But some mystical, magical combination of Southern charm, Christmas cheer and Maker’s Mark created a whole new Stockholm syndrome. Before the night was up, he was holding court and swapping sports stories, telling jokes and bartending; he commandeered the miniature kitchen and was whipping up Cajun treats for one and all. He inspired great merriment in Cheney World, made many new friends and converted our cramped, ice-covered condo into Christmas central. Joy radiated from him. The girls were in their glory.
James was so good—so ridiculously and painfully good.
The night before Christmas, I looked out the window and little fluffy snowflakes were falling outside, so poignantly fragile and small. And there was James in the kitchen—I am getting a love burst just remembering the moment. I knew every nanosecond of existence away from his routine and schedules, and even the warm sun, was misery for him. And I knew that he knew that he should have been persona non grata in Cheney World. He was not with his people, by any stretch of the imagination. And yet, here he was, being pleasant, being sweet, being kind and selfless, and endlessly entertaining.
It was all for the girls. He loves them with all his heart. And maybe, maybe, maybe a little bit of it was for me too.
JAMES
MARY REMEMBERS THAT CHRISTMAS in Wyoming as some kind of traumatic event. I had a fine time.
It’s a beautiful part of the world. It’s gorgeous, although I do remember it being frickin’ cold, like twenty below. They say it’s a dry cold. I don’t know what the hell that’s supposed to mean. It’s just cold.
It’s true that I don’t like spending Christmas—or any time, really—in freezing climates. My general policy is not to pay money to be cold. But my wife was working for the vice president. She had to go out there. She was the one who had to staff it. Given my druthers, it’s not where I’d want to spend my Christmas. But that’s work. That’s life.
We flew out there with the vice president on Air Force Two. Sure, the tree was kind of puny, in a comical way. We were surrounded by Republicans. But I had plenty of Maker’s Mark and a good kitchen where I could cook, and I had my girls. I even found a gym, which made me happy because it was too damn cold to run outside.
What more could a Louisiana guy stranded in Wyoming want? It was merry enough for me.
MARY
You might assume that an august and austere White House title such as “assistant to the president” or “counselor to the vice president” would absolve the bearer from the job of dealing with the press. But no White House worker can avoid this dreaded job. Not only that, like many things in Washington, the bigger the title, the more shit-shoveling the job entailed.
Not that dealing with the press is akin to a barnyard task—at least, well, not always.
Another bit of counterintuitive job titling is the use of “media relations” as a job description. This means you are very likely a lousy source. Media relations peeps are restricted to dispensing the worst, the most detested and the most ridiculed thing of all: talking points. (Oddly enough, the people who are absolutely forbidden to talk to the press under penalty of infocastration are invariably the best sources.)
And then there was the White House caste that I fell into—the one restricted to dispensing talking points only but required to make them sound like they aren’t talking points at all. In other words, it was up to you to make processed canned food taste garden fresh. There’s an art to this. But it’s not fun and the press girls and boys are totally onto the scam.
In a way, you can almost forgive members of the media for their regular hissy fits and their standard distrusting, adversarial, distracting and shallow ways. Unless, that is, your primary function is dealing with them day in, day out. Then you will not be able to find forgiveness. You just want to throw them into a meat grinder, turn it on high and leave the premises, like Ellstin Limehouse in Justified.
So while I was roaming around looking for trouble to shoot, there was always some press situation to deal with, which included trying to suss out where they were getting their most primo info. It was like a game of hide-and-seek. Other times, it was like whack-a-leaker.
Bush 43’s Texas Mafia were a notoriously closedmouthed bunch, always on message and never leaking. They wouldn’t give anybody the time of day without authorization. By the time the campaign press got to the White House, they were a pack of starving, ravenous animals. They hadn’t had a decent meal in months. And the new guys, including me, were fresh meat.
I had spent time in that lion’s den, to be sure, but not for almost ten years. Ironically, my years out of politics were spent on political TV, which seems to give normal people the impression that I’m a “journalist.” And while those years gave me a greater insight into the frustrating world of political news gathering, I was never a journalist and could never fathom being one. I have little patience for observing and am too drawn to the thrill of doing. Also, my ass-kissing skills are limited to only what is absolutely required to get something done. And then there’s the sworn duty of professional journalists: resolute objectivity. Sorry, that’s not my scene.
Despite our mutual distrust, I understood the reporters’ job and they understood mine. Except for some routine screaming matches (and one slapping match that I’m not proud of), we generally got along just fine. I actually like journalists. They come with built-in insatiable curiosity and the best ones don’t let their institutions and ambition grind it out of them. I’ve had many a less-than-sober late-night conversation with members of the Fourth Estate who lament the scumbaggery often required of them to do a good job, or their bosses’ idea of a good job.
Dealing with the media requires institutional knowledge. You can’t treat everybody the same. Like people in every profession the world over, there are good guys and assholes. And some circumstances make a good guy go bad, but I’ve never seen an asshole turn good (pardon my language, just sharing the vernacular jargon). So the wisest thing is to take it one person and one situation at a time.
Problem was, by the time I had reentered the dance, the music had changed. The ethics and ethos of the media universe seemed to be spinning on its axis. There were lots of new faces, who rotated often, and very few individuals with serious political interest or experience. Gratuitous burning was commonplace, and once-regular adversarial relationships had become like Sunni-Shia battlegrounds.
It took me a while to get my sea legs. Covering the White House used to be the pinnacle of a career. Sure, over the decades the White House pressroom has housed more than a few kooks. But mostly it was a collection of professional journalists who had risen to the White House beat because they had talent and brains and a kind of healthy shrewdness.
One of my very best friends, before she died, was Ann Devroy, the Washington Post reporter extraordinaire who covered the White House in the Reagan and Bush 41 days. Ann was universally considered one of the media’s most astute political minds. She was a piercingly insightful writer with impeccable integrity, and she certainly didn’t regard her White House job as a stepping stone to riches, fame and fortune—or a gig as a talking head. And she never, ever in a million years would have rotated into the administration of any party. She thought of her profession as the great responsibility that it was and brought enormous intelligence and skill to everything she did. Her stories in the newspaper were unremittingly tough and, loyal to Poppy Bush as I am, it could be painful to read them sometimes. But I had to respect Ann’s reporting, her ability to figure out what was really going on, to see through the weeds to the big picture. She used to call it “gathering threads” and had sources behind every bush and under every stone, kind of like Mike Allen of Politico today. Like Mike, she was kind and never snarky, even when institutional loyalty demanded it. Her untimely passing, like Tim Russert’s, was paradigm shifting in the world of political journalism.
Although there would never be another Ann in the White House Press Room (or in my heart
)—and I didn’t expect to find any—I was thrown way off-balance by the younger generation of reporters. I had to start from almost scratch to get a trusted band of press partners to play ball with. Of course, Fox and most of the economic reporters were trustworthy straight shooters, but given the fat portfolio of the VP’s office, I had to expand my reach. Some of them aren’t conservative favorites today, but they were always fair to me. I am not sharing their surnames, because they might not want it known they were decent to a knuckle dragger (except for Don Imus, ironically a non-journalist who always produced the most fun and maximum coverage): John, Paul, Mathew and Mark (no kidding); John, Ron and Jon; David, Dan, Candy, Maggie, Sally and Sandy; Lloyd, Leslie and Lois; Mikey, Michael, Mike; Brian, Byron; Bill, Will and Wolf. And George. You know them all and might be surprised to know there are many more.
Even more important than developing a reliable outsource operation was figuring out who the assholes were—I am not going to name them here; I won’t give them the satisfaction—but you know who they are too.
What was saddening though, despite the number of truly good political journalists remaining, was that a passion for the craft and subject matter or a sense of history seemed missing in the general atmosphere, in the stories as they were conceived and assigned. They might as well have been covering a baseball game. Much of this had to do with their command–and-control editors or the new warp speed of the Information Age. But a fair amount was due to a changed culture in their ranks.
I thought I had it mostly sorted out by the time the vice president embarked on a twelve-country ten-day trip to the Middle East, the walk up to the Iraq operation. Cheney began the trip doing daily readouts for our traveling press (i.e., debriefs from his meetings with foreign leaders or context for whatever country we were in). He wasn’t trying to manipulate them, but for a host of other reasons, Cheney would start each readout saying, “This is on deep background” or “This is off the record.” Those were the rules that he knew, I knew, the press knew, and the rules that had long been the standard of the road, so to speak. If a reporter needed to put background info into “for attribution” mode, he or she wrote “according to a source close to Cheney” or a similarly oblique version of that. This was not meant to obscure the source or the info, but most of the time, the “for attribution” stories were for the president to disclose and detail. We were the prep-work crew.
But that was so yesterday, because on this particular trip a network reporter announced right off, “We don’t do deep background. We only take information that’s on the record.”
Those may sound like words of integrity. But the reality is that the vice president was respecting the intelligence of the press corps traveling with him by assuming it would be truly interested in acquiring a deep understanding of a sensitive and complicated moment in history rather than obtaining say-nothing quotes to plug into a formula story. “We only take information if it’s on the record” is not the path of integrity. It is the path to zero understanding and cut-and-paste work.
The upshot is the public doesn’t get information nuanced with shading and depth. It’s more like one of those sticker books you give your kids when they are too young to actually draw. You punch out the sticker of the cartoon insect and put it on the outline of the insect body, and when all the stickers are punched out and pasted in, it isn’t a book you ever want to look at again (or find interesting in the first place).
Or maybe they just didn’t trust us and weren’t interested in finding out if they could. Whatever, it came out to the same place.
Cheney continued to share his formidable knowledge and insights, but the sessions got increasingly immature so eventually we just gave up. We figured there was no way to talk to most of these meatheads en masse. We gave the group the stale readout with say-nothing quotes they could use for their formula stories.
I honestly felt for the guys who wanted to get to the heart of a story and portray a textured understanding for their audiences, and I tried to give them more “color,” but it was not easy to quietly slip them intel in such close quarters. If you go back and look at those pieces, you can see who was reporting and who was just playing reporter.
JAMES
I’D BEEN AGAINST MARY taking the White House job in the very beginning. Then I’d been on board with it after 9/11, even when she worked all the time and traveled constantly and hardly ever came home during the daylight.
But the months leading up to the Iraq War in 2003 soured me all over again. I really was against the whole undertaking from the start. Vehemently against it, and Mary knew that.
That was one topic we really never talked about at home. We just didn’t. It’s not like I could wait up for her to get back after another eighteen-hour workday and say, “What the fuck are you guys doing?” It’s never worked like that with us, no matter which of our guys was in the White House.
Besides, bringing it up at home only would have led to a fight of epic proportions. And for what? She knew exactly how I felt. I was out criticizing the Bush administration’s push for war on Crossfire and any other chance I got. I knew she was working for one of the main proponents of invading Iraq. What were we going to say to each other to change any of that?
So we generally kept the peace at home during that period. But it was an uneasy peace.
MARY
HE REMEMBERS IT ONE way—the wrong way. He remembers not being for the war from the start. But James is conflating time. He mushes together the reelection, or “reelect” to use the political jargon, which got poisonously ugly—politics being politics—and forgets how it really was, how he felt at the time, how scary the threats and the possibility of weapons of mass destruction were. Of course, James is not alone. A whole raft of his liberal colleagues, from Hillary on down, voted for the war and uttered their supportive words and made statements. These are a matter of record.
I am not going to rehash the Iraq War or our effort to further democracy in the Mideast. Such matters are now the province of partisan politics not policy reality. The enduring but demonstrably false “narrative” is Bush lied and people died. The irrefutable truth of the Obama administration’s mendacity and incompetence in the Mideast from Egypt to Benghazi to Syria seems to escape such scathing narratives.
Today, the smart people have deemed Iraq the “dumb war.” At the time, we certainly were cognizant of the age-old war dynamic: a battle plan is only good till the boots hit the ground. Iraq was then, as Iran is today, a closed society and near impenetrable to intel gathering. We had to plan for what we knew, for what we knew we didn’t know and what we didn’t know we didn’t know, as Secretary Rumsfeld so eloquently put it.
We had some decent but not 100 percent intel, which is the very nature of intel; the world community was in general concurrence with the intel we shared; we had confirmation and support from the regional leaders for eradicating the growing threat of Saddam; we had the 100 percent historical record, which included his use of WMD; we knew for a fact from intercepted correspondence that al-Qaeda, in response to our efforts, was moving its front from Afghanistan to Iraq.
We didn’t know the extent of the physical and psychic degradation wrought by decades of Saddam’s tyrannical rule, which made standing up a democratic government more difficult. We didn’t know the extent of stockpiled WMD, but we did know from defectors and inspectors, the means to produce more was largely intact, which made erring on the side of security. We did know the extrication of Saddam was not “Mission Accomplished.”
As the Obama administration is now seeing, protecting our nation’s strategic interests is not a textbook endeavor. I often wonder if they don’t regret their venomous politicizing of national security.
And this seems important to remember: The Iraq War made sense to the sensible until politics took over. It wasn’t until reelection politics entered into it that we began our epic battles. But when James goes political, all sense go
es out the door. It didn’t take much time or exposure to his uninformed, knee-jerk partisan blaspheming to make my teeth hurt and my head bang. Pretty quickly, he’d say one little stupid thing—actually, everything he said was stupid—about the war and I’d go crazy.
I was bone tired.
All our conversations became reduced to one topic, and not the one topic we should have dwelled on, since we had just finally patched up our acrimony from the last election and recount. Instead, we went at each other again. Everything he said made me nuts—and caught me in a perfect nexus of loyalty and policy, two things I care deeply about. His criticism concerned both my job as adviser to the president and vice president, as well as my own sense of devotion to Cheney, who was catching spears for the president while my husband was on TV every week as one of the misled, know-nothing spear throwers.
I will give it to him that he was careful not to directly attack Cheney. He knew that would be wrong. Or maybe he just knew it would be a divorceable offense.
Usually James is acutely aware of what he doesn’t know—and he doesn’t pretend to know things. But in this case, he was on the radio and TV, speaking with authority about things he knew nothing about. Meanwhile, I knew all this classified stuff that I couldn’t talk about, and knew what was really going on. He was all curveball and yellow cake, very opinionated but with no facts. He was pulling it out of his ass. And since I had to guess that he knew that he didn’t really know—and I did—it made me suspect that he was just trying to piss me off.
Love & War Page 19
