The White House Mess

by Christopher Buckley

  “On my first day in office?”

  * Some found my admiration of a Republican inconsistent with service in a Democratic administration. But Hayes was a man of rectitude who enforced a sound money policy.

  * One Hundred Years of Solicitude, by Manolo Rivas.

  2

  THE STAFF

  Wrote heated letter to Safire of New York Times in response to calling me President’s “bootblack” in column. Joan very upset.

  —JOURNAL, JUNE 4, 1989

  I confess that Bamford Lleland IV and I did not hit it off from the start. Sig Beller, our campaign manager, brought him in after the New Hampshire primary when we realized that the Governor now stood a chance to be elected President. His arrival did much to change the flavor of the campaign. He fired fifteen people the first two days. When I found out that he had tried to sack me, I confronted him and gave him a rather large piece of my mind. He was apologetic, but I had no doubt it was because he realized by then that I was “untouchable” owing to my long, personal relationship with the First Family.

  Bam Lleland was an adenoidal Bostonian of considerable (inherited) wealth and breeding, with perhaps a little overmuch of the latter. He was a congeries of Eastern affectations: hair pomaded straight back, suspenders, lizardskin briefcase, bow tie, Porcellian Club cufflinks, clear-rimmed glasses, and a show-offy knowledge of French menus. He had increased his wealth by marrying into more, with the result he was able to afford such trifles as his 130-foot motor yacht, the Compassion. This unfortunate manifestation of conspicuous consumption he kept in Norfolk, Virginia, the waters in nearby Chesapeake Bay not being deep enough to accommodate it. It was a most maladroit political symbol, given President Tucker’s egalitarian philosophy. Lleland always referred to it as “my wife’s boat.” More than once Feeley and I tried to persuade the President to get Lleland to get rid of the wretched thing.

  Marvin Edelstein was another Ivy Leaguer, a Yale professor of political science whose book, Toward a Grain of SALT, had made a deep impression on the Governor. Marvin was only thirty-nine, very young to be given such an important post as director of the National Security Council. He was brilliant, with a tendency to arrogance; perhaps that explained why he got along so well with Lleland. They seemed to speak the same language. Despite this, I was fond of Marvin. In a way I felt a bit sorry for him. He was a transparent young man. He wanted to be respected; more than that, I think, he wanted to be liked.

  Marvin was very taken with the mystique that went with his job. He carried his penchant for secrecy to great lengths. Whenever we spoke over a non-SECURE telephone line, he would resort to a code incomprehensible to anyone but himself or a skilled cryptanalyst. Before he left on one of his secret missions, he would give us one-page keys to whatever code he had chosen for that particular mission. Invariably, no one paid attention to them.

  The first time he tried it on me, the system did not work well. One day my secretary told me there was a call for me from a “Maximum Effect.” I assumed it was one of the deranged people who every now and then penetrate the White House switchboard. I simply told her to hang up. She did, but within minutes this Maximum Effect fellow was back on the line. “He says it’s urgent,” said Barbara. I told her I couldn’t be bothered and to inform whoever it was that there were severe consequences to tying up important government lines. A minute or so later Barbara buzzed me again.

  “What is it, Barbara?” This was most annoying.

  “It’s Mr. Edelstein calling from Cincinnati,” she said.

  I got on. Marvin was nearly hysterical. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “What’s wrong with your secretary? It’s me!”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “How is everything, Marvin?”

  “Don’t call me that!” He cringed. “The code. You forgot the code.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve been very busy.”

  He was on his way to Havana to meet with Fidel Castro. For reasons of secrecy he had insisted on flying there via Cincinnati, though that seemed out of the way to me.

  “Well, how’s it going?” I asked.

  “I met with Cucumber,” he said. “The dressing was delicious.”

  I rummaged through my drawer for his key. But I could not find the key.

  “Good,” I demurred. “It was a good lunch?”

  There was a pause. “You don’t know what I’m talking about. Do you?”

  “I seem to have misplaced the key, Marvin. It must be here somewhere. Hold on, I’ll find it.”

  “Never mind,” he said. “Never mind. I’ll be in touch via Crown. Over and out.”

  “Roger,” I said, thinking it would help.

  I don’t mean to make light of Marvin’s undercover diplomacy or of the need for secrecy. The latter is a real and vital part of the former. But Marvin’s system did produce some confusion.

  Next to me, Mike Feeley had been with the President the longest, having joined the campaign well ahead of all the johnny-come-latelies. Feels, as we called him, had come up through the hawsepipe, and had served briefly—four days—as Geraldine Ferraro’s press secretary. (He had the most unpleasant memories of that experience, apparently.) He was a pugnacious fellow of Irish descent, with a florid complexion and unruly hair. (I often had to ask him to brush it before a press conference.) Feels was not a man of delicate sensibilities. I suppose press secretaries can’t afford them. His trademark was his propensity to resign. His cries of “This is a fucking outrage!” were a familiar sound of the Spirit of Greatness, our converted Boeing 707. One day he resigned twice. His foibles amused the Governor, and he was very good with the collection of jackals and unscrupulous swine that make up the White House press corps; ladies excluded, of course.

  Any White House staff is divided into two classes: those who have access to the President and those who don’t. Access is the coinage of the realm. Those who have it do not take it lightly. Hal Jasper, Assistant to the President for Communications, was so worried about being “cut out of the loop,” as they say, that he kept coming to work throughout a severe bout of the chicken pox. He applied a cosmetic to hide the unsightly skin eruption. Poor Hal was convinced that if the President could manage without his “input” for even a week, he might begin to consider him dispensable. Unfortunately, he managed to infect the President. Though extremely generous by temperament, the President was not pleased, and that was the end of Hal’s access.

  The various offices, or “shops,” within the White House are not unlike medieval dukedoms or baronies. They seem to spend as much time conniving and plotting against each other as they do in running the country. This is sad, but a fact of White House life. I did my best to keep the tensions among the domestic, press, foreign-policy, and other shops to a minimum. In some ways that was a thankless task. I was surprised at the lengths—or depths—to which some would go.

  One morning, for instance, my phone rang at 4:30 a.m. The voice identified itself as that of the duty officer in the Situation Room, and said the President had instructed senior staff to assemble immediately in the Situation Room at the White House. Alarmed, and thinking that my President needed me, I dashed to get there, driving at foolhardy speed. When I arrived at the Situation Room, I found only the duty officer, who yawningly informed me that the President was asleep and all was well.

  My sense of humor is as good as the next person’s, but this kind of childish prank has no place at the White House. I asked the Attorney General to have the FBI investigate the incident and issued a very sharply worded memo to the junior staff warning that such pranks would in the future be grounds for dismissal.

  In time I began to think of myself as a shock absorber. I would get home to Joan and she would say, “Dear, you look like a shock absorber.” “Yes, Joan,” I would say, “I feel like one.” Of course, I was speaking metaphorically.

  On one occasion the people in Lleland’s shop had my security clearance reclassified so that I suddenly found myself being denied access to documents of which I
had urgent need. When I confronted him, Lleland suavely denied any culpability on the part of his staff and chucked it off to some bureaucratic gremlin. I was not amused.

  They say that revenge is a dish best served cold, and as it happened I was perfectly situated to provide such a meal, since the White House mess, run by the Navy, was under my direct control. Every time Lleland’s myrmidons visited some fresh humiliation upon me, they found themselves getting very slow service, overcooked food, and watery Coca-Cola.

  Perquisites are a key part of the White House, and staff members measure their importance by them. Access, limousines, tennis-court privileges, mess privileges—these are the talismans of power. Frankly, I wish there had been less attention paid to who made the Air Force One manifest than to running an efficient operation.

  My decision to have the White House tennis court grassed over was due to an incident one Sunday morning in the summer of 1989. Because of a scheduling error, Jean Logan, Assistant to the President for Public Liaison, and Marvin Edelstein arrived with their respective tennis partners to play at the same time. Heated discussion ensued, followed, apparently, by name-calling. By the time my phone rang, at ten o’clock on an otherwise pleasant Sunday morning, Jean was in a state.

  “He’s doing this just to get at me!” she shrieked. “Jews don’t even play tennis!”

  Jean, a graduate of the exclusive Madeira School, had led a sheltered life, when you came right down to it.

  I was attempting to calm her down when my other phone rang. I put Jean on hold. It was Marvin.

  “You tell that anti-Semitic bitch to get her tits off that tennis court,” he said.

  The situation seemed to require Solomonic action. “I suppose doubles would be out of the question?” I asked. Yes. Marvin had reserved the court first. It was by rights his, he said.

  If Jean Logan’s ego was delicate as tissue paper, her temper was a hummingbird’s wing. She exploded at me, called me an unpleasant name, and told me she was taking her problem “to the top.”

  “I’m sure the President will be fascinated,” I said sarcastically.

  I was drawn into no less than one dozen tennis-court disputes that summer. By August my patience was exhausted. At my orders, workers arrived at nine o’clock one night and by dawn all that remained of the tennis court was lawn. If this did nothing to enhance my popularity, I still think I did the right thing. We had a country to run.

  Every senior White House official needs an “enforcer”—to use the colorful expression—to make sure that his decisions are implemented. My first executive assistant was Hu Tsang, a thirty-three-year-old graduate of the Kennedy School. He brought to the job a number of attractive qualities, to say nothing of an imposing physical presence. He would arrive each morning at 5:30 and would practice his martial-arts regimen on the South Lawn. It took some time for the uniformed Secret Service guards to accustom themselves to this.

  Hu did not have an easy time of it at first. Lleland’s deputies, Phetlock and Withers, treated him condescendingly and called him “Rice Bowl.” Hu brought this to my attention. I called Phetlock and Withers in and told them I had given Hu permission to use his Tae Kwon Do on them the next time they called him that; presently the nicknaming ceased.

  Despite his eventual betrayal of me—for which I have forgiven him—Hu was a superb implementer and an outstanding public servant. I was deeply saddened to learn of his recent conviction, but I am confident that the appeals process will fully exonerate him and that he will someday return to government. It would be a great shame if young people such as Hu were discouraged from seeking careers in public service.

  Betty Sue Scoville, the President’s personal secretary, had been with him since his first term in Boise, and she worshiped him. Betty was convinced that history would regard her boss as the greatest President of the twentieth century. Once, after she had had too many martinis, she revealed to me that she kept a “little museum,” as she called it, of personal articles of his, such as handkerchiefs, a sweatband, pens, a contact lens, cigarette butts, awaiting the day the Smithsonian might want them. I made her promise me not to reveal the existence of her “museum” to anyone. If the press got hold of it, she could expect no mercy from those piranhas.

  Everyone who comes to work at the White House must undergo a rigorous security check by the FBI. These take months and cost the taxpayers thousands of dollars apiece. My experience was that they are by and large a waste of time and money and weed out only institutionalized psychopaths and incompetent KGB agents. If the security checks really worked, we wouldn’t, for instance, have had the problems we did with Mitch Buxbaum.

  Mitch had worked hard on the campaign, and I was enthusiastic when Feeley recommended him for the position of Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Media Relations and Planning. But, however diligently he had performed his tasks during the campaign, the fact remained that he had put himself through university by acting in pornographic movies. You would think that a full field investigation by the FBI would have turned this up if the Washington Post could. When I finally read the FBI report, all I found to indicate that he had made his living by undressing in front of a sixteen-millimeter movie camera was: “Active in college film society.” Indeed he had been. The President’s refusal to fire Mitch may have been admirable in principle, but it provided elements on the Right with live ammunition which they did not hesitate to fire.

  Speechwriters are not expected to have the same moral values as other people in political life. For the most part, they do not attend church as often as non-writers do, and many of them entertain lifestyles which render them unsuitable for public office. Very frequently, speechwriters are recruited from the ranks of journalism, which accounts for a great deal.

  The FBI gave our chief speechwriter, Charlie Manganelli, a clean bill of health. I was delighted, since for some time I had suspected his sudden mood shifts had more to do with drug usage than with the vicissitudes of the artistic temperament. The President too had had his suspicions, so that when I told him of the FBI’s clearance, he was gratified. He relied on Charlie, and enjoyed his company.

  When Charlie developed his drinking problem, I was inclined to put it down to pressures of the job—which were admittedly heavy—and to urge him to seek help. What I did not know at the time was that his drinking problem stemmed from his drug problem. When he casually informed me of this one day during a heart-to-heart talk in the White House mess, I was aghast. I don’t think he quite realized the implications. I arranged for him to enter a very private rehabilitation program at Bethesda Naval Hospital. I told the supervising physician that if one word of Charlie’s problem leaked out I would see to it personally that he spent the remainder of his Navy career tending to sick seals on Diego García. I was always very fond of Charlie. He still writes me every now and then from his ashram in Mexico, when the mails are running.

  3

  FIRST FAMILY

  Have been detailed to cope with our First Brother problem. Am not sanguine.

  —JOURNAL, OCT. 5, 1989

  The first time I saw Jessica Heath was at Cinema 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 in Boise. I don’t see many movies (except ones with Alec Guinness in them), but Joan enjoys them, so once a month we used to go on a Saturday night. I confess that I found the violence and sex in Midnight Water off-putting, but I must admit that the future Mrs. Tucker was, as they say, a bit of all right.

  There were those who counseled the Governor not to get involved with an actress, but not me. From the first moment I met her, I knew this was the woman for him: young, vibrant, beautiful, and quite independent-minded. And a temper, too. All for the best, a very modern woman. The Governor certainly would never be bored.

  We became friends. She knew she could always count on me, and she could. Herbert Wadlough is nothing if not reliable. On those occasions when she and the Governor were not speaking, she would sometimes call me, and I would go over to the residence and listen. I enjoyed our sessions very much. It does he
lp to get things out.

  Though excited at the prospect of moving to Washington, she was also nervous. “Not to worry,” I told her. “I’ll be there.”

  It should come as no surprise to those who have seen her films, especially Minnesota Hots, that the First Lady was a deeply sensuous woman. That is perhaps a little unusual in First Ladies, and the White House residence staff was slightly scandalized.

  Several weeks into the administration Mrs. O’Dwyer, the rather formal, sixty-year-old Irish woman who headed the household staff, came to see me. She was in a state of agitation, kneading her hands together and going on at length about how “irregular” it all was and how the rest of the staff were “beside themselves.” She couldn’t quite bring herself to say exactly what it was that was causing all the trouble, although she didn’t have to. I could guess.

  I explained that the President and his wife were still in the first blush of love and that we all ought to be grateful to be working for such a happy couple. The staff, I said, should treat this as a source of contentment, not consternation.

  “But at twelve o’clock noon, Mr. Wadlough?” she said. “In the living room—on the floor?”

  Surprised though I was to hear this, I cleared my throat and suggested that in the future she and the rest of the staff err on the side of discretion and knock before entering the family quarters. At this she drew herself up stiffly and said if it was discretion that was called for, it certainly wasn’t on the part of her staff.

  During the first summer of the administration, an unusually warm one, Bill Dale, the Secret Service shift leader, came into my office one day. Bill was one of the best men on the detail, and one of the President’s favorites. He clearly felt awkward as he sat in my office telling me “an unusual security problem” had arisen. I told him we were all family here and not to be embarrassed.

  He told me the President and First Lady were leaving the family quarters in the small hours of the night, dressed in nightgowns, and splashing about in the new swimming pool on the South Lawn. I gathered from Bill’s pained recitation that they were doing more than just splashing about.