Of course, what married people do is their affair. The problem was that the President was telling the agents who trailed them to the pool to “take the rest of the night off.” But Secret Service likes—indeed, requires—Presidents to be in their sight at all times. Bill and his men would retreat to the rhododendron bushes and radio to the sniper teams on the roof. The President espied them and became angry. Last night, said Bill, he had climbed out of the pool, wearing only a scowl, walked over to the nearest bush, dripping wet, and ordered him and the others back to the house.
No matter what your instructions are, it is difficult to disobey a direct order from the President of the United States. Poor Bill and his men withdrew a few more yards and kept a nerve-racked vigil until the President and the First Lady emerged and walked like two moonstruck teenagers, hand in hand, back across the lawn into the White House.
As intimate as I was with the First Family, I could hardly tell the President what he could and could not do with his wife.
The next day I had the White House mess order several hundred pounds of ice, and while the President and his wife entertained their guests at dinner, I personally supervised the dumping of it into the pool. At the same time I instructed the engineering staff to bring the temperature in their bedroom to sixty-five degrees. If my methods sound devious, it should be borne in mind that my only concern was the President and First Lady’s safety.
Operation Deep Freeze, as I dubbed it, was not a success. The President opened all the bedroom windows and ordered the pool heated. My consternation was great.
Finally I resorted to what will sound like a drastic solution. I proposed to Major Arnold that we put a mild sedative in the two ounces of rum the President habitually took before retiring. Arnold was alarmed by the idea. An hour later the Secretary of Defense was on the line asking me what on earth I was thinking of. The nation could ill afford a logy commander-in-chief in the event of nuclear attack.
In the end a special detail of Secret Service agents disguised as rhododendron bushes was posted every summer night by the pool as a means of establishing a “sterile perimeter” around the President. It was not a popular detail among the agents, but our peace of mind was worth the extra effort.
The President realized that there would be sacrifices and certain privations. Here was a man who liked to go hiking by himself in the high country of Idaho. Now when he did that, 435 people (including communications personnel) went along. But some things he especially resented—such as when the press was critical of his wife’s statements.
Mrs. Tucker was a marvelously candid lady, not given to artifice. She was almost incapable of giving a dull interview, and this led to problems, as when she told the Ladies’ Home Journal that she thought Washington “dull.” My heavens, what an uproar! This was followed soon by her declaration in Time that she thought that, as a species, whales were “overrated.”
For all her theatrical flair, she had a practical streak. She confided to me that she often remembered the hullabaloo poor Mrs. Reagan got into when she ordered $209,000 worth of new china—even though it had been paid for privately. Thus when Mrs. O’Dwyer informed her that the White House bed linen was worn thin and full of little holes, she did nothing about it. Several times the President complained to me that he would wake up mornings “in ribbons.” Finally he asked me to purchase an entire new set of linen at his own expense. (Cost: $3,200.) During their time at the White House he was forced to purchase quite a few household items out of his own pocket, including the new drapes in the Queen’s bedroom.
The President had nicknamed their four-and-a-half-year-old boy, Tom, Jr., “Firecracker.” Mrs. Tucker did not like the name and waged a lonely, futile campaign to get the staff to use his Christian name. He was a bright little boy and a natural ham who took easily to the cameras. The night of the final ballot of the New York convention, he sat on the floor of the hotel suite writing on a legal pad with his crayons. When his mother asked him what he was writing, he told her it was the speech he was planning to give that night. His father was delighted; his mother, appalled at this precocious political inclination. (She envisioned for him a career in the arts.) When I asked Firecracker to show it to me, he agreed, but only if I promised not to “fuck it up.” Obviously, he had been spending too much time with Feeley, and I made a note to speak with Feeley about it. It was a drawing of him at a podium. I told him it needed no editing by me. He was genuinely disappointed when it dawned on him that the cause of all the fuss was his father.
But he was certainly a political asset in his own right, and not just photogenically. Contrary to the press reports, it was entirely his own idea to write Soviet Premier Kropatkin to suggest a summit meeting between the two of them. The fact was, he only told one person he was writing the letter, because, as he subsequently explained to his father, he was worried about leaks. The first we learned of it was a frantic 2:00 a.m. phone call from our embassy in Moscow saying Pravda had the full text of the letter in the morning’s edition, with accompanying text suggesting the son of the President of the United States was more eager to sign an arms accord than his father.
During the storm that followed, the President tried to get from him the name of the person to whom Firecracker had dictated the letter. (I suspected Feeley.) But even under the threat of a paddling, Firecracker stood firm and coolly told his father it was a matter of “national security” and on a “need-to-know” basis. The next day Senator Kennedy made his quaint suggestion that the President nominate his son to head the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
When he was not making administration policy, Firecracker was usually getting into trouble. At a state banquet for Prime Minister Thatcher he managed to transfer several raw Chincoteague oysters from a serving dish to Defense Minister Alistair Horne’s chair seat. (Horne, a rather formal Briton, was unamused.)
I believe a lot of it had to do with the fact that he was kept under such tight security. Being popular, he generated quite a number of kidnap threats, and as his mother’s worry about them increased, she tended to let him out of the house less and less. Toward the end he had a Secret Service detail of six.
It was hardly a natural way to grow up. Sometimes he would pop into my office and ask me to ask his mother to let him go to the movies or spend the night with his school friends. I got her to agree to the latter once, and what a logistical nightmare that turned out to be. The Phinneys—the parents of his schoolmate Tad—were very sporting about turning their house into an armed camp for the night.
Despite everything, Firecracker was fond of his Secret Service agents. His teacher was somewhat taken aback when for show-and-tell at school he brought in some empty cartridges and gave a talk comparing the Uzi submachine gun and the M-14. So was his mother. The Secret Service agents adored him, and all kidnap and other threats were investigated with a vengeance.
Firecracker reacted to the tight control on his whereabouts by trying to elude his protectors. This was impossible outside the White House grounds, and pretty difficult even inside, but he became adept at it. He once sneaked out of his room late at night (evidently a family trait). When the First Lady looked in on him and discovered he was missing, she panicked and sounded the alarm. The search involved fifteen Secret Service men, two German shepherds, several members of the household staff, the First Lady, and the President. For almost half an hour the White House reverberated with cries of “Firecracker!” He was finally located, nestled inside a ventilator shaft on the second floor with his hamster, Theodore.
The President’s parents had passed on, but his brother, Dan, was very much alive. The President loved his brother deeply, but Dan’s lifestyle left a lot to be desired. I always said that if Dan Tucker had finished college, he wouldn’t have turned out the way he did, wandering through life aimlessly, becoming involved with so many women, hot-air-ballooning one week, Buddhism the next, singing with a Bluegrass group the next. I know it all sounds like jolly good fun, but at thirty-five a man ought to
have some sort of career. And for me his peregrinations ceased being amusing when he decided, in the midst of the general campaign, to buy a half-share in that Denver drug-paraphernalia business—“head shops,” they are called—named Opiate Of The Masses.
It was bad enough that he ever should have been involved in this kind of sordid business, but Dan’s partner, Mr. Ezekial Brown, who went by the name of “Pillbox,” had a record of drug-related arrests. Of course we did not find this out until everyone else did, the morning the Denver Post broke the story. I remember the moment well.
We were in the Spirit of Greatness, 37,000 feet over Tennessee, when the call came in. It was Roger Bond, our campaign press person in Washington, and he was beside himself. “Oh,” he kept saying as he read from the story, “this is awful, this is just awful.”
Feeley was no island of calm on that occasion either. He sputtered up and down the aisle, saying the man should be behind bars. He resigned several times that day.
We were grateful, naturally, for the precedent set by Billy Carter. I believe the American people are decent and forgiving when it comes to these things; there are a lot of younger brothers out there.
4
OPEN DOOR
State of the Union speech last night. In my view, both historic and an unqualified success, though early newspaper reactions disappointing in the extreme. George Will said President’s call to the nation “more of a parking ticket than a summons.” Have been given charge of the National Metrification Initiative. Awesome responsibility.
—JOURNAL, JAN. 28, 1990
There was an unmistakable air of excitement in the days following the President’s address to the nation. Once again there was a sense of purpose, an aura of new frontiers. I was confident the phrase he used for his legislative package, “The Great Deal,” would kindle the national imagination, and for a while there was talk of a new Camelot on the Potomac.
It was a giddy, busy time of state dinners, weekends at Camp David, and battleship decommissionings. (The President felt he might mollify the Navy, whose budget he had cut so drastically, if he made the decommissionings special occasions by his presence.) We huddled in the Oval late into the evenings. The President talked about his dream of revitalizing the Infrastructure. He spoke too of normalizing relations with Cuba. The air was rich with the pure ether of power, and I took care not to breathe too deeply. I buckled down to work on Metrification, devising a program that would convert American to the metric standard, no easy task. Joan was typically understanding about my late hours. What a good egg she was!
I wanted the President to be free for “creative thinking,” as I called it, so I tried to “run interference” for him by taking on myself some of the more nettlesome problems. Such as Vice President Douglas Reigeluth.
“Bingo,” as he was called by his friends, was a frisky fellow who had his eye fixed on one thing and only one thing: the top job. And, in my view, he wasn’t going to sit around twiddling his thumbs for eight years.
Whenever Secret Service advised us that there was heightened risk in an area the President planned to visit, Bingo would always pipe up cheerfully and say things like “We can’t let ourselves be ruled by fear.” One had to wonder. I was especially put off by the way he comported himself at cabinet meetings, speaking up whenever he pleased, even interrupting the President—the President!—to offer his views on this and that. It had been a marriage of convenience. He had been foisted on us at the convention, and now here he was carrying on as if his opinions mattered. If you ask me, Vice Presidents should be seen and only infrequently heard.
I also felt that Bamford Lleland was a bit too cozy with him. It was he who suggested Bingo be given charge of the President’s Task Force on the Infrastructure. I demurred heavily, convinced as I was that in his lust for influence Bingo would turn it into a personal power base. But I suppose he had to have something to do. To my horror, Lleland suggested he be given Metrification—and on the spurious grounds that it “didn’t matter anyway.” My Initiative. I sent him a stiffly worded memo telling him exactly what I thought of that. I could see that Bamford Lleland and I were not destined to be easy partners in history. The back-stabbing had already begun.
One day the President called me into the Oval and said, “Herb, I want to open this place up, get some fresh air in. It still feels musty from those Reagan years.” I did not at first understand the President’s meaning, but he often spoke elliptically.
“I don’t want to lose touch with the American people,” he said. “Don’t want to isolate myself.”
“Noble sentiment, sir,” I replied.
“If I ever start using ‘we’ instead of ‘I,’ promise me something.” I agreed, of course. “You’ll pull the plug.”
I promised I’d do the honorable thing, though of course in jest. Then he told me that no matter how busy or important his schedule got, he wanted to meet with one “ordinary American per day.”
I was, well, speechless. As admirable an idea as it was, it was hardly practical.
“Just how ordinary?” I asked.
“Ordinary, Herb. I want dirt under their fingernails. I want to be able to smell them.”
This was certainly an unpleasant prospect. I could not help myself. The words came out before I could check them: “And will we be having barn dances in the East Room?”
He did not seem to “get” my sarcasm. “That’s not a bad idea,” he mused. I decided not to pursue it. I was confident, anyway, that he would soon come to his senses. In the meantime I was put in charge of Operation Open Door.
Jean Logan’s reaction was predictable. Hysteria.
While it was true that Jean had made herself invaluable during the campaign putting together fund-raisers, she was a woman of obvious limitations. It was Lleland who persuaded the President to give her the Public Liaison shop. (Feeley suspected the two were having an affair, but of course that was beside the point.) Feels and I had rather hoped he would give her something out of the way, such as the National Endowment for the Arts.
“You can’t be serious!” she screamed at me over the phone.
“Calm yourself,” I said. “We have work to do.”
She was sputtering. “Where are we going to find them?” Social ambidexterity was not one of Jean’s talents. She was a Washington hostess, and, as the popular jingle from the early eighties put it, she was not the sort to reach out and touch someone—unless she had first been introduced.
This was silly. “I don’t know, Jean,” I said tartly. “Maybe your servants know some.”
“Yes,” she said, “I suppose they do.”
Thus began a distinctly unpleasant period of my life. Jean fought me every step of the way. Our ideas of what constituted an ordinary American were quite unalike. Hers dressed in Laura Ashleys and drove Volvos.
My ordinary Americans were ordinary: drab, dull, and fragrant. I saw to that personally. If the President wanted to smell real people, then let him have a good whiff—maybe they might change his mind and cause him to cease this undignified spectacle. I was especially proud of one aromatic chicken-packer from Maryland. “Come as you are!” I told him over the phone.
Jean found my “ordinaries”—as we called them—grotesque, and we tussled constantly. “Why is it,” I said one frustrating afternoon after reading the briefing sheets of her next two weeks’ worth of ordinary Americans, “that four of them went to Harvard, two to Princeton, one to Yale, one to Stanford, one to Vassar, and the other to Wellesley?”
“You know,” she said, twirling her frosted bangs with a forefinger, “I wasn’t sure about the Stanford person.”
“Jean,” I said, “I’m not sure I’m getting through. It’s bad enough they all went to college. But to Harvard, Princeton—”
“What’s wrong with a good education?” she snapped.
After a month I no longer had the energy to argue. I took her off Open Door (she didn’t complain) and turned her work over to Hu Tsang. For a while there was a prep
onderance of Oriental ordinary Americans, a tendency I had to correct.
Hu showed real zest for the job. It was he who set up the Office of Human Background, which processed and evaluated the ordinary Americans, weeding out the extraordinary and subordinary ones. Candidates for presidential interviews had to be carefully screened by Secret Service, then by OHB’s health, economic, and ethnology experts. Only then could they be pronounced truly ordinary.
The press, in its callous, cynical way, was suspicious of the program at first and called it pure symbolism. The President chafed at this baseless criticism. At a press conference he said, “I hear more common sense from these ordinary Americans than I do from reading most editorial pages.” The press shut up after that, and Bob Petrossian, our pollster, reported a one-point rise in the President’s approval rating that week.
A few weeks later the right-wing journal Human Events reported that the Ordinary Americans program had been penetrated by the KGB. Honestly.
The President thrived on his sessions with his ordinaries. When affairs of state were overwhelming and he had spent too many hours in meetings with soft-spoken, pin-striped men, he would buzz for an ordinary American. (I kept one on standby at all times just across the street at the Hay-Adams Hotel.) They were his link to the America he loved and understood, and he always emerged from his sessions with them refreshed and ready once again to take up the heavy mantle of leadership. In time, I confess, even I became a convert. Truly, the President was a visionary man.
But then two unsettling incidents occurred that marked the beginning of the end of ordinary Americans in the White House.
The President was given a two-page “backgrounder” on whomever he was to see that day. This meant that valuable conversational time was not wasted on such irrelevancies as “So, tell me about yourself.”
The White House Mess Page 4