On the surface, there was no apparent change in life at the White House after the president was diagnosed. That first weekend, Corcoran went to Camp David. He felt terrible from affects of the drug cocktails—he didn’t even want to get out of bed those early days—and McCord wanted him out of sight until he got used to the drugs. Lisa stayed behind in Washington. Only McCord and Elsner accompanied the president. The weekend stretched into the following week, with the public being told the president was fatigued from the affects of a lingering cold and a mild case of the flu.
McCord could see the frostiness between the president and Lisa, but they had their own schedules and few outside the personal staff in the residence were aware of any problems between them. Lisa and the children were tested. All were negative.
But the drugs began to affect how the president looked and that had McCord worried. He walked stiffly, as he if were plagued with an early attack of arthritis. He found it painful just to shake hands—something a president does hundreds of times a day. His skin was constantly burning. Corcoran complained he felt like he had a full-body sunburn. He often seemed dizzy and was constantly running to the bathroom. His bowel movements were difficult to control. Just as troubling, he tired easily.
So McCord organized the president’s schedule to minimize the risk of exposure. Meetings never lasted more than 45 minutes. Rest times were scheduled every day at mid-morning and mid-afternoon. Officially, they were called “think periods” where the president could read and ruminate. Actually, he slept. He rarely got up to greet visitors. Instead, McCord saw to it that he was already seated either at his desk or on the yellow Oval Office sofas before a meeting started.
Elsner’s drug schedule was glued to a convenient yet hidden place in the president’s desk. And to ensure he didn’t forget a pill, the chief of staff arranged for Corcoran’s private secretary, Rose Forest, to buzz the president whenever it was time to take his drugs. McCord didn’t tell her why the boss needed to take so many drugs during the day and she didn’t ask. She had been with Corcoran since his days as a columnist and was his most loyal and longest-serving aide. If Jack McCord didn’t give her a reason, she wasn’t going to ask.
So every day at 10:30 in the morning, then 2:30 in the afternoon and again at 4:30—no matter where the president was, no matter whom he was with—Rose buzzed and Corcoran quietly disappeared into the bathroom for a few minutes. The president also had to take pills before breakfast and shortly before he went to bed. So Elsner made sure to call him twice a day, early in the morning and late at night, to check on how he was doing—and to make sure he hadn’t forgotten his daily dosage. McCord didn’t want his chief falling off the wagon.
The president’s evenings were also curtailed. He rarely went out and when he did, he left for home early. Official dinners were shortened, with the president often excusing himself early due to the press of business. Out of town trips rarely included an overnight stay. McCord told the president to conserve his energy for his public appearances, to sleep or rest on the plane to and from events. To keep up his spirits, McCord stepped up Corcoran’s talk radio schedule. Corcoran had always set aside at least one day a week to go “trolling for outrage,” as he called it. Now, McCord organized these sessions several times a week. The president loved the give and take of live radio, it got his spirits up and his juices flowing. His voice was still strong and no one could see how he looked on radio.
McCord could try to hide the president’s weakened condition to the nation. But he couldn’t hide it from the White House staff and his aides began to notice the president’s increased fatigue. There were whispers and some of Corcoran’s closest aides—the press secretary, the national security adviser, some of the cabinet officers—told the chief of staff they were worried that the president was pushing himself too hard, running himself down.
McCord brushed off their concern. He told them the doctors ascribed it to his allergies, which were known to cause fatigue and tiredness, and that was why he was limiting the president’s schedule as a precaution.
Of more serious concern was the president’s mental state. McCord needed to keep him upbeat and not let his disease sap his natural feistiness, his love of political combat. The doctors had convinced him that he would survive, that AIDS was not inevitable. But McCord knew Corcoran was having trouble dealing with what could be a fatal illness and the disintegration of his marriage. Lisa rarely talked to her husband now and the girls were beginning to ask why their parents were so unfriendly to each other. They never seemed to do anything together as a family any more.
Moreover, McCord knew Corcoran was depressed over the fact that he could go down in history as the first HIV president, not the president who moved the country back to the right. He wanted to be known as Reagan II, not some freak who was the first Oval Office occupant to get an incurable disease. Corcoran feared he had let his supporters down, that his personal mistakes would undermine the political movement he had led to power. Like Reagan before him, Corcoran had pushed conservative issues to the center of American politics, turned respectable ideas that had been dismissed as outlandish and out of the mainstream. The Religious Right, once denounced as extremist, was now close to the political middle—and had a friend in the White House. And that was all because of Tom Corcoran. His vitality, his political strength, his popularity made that possible. Now all that was in jeopardy. If anyone found out he was HIV, he would be exposed as a fraud, a hypocrite, a political leper.
Thomas Wallace Corcoran came of age at Georgetown University in the 1960s, though he was the antithesis of the hippies and the flower children who came to personify the Age of Aquarius. He scorned war protests, kept to his studies, went to church every Sunday, even joined the Young Republicans. “Young Fascists,” the lefties on campus called them derisively. But Corcoran secretly hoped the turmoil over the war would mean trouble for the Democratic president, which could leave an opening for the Republicans in the next presidential election.
Corcoran worked for Richard Nixon in 1968 as a volunteer, even went to New Hampshire for a weekend before the primary. He wangled his way to Miami Beach for the Republican convention and spent most of the fall working in the campaign. It was his senior year and almost flunked out that semester, he spent so much time working for Nixon. But he made up for lost time after the election, survived enough to graduate and got a job as a reporter at a suburban Maryland newspaper.
He dreamed of being another William F. Buckley: writing something famous in college, like Buckley did at Yale, and propelling himself into the conservative stratosphere, a young conservative voice in a liberal era. But except for a couple of essays for the campus newspaper—the editors humored campus conservatives by occasionally offering “the other side” a column or two—his writings never made it beyond campus.
He hungered to be an editorial writer, to use the bully pulpit of a newspaper to spread the conservative gospel. Instead, he became a reporter and he never got much farther than that. He soon became bored with town meetings and district school boards and local police blotters and in 1972, he chucked it all to re-up with CREEP—Nixon’s re-election campaign. He never looked back.
This time, he got paid for working on the campaign and after the president’s re-election, landed a White House job. At age 26, he couldn’t believe he had a White House pass. He was so proud that he had it copied and framed and hung prominently in his apartment. He was little more than a gofer in the press office, occasionally writing minor press releases and handling the out-of-town papers and obscure weeklies. The job was hardly glamorous. But he was working in the White House and he was in heaven.
Watergate soon engulfed President Nixon and Corcoran was devastated, his hero dethroned by the liberals, he thought, for just doing what Johnson and Kennedy and Roosevelt had done before him. Corcoran felt little allegiance Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, and he eventually drifted away, taking a job with a Washington public relations firm.
Corcoran watched the 1976 Reagan campaign from afar and anguished over staying on the sidelines; the political stage, he realized, was where he wanted to be. Four years later, he didn’t make the same mistake. Using his Nixon contacts, he latched unto the Reagan campaign early and rode him back into the White House.
Only now, he wasn’t some anonymous paper filer in the basement. He started out as a speech writer, but he was really more than that. Through his work in the campaign—mostly in the press office—he had begun to meet the national reporters for the first time. He thought them all left-wing whiners, but he found he could charm them, humor them. They thought him a lovable rogue, an entertaining companion at the bar who could give them Reagan spin and perhaps a little bit more.
Corcoran learned that reporters hungered to know what it was like on the inside of a campaign and, later, the White House; who really had influence and the president’s ear. There is always a subterranean flow of information between reporters and White House aides that guide the coverage of a president and Corcoran eagerly swam in that stream. He aligned himself with the hard-right faction in the White House—as opposed to the appeasers, as he liked to call them, the moderates who wanted to work with Democrats on the Hill. And reporters loved to write about the behind-the-scenes battles between the two factions for Reagan’s ear. Corcoran, with a well-placed anecdote here and carefully timed hint there, found he could use the media to help the right-wingers, showing its leaders to be the true defenders of the Right and the legacy he believed Reagan stood for. He was turning into an accomplished spinmeister.
And he quickly moved up the White House ladder. He had a key press role in the ’84 re-election campaign and became one of the president’s top communications advisers after the 1985 inauguration. But the second term wasn’t as much fun as the first. Donald Regan didn’t run as tight a ship as Jim Baker had as chief of staff and soon Iran-Contra began to overshadow anything else. It was Watergate redux, Corcoran feared. And he had no desire to be part of either a Bush campaign or a Bush presidency. So he began to contemplate life beyond the White House.
Also, by the second term, Corcoran’s life had changed. In the ’84 campaign, he had met a pro-life activist name Lisa McShane. She was lively, opinionated and cute. (She was also a bit overweight, but Corcoran was no slim-jim himself and they often kidded each other about who was going to lose weight first. Neither of them ever did.)
They married within a year and had two girls pretty quickly and Corcoran felt pressure to do better financially than just a top aide at the White House. He had gotten feelers in the past about writing a newspaper column—he was, after all, a former journalist—so in the middle of the second term he jumped ship and went back to writing.
And speaking. He found he could rouse a crowd, especially on college campuses. He was nervous when he first started giving speeches. He knew how to write a good speech, of course, but giving one—that was for professional pols. He thought of himself as a behind-the-scenes guy. But he discovered the combination of his Irish humor and the condemnation of anything left of center won him applause and plaudits before conservative audiences. Soon he was making more money from speeches than his writing. With Bush in the White House, he had no allegiance to the party leadership and he became a star of the Republican right, a regular on the lecture circuit and the Sunday morning talk shows. Sound bite thunderbolts, he found, gave him headlines in the Monday papers and adherents around the country.
It wasn’t long before friends began suggesting that he run for public office. At first, he blanched at the idea. He was a pudgy, excitable Irishman who loved to rip his enemies in print. Politicians had to make too many compromises—with special interests during the campaign and with Democrats once in office. He’d seen it all himself. He’d rather be a lion outside than a lamb inside.
But they persevered and Corcoran became intrigued. When a Senate seat opened up in Virginia, he couldn’t resist. He decided to run his way—no compromises, so smoothing out the rough edges, no move to the middle. He was what he was—a flaming right-winger; if the public didn’t like it, fine, he’d go back to his column and his speeches. They were creating quite a nice little nest egg for his family anyway.
To protect him from the consultants and the pollsters and the money men and the hangers-on who were sure to place victory above ideological purity, Corcoran brought in his old friend Jack McCord in as chief strategist. Jack was a corporate flak who liked Reagan and had worked in the White House press office when Corcoran was there. He had gone on to do some political consulting and his company was one of the better Republican firms in town. But McCord also knew Corcoran and knew how to protect him from rabble that can quickly subsume a campaign and its candidate.
McCord would help keep Corcoran on the right path, or rather, the Right path, and it turned out to be the path to victory. Virginia’s Religious Right was strong enough and the Democrats weak enough that Corcoran sneaked in. His bully pulpit was now larger than ever.