But Enough About You: Essays

by Christopher Buckley

  Continuing down Pont Street, I got even luckier. There in a grimy doorway was a plaque dedicated to Sir George Alexander. The name rang familiar, and what do you know: He inaugurated the role of John Worthing on February 14, 1895, the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest.

  Next to Chelsea Old Church is a little square of quiet greenery called Roper’s Garden, once the site of St. Thomas More’s orchard. (More himself lived a bit up the street.) In Roper’s Garden, you’ll find a relief sculpture by Sir Jacob Epstein, commemorating his studio, which stood here 1909–14. If you’ve visited Wilde’s grave in Père-Lachaise in Paris, you already know that his tomb was carved by Jacob Epstein, between 1909 and 1912. Thus did I learn the strange coincidence that Oscar’s gravestone was carved only a few blocks from where he lived.

  —ForbesLife, May 2011

  SMALL AIRCRAFT ADVISORY

  BEFORE YOU GO

  The longer the flight number, the smaller the plane.

  Reconfirm your reservation every fifteen minutes, beginning two months before date of departure. Increase frequency to every six minutes forty-eight hours prior to departure.

  Send baggage on ahead by FedEx. If feasible, have yourself sent on ahead by FedEx.

  Reserve a room at the hotel airport for three days on either side of theoretical departure date.

  AT THE AIRPORT

  Arrive at least three days prior to departure. (See above.)

  When they ask how much you weigh, do not lie.

  Carry on no more than can comfortably fit in a dental cavity. The overhead compartments on most small planes were designed for pressing wildflowers—and apple cider—though they can, in a pinch, be used for crushing expensive cameras, computers, hats, etc.

  When you are told that the flight is overbooked and you have no seat, remain calm. This is a test to see if you have “the right stuff” and are worthy of the seat you booked to Bangor eight months ago. Screaming at the gate agent that you are extremely important, a close friend of the president of the airline, or a cardinal (in plainclothes) of the Catholic Church, etc., is a sign that you have “the wrong stuff.” So is telling the agent that he is a baboon.

  Instead, dress in surgical scrubs with hemostats clipped everywhere. These will look more impressive than a cashmere blazer and Italian loafers when you attempt to convey to the agent that it is critical that you be in Bangor by noon. For added emphasis, carry a small beach cooler prominently labeled HUMAN ORGAN.

  ON THE BUS FROM THE GATE TO THE PLANE

  Congratulations—you are one of the “chosen.” But this is no time for complacency. Here is your first chance to size up your fellow passengers and to see, from the boarding passes clutched in their hands, how many of them have also been assigned your seat. It’s also a chance to see the “Quartier Latin” of the airport (where they keep the smaller, quainter aircraft), and to get on the plane for Manchester, New Hampshire, instead of the one for Bangor.

  WELCOME ABOARD!

  Get on first, regardless of row number. Once seated, permanently fasten yourself to your seat with chain, steel cable, or bicycle lock and heavy padlock to discourage the five other people who have also been assigned Seat 8A.

  YOU AND YOUR FLIGHT CREW

  The pilot and copilot are every bit as competent as the people who fly planes with engines that don’t resemble food processors. They don’t want to be here any more than you do. Like you, they would rather be in a Boeing 767 instead of a plane made by a company that mostly makes lawn mowers.

  Pilots of small planes generally fall into one of the following categories: those who (a) don’t have enough experience yet to fly planes with bathrooms you can stand up in; (b) kept crashing during the tests in the flight simulator; (c) cannot distinguish between interstate highways and runways; (d) have “attitude problems”; or (e) experience violent flashbacks involving aerial combat in Vietnam.

  AFTER TAKEOFF

  If you are a “nervous flier,” immediately swallow enough Valium to induce hibernation in a polar bear. (Be sure to attach somewhere to your person a highly visible note indicating your final destination, contact numbers, blood type, etc., in the event that they cannot revive you when it is time to deplane.)

  If you are susceptible to motion sickness, color-coordinate your clothing with the meal you eat beforehand.

  To take your mind off the fact that it now looks as though the pilot will have to go through the thunderstorm, close your eyes and try to imagine that you are Charles Lindbergh and that this is the adventure of a lifetime. Soon you will land at Le Bourget field and be carried off by hordes of adoring French people shouting nice things about America. (Far-fetched, admittedly.) Keep repeating to yourself, in the voice of Jimmy Stewart—silently, so as not to put the already distressed person next to you over the edge—“G-Gosh, there’s the Eiffel Tower!”

  —The New Yorker, October 1996

  Statecraft

  * * *

  Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.

  —SECRETARY OF THE NAVY JOHN LEHMAN

  THE VISHNU

  Those of us who worked for Mr. Bush when he was vice president had a nickname for him: “The Vishnu.” It was his own coinage. He had recently been to India on a state visit, where he was presented, amid great ceremony, with a statue of the four-armed Vedic deity Vishnu, its plaque describing Vishnu’s many godly qualities, among them omniscience, omnipotence, and the title “Preserver of the Universe.”

  Mr. Bush immediately recognized a kindred godhead and began referring to himself in staff memos and on Air Force Two’s p.a. system as “The Vishnu.” (In more intimate settings, he was “The Vish.”) There I’d be on the plane, a lowly speechwriter banging away at some arrival statement, when over the speakers would come in grave tones, “This is . . . the Vishnu speaking.” After the visit, had it gone well, upon takeoff we would hear, “This . . . is the Vishnu. The Vishnu is well pleased . . .” It had a certain Oz-ness, which of course was the intended effect.

  When the Vishnu became president in 1989, we stopped calling him that. It was only a few years ago that I was able to relax back into calling him by his old nickname. I got the sense that he’d missed being called by it.

  Mr. Bush was, to be sure, an ur-Yankee blueblood establishmentarian, but he was always winking at you, even in the midst of some very formal ceremony. He took a boyish delight in kicking his own pedestal out from underneath him. After he left the White House and started using e-mail, I asked his secretary what on earth the “flfw” part of it portended. The answer was: former leader of the free world. And why not?

  On the first foreign trip I made with him, in 1981, I watched him charm the staff of a U.S. embassy with a story about a visit he had made to President Reagan after his shooting. Mr. Bush was shown into the president’s hospital room only to find it—empty. At a loss, he finally crouched down to look under the bed to see if perchance the current leader of the free world might (for some reason) be curled up there. At which point he heard a voice from the bathroom: “George, I’m in here. Come on in.” With some reticence, Mr. Bush peered in. There was the president, on his hands and knees, wiping the floor with paper towels.

  “Mr. President. What are you . . . doing?”

  “Well, you see,” Reagan said, “I spilled some water and I don’t want the nurses to have to wipe it up.”

  Mr. Bush loved that story for the volumes it spoke about the profound decency and humility of Ronald Reagan. He told it again and again until we, his staff, were heartily tired of hearing about the profound decency and humility of the president. But the moral was not lost, even on cocky, self-important young politicos such as ourselves. On reflection, it could just as well have been a story about George Bush. I have no difficulty imagining him down on all fours in a hospital room, mopping up a water spill to spare the nurses. Moreover, had Mr. Bush been hospitalized after being shot by a deranged young man, I can quite easily imagine him getting back into bed after mopping the floor and
handwriting his assailant’s parents a note of sympathy, expressing his concern for what they must be going through. For a multiarmed, omniscient, and omnipotent deity, the Vish was the most considerate man I have ever known.

  Which could be maddening in a politician. My boss, his press secretary Pete Teeley, would shake his head and roll his eyes and mutter frustrated imprecations over the Vishnu’s steadfast refusal in those days (the early 1980s) to talk about his World War II record. One reporter, having serially failed to entice Mr. Bush into providing a dramatic account of being shot down over Chi-chi Jima by the Japanese, remonstrated afterward with Teeley. “For God’s sake, your guy’s a [expletive] war hero. Why won’t he talk about it? It’s like drawing water from a [expletive] rock.” Teels could only shrug.

  Then came the ’88 campaign and the era of Lee Atwater and the other high-velocity spinners. From then on Mr. Bush pretty much had to talk about it. But you could see him wincing. He recoiled from chest thumping (the “Introspection Thing,” as he called it). This was, after all, a man who had been brought up short by his own mother at the Thanksgiving dinner table in 1980. He had been regaling the family with his adventures on the presidential campaign trail. Dorothy Bush said to him sharply, “George, stop it. You’re talking about yourself too much.” And he did.

  As a boy, one of his nicknames was “Have-Half,” after his habit of always sharing half his sandwich with whoever was there. George H. W. Bush had a kind of valence: he seemed to attract nicknames. His childhood nickname was “Poppy.” His namesake son famously had the converse habit of bestowing nicknames. But “Have-Half” fit him, even later on in life. When he was vice president, Mr. Bush would stay over in Washington for Christmas rather than go home to Houston, so that his Secret Service detail could spend the day with their families.

  There are dozens, scores, hundreds such stories about George Herbert Walker Bush. He had noblesse oblige—or as he once called it—“noblesse noblige.” Who but George Bush would have had the grace—and wit—to invite his impudent Saturday Night Live doppelganger Dana Carvey to spend a night at White House. This was after Mr. Bush was defeated for reelection. Carvey didn’t quite believe it when the invitation arrived; but it was genuine, and he went, and was charmed by his host.

  For a speechwriter, putting words in Mr. Bush’s mouth could at times be a challenge. Mr. Bush was a natural storyteller, and a natural listener—a quality not generally in surplus among politicians. He was usually better off without a written text. And without props, as I learned the hard way.

  The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan and as occupiers were engaged in atrocities. Among these was the usage of a device they were dropping from helicopters: “butterfly bombs,” as they were labeled by NATO. Plastic, packed with high explosives, they looked like harmless toys. They fluttered gently to earth—hence the name—and when picked up by curious children, exploded. The intent was to maim, not kill. Psy-war, red in tooth and claw.

  I proposed that we anathematize this gruesome weapon by having Mr. Bush hold one up during the speech he would deliver on Sunday at the Kennedy Center on the occasion of “Afghanistan Day.” It would certainly make for a dramatic photograph. After staff discussion, Mr. Bush said he agreed.

  A man from the CIA arrived in my office on Friday morning. He informed me that great pains had been gone to to provide us with the (deactivated, naturally) butterfly bomb. He would return to my office on Monday to collect it. Its custody, he emphasized, was my responsibility. You can see where this is going.

  Mr. Bush and I rehearsed his speech. I told him it was critical that he hold the thing aloft in his hand during the reference in the speech to the device, and that he hold it there long enough for the photographers to get their shot. I suggested that he take it home with him over the weekend and practice.

  The speech was at noon. Sunday morning my phone rang at seven. The Vishnu. “Say,” he said, “do you have it? You know, the . . . thing.”

  “Sir,” I said nervously, “by ‘thing,’ do you mean the butterfly bomb?” That is to say, sir, the centerpiece of the speech you’ll be giving in a few hours. At the Kennedy Center. In front of thousands of dignitaries.

  “Yes. Well,” he said blithely, “it doesn’t seem to be here anywhere.” But then why should he worry? It wasn’t his fingernails the CIA would remove on Monday morning.

  I immediately phoned Ed Pollard, head of his Secret Service detail. You will not be surprised to hear that Secret Service agents, especially those at the supervisory level, do not brim with glee when told that you have given their principal a device associated with the word explosives, and without bothering to mention the fact to them. A rime of frost instantly formed over the phone line. Ed hung up without further pleasantries and ordered his men to fan out to find the bomb that I had given the vice president. Oh, Ed was just thrilled.

  Several anxious hours later, Mr. Bush and I were reunited backstage at the Kennedy Center prior to the speech. He grinned sheepishly and produced from his trench coat the cherished item. I sighed with relief—and then stared.

  It was punctured through and through by what appeared to be canine dentition. The vice presidential cocker spaniel, Fred C. Bush, had purloined it on the limo ride from the White House to the residence. Eventually tiring of it, Fred had deposited it in Mrs. Bush’s dahlia bed. Thus a device made in Soviet Russia for the purpose of maiming Afghan children ended up as a chew toy for the dog of the vice president of the United States. Monday morning, the little gray man from Langley listened impassively to my variation on the theme of “the dog ate the homework.”

  During my time at the White House, I found myself, once or twice, the only other person in the room with Mr. Bush and President Reagan. Mr. Bush was unfailingly courteous in any situation, with anyone, from kings to cleaning ladies. Courtly and respectful—what we used to call “gentlemanly.”

  With Reagan, even in a casual atmosphere, he was especially deferential; not obsequious, but extra attentive, as one might be with, say, a grandfather. This attitude struck me as filial, and entirely without affect.

  Back then, the general attitude of the Georgetown cognoscenti—the “cave-dwellers,” and other bluebloods of Permanent Washington Society—were the kind of people Bush mixed with easily, for he, too, was of bluish blood. The Georgetown set, however, looked on Reagan will ill-disguised hauteur: in the now-ironic phrasing of the Establishmentarian Clark Clifford, an “amiable dunce.” (Reagan, who looms larger and larger, had the last laugh; Clifford ended his career mired in a tawdry banking scandal.)

  I thought then, and think still, that in a way George H. W. Bush was the real Ronald Reagan. I mean this with no disrespect for Mr. Reagan, whom I admired and loved. But George Bush had gone to war; Mr. Reagan had played war heroes in movies. George Bush was a devoted father; Reagan was perhaps devoted to his children, but in a very different way. This perception of mine jarred as I observed the two of them together up close, for it was Reagan who gave the impression of being the tougher guy. No one would fault his physical courage. After all, he’d insisted on walking into the emergency room with Hinckley’s bullet in his lung, and had cracked jokes on the operating table, saying he hoped they were all Republicans. His heroic aura was genuine. Bush’s was submerged beneath the genial preppy exterior: the Cowboy and Dink Stover.

  Mr. Bush’s critics were constantly yapping at him for being preppy. Then, memorably, when the ’88 campaign got under way, the decorated war hero who had been shot down while flying his torpedo bomber into a maelstrom of Japanese flak found himself on the cover of Newsweek, ridiculed for “the wimp factor.” Is this a great country, or what?

  I never once heard Mr. Bush chafe at the preposterous notion that he lacked walnuts. He was entirely serene about his manhood. And why shouldn’t he have been? If you’ve been to war as a young man, seen death face-to-face; cradled your dying six-year-old daughter in your arms; drilled for oil in Texas; raised a family; been elected to Congress; headed the Republic
an Party—during Watergate! Thanks, Dick—opened the first U.S. liaison office in China; run the CIA; and got yourself elected vice president of the United States, maybe you don’t need to have your manhood validated by smartass magazine editors and other soft-faced thumb-suckers of the punditariat.

  For someone who seemed gangly or physically awkward, he was quite comfortable in his own skin, as the French say. A later speechwriter of his who put into his mouth many golden words—as well as one problematical pledge involving lips—hit exactly the right note in his 1988 convention speech when she had him say, “I may be awkward at times, but there is nothing awkward about my love of country.”

  Being comfortable in his manhood may in fact have been one of his greatest assets as president. When the Soviet Union collapsed—on his watch—Mr. Bush took pains not to bang the drum and thump the national chest, lest it provoke a rump element of the Red Army. He was criticized for that, but history has since vindicated the wisdom of that reticence.

  He was criticized, too, after the Tiananmen Square massacre, for not publicly excoriating the Chinese Politburo and demanding heads on pikes. But he understood the Chinese mind, and that grandstanding would only be counterproductive. He undertook quieter measures, and history has since vindicated those, as well.

  Mr. Bush conducted what may have been America’s most efficient war, against a desert despot, assembling a historic coalition of twenty-six countries including Syria. And when that war was swiftly consummated, he withdrew—mission accomplished, to deploy a phrase that would haunt another Bush in later years. The senior Bush was criticized by a great many armchair warriors in 1991—notably by the neocons—for not “going all the way.” But he understood the terrible prospects involved in door-to-door warfare in Baghdad.

  To be sure, he and his advisors made a tragic miscalculation when he encouraged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam. Those who did rise up were mercilessly cut down by Saddam, whose helicopters had been inexplicably given permission to continue flying. This mistake gnawed at Mr. Bush. But his wisdom in not “going all the way” has been ratified. In time, George Bush 41 may be well regarded by historians, as Eisenhower now increasingly is, as much for what he did not do, as for what he did.