“Okay. First, it’s very important to the administration. Somebody at the White House told me the president called it ‘the deal of the century.’ It’s definitely jobs, jobs, jobs. The U.S. bidders all have factories in California, which is votes, votes, votes: American Telephone Corp., IBM, Hewlett Packard, General Science. They’re all afraid that if they get shut out of the China market, they’re dead. One billion consumers, and all that. They’re competing against a French group that’s headed by their big conglomerate, called Unetat, I think. If anything, the French want it even more than the Americans. Both sides see it as the key to Asia. It’s like the founding of the East India Company in the 1700s. Whoever wins has a lock on commerce for the next hundred years. Or so they’re all telling themselves.”

“Who’s going to win?”

“How the fuck should I know? But it’s huge. They have a special interagency task force at Commerce to send memos to all the departments reminding everybody what a big deal it is. Both sides are supposedly pulling out all the stops. Haven’t you been reading the stories?”

“Not very closely. But I’m getting interested.”

“So you’re going to steal this one now, too? You prick.”

“No,” I said, laughing. “I don’t think so. Not unless it gets really good.”

A few days later, Bowman opined for the first time on the China communications deal. He wrote in his weekly column that there was growing concern in Congress about the wisdom of doing the deal at all because of China’s poor human rights record. He quoted an appropriations subcommittee chairman from Wisconsin as saying that signing the contract would be “craven,” and he had a blind quote from an administration official saying that the White House was reviewing its options. He noted the heavy campaign contributions that had been made by U.S. communications companies and their subcontractors to the president and key members of Congress.

It was a garden-variety Washington dope story. A few titillating facts, a lot of spin. The headline helped: CHINA DEAL: A $30 BILLION BLUNDER? It was the sort of story that might lead the network news on a slow day, with the reporter standing in front of the White House saying, “A new controversy is swirling in Washington tonight, Dan, around a huge trade deal with China that some critics are calling ‘craven.’” It was the sort of story that would prompt editorials in leading newspapers urging the administration to reconsider. I put Bowman’s column in a file that I had started a few days before and locked it in my desk drawer at home.