“Just one thing: I have a source in the White House who tells me the president has herpes. Serious, full-blown oozing-dick herpes. The lawyers want another source before they let me go with it, but how are you going to confirm something like that? Really! And the president isn’t going to sue. Can you imagine getting discovery in that lawsuit? But my producers are worried. Do you know what they said? They said it would be irresponsible to run the story. Can you believe that? This isn’t the New England Journal of Medicine, for God’s sake. It’s Hard Copy. Does everybody on this fucking planet have to be responsible?”

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The Chinese government announced on Wednesday, May 15, that it would award the communications contract to the French company, Unetat. Because the Chinese would be purchasing what the announcement described as “upgrades, product enhancements and long-term technical support,” the total value of the contract would be increased to $38 billion over seven years. The deal also included a complicated financing package: the European community agreed to underwrite the deal, allowing China to borrow the $38 billion from European banks at low interest rates. I could only assume that $8 billion of that total would find its way to the commission agents, consultants and other intermediaries—French and Chinese—who had been swimming around the deal. In effect, the citizens of Europe were lending money that would be paid out as bribes to the deal makers.

The White House issued a statement congratulating Unetat but expressing regret that the U.S. consortium’s bid had been rejected. White House political aides were privately telling Susan Geekas that the president was relieved, because he had never been comfortable with the idea of America’s getting so close to the dictators in Beijing. The politicos apparently didn’t get the message to the assistant secretary of state for East Asia, who opined on background that the new French-Chinese alliance was “a potential disaster” for the United States.

The next morning, the Mirror carried my backgrounder on the China deal across the top of the front page, twinned with the day story about the contract award. We destroyed the other papers: none of them could match my account of the seamy side of the deal. Ed Weiss was in heaven. He lived for stories like this. The producers of MacNeil/Lehrer asked me to be a guest that afternoon, and Linda Wertheimer interviewed me on All Things Considered. The editor of our Sunday “Mirror on the World” section asked me to write an essay on the Bowmanesque topic of what the China deal would mean for global economic and political stability.