The White House Mess

by Christopher Buckley

  We had tried to keep the press entirely off the island by getting the Monhegan assessors to pass a temporary ordinance against their presence, but the town selectmen were obstinate. (I privately resolved that these wretched people had seen their last Department of the Environment grant.) So the press was there, though only twenty of them. They spent their time seeking out the more eccentric and discontented Monheganers, who gave them boozy harangues about how the noise caused by the presidential helicopters was causing the lobsters to molt.

  I did not actually spend much time with the President during this period, but late in the evening of the next to the last day the President called and asked me if I would like to walk with him. I was already in my pajamas, but of course I said yes. He met me outside my cottage, “Poopdeck,” and handed me a flashlight. Accompanied by only six agents, we set off. I could smell bourbon on his breath. But this was, after all, his vacation.

  To my consternation, he headed toward the shore, instead of following any of the quite lovely paths that wind their way through the pine forest. The President was fond of taking people for “walks” along this shore. In truth, these peregrinations required the talents of a mountain goat. The route went over boulders, under two gigantic driftwood tree trunks, through slippery seaweed-coated gullies, culminating in an exceedingly unpleasant stretch of foot-wide walkway cut into a cliff face twenty feet above the water. It was difficult enough during the day; at night it resembled the set of one of those Alistair Maclean World War II movies. Whenever the President announced he was going for a walk, Secret Service alerted the medical staff and positioned agents in a Zodiak rubber boat at the foot of the cliff walk. A year earlier the President had taken the Sri Lankan Prime Minister on one of these walks. That was the reason the Honorable Mr. Chiribindigar had left without signing the mutual-defense treaty, although I understand the Prime Minister has since regained full use of his left arm.

  I was grateful for the three-quarter moon. It permitted me to see about three feet in front of me. My night vision is not good at all, and when I exert myself, my glasses do have a tendency to fog.

  “Remember,” said the President, leaping from one rock to another, “no hands.” He maintained it was only challenging if you didn’t use hands. Frankly, I would have found it challenging with crampons and rope.

  He did not say much. I sensed in him some gloominess or apprehension. And why shouldn’t there be? He recognized the obvious: that it would be a hard, uphill campaign. The four years had taken some physical toll. He looked older than fifty-two. His face had lines that hadn’t been there on inauguration day. His cough was worse too, though he had “absolutely promise[d]” to give up smoking by Labor Day. I earnestly hoped he meant it this time, though the start of a campaign was not an easy time to give it up.

  “Herb,” he said to me as we paused atop a slimy boulder, “I don’t know about this election.”

  I sensed he wanted reassurance. I am not a “yes man,” but there are times when a counselor best serves his principal by saying soothing things. I told him that the entire staff was “in very high spirits.” This was not exactly the case, but it was all I could think of at the moment.

  “High spirits,” he repeated. “You must mean Manganelli.” I had had to tell him about Charlie’s problem after the incident at the convention. It was a measure of the man’s generosity of heart that he kept him on as his chief speechwriter.

  I laughed, and he skidded on some sea moss and fell between two rocks. The agent looking down on us from above said something into his walkie-talkie and all of a sudden the entire area was bathed in harsh light. It was the searchlight beam from the Coast Guard cutter fifty yards off.

  The President clambered up. “Shut that thing off.”

  Seconds later all went black, with retinal exploding spots. Blinded, I took a cautious step forward. There was a loud squish under my foot, then both legs were up in the air and I landed on my posterior, causing me to champ down on the tip of my tongue.

  “Did you use your hands?” asked the President.

  “I think I bit off part of my tongue,” I said.

  We walked—so to speak—some further distance along. Even in my pain I could see that it was a beautiful evening. All seemed at peace. The moonlight undulated on the water and seagulls flitted overhead—if seagulls flit; otherwise they were bats.

  We came to a particularly nasty-looking piece of cliff that in some glacial age had split off the face and toppled over at a thirty-five-degree angle. The President had a name for it: Old Snaggle Tooth. “Come on up,” he said gaily. “We can talk here.”

  I asked if I couldn’t talk to him from the foot of it. “I can hear you quite well from here.”

  “Come on.” It is difficult to say no to the commander-in-chief. He didn’t do these kinds of things out of mischief. It was simply that there was a touch of the boy in Thomas Tucker.

  I was a few feet up when I pitched forward and fell flat. The rock was coated with globs of the wretched rockweed. I slid back down, covering the entire front of my body with slime.

  “You have to take a running start,” said the President.

  “I don’t understand,” I wheezed. “How are you supposed to get up there?”

  “Momentum!”

  “Right,” I said, and started up at a great clip. I succeeded in getting almost all the way up before the seaweed arrested my progress. “Oh!” I said, feeling myself about to start sliding back. I didn’t want to. It was a good fifteen feet down.

  “Here,” said the President. “Grab my hand.”

  As I reached for it, I began to slide. My fingernails dug into the rockweed and scraped, rather painfully, down several feet. Finally, I was able to brake myself by grabbing fistfuls of weed anchored to the rock. I had stopped myself from sliding any further; on the other hand, I couldn’t move back up. Every time I tried to pull myself up, my fistfuls of rockweed ripped out. The only thing to do was to hold on in this awkward position.

  “Aren’t you coming up?”

  “I’ll just stay here,” I said, spitting out a bit of marine algae I was sure was infecting the wound on my tongue.

  “I love it here.” He sighed and called up to the agent, “Ask them to move that vessel out of the moonlight, would you?” He chuckled, “I don’t think any fish will try to kill me tonight.”

  If there was any dying to do tonight, no doubt I would be doing it.

  The cutter gunned its engines and maneuvered a hundred yards to one side.

  “Much better,” said the President. My forearms were starting to cramp. “I guess I won’t have to worry about Coast Guard cutters fucking up my moonlight much longer.” He leaned back and laughed. “I’ve really fucked up, haven’t I?”

  I didn’t think it was right for him to go into a campaign with that kind of attitude. “Just because you’re trailing in the polls—” I was unable to finish my sentence because one of my handfuls of weed tore loose, causing me to swing to one side.

  “Twenty-five points isn’t trailing, Herb. It’s drowning.”

  “But the advantages of the incumbency—”

  “When they start throwing eggs at you—on Pennsylvania Avenue. What did Feeley call it? ‘Like Caracas.’ Caracas!” He laughed.

  “A handful of radicals,” I puffed, having regained my handhold. “The majority of the American people—”

  “Hate my guts.” He reached into the pocket of his windbreaker and took out a flask. “Well, at least I don’t refer to myself in the third person. When they write their fucking memoirs, they won’t be able to say that about me.”

  Let him get it out, I thought. Then work on his self-confidence.

  “So,” he said. “Have you got a publisher lined up for yours?”

  I was surprised, and not a little hurt, at the question. “Of course not. I don’t plan to write a memoir.”

  He laughed. “That’s not what Feeley told me.”

  “What?”

  He took another
swig. “The day Jessie beat you up. That’s why I hired you back. He said you’d already signed with a publisher and were going to spill everything about our marriage.”

  Feeley! So that was it. I clenched my fistfuls of rockweed tight, imagining they were his throat.

  “I gotta admit, Herb, I really hated you there for a while. Then I figured, what the hell. Everyone’s going to write a book.”

  I began to tell him it was an outrageous falsehood, that Feeley was only—in his devious way—trying to get me my job back.

  He only shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Ah, I love it here.”

  I clung on, raging inside at Feeley. The President was gazing out to sea.

  “You want some?” He offered me the flask; peered down at me. “You okay down there?”

  “I’m all right,” I said, still piqued.

  “Say, Herb,” he said, “something I always wanted to ask you.”

  “What?”

  “You like being an accountant?”

  I was not in the mood to discuss my work, frankly. I mumbled something about how I enjoyed working with numbers. You could trust numbers.

  “I dunno,” he said. “Sounds boring.”

  “I quite liked it,” I said. My arms were knots of pain.

  “The South is going to be a real problem. You saw what [Mississippi Governor G. V. “Sonny”] Montgomery called me last week?”

  “Maybe if we had a few more unity breakfasts,” I groaned.

  The President grunted and pulled on his flask. “Unity breakfasts! You’ve gotta beat these people over the snout. Cut off their highway funds, close their military bases. It’s all they understand.”

  “We tried that. It doesn’t seem to have gotten us anywhere.”

  “Us? What is this, a hospital? ‘How do we feel this morning?’ ”

  “I was speaking,” I said with mounting anger, “of our administration.”

  “Maybe it was the staff. Maybe that’s where I went wrong. Sorry—we.”

  I sighed. This was old ground. “If you’re not happy with the staff we selected, why didn’t we do something about it?”

  “Well, maybe we should have!”

  “Fine,” I grunted. “I could suggest a number of changes right off hand.”

  “So could I!”

  We were now snarling at each other across an incline of moonlit seaweed.

  “Well, if that’s the way you feel about it, I resign!”

  “Accepted! Effective immediately!”

  “Good! Maybe I’ll go work for George Bush—”

  “Great! It’ll give me an edge over him!”

  “—after I write my memoir!”

  “Go ahead! Put me down for a recommendation. They won’t hire you to run a Tastee Freeze!”

  “Ha!,” I said. “I bet they won’t even give you a presidential library! Who’d want your papers and your terrible speeches?”

  “Harvard!”

  “University of Caracas, you mean!”

  In the midst of all this I let go of one handful of weed to shake my fist at him. I should not have. I slid to one side and the remaining fistful started tearing off the rock. I began to slide.

  “Ahhh!” I cried. I managed to grab two fresh fistfuls and stopped sliding.

  “Here,” said the President, reaching down, “take my—”

  I looked up and saw him starting to slide. “No!” I said, but it was too late.

  His head slammed into the space between my shoulder and neck. The impact caused my fistfuls of weed to rip off the rock with a sickening, slimy, ripping sound. I endeavored to brake, but succeeded only in causing the most extreme and painful sensations under my fingernails. Thus locked together like two belligerent elks, we slid down the slope of Old Snaggle Tooth.

  26

  REST AND RESPITE

  Arnold wants me on sedatives. Tempted as I am, must keep wits about me.

  —JOURNAL (dictated), SEPT. 7, 1992

  Feeley showed up at my bedside at Bethesda Naval Hospital shortly after ten the next morning.

  “Urrr,” I said.

  “I’ve just seen the boss,” he beamed. “He looks terrible. Both eyes are black and blue. His forehead has a lump on it the size of a golf ball, and he’s got a hairline fracture of his ulna.”

  “Why,” I moaned, “does that please you?” The pain in my chest was extreme, making it difficult to breathe. My toes felt hot and itchy inside the cast.

  “The switchboard’s going bananas. We’ve logged twelve thousand sympathy calls. And the fucking flowers. We’re sending them over to Arlington cemetery.”

  Pleased as I was to hear that the American people were pulling for their President, I said I was surprised at the extent of the outpouring.

  “Well, considering the circumstances,” said Feeley.

  “Circumstances?”

  “Yeah. I mean, it was a great thing he did. I tell you, they’re shitting bricks over at Bush headquarters.”

  The remark cut through the pain like a horn through fog.

  “Tell me,” I said, “about this great thing he did.”

  “Saving your life.”

  Joan told me afterward that I attempted to lunge out of bed and attack Feeley. In doing so, I apparently rebroke my collarbone and passed out from the pain.

  When I came to, a Navy doctor was leaning over me. Joan was sitting beside me looking worried.

  “Feeley,” I moaned. “Feeley.”

  “Of course you’re not feeling well, Mr. Wadlough,” said the doctor.

  “No, Doctor,” said Joan, “Mr. Feeley was the one he—”

  “Ah,” nodded the doctor. “You need rest, Mr. Wadlough.”

  Several hours later Joan fed me some homemade meatloaf. She was a great comfort to me.

  “How are the children?” I asked. “Do they miss me?”

  She told me Herb, Junior, had been put in the “B” section of ninth grade.

  I sighed. “What other good news do you have for me?”

  “We had a letter from Mr. Urrutia-Bleyleben’s lawyer.”

  “Joan,” I said. “I was being sarcastic.”

  We lived next to the Uruguayan military attaché. He was a singularly unpleasant man who owned nine basset hounds that bayed all evening long at the moon, whether it was out or not. After being pleasant about it for some months, I had finally threatened him with legal action. Then Herb, Junior, had taken his bow and arrow and wounded one of the beasts in the hindquarters. Neighborly relations had been very strained thenceforward. Whatever the new development was, it could wait.

  After Joan left, I had a nurse dial the White House and ask for Feeley.

  “Tell him I want to see him. Immediately.”

  She got him on the phone and told him. “He says he’s very busy right now. Can he come tomorrow?”

  “Tell him he has one hour. After that I start giving interviews.”

  She gave him the message.

  Forty-five minutes later the door opened.

  “Jesus, what a day.” He had that altar-boy smile and was carrying a large and hideously ugly house plant.

  “Where did you steal that? Arlington?”

  “How you feeling?”

  “Miserable. Miserable and betrayed.”

  “That’s terrible.” The worst thing about it was he was sincere. “Can I get you anything?”

  “You can. What sordid prevarications have you been spreading?”

  “Would you like to read the press release?” He offered it to me.

  “I can’t use my arms.”

  “I’ll hold it for you.”

  “Just put it there!”

  I read.

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  August 31, 1992

  12:00 AM EDT

  Office of the Press Secretary

  For Immediate Release

  The President is in “very good” condition this morning following an accident last night on Monhegan Island, Maine. He sustained soft tissue injuries, ecchymosis und
er the right eye, and a hairline fracture of the ulna. His personal physician, Major Todman F. Arnold, expects him to be released from Bethesda Naval Medical Command tomorrow, and to be able to fully participate in the general election campaign.

  “You split an infinitive,” I said. Feeley shrugged. I read on.

  Herbert A. Wadlough, deputy chief of staff and assistant to the President, sustained slightly more serious injuries.

  “ ‘Slightly’?”

  His condition is being termed “good” by doctors at Bethesda. He sustained a contusion of the forehead, a fractured clavicle and a ruptured plantaris. Doctors expect him to be released within the week. It is not known at this time if his injuries will preclude his full participation in the election campaign.

  The incident occurred at 11:08 Eastern Daylight Time while the President and Mr. Wadlough were walking along the rocks on the eastern shore of the island. Mr. Wadlough slipped on seaweed and began to fall down the side of a rock. The President, attempting to break his fall, jumped and interposed his body between Mr. Wadlough and the base of the drop. It is the opinion of Major Arnold that Mr. Wadlough would not have survived the fall if the President had not acted as he did. In so doing, the President sustained the above-mentioned injuries, which, though not life-threatening, were serious enough to require his immediate evacuation from Monhegan.

  “You’re responsible for this,” I said.

  “Herb, before you get all bent out of shape—”

  “Bent out of shape? You perfidious—Look at me!”

  “Oh, sorry. Didn’t mean that. It’s just, the thinking was—”

  “Don’t tell me what ‘the thinking’ was. Whenever I hear that, it means there wasn’t any thinking at all, just conniving and deviousness. Usually both, in your case.”

  He grinned, which annoyed me considerably.

  “You were probably exploiting my injuries for political purposes before I even got medical attention.”