Then he recalled the evening at law school when he and the professor who ran the low-income law clinic had pulled an all-nighter to finish a petition for several families tossed out of a housing project for nonpayment. Why’d you come to law school? she had asked Addis. All he could offer was a cliché: So I can take a swing or two at changing what I don’t like in our world. Very noble, she had said, but remember, the smallest victories are the truest.

Addis thought about where he should place LaTeenah Williams’s postcard. He picked up a mounted cartoon: a caricature of the previous President at a podium, frantically waving his arms and saying, “Enrico Fermi, I. M. Pei, Lee loccoca—what sort of American names are these?” Below the cartoon was an inscription: “Add Nicholai Addis to the list. Without you, none of this would have been possible.” It was signed by Bob Hanover, the President of the United States, and dated the day of his inauguration.

The cartoon referred to an event early in the presidential campaign. A foreign reporter had asked the President about a statement made by an aide to Louisiana Governor Bob Hanover, who was competing in the presidential primaries of the other party. The reporter had used Addis’s full first name—given to Addis to honor a grandfather from Russia—which nobody ever did. “Nicholai Addis?” the President had replied. “What kind of American name is that?” After days of unfavorable editorials, the President sent Addis a letter of apology and one of the shoes he had been wearing when he made the remark. “Finally got it out of my mouth,” the President had written.

Addis then announced he was sending the shoe to a Washington goodwill store and called for the President to donate the other shoe. Days later, Addis checked with the thrift store. Nothing had arrived from the President. That evening when a network anchor was concluding a live interview with Hanover, he asked what was most on the candidate’s mind those frantic days. Hanover grinned: “Well, Mike, I’m waiting for the other shoe.”

Hanover’s quip made the cover of the major newspapers the following morning. He repeated it for days. Finally, the President donated a case of new shoes to the thrift shop.

Addis’s face-off with the President turned him into a political celebrity. Photographs of the most influential campaign aide of the political season appeared in newspapers and newsmagazines. One long piece in a gossipy weekly speculated that Hanover had embraced Addis as a replacement for Hanover’s brother, a zookeeper and part-time evangelist in Orlando. A woman’s magazine put Addis on its first male cover: “Tall, Skinny, Pale, Nerdy: A Sex Symbol for Now.” His toothy, crooked smile stretched across a full page. That had been four years ago.