He was gruff, in no mood for pleasantries. “What the hell happened to you?”
“Oh, this?” At that moment my right knee came into excruciating contact with the corner of the Roosevelt desk. I had overestimated the distance. I stifled a moan and staggered back.
“Ah—I—fell. Sir.”
“Fell? Well, sit down.”
I felt my way backward and sat down.
“Where are your glasses? And what’s wrong with your lip? Did my wife do this to you?”
“We had a staff meeting this morning.”
He sniffed. “Jesus. Are you wearing perfume?”
“I can explain that,” I replied.
“My wife just told me she is going to divorce me.”
Oh, dear. I wondered if a President had ever campaigned for reelection in the midst of a divorce, but to my best recollection such a situation was unprecedented.
“She seems a little upset at the moment.”
“Upset? You skinless hot dog, she’s threatening to divorce me!” I was not familiar with the President’s expression, but his tone of voice was clear. “Do you realize what this means?”
“An uphill campaign, sir?”
The President became vehement in his remonstration. No useful purpose would be served by repeating it here.
Our interview did not last long. I assumed the First Lady would no longer be requiring my services, and it certainly wasn’t likely the President did. I suggested that perhaps the time had come for me to take my leave. He agreed. I told him that, despite recent developments, it had been an honor to serve in his administration. He did not keep me long.
I would have liked one last look at the Oval, the room where I had spent so many happy hours; but without my glasses it was just a gauzy mist. Taking my final leave of the President, I turned toward the door, erect and with a dignified, purposeful bearing. I missed the door, however, and became impaled on the Frederick Hart sculpture. I will spare myself recounting the details.
18
PEACE BREAKS OUT
Resolve to concentrate on Metrification Initiative.
—JOURNAL, NOV. 7, 1991
Major Arnold dressed my wounds, the javelin puncture being the most serious. Mrs. Metz retrieved my glasses from the residence, and I called Joan and told her I would be home early. I didn’t go into details, but Joan knows me better than anyone. She said she’d make meatloaf that night, which was her way of saying, It doesn’t matter. What a woman!
Feeley called, very worried. The First Lady had arrived in New York—on the Eastern Shuttle—and the press was demanding to know why they hadn’t been advised, why she was there, etc., etc. “Buying shoes, getting a divorce,” I said without interest. “Who knows?”
He arrived in my office in less than two minutes, panting and out of breath. I told him he really ought to cut down on his smoking. “Fuck that,” he said. “What’s going on?”
I explained.
“You can’t resign,” he said. “Not now.”
I told him it wasn’t a question of resigning.
“I’ll fix it,” he said.
I think I told him that I wasn’t really sure I wanted my job, or any White House job, back. He told me I was being hysterical, and to leave everything in his hands.
That night on the news the First Lady’s “surprise arrival” in New York was played prominently. She was holed up at the Sherry Netherland hotel on Fifth Avenue. Feeley was shown at a press briefing saying it was just some early Christmas shopping. The Greater D.C. Merchants Association spokesman was shown saying it was an insult to all the fine stores in Washington. The whole thing was a sorry spectacle. I was surprised that news of my “resignation” wasn’t included—I’d have thought Lleland would have had it announced even before my wounds were seen to; no matter. But, for the first time since arriving at the White House, I felt comfortably numb, beyond the care of such concerns and intrigues.
The next morning I asked Mrs. Metz to help me put things in boxes. As we worked, the phone rang without stopping: press queries about the First Lady. Mrs. Metz held them off with exemplary Teutonic firmness. Throughout my ordeal she maintained the most correct bearing. Another woman might have given in to emotions, but not Mrs. Metz. I came to regard the German character very highly on account of her. (Of course she was a naturalized U.S. citizen. It was not our practice to employ foreign nationals.)
Lleland called. “Sorry to hear you’re leaving,” he said. “You’ll be missed. But we can use the parking space.”
The conqueror’s smirk, the knife twisted in the wound. My West Exec parking space … they had tried to take it from me when I moved over to the East Wing. I’d fought them like a beast uncaged, and won. Who would get it now? Phetlock? Withers? I closed my eyes—it was too painful to consider. I’d become accustomed to the space.
If Lleland wasn’t magnanimous in victory, I decided I would be in defeat. I told him it had been “interesting” working with him and wished him luck with the Bermuda Crisis, the Inflation Crisis, the Budget Crisis, the Deficit Crisis, the Confidence Crisis, the First Lady Crisis, and with the campaign, which wasn’t far enough along to have become a crisis but which almost certainly would before long. He reacted as though I were being cynical, but I wasn’t.
Then an odd thing happened. I was summoned to the Oval. Maybe a goodbye photo, I mused on the way over. The President was very good about that sort of thing.
The President greeted me cordially, but formally—the way he did heads of uncooperative states. He seemed almost embarrassed. I tried to put him at ease by apologizing that I hadn’t put through my resignation letter yet, but that I would before the day was out.
He told me he didn’t want it.
He said he’d given the matter some thought, and that he wanted to offer me my old job back. The West Wing job. Deputy chief of staff.
This was startling. “But why?” I said.
He told me the National Metrification Initiative was faltering, and that he needed someone with my “instincts” to take charge of it.
I did not know what to say. The President had never really expressed much interest in Metrification. (Of course, he was deeply committed to it. He was determined that America should begin the twenty-first century “fully metric,” as he used to say.) Though I do think I had a certain—call it knack—in this important national initiative, I suppose there were others who could have done the job. I was, therefore, puzzled that the President, with so much on his mind—including, possibly, a very public divorce—should have his mind on this.
Just then Betty Sue Scoville walked in. “Mr. President,” she said, “it’s the First Lady.”
His hand darted for the phone when she said, “She’s apparently calling for Mr. Wadlough.”
He looked at me; I looked at him. Neither of us made a move.
“Should I put her through?” asked Betty, puzzled.
The President frowned and nodded. I walked to the phone by the fireplace and picked it up. “Madam?” I said cautiously, as if the receiver might electrocute me.
“Herb,” she said. It was a sweet, caring voice. “Are you all right?”
Most curious. I thanked her for asking, and said that I was quite well. She wanted to know about my stomach wound. I told her it was healing nicely. The President was listening intently.
She began to apologize for the day before. I said that it was nothing, really, just a few scratches. But she went on to explain that she’d been feeling out of sorts and had overreacted.
It was perplexing. Mrs. Tucker was a woman of some whimsy—theatrical people are this way—but this was positively, well, schizophrenic. (I do not mean to imply that the First Lady had psychological problems. It was simply strange behavior.)
She said there was someone there who wanted to say hello. Firecracker, no doubt.
But then on came a familiar voice.
“Jerb!” it said. “Is you?”
I looked over at the President; his eyebrows were
knotted.
“I am furious with her!” Mr. Villanueva continued. “She say she beat you up.”
I was at a loss.
“She don’t understand. I tell her dat you jave tell me not to come to Washington. Sure, but now she tell me she think you are making plot against me. Jessica, you are so estupid sometime. I want you to say you are sorry again to Jerb. Here, say.”
The First Lady came back on, apologizing once again. We chatted. She said she was furious with whoever was spreading the rumor about me and Mr. Villanueva. She said, “Is my husband involved? Is he behind this?”
The President was in extremis, trying to figure out what was going on. I said, “Certainly not.”
She seemed to believe me.
I asked her if she was coming back to Washington soon. She said she didn’t know.
I told her the President missed her. He nodded vigorously. She said if he really missed her he’d spend more time with her and Firecracker.
It went on this way, me pleading with her to come back, she demurring. The President began writing things down on paper—talking points, as we call them in politics—for me to tell her. On one slip of paper he wrote, TELL HER MY COUGH WORSE.
It was certainly the most taxing phone call I have ever experienced, but twenty minutes later I had her promising to call him as soon as she hung up. I almost made a fatal mistake when she asked me to transfer the call to the Oval Office. I nearly handed him the phone. But I pulled myself together and said that it would be much more “dramatic” if she called him directly on his private line.
When I hung up, the President practically embraced me, he was so happy. I said I was only too glad to help and that I should withdraw before the First Lady’s call came through.
“Go ahead and write the book,” he said cheerily as I made my way to the door.
I didn’t understand. “What book?” I said.
But then the phone rang. As I closed the door behind me, I wondered what he had meant by that.
19
CAKEWALK
The President has got it into his head to take walks in the park.
—JOURNAL, DEC. 8, 1991
We were a happy family once again. The First Lady returned from New York, and I plunged into Metrification. I took the keenest pleasure in expelling Phetlock from my old office, two doors down from the Oval. I informed Withers I would be needing my old parking space. I am not a vengeful man, but I would be dishonest if I said this was not a happy homecoming for me. This, I mused, must be how it had felt to retake Paris in 1944. Lleland grunted that it was “nice” to have me back. My security clearance was upgraded from DRIZZLE to TYPHOON.
I told the President that I would like to have the mess back again. Immediately, it was done. Sanborn assembled the staff for a full-dress review. I had difficulty suppressing a tear when they presented me with a wooden fork to match the spoon they had given me when I departed. It was inscribed, in their quaint handwriting, WELCOME HOME MR WADLOUGH. All was well with the world.
Except that the President seemed not to confide in me as he had in the past. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but he seemed to be keeping things from me.
I thought it might have to do with the distraction of his continuing domestic situation. On the whole, things were happier between the President and First Lady, but she was taking quite a number of trips to New York that pre-Christmas season. These were announced as shopping trips—to the continuing distress of the Greater D.C. Merchants Association. The truth was that the peace between them was an uneasy one. The First Lady had also been dropping remarks about how much she wanted her husband not to run for a second term.
The President was more often than not depressed. His attention span diminished and he grew unresponsive, even in the (rare) event of good news. When he was told the Senate had passed his handgun-reform legislation, the Bullet Control Act, he looked up from his briefing papers, murmured, “About time,” and went back to work. Considering that he was the first President to get action on this most pressing social need, this was an understated response, to say the least. Considering it was his only major legislative victory since taking office, it was even more surprising. That he seemed to take no joy at all in this important achievement worried me. He was also smoking heavily. Major Arnold was frustrated, and kept telling me he didn’t want to be the first Presidential doctor to be blamed for a case of lung cancer. “These are difficult times for him,” I told the Major.
He was also starting to rebel against the tight security. He had never been comfortable in the fishbowl. Now he kept saying things like “I should be out there talking with my people.” Feeley worried he might use that phrase, “my people,” in a press conference. Unfortunately, the number of death threats coming in from his people, as well as the egg assaults on his limousine, precluded his being out there.
Then, on the afternoon of December 5, it happened. He got it into his head to take a walk in Lafayette Park, across from the White House. At first I didn’t know why; then I remembered he had been reading biographies of Harry Truman lately.
Rod Holloway, chief of the Presidential Protection Detail, called me. Rod has a calm disposition, and I had never heard him so alarmed. The egg that had struck the President’s limo three weeks earlier had been thrown from the park.
“You’ve got to do something, Mr. Wadlough. He’s serious. He told me he only wanted two agents.”
“Two?”
“I don’t think he understands. He also wants it ‘spontaneous.’ No advance.”
That meant the Secret Service wasn’t to “sanitize” the area before the President arrived.
“What time does he want to go?”
“Six.”
I looked at my watch. It was 5:42 p.m. Good Lord.
“We have work to do, Rod,” I said.
I immediately called Marvin. I explained the problem and told him he had to make up a foreign-policy crisis. (I almost added, “You shouldn’t find that very hard.”)
He refused. “Out of the question.”
“I don’t have time to argue with you. We need a crisis.”
He was sarcastic. “What did you have in mind? Mechanized divisions in the Fulda Gap, or something in a Sino-Soviet border clash?”
I said, “Fine. When I’m called before the investigating commission, I’ll tell them your scruples wouldn’t permit you to prevent his assassination.”
That got his attention. When he started telling me it went against his better judgment, etc., etc., I cut him off. “Never mind the preamble. Call him at exactly two minutes to six. Get on the line and stay on the line as long as you can. Tell him it looks like war.”
“I can’t do that!”
“Marvin,” I said, “your President needs you. He doesn’t realize it, but he needs you. You may be the only one standing between him and a deranged killer.”
“I don’t like this,” he said. “It’s not right.” I got the distinct feeling he was taping the conversation.
“Never mind. What are you going to tell him?”
He sighed. “That we have a report of a sinking in the Strait of Hormuz.”
It sounded awfully routine to me. “Can’t you do better than that?”
He became abusive. “What do you want me to do? Blow up Leningrad?”
“All right, all right. Strait of Hormuz it is.”
Rod Holloway and I then went to work like first-generation immigrants. My office became the temporary command post. He rounded up every available agent. We would have raided the Vice President’s detail, but at the time Reigeluth was representing the American people at a “cultural conference” in Muscat, Oman.
Counter Assault Teams were rushed to the rooftops of buildings lining the park. Rod was very nervous having to do without his usual helicopter coverage.
The next problem concerned the troop of scruffy and mentally unsound hoi polloi who keep their constant vigils in the park with their signs calling for the elimination of the atom and fornic
ation. (While I sympathize with both those goals, I believe in trying to accomplish them through the democratic process.) Rod wanted to “neutralize” them, whatever that meant. But there wasn’t time.
It was now 5:59. Marvin should be one minute into telling the President that war was about to break out in the Persian Gulf. The first wave of agents had arrived in the park. The CAT teams were in place; one of them had caused a commotion in the lobby of the Hay-Adams hotel when they were mistaken for terrorists. Major Arnold was on his way to the ambulance that would wait around the corner of H Street with the motorcade. We wanted to keep the whole operation “en famille”—as the French say—so we hadn’t alerted the D.C. police. Instead, Uniformed Secret Service agents on motorcycles were poised along the Pennsylvania Avenue intersections between Lafayette Park and George Washington University Hospital. We wanted intersection control in the event of “takedown,” as Holloway kept ominously calling it.
At two minutes past six Holloway pressed his earpiece. He listened; grimaced. “It’s Firebird,” he said. “He’s moving.”
I blanched. “He can’t be. He’s on the phone with Marvin.”
Holloway just shook his head and was out my door. I rang Marvin.
“What happened?” I demanded.
“It didn’t work.”
“Why? What did you tell him?”
“Exactly what we discussed. I told him we had a report that a tanker of uncertain registry had been attacked and sunk in the Strait.”
“And?”
“I said it was an extremely grave potential situation. Or a potentially extreme grave situation, I forget which.”
“Never mind. And?”
“He said he didn’t care.”
“What do you mean?”
“His exact words were, ‘Fuck the Strait of Hormuz. I’m going for a walk.’ Then he hung up.”
I dropped the phone and ran out the West Wing door. The Marine guard was standing stiff as a barber pole, but his face showed a residue of great surprise.
“Did the President come out this door?”
“Oh, yes, sir, he did, sir. Just now, sir. He’s just walked out the gate. Sir.” He pointed toward Pennsylvania Avenue. It was dark. I shivered with the cold and realized I was in shirtsleeves.
The White House Mess Page 13