GARRY TRUDEAU IN his Doonesbury comic strip had been twitting the president about his shattered syntax and making it appear as if the president couldn’t organize a sentence on his own. While that was frequently true when speaking extempore, he could do so with preparation. To prove it—not to Trudeau, who wouldn’t be there to see, but to himself and those around him—he decided to write his own remarks for a group of Orange County and Los Angeles Republicans.
He had made notes. He wanted to touch several bases. He asked his secretary to get them from his briefcase.
The president’s regular secretary was ill. Her regular replacement was on vacation. The regular second backup was already assigned a certain activity. That left Carol Boomsliter, a woman from the White House secretarial pool who had never actually served the president before. She was doing the best she could and going by her personal code: when in doubt, do twice as much.
Bush’s notes were little more than a scrawl on the back of an envelope. Ms. Boomsliter, an anal retentive, couldn’t believe that no more had been done, even for a minor speaking engagement, even if it was identical in every way to the twenty that had come before it. She searched the briefcase quite thoroughly and, for the first time in four months, the Atwater memo appeared. A single glance was enough to frighten her. Not because of its content. Like so many people in government, she had gotten to the point, or perhaps had come to Washington with the mindset that content was completely meaningless. Like Stan the Steward, she was cleared for Top Secret—Limited Distribution, for Ultra and even, technically, for YEO, but she certainly did not want to be caught handling a YEO that she had not been handed by a very authorized hand. Now that it was in her hand, with her fingerprints on it, she had to make a decision. And, unlike Stan, she noticed that it was not addressed to Bush but to J.B.III. Of course, she knew who that was. She did not doubt that the president was authorized to see it, but she could visualize a scenario in which J.B.III missed it, went searching for it, and, when it was found, even in the presidential briefcase, demanded an investigation. The FBI would come in, check for fingerprints—she realized she didn’t know how to wipe fingerprints off paper, and even if she did, she did know that criminals always made a mistake and left some trace. She decided to come clean.
She handed George Bush the envelope with the scrawls and then the neatly refolded memo from Lee Atwater. She apologized for having seen it and she swore that she had read no further than the letters YEO.
If the president’s regular secretary had been in the room, he might have reflexively handed it to her and said to either file it or shred it. If the secretary of state to whom it was addressed had been in the room, Bush might have turned it over to Baker. But without those options and with so many presidential things to think about, it became that 2,134th detail that the presidential mind could not handle, akin to, Should the black socks be to the right or the left of the blue socks in the sock drawer or should “Me” follow “Mac” or come after “Max” in the contributor’s-list filing system or where to actually put bills when he vetoed them.17
Because there was no one there to take it from his hand immediately and because he couldn’t decide if he wanted to shred it or re-reread it and because he had no idea how to file it, George Bush put Lee Atwater’s deathbed memo in his pocket. Where it bulked and crinkled and reminded its carrier that it was present.
It was there when the president climbed into his helicopter. Still there when the copter brought him to Air Force One.
This was a working flight. Several members of his undistinguished cabinet were onboard. Each with urgent matters to attend to. In addition, there were his press secretary; the presidential pollster, Kenny Moran, on loan from the Gallup Organization, ostensibly employed by the Department of Agriculture,18and the current head of the Republican Party, who had arranged the West Coast fund-raiser to which they were all on their way.
The five hours of flight time passed quickly. There was a lot of business. None of the news was cataclysmic or catastrophic. But none of it was good.
Noriega’s lawyers were fighting to unfreeze his assets. This was delaying the trial, and until the trial ended and Noriega was convicted, the invasion of Panama teetered on the edge of an abyss named Farce. The economy was the lead depressant. It was just stagnating. The savings-and-loan scandal stumbled along, growing from billions to tens of billions to hundreds of billions lost, lurch by lurch. Bush’s son—why was it that the sons of great men, excepting himself of course, were such disappointments?—was ensnared in one of the messes. Anyone dumb enough to invest in a bank named after a shoot-’em-up movie, Silverado, should be willing to take their loss and not complain. Fortunately, the sins of the son were not being visited on the father. He didn’t expect them to be. After all, Jimmy Carter had survived Billy Carter, Reagan had survived both a “ballet-dancing son” and a Mommy Dearest daughter. But that could change. Just as what a grown man did with his own penis had suddenly become a matter of public policy under the heading of “character”—a man carries the weight of the world on his shoulders and he isn’t even entitled to a little discreet release of tension—so too could the whole family’s faults suddenly become the basis for judging a politician. The balance of payments continued to slide the wrong way. The deficit continued to grow.
After about four hours of this damp news, he came to feel like he was standing under an awning, waiting for the rain to pass, with a slow leak above him and a drip that somehow always found the gap between his neck and his collar—plus, he had to urinate.
Which he did.
While he was gone, the fax that they had been waiting for finally arrived over the encrypted communications system. The first thing he saw as he walked out zipping his fly was the new data printing out. Moran had taken the high post beside the machine, watching the data possessively.
“What do we have, Kenny?” the president asked.
“I’m sorry, sir, but it looks down another quarter point.”
“Me? Me, personally?”
“Yes, sir. But it’s just a quarter point.”
“But it’s the trend. That’s what counts. That’s what you guys are always telling me. Isn’t that what you always tell me? Watch the trend?”
“Yes, sir. I’m just the messenger.”
“You’re more than that. You’re the magician that reads the entrails.”
“Huh?”
The president threw himself down in his chair. “Out. Everybody out. I have to figure this out.” His aides knew he didn’t mean it. They were at eighteen thousand feet.
A few minutes later he retired to the bedroom to change into a fresh shirt and suit for the fund-raiser. Transferring the contents of his pockets, he came across the memo. Partly because he didn’t want to go back out and face more news that was neither good nor bad, just dreary, he unfolded it and read it again.
Maybe because it was a little more familiar, it didn’t seem quite so insane this time.
And the dead Lee Atwater promised to do what no living person seemed able to do—he offered a way to slice through all the niggling bullshit, all the tedious nit-picking that was tearing him down in the polls in inexorable half- and quarter-point increments; he offered a way to change it all in one grand stroke.
The memo made reference to a specific person as the key agent to implement the plan. If there had been a conference about the matter, it might have been decided that “someone of that sort” was the point, not one individual and that individual only. It was a man that Atwater knew but that Bush had never met. Yet. Bush was scheduled to meet him, coincidentally, at the fund-raiser, in about—the president looked at his watch as he felt the 747 begin its descent—twenty, twenty-five minutes.
It is also possible to suppose that none of that really mattered. That the power was in the idea. And it was bound to make itself manifest no matter if the physical piece of paper it had been written on was shredded or lost or forgotten. The paper and the print were nothing—the power was in the idea.
17 It is all too easy to make fun of presidents, particularly since they have come to be judged by the standards by which we judge fictional characters who appear on our TV screens. It’s ridiculous and it’s unfair. TV characters appear in a show that lasts twenty-two minutes, once a week, twenty-six or thirty-nine times a year. The TV character gets retakes and his mistakes become outtakes. Jerry Ford bumps his head and he is defined as a bumbler for the rest of his life. Richard Nixon tries, and fails, to pry the cap off the aspirin bottle with his teeth one night and it becomes a character-revealing trait, implying an unimaginable depth of dysfunction. Jimmy Carter has a run-in with a rabbit and is forever after labeled boob and wimp.
Then there’s the sex business. For example, there are persistent rumors that Bush has girlfriends. Remember that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” look at Barbara, and there are three possibilities: George is a normal male attracted to younger women and he cheats; George chooses to have sex exclusively with a woman who looks like a Hallmark greeting card grandmother; George is a eunuch. Think about it—which George would you want running the country?
The only guy who could handle being “on-camera” every public minute and come out of it looking good was the guy who spent his life “on-camera,” Ronald Reagan.
If the experiment with Bill Clinton is no more satisfactory than those with Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Bush, then perhaps Reagan will turn out to be the harbinger of things to come and the practice of having someone “act” as president will be institutionalized.
18 It is common practice to employ campaign people in government posts. I have no specific knowledge that there was a pollster employed on a DOA line, and Kenny Moran is a fictitious name.