minutes. Time is of the essence on this one. It’s going to be a long night. The next time you sleep we might be on our way to Russia.”
CHAPTER 58
Washington, D.C.
REGINALD PYNE RELISHED HIS role as gatekeeper to the president. One could say that the president of the United States was the world’s most powerful figure but, in Pyne’s mind, the man who controlled access to the president held the real power. A soldier for most of his life, President Grimes was acutely susceptible to Pyne’s influence and manipulation, not having been raised in the literal and figurative swamp that was Washington, D.C.
Roger Grimes had spent a career as an army officer and was selected as vice president to provide ideological balance to a ticket that would have otherwise leaned too far left for many of the nation’s crucial swing states. With a decorated hero of the War on Terror by his side, the previous president cruised to an Electoral College victory.
After Grimes was sworn in as vice president, he found that he was soon relegated to the background, rarely meeting with the president or his senior staff. It became clear that he had been mere arm candy during the campaign and that the close advisory role that had been promised to the American people had been a façade. Grimes handled it like a professional and took it upon himself to focus on veterans’ issues, appointing a commission to assess the VA health care system and then overseeing the implementation of its recommendations.
Pyne, a longtime Washington insider and former lobbyist, helped guide then–vice president Grimes through the morass of the federal government as he tried, mostly in vain, to advance the causes of those who had served their nation in uniform. The VP learned to trust Pyne’s political judgment and took his advice as he would that of an executive officer in the Army. For his part, Pyne played the loyal soldier, biding his time for an opportunity to gain even greater influence. He couldn’t care less about the VA. Those soldiers were stupid enough to volunteer knowing the risks. They were lucky to get free medical care for life. So what if they had to stand in line for a few hours?
Pyne found that the techniques from a book he’d read at Harvard on how to manipulate women into bed worked equally as well outside the realm of sexual coercion. Its methods helped him to influence and control both male and female politicians on policy issues. Sometimes he couldn’t believe how easy it was.
He’d started his professional lobbying career during a time when the tobacco industry was under attack. He’d learned that the old ways of throwing money at politicians and then threatening to support their opponents in the next election if they didn’t stay on board didn’t work the way they had in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. The opposition had organized and adapted. One had to play the game differently.
There was no law against stupidity. If these idiots wanted to smoke and make the tobacco industry even more profitable, who was the government to stop them? Volenti non fit injuria. To a willing person, no injury is done. Besides, the U.S. government needed those tax dollars. How else were they to pay for a cradle-to-grave welfare state?
He’d successfully delayed a 2006 court order mandating that tobacco companies advertise the ill effects of smoking. The government was forcing private companies of a legally available product to spend their hard-earned profits to undermine their own business. He had tied them up for ten years in appeal after appeal. That the product he defended killed more than 480,000 of his fellow citizens annually didn’t bother Pyne in the least. It was a free country. And imagine the health care costs if those half a million people a year lived. The country would have to care for them for even longer. One of his main takeaways from a philosophy class while in college in Boston were the words of French biologist Jean Rostand: Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.
Pyne thought about how lucky they were that the media was so focused on the so-called opioid epidemic. With multiple states’ attorney generals and their plaintiff lawyers distracted by the mere seventy thousand opioid deaths a year, tobacco could recover from the hits they’d taken in the nineties. That his company was killing Americans