The Stormy Present: The One Episode of The West Wing That's Bothered Me for Seven Years

After creator Aaron Sorkin and chief director Thomas Schlamme left The West Wing at the end of the fourth season, the show entered a severe creative slump that only lessened with the spectacular episode "The Supremes" (guest-starring Glenn Close and William Fichtner as potential Supreme Court nominees), and then lasted until the seventh season, when the show got halfway and almost three-quarters to being Sorkin-like. I hung on. I had watched The West Wing from the beginning in 1999, graduated high school between seasons 3 and 4, and moved to Southern California between seasons 4 and 5, which should have been a sign of what living in Southern California was going to be like for eight years.

No matter how much John Goodman's Glenallen Walken was wasted as an Acting President (There was so much more they could have pursued with that storyline than just partisan sniping), no matter how bad the writing got, I was there. I kept hoping for better. I knew that without Sorkin, the show could never again reach the greatness it had consistently achieved, but I wanted enough of my show back to justify still watching it. I'm fascinated with the presidency, historical and fictional, and I just wanted my show to work again.

When "The Stormy Present" originally aired on January 7, 2004, I was hopeful. John Goodman was returning as Glenallen Walken, and James Cromwell was guest-starring as former president D. Wire Newman, the last Democratic president in office before Bartlet. All three were flying on Air Force One to the funeral of former president Owen Lassiter, a Republican, and likely Bartlet's predecessor, as Lassiter had served eight years in office throughout the '90s (The West Wing universe is markedly different from ours, especially with the differences in election years, which fans online have theorized about at length).

This was a few months before Reagan had died, so the funeral was modeled on Nixon's in 1994. It was being held at the "Lassiter Library in Costa Mesa," "The one with the fake Oval," as Josh states in Leo McGarry's office. Nixon's library does not look like what they filmed. It seems more vast, and quietly haunting, not just because of the funeral at hand, but I guess all presidential libraries are haunting in a way, with a recap of power, photos all over, various historical videos (The starting point of the Nixon Library has a video of Pat Nixon accepting a gift of two pandas from China for the National Zoo), accomplishments heralded, and scandals kept on the down low, save for the Nixon Library which apparently has a new Watergate exhibit that hews closely to the truth and not created by loyalists, as the previous exhibit was.

Bartlet with Newman and Walken could mean that the men would talk about their time in office, how they feel personally about the huge burden placed on them as leaders, however temporarily it was for Walken. It would be interesting to learn what it was like for Walken when he was summoned to the Oval Office to become Acting President. All we saw at the end of the fourth season was him coming down the steps of what might have been his home, or the Capitol building, and being ushered into a waiting car with a security detail there, and then climbing out of it and walking up the steps to the back end of the White House.

None of that happened. The episode was also about a protest in Saudi Arabia shouting for democracy, and the thought by Newman that Walken's actions of bombing Qumar (fictional Middle Eastern country in our world) in retaliation for Zoey Bartlet's kidnapping may have helped foster the protest. It's just policy discussions between Newman and Bartlet, and then all three after Walken joins them when the plane lands in Missouri to pick him up.

I still somewhat like the episode because of the presidential library setting, but Newman gets more play when discussing with Bartlet how he felt when Bartlet revealed to the world that he had multiple sclerosis. Walken is reduced to sitting with Bartlet on a bench, recounting a trip to China with Lassiter. The show is generally only 42 minutes, I get that, but here was a grand opportunity for reflection of a kind. Instead, the episode is also jammed with "B" and "C" storylines of Josh mediating a dispute between Connecticut and North Carolina on who actually owns a copy of the Bill of Rights that was stolen by a Union soldier during the Civil War, and C.J. finding out if the Department of Defense is heading up mind-control research. Useless storylines. What was so wrong with spending more time on Air Force One, and at the Lassiter Library, a little more time than just the last 11 minutes? There's former members of Lassiter's cabinet on the plane, including one named Bobby Bodine, "who I think tried to sell back Alaska as Secretary of the Interior," as Toby tells Josh on his cell phone while walking to the plane. Shouldn't Toby talk to these men that incense him so? He may not come to an understanding with them, if they'd want to talk to him at all, but just to put more meat in the episode. Here is a long-ago administration in the same plane as one that's most likely in the second year of its second term (I can't quite determine here what year the Bartlet administration is in, but that feels right).

There's a covered outdoor area of the Lassiter Library that Bartlet and Newman somberly walk through, and there's a banner with Lassiter's likeness on it. Here is this man's presidential library. Here are these men who have served and are serving in the same office. Reflective moments were sorely needed in this episode, from those former Lassiter cabinet members, from Walken, from Newman, from Bartlet (though he does get one when he talks with Toby, who's having trouble writing Bartlet's eulogy for Lassiter). What does it mean to these men to have been in power, to have power? How does it change them?

All of that would have been most welcome. But still I'll watch that episode occasionally (I am right now on Amazon), reminded of Reagan's death and the events that followed, and watching the Reagan funeral motorcade on that freeway from our apartment in Valencia in that summer of 2004. And it continues to inspire me for one presidential history book I want to write. I watch with regret, though. Always regret.

James Cromwell at the Supermarket

I went to bed at 2 this morning and drifted into a dream that carried me all the way through to 9:14 a.m. It's amazing how dreams that seem to only happen in an hour or two turn out to have encapsulated seven hours of sleep.

Last night, I was thinking about the supermarket, any supermarket here. I need more frozen blackberries and yogurt for the coming week. In that dream, I found myself at a supermarket, looking for yogurt. Not many Greek yogurts in one refrigerated case, and then I encountered apparently a former co-worker at The Signal, even though I didn't recognize him, and I would have. We reminisced about our days there, I asked him what he was up to, and we moved on.

And then, in an aisle full of crackers, I was behind a tall man who was picking up a box from the top shelf, and it turned out to be James Cromwell. Yes, Farmer Hoggett from the Babe movies, but for me, a West Wing fan, former president D. Wire Newman in the 5th season episode, "The Stormy Present," one of only two episodes I liked from that season, but a slight disappointment to me, because though I could get the feeling of life after the White House from Newman and his deceased successor Owen Lassiter (the funeral in the episode takes place at his presidential library in Costa Mesa), there wasn't enough discussion about the personal impact of the White House from Newman or from former acting president Glenallen Walken. Instead, the focus was on the protest situation unfolding in the Middle East, and Newman's experience with the same royal family during his term, and Walken's opinion about what should be done. I liked the scene of Newman telling Bartlet how he felt after his MS was revealed to the world, and of Walken talking to Bartlet about a trip he took to China with Lassiter. But there was that golden opportunity, squandered, also because of a "B" story of Josh trying to negotiate a settlement between North Carolina and Connecticut about a copy of the Bill of Rights stolen by a Civil War soldier.

In the dream, my intention was to ask Cromwell if there had been anything changed in the script, any sections of exactly what I had hoped for that were excised. I began talking to Cromwell, telling him that I know others would ask about Babe, but I really wanted to know more about his role as former president Newman, to learn about the filming, to see if anything had been left out.

Also at the supermarket was a contingent of his family, on hand because his mother or father was dying, which is strange to me now because his mother, actress Kay Johnson, died in 1975, and his father, director John Cromwell, died in 1979. Or maybe it had been an aunt or an uncle, but either way, they were there for support and to get him back to the hospital in due time. I remember also nieces and grandchildren there too, and at the end of the dream, a 14-year-old granddaughter who had actually seen the episode I was wondering about, but all I could muster was telling her that her grandfather did was excellent in it. Some things are too important to let questions about other things creep in.

There seemed to be his family in nearly every aisle. There were instances in which he dashed off, and I encountered them, and they answered some of my questions, but not what was truly important to me. It was remarkable how tight-knit this family was, a rare quality.

That's all I got out of the dream. I think if I'm to get any hypothetical answer about the missed opportunity, my next dreams are going to have to involve John Sacret Young, who wrote the episode. Or maybe even executive producer John Wells, since he was at the head of that atrocious fifth season after creator Aaron Sorkin and chief director/co-executive producer Thomas Schlamme were fired at the end of the fourth season.