The White House Mess

by Christopher Buckley

  There was a wind blowing from the north. The streetlights shone brightly. Washingtonians were going home—to their wives, to a cocktail; to play with their children and have supper. For a moment I stood there and it suddenly hit me how removed the President was from life’s comforting, ordinary rituals. I thought of all the men who had walked out the door I had just come through, flushed with self-importance at the thought they had just been with the President of the United States. Suddenly it seemed not so strange or even alarming that the President should want to do something denied to the most powerful man in the world: take a walk in a park. Why not let the Strait of Hormuz conflagrate itself? It could wait the length of time it took a man to refresh himself with December air.

  Still I struggled against the temptation to go after him. What if …? I didn’t want him to die surrounded by Secret Service agents and emergency-room technicians, people he did not know. Heavy with presentiment, I turned around and walked back to my office.

  We were surprised the next morning that there was nothing about Operation Cakewalk—as we’d dubbed it, ironically—in the papers. The President was in better spirits than he had been in six months. He teased Feeley and joked good-naturedly about the incompetence of his cabinet. In the midst of a discussion about my plan to change the Mile One marker near the White House to the Kilometer One marker, he said to me, “Nice people.” He described an encounter with a lady in the park who told him she had voted for him and would again in ’92.

  “You know what she said? ‘Any President who’d take a walk in the park is just what this country needs.’ ” His eyes glassed over. “Know what she said? ‘Don’t give up, Mr. President. We’re pulling for you.’ ”

  Oh dear, I thought. This will mean more walks.

  As I was leaving, he said, “I want her invited to the next state dinner.” He told me her name: Charlotte Quillan. “She’s in the book.”

  When I got back to my office, I called Rod Holloway and asked him for his assessment of last evening’s operation.

  He exhaled purposefully. (Secret Service agents don’t sigh.)

  “I’m just glad it’s over, Mr. Wadlough.”

  “I’m not so sure,” I said. I asked him how many agents he’d deployed in all. About seventy, he said.

  I was impressed. I told him the President had remarked on how many people there were in the park so late on a cold winter’s afternoon.

  He smiled and said that as a matter of fact everyone in the park was a security agent.

  “Rod,” I said, “does the name Charlotte Quillan mean anything to you?”

  Indeed, he said. She was “one of ours.”

  Good God.

  I asked him if they’d had a long conversation. He said they’d “conversed for approximately four minutes.”

  It was most annoying. I said, “Rod, you know how I feel about the agents fraternizing with Firebird.”

  “Under the circumstances, Mr. Wadlough, it was hard to prevent.”

  “Yes, I suppose it was. But I don’t see why she had to strike up a conversation with him. All he wanted was some fresh air to clear his head.”

  “Actually, he approached her.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Any particular reason?”

  Rod cleared his throat. “She’s—attractive-looking, you might say.”

  “Attractive? How attractive?”

  “Well, she’s about five nine, a hundred and twenty pounds, blonde, green eyes. Full figure.”

  “All right,” I said. “I get the picture.”

  Rod said, “She’s single, you know.”

  “So?”

  He was uncomfortable. “She’s a little unconventional by our standards.”

  “What do you mean, unconventional?”

  “Well,” he said, “she doesn’t fit the mold.”

  “I know what unconventional means, man.” I was getting alarmed.

  “She has a kind of vivacious personality.”

  “Vivacious?”

  “Lively.”

  “I know what vivacious means. What do you mean it means?”

  “Well, outgoing.”

  “Let’s speak frankly, shall we, Rod?”

  “She gets around.”

  I moaned.

  “She’s extremely capable. And she’s definitely not a security risk. She gets polygraphed every six months, just like everyone in her division.”

  “I want her transferred, Rod.”

  He looked at me with surprise. “Is that necessary?”

  “Necessary? He wants her invited to dinner!”

  Rod was not happy when I prevailed on him to have her transferred to the Secret Service office in San Francisco. We arranged to move her up two GS pay grades as consolation. Though my decision may seem Draconian, bear in mind what the consequences would have been for the nation if the President had found out that the “people” he’d met on his little constitutional through Lafayette Park were in fact Secret Service agents; or, worse, what the consequences would have been had he been attracted to the “vivacious” Miss Quillan. Myself, I shuddered to think.

  20

  EDWARD VIII

  Wonder sometimes about Feeley’s judgment. Am badly neglecting Metrification.

  —JOURNAL, JAN. 4, 1992

  The atmosphere around the White House in the days following the New Year could only be described as depressing. The Bermudian United People’s Insurrection, or BUPI, had seized control of three more sweater concerns. The Southampton Princess Hotel was the scene of fierce fighting, with room service being cut off to 900 guests, and the leader of the revolutionary forces, Makopo M’duku (né Cedric Pudlington), was threatening to turn Bermuda’s golf courses into “re-education camps.” We were deeply concerned. But each time Admiral Boyd of the Joint Chiefs implored the President to “show a little flag,” the President reminded him of his campaign pledge: “No more Grenadas.”

  The President was not a happy man these days. Things were not going well upstairs, so I gathered, for neither he nor the First Lady was confiding in me as they had in the past. He was genuinely hurt by the repeated suggestions Democratic leaders were making in the press—in the press!—that it would be better “for the party” if he didn’t run again.

  I did know that this was in fact the main bone of contention upstairs. The First Lady really did not want him to run. One morning he grumbled that she had told him the night before that he was the worst President since Jimmy Carter. I tried to cheer him up by saying that was just the First Lady’s way of teasing him, but he gave me a very unpleasant look and buried himself in his TOP SECRET folder.

  Mrs. Tucker was at that time busy with her plans to have Christo, the Bulgarian conceptual “artist”—and for my money a queer egg if ever there was one—cover the White House in pink plastic. It had created a small scandal, and her new chief of staff, a man of as yet unobvious talents, was barely coping.

  The President was also drinking a little more than usual. At lunch he would take two martinis. While it was not for me to say how much the President should drink, that, coupled with the four glasses of (American) wine, seemed to make him a bit logy. We endeavored not to schedule his SNGC (Simulated Nuclear Global Crisis) sessions after lunch owing to his tendency to doze off.

  It was during this period also that he had taken to writing his own speeches. The unsuccessful Notre Dame, U.N., and San Francisco World Affairs Council speeches were written almost entirely by him.

  Let me say this about President Tucker’s rhetorical skills. I think he was one of the best ad-lib speakers on the circuit; but he was not entirely at home with the written word—if they were his own written words, that is.

  Charlie Manganelli was most upset by the criticism of the U.N. speech, with its unsuccessful tropes (“the nuclear family of bombs”; “up and atom,” etc.), because Lleland was telling everyone Charlie had written it. (One of Lleland’s less endearing traits was to claim authorship of any well-received speech and to disown the clunkers.)


  Attempts to dissuade the President from creating his own oratory were unsuccessful. Sometimes when we were on Air Force One en route to a speech and the President was napping, Feeley would filch his speech text and work furiously to correct some of the more egregious infelicities of phrase and grammar. The President seemed never to notice that his text had been tampered with, but this was a less than desirable modus operandi.

  By early January the pressure to announce whether he was a candidate was intense. But he refused to say. Then, on January 4, my phone buzzed. It was Feels. The President had just instructed him to get ten minutes of network air time at nine o’clock on Monday. This was Saturday.

  Feels was upset for two reasons: the President wouldn’t tell him what he wanted it for, and he would be cutting into Tumor Ward, the highest-rated TV show on the air.

  Immediately, Washington began to buzz. Extra operators had to be brought in to handle the switchboard overflow. There were a disturbing number of private individuals who called in to say they hoped he would not be a candidate. I instructed the operators to give those calls short shrift, but to take the names of those who called urging him to run. I thought it would be nice to give the President a nice, thick sheaf of names. It didn’t end up being very thick, but it was certainly a sheaf.

  The Post headline the next day read

  TUCKER ASKS AIR TIME

  AMID REPORTS HE WILL

  WITHDRAW AS CANDIDATE

  The more reserved New York Times story was headlined:

  PRESIDENT TO MAKE

  ‘MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT’

  THURSDAY NIGHT

  SPECULATION HIGH

  White House Aides

  Deny Reports He Will

  Not Be a Candidate

  “This is terrible,” said Feeley.

  I took a call from Vice President Reigeluth, aboard Air Force Two, en route from Zimbabwe to Lagos.

  “Don’t you think I ought to get back home, under the circumstances?” he said.

  “What circumstances?” I replied.

  He seemed as surprised by my question as I had been by his. “Uh, November-wise,” he said. It was not a secure line; no conversation taking place over airwaves is.

  I assured him there was no need to return, and that he was doing an absolutely first-rate job representing the President overseas. I even told him the President had mentioned his name the other day in the Oval Office. That always cheers up Vice Presidents.

  Yet Feels and I simply weren’t sure what the President would do. President Tucker had surprised the nation before. He’d done it in Boise with his call for a nuclear free zone, in ’88 in New Hampshire with his call to harness acid wind, by his cockamamie suggestion that we give back 180,000 square miles to Mexico—well, he was adept at the art of political suspense. In my book the odds were even he’d run again. Of course Mrs. Tucker would be very upset if he did, but we would have to cope with that down the road.

  Then I got a phone call from Charlie Manganelli. I girded my loins (figuratively speaking), thinking it would be an unhappy call about the President’s writing his own speech.

  It was. He was furious. Sixty million people watching and he was going to “stick his dick in his mouth again.” On and on it went. Finally he calmed down. Then he told me something that piqued my curiosity. One of the researchers had told him Betty Sue Scoville had ordered up a copy of the abdication speech of His Majesty King Edward VIII.

  “I guess that clinches it, huh?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I equivocated, thinking fast, “he’s always been fascinated by the between-wars period in Britain.”

  “Bullshit,” said Charlie.

  I decided to level with him. I said this mustn’t get out. I made him swear not to reveal it to a soul. Then I rushed to tell Feeley. He was puzzled.

  “Who?” he said.

  “Edward the Eighth, you ignoramus. The one who abdicated the throne of England for the woman he loved.”

  He reflected on this. “Jesus Christ.”

  I told him I wished he wouldn’t use the Lord’s name like that. I don’t like nagging, but it’s something I feel very strongly about.

  He drummed his fingers on the desk. “I just bought the condominium in Alexandria,” he said.

  Frankly, I was appalled. “I’m sure the nation will mourn your mortgage payments,” I said tartly. “How can you think of that at a time like this?”

  “Do you know what my payments are? These nineteen-percent rates—”

  “Never mind,” I said. “We’ve got to do something.”

  He agreed, but neither of us could think what.

  Several times that morning we looked in on the President and asked if he’d like some help with his address to the nation. Each time he waved us off.

  Just before noon Feeley called me. “I asked him when we’d see the text. He said, ‘You won’t.’ So I said, well, when do we get it for the Teleprompter? And he said he was taking care of that. He’s being weird, Herb. I don’t like it.”

  I called Betty Sue and asked her about this. It was true. He’d told her to have a Teleprompter typewriter brought to the Oval. He planned to type it himself.

  “Are you certain?” I said.

  “Yes. He said, ‘This time there won’t be any leaks.’ ”

  “But he can’t type, Betty.”

  “You want to tell him that?”

  “No,” I said, and hung up.

  Feels and I lunched together in a quiet corner of the mess. We felt miserable and defeated. The President was about to make the most important speech of his political career, and we were helpless to help him.

  “Fuck it,” said Feels. “It’s his speech.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk that way,” I said. “At least not in the mess.”

  He groaned and went on. “He wants to make a fool of himself in front of sixty million people, let him.”

  But—what if he was going to run? A badly botched announcement would cripple the re-election effort.

  “Suppose the sentences don’t even end?” said Feels. “Like in San Francisco.”

  Well, that would be a problem.

  “Jesus,” he said. “There’s got to be a way to get a look at it.”

  But we couldn’t think of a way.

  As I got up to leave, I mentioned I’d offered to baby-sit Firecracker that night. I sometimes did that; he was my godson and I liked spending time with him, especially since he was old enough to learn something of religion. (I feared his parents were neglecting that part of his upbringing.) Joan and the children were still in Boise. The President and Mrs. Tucker were going to the symphony at the Kennedy Center.

  That afternoon Feels and I walked into the Oval to make one last attempt at convincing the President to let us help with the draft. There he was, banging away, hunt-and-peck style, on the Teleprompter typewriter.

  “No thanks!” he said cheerily, ripping the paper out of the carriage. “All finished.” He took the narrow roll, opened the right top drawer of his desk, dropped it in and closed it.

  “Sir,” I persisted, “ask yourself: is this prudent?”

  He said to me, “Ask yourself, Herb: am I being a pest?”

  Pest. It was discouraging.

  It was 6:30. I was working on a Metrification pep talk I had to give at the National Bureau of Weights and Standards when the door opened and Feels walked in. He was carrying a shopping bag and grinning.

  21

  TREASURE HUNT

  Up whole night searching for First Rodent, then nearly electrocuted this a.m. Exhausted.

  —JOURNAL, JAN. 5, 1992

  “I have a terrible feeling about this,” I said. Feeley and I were riding up the elevator—the one built for FDR—to the residence.

  “Will you relax!” he hissed. The door opened. Firecracker, already in his pajamas, took a running leap and hurtled into us. He caught me by surprise. His knee took me in the groin and my glasses were knocked off.

  The First Lady
appeared in her evening gown, putting on her second earring. “Mike!” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  Feeley grinned and said that he and I had some work to do, so he’d come along. We’d do it after Firecracker was in bed.

  The President appeared. He was in black tie.

  “What, two sitters?” He said to Mrs. Tucker: “I hope you don’t have to pay them double.”

  There were warm family smiles all round that made me hate myself even more.

  We bantered for a few moments, then Firecracker blindfolded his father with his cummerbund and made him walk an imaginary plank—a little ritual they had. Rod Holloway appeared and said, “We’re ready, sir.” The First Lady told me to make sure Firecracker was in bed by eight.

  As soon as they had left, Feeley went to work.

  “Let’s play a game,” he said. “Treasure Hunt!”

  Firecracker wanted to play soldiers instead. He supplied us each with a rubber pistol and shot at us for the next half-hour. We had to make repeated assaults on his bunker beneath the Lincoln Bed.

  “That was great!” said Feeley, wheezing. “Now I want to play Treasure Hunt.”

  But Firecracker didn’t want to yet. For the next fifteen minutes we played hide-and-seek, during which I was shoved behind the firescreen in the Queen’s bedroom.

  “Boy,” said Feeley, “that was fun. Now listen, Firecracker, I really want to play Treasure Hunt.”

  “That’s a dumb game,” he said.

  Feeley said: “Don’t you want to win a TV?”

  That got his attention. “What kind of TV?”

  “A small color TV that runs on batteries. The kind you can put under the covers of your bed and watch all those great shows that come on after your bedtime.”

  “Is it a Sony?”

  “Gimme a break,” said Feeley. “You know how much those cost?”

  “Two hundred sixty-five dollars,” said Firecracker, “for the Trinitron XM.”