by Mo Rocca
Contents
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
WHITE HOUSE PRESS BRIEFING, APRIL 1, 2004
PROLOGUE
1. Strangeness on a Train
2. Some Background on How I Became Jim Traficant’s Bitch
3. There’s Something About Harry (and All Our Other Presidents)
4. Stepping in Dhue-Dhue
5. The Karate Yid
6. Fast Times at White House High
7. Vanity Fair and Balanced
8. The Lair Down There
9. How the Pupniks Saved Civilization
10. The Alien and Sedition Acts, or How I Went to the Outback Steakhouse with Coulter, Crowley, Hannity and Colmes and Almost Lost My Mind
11. Federalist Smackdown
12. Thai Me Up, Thai Me Down
13. The Fox and the Pussy
14. Helen Thomas Underneath It All
15. Bird of a Nation
16. The Age of Jackass
17. First in War, First in Peace, First in the Field of Animal Husbandry
18. A Conspiracy So Great
19. The Dog of War
20. Book Clubbed
21. Vest in Show
22. Dick Morris’s Feet
23. When Good Presidential Pets Go Bad
24. Eyes Wide Open
25. The Great Hallucinator?
26. The Compromise of Helen Thomas
27. That’s Infotainment!
28. The Chapter That Only Jerry Bruckheimer Could Bring to Film
29. In Which Everything Ends Happily for Everyone Except the Several Dozen Casualties in Chapter 28
30. All the Presidents’ Pets: The Next Generation
THE PRESIDENTS AND THEIR PETS: A SELECTED LIST
ENDNOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
For Pop and Mamita
White House Press Briefing
APRIL 1, 2004
PRESS SECRETARY SCOTT MCCLELLAN: Helen, go ahead.
HELEN THOMAS: When is the President going to hold a news conference? He has not tackled any of these issues in an overall news conference, full-scale, since last December 15th. Isn’t it about time that we had a time—chance, that is, to question?
SCOTT: I appreciate your question, and I always try to work to accommodate your needs.
HELEN: Well, is there any possibility of having one—
SCOTT: Well, there’s nothing I’m announcing today. But I understand your question and I will certainly take it into consideration.
HELEN: Is it a difficult question?
. . .
2ND REPORTER: A couple things. First, I just wanted to associate myself with Helen’s request here. There are a lot—
SCOTT: Anybody else? Anybody? Okay.
2ND REPORTER: It would be great to hear from the President.
SCOTT: Okay, we will do one later today. Oh, April Fool’s, I’m sorry.
Prologue
The remarkable thing about Daniel Chester French’s sculpture of a seated Abraham Lincoln is the way it captures both the sixteenth President’s godliness and his humanness. Lincoln, the former rail splitter with almost no formal schooling, is memorialized in a nineteen-foot-high statue of Georgia white marble and seated inside a Greek temple—a fitting tribute to the man who saved, then died for, our democracy.
And yet he is totally approachable, even kindly, not aloof like Jefferson or inscrutable like Washington. The statue may be colossal but the expression is undeniably human—worn and pensive, eyes cast downward, modeled after Mathew Brady’s photographs.
Lincoln has always been both a leader of irreproachable principle and at the same time eminently reasonable, political in the best sense of the word. He compromised, even wheeled and dealed, for an uncompromisingly noble goal—the survival of America. Lincoln was strong because he could bend, like the mature branch of a willow tree. Today’s so-called ideologue is ineffectual, a brittle twig.
Surrounding the President, etched on the north and south walls of the Lincoln Memorial, are the Gettysburg Address and my personal favorite, the second inaugural speech. “With malice toward none; with charity for all,” Lincoln urges us to strive on to finish the work we are in—with firmness, yes, but always with compassion.
Which is why the sight of my body floating facedown at the western end of the Reflecting Pool, just a few yards from the bottom step of the Lincoln Memorial, my hand still clutching a faded Pinocchio chew toy, would have saddened him so deeply.
How did I, a thirtysomething journalist on a simple quest to save our once again imperiled democracy, get to this point? Only recently had I discovered the White House’s deepest darkest secret. Now everything was hanging in the balance.
My story begins three and a half weeks before I ended up so unceremoniously in the water. And just like any story that’s equal parts All the President’s Men and Charlotte’s Web (with a little Da Vinci Code thrown in), it’s a tale that must be told—even if I never get invited back to the White House Correspondents Dinner.
1
Strangeness on a Train
All aboard!
The Acela Express between Washington and New York launched its maiden voyage in the fall of 2000 as a high-speed alternative to the poky, college-student-infested Amtrak train. With their double-espressos, laptops, and New York Times in hand, politicians, lobbyists, newscasters, and pundits flocked to the express service like it was the Concorde in its heyday, praising its ease and speed. Forget about the Delta Shuttle. After 9/11 no one was allowed to walk through the aisles once the plane was in the air, so it was impossible to network.
Because of its state-of-the-art everything (outlets at every seat!), the silver-and-turquoise bullet train quickly became a schmoozefest on wheels, a veritable kissass-ela. “It’s so European!” gushed GOP leader-turned-lobbyist Dick Armey to Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank. Across from them in a four-seater, columnist Tina Brown fawned over freshman congressman Ryan Seacrest. “How do you do it all?” she asked him. And in between cars, leggy conservative pundette Laura Ingraham canoodled in the shadows with pint-sized Clinton cabinet secretary Robert Reich—strange bedfellows indeed but on the Acela they shared one important trait: these powerbrokers were all arriving in Washington a full fifteen minutes faster than the lowly schmucks stuck on the Metroliner.
The Acela was especially busy the last time I took it. I wasn’t en route to an assignment, though. My trip was the assignment, part of my current gig on MSNBC, also known as the Michelle Kwan of the twenty-four-hour cable news channels. (No matter how hard it tried, it always seemed to land on its ass.)
I wore a fake mustache and took my position behind the counter of the café car. It was the latest in my series of undercover reports focusing on different service jobs, appropriately called “Pressure”—and appropriately accompanied by the Billy Joel song “Pressure,” or, as the singer pronounced it, “Preshah!” Each segment featured me thrown into a different job, wearing a different disguise each time. As a furniture mover I got to wear a soul patch. As a mohel I wore payos.
The segment was part of MSNBC’s latest experiment in primetime news, Hard Time with Jim Traficant, starring the flamboyant former Ohio congressman and convict with the Davy Crockett hairpiece. From prison Jim had seen me on TV and become a fan. When MSNBC approached him, he demanded I join the ensemble. “You get me that Mo. He works my funnybone real good.”
Unfortunately Hard Time was scheduled against the mighty Bill O’Reilly. If O’Reilly and his two million viewers occupied a no-spin zone at the nucleus of cable news, we were a negatively charged speck in the outermost valence shell.
This was hardly the kind of work I envisioned when as a boy I dreamed of covering presidential politics. It was humbling, to say the least. (Only moments earlier C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb had gone ballistic on me for overheating his Sara Lee cheese Danish. “You’re supposed to poke a hole in the plastic before you nuke it, retard!” he shouted.) To make matters worse I was saddled with a 315-pound cameraman named Phil, who spent most of the day on his cell phone prattling on with his fellow conspiracy theorists: “It’s absolutely true, Norma. The first President Bush and several Bin Ladens once went to hear cabaret singer Bobby Short . . . at New York’s Carlyle Hotel. You can’t make this stuff up.” If I tried to get sharp with him, he only threw it back in my face, reminding me of his own glory days. “When Morley interviewed Betty Ford, guess who did the light-meter reading,” he gloated.
But like it or not, Phil was my cameraman, and I needed his cooperation if I was ever going to prove that I was worthy of a meatier assignment. I picked up a copy of the Washington Post I’d been keeping behind the counter. “Hey, Phil, did you know that Amtrak requested $1.82 billion in federal assistance last year?”
Phil didn’t hear me. He was polishing off a pack of peanut M&M’s and staring at the café car TV, which was tuned to CNN.
Earlier that day, President Bush had once again dropped his dog Barney, this time at a gathering of Hispanic businesswomen. (It had happened once before, at an airfield in Waco.) It didn’t seem like a particularly remarkable event—and playing it over and over didn’t make it more so. In fact the only thing that was remotely interesting was the split-second startled look on Bush’s face before he dropped the Scottie. But Phil didn’t notice that.
“Poor doggie,” he whimpered. I tried again to get his attention.
“So anyway, Amtrak requested over $1.8 billion and yet its on-time record continued to decline.”
“And?” Phil snapped without looking at me.
“And that’s pretty outrageous,” I said defensively. “This is the story we should look into.” Phil finally turned to me with a look one-quarter compassionate, three-quarters belittling that read, “You sad deluded clown. You really think they want you to be a real reporter?” But before I could respond, a woman’s voice piped in.
The first strike in the War on Terriers?
“And yet it’s still faster than the shuttle door to door. How are you, cutie?” My cover was blown, by none other than CBS’s Lesley Stahl, a former network “colleague.”
“Hey, Les,” I said, forcing a casual smile, then remembering it was no use pretending I wasn’t embarrassed. I was wearing a fake mustache.
“Don’t you ‘Hey, Les’ me, Mr. Adorable Café Club Car Undercover Agent, you! Give me a hug!!” I awkwardly hugged Lesley over the counter. “I’d kiss you but your sexy Magnum, P.I. mustache might burn me! And, Phil, what on earth are you doing shooting for CABLE?!” The way she shrieked “cable” made me want to put my head in the microwave.
Phil seized the chance to take a swipe at me. “Helping the needy,” he sneered.
Lesley threw her head back with a laugh. “We really miss you at the network, honey,” she said to me, grabbing my hand. She couldn’t resist adding, “But cable allows you to focus on hard news. No fluff here.” She and Phil both cackled.
There was no denying I looked silly. Then again, Lesley was wearing a pink leather jacket, miniskirt, and spike heels. Was she off to cover a rumble between the Sharks and the Jets?
“So what’s going on in D.C.?” Phil asked her, hoping that she might sweep him off to an interview with some visiting head of state.
“The anniversary of Chandra Levy’s disappearance,” she said, suddenly somber.
“60 Minutes?” Phil asked.
Lesley quickly changed the subject—she must have been shooting for 48 Hours. She looked up at the menu. “Mo, sweetie, tell me about this Maine lobster wrap ‘enhanced with lemon mustard aioli, complemented by crisp cabbage slaw.’ Very fancy-sounding.” By the time she finished reading she was leaning almost over the counter, one leg, bent at the knee, sexily kicked up behind her.
“Well, let’s see,” I said, fumbling with one of the sandwiches. “It looks like the lobster is wrapped in some sort of a fennel tortilla with—”
“Why am I asking you?” she kidded, grabbing my collar and pulling my ear right up to her lips. “You’re not a food reporter, Maurice,” she cooed, using my birth name. “You’re an investigative reporter!” I’d just about had it with Lesley’s Mrs. Robinson routine when her cell phone rang and she pushed me away to grab it. “It’s Andrew calling! Must be important.” She wanted me to believe it was CBS News president Andrew Heyward, but of course I knew it was Andy Rooney. She covered the phone for a second. “Sorry, boys, but I have to take this. It’s the network.” And she was gone in an instant, the clicking of her heels receding down the aisle of the café car.
“Isn’t she amazing?” Phil said dreamily.
“Amazing,” I said, through clenched teeth.
2
Some Background on How I Became Jim Traficant’s Bitch
Maybe I was overly sensitive to taunts from network people. After all I’d once been at network, before I “transitioned” to cable.
For years I’d dutifully filed quirky reports for the CBS Early Show, which every TV critic described as “the long-suffering Early Show.” (Most of those writers had assigned the phrase its own F-key.) My beat included everything from a behind-the-scenes look at Survivor: East Timor to a whatever-happened-to look at the contestants from Survivor: Chechnya.
When our executive producer forced me to serve as an usher for the Early Show’s on-air wedding—in which the groom had been married once before on NBC’s Today—I knew it was time to leave.
The ratings were one problem. One week, when Today was in Los Angeles and ABC’s Good Morning America was in London, we pulled out all the stops. Cohosts Harry Smith, Hannah Storm, Julie Chen, and René Syler—“Harry and his harem,” the crew used to snicker—and I put on grass skirts and brandished tiki torches for our own game of Survivor: Early Show. But the only person who stopped to look through the windows of our street-side plaza was a homeless man with no pants. Worse still, our ratings actually dropped when the five of us underwent simultaneous colonoscopies.
More important, I wanted to be a political reporter. I looked at Jeff Greenfield, the brainiac who left ABC’s Nightline for CNN so that he could do even more hard news. The network-for-cable gamble had paid off for him. Why not me? Yes, MSNBC was in fourth place among the three main twenty-four-hour news channels (Nielsen stood by its figures), but it was better than Oxygen, the only other cable outlet that gave me an offer. And so, in a very small way, I was on my way.
My goal was, had been for a long time, to cover the White House—the big kahuna among political assignments. Since childhood I’d had a deep, even romantic, fascination with all things presidential. (More on that later.) MSNBC’s then-president Eric Sorenson wouldn’t promise me that primo beat right off the bat. “We’re in a state of flux right now,” he explained. “But don’t worry, we’re in the Mo Rocca business for the long haul.”
When I signed my contract, though, Eric surprised me—but not with the White House. “We want to try something alternative with you, Mo.” I was a funny guy, he said, and that could play with a younger demographic. “MSNBC’s mission from the beginning has been to harness the current-events curiosity of young, hip viewers. That means being serious and sexy and not talking down to them.” The only thing vaguely sexy about that so-called mission statement was the word “harness,” but I was intrigued. Eric continued: “Our studies have shown that Generation Z is hungry for news, but they just don’t trust the ‘three wise men’—you know, Tom, Dan, and Peter. You can be an ambassador, Mo.” I was bewildered but flattered, too, by the notion that I could be a bridge to disaffected hipsters everywhere.
Thus was born MSNBC’s Rocca Your World, a platform for me to ask the questions of politicians and
lobbyists that everyone wanted to ask but wouldn’t. I would be the television journalism world’s id.
To run the show MSNBC brought in a twenty-five-year-old former production assistant from HBO’s acclaimed Da Ali G Show. Everyone was duly impressed by Seamus. He had never finished college, he played the drums in his own jam band, and he’d once been named as a defendant in an online music-file-sharing suit. “This guy’s really in touch,” said Eric knowingly.
Tall and lanky, with a tousled head of red hair, uniformed in brown Wrangler cords, a Willy Wonka T-shirt that was three sizes too small, and a pair of Vans on his feet, Seamus looked like he’d skateboarded right off a Vice magazine shoot. Every time he skidded into our studio in Secaucus, New Jersey, a frisson of excitement whipped through the newsroom. “We’re going to take your grandpop’s newscast and flip it inside out, Moises,” Seamus decreed. “Kids will dig it because they’ll know you’re winking at ’em the whole time. Solid?”
I wasn’t. But I didn’t want to be difficult, so when Seamus decided I needed a new look, I went along. I stopped cutting, washing, or combing my hair and borrowed money from my parents to buy a Juicy brand velour track suit and a pair of Chuck Taylor All-Stars. Seamus even convinced me to get “Murrow” tattooed on my left shoulder. But when the two of us came back with blue-tinted Samuel L. Jackson frames for me, Eric overruled us. “The look may be cool, Seamus, but the audience has got to see his eyes. Standards and practices.”
Seamus put his arm around me and confided, “Execs need to feel like they’re part of the creative process. Let’s say we give ground on this one, Mo-meister, aiiight den?” Uh, sure. It’s not like we had a choice. Eric suggested we call former MSNBC correspondent Ashleigh Banfield, famous for her sexy eyewear, for another direction on specs. I’d never actually met Ashleigh, but Seamus had once made out with her at a Radiohead concert, so he did the talking.
Ashleigh was now reporting for ANN, the Arctic News Network. For the past two months she’d been busy reporting on preparations for Alaska’s Iditarod sled dog race. After that she was scheduled to spend another two months covering potential Iditarod fallout, before gearing up to report on next year’s Iditarod. Somehow she found time to take Seamus’s call.