by Selina Meyer
But that example was a little hard, because the crisis was slow-moving and slowly building. So let’s take another hypothetical example, this time of the more “classic” type that features a sudden, unexpected development requiring prompt action, as opposed to endless, meandering briefings in unnecessary detail from pompous lifelong civil servants unable to conceal their pleasure in themselves.
Let’s try again:
The small, impoverished Central American nation of San Cristobel has an uneasy relationship with the United States due to some unwelcome attention from the CIA back in the 1960s. Nevertheless, San Cristobel is almost entirely dependent on the United States because remittances from Cristobelians (as they are called) working in the States, foreign aid, and a nascent bullsh-t ecotourism industry in the country’s small rain forest constitute the bulk of the national economy. The country’s new president, Diego Monteverde, a handsome former college professor (warning sign!) with leftist leanings, has been giving speeches about “breaking the shackles of colonialism” and “declaring the death of dollar diplomacy,” blah blah blah, you know the kind of thing I’m talking about.
Normally, we wouldn’t be paying a lot of attention to President Monteverde’s commie rantings. In fact, we would be attempting to deny him the oxygen of publicity by studiously ignoring him. The last thing we’d want is some anti-American firebrand on the cover of Time magazine with one of their dumb cover lines like “San Cristobel: The Flaming Bag of Dog Sh-t on America’s Doorstep” or something.*
Unfortunately, thanks to a ridiculous screwup by the Navy, one of our state-of-the-art spy ships, which is supposed to be invisible to radar, turned out to be a little too invisible and crashed into two fishing boats, sinking one of them. Two fishermen drowned, and even though the ship, the USS Norvell Ward, rescued the rest of their crews, the damage was done. So far so good, right? But, yet again, as in the Bugumba example, there were complications. For starters, one of the fishermen on the other boat dragged out an old Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifle of a type that, though long out of date, is extremely reliable even when wet and fired off a few shots at what he later claimed he thought was a sea monster. The crew of the Ward, thinking they were under attack, opened up with their 5 "/54-caliber deck gun, completely missing the guy who had shot at them (of course) but killing three others.
And then one of the seemingly inevitable complications that always seem to arise in these hypothetical scenarios arose. The commander of the Ward, Lieutenant Commander Evelyn Ng, the first Vietnamese American woman to command a capital ship in American history, thinking that the fishing boat captains were unlikely to have the means to contradict her, tinkered with her log book to suggest that she was actually outside of the territorial waters of San Cristobal when the accident occurred. I understand why she did it, even if it was wrong, and it should be pointed out that, by doing so, she was not just attempting to cover her own a-s but the enormous a-s of the United States of America.
For a moment, it seemed like the whole thing might blow over, with a simple payment to the families of the deceased men. But then the San Cristobal Air Force (that’s something I would pay good money to see!) released a set of radar intercepts showing that the Ward was actually much closer to the shoreline than Lt. Cmdr. Ng had claimed and made a formal protest. The Navy issued a vague denial and, in response, the Cristobalians revealed that the ship had actually been hovering just offshore for weeks, presumably eavesdropping on everyone’s private conversations and d-ck pix.
The whole thing was rapidly snowballing out of control. Other countries in the region joined the protest, demanding that the United States pledge to respect their territorial integrity, including sovereign waters. Fishermen carrying their nets engaged in camera-ready, beautifully art directed protests (anything for a day off work, right, muchachos?), and the anti-American American press had a field day. To complicate things, Vietnamese Americans, who had celebrated Evelyn Ng’s promotion as a matter of pride, now began to complain that she was being used as a scapegoat in an ugly reminder of the overt prejudice of years gone by.
In short, the hypothetical San Cristobal crisis was a real mess being made worse by professional agitators stirring things up to make political hay. To compound the problem, the people of San Cristobal are proud, very proud, and even if President Monteverde was prepared to settle the whole thing with some quiet, private diplomacy, the crowds on the streets of the capital, Santa Rosa de Flores, screaming “Yankee go home” in their native tongue, whatever that was, were not about to let him.
The solution? Boy, that’s tough. Maybe just promote Lt. Cmdr. Ng to full commander and transfer her to an obscure desk job somewhere, keep the payoffs to the locals coming, and wait for the whole thing to blow over. I’d consider sending an extra $100 million of foreign aid but, frankly, I don’t trust that oily President Monteverde any farther than I could throw him, which, in no small part due to his oiliness, probably wouldn’t be very far.
It’s not a perfect plan, but it’s the best I can come up with on short notice.
I hope you can see from these realistic examples how hard it is to cope with crises when you’re president. Maybe you have things in your life that seem like big crises to you (you crashed your car, your dog needs an expensive operation, your kid is shooting heroin) and think they’re much harder to deal with because you don’t have a lot of aides and experts like the president does. Well, I can tell you from personal experience that having all these people around you doesn’t make things easier. It makes things harder, because at first you believe in them, and then they let you down.
And, at least when you’re dealing with your problems, you don’t have the nitpickers and Monday morning quarterbacks second-guessing your every decision. During the very real crises I encountered in office, like the Leon West Tehran Hostage Rescue or the Banking Crisis of 2016, I made dozens of decisions, and I probably stand by a lot of them. But the best advice I can give you about dealing with crises, real or hypothetical, is to avoid them in the first place.
* I swear that there is nothing sadder than Time magazine’s feeble efforts to stay relevant and not just something that you used to read on grandma’s toilet when you were disposing of Thanksgiving dinner.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
No “I” in “Team”—The Wind Beneath My Wings
Everyone knows that there is no “i” in “team.” If they don’t, I think they probably learned it when I said it somewhere earlier in this book. But there is a “me” in “team.” You have to rearrange the letters a bit, but it’s definitely there. I guess by the same token there is “meat” in “team,” too.
The “me” in my team was me. Every president has advisors, official and unofficial, and aides, of course, and every so often one of them, like Henry Kissinger, will achieve a level of prominence and renown that approaches that of the president himself (or herself!), though I doubt whoever the president was back then liked being eclipsed by Henry Kissinger very much. In my case, I often found that my closest, most loyal advisors were useful for making suggestions that I could do the opposite of. Still, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge them and offer up a few observations about their personalities and choice anecdotes about our time working together.
First and foremost, there is that great grumpy bear of a man Ben Cafferty and his constant companion and alter-ego, Kent Davison. There are many others. Karen Collins. Others.
On second thought, I don’t think I really need to spend a lot of time on observations and anecdotes here. They can do that in their own books.
CHAPTER TWELVE
On the Run Again—Campaigning in the “Real” America
Attentive readers will recall that although I was now, in fact, the president, I was also still running for president. With Election Day less than a year away, the most intense part of the campaign season had already begun when President Hughes decided to step down. As president, of course, I now had considerable advantages over the competition, most
importantly the power of incumbency and the ability to generate headlines and earn free media coverage on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. Now, anyone in the public eye knows that fame and political prominence have two sides, and the press is as ready to criticize and find petty faults as they are to be supportive. In fact, they’re generally much more eager to condemn than they are to praise. But once you’ve met a few of the reporters who cover the White House and see what pathetic and depressing retards* they are, you’ll see why they can’t resist the urge to try and bring someone else down. I’ve always maintained that the best sort of people don’t go into journalism, finding it generally too disgusting on all levels.
In fact, all media people fall into two categories: attractive morons (TV reporters usually) and unattractive morons (print, radio, the “internet”). Whenever I speak to press groups or to reporters individually, I always ask why reporters are all so stupid and just kind of weak—not, mind you, in order to be insulting, but because I’m honestly curious—and they always laugh idiotically or just stare at me uncomprehendingly. Frankly, it turns out that the press are actually just about the worst people to ask to explain why the press is so dumb and embarrassing, which is pretty ironic when you hear how much they talk about the importance of investigative reporting and being honest.
Still, some people believe that there’s no such thing as bad publicity or, as George M. Cohan once said, more or less, “I don’t care what they print as long as they spell my name right”—though supposedly that was because he was a virulent anti-Semite and wanted to be sure no one misspelled the Mick Irish name of Cohan as the invariably Hebraic Cohen. In the year of my presidency, I would test the theory that there is no such thing as bad publicity repeatedly and come to the conclusion that, yes, actually, there is such a thing as bad publicity.
And I got plenty of it.
The processes of retail politicking were different for me as president than they were for the wet-behind-the-ears Congressional candidate of a decade earlier. I had the “bully pulpit” of the presidency at my disposal, from which I could bully people, and bully them I did. I no longer had to ring doorbells and risk encountering bad smells or people wearing cheap clothes from Target or, sometimes, Goodwill. I also found that many more people, though not everyone, knew who I was and, if they didn’t know who I was, I could explain that I was the president, which is much easier for people to grasp and sounds much more impressive than saying that you’re someone’s congressman or senator.
This is not to say that campaigning is actually fun or enjoyable as president just because it’s more fun and more enjoyable than doing it as a something-other-than-president. Still, it must be endured, since voters and the media expect it. The trick is to try and keep it to a bare minimum, until the time comes when robots can take over, a day that every politician will agree cannot come soon enough.
Actually, there’s another trick.
This is a good one, and one that can be used in pretty much any unpleasant situation, not just campaigning. If you learn nothing more from reading this book than this one trick (along with the “horrible/delicious” one I mentioned earlier), it will have been worth whatever you paid for it, even if you bought the hardcover.
As one of the many horribly sexist customs that still prevails in Congress even now in the twenty-first century, if you are a female legislator you are supposed to show a more-than-usual interest in hearings having to do with sexual assault, just as male congressmen and senators are supposed to be particularly interested in hearings involving firearms or interstate trucking. And sexual assault is not one of those topics, like confirming an ambassador or deciding whether or not to land on the moon, that eventually gets resolved one way or the other. The hearings just go on and on with seemingly endless permutations having to do with where and how the sexual assault takes place: sexual assault on campus, sexual assault in prison, sexual assault in the workplace, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum.
One day back when I was in the House or Senate, I can’t remember exactly, I was sitting in my umpteenth hearing about sexual assault, doodling on my special congressional notepad, my mind wandering restlessly, when the woman who was testifying, I can’t remember if she was a victim or some kind of expert like a doctor or professor or maybe she was both, anyway, whoever she was she said something that made my ears perk up instantly and I will never forget it.
She was explaining various methods for coping with the psychological trauma that generally accompanies sexual assaults, and she described a process she (or he? I’m pretty sure it was a she) called “positive mnemonic visualization,” in which one thinks of some pleasant memory from one’s past instead of whatever unpleasant thing is happening at the moment. I immediately put this technique to use by remembering a trail ride I had taken in Jackson Hole one summer with Daddy when we traveled through fields of wildflowers up to a peak from which we had a spectacular view of the Tetons. Daddy, as I’m sure I mentioned, was a handsome man, but he always looked especially rugged and masculine in the outdoors and never more so than when he was on horseback. For the rest of that day’s sexual assault testimony, I was able to appear alert and interested even though my thoughts were far away in space and time remembering the gentle motion of Daddy’s strong shoulders as he sat tall in the saddle above his horse’s muscular, rolling buttocks.
Unfortunately, a single memory, no matter how rich and enticing, is not sufficient to last one through an entire campaign season, when one must deal with so many boring people and events that you’ll want to deep-throat a shotgun forty times a day. Fortunately, I had a whole suite of pleasant reminiscences that I utilized during my presidential campaign to get me through countless tedious encounters.
One winter when I was still a junior associate at Maltby, Pierpont, and Blumfeld, I was laboring in the Trusts and Estates department, which attracts exactly the sort of fourth-rate legal minds you would expect, when Edgar Giddings, one of the more senior partners, asked to see me. I went to his office expecting the usual armload of paperwork and a-s-grabbery when he surprised me by asking if my passport was up to date. I said that it was, and he told me to clear my schedule for the next two weeks because we were going to Europe.
The timing was fortuitous, since Andrew and I were having one of the periodic hiccoughs in our relationship that occurred from time to time. In this particular case, Andrew was on a rare winning streak thanks to an innovative Ponzi scheme called “the Airplane Game” that had netted him almost $50,000. Instead of using the money to repay what he owed me for a series of promissory notes he had forged my signature on, he had purchased a second-hand luxury Mercedes executive van and hired a driver named Manny, both of which he described as “productivity tools.” When Manny crashed the van into some kind of Mexican parade while drunk and turned out to have several outstanding warrants for his arrest and also be an illegal alien to boot, well, Andrew wound up in the doghouse. At least he had insurance.
Of course, he didn’t have insurance. Still, for him, the whole thing counted as a winning streak.
So I was happy for a chance to get away for a bit while he manufactured documents or fiddled with the speedometer or bribed witnesses or changed his identity or did whatever he had to do, even if it was with Edgar, who was pretty old but still appeared to be in decent shape and maybe worth at least a hand job if he took things reasonably slowly and didn’t just put a blanket over his lap and demand it right after take-off, like so many guys do.
En route to Frankfurt (in proper first class, not some business bullsh-t), Edgar explained that one of the firm’s clients was a German businessman by the name of Graf von Kronintorp-Fesselheim, who rewrote his will every few months to punish or reward various worthless members of his family and, having experienced the ruthless efficiency of the Allies during World War II as a colonel in the Wehrmacht, he preferred to have American lawyers do it. Although the count (graf means “count”) was old and enfeebled and confined to a wheelchair, he still enj
oyed what Edgar, in his Princeton Class of 1952 way, referred to as a “well-turned ankle.” Hence my presence. All in all, it sounded like a pretty nice little junket: two weeks of room service and very lightweight legal work and, thus far into the flight, not a hand job in sight!
The count turned out to be pretty much your garden-variety Bond villain living in luxury in a schloss full of hunting trophies and some pretty good paintings that were probably acquired at a steep discount in the late 1930 s, if you know what I’m saying. He took an instant shine to me and, somewhat to Edgar’s annoyance, dismissed him early on, saying that he preferred to work with me alone because he thought Edgar looked like an anteater (which he sort of did). Edgar was getting his hourly fee whether he rewrote codicils in the castle or jacked off to the amazing hard-core porn they show on regular television in Germany back at the hotel, so, although he was mildly insulted, he didn’t really give a sh-t.
The count changed his mind about his will on a pretty much hourly basis, and every change was explained to me by means of a very lengthy anecdote or two that would begin with something like, “I was thinking that I really need to do something for Helmut, my nephew I was telling you about, who is the transvestite race car driver. He is terrible with money and spends as many years as he is old in millions of euros for his birthday party every year. Even though his ears were burned off in a crash, he will live to be one hundred and will have to spend a hundred million euros for a party he will not even be able to hear. Ach, he is so worthless, but I promised his mother I would always take care of him. She was not really my sister, but a prostitute I pretended was my sister so that she could visit me in the POW camp. She was the only woman I ever loved. I think I will leave Helmut the hydroelectric plant in Schleswig-Holstein. It is a cash cow . . .” And so on like that, hour after hour, day after day. Still, it was a lot more entertaining than being stuck in some dull office doing something utterly useless like removing staples or taking depositions.