of the President's speech, if you happen to have one for some reason."
"You have a copy of what was on the teleprompter, right?" Addy pointed out, diverting her phrasing at the very last minute from 'McGarry's version,' which would have naturally led the reporter to wonder if there existed two versions.
"Yep. Thing is, I think someone different wrote this one."
"Looked to me like the President was-" Addy clamped her lips together before she said anything else. She started for the door, planning to plead ignorance if Carol asked about the extra pages.
"Oh, yeah, Toby told you not to talk to anyone. Sorry," Danny said with a friendly wince. He kept talking as he followed her. "Anyway, I'm only curious because I think everyone's going to write about the same thing, and if I can write about that and a human interest story about a new speechwriter getting their big break-"
Addy turned around and gave him a look.
"That's the most friendly crock of crap I've ever heard. You have a gift, Mr. Concannon," she said.
Danny was focused on something behind her when he said, "Okay."
Addy wasn't surprised to see Ziegler there when she looked over her shoulder.
"I thought I said not to talk to anyone?"