Chapter Six

THE LONELY SENTRY

He likes to be left alone.

—Bob Haldeman, speaking of President Nixon

SOME NIGHTS, LONG after my wife and daughters had gone to bed, I’d step outside our cabin into the cool, pine-crisp darkness and just let it all surround me. It’s unbelievably quiet at Camp David. The airspace is restricted, so there’s not even the sound of an occasional airplane passing overhead. In the summer there are crickets and owls. Sometimes I could hear the squirrels scampering through the leaves on the ground or the wind rustling in the trees. But mostly it was the silence that struck me, so dense and thick it was like awe itself. The history and immensity wrap around you and muffle everything else.

These times of loneliness happened often at the camp and were usually known only to me and Michele. As I slowly walked the dimly lit asphalt roads and golf-cart paths, the calm and serene canvas of the still and surreal setting would be painted with questions like What am I doing here? and How did I do today?

Alone with nature in such a beautiful part of camp year-round, covered by a canopy of leafy boughs in the summer and ice-encrusted, dormant branches in the winter, I found the loneliness penetrating. I heard only my footsteps and saw only the moonlight; there was no light from neighbors’ houses because we didn’t have any neighbors. At these times, my thoughts tracked back to the events of the day, the ups and downs of a recent or current visit, the constant effort to make life more normal and happy for my family. Yards away from the people who loved me most, I could still feel a sense of loneliness that comes from command.

I suspect that most commanding officers, executives who have led their organizations, and anyone who has been responsible for a mission and people have had times of loneliness. The reality of “It’s lonely at the top” hits you, and it’s not a bad thing, although there’s a temptation to fall into dark, introspective periods of self-doubt, self-criticism, and self-evaluation—and these can consume your psyche. I tried to resist these and focus on what I could do to make things better the next day or week. But I couldn’t resist reflecting on the loneliness that our primary guest, the president, experienced as a constant of his job.

I think what many people don’t realize, and maybe don’t care to realize, is that the president is a person like you and me, as far as psychological and emotional makeup go. This president, this normal person, has likes and dislikes, favorite foods and games, might enjoy napping on the sofa or throwing a ball in the yard just like anyone. For the president, there aren’t many places to do that other than at Camp David. And our job is to make sure that the chief executive gets those moments whenever needed.

If I sometimes felt like a lonely sentry at Camp David, I knew that the president, too, was a lonely sentry, except his oversight spanned the nation and even the world. My mind often travels back to images of the solitary figure of FDR sitting on his screened patio at Shangri-La working on his stamp collection, alone with his thoughts—and what thoughts they were! Grace Tully recalled the drive up to Shangri-La with FDR on the day of the invasion of North Africa, one of the critical turning points of the war. She did not know it was happening, but she observed that the president was preoccupied. Throughout the day, others noticed that the president seemed to be on edge, as if he was waiting for something. “Finally, a call came from Washington—from the War Department,” Tully remembered. “The Boss’ hand shook as he took the telephone from me. He listened intently, said nothing as he heard the full message, then burst out: ‘Thank God. Thank God. That sounds grand.’” The Allies had landed in North Africa. “We are striking back,” he told those assembled in his cabin.

Away from the intense, noisy swirl of the Oval Office, reflection is possible. Eisenhower felt the unrelenting buzz of activity was a distraction. “When does a man get a chance to think around here?” he complained. When Harry Truman called the White House “the great white jail,” he might also have been referring to the clamor.

Regardless of the personality of a president, a sense of loneliness comes with the job. It stems from the weight of responsibility for decisions only he or she can make, the need to keep at a remove from others in order to properly weigh advice and requests. When I was at Camp David, I was often struck by the isolation of the president, even when he was with his wife and children and friends; he always seemed to be standing apart. When I spoke to the other commanders, they told me how certain presidents visibly brought the burdens of the office to camp to contemplate them on their own.

It is interesting that President Kennedy’s first visit to Camp David came at one of the loneliest moments of his presidency—the time when his heart was most heavy. He wasn’t there to relax. Soon after the catastrophic Bay of Pigs invasion, which was less than three months into his term, Kennedy was at a loss. He admitted that the invasion had been a mistake, and he even worried it could end his presidency. So he called Eisenhower and asked him to come to Camp David for a private conference. Eisenhower agreed. When Eisenhower’s helicopter landed, President Kennedy was there to meet him. They walked solemnly along the paths, Eisenhower pointing out various features of the camp that Kennedy was unfamiliar with. But mostly they sat together in Aspen and talked about Cuba. Eisenhower offered some sharp criticism in a gentle manner as well as some solid advice. Kennedy, who hadn’t thought much of his predecessor before that day, listened intently. Looking back, this seemed to be a moment when a full awareness of the weight of the presidency settled on Kennedy’s shoulders. It was also a bonding, a point when Kennedy realized that only presidents knew the full extent of how hard the job was. After that, he often sought Eisenhower’s counsel. As Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy revealed in their wonderful book The Presidents Club, in the presence of those few who are truly peers, the president might find that his solitary load feels a little less heavy.

For Johnson, who preferred his Texas ranch for respite, Camp David was mostly a working site. He filled it with advisers debating the most troubling issues of his administration, including the one that would be his downfall—the Vietnam War. Arguably, one of the most critical meetings of his presidency took place at Camp David in July 1965. On the table was the urgent question of whether to continue the war. At this meeting Clark Clifford, who had been a key adviser to both Truman and Kennedy before Johnson, placed his seasoned hand on the table and warned Johnson that an escalation of the war would surely lead to a “quagmire.… It will ruin us.”

Arguing with equal force for escalation was Robert McNamara, who said withdrawal would make America look weak and that the war could be won with the nation’s superior military might.

The discussions and debates continued into the next day. At last, Johnson retreated for some time alone and walked around the grounds, his heavy shoulders bent. And when he finally made his decision, he sided with McNamara. The war would be escalated (and indeed, it did result in a quagmire). The nation watched as Johnson seemed to sag, his long face and haunted eyes evidence of his sleepless nights.

Lady Bird often woke in the night to find him sitting up in bed, his eyes wide open. She was grateful for the small relief Camp David offered. “What a glorious night of sleep!” she wrote in her diary during one visit. “I treasure it for Lyndon as I would a four-carat diamond on my finger.”

In April 1968, after he had announced that he would not seek reelection, Johnson gathered his key military and diplomatic advisers at Camp David to try once again to hammer out a formula for peace talks. In The Vantage Point, published after he left office, Johnson described the way Camp David could work on his mood:

On the evening of April 8, I flew by helicopter to Camp David. It was a relief to get away from the noise and carbon monoxide of downtown Washington. At the Aspen Lodge I changed into more comfortable clothes and sat in the living room talking with Walt Rostow [special assistant for national security affairs] about the problems we would be discussing the next day. Finally, I dozed off in my chair until dinnertime. The next morning, I drove to the helicopter pad to greet my visitors from Washington.… We went to the lodge and over breakfast, talked about Vietnam and discussed the latest exchanges with Hanoi. We later moved outside to enjoy the sunshine and continue our discussion.

In an obituary for Richard Nixon, Tom Wicker wrote in the New York Times of his “incurable loneliness.” For him, it wasn’t caused solely by the burdens of the office; it was a central aspect of his character. That loneliness was on display at Camp David even when he was accompanied by aides. In Breaking Cover, the White House military aide Bill Gulley wrote about how Nixon kept his closest advisers at arm’s length. “When Nixon went to Camp David… he would choose to eat alone. He never asked Haldeman or the others to join him for dinner; they would eat their meals separately. None of the camaraderie existed among them that you might have expected. Nixon told me one time that he didn’t believe in socializing with his staff, and he meant it.”

During his first year in office, Nixon spent many days at Camp David, and when the press asked what the president was doing, Bob Haldeman told them bluntly, “The man knows the value of contrasts, and he’s entitled to be wherever he chooses. Besides, he likes to be left alone, and getting out of Washington is the only way he can be alone, really alone.”

Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman governed Nixon’s visits like “Doberman Pinchers [sic],” wrote George Baker. John Dettbarn, who was commander for nearly four years during Nixon’s presidency, concurred. “Haldeman was a tough guy who seemed all-powerful and full of disdain for everybody not in the inner circle,” he said, although he found Ehrlichman to be somewhat nicer. His impression was that they pulled the strings for the president who was in the shadows.

In President Nixon: Alone in the White House, Richard Reeves described this characteristic in evidence at Camp David: “In the mountains, Nixon was forever plotting, planning revolutions great and small, sometimes to build a better world, more often just coups against his own staff and cabinet. He saw himself as a man of ideas, and of surprise moves, his real work done alone with his yellow pads or with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, his agents of control and organization whom he saw as his two arms.”

One thing Nixon did enjoy was ruminating about his fellow politicians. Kenneth T. Walsh, the chief White House correspondent at U.S. News and World Report, wrote of Nixon’s political musings at Camp David, noting that Nixon once opined of the governor of California, “Reagan is not one that wears well.” For Walsh, this was an example of Nixon’s fundamental blindness to a basic reality: Reagan was likable; Nixon was not. He might have had more depth on the issues than Reagan, but he didn’t see the distinctions between knowledge and personality that Americans grasped intuitively—and that were often reflected at the polls.

The only person who could break through Nixon’s isolation was his secretary Rose Mary Woods, a frequent guest at Camp David who occasionally even dined with the president. Once, Nixon summoned Woods during the night to take dictation using a tape recorder. The next morning, in another one of those eerie omens that occur at Camp David, she went to transcribe the tapes and found they were blank; the recorder seemed to be faulty. The device was immediately replaced, although technicians couldn’t find anything wrong with it. “Someone’s going to have to tell the president,” said Woods. “And it’s not going to be me.”

By the time Watergate took hold and consumed the presidency, Camp David had the aura of a presidential exile. Nixon often retreated there alone or surrounded by close family members, brooding about the assaults delivered daily in the press. In April 1973, more than a year before the end, he dealt the fatal blow to Haldeman and Ehrlichman not in the White House, but at Camp David. There was almost a Shakespearean quality to the firings. First Nixon summoned Haldeman to Aspen. The president shook his hand, which, according to Haldeman, he had never done before, and asked him to step outside and look at the fresh tulips blooming. Nixon described how, as he’d said his prayers the previous evening, he’d hoped he wouldn’t wake up. Yet he had—and now he faced the terrible duty of asking for Haldeman’s resignation. He repeated the process with Ehrlichman, again relating his prayerful wish of the previous night, and then he started to cry. Later, as Haldeman and Ehrlichman boarded a helicopter at Camp David for the last time, Nixon saw them off. It felt like the end, but the end would drag on for the next year.

During the Watergate hearings, the crew at Camp David saw the pain of the First Family. “Mrs. Nixon, Julie, Tricia—they were in tears,” said Dettbarn. “It was hard for us because we knew them.”

On August 8, 1974, before the resignation was official, Gulley was told to pack up some items from Aspen that Nixon wanted, including a dozen Camp David highball glasses.

In spite of Jimmy Carter’s success with the Camp David Accords, his time at Camp David in the last years of his presidency was defined by two words: malaise and hostages. In July 1979 he retired to Camp David alone for weeks, filled with a pessimistic spirit about the American way. His goal was to craft an important speech that would inspire the nation. Instead, the result of all this deep reflection was the “malaise” speech, delivered on July 15. Carter sounded like a disappointed parent as he chastised the nation for its shortcomings and told its citizens they needed to do better. This perhaps more than anything else set up a contrast with Ronald Reagan that the governor of California would exploit in the coming election. The Iran hostage crisis, which began on November 4, 1979, when fifty-two Americans were taken hostage at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, underscored Carter’s weakness—and his isolation. Instead of going out on the trail to appeal personally to the American people, he remained sequestered and grim while Reagan’s sunny personality captivated the country.

Presidents, as I’ve said, are human beings, and as anyone would be, they are tormented by the fear that they have let down the nation and the people they love. George Bush 41 agonized at Camp David over the decision to launch the Gulf War after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Once he’d decided, he was resolute, but haunted. It was a more sober Christmas at Camp David that year, and on New Year’s Eve he sat alone and typed a letter to his children:

Dear George, Jeb, Neil, Marvin, Doro,

First, I can’t begin to tell you how great it was to have you here at Camp David. I loved the games (the Marines are still smarting over their 1 and 2 record). I loved Christmas Day, marred only by the absence of Sam and Ellie. I loved the movies—some of ’em—I loved the laughs. Most of all, I loved seeing you together. We are a family blessed; and this Christmas simply reinforced this. I hope I didn’t seem moody. I tried not to.

When I came into this job I vowed that I would never [w]ring my hands and talk about “the loneliest job in the world” or [w]ring my hands about the “pressures or the trials.” Having said that, I have been concerned about what lies ahead.… When the question is asked, “How many lives are you willing to sacrifice”—it tears at my heart. The answer, of course, is none—none at all.

Surrounded by a family who loved him, President Bush was still, at that moment, the loneliest man in the world.

IT’S AT TIMES of great national crisis that the citizens of this nation feel as if we are really in it together. The barriers dissolve as we grapple with our shared emotions and fears as Americans.

Such a time was Kennedy’s assassination. Hank Howe, now sixty-six, is still unable to talk about that period without choking up. It was a formative experience for him, one shared by most Americans, but especially intense for him because these were people he felt close to. “I remember we were sitting in class when President Kennedy got shot,” he said. “They came in and told us and we were all stunned. We couldn’t grasp it.”

At camp, Hank’s father, CO Howe, was just returning from lunch at Cedar when he got a call to turn on the television. As he watched in horror, he fielded a couple of calls from the White House warning him that it could be a conspiracy, and there might be additional incidents. So he and his crew did everything they could to make sure the camp was secure. And then they did what every other American was doing: they sat and waited. When the announcement finally came that the president had died, Howe went down to the barracks and assembled the troops. They lowered the flag to half-mast and said a prayer. Everyone was heartbroken. They had come to enjoy being with the president, who was always optimistic, friendly, and full of humor and energy. And they felt protective and loving toward Jackie and the kids. Now, in an instant, it was all over.

“My parents were very religious,” Hank said, “and the afternoon of the day Kennedy was shot I went out in the woods and wandered around crying. When I came back, still crying, I said to my mom, ‘Why… why… why?’ She told me, ‘Hank, it’s because God gave man free will. He can’t control everything, but He’ll be there every day to deal with what happens, and He’ll help us all go on.’”

Jackie and the children never returned to Camp David. Their possessions were packed up and sent to Washington. Howe had the crew remove all the pictures Kennedy had chosen, and, not knowing what the new president, a westerner, would like, he replaced them with Russells and Remingtons. Hank didn’t see Jackie and the children again, but his recollections are as fresh as if it were yesterday. Lady Bird Johnson indicated that she always felt as if Jackie’s shadow loomed over her. She was at Camp David in 1968 when she learned Jackie had married Aristotle Onassis. “I feel strangely free,” she wrote in her diary. “No shadow walks beside me down the halls of the White House or here at Camp David… I wonder what it would have been like if we had entered this life unaccompanied by that shadow.”

September 11, 2001, was another tragic and momentous occasion for every American. At Camp David, CO Mike O’Connor had just completed his first presidential visit and was looking forward to an easy week. The morning of September 11, O’Connor received a call from his wife, Elizabeth, at the front gate. “Julia is refusing to go to school,” she said. O’Connor was annoyed; his wife argued with Julia, to no avail, and finally gave up. Julia was allowed to stay home that day, and no one understood why she was so adamant about not going to school.

Soon after, O’Connor’s personnel chief walked into his office. “Turn on the TV right now,” he said. They stood and watched reports of a plane flying into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Like many other people, they assumed it was a small plane, and as Navy pilots themselves, they found it quite bizarre. How could a plane inadvertently hit a building on such a beautiful day? There was a lot of confusion in the reports. But then they heard that a second plane had flown into the South Tower.

At that moment, their pagers erupted. The next report was that another plane had just hit the Pentagon. Someone said there were rumors of a fourth plane in Pennsylvania, and it might be headed their way. There were clear blue skies over Camp David, and the trees made it nearly impossible for anyone to find the camp from the air. But no one was in the mood to take chances. O’Connor ordered the emergency fire trucks to head to the north end of the camp, and he went to the south end. Later they would hear of United Airlines Flight 93 crashing near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, 117 miles northwest of the camp. No one would ever know for sure where it was headed.

Soon O’Connor received word that Vice President Cheney would be arriving. (Only recently has it been revealed that Camp David was Cheney’s secure location.) He and his team went to meet the helicopter, and moments before it landed, a four-point buck walked across the landing zone, giving everyone a chill.

Cheney landed, and a photo was snapped of O’Connor greeting him. Later, the Washington Post would publish the photo, captioning it “An unknown sailor greeting Vice President Cheney.” O’Connor didn’t mind being called an unknown Sailor. After all, his job was to stay in the background.

When O’Connor was coordinating Cheney’s visit with the White House, he asked which cabin Cheney should be put in. He was told Aspen.

O’Connor was confused. “Aspen is the president’s cabin,” he said.

“The president said to put him in Aspen.”

So he did. When the Bushes arrived on September 15, the president walked into Aspen and barked at O’Connor, “Who’s been sleeping in my bed?”

O’Connor explained that he had been following the president’s orders to locate Cheney there. Turns out the president had not ordered any such thing. O’Connor realized he’d been misled by Cheney’s people, and from then on, whenever he heard the words “The president said,” he double-and triple-checked. I learned the same lesson with both presidents I served. Sometimes the people around the president—I call them the handlers—have their own agendas. I had to learn how to ignore, work around, or filter some of the things they instructed me to do.

Bush’s arrival the Friday after 9/11, following a tour of the World Trade Center site on Thursday, signaled an intense period. His first remark after he landed was to O’Connor; he took him to task for allowing the bright pathway lighting. He thought they made the camp a target. “If you don’t get those lights off by morning, you’ll be running laps around the camp,” he said. Turning off the lights was easier said than done. O’Connor eventually had to send the crew out with wire cutters to shut them off.

The president was accompanied by Laura as well as a large team of advisers, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, attorney general John Ashcroft, FBI director Robert Mueller, many generals, and “more Secret Service than you could shake a stick at.” They arrived that day and on Saturday by road and air. They sequestered themselves for meetings. “George was convening a council of war,” Laura Bush wrote in her memoir.

Saturday evening before dinner at Laurel, John Ashcroft sat at the piano playing hymns as the group gathered round and sang. He then accompanied Condi Rice as she sang “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” Rice later wrote about the powerful moment. “The comforting song proclaims God’s eye is on the sparrow ‘and I know He watches me,’” she wrote. “It was a deep, mournful moment. At dinner, the President asked me to say the prayer. ‘We have seen the face of evil, but we are not afraid,’ I prayed. ‘For you, O Lord, are faithful to us.’”

The high point of a painful and somber weekend was the Sunday service. Navy chaplain Bob Williams brought the president and the congregation to tears with his words, which included this note of enduring hope: “I believe I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”

When it came time for the passing of the peace, Elizabeth O’Connor walked over to President Bush and they embraced and kissed. Everyone was filled with such emotion that the normal distances between presidential family and crew evaporated. In his book Decision Points, Bush wrote of how the “late summer light streamed through the serene woods and into the chapel” during the service. He called Williams’s sermon “touching and comforting. He asked the questions so many of us had struggled with: ‘Why?… How could this happen, God?’

“Bob said the answer was beyond our power to know,” but he counseled, in a quote from Saint Ignatius of Loyola, “Pray as if it all depends upon God, for it does. But work as if it all depends upon us, for it does.” President Bush later used some of the chaplain’s remarks at his press conference.

“It was a time when people were hurting,” Chaplain Williams said. “Across the country they were standing in line at churches, caught up in a need for community and prayer. Whatever practice of faith they walked in with, they found what they were looking for that weekend.”

My family and I were at my new duty station in Hawaii on 9/11, and the girls were quite upset, especially Ryanne, who peppered us with questions. She was very worried about the O’Connors’ daughter Julia, and she was also concerned for the president, with whom she’d developed a sweet relationship. She wanted to know if her “buddy” was okay. She didn’t really understand that the attacks hadn’t been at Camp David. On September 13 Ryanne wrote President Bush a letter:

Dear President Bush,

I am so glad you are safe. I was so worried about you, Mrs. Bush, Spottie and Barney. Mommy let me call my friends at Camp David so I would know they were safe. I wanted to call you but she said you were very busy trying to find the bad guys and are working to keep us safe. I was so happy when I saw you talking on our neighbor’s TV (our things aren’t here yet). That’s when I knew you were okay! Are Barney and Spottie scared? Mom says that Mrs. Bush and Mr. Dale are giving them extra huggs [sic]. I’m glad you are going to camp a lot because our Marines will keep you safe.

Hawaii is fun. I like my school. I am taking surfing lessons and hula lessons. I have fun snorkeling and hiking. Our house is in a neighborhood with lots of kids. You were our only neighbors at camp. I wish you were still coming to Hawaii. I miss singing for you on Sundays!

Love

Your friend,

Ryanne Giorgione

On November 2, Bush wrote a response by hand:

Dear Ryanne,

Thank you for your letter. I am glad to learn you are doing well. Hawaii sounds like a great place.

I miss seeing you at Camp and at Church. You always made me smile. And these days I need to smile. Give your Mom and Dad my best. Say hello to sister.

Your pal,

George Bush

The buildup to the war was a difficult time for the camp commander. Most of the Navy guys at camp were pretty senior and already had several deployments under their belts, but the young Marines and Sailors longed to be at the front. They wanted to go in the worst way and were totally unafraid of what might happen to them at war. Elizabeth O’Connor had gotten close with some of them, and she’d come home shaking her head. “They want to go. They say, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be okay.’” O’Connor tried to deal with their frustration by instituting high-speed training, bringing Navy SEALs and Secret Service on-site to work with them. It was in part to distract them from their desire to join the fight. But the primary goal was to keep them alert and motivated—to remind them that their very unique mission was important too.

For a president, crisis can sweep in without warning, as it did on September 11, 2001, and again on February 1, 2003, a lovely day at Camp David. O’Connor was getting ready to go for a run with President Bush and his chief of staff, Andy Card. They were standing around chatting when a military aide tapped Card on the shoulder and asked if he could speak to him for a moment. Card stepped aside, listened, and then came over to Bush. “Bad news,” he said. “The space shuttle Columbia just exploded over Texas.”

Suddenly the laughter stopped, and they stood for a moment, shell-shocked. Bush looked tortured, in pain, and everyone thought the run would be off. But then he said grimly, “Let’s get this run going.”

Reflecting on the moment, O’Connor said, “He needed to get his thoughts straight—that was now the purpose of the run.” Bush let the inspiring setting speak to him, and when he came back, he had found the words to address the nation.

“In the skies today we saw destruction and tragedy,” the president said somberly. “Yet farther than we can see, there is comfort and hope.… The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth; yet we can pray that all are safely home.”

Watching at Camp David, O’Connor and the crew were once again moved to tears.