What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  Then there is another shade of the verb. To Know, in the sense of awareness. It is about what’s going on right now, and as such, it is Washington’s highest branch of knowledge. Encyclopedic scientia on the theory, history, and practice of progressive taxation in America is nothing, less than nothing, compared to knowing (a week before the vote) Chairman Rostenkowski’s bottom line on depreciation of timber assets. One brand of knowing (scientia) earns a ratty office and a shared secretary at the Heritage Foundation. The other (awareness) brings power, money, fame. ...

  But as the highest form of capital-knowing, the quest for awareness is also the most dangerous. Clearly, the lack of this knowing can undermine reputation or power, especially if one’s position, or one’s connaissance, indicates that one ought to know. To be unaware, to be Out of the Loop, is allied in the tribal consciousness with impotence, inability, imbecility ... and ultimately with the fatal affliction of ridiculousness. But there is also, in success, in wide awareness, a danger just as mortal. For this is the brand of knowing that is closest to Eating from the Tree of Knowledge, and can result in expulsion from Eden. When things foul up in a massive way; when The Washington Post, like God, is angry; when Committee Chairmen vie for jurisdiction of the hearings that will make them well known as the scourge of evildoing, then this is the knowing implied in the most portentous of capital questions:

  What did he know, and when did he know it?

  And so, there has developed, in Washington, a kind of knowing without being known to know, for which there is no word at all. It is a nonoperational, untraceable knowing, which can seldom be proven or disproven. Indeed, its vaguely oriental essence can barely be expressed. It is yin-and-yang, knowing-not-knowing. It is knowing all about the thing without being culpable of knowing the thing itself. All of which brings us to that veteran capital personage, that longtime practitioner of the Washington arts, that most knowing of men, Vice President Bush.

  Here was a man whose very job, whose only job, was To Know, as the capital understands the verb. He started early each morning, in his office in the Old EOB, getting to know someone or something over breakfast, which might last for only fifteen or twenty minutes, and always ended in time for the Veep to receive the little man with the briefcase, the gnome from the CIA who appeared each day at 8:00 A.M., to offer the Agency’s knowledge, its awareness, not as a Vice Presidential perk, but as a courtesy, a tip of the old school cap, to the former Director, Mr. George Bush, who liked to know what his old shop had been doing for the last twenty-four hours; and when that was finished, he was off across the driveway to the West Wing, to the Oval Office, there to sit in on the President’s Chief of Staff briefing and his National Security briefing, to sit in not because the President wanted or would seek his opinion, not because the briefings would offer material on which he’d work, that day or ever, but simply To Know, which, after all, was the point; and when those briefings were over, Bush began his formal work for the day, getting to know and to know about some federal or local officials who’d convened en bloc in the capital, or sitting in with the President to refine and reinforce his acquaintance with the President of Zaire or the Foreign Minister of Malaysia, or jetting off to meet and to know the officers and enterprise of the nation’s first tall-stack-clean-coal power plant, or returning to his office for an informational briefing on the federal narcotics interdiction effort, or sitting down at his desk to work through the report on ... no matter. ... Every meeting, every act, each step in his daily Vice Presidential march, down to the last skip-and-jump through the briefcase full of papers which he’d tackle in his study at home, at night, had simply to do with knowing, and knowing in the Washington Way. Here was a man, after all, who owed his job to his connaissance, and maintained his standing in it almost solely by one pinpoint of that connaissance: his knowing relationship with Ronald Reagan. At the same time, his Constitutional duty required him to master the scientia, to know at least enough of the arms-control-throw-weight-multiple-reentry-warhead scientia to be President, today, should disaster strike. At the same time, his political standing, his sole shield against the dread and fatal ridiculousness of the job, depended on his ability to enhance the precious awareness ... and yet ... and yet! ... He could not know, could not afford to know, in the full operational sense of the word, anything beyond what the administration was known to know, or anything different from what the administration Officially Knew, or anything that put the lie to any of the fond and rosy myths that swaddled, like a blessed baby, the mind of the most know-nothing President in the capital’s known history.

  Here was, in short, the most creative and subtle knower of knowledge in the capital.

  Which brings up, again, that lamentable word: for when Iran-contra transpired, and God, like The Washington Post, was angry, and millions of Americans eagerly awaited a single, supposedly simple fact—yes or no?—and an answer was sought a thousand times, by a thousand of the nation’s best journalists ... it was sought only with the blunt tool at hand, the edge of that mealy flapjack, always with a question that came out this way:

  Did George Bush know?

  Now what could they possibly mean by that?

  On the eighteenth of November, 1986, George Bush was to host a night at the movies: Top Gun was on the bill, just the kind of action flick the VP liked. In fact, it should have been a perfect night: friends, mostly Governors, in town for the Republican Governors’ do, all convened in comfort and security in the armchairs of Jack Valenti’s private theater on Sixteenth Street in the capital, a plushy screening room maintained for VIP entertainment by the Motion Picture Association of America. It was just the sort of soirée—twenty or thirty people he knew, gathered for activity and no heavy talk—the VP always enjoyed. He’d have them out to the house for drinks before the film. Perfect! Then he could pick off two or three, take them off to his study for a moment—no arm-twisting, nothing like that—just a friendly word or two ...

  “Well, I feel we’re doing all right ...

  “And I hope you could feel, you know, I’m qualified ...

  “If you could help ...”

  It always worked like a charm. After all he’d done for them, now he was asking, so intimately, gently ... it was so respectful and decent. If it came to arm-twisting later, well ... Atwater did the heavy lifting with the Southerners. Andy Card was working on Governor Sununu from New Hampshire. Bush’s friend, Nick Brady, went back a long way with Governor Tom Kean in New Jersey. In fact, Kean appointed Brady to the Senate, to fill out an unexpired term. So, if it came time to announce: Hey! Bus is leaving! Get on board or be left behind ... there was always someone else to do it. That left Bush as the genial host ... such a decent guy! That’s the part he liked, anyway. He’d have Kean over that night, after the movie. He could stay the night! There was plenty of room! Bar would get everything set up upstairs. ... It’d be fun!

  But that was all arranged before the deal with Iran started to come out on Election Day. Since then, there was nothing else in the news: ten minutes or more at the top of each newscast, guaranteed—they loved this crap! Ted Koppel, every night after the late news, making mincemeat out of anyone who dared say a kind word for Reagan. Turn the channel, there were Johnny Carson jokes: a cake and a Bible for the Ayatollah! That was before the Post started doing a special section each day, turning over every rock in town on that question: What did they know, and when did they know it? By the time the Governors came to town and Bush was to host his night at the movies, nothing seemed much fun.

  Kean could tell right away when he got to the Residence: Bush wasn’t happy. He was alternately pensive and snappish. He couldn’t concentrate on what anybody said. Of course, Kean knew Bush from politics, and had for almost fifteen years, ever since Richard Nixon made Bush the National GOP Chairman. But Kean and Bush had also known one another in the ways that children of good families know one another. Kean’s sister had met young Poppy in Connecticut. Kean’s father had served with Prescott Bush in Congress. In the
early years of the century, their grandfathers were classmates at a private college in New Jersey. So Kean had more than politics in mind when he took Bush aside to ask: “What’s wrong? You just don’t seem yourself.”

  “Aw, this thing with Iran,” Bush said, when they got a chance to talk alone. Bar had gone to bed. The old, rambling house was silent, save for the quiet voices in the study.

  “I don’t know what the hell happened,” Bush said, “and neither does the President. But they’re gonna put him out there tomorrow for a news conference. ... They’ll kill him out there!”

  Just the thought of it ... Bush couldn’t sit still in his chair. He felt so helpless. And it was his ass out there on the line! Reagan wasn’t running again. If the whole second term sank into this Iran swamp, Reagan was still going back to his ranch and horses. It was Bush whose future was ruined. Of course, that’s not how he said it, wouldn’t even think that way. No, it was the price of being Poppy that his first thought, in fact, all his concern, had to bend to the rescue of “this good man, who has become my friend,” Ronald Reagan. The code left no options. When the deal came unglued and the papers started digging up the whole sad tale, Bush didn’t call any meetings, didn’t take polls, didn’t even talk to his political guys. There was only one thing he could do: stand by his friend in the shit-storm. Anything else ... well, it’d be like ratting on a school chum.

  But he could help, if they’d give him a chance. He knew something about this, sure as hell knew more than the President. Reagan didn’t see what all the fuss was, thought he’d just go out there and say what he’d done. He didn’t understand! That’s why Bush went into the Oval Office that day—did what he’d almost never done in six long years. He went to the mat on this: went to the President to tell him to back off—just for a few days! Just until they knew what the facts were, what they were supposed to be. This was a covert operation! Shouldn’t be coming out like this! George Bush had joined his first secret society at age fourteen. He’d been keeping secrets ever since, been Director of the CIA! He knew this stuff in his bones! Just back off, till everybody knew what they were supposed to know, what it was they could admit they knew.

  But they brushed him off like a fly ... Reagan, Meese, Don Regan. Bush talked into the President’s face in a way he never had ... but Reagan simply couldn’t understand. Meese thought the Gipper could just deny it—make it all go away in front of the cameras. Regan was only interested in his own reputation—wanted the world to know it wasn’t him, dropped the ball. Bush had gone at all of them, spent the capital of loyalty he’d been hoarding for six years, and got nowhere. It was incredible.

  “Afterwards, I went at Regan again,” Bush said that night. “Believe me, I went in there ... as hard as I could.”

  He knew Reagan was going to dig them a deeper hole. Bush knew what the President was going to say out there. (Fuller’s wife, Karen, helped Pat Buchanan get the statement together.) And Bush knew some of it was plain wrong, dangerously wrong. That business about the arms fitting into one cargo plane—dead wrong. Bush had taken a private meeting (at Ollie North’s request) with the Israeli middleman who started the whole deal rolling. He knew they were talking about more than one planeload, as he knew they were dealing with the genuine fanatics at the right hand of Khomeini. He never bought that “moderates” fantasy.

  In fact, there were many things that George Bush knew that later emerged in the confluence of revelation that came to be known as Iran-contra. He knew, for starters, the administration shipped arms to Iran. In fact, he was for it, in a quiet, barely traceable way, not because he thought it would work, but it might ... and the President was for it. He knew that if the deal went down as hoped (“planned” was too grand a word), the U.S. hostages would all come home. He knew Bud McFarlane, Ollie North, and John Poindexter were running the show. He knew the Israelis had started the whole deal, were in it up to their eyeballs, in it for their own reasons, not necessarily those of the U.S. And he knew the President didn’t quite grasp the details of the operation.

  On the contra side of the ledger, he had also come to awareness of most of the pertinent facts. He knew Ollie North was a cowboy. He knew Ollie was shaking every tree in the forest for money for the contras. (In fact, he was going to speak at one of North’s fund-raisers, and backed off only when his staff counsel warned him he might get into trouble.) He knew—in fact, his was the first office in the White House to learn—a former CIA op named Eugene Hasenfus was shot down while flying aid to the contras. He knew Hasenfus was not the only demi-spook running around on this secret, airborne, aid-the-contras operation.

  In short, George Bush had come in contact, by various means, at various times, with nearly every salient fact that later emerged in the Post’s special sections that bore the headline: THE SCANDAL. But that did not mean he ever put them together. Why would he, when all he had to know, the only thing he could afford to know, was that the President was for them? Why should he commit the act of overtly informing himself, when none of these matters was on his plate! And so, by a capital feat of knowing-not-knowing, of yin-and-yang Washington art, he was not informed, could not be shown to have been informed, of the scandal itself. As he later pointed out, he was out of the loop! He was not culpable of knowing anything.

  What he was culpable of, on the great historical scoreboard, at least, was of practicing his art of Washington knowing to the end, to the exclusion of all else. George Bush was aware that the U.S. was shipping arms to Iran, and he did not say a word to derail the deal. George Bush was aware they were secretly shipping aid to the contras, and he did not say a word. The only time he went to the mat, spent his capital to affect the flow of events, was after the fact, when the only issue was what should come out and when, what they were allowed to admit awareness of, what they were going to be culpable of knowing. That’s when he went in as hard as he could. ... But, of course, no one outside the White House knew that. They were only asking a question that meant nothing: Did Bush know?

  He was right, of course, about the President digging them in deeper with the press conference, the following day. Don Regan marched the old man out, and he screwed things up to a fare-thee-well. First, Reagan denied the deal was arms for hostages—when no one in the country believed that anymore. Then he denied the U.S. had anything to do with Israel’s shipments—when Regan (as reporters pointed out) had already admitted that the U.S. condoned an Israeli shipment in September of ’85. Then Reagan said there were no mistakes in the deal with Iran—they’d got three hostages back and he’d continue on the same path.

  It was chaos! The spokesman, Larry Speakes, had to put out a “statement from the President” within twenty minutes to correct the stuff about Israel. Don Regan was back in the Blue Room, pounding the table and swearing he wasn’t gonna be hung out in the wind as the leaker on this. Goddammit, he was gonna hold his own press conference! Poindexter wrote the correction and put in the same lies about everything fitting into one cargo plane. After that performance, seven out of ten Americans said they didn’t believe Ronald Reagan anymore.

  Sure enough, Bush saw the ship sinking around his ears, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to patch the hull. He had his own small staff in an uproar, trying to do what the whole West Wing couldn’t or wouldn’t do: “Just get the goddam facts,” Bush said. He took Craig Fuller off other business—what other business was there now?—to get to Ollie North and find out what the hell happened. He pulled Boyden Gray, his counsel, off the next big speech, the address to the American Enterprise Institute, to find out whether any laws were broken. He told his National Security man, Don Gregg, to find out what happened in Iran. Facts, he wanted. And he wanted them now. So, for days they ran around like fevered gerbils, gathering shreds of fact where they could, which they called in the same day, or they sent in memos, mostly to Fuller. ... No one wanted to get in Bush’s face when he got like this. Atwater and the politics guys stayed away altogether. Bush was in a state. If he did happen to pic
k up a phone while they called in, they each, to a man, felt they’d better talk fast. “Yeah. Yeah. What else?” Bush would snap on the other end. They could almost hear his fingers drumming the desk.

  And every day or two, reporters would call his press office with another story they were about to unleash. And his press guy, Marlin Fitzwater, would have to walk into Bush’s big office and coax a statement out of him. Usually, Bush was at his desk, working through papers, and he’d push back from the desk with a deliberate shove of both hands, and slouch back in his leather chair, with his head down, fiddling with his pen. His eyes would stay on the pen, which he rotated in his fingers, while Fitzwater told him what The Wall Street Journal, or the Post, wanted to know today. And Bush would listen with his head down, quiet, with the air of a man beleaguered, a man who had to stay composed. Then, he’d say to his pen:

  “This is so unfair! Don Gregg had nothing to do with this.”

  Or, simply: “Look. The President has asked Ed Meese to find out what the facts are. When we know the facts, we’ll make them public.”

  And then Fitzwater would have to go at it again, until he got a statement he could use.

  “So I can say, ‘Vice President Bush was categorically not involved in’ ...” Fitzwater would look up from his notepad, hoping the Veep would finish the sentence. But he’d always have to do it himself. “... ‘directing or overseeing the contra resupply’? ...”