“Jesus, it was awful. Six pages, and only five sentences. It wasn’t English,” he said. “It wasn’t any known language. And some of the lines. ‘I have not yet begun to run’? God …”
When I asked him if the President wasn’t sure to miss what he’d taken out, he shook his head and said he doubted it, because only a drunk man would have written such a speech and a drunk man wouldn’t remember what he’d written.
I left him muttering in the corridor and went off to resume my search for Theodore.
By 1:30 a.m. I had twelve Secret Service agents combing the White House and immediate grounds for Theodore. Feeley was tiring of the whole thing and wanted to obtain a substitute hamster—in fact, he had been on the phone rousting some poor Smithsonian functionary out of bed, asking him where he could get a hamster at that hour. I vetoed the idea on the grounds that Firecracker would spot the deception in two seconds. Feeley threw up his arms and said he was going to bed.
“Fine,” I said, piqued. “Never mind about your promise to Firecracker. Never mind about telling him you’d have his hamster back in five minutes. I’ll stay here and mop up after you. As usual.”
“Look,” he said wearily, “tomorrow’s going to be bad enough. I’ve got to get some sleep. The rat’ll probably show up in the morning. They’ve got great homing instincts.” By two o’clock he’d started referring to Theodore as a rat.
At three I was still directing the search when my phone rang. I let it ring four times. Was it the President telling me the game was up? Or Joan calling from Boise, worried that she hadn’t been able to reach me at home?
But when I picked it up, the White House operator told me Firecracker was on the line for me. “Where’s Theodore?” he was whispering.
I explained the situation to him. He took it like a man. I promised not to abandon the search and indeed I went on with it until nearly four, but then, exhausted, I too was compelled to give up. The next day was going to be an eventful one, and I reasoned that I ought to have at least two hours’ sleep to be ready for it. Nonetheless, I felt wretched about Theodore. The drive home was full of unpleasant visions of squashed and otherwise deceased hamsters.
The phone began ringing at 6:30 a.m. The press. They were in a state over the President’s expected withdrawal, foaming at the mouth even more than usual and desirous of the usual irrelevant details. ABC, for instance, demanded to know what he was having for breakfast. After less than two hours’ sleep, on top of a trying evening, I found this an especially vexatious question.
“How in blazes should I know what he’s having for breakfast?” I said. “What an intolerably stupid question.”
By seven I had had a dozen such calls and was in a foul mood. Aida, our maid, arrived to cook me breakfast. Joan hated the thought of me having to make my own breakfast, so she’d arranged for our maid to come early.
I was in the shower when Aida brought me the cordless telephone.
Filled with excitement, she said, “It’s de President for you, Mr. Wadloo!” With that she thrust the thing through the shower curtain, nearly electrocuting me.
“Agh!” I screamed, leaping naked out of the shower. In so doing, I banged into the edge of the sink and fell to the floor. Aida stood there regarding me. The phone clattered to the shower floor. I rubbed my hip.
“You wan’ speak to him?”
“Unh,” I groaned. “Unh.” My head, resting on the tile, was only a few inches from the phone. Through the splashing I could hear, “Hello? Hello? Mr. Wadlough, are you there?”
Aida turned off the water. I reached over and took the phone. “Yes?” I gasped.
“Please hold for the President,” said the operator.
The President came on. “Sorry to bother you this early, but Firecracker’s all bent out of shape about his hamster. He keeps saying you or Feeley knows where it is. That’s all I can get out of him. You have any idea what the hell’s going on?”
Think, Wadlough, I said to myself. I got out something vague about how we’d promised Firecracker to help find Theodore. I said I’d take charge of the search as soon as I could get there.
As soon as I got to the office, I assembled an ad-hoc emergency task force consisting of Mrs. Metz, Mrs. O’Dwyer, and myself. All agents and household staff were alerted. Groundskeepers were alerted. The custodial staff was told to disarm all rat traps in the White House basement.
There were questions. Were there any cats on the premises? Was there an effective hamster bait? I needed answers, and time was running out.
I called Feeley and briefed him. From his grunts I could tell he was having a busy morning and was not concentrating on my briefing. Among Feeley’s many talents was his ability to rise above catastrophes of his own making and leaving others to cope with the wreckage. In politics, this is no inconsiderable skill.
The inevitable happened. News of Theodore’s disappearance leaked to the press. At the noon press briefing there were questions. I demanded a transcript.
This exchange had occurred:
Q: How long has the hamster been missing?
Feeley: I don’t have anything for you on that.
Q: Is Libya involved?
(Laughter)
Feeley: Can we get on with this?
Q: How old is the hamster?
Feeley: When Congress gets back after the Christmas recess, we’ll submit the revised immigration legislation—
Q: Can you describe the hamster?
Feeley: For Chrissakes—
Q: Are the Russians involved?
Feeley: Not to our knowledge.
Q: Has the FBI been called in?
Feeley: I understand Herb Wadlough has been tasked with finding the hamster. He is orchestrating the search effort. Can we get on with the briefing?
Q: What are Wadlough’s qualifications?
(Laughter)
Feeley: The President has every confidence in Mr. Wadlough. He has the highest regard for his hamster-locating abilities.
Reading it, my finger trembled. I called Feeley.
“This is outrageous,” I said. “It makes me sound like the White House zookeeper!”
“Herb—”
“It’s humiliating,” I said. “I’m a substantive person.”
“Of course you are.”
“Don’t humor me,” I said. “I’m in no mind to be humored.”
“Relax,” he said. “After the speech tonight everyone’ll have forgotten about the fucking hamster.”
The calls started to come in from the press. I prepared a brief statement which I instructed Mrs. Metz to give out. The only thing that kept me from despair was the knowledge that a seven-year-old boy was depending on me. But though the search continued in earnest throughout the day, Theodore could not be found. I began to fear the worst. At 5:30 I met with Firecracker and told him that everything humanly possible was being done, but that as yet Theodore had eluded us. It was a poignant meeting. Once more I was impressed with his manly bearing.
The broadcast was scheduled for ten o’clock. (NBC had refused to cut into Tumor Ward, so it had been moved back an hour.) The President had graciously asked me and Feeley (as well as Lleland and Marvin) to join him in the Oval Office at 9:30. I think he felt badly about having excluded everyone from his decision-making process and wanted to make us feel part of the historic occasion.
We sat around making small talk. The President was in an upbeat mood.
At 9:45 one of the White House technicians told me he needed the Teleprompter copy.
“Mr. President,” I said, “it’s time.”
“Ah,” said the President. “The great moment.” He smiled at us and opened the right top drawer. “Now you’ll understand why it was necessary to keep such a—Ow!”
He pushed back in his chair, knocking over the table by the window and upsetting the pictures of the family in their silver frames. He was clutching his right hand.
A Secret Service agent rushed forward. Feeley and I collided with each other co
ming around the edge of the desk. Someone knocked over a television light. There was shouting, the kind of confused commotion that usually attends an assassination attempt.
All eyes went to the open drawer from which the President had so violently recoiled. There was a movement, a rustling of papers, then a glimpse of a wriggling brown body and some twitching whiskers.
If the President ever suspected our involvement in the affair, he never let on. Perhaps he did, but recognized that Feeley’s changes had greatly helped his speech. More likely he was preoccupied with the First Lady’s reaction to his decision, which, it was obvious, he had kept secret even from her.
Major Arnold was greatly exercised over the possibility that Theodore might be rabid. He and I exchanged sharp words when he informed me that the hamster would have to undergo the rabies test. I gave him to understand that while I valued the President’s health above that of my mother, I would under no circumstances permit the Air Force to decapitate the President’s son’s hamster.* A vigorous debate followed in the corridor, during which it became necessary to remind the Major that the matter was closed, and that if he could not grasp this fundamental precept, he might refresh his understanding of the Constitution in the calm and quiet of one of our missile-tracking stations in Greenland. I did not enjoy having to put it that way, but it had been a trying day, and I was not disposed to trifle.
* When I told Major Arnold that, I was of course using a figure of speech, but that fact is not reflected in the Major’s memoir, The Bowels of Power.
23
TAKEDOWN
I think this is the end of our little walks in the park.
—JOURNAL, JAN. 10, 1992
The First Lady did not take the President’s surprise announcement at all well.
I received a call from Mrs. O’Dwyer the next morning at eight, when the President and First Lady usually took breakfast. She was in a state.
“Mis-ter Wadlough,” she said. I always got the feeling she held me personally responsible for the goings-on in the residence. “I’m very sorry if they’re not getting along, but I won’t have the crockery being thrown about. It’s not their house, after all, is it? It belongs to the—”
“Mrs. O’Dwyer,” I said peremptorily, for I was in no mood for one of her lugubrious sermons, “what exactly is going on?”
She hooted and told me that, to judge from the sound of it, the President and First Lady were experiencing marital trauma.
“What are they saying to each other?”
“I am not in the habit of eavesdropping.”
“Well, are they shouting?” I said. “Can you hear that?”
“I can tell you this, Mr. Wadlough: she isn’t a bit pleased that he’s running again. And if you ask me—”
“I did not ask you, Mrs. O’Dwyer.”
“Well, it isn’t proper. She may be a young woman, and I can’t speak for what being in the film world does to you. All the world may be a stage, but I’ve been here since Mr. and Mrs. Nixon and I’ve never witnessed such displays as these, and I don’t care to witness any more.”
“Thank you, Mrs. O’Dwyer.” I’d be glad to see to it you don’t, you impossible woman, I thought.
Gloomy premonitions crowded in on me. I’d known Mrs. Tucker would not be pleased by his decision to run again, but, as anxious as she was for him to quit politics, she was a strong woman and a good wife and I was sure she’d “stand by her man,” as the country-western singers put it.
She and Firecracker left for New York that morning on the 10:30 New York Air flight. She could have been flown by Air Force Jet Star. Oh, I thought, that is not a good sign.
She spent the next three days at the Sherry Netherland. She would not accept the President’s phone calls. This was a tense period for the senior staff, and a difficult one personally for the President.
Christmas was over, so we could hardly announce that she had gone on another shopping trip. Feeley told the President it would seem “too Republican.” We put out the story that she was simply on a “private visit.” I made several secret trips up to New York, carrying messages back and forth between them. At the President’s insistence, I wore a disguise—that same vexatious, scratchy beard I had worn during one of our Cuban trips. My hair had also been sprayed gray. Not recognizing me, the First Lady’s Secret Service detail wrestled me to the ground outside her suite at the Sherry Netherland Hotel, putting me in a foul humor.
The First Lady was unresponsive to my entreaties, but at no point attacked me physically, which I took to be a good sign. Her anger with her husband was pronounced. She felt betrayed by his decision to run again. I said that throughout history a number of great leaders had kept matters of state secret even from their wives. She was unresponsive to this argument. When I said that Thomas Tucker had a chance to be remembered as a great President, but only if he had another term in which to fulfill his greatness, she became antagonistic in her response.
In fairness, I could understand her position. On the other hand, the prospect of her making a film during the re-election campaign was unappealing in the extreme. I argued with her forcefully. Let me be frank: I begged her to return.
I think if it had not been for the events of January 9, she might not have returned to the White House.
Bamford Lleland writes in his memoir: “The timing of Hamchuk Hartoonian’s attack on the President was so favorable, in terms of the marital crisis, as to be propitious. Herb Wadlough, who in addition to his role as White House baggage handler and food taster had also been given the job of trying to cajole Mrs. Tucker back to Washington, was positively jubilant over the incident, since it solved his immediate problem. We chided him afterwards, congratulating him on his ‘coup’ in masterminding the attack. As usual, poor Herb failed to see the humor in the remark.”
I do not propose to comment on these smug, untrue, and libelous remarks, except to say that among my failings is a failure to find anything “humorous” in attempted assassinations of the President of the United States by Commandos of the Armenian Genocide. At Harvard, perhaps, such incidents are considered “good sport.”
I was, in fact, returning from one of my undercover missions when the attack took place. I was aboard the 6:30 p.m. New York Air flight to Washington. (My Air Force Jet Star had developed a mechanical problem on the ground in New York, so I had been forced to return on a commercial flight.) At 7:02 the pilot’s voice came on and announced, with what I thought was indecent calm, that the President had just been shot. I wish I could report that the atmosphere aboard the 727 was stunned and grief-stricken, but all I recall is the fellow next to me asking if I knew any good hotels in Washington.
I presented myself to a stewardess in the front and told her I was White House deputy chief of staff and had urgent need of a telephone. She looked at me dubiously and asked for identification.
Since I was known to the guards at the White House, I’d long ago gotten out of the custom of carrying my White House carnet. Grumbling that I was surprised she did not know my name, I offered her my driver’s license.
She looked at it, then at me, then back at it. It was then I remembered I was incognito.
She was now regarding me with some alarm. I told her to summon the pilot immediately, whereupon she told me to return to my seat. I became somewhat indignant—understandably—and demanded to speak with the captain.
It is true, as the press accounts of the incident related, that I yanked off my beard at that point. It is not true, as those same reports allege, that I became “hysterical.” Certainly I was forceful—anyone in my position would have been. At any rate, moments later I found my arms being pinioned behind me by several burly passengers and the co-pilot was speaking to me in tones indicating that he thought he was addressing a person of deranged mind. Thus I was incommunicado until we arrived on the ground and the White House driver Mrs. Metz had sent to meet me made my identity clear to the FBI agents who had been sent to arrest me.
On the drive to the h
ospital I called the First Lady. The White House operator told me she was already en route to Washington.
The scene at George Washington University Hospital was chaotic, the security tighter than I had ever seen it. Sniper teams were already in place on the rooftop. A helicopter was circling. I made my way through a long corridor toward the emergency room. Outside were agents with German shepherds and drawn Uzis. A nurse was arguing with one of the dog handlers. A large black man on a gurney who appeared to have been shunted aside in the general excitement, and who, from the sound of it, had ingested no small amount of controlled substances, was expressing his dissatisfaction with the arrangements.
I moved as if in a daze through the emergency room. The operating area is in the back. I saw Colonel Frye, the President’s military aide. I recognized Rod Holloway, wearing a surgical gown. Major Arnold was also there. Rod brought me up to date.
The President had decided, without any warning, to take one of his walks in Lafayette Park. He’d allowed only one other agent besides Rod to accompany him. To the horror of the two agents, he decided to go talk to the permanent protesters on the Pennsylvania Avenue side of the park. He’d just engaged a few of these specimens in conversation when Hartoonian sprang out from behind and began firing. Jake Thompson, the second agent, brought down the swarthy Armenian with one shot, but not before the assailant had gotten off three rounds with his Smith and Wesson .41 magnum.
One of Hartoonian’s shots hit the President, passing through the left bicep muscle and grazing his side. From there it passed through two placard-carrying supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment. Extremely unfortunate. The other round pierced the roof of a D.C. city bus, exited, and lodged in the northeast cornice of the Old Executive Office Building.
An agent led me into an examining room they had converted into a recovery room. I heard a nurse’s voice: “Please, Mr. President. I must ask you to put that out. It’s dangerous to smoke in here.”
The President was propped up in bed. His upper right arm was bandaged. An IV was dripping into his ankle. His left arm was folded behind his head. His eyes looked a bit glassy—from the anesthetic, I guessed. A cigarette hung at a forty-five-degree angle from the left side of his mouth. By way of response to the nurse’s entreaties, he winked and asked for a cup of coffee, black.
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