And Bush would say quietly, head down, to his pen, or off to the side, to one of his desk drawers: “Absolutely.”
It was the weekend after the press conference that Bush got the word: Meese wanted to see him. He waited at the Residence for two days. He couldn’t even sit still to read the papers. But Meese never showed up. It turned out Meese was closeted with Ollie North, to clean up “the chronology.” (That was the weekend Ollie and Fawn were so busy with the shredder.)
It wasn’t till Monday afternoon that Meese finally came by to see Bush, and then only for about ten minutes, just to drop this bombshell: the money from the Iran deal went to the contras. Swiss bank account. Ollie had the number. Poindexter had to know, too. They’d both have to go. There might be others. Meese was going to tell the President that same afternoon.
Bush didn’t sleep that night. He came in Tuesday, looking like a man who’d got bad news on his cancer test. His mouth was a grim, lipless line. There was no expression in his eyes, no light of recognition when the staff said good morning, like Bush was looking at his own private blank wall. He had pulled completely within himself. No one had to tell Bush what this meant: a secret trail of money, had to be laws broken somehow, investigations, a Special Prosecutor, hearings in Congress ... all they’d done for six years could go down the chute, along with his campaign. It was his ass out there now. They had to do something to curtail the damage. They had to move, and move fast, before this steamroller crushed them. ...
But at the 9:00 A.M. Oval Office briefing, it was clear the President didn’t know what to do. Meese laid out what he knew of the diversion. He said it was all in memos. (Ollie put the damn thing on paper!) Poindexter said he’d known that Ollie was up to something, but no one else did. Regan had already told Poindexter he’d have to go. Regan wanted a commission, some kind of blue-ribbon thing ... appointed today, announced at a press conference. They had to get out in front of this. But Ronald Reagan wasn’t sure. ...
At 9:30, instead of the National Security Council briefing, Poindexter walked in, with his undertaker’s face, and told the President he was sorry, he was resigning. Reagan didn’t even ask what happened. He just said, “I understand ...” Then he brightened, and with the brave smile you see at the end of war movies, he added: “But it’s in the best tradition of the Navy ... the captain accepting responsibility ...” There was a full NSC meeting scheduled after that, so they all went in, except Poindexter. Alton Keel, his deputy, ran the meeting in his stead, and no one said anything about it. That’s what was driving Bush crazy: they were acting so normal. At the end of the meeting, he ducked back into his West Wing office for a minute, stood at the fireplace mantel, leaned on it like it was holding him up. What the hell was going on? Was he crazy? The ship was going down and they kept on dancing!
Bush said to Fuller: “This is disaster. ... We don’t even know who handled the money ...”
Fuller started to tell him what he’d picked up from his friend Al Keel that morning. Total weirdness! Poindexter had some early meeting, so Al ran the normal 7:30 NSC staff meeting. About 8:30, Keel walks into Poindexter’s office to brief him on the staff meeting. And Poindexter’s sitting there, eating a yogurt at his desk. Keel’s reporting, and Poindexter just says, “Uh huh, yeah, uh huh,” eating yogurt. Then he says: “By the way, Al, I’m resigning today.”
Bush, still with his eyes down, withdrawn into the gloom in his own head, seemed hardly to hear the story.
“I’ve got to go back,” Bush said. “Got the leadership meeting. Jesus. This is the worst.”
So he went back to the Cabinet Room for the meeting with the Leaders of Congress, and then back again, after the President’s noon press conference, for a lunch with Reagan and the Supreme Court, and then to the afternoon National Security Planning Group. ... He walked through the day like the rest of them: reading off the cards in their pockets, going through the schedule, through the motions, acting like the ship was still afloat. ... But he couldn’t stop the baneful monologue in his head:
Disaster ... everything they’d done, the second term, the campaign, George Bush out there to take the heat, they’ll clobber Reagan, he doesn’t understand, thinks it’s a movie ... they’ll kill him! ...
By the end of the day, it was screaming in his head. It was surreal, the way no one said anything—like it would all go away if they went to their meetings! Like The Blob That Ate Cleveland didn’t exist! By the end of the day, Bush was back in his office, at his desk, his eyes on the blotter, head in his left hand, staring down, not seeing ...
“It’s like they don’t realize ... what’s going on,” Bush said to the desk.
Fuller said, across the room: “Or that it is going on.”
And Bush looked up with his lips white, all the pain apparent now in the long lines of his face.
“Don’t they realize what this means?”
Watergate ... was the first thing that flashed through Bob Dole’s mind, in the Cabinet Room, at the leadership briefing, when Meese dropped the bomb about the diversion. Dole stopped in at the White House to catch the briefing on his way to the airport. He had to get to Boston, then to Iowa, for the Other Thing ... plane was waiting.
Meese ran through the tale, said Ollie North did the deal on his own. That fell onto the long, gleaming table with a thud you could almost hear. The Leaders, the Speaker, looked at one another in silence. Lieutenant colonels didn’t do deals on their own. The only thing Reagan added was that Poindexter knew about it ... and so, in the best tradition of the Navy ... you know, the captain taking responsibility ...
Reagan didn’t understand. There’s only one captain in the White House. Only one man could take responsibility. ... Watergate ... Dole remembered his friend, Bryce Harlow, in an office just down the hall from this Cabinet Room. Harlow was a Washington sage, an insider, adviser to Nixon, a man Dole looked up to. “That break-in story doesn’t have any legs,” Harlow said, back in ’72. Dole was head of the Party, and he wanted to say something, to let people know the Republican Party had nothing to do with Watergate. But Harlow advised him: “It’ll fade in two or three days ...” So Dole didn’t make any statements, tried to pass it off with a joke.
Dole sat up at the table now, his eyes shifting from face to face. He was trying to see the whole court. Jim Wright, Leader of the House Democrats, was already on that portentous question:
Was this done with knowledge or approval of others?
Who else in the White House knew?
Did the CIA know?
Meese was trying to convince him that Ollie was the only one who really knew. Poindexter only knew Ollie was up to something. Israel handled the deal, Meese said. The Israelis thought it up, did the deed without any help ...
Dole could see Wright didn’t believe it. Who would believe it? He looked down the line to Bob Byrd, his colleague, Leader of the Senate Democrats. Byrd would have a field day, his legalistic way ... hearings, three or four committees ... he’d never let it go, the whole next Congress, it’d eat up the session, the whole campaign, the Other Thing, ’88. ... Maybe Reagan thought they’d help him, put it behind, move on. But Reagan didn’t understand. Byrd always spoke with the air of the statesman, but don’t get in a dark alley with him. ... Hell, he was trying to take Dole’s office. Trying to throw his whole staff out! One of Byrd’s guys took Dole on a tour, to show him the “new rooms” his staff might use. They were coal bins! Walked Dole down into the basement, took him through rooms he wouldn’t take his dog in ... unless it was raining, or cold, dog wouldn’t go out. ... If they thought Byrd was going to cut them a break, well ...
“Musta been my night off,” Dole used to say about Watergate, back in ’72. He never did deal with the issue, head-on. Nobody did. And they paid. It drove a President from office. Almost beat Dole, two years later, back in Kansas. The whole Party paid in blood, for eight years. A stain they never could wash off ... still hadn’t recovered, not all the way.
Well, nobody was going to tar
Bob Dole with that brush now—no way. Sure, he’d support the President, as much as he could. That was his job, and he’d do it. But Reagan had to get the facts out. And if heads rolled, well, so be it. ... Dole wasn’t going to let them shove the Party down the toilet for another eight years. Not this time. This was his time.
Dole was back in the Town Car within ten minutes. “Get the office,” he snapped. And then, over the car phone, on the way to the airport and the Other Thing, he asked not for his Chief of Staff, not for his National Security man, but for the Press Secretary:
“Agghh, gotta get out a statement,” he said. “They took the money from Iran, for the missiles, gave it to the contras. Gaghhh, you b’lieve it? President’s gonna announce it in an hour. Yeah, it’s kinda bizarre ... I wanta call it ‘a bizarre twist.’ Say the President’s doin’ the right thing, get all the facts out ... support the President ... yeah, point is, it’s all gotta come out.”
“I’m just not gonna say anything now,” Bush snapped. He’d been through this, explained it a million times. Why couldn’t they understand? His own staff, guys who ought to know him ... they were coming at him again on this AEI speech, the American Enterprise Institute, the perfect chance to distance himself from the whole Iranamok mess. In his office in the West Wing, Bush spoke to the speech draft that was fanned out on the desk in front of him. “Look, I’ve spent six years being loyal to this President ...” Bush’s voice was high, petulant with his sense of injustice.
“This doesn’t abandon the President,” Fred Khedouri said. Khedouri was writing the speech—or trying, at least. He’d been back and forth with it a half-dozen times. He’d write in a line about the Iran thing—something innocuous, just an acknowledgment that something went wrong—and Bush would balk, like a horse that saw a snake. To Khedouri, it was so obvious: if the VP stuck his head in the sand, it sent a message that he was complicitous ... or lost in the same fog of know-nothing denial that hung over the rest of the White House. It just wouldn’t play! He tried to keep his voice even: “There ought to be some recognition ...”
The Veep heard the edge under Khedouri’s voice—like Bush was some thickheaded child who had to have it explained. Goddammit, he understood English! He didn’t need a pointy-head like Khedouri to lead him through it. Khedouri was another stranger, one of Fuller’s hires, out of Stockman’s shop. A real brain—drove Bush nuts—all head, like a lot of guys who were too damn smart to have any sense. Annoyance drove Bush into his second language, Texan, the one he’d picked up along with his distaste for the Harvard Yard crowd:
“Look, I’m not gonna paint my tail white and run with the antelopes now.”
Fuller let Khedouri carry the ball on this: it didn’t do any good to back the Veep into a corner. It wasn’t that Fuller thought George Bush could get by without some firm statement on the scandal, but he’d come at the Veep in his own way, easygoing: Oh, on that speech thing, sir ... Problem was, they were running out of time. When Bush got back from his Thanksgiving trip to Kennebunkport, there were only three days till the speech. And Bush came back more convinced than ever that none of this should have come out: Why are they releasing a chronology? ... This is a covert operation! ... Worse still, Bush had turned the whole episode into an issue of loyalty, a matter of the personal code. Ronald Reagan just couldn’t see that he or his boys did anything wrong, and George Bush was not going to be the one to rub Reagan’s face in it.
So he said nothing. He disappeared. If the OVP was a whisper zone before, now it was a crypt. Everybody in the capital had something to say—except George Bush, who went to ground like the undead at sunrise. At the PAC, the political guys were catching it on the phones. Republicans were getting nervous. Doonesbury was running Bush every day as the invisible man. The well-fed, well-pleased men with pink jowls and red ties were chuckling about him over lunch with their clients at Joe and Mo’s, Duke Zeibert’s. ... “Oh, I know George—nice guy, but Dole could eat him for breakfast ... problem is, heh heh, you’re hungry a half-hour later. ...” He had caught the dread and fatal affliction: he was ridiculous.
He had to say something! In the office, they all told him—or, to be precise, they mostly clucked to one another about his stubborn incomprehension.
“How about, ‘Sure, we made mistakes, but they were mistakes of compassion ... pursuit of the long-term interests of ...”
“No, he won’t do it. Teeter tried that.”
“How ’bout: ‘Everybody makes mistakes ... but the long record will show’ ...”
“No way. He’s not gonna say the President did anything wrong.”
“Yeah, but where was he? He’s got to say something.”
But Bush wouldn’t budge. He didn’t mind taking his share of the hit, if they’d give him a share of the credit for the good stuff. ... But he wasn’t going to cut and run now, no matter how many brainy-boy staff got into his knickers. They hadn’t been around the track like he had. Reagan would be back, in the polls, they’d come around. Something would happen—always did. Good things happened to good people. Now was the time to have some faith. ... For Christ’s sake, how about some faith in him? That was the hardest part, when he looked up at the latest guy in front of his desk, lecturing him on the speech. His own guys! He saw the doubt in their eyes: they looked at him like he couldn’t understand, or like he must be protecting himself, like he was part of the problem. They didn’t understand loyalty, either. Well, they’d better start. ... No, that wasn’t fair. It was hard for them, too. They’d hitched their wagons to his, to his future, his campaign, and now it looked like the wheels had fallen off before they’d even started. Jeez, next month they were supposed to change the PAC to a real campaign committee. ...
Bush had a dinner scheduled, the night before the big speech, with Sadruddin Khan, the Aga Khan’s brother, a friend of his, just a lovely guy, played some tennis, spoke like an Englishman ... hell, he almost was an Englishman, a Prince of the Earth in general, smooth, shiny like a brushed otter. What a credit to the Third World! ... But Sadruddin had to cancel, and the VP already had the big table at the Alibi Club, one of the old family haunts. So Bush decided to keep the table: he’d invite the senior staff—bring the wives, make it a family thing—he’d get them together in a difficult time, get the team together ...
And there, in the old townhouse on I Street, behind the unmarked door you wouldn’t even notice unless you knew, unless you’d always known; there, in the old club with its brown, musty air and its walls festooned with tatty memento; there, where the caricature of Prescott Bush held pride of place, the drawing of Pres, singing, with the dome of the Capitol behind him and the notes of “The Whiffenpoof Song” floating around his head, there George Bush tried to tell them why he took that stuff out of the speech. It wasn’t that direct, really, not a planned set of remarks: he just started to talk. And for twenty minutes, without a text, without raising his voice, or chopping the air, or lapsing into any of those gestures he employed to give force to his words when he talked to strangers. Bush made the most eloquent speech:
Loyalty, he said, was something he grew up with. It wasn’t a sin. And he didn’t claim it was always an asset. It was just part of him. Sometimes, it didn’t work to one’s benefit. There was a time in his life, when he was Republican Chairman under Nixon, when he stayed loyal to the end. Nixon had assured him—personally—that he was not involved in Watergate. And Bush got burned. But he knew that was not going to happen now. Ronald Reagan was a good man. He wasn’t going to go through the case with them. But they could take it from him, as they went through this tough time, and turned to the new campaign: he knew they were going to come out all right. And he’d do the best he could—for all of them—loyally. He couldn’t really be any other way.
Afterward, the room at the club was quiet. What more was there to say? People started to drift away. They’d all have early meetings the next day ... Bush was about to go, too, when Khedouri made a last quiet stab, with Bar. It was risky. She might have t
aken his head off—she could do it, too—for trying to get to George Bush through her. She hated that. But she listened that night, as Khedouri told her: Bush had to say something in the speech; it wasn’t against the President; no one wanted to hurt the President; this was a way to help Ronald Reagan, to find a way out, to acknowledge that things ... well, to put it behind them. ...
Bar didn’t say anything. She’d never share her opinions. And no one would ever know what she said, or did not say, that night in the Residence. All they knew was that George Bush had Ed Meese in the office, early the next day, and then the two of them went to the President, and when they came back, Bush had the words: Mistakes were made ... that’s what he’d say. No human beings mentioned in the sentence—nothing more. He’d talked to the President. Mistakes were made. He wrote it into the speech himself. The press copies were already Xeroxed without mention of mistakes—no matter. That would only make it better. People would notice: he would diverge from text. It was great! Fitzwater got on the phone to the big-foot reporters, to the networks, the columnists. They might want to make sure they were there today: Bush had something to say!
And they were all there, in the gallery upstairs, and CNN showed it live ... while Fitzwater spun the story like a mad hula-hoopster: George Bush addressed the nation on the issue that mattered. George Bush said the words everyone had been waiting to hear. George Bush stepped out front and told it like it was!
That night, at a State Department banquet, Bush tried to shrug off congratulations. “Great speech today ... absolutely great.” They were literally patting him on his shoulders, his back.
“He’s had wonn-derful reviews, calls from all over the country,” Bar confided in the receiving line. Bush’s face twisted into his aw-shucks grin: “At least I didn’t get thrown out,” he said.
The world was off his shoulders. He looked terrific. Everybody said so. How did Bar keep him looking so good?
Bar said sweetly: “I beat him ...”
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