Apparently, George was up on all the controversy I was causing. Every time I’d open my mouth, I’d be in trouble. So I thought that was a great line. He didn’t care about me, he wanted to meet the woman who could put up with me!
It must have been about a year later that Bush came to visit Minnesota. I took my son, Tyrel, to meet him. The president looked Ty in the eye and said, “So can you kick the old man’s butt yet?”
“Oh, no!” Ty exclaimed.
And the President said, “I can’t either.” Referring, I presume, to George, Senior.
From these moments, I knew that Bush had a good sense of humor. But my first inclination that he was not a man of his word came at that same governor’s meeting early in 2001. Monday morning is a business session, where all fifty governors sit down with the president. He discusses domestic policy—where he sees it going, what he expects from you, and what you should expect from him. He stated at the time that he was a strong believer in giving more power to the states, which I applaud. He was going to be, he said, an old-style Federalist president. I believed him.
Yet just about every move he’s made since that day has taken power away from the states. Cases in point: Twelve states have now passed laws to allow the medical use of marijuana. The federal government under Bush says no way, it won’t let the states do this. Two states have voted for dignity in death. If I’m living in Minnesota and terminally ill, I could have the option of moving to Oregon and fulfill my wishes not to prolong the agony. Again, the Bush administration says, oh no you can’t.
It’s a shame that Bush has turned into what he has. That deception about returning power to the states was only the first of many, the foremost being how his administration lied to the American people in justifying our disastrous invasion of Iraq. Leaving the Midland region that day, I couldn’t help thinking about our dependency on oil, whether it’s from the Middle East or the West Texas variety. We should be taking the billions being wasted in Iraq and putting all this money toward renewable energy sources that won’t destroy the planet. We should be doing everything we can to draw energy from the sun, the wind, and the water.
Bill Clinton was the other president I’d had a chance to become acquainted with. Actually, my first encounter was with Hillary, and we didn’t start out on a positive note. When I was running for governor, naturally the Republicans and Democrats began calling in some of their big guns to try to influence the voters. The last week of the campaign, Skip Humphrey brought Hillary to Minnesota. She was still First Lady at the time. Her first quote to the media was, “Okay, it’s time for the carnival sideshow to end and let’s get down to real politics.” I’d just climbed out of an RV in Rochester, Minnesota, when the press came charging over, thrusting about fifty microphones in my face and saying, “Did you hear that Hillary Clinton called your campaign nothing but a carnival sideshow act?”
I have respect for Hillary, but I felt insulted. And if somebody’s going to fire a round over my bow, they can expect to get one back. I deadpanned: “Well, it seems to me that, rather than being concerned about Minnesota politics, Mrs. Clinton should be more concerned about leaving Bill alone in the White House.” I added something about how, when the cat’s away, the mice are going to play.
Later on, meeting the President and Hillary, she had decided to let bygones be bygones. If she did remember my remarks, she didn’t make an issue of it.
TERRY: The first time we went to the White House, right after Jesse was elected, I was simply overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of where we were. I felt embarrassed, not worthy. Every time we came into a room, there was a guy who would announce your name out to everybody. I felt like walking with my purse in front of my face.
I have to hand it to the Clintons, and their ability to make a person feel at home. We went to a big formal dinner in the State Dining Room at the White House. It was awesome. The tables were decorated with china and crystal, the centerpieces filled with all kinds of flowers and surrounded by silver candlesticks and votive candles. They sat me down next to Dan Glickman, the secretary of agriculture, because I liked farming, and I thought that was very clever of them. He was really nice, and so was everybody at the table, because I was such a beginner. When the waiters came around with potatoes that were fried in the form of a statue, I knew I was in big trouble. “How do they get potatoes to do this?” I asked. Nobody else seemed to know either, which was comforting.
Jesse was seated about six tables away. After the violinists came by our table playing “God Bless America,” finally I said to my group, “Is it all right if I leave my chair?” Oh sure, they said. I made a beeline for Jesse, who of course was holding court at his table. I just grabbed him and said, “Isn’t this great?! Oh my God, do you believe this?” He’s going, “Honey, go sit down now, you’re okay.”
It’s unique that, when you eat in the White House, you don’t sit with your spouse. You get randomly placed, and that’s done intentionally because they want different people to meet. The food was excellent, as you might imagine. When the meal is over, the president gets up and gives a talk, and then you all adjourn to the East Wing, down the hall, where the entertainment will be. Generally, there’s some type of dancing. One time with Clinton, it was Kenny G. This first night we were there, though, was more the Glenn Miller ballroom-type music. Which isn’t my cup of tea, but I can live with it.
When Terry and I walked into the room, the President and Hillary were dancing. No one else was out there. It was like no one wanted to even enter their space. I turned to Terry and said, “What will you give me to walk up to them and cut in?” She grabbed my arm, gritted her teeth, and whispered, “Don’t you dare!”
So I grabbed her and said, “Fine, if I can’t cut in, then come on!”
I figured, by God, I’ll break the ice! I’m the independent, anyway. I won’t get chastised by any upper echelon of the party. I took Terry out onto the floor and we started dancing right next to Bill and Hillary. When the music ended, naturally they turned to us and we engaged in a great conversation, talking intimately for a couple of minutes. I told them about my very first proclamation as governor, which had been to declare February fifteenth “Rolling Stones Day” in Minnesota. They thought that was great.
Looking back on it, I still wish I would have walked up and tapped the president on the shoulder, just to see what he would have done. I think they would have found my cutting in very humorous. Terry now says she should have let me do it.
TERRY: Then they had a big thing where all the First Ladies went out to Mount Vernon for a luncheon. At the end, everybody got to meet Hillary and have their picture taken with her. I’m talking to one of the First Ladies behind me in the line when, all of a sudden, before my name is even mentioned, Hillary says, “Terry!” She knew my first name? She grabbed my hand, looked me in the eye, and said, “I have been so worried about you.” I said, “You’ve gotta be kidding.” I went mute. She went on and on about having seen my picture and how concerned she was for how I was holding up. “Uh huh, uh huh,” was all I could say. I was like a total country bumpkin.
The second time I went to the White House, I brought along my chief of staff, because I thought it would be a good perk for him. When we went to be greeted by Bill and Hillary this time, as soon as I shook her hand, Hillary said, “And how are Terry and the horses doing?” They’d met only once, a year earlier.
I said, “Mrs. Clinton, how do you know that Terry has horses?”
She said, “Oh, I keep an eye on Terry. I don’t want anything bad to happen to her.”
I’m stunned, thinking: This woman as First Lady meets how many people a day, 365 days a year? And she not only remembers your first name, but the fact that you train horses? Unbelievable, this woman’s memory!
At one point I leaned in and asked her, “Madame First Lady, are you sure you want to run for the Senate? Are you positive you want to do this?”
She just laughed and said, “Yeah!”
Toward the mi
ddle of my term, I spent a night in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House. It came about because I had teased President Clinton—were we never going to play golf together? And he’d said sometime we would. He found out that I was in Washington for a couple of days, testifying before Congress on the issue of international trade. Then his security called my security with a surprise invitation. The message was: President Clinton was returning from a trip that night, why doesn’t Governor Ventura spend the night at the White House and we’ll get up early in the morning and play golf? I thought, this is terrific!
I got to the White House around 8 p.m. The president wouldn’t arrive back until about 11 p.m. So, I received the full tour from a lady there: the whole White House, all except for the president’s bedroom, which I can understand. That was off-limits in my governor’s residence, too. But I got to see parts of the White House that ordinarily nobody did. The public tours never include the private quarters on the second or third floor.
Eventually I was put way upstairs in a TV room. I was sitting in there with two of the president’s relatives, cousins or something, when we heard the “helo” land on the pad outside. I had butterflies in my stomach. You feel overwhelmed, is the best way to say it. Especially in my case, when I look at myself and where I come from. The product of a street laborer and a nurse, growing up in a little house in south Minneapolis where both of my parents worked, a latchkey kid. You pinch yourself and say, I’m really here?
When President Clinton walked into the room, he tore off his suit jacket, threw it onto a chair, loosened up his tie, looked at me and said, “Governor, can I get you a beer, water, anything?” I said, “No sir, I’m fine.” He got a beer for himself, came over, plopped into a chair, and gave a big exhale. It shows you that, at the end of a long day, presidents are human, too.
Earlier that day, I had given a keynote speech at Georgetown University, which is where Clinton went to college. I knew C-SPAN had been there with the cameras. So here I am sitting with the president, when he flips the channel to C-SPAN—and it’s my speech! I’m thinking to myself, “Oh my God, I hope I didn’t say something derogatory about the president or Hillary today.” Because my speeches were always ad-lib. Whatever struck me, I was going to talk about it, and I never knew where I’d end up. So this was kind of a strange situation, sitting there having the president watch me giving a speech, almost as a critic. Well, he made a few comments now and then but, when it was over, I hadn’t said anything bad. What a relief!
Then the fun part came. The relatives went to bed, and it ended up just the president and me. I had always wanted to smoke a cigar with him, on the balcony of the White House. But the White House is a smoke-free building. And the Secret Service won’t allow the president to go out on the balcony and have a cigar, because anybody from a nearby building with a high-powered rifle would have a pretty clear shot at him. And if you had an infrared scope, you could do it at night. So I never did have a cigar with him, but we ended up sitting together and talking in his library.
This was toward the end of President Clinton’s second term, and he was working overtime to try to get a peace accord between the Palestinians and the Israelis. This was really the legacy he wanted to leave behind. He started talking about this and he said, “You know, governor, it’s so frustrating. Because it all comes down to one mound of dirt.”
I said, “A mound of dirt?”
He said, “Yeah, there’s a hill over there,”—or maybe he said “mountain,” I can’t remember the name of it—“and all the Israelis believe that their sacred religious artifacts are buried there. All the Palestinians and Muslims also believe their sacred relics are buried there.” The president explained to me that both sides have agreed no one will ever touch the spot. No excavations or anything like that. But neither religion will allow the other one to be in control of it.
I sat there thinking: There’s the rub. Until the religions change their positions, they’re going to be fighting forever. We all know what it takes to get religions to take a different viewpoint. Good luck! You might have to wait for a thousand years or more.
So, after hearing the problem, I sat back in the chair and I said, “Mr. President, I have a solution.”
His eyes flashed. He looked over at me and said, earnestly, “What would you do?”
I said, “Here’s what I’d do. Why don’t you call in an air strike, and blow that hill off the face of the earth? We can say the computers malfunctioned. We can apologize twenty times like we did when we hit the Chinese Embassy in Sudan by mistake, or supposedly by mistake. Just keep apologizing up and down for the next year. Eventually, they’ll forgive us, won’t they, for this miscalculation of our computers? We blow it up, it’s gone! They won’t have anything to fight over!”
I used the analogy of two children fighting over the same toy. How do you stop it? Take away the toy, then neither of ’em gets it. Standard Child-Rearing 101.
Well, you should have seen the look I got. I could only assume that this hadn’t come up in the negotiations. Or with any of his advisers. A stunned expression is putting it mildly. President Clinton didn’t say anything, but if I could put words in his mouth, they were: “You’ve gotta be shitting me.” As best I could determine, he wasn’t quite ready to consider my solution. He might even have been thinking, “And this guy could end up with his finger near the nuclear button?”
Unlike Bush, who goes to bed around 9 p.m. every night, Clinton was a night owl. He never went to sleep until three or four in the morning. But we finally said our good nights, and I walked alone down to the Lincoln Bedroom. It’s on the second floor, almost directly opposite the President’s bedroom.
This is where the feeling of being here really got to me. I stood in the bedroom looking around. Under glass off to one side is Lincoln’s entire handwritten Gettysburg Address. Signed by him. Lincoln’s penmanship is some of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. I sat on the edge of the bed and thought, my God, he wrote this almost 150 years ago! Then I lay down, and began thinking of everything I could possibly remember about different presidents who had occupied the White House.
I have a disease that some people get, a ringing in the ears, so I have to sleep with another sound in the bedroom. If it’s dead silent, it’s difficult for me to sleep. Usually I sleep with the TV on very low, so it gives me background noise. It was about four in the morning now, and I started channel surfing. Suddenly, right there in Lincoln’s bed, I began laughing so hard that the iron bedposts were shaking!
What had come on the TV while I was trying to fall asleep? Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men, the movie with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. Here I am in the very same White House where Nixon had probably walked up and down the halls, swearing like hell, trying to figure—“How do I get out of this one?” And there’s Deep Throat at four in the morning down there in the bowels of the parking lot, telling Woodward, “Follow the money.”
It’s a funny dichotomy. You start imagining the history of this amazing place, and it makes you feel small, insignificant. On the flip side, you realize that these were only men, too. Mortals, human beings; no different in many ways than you or I.
President Clinton and I ended up not playing golf. Something happened that he had to deal with, and some business came up that I couldn’t cancel. But when I got up the next morning and checked out what the golf game would have been like, I’m just as glad it never happened. There were seven Suburbans lined up outside the White House, and each one was loaded with personnel and automatic weapons. I thought, how do you relax and play golf, when behind every sand trap is going to be a fellow holding an H&K MP5?
Driving across Texas, listening to our favorite CDs and a couple of books-on-tape.... Terry wants to know, “What is it with you and Louis L’Amour?” He wrote dozens of what used to be called “dime novel Westerns,” and I was a big fan.
“When I deployed overseas the first time,” I recall, “we all got into reading his books. When you
wrote home to your parents, you didn’t ask for money—only more Louis L’Amour. You could literally leave one on your bed next to a hundred-dollar bill, you’d come back and the hundred would still be sitting there but the book would be gone.”
“Well, that’s a little hard to fathom,” Terry responds.
“Yeah, but it’s true, honey,” I tell her.
She’s got her camera trained on me again, and I don’t like it. “Turn that off, it’s distracting,” I continue.
“Here I am trying to do a video diary,” Terry says, exasperated. “You’ve been in front of cameras your whole life, saying the most outrageous things! But now, whenever I try to get you talking about something, you’re all of a sudden camera shy?!”
“It’s just that I know it’ll be aired in front of the family,” I admit. “I don’t like them having any ammunition on me.”
“Oh, wow,” she says, then pretends to be filming out the window while she hatches a secret plan on how to catch me candid again.
“Do you ever wonder,” Terry goes on, “what ever happened to that other Texas politician?”
“LBJ? He’s dead.”
“No, no, I know that! I’m talking about Ross Perot.”
Terry knows how to get me going.
In 1996, two years before I was elected governor, the Independence Party of Minnesota had affiliated with the Texas Reform Party that Henry Ross Perot had formed the year before, because we saw in him a chance to go national. By God, this Texas billionaire seemed committed, with the finances and the organization and the passion. I viewed him as a great hope for this country, even after the debacle of the 1992 election, where at one point he actually led in the polls. Then, all of a sudden, he withdrew from the race, claiming that Republican operatives had attempted to disrupt his daughter’s wedding and he wanted to spare her from further embarrassment. Perot changed his mind in October and started running again, but he’d lost two crucial months. Even so, he’d ended up receiving about 19 percent of the popular vote, making him the most successful independent candidate since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912.
Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! Page 8
