Love & War

by James Carville

  He would invite economists of all political stripes for regular brainstorming sessions in the Roosevelt Room. You might be surprised to know that economists are quite a lively and entertaining bunch, contrary to their reputation as dreary buzzkillers. For pure cranial delight, nothing beat Cheney going at it with a liberal economist.

  Not that Cheney ever cared about his popularity, but his poll numbers were stratospheric, which unfortunately was overblown by the mainstream media so it appeared he might be overshadowing the president, which incited the mattress mice to unkind chatter. But Bush 43 truly wanted all his staff (and the VP is staff) to have ample and unquestioned authority; that way they could serve as force magnifiers for his agenda. The president also demanded the unvarnished truth and a deep analysis from all perspectives on all his proposals.

  That was Cheney’s sweet spot. His MO was to give POTUS a full analysis, then “salute smartly” and execute whatever course the president ultimately decided on.

  The VP’s other superpower was spear catching. He reveled in catching the flaming arrows of the always-on-the-attack Washington weasels. He therefore became the canary in the coal mine and took point on the most controversial issues. With such an expansive portfolio, unrivaled brains and guts, influence on the Hill and Ciceronian communication skills (the man always spoke in complete paragraphs without taking a breath or breaking a sweat), he was the undisputed champ of policy and political articulation on Capitol Hill, in the print press or on the tube. When he spoke, the chattering classes listened. Just his going out on an issue telegraphed this is serious.

  A big part of my job was to make sure he was briefed with the necessary political and policy ammo whenever he went out. Which was pretty funny because the running joke of the whole OVP was, “Cheney is his best staffer,” because at our marathon briefings, he would always end up knowing more than all of us put together.

  I remember sitting—or rather, kneeling on the floor in my OEOB office at eleven on a Friday night, stretching out a pair of hateful panty hose and punching holes in piles of briefing materials that filled four three-inch, three-ring binders for one of his Tim Russert Meet the Press appearances. The scary thing was, by Sunday morning, he would have consumed every word, and in less time than it took me to assemble the voluminous briefing books.

  A recurring thought on those late nights alone on my knees in the dark, was What has my life come to?

  My hectic, nonstop workdays were regularly interrupted with frantic, dramatic phone communiqués from Mr. Mom. James was now speaking to me again, which wasn’t always a good thing. He’d pull me out of meetings, interrupt conference calls, have my assistants track me down in the ladies’ room with frenzied reports of some home-front terror, like the death of Matty’s hamsters that he had unknowingly left in direct sunshine and heat (which every mother knows is a highly effective hamster killer). Even though I was a rat lover, in the scheme of things, that hardly constituted an emergency interruption, so I rolled with it, but still I hated missing anything in the kids’ lives.

  The only time I was happy at the White House was when I was in the room with the vice president. He always got instantly to the heart of any matter and was never distracted. When I was with him, I never felt like I was wasting my time or spinning my wheels, an occupational hazard in many White House jobs. His focus and mental clarity were infectious. And he wasn’t like so many needy politician types who crave attention and affection. He just wanted to think clearly through problems and be effective.

  That first summer, after we presented the president’s new energy policy to the public and sent it up to the Hill to do their political Cuisinart slicing, dicing and pulverizing, we turned our focus from that cool issue to what was then called Homeland Defense, an interesting although holy-shit scary issue.

  We reviewed and synthesized all the different blue ribbon commission reports, set up an in-house task force, hired a team of experts and scheduled September meetings with Senator Bob Graham, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the other Hill bosses of Homeland Defense.

  It was a subject that deeply troubled the vice president. He knew what the threats were. He was an expert on “dark winter” and suitcase bombs. Earlier in the year, he and Scooter Libby had been to a number of simulation events, held by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and learned more than you’d ever want to know about germ (bio) and gas (chem) warfare and all those other awful things that nobody likes to think about, especially mothers of young children.

  I had to catch up on the subject myself, and was proud that by the time Judith Miller’s book, Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War, the first comprehensive mainstream book on the subject, came out that summer, there was nothing new in it for me, when just a few months prior, if you’d asked me about germ warfare, I would’ve said it was why God created hand sanitizers.

  “What keeps you up at night?” the vice president was asked by Nick Lemann for a New Yorker article that also ran that summer, and Cheney said, “I think we have to be more concerned than we ever have about so-called homeland defense, the vulnerability of our system to different kinds of attacks. Some of it homegrown, like Oklahoma City. Some inspired by terrorists external to the United States—the World Trade Towers bombing, in New York. The threat of terrorist attack against the U.S., eventually, potentially, with weapons of mass destruction—bugs or gas, biological, or chemical agents, potentially even, someday, nuclear weapons.”

  But I relegated germs and gas to a distant cranny of my consciousness in August 2001, when James and I got all revved up to take our first time off together in forever, without the kids, on a romantic Black Sea cruise we couldn’t afford. I got some rest, which I needed. He got some attention, which we both needed, interrupted by only one shore-to-ship call from David Gregory, which really kicked up a bad bout of sea sickness, since I presumed his calling had to be over something I didn’t want to hear about or worse. It was about something really banal, though, and resulted in one of many Gregory-Matalin verbal fisticuffs. I do love that guy, but he can get on your last nerve.

  I returned to duty after Labor Day, remarkably less laborious now, since our office was now a (mostly) well-oiled machine. The West Wing and the OVP were working well together. We all knew more or less what to expect. At home, James was not unhappy, which was maybe the most I could ask for. The girls were in their back-to-school groove. We had a crack caregiver, who was tired a lot, but she repeatedly insisted she was fine and would only speak of her love for us and especially for her “babies,” Matty and Emerson. I set up a car to ferry her to and from her home every day, to make her life easier.

  As for me, I had long ago adjusted to less sleep and more work hours, and after our restful vacation, even though I still looked like something the cat dragged in, I almost had a spring in my step. I worked Saturdays, but I did manage to keep Sundays mostly free, if you don’t count my being on call 24/7. I had entered a chilled-out phase of worrying less about everything because nothing would last that much longer anyway.

  I relied on my campaign seasoning, the comfort born of “you can do anything because you know there’s an end to it.” I was looking at the end-game already. In my mind—and in James’s, per our agreement—we were almost there. There were natural breaks in the White House rhythm and I was about to jump off the merry-go-round at one of them.

  Then that September, America was attacked. And in October, Nee Nee died.

  JAMES

  I WAS AT A BREAKFAST sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor that Tuesday morning inside the St. Regis Hotel, just a couple blocks from the White House.

  It’s one of these events where you go shoot the shit with a bunch of print reporters over coffee and scrambled eggs. It gives both sides a chance to have a longer discussion than the typical sound bite reporters usual have to settle for on deadline.

  The breakfast started at eight a.m. Stan G
reenberg, Bob Shrum and I had come to talk about the state of politics in general, but also about some polling Stan had done. In part, it showed that 43 percent of the people polled thought George W. Bush was already “in over his head” as president.

  At one point, journalist Godfrey Sperling, Jr., who was moderating that day, asked us whether the Bush presidency was vulnerable, meaning could he lose at the polls next time around. Of course, I was already hoping that would be the case and said as much.

  “I don’t care if people like him or not, just so they don’t vote for him and his party. That is all I care about. I hope he doesn’t succeed, but I am a partisan Democrat,” I told the group. “But the average person wants him to succeed. It is his country, his life or their lives. So he has that going for him.”

  Years later, I got accused by some conservatives of having said that I hoped Bush failed on the morning on 9/11. Well, I guess I did say I hoped he failed, but at the time nobody had an inkling about the hell that was coming that day. I was talking about his domestic and economic policies. I did want those to fail; they were bad policies. I wanted the Republicans to lose the midterms in 2002. I wanted a new president in 2004. That’s what I was talking about that morning when I said I didn’t want him to succeed. Terrorism? That was another story.

  Toward the end of the breakfast, cell phones started buzzing. People started getting word that a plane had flown into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York. At first, it didn’t make any sense. I’m a weather watcher, and I remember how it was a really beautiful, blue-sky September day in Washington and that the forecast was the same up and down the East Coast. Airplanes just don’t fly into buildings on perfectly clear days.

  Pretty soon, another plane hit the second tower. We all knew then, of course. And I knew instinctively that the political landscape we’d been discussing minutes before was about to look drastically different. Who gave a crap about poll numbers when the country was under attack?

  “Disregard everything we just said,” I told the reporters. “This changes everything.”

  And it did.

  MARY

  I GOT TO WORK at six-thirty in the morning on September 11, 2001, and, unlike my usual got-dressed-in-the-dark look, I was spiffed up for a meeting with union leaders (largely construction unions, who really do care about the jobs of the rank and file, as opposed to their own feathered beds). It was a big deal that they were supporting the White House on our new, seriously comprehensive energy policy, the first in a generation.

  So I arrived at the White House in a fantastic royal purple Louis Féraud suit with an amazing tapered jacket and pencil skirt, accented with a red knit top. On my feet, I was wearing a pair of impossibly high but oh-so-fabulous Charles Jourdan black-and-red patent-leather spike heels, the height of which will become a factor later. My hair was not blown-dry via the car window that morning but looked a little more attended to. And I was wearing makeup applied while looking in an actual mirror, as opposed to blindly using sense memory.

  I am elaborating on the ostensibly superficial details of my 9/11 attire because I don’t want to leave you with the perception that one has time to deal with appearance in such a job. Working for the president may be the job of your dreams and the pinnacle of your political career, but, sadly, while you’re doing it, you will never look more haggard, and that includes immediately after giving birth.

  As the day wore on, though, I returned to haggard status quo. The photo record does show that with each passing hour I aged dramatically and my once-fantastic outfit became moist, rumpled and slept in. And while vanity was the farthest thing from my mind, I couldn’t forget about those ridiculous designer shoes as long as they were on my feet. I don’t want to suggest that professional women should dress for the possibility of catastrophic events, but one should always keep a pair of portable ballet slippers in one’s purse because you never know.

  The first plane hit when I was in my small West Wing office—one floor up and down the hall from Cheney’s office. Like everybody else in the White House, I had multiple televisions in my office, all going at the same time. Morning shows. Morning news. By a weird sixth sense, the kind of inescapable gut instinct I have no control over, I knew we had a big problem before the disoriented reporters knew what to say. Suddenly all three channels cut to it. This is no accident. It can’t be an accident. I felt certain of this immediately. I bolted up from my chair and raced down the stairs—or raced as quickly as I could in those heels—straight to the vice president’s office.

  I barged in. The vice president was in a meeting with John McConnell, our lovely, brilliant, universally adored speechwriter. But they, like me, were already on high alert. The VP and John were staring disbelievingly at the tube. That’s when the second plane hit.

  With no words or hesitation, the VP sprung into action. The president was on the road so the VP proceeded through the response protocol: contact POTUS, contact the authorities in New York, starting with Mayor Giuliani. Cheney didn’t do an Al Haig panicked megalomania thing, like when Reagan was shot in 1981, and declare himself in charge of the country. He just did his calm-quiet-never-ruffled Cheney thing and began issuing orders. “Do this . . .” “Get that . . .” “Find so-and-so . . .” He was coolheaded and totally focused.

  Within minutes, our chief of staff, Scooter Libby, a seasoned foreign-policy and terrorism expert, bolted into the operating-at-high-gear confab in the VP’s office, and unlike the confounded John and me, he understood the potential implications of the hit. He and the VP began considering the possibilities, which although incomprehensible to us, were immediately evident to them.

  They spoke in shorthand, exchanged sentence fragments with each other. I heard the words Massoud and al-Qaeda.

  Massoud, aka the “Lion of Panjshir,” had been assassinated by the Taliban just days before in a cave in Afghanistan. He was a renowned, fearless warrior in the millennial struggle over the landlocked east-west passage that was Afghanistan, which had been traversed by traders from the beginning of time. The Taliban were the agents of al-Qaeda. Scooter and the VP quickly surmised that al-Qaeda was likely the agent of this unspeakable and unimaginable terror.

  There were communication problems in the White House right away. The VP had trouble getting a secure connection with POTUS on Air Force One. Cheney is never one to blow up, get angry or express his ire—but as the communication snafus continued, and became potentially very serious, he got impatient. He didn’t need to express himself in more than a few words and eyebrow bounces, but there was no missing his sense of urgency or his unspoken message to “get on the connectivity problem!” It wasn’t entirely the White House’s fault. Securing POTUS required communication adjustments and nobody was able to reach Mayor Giuliani in New York that day, or efficiently for many days to follow.

  Before we began to attend to the VP’s communication concerns, he was ripped from our midst. Out of nowhere, a team of superfit, deadly serious, square-jawed, don’t-mess-with-us professionals with skills you don’t learn on a Wii barged through the VP’s small office door (how those big guys got through that little space so gracefully is still a mystery to me) without so much as a cursory knock. As John and Scooter and I backed off lest we be thrown back, the team wrenched the vice president from behind his massive desk, whipped him off his feet by his belt and hoisted his formidable frame up and over like he was a feather pillow. They were decked out in nice suits, but they were operating like heavy furniture movers.

  Even though we were already in a parallel universe, we weren’t sure how to take the VP’s surreal departure. I wasn’t even sure the professional movers were real agents. Was the VP safe? Should I tackle the big guys? That last thought was an indication my mind wasn’t working in the reality zone.

  Not many words were exchanged—just your basic “Move it! Now!” etc.—but the VP seemed to know the drill, which assuaged my concerns for his safety. If you�
��re having trouble imagining this, there’s a stunningly good rendition in the White House movie, Olympus Has Fallen.

  Once my baffled mind registered he was safe, I reverted to no presence of mind whatsoever. In one of my more unheroic moments on Earth, I thought, Wait a second. What are we, chopped liver?

  Luckily, some primal survival instinct precluded my voicing this thought aloud, but my mouth had a mind of its own. It started firing off unanswerable questions to no one in particular, since the VP was way gone within seconds.

  “I need to go with him,” I said to no one. “What should we do, what should we do, what should we do?”

  Every fiber in my being, an automatic response, was screaming to be with the VP—to go wherever he was going. Not just because I loved him, but because that was my job. It was disorienting to suddenly be separated from him and have no idea where he was. Were they putting him on Marine One? What was I supposed to do now?

  Within moments, I got an answer. We were ordered to “evacuate immediately!” Everyone still remaining in the West Wing was shepherded to the White House Mess, where we were to await further instructions.

  “I have to go to my office first,” I said. “It’s just one floor up.”

  “No, you aren’t,” a voice snapped. “You’re going to the Mess. Move it—now.” (“Move it now” was clearly the phrase of the hour.)

  So there we all were, the White House staff hanging out in the Mess with nary a soul having the slightest clue what we were to do there. Not that we had much time to ponder our situation or cluelessness. We were spared that brainteaser by another order issued before we could get comfy. In retrospect, it was delivered in a weirdly calm manner.

  “Run for your lives. A plane is going to hit the White House.”