Card pulls out a doodle from the top drawer of his desk: It is a pencil sketch of a Canadian flag, which Card drew in a meeting during the president's recent visit to Canada. Beneath the flag is a network of circles, jots, lines and warped squares. It is the driveway of his summer house in Poland, Maine: "Here's the house," he says leading a tour of the doodle. Here's the rock garden, the drainage scheme and a tool shed that he's thinking about building.
"Doodling helps my thinking," Card says, a corollary to creating pictures in his mind. "It helps me to visualize that which I'm listening to."
A Range of Options
As Card describes his "kitchen," he is cagey about his front-burner items. "I'm not gonna show you everything I have in my kitchen," Card says. But when less pressing topics arise, Card offers a window into the size and complexity of his kitchen.
An eager storyteller, Card can take a long time with his explanations and descriptions. He is at times compelled to show you every crumb in his cupboard.
Ask Card, for instance, how he chose the exact words he whispered to President Bush on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001: "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack."
"Very carefully," Card says, noting that he wanted to give the president maximum information without giving him a chance to respond, avoiding a public conversation. "I wanted to pass on two facts and one editorial comment and then back away."
The rest of his answer -- unloaded from Card's 9/11 cupboard -- takes 20 minutes.
Card describes the vivid smell of dead fish at the Sarasota golf resort where the president ate dinner on the night of Sept. 10. Walking back to the hotel, Card saw a car parked in a way that blocked a narrow alley. He asked an advance man to remove it.
The next morning, Card became concerned that there was a misspelled word on the blackboard behind the spot where the president would read. The word -- Card doesn't say what it was -- "was adroitly covered by a book cover," he says, adding that it was written in red, orange and blue chalk. Bush learned that the first plane had hit the North Tower as he stood at the door of the classroom, just before he was to begin reading. "We're standing at the door, I'm standing to the president's left," Card says. "The president was holding a doorknob in his right hand."
Card first learned the discipline of Matteo Ricci as a high school junior. He was attending a talk given by "some kind of memory expert" at a Rotary Club near his home in Holbrook, Mass., a middle-class suburb south of Boston. The man quizzed the 50 or 60 people in the audience about personal details -- their names, where they lived and so forth. Then, without notes, he repeated all the information back to them.
Card approached the speaker afterward and asked if he had a photographic memory. "No, no, no," the man said. "I work really hard at this." He explained the Riccian principle of linking facts to visual mnemonics. "He said, take something that you know really well and then associate something with it," Card says. "And I began doing that over the course of time."
Card studied engineering at the University of South Carolina while working at a McDonald's in Columbia (rising as high as night manager). As he manned counters, Card tried to calculate the total price of an order before the clerk could punch it into the cash register. "It really turned into great sport," Card says.
Another McDonald's episode bears mention: Once, when money went missing from the cash register, Card threatened to fire everyone unless it was returned. The cash reappeared and the crew kept their jobs. But Card was serious about his threat, and the episode reflects the resolve behind Card's soft edges, a combination that has served him in politics.
Card's father, a small-town lawyer and unsuccessful candidate for the state legislature, was active in Holbrook politics. Card was elected to the Massachusetts legislature in 1974, a Republican moderate who favored abortion and gay rights. "He was always very supportive of the things that the Bush administration has been hostile to, like gay rights," says Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who served with Card in the legislature.
