Have been detailed to cope with our First Brother problem. Am not sanguine.
—JOURNAL, OCT. 5, 1989
The first time I saw Jessica Heath was at Cinema 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 in Boise. I don’t see many movies (except ones with Alec Guinness in them), but Joan enjoys them, so once a month we used to go on a Saturday night. I confess that I found the violence and sex in Midnight Water off-putting, but I must admit that the future Mrs. Tucker was, as they say, a bit of all right.
There were those who counseled the Governor not to get involved with an actress, but not me. From the first moment I met her, I knew this was the woman for him: young, vibrant, beautiful, and quite independent-minded. And a temper, too. All for the best, a very modern woman. The Governor certainly would never be bored.
We became friends. She knew she could always count on me, and she could. Herbert Wadlough is nothing if not reliable. On those occasions when she and the Governor were not speaking, she would sometimes call me, and I would go over to the residence and listen. I enjoyed our sessions very much. It does help to get things out.
Though excited at the prospect of moving to Washington, she was also nervous. “Not to worry,” I told her. “I’ll be there.”
It should come as no surprise to those who have seen her films, especially Minnesota Hots, that the First Lady was a deeply sensuous woman. That is perhaps a little unusual in First Ladies, and the White House residence staff was slightly scandalized.
Several weeks into the administration Mrs. O’Dwyer, the rather formal, sixty-year-old Irish woman who headed the household staff, came to see me. She was in a state of agitation, kneading her hands together and going on at length about how “irregular” it all was and how the rest of the staff were “beside themselves.” She couldn’t quite bring herself to say exactly what it was that was causing all the trouble, although she didn’t have to. I could guess.
I explained that the President and his wife were still in the first blush of love and that we all ought to be grateful to be working for such a happy couple. The staff, I said, should treat this as a source of contentment, not consternation.
“But at twelve o’clock noon, Mr. Wadlough?” she said. “In the living room—on the floor?”
Surprised though I was to hear this, I cleared my throat and suggested that in the future she and the rest of the staff err on the side of discretion and knock before entering the family quarters. At this she drew herself up stiffly and said if it was discretion that was called for, it certainly wasn’t on the part of her staff.
During the first summer of the administration, an unusually warm one, Bill Dale, the Secret Service shift leader, came into my office one day. Bill was one of the best men on the detail, and one of the President’s favorites. He clearly felt awkward as he sat in my office telling me “an unusual security problem” had arisen. I told him we were all family here and not to be embarrassed.
He told me the President and First Lady were leaving the family quarters in the small hours of the night, dressed in nightgowns, and splashing about in the new swimming pool on the South Lawn. I gathered from Bill’s pained recitation that they were doing more than just splashing about.
Of course, what married people do is their affair. The problem was that the President was telling the agents who trailed them to the pool to “take the rest of the night off.” But Secret Service likes—indeed, requires—Presidents to be in their sight at all times. Bill and his men would retreat to the rhododendron bushes and radio to the sniper teams on the roof. The President espied them and became angry. Last night, said Bill, he had climbed out of the pool, wearing only a scowl, walked over to the nearest bush, dripping wet, and ordered him and the others back to the house.
No matter what your instructions are, it is difficult to disobey a direct order from the President of the United States. Poor Bill and his men withdrew a few more yards and kept a nerve-racked vigil until the President and the First Lady emerged and walked like two moonstruck teenagers, hand in hand, back across the lawn into the White House.
As intimate as I was with the First Family, I could hardly tell the President what he could and could not do with his wife.
The next day I had the White House mess order several hundred pounds of ice, and while the President and his wife entertained their guests at dinner, I personally supervised the dumping of it into the pool. At the same time I instructed the engineering staff to bring the temperature in their bedroom to sixty-five degrees. If my methods sound devious, it should be borne in mind that my only concern was the President and First Lady’s safety.
Operation Deep Freeze, as I dubbed it, was not a success. The President opened all the bedroom windows and ordered the pool heated. My consternation was great.
Finally I resorted to what will sound like a drastic solution. I proposed to Major Arnold that we put a mild sedative in the two ounces of rum the President habitually took before retiring. Arnold was alarmed by the idea. An hour later the Secretary of Defense was on the line asking me what on earth I was thinking of. The nation could ill afford a logy commander-in-chief in the event of nuclear attack.
In the end a special detail of Secret Service agents disguised as rhododendron bushes was posted every summer night by the pool as a means of establishing a “sterile perimeter” around the President. It was not a popular detail among the agents, but our peace of mind was worth the extra effort.
The President realized that there would be sacrifices and certain privations. Here was a man who liked to go hiking by himself in the high country of Idaho. Now when he did that, 435 people (including communications personnel) went along. But some things he especially resented—such as when the press was critical of his wife’s statements.
Mrs. Tucker was a marvelously candid lady, not given to artifice. She was almost incapable of giving a dull interview, and this led to problems, as when she told the Ladies’ Home Journal that she thought Washington “dull.” My heavens, what an uproar! This was followed soon by her declaration in Time that she thought that, as a species, whales were “overrated.”
For all her theatrical flair, she had a practical streak. She confided to me that she often remembered the hullabaloo poor Mrs. Reagan got into when she ordered $209,000 worth of new china—even though it had been paid for privately. Thus when Mrs. O’Dwyer informed her that the White House bed linen was worn thin and full of little holes, she did nothing about it. Several times the President complained to me that he would wake up mornings “in ribbons.” Finally he asked me to purchase an entire new set of linen at his own expense. (Cost: $3,200.) During their time at the White House he was forced to purchase quite a few household items out of his own pocket, including the new drapes in the Queen’s bedroom.
The President had nicknamed their four-and-a-half-year-old boy, Tom, Jr., “Firecracker.” Mrs. Tucker did not like the name and waged a lonely, futile campaign to get the staff to use his Christian name. He was a bright little boy and a natural ham who took easily to the cameras. The night of the final ballot of the New York convention, he sat on the floor of the hotel suite writing on a legal pad with his crayons. When his mother asked him what he was writing, he told her it was the speech he was planning to give that night. His father was delighted; his mother, appalled at this precocious political inclination. (She envisioned for him a career in the arts.) When I asked Firecracker to show it to me, he agreed, but only if I promised not to “fuck it up.” Obviously, he had been spending too much time with Feeley, and I made a note to speak with Feeley about it. It was a drawing of him at a podium. I told him it needed no editing by me. He was genuinely disappointed when it dawned on him that the cause of all the fuss was his father.
But he was certainly a political asset in his own right, and not just photogenically. Contrary to the press reports, it was entirely his own idea to write Soviet Premier Kropatkin to suggest a summit meeting between the two of them. The fact was, he only told one person he was writing the letter, because, as he subsequently explained to his father, he was worried about leaks. The first we learned of it was a frantic 2:00 a.m. phone call from our embassy in Moscow saying Pravda had the full text of the letter in the morning’s edition, with accompanying text suggesting the son of the President of the United States was more eager to sign an arms accord than his father.
During the storm that followed, the President tried to get from him the name of the person to whom Firecracker had dictated the letter. (I suspected Feeley.) But even under the threat of a paddling, Firecracker stood firm and coolly told his father it was a matter of “national security” and on a “need-to-know” basis. The next day Senator Kennedy made his quaint suggestion that the President nominate his son to head the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
When he was not making administration policy, Firecracker was usually getting into trouble. At a state banquet for Prime Minister Thatcher he managed to transfer several raw Chincoteague oysters from a serving dish to Defense Minister Alistair Horne’s chair seat. (Horne, a rather formal Briton, was unamused.)
I believe a lot of it had to do with the fact that he was kept under such tight security. Being popular, he generated quite a number of kidnap threats, and as his mother’s worry about them increased, she tended to let him out of the house less and less. Toward the end he had a Secret Service detail of six.
It was hardly a natural way to grow up. Sometimes he would pop into my office and ask me to ask his mother to let him go to the movies or spend the night with his school friends. I got her to agree to the latter once, and what a logistical nightmare that turned out to be. The Phinneys—the parents of his schoolmate Tad—were very sporting about turning their house into an armed camp for the night.
Despite everything, Firecracker was fond of his Secret Service agents. His teacher was somewhat taken aback when for show-and-tell at school he brought in some empty cartridges and gave a talk comparing the Uzi submachine gun and the M-14. So was his mother. The Secret Service agents adored him, and all kidnap and other threats were investigated with a vengeance.
Firecracker reacted to the tight control on his whereabouts by trying to elude his protectors. This was impossible outside the White House grounds, and pretty difficult even inside, but he became adept at it. He once sneaked out of his room late at night (evidently a family trait). When the First Lady looked in on him and discovered he was missing, she panicked and sounded the alarm. The search involved fifteen Secret Service men, two German shepherds, several members of the household staff, the First Lady, and the President. For almost half an hour the White House reverberated with cries of “Firecracker!” He was finally located, nestled inside a ventilator shaft on the second floor with his hamster, Theodore.
The President’s parents had passed on, but his brother, Dan, was very much alive. The President loved his brother deeply, but Dan’s lifestyle left a lot to be desired. I always said that if Dan Tucker had finished college, he wouldn’t have turned out the way he did, wandering through life aimlessly, becoming involved with so many women, hot-air-ballooning one week, Buddhism the next, singing with a Bluegrass group the next. I know it all sounds like jolly good fun, but at thirty-five a man ought to have some sort of career. And for me his peregrinations ceased being amusing when he decided, in the midst of the general campaign, to buy a half-share in that Denver drug-paraphernalia business—“head shops,” they are called—named Opiate Of The Masses.
It was bad enough that he ever should have been involved in this kind of sordid business, but Dan’s partner, Mr. Ezekial Brown, who went by the name of “Pillbox,” had a record of drug-related arrests. Of course we did not find this out until everyone else did, the morning the Denver Post broke the story. I remember the moment well.
We were in the Spirit of Greatness, 37,000 feet over Tennessee, when the call came in. It was Roger Bond, our campaign press person in Washington, and he was beside himself. “Oh,” he kept saying as he read from the story, “this is awful, this is just awful.”
Feeley was no island of calm on that occasion either. He sputtered up and down the aisle, saying the man should be behind bars. He resigned several times that day.
We were grateful, naturally, for the precedent set by Billy Carter. I believe the American people are decent and forgiving when it comes to these things; there are a lot of younger brothers out there.