Our interview today is with thriller writer Keith Raffel and he discusses his book Drop By Drop. As counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Keith Raffel held a top secret clearance to watch over CIA activities. As a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, he founded UpShot Corporation, an Internet software company, and sold it to Siebel Systems. Befoe we get to his interview, here is a description of Drop By Drop: Stanford professor Sam Rockman suffers the crushing loss of his wife in a bombing at San Francisco Airport. Casting about to find meaning in the ruins of his life, he accepts an offer to come to Washington, D.C. to work for the Senate Intelligence Committee. He finds mighty weird stuff happening in the nation’s capital. Secret documents are showing up on his doorstep. Russians are trying to poison him. A renegade CIA asset is making Florida uninhabitable by strewing nuclear materials up and down Interstate 95. Then comes a groundswell to change the Constitution to enable the current president to stay in office for a third term to handle the crises.Interview with Keith Raffel:
I’m going to confess a deep, dark secret right up front—I went to law school. In my own defense, though, I must mention that a summer working for a big Wall Street firm cured me of any desire to enter private practice. Being young and idealistic, I went down to Washington, D.C., after graduation and managed to wrangle an interview with the staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. It went well, but I then needed to pass muster with the chairman, Senator Daniel K. Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii. I knew he’d lost an arm as a hero in World War II, and while sitting in his anteroom, I panicked. How would I shake hands with him if it was his right arm that was missing? It turned out that his right sleeve was indeed the empty one. I stuck out my left hand and shook his. That seemed to work out fine. (I later learned he preferred to grasp your right hand while twisting his left one.)
Senator Inouye opened up the interview by saying, “By the time you get to me you probably will get the job unless you’ve done something bad in the last few weeks. Have you?” I smiled and said, “Well, I’ve taken the bar exam.” He barked, “Did you pass?” No joking with him. The results were months away, but I still replied, “Yes, sir.” I got the position.
The Intelligence Committee had just been made permanent based on the recommendation of the Church Committee, which had deemed the CIA a “rogue elephant.” I started as the junior of three lawyers on the committee staff. Before the end of my first year, the other two had left. I was 27 years old and suddenly the senior attorney on the committee overseeing the government’s secret intelligence activities.
I didn’t realize how much of what happens in my new novel, Drop By Drop, was inspired by my experiences back then till I started writing this “Story Behind the Story” essay. One example: The hero of the book, former Stanford University professor Sam Rockman, has to figure out how to shake hands with U.S. President Lucas, who lost his right arm in Desert Storm.
Senator Birch Bayh (D-Indiana) replaced Inouye as chairman of the committee in my second year on the staff. When I walked down the halls with Senator Bayh, he emphasize each important point with a physical imprint. I gave my book’s Senator Marty Vincent that same quirk:
The senator put his arm around my shoulder as we walked through narrow, twisty corridors. He squeezed. No politician since LBJ pressed the flesh as literally as Senator Vincent. He used a touch, slap, or squeeze to punctuate each statement, just as a writer would turn to an exclamation point, italics, or a bold font.
One time, Senator Bayh called another staff member and me up to his office because we’d given him conflicting recommendations on how to vote on a bill. After 20 minutes or so of discussion, he asked my colleague, “Why are you advocating this position?”
“Because you are running for reelection and your opponent will hammer you if you vote the other way.”
“But Keith is right,” he said.
You can see why Birch lost his seat in 1981 to Dan Quayle. That result was enough to make me question my commitment to democracy. I still gave my fictional Senator Vincent the same deep commitment to the constitution and doing what’s right that I saw from Senator Bayh in real life.
The head of the legislation subcommittee for most of my stint on Capitol Hill was Senator Walter D. Huddleston (D-Kentucky). Unlike almost all his colleagues, he had not run for president, was not running, and had no desire to run. In Drop By Drop I give Senator Vincent that same distinction, as well as the same Kentucky background. Huddleston’s staff used to call him “Senator” as if that were his first name. I might get a call from his admin who would say, “Senator wants you up here.” Or I might come up to speak to him and be told, “Senator is on the floor.” I use all of that in the book, too.
At a White House meeting in 1980, Vice President Walter Mondale sits at the head of the table with CIA Director Stansfield Turner to his right and Senator Walter D. Huddleston to Mondale’s left. Keith appears in the foreground, on the right.
In the photo above, I’m in the White House with Senator Huddleston. He’d been invited to the Executive Mansion to discuss the legislative charter for the CIA and the intelligence community we’d been working on. He had been told the meeting was for “principals only.” Senator thought that “principals only” was baloney. He figured congressmen and senators were principals—they were elected by the people. By that criterion, the president and vice president were the only principals in the executive branch. In his view the head of the CIA was no “principal”; he was just a staffer, same as I was. “Principals only” was code for excluding congressional staffers and obtaining an advantage in negotiations. Anyway, when Senator stopped his car at the White House gate before this meeting, the uniformed guard noted that he was on the admission list, but I was not. Senator Huddleston said, “If I’m on the list, so is he,” and he pushed down on the accelerator. What a way to inspire loyalty! An incident unfolds pretty much that same way in Drop By Drop.
Over half of the book’s Senator Vincent I made up. The rest is an amalgam of other senators, including Bayh and Huddleston.
“And who was the one?” Senator Kennedy asked.
“Scott of Virginia.”
Senator Kennedy rubbed his hands and said, “Ah, better than unanimous.”
When I started writing Drop By Drop, I worried whether that imagination of mine would be able to transport me back to Capitol Hill. As it turned out, once I sat down in my regular place at the local café and started guzzling my green tea, I became Sam Rockman, the Senate Intelligence Committee staff member. It was as him I entered a parallel world, similar to this one but different, where a terrorist bomb explodes just yards away from me, where secret documents show up on my doorstep, and where Russians try to poison me. I guess that’s the magic of writing fiction.
Digital Book Today – Anthony Wessel:
Keith, thank your for a wonderful interview. You can find more info on Keith Raffel at his website.
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