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The first time I met Jed Bartlet we were still young men.
We didn’t know it then. We were too young to know how young we were.
I felt old, weary and foolish, and he thought he had the wisdom of the ages. We know better now.
I was hunched over the remains of a meal I never tasted in a diner near Capitol Hill, with no notion that this city would ever become my home – this neighbourhood our own personal fiefdom. I was not long out of Vietnam, and even less long married, and so frightened of myself I surely repelled everyone else.
I asked for the check and a nervous young waitress choked out that it had been paid for me already. She pointed to a table by the window.
A man about my own age with messy chestnut hair was surrounded by a whirlwind of papers, muttering to himself. I sighed. The saving was welcome but I’d still have preferred to spend the few dollars than to have to go and thank this benevolent stranger. They all wanted to say things about service and honour and I didn’t want to hear them. But I went over.
“Excuse me.”
He fairly tumbled out of his seat, extending his hand, glancing around him as though he’d lost something.
“Thank you for paying my check. That was kind of you.”
“It’s just a small thing, I just wanted to…” He looked as though he was trying to remember the script. I almost wanted to feed him his line, “thank you for your service”, but he just introduced himself instead.
“I’m Josiah Bartlet.”
“Leo McGarry.”
“And you were in the air force?”
“Yes sir.”
He held up his hands, looking almost alarmed.
“No, no, not sir. Just Jed. I’m just an economics teacher. Well, a student, really.”
He gestured to the seat opposite him.
“They haven’t brought you your dessert yet.”
“I didn’t order anything.”
“I did.”
Just then the nervous waitress appeared and she set down a dish of a ice cream and, would you believe it, a glass of milk.
I looked down at the food and back up at this young man who seemed to have decided I was calcium deficient.
“It’s good,” he said, “try it.”
I hesitated and he just sat there, waiting, as though this was the most serious thing in the world.
“It’s simple,” he finally said. “It’s not French cuisine, but it’s good, and it’s simple. You looked like you could use something simple.”
I gaped at him, but he just kept watching me with that serious look on his face until I ate every last bite and drained the glass, and then he nodded and glanced back at his papers. I was about to stand up, but I had to ask.
“Why… why did you do this for me?”
He gave me this smile that I would soon learn was the precursor to some profound thought of his.
“I’m trying to find ways to do good… to help people. I thought I was on a path… I thought I had a calling. And then I found something else. And so now I’m trying to find other ways to help people.”
I nodded.
“Well, I’m grateful.”
He smiled and nodded too, evidently considering the subject closed.
“So, what’s next for you?” Before I could answer, he spoke again. “Say, do you have a smoke?”
Glad to be able to do something for him in return, I pulled out my pack, and he took a cigarette with the look of a child snatching forbidden candy.
“My fiancée, she’s training to be a doctor… she doesn’t like me smoking.”
“My wife doesn’t like it either.”
His face lit up at that.
“You’re married! I’m glad.”
I was more and more confused by this boundlessly benevolent stranger, looking out for my welfare, and I hadn’t yet discovered the full force of his empathy.
He asked me where I was going, and I told him it was a funeral. I started to explain that with my father gone, I had to represent the family on occasions such as this, the passing of distant relatives, of indeterminate blood connection but from the same highland village fifteen generations back. But I only got as far as, “I'm going to a funeral... My father died,” and this odd, sympathetic, impetuous man misunderstood, jumped up, and started waving his arms in the air. After a moment, I recognised his now familiar, unorthodox method of pulling his jacket on in a hurry.
“Your father died, Leo, I can’t believe it, why didn’t you say so! I’ll go with you, you shouldn’t be by yourself.”
I was so touched by his generosity it took me a moment to explain. I sure could have used Jed on the day that actually had been my father’s funeral.
I managed to persuade him that on this occasion I wasn’t in need of an emotional crutch. Of course, I was, but not because of the passing of an elderly Scotsman I’d met all of twice. I wonder, sometimes, if I had told him that day of the extent of my troubles, whether the next twenty years would have turned out differently.
A few weeks later, the papers were trumpeting the most sweeping measures to assist the working poor ever introduced by Congress, and I saw a familiar name among the newsprint.
On the day he’d seen me and decided to buy me lunch and make me his friend, Josiah Bartlet, award-winning scholar and renowned social welfare theorist, who called himself just a teacher, had been on his way to speak in Congress for the first time, advising a committee on the economics of making milk more affordable. I still have the newspaper clipping, and one day nearly four decades later, I took it with me to New Hampshire and decided to make him my President.