The White House Mess

by Christopher Buckley

  But in reply Lleland sniffed, gave the top of his soft-boiled egg a smart whack, and said, “I hardly think that’s appropriate. You’re talking about the President of the United States.”

  “Bamford,” said Feeley, “why don’t you sit on that egg?”

  Lleland put down his spoon. “I beg your pardon?” he said.

  Feeley repeated what he had said, louder this time.

  “I will not tolerate that kind of talk from a staff member,” said Lleland. He made it sound as if he were talking about the pantry maid.

  Feeley laughed. “You’re just arrogant enough to think we’re working for you. Well, Bamford, this isn’t the crew of that barge of yours.”

  Lleland smiled superciliously. “Actually, it’s a motor yacht, Feeley. But I wouldn’t expect someone of your background to understand the difference.”

  “I’ll tell you what it is,” said Feeley, flushing. “It’s a fucking disaster. All that communication gear—is that so you could stay in touch with E. F. Hutton?”

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” I interjected. The President was due any moment in the Oval Office a few feet away. It wouldn’t have been very seemly for him to overhear all the shouting.

  “Now look here, Feeley,” said Lleland, his lips whitening. (His lips lost color whenever he became annoyed. Feeley said this was common among upper-class Episcopalians and that it was due to centuries of inbreeding.) “You run a sloppy operation and it shows. It showed three days ago. Lofton’s a nut and he shouldn’t have been there. If you want to take your inadequacies out on me, I’m quite indifferent. But if you’re going to take them out on the President, then you will have to go through me. And I promise you that will be an un-puh-leasant process.” He finished the sentence with a slight raising of the eyebrows.

  Feeley leaned back in his chair. “Sloppy?” he said.

  “That’s what I said,” Lleland replied, returning to his egg.

  “You know what’s sloppy?”

  Lleland did not answer as he excavated a spoonful of yolk.

  “This is sloppy.” With that Feeley hurled his English muffin. It flew sideways past my nose, curving in the manner of a Frisbee, missing its target and striking the magnificent oil painting by Bierstadt, “A Look Up Yosemite Valley.”

  No one spoke. We looked at the Bierstadt. A small trickle of margarine glistened on the surface, just above the Indian village.

  Feeley went over and dabbed at it with the corner of his napkin. Edelstein cleared his throat and looked at Lleland. Lleland looked at Edelstein.

  “You know,” I said, trying to get conversation going again, “I’ve never really noticed that painting before. It’s quite beautiful. I mean, the way the light hits the sides of the mountains.” (I have always felt that mirth is a good way of releasing tension.) Feeley started laughing. So did Marvin, briefly. I joined in. But my comment seemed to have piqued Lleland. He called me a fool and stormed out.

  After breakfast I went off to talk to Hardesty about having the margarine removed from the Bierstadt before it congealed and required the ministrations of an expert. He kept demanding to know how it got there. Attempting to jolly him, I told him I suspected the Soviets. He was not amused.

  When we met with the President shortly afterward, Feeley told him what an unmitigated misery his life had been since the President told Lofton to soak his head.

  “Lofton pisses me off,” said the President. “He questioned my patriotism.”

  “Yeah,” said Feels, “well, now everyone’s questioning your sanity.”

  A year ago the President would have laughed, but now there was not even a smile, only an abrupt change of subject.

  11

  LOST ACCESS

  Things not working out as I expected. Joan taking it well, but I fear most for the children. It is hard when your father is a laughingstock.

  —JOURNAL, JULY 7, 1991

  Things changed in the days following the muffin episode. The President stopped buzzing me. On a trip to Omaha my usual seat on Air Force One was occupied by Phetlock. I raised a stink about it and got my seat back, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. Lleland’s people didn’t speak to me the whole way out and back. I was made to feel like a petulant child who has flown into a temper because his favorite toy was removed. During the flight some cables on the deteriorating Bermuda situation were being passed around. When I asked to see them, I was told they were classified THUNDERSTORM and that I was only cleared for DRIZZLE material. I hotly replied that as a member of the senior staff I had never been denied access to important cables. “What,” I said to Lleland, “if the President wants my views on it?”

  I did not like his smile. “Oh,” he said, “I wouldn’t worry about that.”

  Feeley too was being “cut out of the loop,” as they say, and he was not at all happy.

  I decided the air was in need of cleaning. When we got back to Washington, I called Betty Sue Scoville, the President’s personal secretary, and asked her to set up an appointment for me.

  When I had not heard from her three hours later, I called back. She told me the President had asked “what it’s in reference to.” This was quite bizarre. Impetuously I replied, “The health of the Republic!” It was wrong of me, but it just came out.

  Surprised, she said she would “get back” to me. The next day she called to say the President had a “window” in his afternoon schedule.

  “Splendid,” I said.

  “Between three thirty-five and three forty,” she said.

  Five minutes? Oh, this was iniquitous. I, who had spent hours in the Oval brainstorming with the commander-in-chief, now limited to five minutes.

  He greeted me warmly enough, but there was an air of distraction that I did not recognize.

  “Yes, Herb. You wanted to see me.”

  I asked him if things were running smoothly. He seemed to avoid my eyes. “I’m having a hard time concentrating,” he said.

  I asked if he shouldn’t resume his bio-feedback sessions, but he became impatient.

  “We’ll have to limit staff contacts. I’m getting flooded with details. Too many details. I shouldn’t have had to get involved with that Jacuzzi matter. I shouldn’t have had to deal with that.”

  In a memo I’d enclosed several Jacuzzi brochures to see which model he wanted.

  He said, “From now on everything goes through Lleland.”

  It was as if someone had suddenly placed several telephone directories on my chest. I had difficulty breathing. He continued avoiding my blank gaze.

  “It’s temporary. Maybe. And in no way is it a comment on you, Herb. You’ve done a fine job. A really wonderful job.”

  It sounded as if I were being fired.

  “Herb,” he said, “we were wondering—”

  We?

  “—if in the meantime you might help out in the East Wing. Jessie’d be awfully grateful. You two get along so well.”

  The East Wing. The First Lady’s domain.

  “ ‘In the meantime’?”

  “Oh, absolutely. Just till she finds a new chief of staff. Thorndyke didn’t work out too well.”

  “No,” I said. “No, he didn’t.”

  “She thinks the world of you, Herb. I don’t need to tell you that.”

  Then why was he telling me that? I thought it best to ask flat out: “Of course officially I’ll be staying on here—in the West Wing?”

  “Uh, yeah.” Not what I’d call a ringing reassurance.

  With this he began talking about the “chemistry” in the West Wing.

  “I’m not happy with the chemistry, Herb. I think a lot of our problems are chemical.”

  “Chemical?” I said.

  “Yeah. Chemical.”

  I nodded. Then shook my head. “No,” I said. “I don’t understand.”

  Uneasily he said: “This friction between you and the chief of staff. It’s damaging the Presidency. Throwing food in the Roosevelt Room. Christ, if that ever got out …”

 
; “Oh, that. That was just a silly bit of nonsense. No harm done.”

  “Food-throwing by a top administration official in the Roosevelt Room is not a big deal? Do you realize the history associated with that room? That’s where I signed the Omnibus Infrastructural Metrification Educational Assistance Act.”

  Not to mention Teddy Roosevelt’s Nobel Peace Prize on the mantelpiece, I thought.

  “A great occasion it was, sir. And a fine piece of legislation.”

  “I thought so,” he said a bit huffily.

  “Nevertheless, Mr. President, I have a feeling Mr. Lleland has elevated the muffin business into something it was not.” The moment of truth had arrived. The President and I went back a long way. It was time to speak frankly. “Frankly, Mr. President, I’m disappointed he succeeded so easily in persuading you to the contrary.”

  Now the President made eye contact. I had gotten through to him. “Herb, we all have work to do. My decision stands about access to this office. Thank you.”

  He picked up a red folder marked TOP SECRET and pretended to be absorbed. It was his signal that our discussion was at an end. The door clicked behind me, but in my mind’s ear I heard through-bolts being rammed shut, keys turning, chains being fastened. The mind reeled.

  There, waiting to go in, was Phetlock. Phetlock! I thought I detected a smirk. I got a grip on myself and made it back to my office.

  I walked past Barbara as if in a trance. I sat down at my desk and looked about the walls of my office. It looked so small and plain next to the elegant curve of the Oval. Steady, Wadlough, I thought. Better get used to four flat walls.

  Barbara stuck her head in. “Are you all right, Mr. Wadlough? Can I get you some hot water?”

  I told her to hold all calls.

  I looked at my desk calendar. July 5, 1991. Eight hundred and ninety-seven days into the administration.

  How many more days will I last? I wondered. In the West Wing a man without access is like a man in the desert without water.

  The period that followed was among the worst in my life. By the time I got home that night, Joan already knew. I could tell by her face—she didn’t have to say anything. She hugged me and said, “You’ll always have access to my heart.” I almost lost control of my emotions.

  “Dear—” I fumbled.

  “Don’t say anything,” she smiled bravely. “How about a cup of tea?”

  “You know,” I said with an air of gay abandon, “I could use a cup of tea about now.”

  In the cruel days ahead she was an absolute rock. It could not have been easy. There would be whispers at the church socials, catty remarks behind her back in the supermarket aisles. At least she would not be submitted to the indignity of being seated below the salt at embassy dinners. We were not “regulars” on the Washington social circuit anyway. I have always found socializing tiring and a waste of time that could otherwise be spent reading a good book or watching an interesting program on Public Television.

  But Joan was strong, of good pioneer stock. Her ancestors had set out from St. Louis in Conestoga wagons and traveled across the vast, perilous country in search of a better life in the West. Many of them had been ruthlessly slaughtered by the ancestors of our Secretary of the Interior. Thinking about it now made my blood boil.

  It would be hard, too, on the children.

  Herb, Jr., became sullen and unresponsive. He came home one day with a black eye. He said he got it playing football.

  “Football? In July?”

  He finally told me he’d gotten it in a fight. A group of boys had started taunting him about my loss of access. There had been shoving. It turned into a melee.

  Little Joan suffered too. At slumber parties the other girls hardly talked to her. She would cry herself to sleep at night.

  It is not easy to look a nine-year-old in the face and know you have lost her respect.

  At the office, meanwhile, the phone didn’t ring as much as it used to, and when it did, it was some assistant secretary over at Commerce wanting to know if his superior could use the Indian Treaty Room in the Executive Office Building for a press conference. For over two years I had put heads of state on hold. Now I was getting calls from GS-14s about room availability.

  Barbara and the White House mess people did their best to cheer me up. (You truly don’t know who your friends are until times such as these.) Barbara kept me well fortified with hot water, and Sanborn, the head Filipino at the mess, saw to it his men treated me like the king I was no longer. My favorite dish, meatloaf and buttered eggplant, was on the menu every day.

  In victory, Lleland played the haughty seigneur. His myrmidons, Phetlock and Withers, delighted in humiliating Hu. Hu found himself cut out of Cabinet Council meetings. When he asked for an explanation, they sniggered that they were “trying to streamline the decision-making process.” Hu’s Oriental disposition helped him greatly (these people can absorb a great deal of abuse without showing it), but the poor fellow was made to suffer grievously for my fall from grace.

  Phetlock had his minion, Fred Scroggins, the director of the Office of Administration, send Hu a memorandum instructing him peremptorily that his West Executive parking space was being reallocated in order to “facilitate spatial automotive requirements in the office of the chief of staff.”

  This was what Henry Kissinger would have called “an intolerable situation,” an insult of the grossest proportion. And of course it was transparently an attack on me personally.

  I decided on a course of what the strategists over at the Pentagon call Massive Retaliation. I had not started this war, but by heavens if it was war they wanted, I would give them one. I might have lost my access, but I was not without ammunition.

  Within the hour I had instructed Sanborn to bar both Phetlock and Withers (I smiled at this escalation) from the Executive mess. Let them eat in the regular mess, with deputy assistants and speechwriters! I am a reasonable man, but, forced to revenge, I am not without a certain sense of perversity.

  I enjoyed a good laugh imagining their faces when Sanborn informed them that their usual table in the Executive mess had been “reallocated due to spatial consideration.”

  When I told Feeley what I had done, his spirits were greatly buoyed, especially inasmuch as he had just received a “request”—as the arrogant swine in the chief of staff’s shop coyly titled their inter-office diktats—to submit his phone logs for the previous two months. Lleland had just embarked on one of his hypocritical leak-plugging crusades. So Feels had submitted his phone logs, but only after adding a few creative red herrings. He’d had his secretary doctor his log so that the only names that appeared were those of Nobel laureates in the field of microbiology.

  Lleland’s reaction to my White House mess maneuver was predictable: dire outrage. He sent me a stiff memo informing me that, as he often lunched with his assistants, it would be necessary to reinstate their access to the Executive mess. I sent him back a memo saying that “a full review of White House mess privileges was being undertaken at the present time” and that he would be informed of the findings “in due course.” Ha!

  The hell that Feeley was going through is well described in his own memoir, The Outrage of Power. We met frequently during this time of crisis at a bar on G Street called the Exchange. It was slightly shabby there—a suitable atmosphere, I thought. A good place for such as us to meet: the sort of dimly lit endroit where secretaries and Secret Service agents drank. Occasionally you’d find a GS-17 or Schedule C appointee there, slumming.

  In happier times Feeley and I used to meet for drinks (in my case, ginger ale) at Maison Blanche. That was where the Inner Circle met. Now it would have been too embarrassing to go there and endure the smirk of Antoine, the maître d’.

  I was worried about Feels. His wife wasn’t as strong as Joan, and they were part of the social scene. He confided to me his wife had been seated next to the Chilean military attaché, an unthinkable slight in former times. She’d begun drinking before noon and
spending too much time at Neiman-Marcus.

  “Tell you, Herb,” said Feeley one evening after two double bourbons, “it’s affecting our sex life.”

  I winced at this intimacy, but I realized at the same time that he was reaching out to me. I felt helpless, but tried to gather my wits. Perhaps some “man talk” was in order.

  “Maybe if you both drank less,” I offered. “They say it inhibits the libido.”

  “Nah,” he said. “Can’t you see? In this town a man’s dick is only as big as his standing with the President.”

  It took me some time to recover from this remark. But perhaps there was some truth in it. At any rate Joan and I were having no problems on that score.

  I shall leave Freudian interpretations to the reader. I mention the episode only to show what emotional havoc was wrought by our lost access to the President.

  They say you have to hit bottom before things start looking up. I didn’t know about looking up, but a week later I hit bottom. I was informed in a memo—a memo!—that the White House mess was being taken away from me and given to Withers.

  Sanborn grieved with me. “You must be brave,” I told him. “There will be changes. Mr. Withers is not like me.” Of course I urged him to serve Withers as faithfully as he had served me, but my heart was not in it.

  On my last day as head of the mess Sanborn and his staff went all out. They presented me with a large wooden salad spoon, made in the Philippines, and signed by almost all the stewards. My voice almost cracked as I made a little speech thanking them.

  As gratified as I was by this display of loyalty and human decency, the picture was bleak. Thirty-seven days had elapsed since I had seen the inside of the Oval Office. It wasn’t that I minded not being in the proximity of power, but, being unable to get through to the President, I was unable to give him the counsel I felt he desperately needed. Lleland and his new ally Edelstein had gotten control of more than presidential access. Yes, they had gotten control of the agenda.

  12

  IN THE PITS OF POWER

  The President is out of touch.