The White House Mess

by Christopher Buckley

  At 12:41 President-elect and Mrs. Tucker finally embarked in their limousine. He instructed me to work with Feeley on a speech insert explaining the delay. We had seven minutes to come up with it.

  I suggested putting out the story that a gun barrel had been sighted along the motorcade route and that Secret Service had delayed departure until the area had been “sanitized,” as they say.

  Feeley said the Washington Post would find out it was phony and we’d be accused of lying to the American people on our first day in office. “Listen,” he said, “I think we should just tell everyone the man went crazy, pissing on the drapes, the whole works, and tried to start a war. It’s not our fault we’re late, goddammit.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think that’s the approach he wants to take.”

  Muttering, Feeley began scribbling on a legal pad. He finished just as the motorcade pulled up at the Capitol.

  The press was swarming, but at a safe distance. The Secret Service kept them well back. We could hear the shouts, however: “Where’s the President!? What’s wrong!?”

  The President-elect merely waved at them, despite his well-known propensity for marching over to the roped-in area and taking any question put to him—an unfortunate tendency, in my opinion, and one which had led to some of the more spontaneous, troublesome moments of the campaign.

  Feeley and I rushed to join the President-elect as he was hustled through the marble corridors of the Capitol. Feeley handed him a sheet of legal paper.

  He read it quickly and frowned.

  “ ‘Emotionally disturbed’? Feeley, this is terrible. What were you thinking?” He crumbled the page into a ball. “Now I’ll have to wing it.”

  It all seemed to happen very quickly after that. I remember coming through a doorway into cold January air, the bright blue sky, television lights, and Marine band striking up the theme music from The Magnificent Seven, our campaign anthem.

  “Where on earth have you been?” hissed Joan. “People are furious.”

  “Averting disaster,” I said enigmatically.

  To judge from the looks on the platform, Joan was right. They did not look pleased. Some looked downright incensed. The twenty-five-degree cold had not helped. Justice Marshall had turned cerulean, and was apparently experiencing cardiac trouble. My stomach muscles tightened into a Gordian knot. I reached into my pockets for milk-of-magnesia tablets, but they had crumbled. All that remained was a linty powder.

  The President-elect moved to the podium. A murmur rippled through the crowd as it took stock of this unprecedented breach of protocol: the President-elect was about to speak before taking the oath of office.

  “Mr. Chief Justice, Senator Hastings, distinguished members of Congress, friends and fellow Americans,” he began. “I guess I have some explaining to do.”

  Alas, those words would become a leitmotif of the Tucker Presidency.

  “The President is not with us on this occasion. He … could not be with us. He is about to leave the house and city he has lived in for the past eight years. He told me he hopes you would understand and that you will forgive him. He could not trust his emotions at such a time as this. And so he asked me to say goodbye to you for him.”

  The audience was hushed.

  “And so we do, knowing that as he takes his leave of us, our prayers and our thanks go with him.”

  The sound of rotor blades was heard in the distance down the Mall, at first faint, then louder. The President-elect paused. Tens of thousands of heads turned. Few Americans are unfamiliar with the dramatic television footage, the poignancy of the moment, as Marine One banked its rotor blades in what everyone took to be a gesture of farewell before disappearing over the edge of the Capitol. I heard sniffling around me as the noise of the blades receded in the southeast and the stunned, almost reverential silence set in. I remember thinking, How moving. But possibly it was the beginnings of the flu that so many people got on that historic day.

  BOOK ONE

  HONEYMOON

  1

  IN THE OVAL

  The President appears not to understand the gravity of the situation. Are we destined to spend the crucial moments of the Presidency huddled in lavatories? I worry.

  —JOURNAL, FEB. 12, 1989

  I do not propose, as so many White House memoirists do, to give the last four hundred years of my genealogy. But since I am frequently asked why I speak the way I do, I shall explain.

  I was born in England during World War II. My father had been wounded by a malfunctioning crane while serving with the Corps of Engineers. He recuperated at an English Army hospital, where he met my mother, a nurse. Eventually they married, and I was born. At war’s end Father moved back to Boise, Idaho, where he resumed work as assistant manager of a paper mill. Though she liked Idaho well enough, Mother missed England and inculcated in me a fondness for my maternal country. I was sent to school there, and it was there I fell in love with chartered accounting. But, being an only son, I returned to Boise to be with Father and Mother in their autumnal years.

  It was while working at Dewey, Skruem and Howe, Certified Public Accountants, that I first met Thomas Nelson Tucker. He was then a figure in Boise society, scion of Thomas Oglethorpe Tucker, the lumber and tinned-trout impresario. My wife, Joan, and I did not participate in the glitter and glamour of le tout Boise, as the French say, so I knew him only from the gossip columns, which I read infrequently. Mr. Tucker, as I called him until the day of his inauguration, had been put in a spot of trouble with the Internal Revenue Service because of some sloppy tax preparation. Old man Tucker’s returns were done by DS&H, and so I was called in to clear them up. I was only too glad to help.

  Thus began a friendship that—aside from religion and my own family—has been my most enriching life experience. I knew right from the first moment that this was a young man destined to go places. I was not disappointed. I served as finance chairman of his successful gubernatorial races. I also became a sort of counselor without portfolio, managing the personal arrangements, such as travel and accommodation, making sure the household ran smoothly. If I had a coat of arms, it would read: SEMPER IBI. Always there.

  And I was there, from the beginning—unlike so many others, such as Chief of Staff Bamford Lleland IV and National Security Council director Marvin Edelstein. During Governor Tucker’s celebrated courtship of Jessica Heath, it was I who snuck her into the Governor’s mansion in the back of my Ford station wagon. And during their engagement it was I who prevailed on her to take his name in marriage. When their son, Thomas, was born, I stood by him at the baptismal font as godfather.

  I had my finger in the policy pie, as well. I well remember the night the Governor told me he was going to announce his controversial demand that the federal government remove all Muscleman missile silos from Idaho and that the state be declared a nuclear-free zone. While I might have recommended a more cautious approach, I said to myself, Courage, Wadlough. This is just the story of bold initiative that will land Thomas Tucker in the White House someday. I was not wrong.

  When the great moment arrived on election night and Ohio put us over the top, I began almost immediately to worry about moving to Washington. How would it affect Joan, who had never been further east than Denver; and our children, Herb, Jr., and Joan? I resolved that the transition should be a smooth one. Instead of renting a house in fashionable Georgetown or Maclean, I found a pleasant and modest house in Arlington, with a small garden and within walking distance of church.

  • • •

  I had visited the White House a number of times during the transition, but I was not prepared for the sense of awe and history that I felt as my car pulled up in front of the Southwest Gate at 6:48 a.m., to a smart salute from the uniformed guard. As I made my way to my spacious office on the first floor of the West Wing, I was greeted with a crisp chorus of “Good morning, Mr. Wadlough.” Yes, I thought, this will do quite nicely.

  As I walked in, my secretary, Barbara, a loyal, clean, a
nd efficient public servant, handed me a slip of paper. It was one of those pink WHILE YOU WERE OUT slips. She had put a check next to the PLEASE CALL BOX. Under REMARKS she had written only two words: “The President.”

  The President. I would be dishonest if I said that the words did not send a frisson up my spine. I pocketed the slip of paper. Perhaps a grandson of mine would someday be asked to bring it to school and show it to his classmates.

  The past twenty-two months flashed through my mind like film run at high speed, and suddenly I felt rather tired. Democracy can be a bit of an ordeal, you know. I had put on weight. My hairline had ascended another inch or so. My glasses had developed the tendency to fog after I climbed a flight of stairs, and my knees throbbed in overcast weather. I was approaching fifty and felt it. Was I fit, I asked myself, to advise the President of the United States?

  But had I come this far, I wondered, only to clutch on the threshold of power?

  “Mr. Wadlough?”

  Barbara’s voice brought me out of my reverie.

  “Are you feeling all right?” she asked.

  “Yes, Barbara,” I fibbed. “Fit as a fiddle.”

  She knew me better.

  “Shall I bring your hot water?”

  I do not drink coffee or tea; in the mornings I find a nice, hearty cup of hot water soothing and stimulative of the digestive functions.

  I sat down for the first time in my new office. I had asked August Hardesty, the White House curator, to do it over in the style of the administration of Rutherford Hayes, one of my favorite Presidents.*

  Hardesty and I had exchanged sharp words over the matter. He was a persnickety old fussbudget and, in my opinion, probably Republican. He looked on our occupancy of the White House with the undisguised distaste of a retainer who has been sold along with the estate and left to assist with its desecration. He had stiffly informed me that he was not “a decorator.”

  He had indeed redone my office in the style of the 1870s. An enormous brass spittoon squatted beside my desk, which had probably last been varnished while Hayes was alive. The desk was split in eight places. The oak veneer top was so warped it resembled the surface of the sea in a moderate chop. The crowning impertinence was the phone. It was one of those antique stand-ups with the earpiece. To compound the travesty, the old goat had installed another, similar phone painted a garish shade of red and labeled SECURE.

  When I attempted to swivel in my chair, I nearly caused scoliosis. On closer examination of my chair, I found I was sitting on a mahogany commode.

  “Barbara!” I simmered. “Get me Hardesty!”

  Just then the blasted antique phone rang. Brrrring brrring.

  It was the President. It sounded as though he was speaking to me through a long pipe.

  “Herb? I can barely hear you. Where the hell are you?”

  Mortified, I told him it was a technical dysfunction. Hardesty would pay dearly for this.

  He was sitting behind his desk—the one that had once belonged to FDR—in his shirtsleeves, tie loosened, feet propped up, enveloped in cigarette smoke. I wasn’t surprised to see him in such a casual posture, but I was stunned by the cigarette smoke. His smoking had been one of the most closely guarded secrets of the campaign.

  No presidential candidate since Nixon had smoked, and certainly never in public. Though we tried to see to it that he was never photographed with a cigarette in his mouth, one or two photos of him smoking had made it into the press.

  But when that wretched eleven-year-old elementary-school girl in Ames, Iowa, asked him in front of all the cameras if he’d please give it up “for me,” we were in a spot of bother.

  Afterward, he’d sat there that night in front of the TV chain-smoking and becoming gloomier with each testimonial to what a great thing he’d done.

  “What are we going to do, Herb?” he said with a stricken look.

  I told him that “we” had best live up to “our” promise.

  “Don’t ask me to do that. Not in the middle of a campaign.”

  I reminded him that I hadn’t asked him to do anything. Little Mary McInnis had.

  I brought in cigarette-quitting specialists; I brought in a hypnotist. They only managed to put the candidate into a foul temper. At one point he went eighteen hours without one.

  But since the consequences of going back on a promise to an eleven-year-old girl were unthinkable, he agreed only to smoke in bathrooms. In return for our consent, he swore he would give it up the day after he won the election.

  We made it through the campaign without being found out, no small miracle. I always carried a bottle of Listerine with me. Before interviews he would have a furtive glug from the bottle.

  On election night he told me “come hell or high water” he would give it up the day after the inauguration. Now here we were, first full day in office, enveloped in smoke.

  “Mr. President, may I speak frankly?” I said as I stood there on the Oval Office carpet for the first time.

  “No,” he said.

  “This just won’t do.” It was not easy to speak this way to the President of the United States. But it was my duty. “Shall I have Feeley come in and paint headlines for you? ‘TUCKER BREAKS PROMISE TO LITTLE GIRL, NATION …’ ”

  “Feeley smokes two packs a day.”

  “Feeley is not President. And anyway he spends the early morning spitting out little pieces of his lung,” I said. “A disgusting spectacle.”

  “FDR smoked. He was a great President. Suppose I got a holder?”

  I said I did not think a holder would solve the problem. But it was useless. All I could do was get him to agree to the campaign conditions. Later that day I made arrangements with General Services Administration to install special NASA-designed air-purifiers in the Oval Office. They were told it was for the President’s hay fever.

  Major Arnold, the President’s Air Force physician, was very distressed by the President’s smoking. I was present one day shortly thereafter when he launched into one of his sermons. These exhortations had obviously begun to grate on the President. When Arnold was through, the President lit another one and asked him if he had ever been to Greenland. When the Major expressed puzzlement at the question, the President reminded him of our Air Force missile-tracking installations there and said he would be more than happy to arrange for his transfer to one of them. “Northern Greenland, Arnold,” he said.

  The Major did not again bring up the subject. It was he, in fact, who arranged for the special flesh-tone dye that the President applied to the nicotine stain on his middle and index fingers.

  Later that first day in office Feeley and I were in the Oval and I noticed a number of books piled up on the desk. It occurred to me that in all the photographs I’ve seen of desks in the Oval Office, I’ve never once seen books in any of them. Feeley noticed them too and told the President he wanted one of the White House photographers to shoot a roll of him behind the desk, reading.

  “It’ll appeal to the pinheads,” said Feeley. Feels wasn’t high on intellectuals; he was a meat-and-potatoes politico. That explained in part his dislike of Marvin Edelstein, head of the NSC. Having grown up in a Pennsylvania steel town, he was suspicious of our chief of staff.

  “Catching up on your reading?” asked Feeley.

  “No,” said the President. “Trying to figure out how to keep the reading from catching up with me.”

  The books were all White House memoirs. Hamilton Jordan’s Crisis, John Ehrlichman’s Witness to Power, Emmet Hughes’s The Ordeal of Power, A Thousand Days, With Kennedy, Blind Ambition, Breaking Cover. There must have been about fifteen of them.

  “Remember what Oscar Wilde said?” asked the President.

  “Who?” said Feeley.

  “Christ, Feeley. Oscar Wilde.”

  “Fuck if I know.”

  The Oval is hardly the place for such expressions, but Feeley and the President had a good relationship. He was casual with the President, and the President liked that, since
there is no dearth of bowers and scrapers in the corridors of power. Next to me, the President was closest to Feels.

  “Surprise me someday, Feeley. Read a book. Oscar Wilde said every great man has his disciples and it’s always Judas who writes the biography.”

  “Uh-huh. You hear about the guy goes for his physical—”

  “Feeley, you’re missing my point.”

  “Well, what is your point anyway?”

  “These memoirs, Feeley. They make me unhappy. It makes me unhappy to think that you and Herb and Edelstein and Bam Lleland and all the rest of you are going to write books.”

  “So don’t think about it.” Feels usually had an answer.

  “Even the valets. Did you read that book by Ford’s?”*

  “Yeah,” said Feeley. “That stuff about the cold cream. Jesus.”

  As we talked about Donald Nixon’s shady business deals and Lyndon Johnson’s fondness for conducting business astride the toilet, I could see the President was deeply perturbed that all his private moments would someday be available on the paperback racks at airports. Something else was worrying him.

  “I told a joke this afternoon,” said the President. “There were about eight people here. They all laughed.”

  “So?” said Feeley.

  “It wasn’t funny. That’s why I told it. To see if they’d laugh. They all did.”

  As the late-afternoon sunlight played on the bare branches of the oak trees outside, the President was philosophical.

  “Who knows?” he said as his eyes scanned the curve of the Oval. I sensed it was a historical moment, a man reflecting on the immensity of power and on the implacable forces that would come to bear on him in the years ahead. “This place could turn us all into assholes.”

  The phone rang. The President picked it up. “Oh.” He turned to us. “It’s Jimmy Carter.”

  Feeley said: “What does he want?”

  “I have a feeling he wants to give me advice.”

  “Oh, Christ,” said Feeley. “Tell him you’re out.”