August 14, 2019: Controlling the Narrative

“You gotta control the narrative,” Governor Peter Florrick tells his wife, Alicia Florrick, who’s running for state’s attorney on Season 6, Episode 18 of “The Good Wife”. It’s a show which, though apparently highly regarded in some quarters, is in my humble and untutored opinion pretty much trash. Which doesn’t keep me from nearly finishing season 6 so far.

In my defense, when I sit down to watch, I’ve stopped writing for the evening and usually have had a drop taken. But, unlike with The Sopranos, even with a drop taken, I can usually identify all of the characters. Maybe that’s why I watch it.

So that’s what I didn’t do in so many instances: control the narrative. It never occurred to me. I’ve spent my whole life back on my heels, conversationally speaking. How would that have worked? To have controlled the narrative?

In the summer of 1988, Nancy had taken a job with Burroughs-Wellcome in Research Triangle Park, an issue as we lived in Greensboro nearly an hour away and I worked for a law firm there. But those were good days for lawyers, and I soon found a job with SAS Institute, Inc., a software company in the same area.

So I dutifully gave notice to Dan Fouts, who was very senior and for some reason the person I thought I needed to resign to. You may remember Dan from the post in which I spent a week in Raleigh interviewing defendants’ witnesses in a case we blunderingly won. Fouts was a big man with straight, short-clipped grey hair and a sweating forehead, perhaps a harbinger of the heart attack that later killed him too young. A sign in his office read “Thank you for smoking”, and his vanity plate referred to his Air Force reserve service. I sat in the chair opposite him and waited as he read my resignation letter and shook his head.

“George, is this irrevocable? Everyone likes you so much.”

What his statement did was put me on the defensive: why are you leaving when you’re so beloved? Why are you doing this to us? Unspoken was that I was a third-year associate, about the time, they often said, that I was trained well enough to make them money. (False: I know the numbers, and I always made them money—that is, the money they collected on work I did exceeded my salary, benefits, etc.)

I just sat there blinking. Not controlling the narrative. I was looking like an ungrateful wretch.

I should have said, “Well, Larry Moore, in my last evaluation, said that everyone seemed to think I needed to improve tremendously. Bob Baynes thinks I ought to read business magazines, to what purpose, I’m unsure. Devaney questions my maturity. I think it’s doubtful that everyone likes me so much. It’s a whole lot better for everyone if I move on. I don’t need to be turned down for partnership here.”

See what happened there? I would have put Fouts on the defensive, having to explain away—or simply ignore—those criticisms that did indeed come up at my evaluation and in part resulted in my desire to escape. If he ignored them, I could press the point. If he tried to gainsay them, I could have said, Well, ask Larry Moore what he said. And then I would have left his office, the narrative clearly under my control. But I slunk out, nearly feeling guilty for leaving the firm that hired me, trained me, put up with my many mistakes. But I had made them money. Control the narrative! I didn’t and felt like a jerk when I really wasn’t. People left that firm all the time. One guy, upon leaving, had said, “You’re better off being a firefighter than working for this firm.”

A second time, a number of years later: I was an associate general counsel at AIG. Each of us lawyers was counsel to this or that “profit center”. The term “profit center” was for some lines of business a huge joke that we lawyers sniggered at frequently. Anyway, I was in charge of “Accident and Health Insurance”. Don’t ask. The Senior VP, Tony Galioto, called me one day and described a new business scheme.

I said, “I’m sorry, Tony, but you can’t do that. I know it’s not my business to say no but instead to tell you how you can do something, but there’s just no way to make this work. It’s illegal. It’s a kickback to the policyholder.”

Tony: Well, we’re just going to do it. It’ll make a lot of money.

Me: Tony, no, please, you can’t do it this way. It’s just illegal.

Tony: Well, that may be, but it’s going to be very profitable. We’re just going to do it.

Me: Aw, come on Tony, you know I can’t let it just sit. I have to go to Bob [the president].

Tony (after the shortest possible of pauses): Well, you fucking do what you have to do, and I’ll fucking do what I have to do.

Then he hung up on me. I ran to the end of the hall to my boss Robert’s office, where he was already taking a call from Tony. “No, come on, Tony, George is right. You can’t do that.” Long pause. “Tony, George is just doing his job, come on.” Another long pause. “OK.” Robert hung up and looked at me. “Tony doesn’t want to work with you anymore.”

OK, I really failed to control the narrative there. Before Tony hung up, I should have said:

“Tony, quit being a dicklick. I just said you can’t do it. You want to be a criminal, go ahead, but you’ll be lucky to have a job by Friday. Bob doesn’t want you assholes doing this kind of shit anymore. Can’t you make a buck legally, anyway? So just fuck and no.”

I bet that would have gained a little traction. Or at least a pause before he hung up and called Robert anyway. Oh, whom am I kidding? If I’d have said that, Galioto’s head would have exploded, and he would have had me whacked.

I could no doubt have stood up to Daniel Fouts, with all his paraphernalia of the Air Force and tobacco industries. It would simply have required me to be a tiny bit assertive. Galioto, eh, that wouldn’t have ended well. It’s taken me a long time to learn that, sometimes, you just can’t control the narrative.