PRESIDENT BUSH HAS rarely been described as a racist or as anti-Semitic. But it would be fair to say, at the very least, that he is enthnocentric and by choice prefers a fairly narrow range of people. If one envisions diminishing concentric circles—like illustrations of the rings of hell from Dante’s Inferno—the outermost ring would be WASPs. Moving inward the rings would be: males, who wear suits and ties, have a lot of money, play golf, are in business, are from old money, are eastern establishment, Ivy Leaguers, jocks, Yalies, from prep schools, members of Skull and Bones,26second-generation Yalies.
He therefore looked forward to going to a fund-raiser in Orange County, that area south of Los Angeles County which is a bastion of folks who would be just like Bob Hope if he weren’t funny and had a straight nose. That is to say they loved the Republican Party almost as much as they loved golf, they lived for martinis, disapproved of sex but could appreciate a pretty girl, still danced to the music of Lawrence Welk, knew that we lost Vietnam because of the media and lost China because of traitors in the State Department. They knew better than to trust the Commies even in 1990, and it was obvious to them that Gorbachev’s reforms were a trick to lure us into disarmament. Disneyland is in Orange County.
A relationship between Bush and Hartman—one that ultimately required an incredible amount of faith and trust on the president’s part—was not likely to come about as a happy accident, and in fact, it did not. It was sought out and engineered by Hartman with avarice aforethought. Though what he expected from that relationship did not even remotely touch on what actually came of it. That was determined by the genius, or mad despair, of Lee Atwater.
To understand David Hartman it is necessary to reference Lew Wasserman of MCA, Inc.
Lew Wasserman is to agents what Henry Ford is to automobiles, not necessarily the best, but the first one to transform what was essentially a personal-service business, subject to all such an enterprise’s inherent limitations, into a major multibillion-dollar corporation.27
For Hartman to feel he had become the greatest agent in the history of the world, he would have to surpass Wasserman.
Like almost anyone who enjoys big-time success in business in America, Wasserman was a major player in politics. He cultivated relationships and gave generously to both sides. A discreet and secretive person, his influence was either far less or more than it appeared to be. In either case, it enjoyed legendary proportions and it bore fruit. While MCA did not win every battle that was decided by government, it won a lot of the big ones. Its business practices suggested antitrust violations. It enjoyed relationships with unions that were so favorable that it is difficult to believe that they were achieved without illegal forms of collusion. MCA was investigated frequently, but whether the bottom line was that they were basically honest or that they had as much influence as reputed, they were never convicted, and only occasionally submitted to a consent decree.
Hartman had kept a relatively low profile in politics. He had not yet needed heavyweight political clout. But it was time to take that next step, from mere agent to something that owned and controlled vast tangible assets. He was looking at certain possibilities. Some of them involved large investments from Japan. Others involved possible antitrust violations. It would be good to know that if he dialed a number in Washington his calls would be answered. Not that he would ever expect to have a president in his pocket. That would be presumptuous, excessive, and crude. All that anyone wanted, and if they knew what they were doing, all that anyone needed, was access.
Then, in 1988, with Reagan out and Wasserman a key figure in raising funds for Dukakis—for the loser—Hartman sensed a major vacuum. Although there were several very visible conservative celebrities, there was no big-time entertainment business power broker hooked in to the national Republican power structure. Hartman was not about to simply throw money at Bush or his party. If he did that, they would treat him the way a prostitute treats a John. Hartman wanted a relationship. He wanted the inner circle to know his name, to be thought of as the person to go to when Washington needed something from Hollywood.
Hartman had seen Lee Atwater as a person to bridge the two worlds, and in 1988 he arranged to meet the political consultant. When the criticism of Lee was at its height, David had called him and taken him out to lunch and praised his creativity. He listened to Lee’s ideas and told him that he was a genius of politics in the same way that Hitchcock had been a genius of suspense films and Elvis a genius of music: that all three had taken forms that were not even recognized as arts and personally raised them to such high levels of cultural significance that they could no longer be ignored. He knew that Atwater’s three favorite books were The Art of War, On War, and The Prince, so he told Lee that his tactics reminded him of Sun Tzu and that no one since Machiavelli had seen politics with less hypocrisy. After the election Hartman arranged some speaking engagements that gave Lee a lot of ego gratification and about $10,000, plus expenses, for each. Not bad for an hour or two of gab. The relationship was firmly established. Hartman had his White House entrée. But then came the brain tumor.
With the link through Lee lost, the most obvious line from L.A. to Bush would have been through Ronald Reagan. But even if Hartman had had good connections to the Reagan crowd, he wasn’t at all sure that the Reagan route was the best way to reach out to the new president. After all, Reagan had beaten Bush quite badly in the 1980 Republican primaries. Then as VP. Bush spent eight years eating Ronald Reagan’s shit. Hartman had once been a vice president at Ross-Mogul, at that time the third-largest talent agency in the business. The head of the agency, Allen Ross, recognized David’s talent. He helped Hartman to rise very fast and to make a lot of money. That didn’t mean that David would ever forgive Allen Ross for once having been his boss. Every star that RepCo stole away from Ross-Mogul brought Hartman deep personal pleasure and the day RepCo finally billed more than Ross-Mogul had been the happiest single day of David Hartman’s life.
So Hartman next reached out to Bush through Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger, a clever and ambitious man who had gone further on an astute combination of iron will, pig iron, and steroids28than anyone would ever have dreamed, had his own political ambitions and understood very clearly the importance of personal connections.
Arnold dropped David’s name at the White House a couple of times. He suggested Bush meet him, that Hartman might be the kind of key money fulcrum that Wasserman had been. At some point after Arnold spoke, but before the suggestion was acted on, the president read Lee Atwater’s plan. If Hartman, who seemed to be a key part of it, turned out to be one of those loud, pushy, offensive types, that would give the president the opportunity to drop the whole thing. And at least part of him wanted to forget he’d ever read the bizarre but compelling concept. So it was the president who chose the meeting ground. The contrast with the Orange County crowd, he hoped, would help him dislike the agent.
Hartman researched and studied people he wanted to deal with. He did not intend to underestimate the president. He was prepared to think the president was shrewd, manipulative, and vindictive, just as he was himself He had his best reader29prepare a synthesized synopsis of several Bush biographies. It hadn’t been difficult for him to figure out that he should dress like an eastern banker who had taken a major cut in pay to perform government service. And that he should sound like one. He’d made a list of what to talk about and what not to talk about. He would not, for example, talk about his son’s upcoming bar mitzvah and the incredibly lavish plans for it. Although he truly hated golf. he was prepared to talk about greens and bogeys and birdies. He would play down his practice of kendo and play up his jogging.
Air Force One landed at Orange County’s John Wayne Airport at 6:00 P.M. California time, 9:00 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. The limo was waiting along with the various police and Secret Service escorts. The route had been precleared. The president was whisked to the dinner within eighteen minutes. He got out, standing tall and smiling, looking athletic and energetic. He waved at the cameras, said, “Hello, California! Great to be here. I wish I could stay for a round of golf But if I can’t maybe Dan30can do it for me.” He gave a big thumbs up. Then he went inside.
There were five people for him to say hello to. Four of them were big contributors from previous campaigns. Two were associated with finance and banking, the other two represented defense industries and aerospace. The fifth was David Hartman.
Bush was pleasantly surprised to see that if this had been a police lineup, he wouldn’t have picked Hartman out of the group as either the agent or as the Jew. In fact, he looked rather like Brent Scowcroft: balding, serious, but capable of avuncular good humor, with lots of wrinkle lines in his forehead. He was wearing a simple gray suit, a plain white shirt, a muted tie, and, except for a simple gold wedding band and one of the less ostentatious Patek Philippe watches, no jewelry. The image was not shattered when he spoke. He sounded like one of Bush’s own kind. No slang, no jive, no Yiddish, none of those funny intonations.
Bush touched the memo tucked in his jacket pocket. He hadn’t found Hartman offensive enough to call it off But with the downside so enormous, he hadn’t yet decided to go forward.
So he plunged ahead with what he was there to do. Shake a lot of hands, grin and wink, and make his famous thumbs-up gesture. Everyone in the room had given a minimum of $5,000, most of them $10,000 or more. They were entitled to a little pressing of the flesh and they wanted to go home feeling good. He went through the speech—he eventually went ahead with the speech-writer’s version, it was so little different than what he himself wanted to say—with reasonable fervor.
Dinner was over at 8:00 P.M. California time, 11:00 P.M. EST. Air Force One was scheduled for lift-off from John Wayne at 9:00 P.M. California time, midnight on the president’s biological clock. He was scheduled to meet with the director of the CIA in the White House at 9:00 A.M. EST, with the un-Soviet ambassador at 9:15, then with the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee about the selection of nominees for federal judgeships. The only way to survive that sort of schedule was to fall out as soon as he lay down on the presidential bed aboard the 747, sleep all through the flight, no matter how turbulent, even through touchdown, and not wake until the steward came in at 8:00 A.M. EST on the ground back in Washington. The human body won’t behave that way on its own. Therefore, with his dessert, crème brûlée, the president dropped a Halcion, figuring it would kick in just about the time he got on the plane.
On the way out, as the president was making his final handshaking rounds, the chairman of the California Republican Party fund-raising committee told him that Hartman had just made a $100,000 contribution. Bush was impressed. Not just by the amount, but that Hartman had not waved the money in his face or given it to him directly. The impulse that had been working on him for half the day finally broke through.
He invited Hartman to ride with him back to Air Force One.
Hartman had twelve to eighteen minutes to make a friend. He’d done it far faster than that lots of times. The first thing he said was, “1 want to confess something, Mr. President. My conversion to the Republican Party is very recent.” This was an old story. Reagan, Heston, Sinatra, and lots of others were all ex-Democrats. Bush was not impressed. “Most of my life I regarded myself as a nonpartisan person whose true loyalty was to business, to the creativity of the economic impulse.” More bullshit. “Actually, I was on the fence right up until 1988.” Now the president listened. There were lots of so-called Reagan Democrats. No one, he suddenly realized, ever spoke of Bush Democrats. David Hartman had already endeared himself as the first one. “I wasn’t that impressed with Mr. Reagan. But you truly impressed me.” Music to the president’s ears. So many people spoke of Bush as if he were a pale imitation of his predecessor, when it was Reagan who had napped through most of his two terms, never reading or studying, just popping up to perform when the cameras rolled, returning to somnolence as soon as the power was switched off “I don’t want to embarrass you, but I will tell you why. It’s not the obvious thing, that you have, probably, the best résume of anyone who’s ever held your office. To me you’re the real thing because you were a war hero.” The president put on his aw-shucks face.
“To me,” Hartman went on, “the great presidents were Ike and Jack Kennedy. I had no use for Johnson, Carter, and Reagan. I didn’t think to analyze it until you came along. What was different about you, from Reagan, from Dukakis? I’ll tell you. George Herbert Walker Bush, Dwight David Eisenhower, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, they all saw real combat. Let’s face it, where was Ron Reagan when the world was at war? He was in Hollywood, with clean sheets and pretty girls, and his uniforms were fresh-pressed every day by the Santa Monica dry cleaners.
“You were out there. Youngest pilot in the Navy. You put your life on the line. You know what that means.”
“Those were great days,” the president said, and then asked, as Hartman had wanted him to, “Were you in the service?”
“Yes, sir,” Hartman said, making his move.
“Well, you’re a little young for the big one, when were you in? What branch of service?”
“I was a Marine, sir. In Korea.”
Bush was pleasantly surprised. “Well, some Navy men don’t think too much of the Army”—this was a good-humored, manly remark—”but by God, you can’t say anything against the United States Marines. Tell me about your service, Dave. And forget the sir and Mr. President bullshit. Call me George.”
“I have to tell you, sir. It’s hard to call the commander in chief George. I’m just too much of a Marine, still, to do that.”
“Well, you can relax, Dave. What’d you do in the service?”
Hartman saw how the table lay, which was exactly how he expected, so he went ahead and played his ace. “Tell you the truth, sir. I was a pilot. Fighter jock.”
“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” the president said. It had never occurred to him that a Jewish Hollywood agent would have been a Marine fighter pilot in Korea.
“How many missions you fly? How many kills?”
“I only flew five combat missions.”
“How come?” the president asked.
“I had to ditch in the ocean. I wasn’t shot down. I had a fuel-line malfunction, then the engine caught fire. I ejected. Good thing too. On my way down I got to see my plane explode. Thank God for those Air-Sea rescue boys. I got pulled out by a Navy chopper off of a carrier. You know, sir, better than I do, what it’s like to be sitting in a freezing ocean, wondering if it’s the first day of the rest of your life. Or the last.31Anyway, I hurt my back when I hit the water, and when they couldn’t fix it, they gave me my discharge.”
“So I guess you understand how important it is,” the president said, “to keep America strong?”
“The most important thing in the world,” Hartman said. “Not just for America, for all mankind.”
Again, it’s possible to ponder the role of coincidence: that Hartman had chosen a way to win the president’s confidence which spoke directly to the things the president wanted to discuss with him. But it’s more likely that all three of them—the third being Atwater, although he was dead—had simply tuned in to the same thinking about basic themes. Maybe the president would have gone ahead even if Hartman had spoken about banking standards or the need for celebrities to support family values or of his commitment to free trade.
“I have a project,” the president said. “You remember Lee Atwater?”
“Very well. I admired him.”
“He wrote a memo. He was a good friend,” Bush said. “The baddest good ol’ boy. I had a lot of fun with Lee. He thought well of you. Did you know he played blues guitar?”
“He was an excellent person.”
“This is a concept thing. He said, before he died, that you’re the person, what with today’s Hollywood. When a friend writes a deathbed memo, you have to do what you have to do. I have to swear you to secrecy.”
“You have my oath. As an American. As a Marine.”32
“The word of a United States Marine. You can’t ask for much more than that,” the president said. It may be that at this point the Halcion was kicking in. According to the president’s own schedule, it certainly should have been.33
The president sat silent, trying to figure out how to formulate what Atwater had proposed. Then he suddenly wondered if they were being recorded. Not by some foreign spy but by his own people. Look what had happened to Nixon. Speech was never safe. Although they had decided never to show the memo to anyone, he and Baker, somehow showing it seemed—better. Clearer, easier, and safer. He reached into his pocket.
“I want you to look at this,” the president said, and gave Hartman the memo. The limo turned past the gate and entered John Wayne. As it crossed the tarmac to Air Force One, Hartman read.
Hartman had admired Atwater’s destruction of Dukakis. Lee had happened to see that the America of ’88 would vote for a waving flag and against violent sexual, black males. He happened to be running a presidential campaign, so that’s the choice he offered the public. What else, Hartman thought, should he have done? Most people either lack the capacity for thought or they’re too lazy to employ it. They shroud themselves in the fog of conventional morality and substitute knee-jerk sentimentality for thought-out reactions. Lee had refused to be that sort of cripple. Good for him.
But this memo put Atwater in a whole different class. This was beyond intellectual rigor and unsentimental honesty—this required real audacity, this was true clarity. Atwater had proved a most worthy student of SunTzu and Clausewitz and Machiavelli. If he had been there, Hartman would have bowed in a formal gesture of respect, as they do in the East, to a teacher, someone to learn from and to emulate.
But Atwater was dead and gone. Hartman didn’t believe in ghosts, or at least not in ghosts who listen. His tribute to Atwater was that he was the first to read the memo who didn’t say, “Jesus fucking Christ. Atwater’s fucking in-fucking-sane.” He turned to the president. He thought of a hundred different things he could say. His actual favorite was: George, I don’t know if you’ve ever used an agent before. We get ten percent. Of everything. But it’s not what he said. He thought of Oliver North, sat up as straight as the limo seat allowed, his back in a fair imitation of military posture. “Sir,” he said, raising his right hand, touching his fingertips to his eyebrow in a salute, “you do me great honor. In giving me this opportunity to serve you and my country. Thank you, sir.”
26 Yale’s, and America’s, most famous publicly secret society. What Yalies are to the rest of us, members of Skull and Bones are to Yalies. Until 1992 it was an all-male group. Some of the practices include lying in a coffin, ritual masturbation (will this continue now that sexual integration has come? and if it does, will it change the psychic impact of the practice?), and written confessions. These written confessions are kept in logbooks which are, it is said, intact since the beginning of the practice, with one exception. Legend has it that the year which would have included George Bush’s entry is missing. Only Spy magazine, wouldn’t you know, has seen fit to print this information.
27 Wasserman’s biggest breakthrough is fascinating for a number of reasons. MCA—and Wasserman personally—was Ronald Reagan’s agent. They did very well for Reagan even when his career as a film star was quickly fading. In 1952, when Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild, he negotiated a deal that permitted MCA and only MCA to get a blanket waiver to both represent actors and produce shows. This gave MCA an incredible advantage over both rival talent agents and rival producers. It gave them power over the studios. For example, they forced Paramount Pictures to produce a Hitchcock film on a lot at Universal—by then owned by MCA—even though Paramount had its own studio space.
In the late sixties MCA helped arrange real-estate deals for Reagan that made him a millionaire and put him in a position to run for governor. A more detailed exposition can be found in Dan E. Moldea, Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob (Viking, 1986). Moldea paints Wasserman as an éminence grise who took care of Reagan and was, in turn, taken care of. Ronald Brownstein, in The Power and the Glitter: The Hollywood-Washington Connection (Pantheon, 1990), portrays Reagan and Wasserman as two individuals on separate tracks that sometimes ran congruently and sometimes ran at odds.
28 Like the other gossip and casual character assassinations in this book, we regard this as an unsubstantiated rumor, although Spy magazine treats it as established fact: “So let’s get this straight: A man who took huge amounts of steroids becomes head of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, but his main worry is that people will think he smokes cigars.” (Charlotte Fleming, 3/92)
29 Readers are very important lowly people in Hollywood. Anyone with any power or pull has scripts and books and treatments shoved at them all day long. No one has time to read them all. Yet everyone with power or pull is looking for a great property to produce. Hence they employ readers. Readers read and then write the equivalent of a high-school book report, a review that mostly summarizes but also rates. In the rare instance a reader says something is so hot the reader’s employer decides to run with it, he or she must then convince others—stars, directors, studio chiefs, name screenwriters—to jump onboard. None of them will have time to read the property, and they in turn will give it to their readers. Readers are among those thousands in Hollywood with the power to say no. It is also a position from which, legend has it, it is possible to rise.
30 Vice President Quayle. A jocular reference. Quayle was at that time involved in moderate scandal about the use of military jets to take him on golfing trips. A mild irony is that he took most of them with Samuel K. Skinner, later the White House chief of staff—who was then secretary of transportation. OK, it’s a very mild irony.
31 On September 2, 1944, George Bush’s plane was hit by antiaircraft fire while making a bombing run over Chichi Jima, about 150 miles north of the better-known Iwo Jima. Pilots made every effort to ditch at sea. Japanese POW camps were reputed to be terrible places. The one on Chichi Jima was run by a Major Matoba. After the war he was reported to have cut up prisoners and fed the pieces to other prisoners. With his plane on fire, Bush managed to get out over water, where he jumped. He landed in the ocean without major injury. He found his life raft—though without water or paddles. He was rescued several hours later by submarine.
32 According to U.S. Army records, Hartman, a draftee, served one year in the Army, not the Marines. He never rose above private. He did receive a medical discharge. However, his previous boss, Allen Ross, had been a Marine pilot in Korea. Ross spoke of it often, and had a collection of military aviation books and memorabilia in the office. The story Hartman tells here, while similar to the president’s, is virtually identical to Allen Ross’s.
33 The use of Halcion is controversial. Many, like the president’s doctor, consider it totally safe.
Benjamin J. Stein, identified as a lawyer, writer, actor, and ex-speechwriter for President Nixon, said this in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, 1/22/92: “. . . Halcion is the most terrifying drug I have ever used and its effects are incalculably more frightening when they are at work on the president. I have been taking prescription tranquilizers since 1966. I have used almost every kind imaginable . . . but Halcion . . . is in a class by itself for mind-altering side effects. It is not just a classic sedative which basically just slows things down. No, benzodiazepenes are described by Halcion’s maker, the Upjohn Company, as ‘anxiolytics,’ meaning they cut the anxiety in your brain.
“When Halcion hits you, it’s as if an angel of the Lord appears in your bedroom and tells you that nothing is important, that what you were worried about is happening on Mars and that Nirvana, Lethe, and the warm arms of mother are all waiting for you.”