Relying on a little-known McCarthy-era House rule that permitted subpoenaed witnesses to exclude camera crews, Pierce’s attorneys made sure we were kicked out of the hearing room to miss the former HUD secretary’s star turn. If it didn’t happen on television, the theory went, it hadn’t really happened. So when the embattled housing secretary finally emerged from the hearing room, there was blood in the water and we were the sharks. Flanked by aides and Capitol police, he raced down the hall looking for an escape. As he moved faster, so did we. Finally, trying to get him to comment, I chased him into the elevator; what viewers saw on Nightly News was the elevator door closing on my arm and the microphone and Sam Pierce all but pinned against the elevator wall trying to duck the camera’s lens.
Inevitably, all this had a corrosive effect on attitudes toward Washington. There was so much rough-and-tumble that the public was getting the impression that the government was rife with corruption: so much was happening at once, and the scandals were unraveling equally in both parties.
The savings and loan mess was a classic example of the bipartisan malaise of the time. During the 1988 campaign, no one had questioned either candidate—Bush or Dukakis—about the insolvency of the nation’s savings and loan system. Both political parties were so deeply dependent upon contributions from the S&Ls that nobody wanted to turn over that rock—neither Bush nor Dukakis nor any of their minions. But shortly after the election, it became clear to thrift regulators, who’d also been asleep at the switch, that something was dreadfully wrong.
The poster child for the scandal became an S&L operator named Charles Keating, who had a number of friends in Congress. The Senate began investigating whether several senators who were friends of Keating had taken favors from him in exchange for helping him with a business badly dependent upon federal subsidies and regulations. Savings and loans started collapsing; the depositors were generally older people on fixed incomes who were losing their retirements. It was a case made for national television.
The Senate opened hearings into what became known as the Keating Five—five senators who had different degrees of complicity. As the investigation began, it was generally believed that Senator Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, which was Keating’s home state, was deeply involved. But also tarred by this broad brush were at least two other senators who really had no business being part of it. One of them was John Glenn, hero of World War II and Korea, as well as the space program, and a candidate for president during the primaries in 1984. No one could have been more of a straight arrow than this former marine pilot, but all of a sudden he was being swept up in a media feeding frenzy, because of a peripheral connection to Charles Keating.
The other person who was unfairly captured in this mess was Arizona Senator John McCain, because the Democrats did not want it to become an exclusively Democratic scandal. So the Democrats on the Ethics Committee insisted on including one Republican. McCain, who knew Charles Keating and whose family had taken airplane rides with him—a common practice by members of Congress—became an easy target. To this day, McCain is deeply resentful at having been included, with good reason. A decorated Vietnam prisoner of war, he had national ambitions; now he could see his whole career being wrecked.
As the investigation proceeded, it became clear to the Ethics Committee special counsel, Bob Bennett, that neither McCain nor Glenn had any business being in the dock. Bennett, in fact, had privately recommended to the committee that the ethics complaint be streamlined to become “the Keating Three,” excluding McCain and Glenn. But the committee refused to go along, because to remove Glenn and McCain would make it look bad for the remaining Democrats, Senate banking chairman Don Riegle and Alan Cranston of California, a prodigious fund-raiser for the Democratic party.
The hearings were turning into a full-scale Washington drama when the controversy hit home for me: it was revealed that four years earlier, before Keating’s Lincoln Savings and Loan was in trouble, a prominent New York law firm representing Keating had hired a private economist with a big reputation to do a study on what kinds of investments savings and loans should safely make. Then running a Wall Street firm, Alan Greenspan had given his “Good Housekeeping” seal of approval to a Keating proposal that savings and loans be permitted to invest directly in real estate. Now these practices were being criticized for helping make the S&Ls excessively vulnerable to swings in the economy. Suddenly in the middle of my coverage of the biggest scandal in town, everyone was focusing on the fact that Greenspan, by then Fed chairman, had years earlier given Keating what was being interpreted as a clean bill of health.
For the first time since Alan’s appointment, I had a real conflict, especially because John McCain was pointing to Alan’s study to justify his own earlier conclusion that Keating was reliable. I had to take myself off the story, at least until Alan’s role was cleared up. The criticism didn’t bother him at all, but knowing his rock-hard integrity, it galled me to hear people taking his earlier work for Keating out of context and attempting to drag him into the current scandal. Finally, the facts caught up with the news coverage. Alan’s limited role was resolved, and the investigation refocused on the senators.
A year later, I was able to cover the outcome of the hearings, as the Senate Ethics Committee meted out varying punishments to the five senators. But it was an important example of how suddenly issues could arise that required separating my professional life from Alan’s, erecting a firewall between his work and mine. We also had to be careful to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. As a result, I avoided showing up with him on some occasions usually attended by spouses. As much as I would have liked to attend one of his five confirmation hearings, for instance, I thought it better to avoid drawing attention to our relationship. And when I was covering Congress, I made sure I was nowhere nearby any time he came to the Hill.
The savings and loan scandals made average Americans feel vulnerable about the safety of their savings, perhaps for the first time since the Great Depression. They realized that some of the people they’d trusted to handle their money—often friends and neighbors, pillars of their small-town communities—had swindled them. It played to a recurring populist resentment of corporate America that dates back to Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting and Lincoln Steffens’s muckraking journalism in the first decade of the twentieth century. It is the same anger we now see, justifiably, in response to corporate scandals, and it feeds a more generalized outrage against big business that animates much of the rhetoric in contemporary politics.
The S&L scandal caused real damage to people’s lives, and to the federal budget. The government had to spend more than $480 billion bailing out the thrifts, and many depositors lost their savings. In fact, an interagency group of regulators, including Alan, was appointed by the president to work nonstop on the bailout. A pattern of abuse in the private sector, followed by a government rescue, was established.
The other outcome was that the millions of dollars that the savings and loans institutions had poured into congressional campaigns—a million from Keating to the five senators alone—exposed Congress’s ugliest secret, the campaign finance system. For John McCain, it was an epiphany. He knew he had to purge himself of supporters like Keating. To resurrect his career, he transformed himself into the nation’s leading advocate of campaign finance reform.
It became his new persona: he helped sponsor every major campaign finance bill that followed. The issue distinguished him from his colleagues and positioned him to become a national force for independent-minded politics in succeeding years. As he himself would say, as a reformed sinner, someone previously dependent on contributions from men like Charles Keating, he could be even more zealous in trying to change the system.
Until then, my years in Congress had been consumed by scandal and corruption. As exciting, and productive, as it was, after so many years of covering foreign policy in the White House, I missed international news, presidential summits, even military conflicts. But soon enoug
h, I’d have more foreign news than I’d want. On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. America had been Iraq’s unofficial ally during Saddam’s eight-year conflict with Iran, a country the administration viewed as even more sinister than Iraq. But when Saddam’s troops crossed the border into Kuwait, he threatened to seize an even greater prize, the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. America’s showdown with Iraq was on. At the time, it felt like a final confrontation. We didn’t realize it was only the first chapter in a much longer engagement.
The president and his defense secretary, Dick Cheney, knew they had to mobilize a military force to push Saddam back, but few of Iraq’s neighbors in the Persian Gulf were willing to permit American forces on their territory. Even the Saudis, whose oil and territory were most at risk, resented having to request American help and wanted to limit their population’s exposure to more Westernized countries. Cheney’s secret mission was to persuade Gulf monarchs, who had previously insisted on only the most secret military arrangements with the United States, to permit U.S. forces to take up positions openly in their countries in preparation for an all-out assault against Iraq. That meant siding with the “infidel” against a fellow Arab, but one whose secularism and territorial ambitions were deeply threatening.
Because Congress was gone on summer vacation, euphemistically known as district work periods, I was available to go with Cheney as the network TV representative in a small group, or pool, of reporters from the major newspapers. We went to the relatively closed societies of Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, and to more Western countries like Bahrain. Routine photo opportunities became culture wars: our group included several women, and we found ourselves asking questions of Arab rulers who never expected to be questioned by a journalist, much less an American woman. Although we didn’t wear chadors and veils, we tried to respect their religious imperatives by wearing long skirts and long sleeves. But even appropriately dressed, I startled the emir of Qatar when I presumed to ask a question at a photo opportunity. (It was actually pretty intimidating; I felt like Oliver Twist asking tremulously for another bowl of porridge.)
It was during that trip, on board the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower, that I first realized war was inevitable, despite the feints toward diplomacy. We were in the Red Sea, accompanying Cheney, on August 18. Two days earlier, under new United Nations resolutions authorizing an embargo of all but medical and food supplies to Iraq and occupied Kuwait, ships from the U.S. and its allies had begun intercepting merchant vessels that challenged the blockade. According to the Pentagon’s “after-action report,” in the Gulf of Oman, the USS Reid, a guided-missile frigate, fired the first shots of Operation Desert Shield across the bow of an Iraqi tanker that refused to alter its course in the Persian Gulf. Another encounter with an Iraqi tanker followed, this time in the Persian Gulf itself. The USS Bradley fired three warning shots when the tanker wouldn’t turn back. All ships in the region, including ours, were put on general quarters, with their crews sent to battle stations. Rather than feeling frightened, we were excited to be close to the action. Dick Cheney was briefed on the incidents while on board the USS Scott, a destroyer in the Eisenhower battle group. The Scott had peacefully turned back a Cypriot freighter loaded with chemicals only hours earlier at the opening of the Gulf of Aqaba. Cheney told the crew that they were doing tough, hard, dirty work, but that it was perhaps the most important moment for the nation for the rest of the century. There was no doubt about his mind-set; he was determined to take on Iraq.
The military consequences of these early encounters were negligible, but that wasn’t the point. Through the cat and mouse game with Iraqi ships, the United States was seeking to project strength and determination to Iraq and the rest of the world. The sanctions would be enforced. It may have been a minor skirmish to the rest of the world, but to those of us on the flight deck of one of the two U.S. aircraft carriers in the region, it sounded like World War III. I scrambled to file live reports on the action for the pool, and for Nightly News from “Pri-Fli,” or primary flight control.
Visually, nighttime flight operations are stunning. Acoustically, it is a complete assault on your senses: when flight operations are under way, the noise is thunderous. What is also striking to the uninitiated is how close the quarters are, even on a carrier. When these men are in their “racks,” as the bunks are known, they are literally sandwiched one on top of another, with only a few inches on either side. It is claustrophobic, but somehow the crew manning this enormous ship, essentially a small town afloat, works together, in peace and wartime. The experience gave an outsider like me a new and healthy respect for the chain of command and the discipline that make such a highly choreographed operation possible.
It was my first visit to Saudi Arabia, and it was obvious that the royal family was deeply ambivalent about the trade-off between preserving its culture and accepting Western help to defend its borders against Saddam. Until we arrived in Jeddah, very late one night, I had no concept of how deep a chasm existed between American culture and the strict Wahabi form of Islam that governs Saudi Arabia, and that has, through its clerics, been responsible for radicalizing a generation of Saudi youth. By the time we had completed the formal arrival ceremony and traditional drinking of tea, it must have been two in the morning, but Cheney immediately went to see King Fahd, as was expected. We learned later that it was a critical meeting to obtain the king’s consent for a massive, and unprecedented, U.S. troop deployment on Saudi soil.
Our small press group was taken to what appeared to be an Inter-Continental Hotel. Once inside, it was surreal, like something out of Last Year at Marienbad. There were no other guests, as far as we could ascertain. The only people in the hotel were the five or six of us from the press pool, vastly outnumbered by the staff. It turned out that instead of being at a commercial hotel, we were staying at an official guesthouse reserved for the royal family.
One of the most obvious differences about being in the kingdom was the lack of television news other than the officially sanctioned Middle East Broadcasting on every channel. The Saudis were not going to permit their people to see Western media. Not being in a real hotel, we also had all sorts of technical challenges in getting our stories out: we hadn’t arranged for satellite feeds, because the networks had not anticipated that this would be a newsworthy trip—but it was quickly developing into one.
At that time the Saudis were not readily granting visas to American journalists to enter the kingdom. We got in only because we were accompanying the secretary of defense. Several newspaper reporters wanted to take advantage of this monthlong visa to stay in Saudi Arabia, rather than returning home directly with Dick Cheney. But when they tried to book flights from Jeddah to do more reporting at the American military base at Dhahran, they immediately ran into another Saudi rule: unmarried women could travel only if accompanied by a male relative.
So Dick Cheney cooperated by writing notes, as though he were writing a teacher’s permission slip or a doctor’s note, for Molly Moore of The Washington Post and some of the other women journalists, saying that they were the sisters of Michael Gordon of The New York Times. The secretary of defense was creating instant families by fiat.
After we returned home, a month later, I had a glimpse into the way diplomatic relationships are cemented behind the scenes. It is a secret world, parallel to official Washington, and perhaps more important. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia’s legendary ambassador to the United States, and his wife, Princess Haifa, invited us to dinner on September 28, at their palatial home in McLean, Virginia, on the banks of the Potomac near the CIA. The only other guests were Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne, and Ken Duberstein, Ronald Reagan’s last chief of staff, and his wife, Sydney.
Alan and I accepted immediately, but then I got a call from Ken.
“What are you going to do about the Bandar dinner?” he asked.
“Of course we’re going,” I replied, having not really focused on the calendar. But he pointed out that the
dinner was scheduled for Yom Kippur. Not only wouldn’t we be fasting, as required by Jewish religious law, we’d be eating at the home of the Saudi Ambassador. In the end, we both decided that the Lord, and our parents, would somehow understand, and we drove to the Saudi residence. On Kol Nidre, the holiest night of the Jewish calendar, we found ourselves being inspected by the well-armed and very tough-looking British security men who guard Bandar’s estate.
Bandar is the son of Prince Sultan, the Saudi defense minister, and therefore a member of the royal family; although, because his mother was reportedly a Sudanese servant, he is not believed to be in the line of succession. Trained in British schools and by the British and U.S. military as a jet pilot, he is the dean of the diplomatic corps in Washington, having served as ambassador since 1983, longer than any of his colleagues. He is flashy, extravagant, witty, politically astute, and extraordinarily charming. On this evening, he displayed all those assets, and more. I confess that the meal, on this Jewish fast night, was superb, reflecting two cultures: first a Western dinner heavily influenced by French cuisine, followed by several beautifully seasoned courses of traditional Arabic food.
After dinner, in a throwback to an earlier Washington practice that Georgetown doyennes Kay Graham and Sally Quinn had helped eradicate, the men and women separated. The men remained with Bandar for cigars, brandy, and conversation, while we joined Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa, who was the late King Faisal’s daughter. We marveled at how she managed to bridge two worlds, and how the cultural divide affected her teenage daughters. What did they do about wearing the veil?
Talking Back Page 22
