Major Arnold had been keeping tabs on the recent outbreak of dengue fever—he’d had conversations with Leslie about it. Now Leslie, acting on his own authority, had blithely informed Docal’s deputy that all Cuban officials to come into contact with the President would have to be fumigated by a U.S. Department of Health official. I told the fuming Docal that there had undoubtedly been a failure of communication, and not to worry.
My next call was to Leslie. “Have you taken leave of your senses?” I screamed into the phone. “You can’t expect high Cuban officials to allow themselves to be sprayed!”
“Calm down, Herb. You ever seen a case of dengue? Great big, nasty blotches—”
“Now you listen here, Leslie. There will be no spraying of Fidel Castro, or of any Cuban. If I so much as see you with a can of deodorant, I will have you hanged. Do you hear me?”
“Uh-huh.”
I don’t like to use threats, but they were the only language he understood.
8
24 NORTH, 82 WEST, HIKE
Myself, I consider the High Seas Summit a masterpiece of diplomacy and a great feather in TNT’s bonnet. Lleland trying to blame the whole fiasco on me. Am disturbed that Marvin should take his side. Joan a great support throughout historic episode.
—JOURNAL, MARCH 15, 1991
I remember the day as if it were yesterday: the clear skies flecked with small clouds, crisp morning breeze, the deep blue color of the Florida Straits, the whop-whop sound of Marine One landing on the huge American flag painted onto the deck of the Diefenbaker; the arrival moments later of the Soviet-made Mi-26 HALO containing President Castro and the Cuban leadership. The anthems, the review of honor guards. (I must say that I thought the Cuban guard a bit tatty.) It was an awesome sight to behold.
We were steaming in a circle, surrounded by a small armada of U.S. and Cuban naval vessels. Off on the horizon was the Soviet guided-missile destroyer Sovremennyy. Beneath the waters the nuclear-attack submarine Chattanooga prowled the deep.
We were steaming in a circle for a reason. Cuba wanted the Diefenbaker to steam south, toward Cuba. The U.S. wanted her to bear north. East was ruled out by us, west by the Cubans, out of deference to the Soviet Union. Marvin had had to come down to Havana with an admiral and a meteorologist. After tense negotiations the idea of steaming in a circle was proposed. The Cubans accepted, but demanded it be in a clockwise direction because, as Foreign Minister Galvan said, they wanted to set the clock forward. At this point the President declared the whole situation “silly” and said all right.
That El Comandante was smitten by the First Lady was immediately apparent. I must say, I had seldom seen her look so beautiful. (The sea has always complemented Mrs. Tucker.) She wore her peach suit with the ruffle neck and ivory stockings; not a sailor’s eye was off her the entire time.
El Comandante bowed low and planted a kiss on her hand. She accepted his arm and accompanied him on a review of his Moncada Battalion troops, President Tucker following docilely behind. It was an egregious breach of protocol.
Lleland came over, bookended by the beady-eyed Phetlock and Withers, and complained, but there was hardly anything I could do.
By the time the reviewing was over, El Comandante had discovered that Mrs. Tucker spoke Spanish and was even more taken with her. The President was grinding his mandibles, but forcing himself to smile.
Luncheon was more of a success. There had been a great deal of wrangling over the menu. The Cubans wanted their own (revolting) native cuisine—greasy pork and fried plantains. We pushed for a good, hearty North American meal: roast turkey and all the trimmings. They counterproposed chicken, but then an impasse was reached when the Cubans insisted it be boiled and served with black beans. We counter-counterproposed Southern-frying it and serving it with new potatoes and green peas. Just when it looked like a mealless summit, the Canadians offered to undertake the catering. This was acceptable to both parties, and so we sat down to a lunch of smoked rainbow trout and Melton Mowbray pie, accompanied by Okanagan Valley Pinot Noir and Zinfandel. I am quite partial myself to Melton Mowbray pie, and I was told the Okanagan wines were “drinkable,” which is, I suppose, what wine should be.
The President and Castro were seated next to each other, with the First Lady on the Premier’s left. Castro began by telling Mrs. Tucker he had seen all her films. This seemed greatly to distress the President, what with the First Lady’s celebrated déshabillé scenes in Minnesota Hots. Except for a few opening pleasantries with the President, El Comandante spent most of the lunch talking with her. By the time dessert arrived, I feared for the President’s enamel, so hard was he grinding his teeth.
At lunch’s end the President stood and spoke for eleven minutes—about the importance of the day, the need for dialogue and understanding, and ended with his pledge to “forge vibrant links” between our two countries. It was an admirably delivered talk, I thought, and quite appropriate to the occasion.
El Comandante’s people had assured us he would speak for eleven minutes as well; that had been all hammered out in advance. He was known to give five-hour speeches, so particular attention was given to this detail. Eleven minutes, Docal had assured me.
As everyone who has watched the live broadcast remembers, El Comandante spoke for fifty-five minutes. Twenty minutes into what became known as “El Discurso Enorme” (literally, “the enormous speech”) President Tucker’s face assumed a passivity that a volcanic eruption could not have disturbed. He did not even flinch when Castro got to the part about America’s “history of felonious foreign policy” vis-à-vis Cuba.
The networks were furious too, since they were locked into live coverage and El Comandante was cutting into the soap-opera time. In sum, no one was happy—except for El Comandante, whose protracted expatiations inflicted incalculable damage on the administration. There was not much discussion aboard Marine One on the flight back to Key West that afternoon.
BOOK THREE
MID-TERM BLUES
9
MORNINGS AFTER
The President is cranky of late.
—JOURNAL, APRIL 4, 1991
The year that followed the High Seas Summit was not a happy one for those working at the White House. The scandal at the Interior Department, the mid-term elections, the Soviet invasion of Pakistan, the President’s brother’s conversion to Islam—it was one thing after another.
The President was working grueling eighteen-hour days trying to save the Great Deal. But with the loss of so many Democratic seats in the House in the November ’90 elections, he had to fight like a bobcat to save this far-reaching legislation from the long Republican knives; nothing so seemed to please those eager, well-scrubbed freshman faces as the prospect of disemboweling it of its most progressive elements.
It was during this period that the President began to despair of his cabinet.
Cabinet meetings had grown so unproductive and depressing that we had to plead with the President to schedule them. We would have to remind him that one of his campaign promises had been a return to cabinet government.
“My cabinet,” he grumbled, “gives me a pain.”
Secretary of State Holt’s perfervid desire for a breakthrough in the Middle East led him to pay little attention to the rest of the world. Thus the news that one third of Pakistan had been rendered radioactive seemed hardly to disturb him, except insofar as it “impacted” on Jordan.
At one meeting he launched into a forty-five-minute disquisition on an opaque nuance made in a speech by Foreign Minister Rubal of South Yemen. The President’s eyes looked like eggs in aspic. Feeley, exasperated well beyond his five-minute attention span, crushed his tenth cigarette of the meeting and declared, “Mr. Secretary, with all due respect, this doesn’t amount to a sockful of shit.”
Holt’s face turned the color of an overripe pomegranate. The President reprimanded Feeley, but with a mildness suggesting sympathy. He agreed with the assessment.
Then in September the Post
broke the story about Interior Secretary Chief Fred Eagle. That was a particularly black day for those of us who had urged the President to take on the Chief at Interior. Indeed, I had been his prime sponsor, believing as I did—and still do—that this country’s treatment of our Red Brethren is its saddest chapter.
The press distorted many aspects of the case, but the nut of it was that as a regional commissioner in the Bureau of Indian Affairs he had sold off an ancestral Sioux burial ground to a South Dakota Rooty-Toot Root Beer franchise. It did not mitigate the controversy that the Chief was a member of the Cheyenne, historical enemies of the Sioux.
The President stood by the Chief, though privately he was furious. More than once he made tart comments in my direction, such as “Where do you find talent like that, Wadlough?” It was a period of great stress for the Chief, what with the special prosecutor and the Senate hearings. We squeaked through, but it took its toll on him. He became irregular in his sobriety and would launch into disconnected, hortatory speeches about such matters as space exploration.
It was all we could do to prevail on the President to hold one cabinet meeting every two months. And even those he approached as if they were trips to the dentist.
The fact was that the President had changed in two years. He was less patient. His Great Deal zeal had been frustrated by the Congress, that cacophonous body of do-nothings. Every time he announced a bold initiative, a hundred obstacles were thrown in his way. He wanted things done, not “acted on.” Anyone who has worked in government will appreciate the difference.
I believe that explains his short-lived proposal, following his moving visit to an inner-city drug-rehabilitation center, to have the government grant letters of marque and reprisal to private individuals, authorizing them to sink or shoot down any ship or airplane carrying drugs into the United States.
Now, letters of marque and reprisal had not been granted since the War of 1812, when privateers were empowered to plunder British vessels. Attorney General Struzzi, a strict civil-libertarian, was visibly shaken by the President’s idea, though he understood that Congress would never go along with such a program.
Relations with Congress were, in fact, at a very low point. When Senator Bliffen of Louisiana denounced our Metrification Initiative as “un-American,” not one of his colleagues rose to protest this frankly absurd charge.
Tim Jenkins, our congressional liaison person, thought we should lay on more candlelight dinners for Congressmen and their wives. The President did not think highly of the proposal. “We’ve had so goddam many candlelight dinners,” he said, “my eyes are failing.”
During a budget session in the Oval he grew heated when told there wasn’t enough money to fund a Department of the Infrastructure. When someone suggested he might shave a few more billion off the defense budget, he grumped, “If I cut any more out of the Pentagon, the Navy’s going to have to go back to tall ships.” Relations with Admiral Boyd of the Joint Chiefs were not very good either.
I had noticed that the President had started to quote conversationally from his speeches. Though disturbing, this was not without precedent. Historians have recorded President Kennedy’s tendency to ask his wife, “Ask not when is dinner; ask what is for dinner.” And at least TNT had not yet begun referring to himself in the third person.
The President had always enjoyed self-deprecation in his speeches, little touches such as apologizing for “ruining your dinner” in an evening talk. Charlie Manganelli, our chief speechwriter, always included such a self-deprecatory line. But now one day he called me in a state. He’d just gotten a speech draft back from the President, and the President had X’d out the self-deprecatory line, writing in the margin: “Unpresidential—let’s drop this sort of thing.”
“Herb,” said Charlie, “tell me. Is the man going Nixon on me?”
I told him the President was under some stress at the moment.
“Stress?” said Charlie. “Stress? I’ve got four writers who haven’t seen their wives in three months. I spend more time on that plane than I do on the ground. I’m getting too old for this, Herb. One of my researchers—Julie—fainted last week on the West Exec. If the man wants less stress, tell him to stop making so fucking many speeches!”
It was true the speech schedule had been heavy, but the President felt firmly that the worse things were going in Washington, the more important it was to be on the road, taking his message to the people.
Three days later the President looked up from a pile of papers and scowled. “What’s gotten into Manganelli?” he demanded.
“Sir?”
“Read this.”
It was Charlie’s latest speech, the one for the Eleanor Roosevelt Society Dinner. It began: “I don’t deserve this honor you’re bestowing on me this evening. The way I’ve been screwing things up lately, about all I deserve is early retirement.”
I must admit it was extreme.
“You tell him the President is furious. One more chance, then he goes back to writing ad copy for yogurt.”
There it was—the third person. Oh, dear, I thought. Not a good sign at all.
Jovially, I told him that Charlie was just using a formula that had served him well in the past.
“This is the White House, Herb.” He sounded sincere. “I’m just thinking of the office.”
“I see,” I said.
“You’ve got to have respect for the office.”
“Yes.”
“Manganelli has no respect for the office.”
“He—”
“What does he think this is? The Kiwanis? They’re giving me the Eleanor Roosevelt Medal.” He gestured with his hand at the text in my hands as though it were a stray dog that had wandered in. “Tell him I need a completely new draft. Tell him a completely new approach.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And tell him to stop quoting John Kenneth Galbraith. I want new ideas.”
By now it had become obvious that the Vice President had his own agenda. His speeches—which I now insisted on reading beforehand—rarely made any mention of the President. A historian of the future, in fact, might have inferred from reading them that Reigeluth was the Chief Executive, such was the proliferation of references to “my vision for America.”
Admittedly, the man had a dynamic speaking style and was a first-rate fund-raiser for the party. But when his interview with Ann Devroy of the Gannett newspapers came out, the one in which he said he wasn’t sure if he’d run again in ’92 because he might want to spend a few years “getting back in touch with the people,” we decided we had a bona-fide problem on our hands. We also learned that certain elements at the Democratic National Committee who envisioned a Reigeluth run in ’96 were quietly encouraging him to put some distance between himself and Tucker.*
Thus it was decided to send the Vice President on a series of foreign trips to such countries as Mauritius, Oman, and Sardinia.
“Let him get back in touch with them,” sniffed Lleland. The Vice President took to buttonholing people in the West Wing and telling them he had been misquoted, but it was a bit late for that.
* It is not true, as Lleland alleges in his book, that I tapped Reigeluth’s phone. I had good contacts at the DNC, and I hardly would have had to resort to such an underhanded method.
10
THE MUFFIN INCIDENT
Disturbing incident this morning in the Roosevelt Room. Doubt such undignified behavior ever displayed there since LBJ’s time. Spoke with Hardesty about the margarine stain. He appalled.
—JOURNAL, JUNE 25, 1991
I sensed the showdown which was coming.
For some months now Lleland and his henchmen had been feeding tidbits of prevarication to the press, saying the President was displeased with my handling of the Cora Smith business, the Cuban business, and so on. I’m surprised he didn’t blame me for the weather. While I didn’t doubt the President had better things to worry about—and he did—I found these vile canards distressing. And of course Jo
an was extremely upset by them.
The President, once contemptuous of flattery, now submitted to it; enjoyed it, even. Lleland and Marvin were ample purveyors of it, as were their deputies. Withers, I noticed, had adopted the royal custom of walking backward when he left the Oval Office. I resolved to have a real heart-to-heart with the President. But, to my dismay, every time I proposed we have “a chat,” he said he was too busy. “Next week,” he’d say, and then forget.
In all fairness to him, it was not a happy time. His marriage was under a strain. (The First Lady and I still had our little talks, and I was able to infer from them that all was not well at home. She spoke of taking a “sabbatical” to make another film. I tried to be both encouraging and discouraging at the same time.)
The President had always had a temper, but as Governor he had taken bio-feedback treatments for it, with happy results. Now, however ever, he had lost the knack of regulating his heartbeat—where was the time to practice?—and it showed.
During an interview he told columnist John Lofton of the Washington Times to “go soak [his] head” in response to his antagonistically phrased question about “destroying America’s economy and defense.” Lofton went with it, as they say, and appeared on TV shows playing the tape of the President screaming at him and ordering him out of the Oval Office.
A few days after the incident we were in the Roosevelt Room having our customary senior-staff breakfast. Lleland was there, as were Marvin, Feeley, myself. The “Big Four,” as we were called by the press.
Feeley had spent a rough couple of days coping with the fallout from the President’s ill-advised behavior. He called the President a “jackass.”
Now, if anyone other than Feels had said this, I would have been on my feet demanding a retraction. But Feels was—Feels. There was no question of his loyalty to Thomas Tucker. He loved the man almost as much as I did.
The White House Mess Page 7