The Kid Who Became President

by Dan Gutman

  “We can’t just leave him there!” screamed Tennyson Martin. “He’ll drown!”

  Agent Doe was going underwater for the second time. While everybody stood around arguing, I swam over to him and grabbed him around the neck. It was hard to do, because his neck was about as thick as my waist. But I had taken a lifesaving course at summer camp one year, and I knew the basics of how to handle somebody who was drowning.

  I got Agent Doe’s head out of the water and slowly began pulling him to the shallow end of the pool. It was like dragging a whale ashore.

  It took six of us to haul him out of the water and lay him down on the concrete. He was gasping for air and his walkie-talkie was ruined, but it looked like he was going to make it.

  “Are you okay, Doe?” I asked.

  “I think so,” he choked, spitting out water. “I thought I was supposed to protect your life, sir, not the other way around.”

  After that fiasco, I thought it would be a good idea to get the kids out of the pool area. It was almost dinnertime anyway. When everyone was dried off and dressed, I took them up to the Oval Office. The kids were really impressed. Most of them wanted to sit in my chair and have their picture taken.

  “I’m starving,” Max Pappalardo said as he sat at my desk. “What’s for dinner?”

  “Anything you want,” I replied. “This is the White House.”

  “Pizza!” everybody yelled at once.

  “We have to have it delivered,” I told them.

  “Cool,” Max said. Before I could stop him, he picked up the receiver of the red phone on the desk.

  “No!” I shouted.

  “What’s the matter, Moon?”

  “That’s the hot line!”

  “You’ve got a hot line to the pizza parlor?” Max marveled. “Man, being president is the coolest.”

  Somebody in Russia must have picked up at the other end. Max looked puzzled, like he couldn’t understand what the person was saying.

  “Do you speak English?” Max asked. “We want four large pies with everything on ’em. Delivered to the White House.”

  There was a long pause. We all stared at Max when he put down the receiver.

  “What did they say?” I asked nervously.

  “Call Pizza Hut,” Max said calmly.

  So we did.

  After dinner, Honeywell told me he had a big surprise. He led a brown-haired guy over to me. The guy was holding one of those metal film cans that are nearly the size of a manhole cover.

  “President Moon, I’d like to introduce you to Mr. Robert Banks.”

  “Rob Banks!” I shouted excitedly. “The guy who directed Gore, Guts, and Guns! I love your movies! You came all the way from Hollywood to see me?”

  “I was in New York when they tracked me down, Mr. President,” Rob Banks said. “I heard you wanted to see my next movie. It’s not quite finished yet, but I brought along what I’ve got so far.”

  We all went to the White House movie theater. Honeywell fired up the popcorn machine and we watched the new movie along with Rob Banks. It was great.

  “Those explosions were awesome,” I told Mr. Banks when the lights came back on. “I love watching stuff blow up.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Rob Banks replied with a laugh.

  “You should make a whole movie with nothing but stuff blowing up,” I suggested.

  “That’s not a bad idea, Mr. President,” he said as he shook my hand.

  That’s one of the best things about being president, I discovered. People say your ideas are great no matter how stupid your ideas are.

  After the movie, Rob Banks left and all the kids sat around the Lincoln Bedroom talking about the great day we had. We were hoping the ghost of Abraham Lincoln might appear. He never showed up, so we went to bed.

  On Sunday, we had another blast. Honeywell, probably to get us out of the White House before we completely wrecked the place, suggested I take my classmates to Camp David.

  Camp David is a presidential retreat sixty miles from Washington in the mountains of Maryland. President Eisenhower named it after his grandson. Presidents go there when they need some peace and quiet. We all piled into helicopters, and twenty-five minutes later we were there.

  I was afraid that Camp David would be a big bore, but it was almost like Disney World. There’s a heated pool, horses, snowmobiles, a golf course, a skeet and archery range, and a badminton court.

  It even has a trampoline. It was hard to imagine Richard Nixon bouncing around on a trampoline, but I sure enjoyed it. We all had a wonderful time.

  When we got back to the White House on Sunday night, another surprise was awaiting us. Earlier that morning, Honeywell had told me that many actors and musicians had visited the White House and performed there. All the president has to do is ask, he said, and celebrities are usually thrilled to be invited.

  Honeywell mentioned that the Juilliard String Quartet happened to be in Washington that weekend, and maybe they would perform for me and my friends. I asked him if anyone else was in town. He looked into it and said he could get either the New York Harp Ensemble or a Suzuki violin group.

  “Do you think you can get Aerosmith?” I requested.

  “I’m not familiar with him, sir.”

  “It’s a quintet,” I informed him. “Very classical. They’ve been performing together for thirty years. Really excellent.”

  No way I was going to tell Honeywell that Aerosmith was the loudest, raunchiest, and most outrageous rock-and-roll band in history.

  But Honeywell got on the phone, and when we returned from Camp David, Aerosmith’s lead singer, Steven Tyler, was in the Blue Room, drinking champagne out of one of Thomas Jefferson’s crystal goblets!

  Wow! I got to meet the guys in the band, and they even asked for my autograph.

  We gathered my classmates in the State Dining Room, and Aerosmith put on a show that just knocked our socks off. My ears were ringing, the walls were shaking, and I was seriously afraid that the giant chandeliers hanging from the ceiling were going to come crashing down on everybody. If Honeywell hadn’t been hard of hearing, I think he would have run screaming out of the place.

  For their encore, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry hauled me up onto the stage to sing “Walk This Way” with them. It was the greatest moment of my life.

  I felt sad when all the kids said their goodbyes and piled into limos to go to the airport and fly back to Wisconsin. The White House seemed so quiet suddenly. I almost wished I could go with them.

  Honeywell came over to me when the last limo pulled away. He looked exhausted. Wordlessly, he handed me the Washington Post.

  “It looks like you’re doing a great job, sir,” Honeywell said. “In all my years at the White House, I have never seen such a high approval rating.”

  “But I haven’t done anything yet!” I complained.

  “You apparently do nothing rather well,” Honeywell said. Then he handed me a piece of paper. It was a bill — for ten thousand dollars.

  “What’s this for?” I asked.

  “Food, helicopters, limousines, taxis, telephone calls …”

  “You mean the president has to pay for all that?” I assumed that the president didn’t have to pay for anything.

  “Personal expenses are paid for by the president, sir.”

  “Pay it,” I sighed.

  Honeywell then handed me another piece of paper. It was a separate bill for three thousand dollars.

  “The First Lady bought some clothes this weekend,” he said.

  It cost a fortune to be president, I realized. But thinking it over, it was worth it. I had just enjoyed the greatest weekend of my life. Being president of the United States was fun!

  After my friends left the White House on Sunday night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about all the fun we had. Usually when I can’t sleep, I pace. I started walking up and down the long hall that runs the length of the second floor.

  As I passed the Lincoln Bedroom, I heard a noise. It
sounded like papers rustling. I stopped in my tracks to listen. Yes, it was definitely coming from the Lincoln Bedroom. Somebody was in there!

  Lincoln! It had to be the ghost of Abraham Lincoln! Everybody was asleep. Lincoln’s ghost supposedly lived in the Lincoln Bedroom and came out from time to time. I was frightened, but I wanted to see him for myself.

  Slowly, I turned the doorknob. Hesitantly, I opened the door a crack and peeked inside.

  It was my dad. He was unloading office supplies and stuff from a big cardboard box.

  “Dad, what are you doing?”

  “Setting up our home office.”

  “In the Lincoln Bedroom?”

  “It’s the only bedroom that isn’t being used.”

  Before I won the election, Dad was a salesman. He sold corrugated cardboard boxes for a company in Wisconsin. My mom was in sales, too. She sold carpet tiles. They both really loved their work, and they weren’t sure they were going to move to Washington, because it meant they would have to give up their jobs. In the end, they decided it was more important to be with me.

  “Your mother and I decided to start our own business,” Dad informed me. “See?” He held up a piece of stationery that read, WHITE HOUSE BOX AND CARPET TILE COMPANY.

  “You’re going to sell cardboard boxes from the White House?” I asked, incredulous.

  “And carpet tiles,” he added. “Plenty of people start businesses in their homes nowadays.”

  “But they don’t live in the White House, Dad! It’s not cool.”

  “Are you ashamed of what your mother and I do for a living?” Dad asked, a little hurt. “No.”

  “Did you expect us to give up our careers when you became president?”

  “No.” I hadn’t really thought about what my parents were going to do, I had to admit.

  “Judson, do you understand how capitalism works? Do you know what free enterprise means?”

  “Uh, selling stuff?”

  “It’s more than that, Judd. It means we live in a country where people compete freely to provide things they think other people want. That’s the basis of our American way of life. It’s why our standard of living is so high. The government didn’t tell me to sell cardboard boxes or some other guy to open a restaurant. I discovered there’s a need for cardboard boxes, so I’m filling that need. I sell boxes, and I’m proud of it. Starting this business out of the White House is my way of being a good American.”

  Dad always finds a way to make it seem that life itself revolves around cardboard boxes. He once spent an hour explaining to me what the world would be like if we didn’t have cardboard boxes. I won’t bore you with the details, but basically civilization collapses because we don’t have anything to put stuff in.

  “I see what you mean,” I sighed. “But if Abraham Lincoln’s ghost shows up one night and tells you to get your stuff out of his room, can you move your home office someplace else?”

  “Sure, son,” he chuckled.

  “Okay, Mr. President, let’s get cracking!” Chief of Staff Lane Brainard said cheerfully when he walked into the Oval Office the first thing Monday morning.

  The weekend had been great, but I was excited and anxious to get to work doing good things for America.

  “Lane,” I began, “when I was campaigning, I promised the children of America the first thing I would do as president would be to abolish homework. So we should start working on that right away.”

  Lane looked at me with a blank expression on his face.

  “You’re joking, right, Moon?”

  “No, I’m totally serious.”

  “You don’t honestly think the president has the power to abolish homework, do you?”

  “Well, yeah,” I admitted.

  Lane threw back his head and laughed. “You think the president just dreams up new laws and suddenly everybody has to obey them?”

  “That’s not how it works?”

  “Moon, with all due respect, get a clue! This is how it works. Our government is sort of like a tree. There are three big branches. The first is the Executive branch. That’s you, the president. The second is the Legislative branch. That’s the Senate and House of Representatives, which make up Congress. The third is the Judicial branch. That’s the Supreme Court. You follow me so far, Mr. President?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But you don’t have to call me Mr. President.”

  “It shows respect for the office, Moon.”

  “All right, all right,” I groaned. “How do you know so much about the government anyway?”

  “It’s all in the Constitution, Moon. You see, the Founding Fathers of the United States had a revolution against the King of England. So they made sure that our president couldn’t get too high and mighty. They worked it out from the start so that the president is no more powerful than Congress. There are strict limits to what you can do.”

  “What if I want to sign a peace treaty with some other country?” I asked.

  “You’ve got to get the approval of Congress first,” Lane explained.

  “What if I want to appoint a Supreme Court justice?”

  “You’ve got to get the approval of Congress.”

  “Well, what if I want to declare war on some foreign country?”

  “You’ve got to get approval,” Lane said. “Only Congress has the power to declare war.”

  “That’s not fair,” I complained.

  “It’s perfectly fair,” Lane said. “Because it works both ways, Moon. If Congress wants to pass a law that you don’t like, you can veto it. The Congress has to get the president’s approval to do stuff, too. See, it’s a system of checks and balances. That way, no one branch can force its will on the others. If one of the three branches is weak, the whole tree falls down. Get it?”

  “Wait a minute,” I declared. “If the president can’t pass any law he wants, why did you talk me into promising kids I’d make homework illegal?”

  “To get votes!” Lane shouted. “So you would win the election!”

  “But it forces me to break my promise,” I complained. “I don’t want to be the kind of president who breaks promises.”

  “Moon,” Lane said, throwing an arm around my shoulders, “don’t think of that homework promise as a promise. Think of it as … an idea. A bad idea. It would never be passed by Congress, so we’ll come up with some other ideas that will.”

  “I feel bad about letting the kids of America down,” I said.

  “Forget about them,” Lane said. “Kids can’t vote anyway.”

  “Then why did you have me make promises to them?!” I was shouting now.

  Lane was about to answer when Honeywell came into the Oval Office. He handed me a copy of the Washington Post.

  “I thought you might want to see this, sir,” he said politely. Then he said he had to go assist Vice President Syers.

  “Oh no!” shouted Lane.

  The front page headline read:

  SECRET SERVICE MAN

  NEARLY DROWNS

  AT WHITE HOUSE POOL PARTY

  “How could they have found out about that?” I wondered out loud. “There were no reporters there.”

  “The press has a way of finding out everything,” Lane sputtered. “One of the kids probably leaked the story.” He slammed his fist on the desktop.

  “What’s the big deal?” I asked. “It’s kind of funny.”

  “Moon,” Lane began, lecturing me, “people watch every move you make. You’re in a fishbowl now. Everything you do is important. Everybody is going to judge you, criticize you, tape you, photograph you, read your e-mail. I didn’t even want them to know you throw pool parties. It doesn’t look presidential.”

  “I guess I can’t pick my nose in public anymore,” I quipped. Lane ignored the remark.

  “We’d better start working on your image,” he said.

  “But I already won the election,” I protested. “Why do I have to work on my image? Why can’t we just do good things for the country? If I do
good things for America, won’t that improve my image?”

  Lane snorted. It was the snort he always snorts when I say anything he thinks is horribly naive.

  “I’ve got some ideas that will improve your image,” Lane said, pulling out a notebook. “Do you play golf?”

  “Never.”

  “How about jogging?”

  “I hate jogging.”

  “Well, I want you to take up golf and jogging.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Because all presidents golf and jog,” he explained. “If you want to look presidential, you’ve got to lose that skateboard and get a set of golf clubs. Also, we need to give you a unifying vision.”

  “A unifying vision? What’s that?”

  “It’s a meaningless expression that sums up your presidency in three words or less. Kennedy had ‘Camelot’ and ‘New Frontier.’ Johnson had ‘The Great Society.’ Reagan had ‘Morning in America.’ You need something like that. What do you think of ‘New Millennium’?”

  “I hate it,” I replied.

  “It will grow on you,” Lane said, checking off something in his notebook. “Next, we need to figure out a way to make an emotional connection to show the public you care about people, without actually having you go out in public.”

  “Why can’t I just go out in public and show I care about people?”

  “Because people might try to kill you,” he explained. “Now, in Franklin Roosevelt’s day, he used to go on the radio every week and talk directly to America. It was called a Fireside Chat. It helped pull the country through the Depression. I think we should revive this idea.”

  “You want me to go on the radio?”

  “No, this is the Information Age,” he said. “I have a better idea — the Fireside Tweets. Once a week, we’re going to have you go online and give ordinary citizens the chance to type questions to you. You know, have sort of an interactive conversation with America.”

  “That’s a great idea,” I said. “I’ll be able to hear their problems, their concerns. I’ll be able to keep my finger on the pulse of America.”