Spinning Dixie

Chapter One April 2005, Washington, D.C. Omnia vestigia retrorsum (All footsteps turn back upon themselves) People ask me how a boy who was raised by a mobster grew up to become press secretary to the president of the United States. The answer is, when reporters started hammering me with questions about my pedigree, I did something sly that caught the Washington press corps off guard: I admitted everything. the times: Jonah, is it true that upon the death of your grandfather, Mickey Price, you attended a Mafia summit? me: Who do you think called the meeting? follow-up: Would you say your relationship with Mr. Price was of the conventional see-Grandpop-on-Sunday kind? me: It was the opposite of conventional. He and my grandmother virtually raised me after my parents died. They were my best friends. global wire service: Mr. Eastman, it's been rumored that you arranged for the murder of a mob figure who was said to have crossed you? me: Absolutely not. I handled it personally. As Henry Kissinger once said (but did not abide), "What will come out eventually must come out immediately." People were stunned by my answers. Sure, I was using candor as a spin device, but Washington found it "refreshing." Washington likes to think it finds candor refreshing, but honesty in this town is a novelty mint, not sustenance. Nevertheless, the same frankness and irreverence that had been the "Jonah Eastman brand" for the last two years of the Truitt administration had finally become my undoing. I was fired this morning. Before I took my job as the president's spokesman, I had been a Republican pollster. I specialized in handling difficult elections, ones that needed an unconventional boost. And, yes, my grandfather was the late Moses "Mickey" Price, the Atlantic City gangster known as "the Wizard of Odds." Despite its Nixonian whiff, let me be perfectly clear about something: I am not a gangster. My Edie wouldn't have married a gangster, but she wouldn't have married a choirboy either. She had choices and, at some level, knew what she was doing. I couldn't have gotten to the White House being a cherub, and some of the runoff from Mickey's jungle of shadows had crept into my frequency. While I am tempted to reinvent myself for the reader, I am no more immune from my environment than the minor prophet with whom I share a name, the one in the Bible who tried to run from God and was swallowed by a big fish. Jonah was chosen by God to be in a sea of trouble, and in my more philosophical moments, I believe I was genetically predisposed to scandal. Anyhow, spinning at this stage would be a lie that runs counter to the spirit of my forced retirement from the lying business. Officially, I wasn't fired. I resigned. I did so after a few unfortunate catalysts put me in play. It began when the head of the Republican Party declared the current recession to be a "communications problem." As press secretary, communications strategy fell under my purview. Then there was The Remark. I made The Remark two days ago during a press conference after a suicide bomberan erstwhile taxi driver from Yemenblew himself up at a Phillies game, killing twenty-four people. Even though I was technically a New Jerseyan, Philadelphia was the provenance of my "hometown" spDezenhall, Eric is the author of 'Spinning Dixie ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780312340636 and ISBN 031234063X.