Q Clearance

by Peter Benchley

  "Put 'em on, then. Just don't turn around."

  "And walk like a duck with a broom up its ass? No thanks. Tell him I'm in a meeting."

  "Are you crazy?” Dyanna shouted. "Here. Gimme here. For pity sakes." She snatched the trousers from his hands, looked at the ragged stitches he had made and tried to bite the thread to draw them out. But he had double-stitched and pulled them so tight that she couldn't get her teeth around them. "Give me some scissors!"

  Burnham opened the top drawer of his desk. "I don't have any scissors!" He looked at his watch, as if suddenly aware that he was keeping The Most Powerful Man in the World waiting because he had a rip in his pants. "Hurry!"

  "I can't! I can't get the stitches out!"

  Burnham yanked open drawer after drawer. Pads and paperclips and rulers and rubber bands spewed out onto the mg. No scissors. But he spied a solution. He grabbed the trousers back from Dyanna and laid them carefully across the

  blotter. He placed her hands at the top and bottom of the huge rip and told her to pull hard, keeping the rip closed.

  He picked up his big desk stapler, fit it over the top of the trousers and, woridng from the top downward, slammed the staples into the fabric—bam! bam! bam! bam! He flung the stapler aside and examined the pants: They would hold, unless the President intended to grapple with him.

  "Remember now," Dyanna said, as she watched Burnham hop delicately into the trousers, "whatever he wants, say yes. I 'spect he wants you to do a special job of work for him, something real important like where my contacts could come in real handy, and you can tell him that. If it's travel, and they say he's thinking of going to Europe and maybe Asia at least one more time, don't worry about Sarah and the kids 'cause I'll make sure someone looks after 'em while we're away. It could be that he wants us to move into the White House so's he can call on us more often, and that's okay too, it won't be as big as this but lots more exciting and if we have to we can share an office 'cause there's not that much phone-calling to be bothersome, you know that."

  Burnham listened to her with one ear. Most of his brain was engrossed in defense preparedness—trying to isolate the possible areas of vulnerability. He had never before been summoned to see the President, and he didn't know what such a summons meant. If a phone call was usually bad news, what was a meeting? Potential catastrophe.

  Burnham had met with the President several times, but only as one of the group of writers. Usually, after the President had expressed displeasure with a number of speeches ("My cat shits better stuff than that!"), Cobb would counsel gently that it was difficult for the writers to write a given speech unless they knew what the President wanted to say, and since the President's normal response to an inquiry about what he wanted to say to a group was "Oh, something nice," the writers were left to guess what the President thought would be nice.

  "They're my writers," the President would say. "They're supposed to know what I want to say."

  "But, sir," Cobb would reply, "it's hard for them to anticipate you if they don't know you."

  "If they don't know me, how come they're working for me?"

  "They're professionals, sir, the best money can buy. That's what you ordered, after the . . . Brandon business ..." (The six professional writers had been brought in as firemen, to douse the conflagration ignited by Brandon Mundy, the President's second cousin, whom the President had brought with him to the White House as his "personal wordifier." Mundy was a mean, vindictive poetaster whose work had been published in The American Rifleman, Grit and Velvet, and who worshiped Ezra Pound for his war-years poems. The first speech Mundy had written for the President, to an Italian-American group, had begun, "lo sono un WOP. And I'm proud of it, 'cause I know that WOP means you came to this country With Out Papers, and that means you really wanted to get in." Mundy's second effort had been an address to a right-to-life group, and it had contained the sentiment, "To paraphrase Marie Antoinette: Let 'em use coathangers." There had been no third Mundy speech.)

  "You're right. I did." The President would ponder for a moment and then say, "Warner, I want every one of the writers to spend a full day right at my side, twenty-four hours stickin' as close to me as my shorts. One by one, I want 'em to see me, hear me, smell me, feel me, get to know my every mood, so when they get an assignment they can say by instinct, 'This is what my President would want to say.' "

  Cobb would agree, and a day later he would write a memo to the President with a proposed schedule for the writer-in-residence program. The memo would not be answered. Cobb would send another one. It, too, would go unanswered. In three or four weeks' time, Cobb would get a call from the Appointments Secretary, informing him that the President thought that a more economical way to get to know the writers would be to gather with them for an informal session in the Cabinet Room. "No other staff," the President would be quoted as having said. "Just some real give-and-take with my boys."

  The meeting would last exactly one hour. The President would point to each writer in turn and ask for complaints, comments, suggestions. The words of each response might vary from individual to individual, but the substance was identical: It was difficult—nay, impossible—to do the job the President wanted without more contact with the President.

  To each the President would reply, "Damn right. That's why we're here today."

  Whatever time was left over the President would devote to reminiscences about his childhood or his time in the Senate or Great Men He Had Known—"So you'll have grist for your mill and know what's behind this fella you call the President."

  It was a completely predictable ritual.

  Within a week after the meeting, each writer would receive a photograph of the assemblage taken by the President's personal photographer, a Pakistani named Naj who had worked for the USIA for two decades. The President would have inscribed each picture with the most coveted of phrases:

  "To : With gratitude from his friend and President,

  Benjamin T. Winslow."

  To Burnham's knowledge, none of the writers had ever met alone with the President. Why now? Why him? He wasn't even the senior writer, or the most important. He rarely got big foreign-policy speeches to sculpt. That was Butterworth's ken. And McGregor got to enunciate all the economic thunderclaps.

  "What have I done?" he suddenly cried aloud.

  "What? Nothing." Dyanna was smoothing his lapels and checking his tie. "You'll be fine, Mr. Burnham, Honey. Okay. Now go!”

  Something didn't feel right. His hands. His hands were empty. "Get me some papers!"

  "Papers? Newspapers?"

  "No! Papers papers! Documents! You can't walk around the West Wing without papers. Everybody's always got papers. Otherwise you look like a butler."

  Burnham didn't remotely resemble a butler, but Dyanna wasn't about to argue. She dipped her hand into the IN box and plucked out a proclamation and a State Department proposed first draft of a Presidential greeting to some visiting poo-bah. Then, for icing, she tore two message slips off a pad, ticked the box marked "urgent" and scribbled on one "Margaret Thatcher—please call soonest" and on the other "Andrei Gromyko returned your call." These she stapled prominently to the top sheet of a yellow legal pad which she placed atop the other papers, all of which she thrust into Burnham's hand as she propelled him toward the door.

  '"Go for it, Mr. Burnham, Honey," she said, as she held the door for him. "It's first down and goal to go!"

  What is going on? Burnham shouted at himself as his shoes clattered down the marble corridor and he unconsciously checked his collar buttons, his tie, his shoes and the shoot of his cuffs. Why am I here? I'm just a nice boy from the Northeast who does what he's told as best he can. I should have stayed in New York. Journalism's an honorable profession.

  He pushed through the swinging door and walked down the ramp to West Executive Avenue, the thin ribbon of concrete that separated the White House from the Executive Office Building and provided parking spaces for the small armada of White House staff cars and fo
r the private vehicles of about three people in the solar system, including Evelyn Witt and, should he for some reason choose to drive himself to work rather than wait to be picked up at home, Mario Epstein. It was here on West Executive Avenue during times of Deep Crisis that the Secretaries of State and Defense were seen on television disembarking from their limousines and marching somberly into the West Basement, because that was the quickest route to the Situation Room, the nerve center from which the first salvos of Armageddon would be fired—before everybody who was worth saving boarded the aircraft that would take them into the bowels of a Maryland mountain.

  As always, a phalanx of GM sedans sat, nose-in to the curb, engines idling so the government chauffeurs could enjoy air conditioning while they dozed or read or composed screenplays that would free them from the drudgery of driving bureaucrats who treated them like old furniture through the sclerotic Washington traffic.

  Striding purposefully across the avenue, pretending to read a draft proclamation for White Cane Safety Day, Burnham looked up just long enough to glance at the sedans and wonder if it was possible that this meeting with the President would result in his being initiated into some new knighthood so exalted as to entitle him to what was called "portal-to-portal"—meaning that a black sedan picked him up at the house every morning and returned him there at night. Not bloody likely. True, things were a lot better than in the days of the Carter Proletarian Presidency, when the higher you were ranked the more ardently you had to pretend to embrace the plebeian ethic, and Cabinet Secretaries, for Christ's sake, were driving to work in Volkswagen Beetles. But better or not, one still had to be several rungs closer to Olympus than Burnham was to get portal-to-portal.

  Besides, this cozy little fantasy was founded on the assumption that he was being summoned to receive good news.

  Burnham opened the door into the West Basement. It was dark in there, and cool, and the air conditioning made a soothing noise that reminded him of staterooms on ships at sea.

  A few feet ahead, on the left, one door this side of the one marked "Ladies," was the door to Warner Cobb's office. To the right, down a short staircase, was the White House Mess, which was—but only in the Second Sitting—the most exclusive luncheon club in Washington, where delicious, inexpensive (subsidized) meals were served in opulent surroundings to the princes of the White House royal family: Special Assistants, Special Counsels, the President's private secretaries, the Vice-President (who had had to fight off an attempt to stick him in the First Sitting), and, when a whim led him to break bread with those who served him, the President himself. The Second Sitting sat from 1:00 to 2:00.

  The First Sitting, of which Burnham and the other writers were members, sat from 12:00 to 1:00. Burnham, pleased though he was to have been awarded the perk, rarely attended. The membership of the First Sitting was, in general, about as much fun as mononucleosis. Second- and third-level myrmidons on the White House staff were exactly what they should be: second- and third-level functionaries who did one job with mechanical precision, be it advancing presidential voyages, sifting political requests, flying the presidential planes or operating the White House social office.

  Burnham didn't consider himself above the others, he existed apart from them.

  The other writers could be jolly companions, but they didn't have to go to the Mess to see one another. Much more lively was to go out into the world, where one didn't have to speak in a murmur while scanning with one's ears the other conversations in the room in search of White House gossip.

  Warner Cobb's battery of secretaries sat somewhere in the White House, but Burnham had no idea where. They could not have been in or near Cobb's two-stall office, of course, since it was barely big enough for Cobb alone, and there was nothing nearby but the remains of the ladies' room and a narrow corridor. This arrangement was not ideal for Cobb, but it suited the writers just fine: If they needed to see Cobb, no secretary barred the door; with no anteroom before his office, he could not command them to wait in the anteroom. If he was in, he had to do business with them without resorting to status games.

  Not that Cobb was the kind who enjoyed such petty juvenilia, but you never knew. Big offices with anterooms and lots of secretaries had a way of turning any head. It was like giving a loaded pistol to a child and telling him not to shoot it. He'd have to try it once or twice, and once he saw how much fun it was, there might be no stopping him.

  Cobb was an unpretentious man trying to do an impossible job for which he had had no training, for which there was no such thing as training—that is, to maintain a productive, even creative, dynamic between a President who thought all writers were either left-wing rabble-rousers, right-wing messiahs, snobs, natives of New York or Boston or San Francisco ("Hotbeds of assholes, and I can prove it!"), or out to get him, or any combination of the above, and six professional writers who were skilled at articulating matters of policy and politics, who knew the tricks of rousing and holding an audience, who agreed generally with the stated aims of President and party, who had been respected—even lionized—in their prior occupations and who were therefore unaccustomed to, and unhappy at, being considered by their employer (the President had offered both appraisals several times) "as useless as a spare prick at a wedding" and "a necessary evil—like farting."

  Burnham listened at Cobb's door before he knocked, a courtesy to avoid interrupting phone calls. He heard Cobb's old Royal clacking away, so he knocked and opened the door and went inside. Cobb was bent over the typewriter, the bald spot on the crown of his head gleaming like a new dollar, and he held up a finger that said "Be with you in a minute" and continued to coifipose one of the myriad memos he sowed about the federal government each day—suggesting ideas for presidential remarks, for groups who should be addressed, for organizations that would serve well (if unwittingly) as conduits for new proposals, for things that needed saying and things that should be left unsaid.

  And for new acronyms.

  The President was in love with acronyms. If a program was marginal in substance, it was made worthy, in the President's eyes, by slugging it with an acronym. He liked NORAD and the DEW line, was nostalgic for the WACs and a strong supporter of NATO, SEATO and CENTO. He signed a bill changing the name of the Naval facility on Andros Island by the Tongue of the Ocean to TOTO. He wanted young people to train for government service in YONGOV, wanted businessmen to hire the handicapped through BUSCAP, and lobbied for a Gerald-Ford-like economic slogan that, unlike Ford's Whip Inflation Now (WIN), would attack all the gremlins in the economy. But he abandoned the effort when he found that no one could pronounce the acronym he had proudly fashioned for Whip Inflation Now and High Interest Rates Too For Rising Employment (WINAHIRTFRE).

  Cobb finished typing and spun in his chair to face Burnham. "Hi," he said.

  "This is a joke, right?"

  "Nope."

  "What, then?"

  "I don't know. The boss called me bright and early and said, and I quote, 'Get me the fella wrote the O'Leary thing.' And I looked on my list, and lo and behold! It was you. Lucky you."

  "What O'Leary thing? What ... oh. That?'' Days ago, last week sometime, Burnham had written a couple of hundred words for the President to deliver at a surprise appearance at a dinner for Mary O'Leary, a former Oregon State Attorney General whom the President had nominated for a federal judgeship. Burnham had been instructed to keep the remarks short and free of controversy, and to begin them with one or two soft jokes—not thigh-slappers but mildly amusing one-liners to establish fellowship with the audience. All this Burnham had done. Or thought he had.

  "What went wrong?" he asked Cobb. "What could've gone wrong?"

  *'Nothing, far as I know. I told the Signal Corps to send me the tape, but it isn't here yet."

  "Then what's this about?” Burnham felt frantic. There was an unsavory smell to the summons, the bitter smell of surprise.

  "Beats me. For what it's worth, he didn't sound pissed. Just sort of matter-of-fact."

&nb
sp; "Icy, you mean. Wonderful. Let's wait for the tape."

  Cobb shrugged. His phone rang. It was answered by a secretary somewhere, and then a buzzer sounded once, meaning that the call was from inside the White House and Cobb was to answer it personally. (Two buzzes signaled him to speak on the intercom line to the secretary.) Cobb punched the flashing button and said, "Cobb. . . . Oh, hi, Evelyn. Yep, he's right here. ..."

  Burnham felt sweat on his palms and under his arms.

  "Okay," Cobb continued. "It's his candy store. Right away." He hung up and said to Burnham, "He wants to see you now, so you better haul ass."

  Burnham took a deep breath and stood up, clutching his papers. "Let's go."

  Cobb shook his head. "He said alone."

  "Oh, shit."

  "Yes." Cobb nodded. "I would say that is a fair appraisal of the situation."

  Burnham smiled weakly as he reached for the door and said, "Say later that my demise eclipsed the gaiety of nations."

  Burnham's breath was coming too fast, and, climbing the stairs to the first floor of the White House, he gripped the banister and fought to breathe rhythmically. He turned the comer and walked down the corridor past Epstein's office, where Esther Tagliaferro orchestrated the medley of bells and lights that began every rooming just before 8:00 and tailed off every evening just after 8:00 and kept eight healthy American women so busy that no two dared visit the ladies' room at one time; past the perpetually closed door of the office of the President's Appointments Secretary, a quiet, retiring man who wielded immense power by virtue of controlling access to the President, power about which he cared little since he served the President only in payment of an enormous unspoken debt owed by his father to the President's father, power in return for which he had to function supercurricularly as Special Assistant to Receive Unfocused Presidential Abuse and to Keep from Public Scrutiny Awkwardnesses and/or Embarrassments Committed by the President or Members of His Immediate Family; toward the two Secret Service praetorians who flanked the door to the Oval Office.