State of the Union speech last night. In my view, both historic and an unqualified success, though early newspaper reactions disappointing in the extreme. George Will said President’s call to the nation “more of a parking ticket than a summons.” Have been given charge of the National Metrification Initiative. Awesome responsibility.
—JOURNAL, JAN. 28, 1990
There was an unmistakable air of excitement in the days following the President’s address to the nation. Once again there was a sense of purpose, an aura of new frontiers. I was confident the phrase he used for his legislative package, “The Great Deal,” would kindle the national imagination, and for a while there was talk of a new Camelot on the Potomac.
It was a giddy, busy time of state dinners, weekends at Camp David, and battleship decommissionings. (The President felt he might mollify the Navy, whose budget he had cut so drastically, if he made the decommissionings special occasions by his presence.) We huddled in the Oval late into the evenings. The President talked about his dream of revitalizing the Infrastructure. He spoke too of normalizing relations with Cuba. The air was rich with the pure ether of power, and I took care not to breathe too deeply. I buckled down to work on Metrification, devising a program that would convert American to the metric standard, no easy task. Joan was typically understanding about my late hours. What a good egg she was!
I wanted the President to be free for “creative thinking,” as I called it, so I tried to “run interference” for him by taking on myself some of the more nettlesome problems. Such as Vice President Douglas Reigeluth.
“Bingo,” as he was called by his friends, was a frisky fellow who had his eye fixed on one thing and only one thing: the top job. And, in my view, he wasn’t going to sit around twiddling his thumbs for eight years.
Whenever Secret Service advised us that there was heightened risk in an area the President planned to visit, Bingo would always pipe up cheerfully and say things like “We can’t let ourselves be ruled by fear.” One had to wonder. I was especially put off by the way he comported himself at cabinet meetings, speaking up whenever he pleased, even interrupting the President—the President!—to offer his views on this and that. It had been a marriage of convenience. He had been foisted on us at the convention, and now here he was carrying on as if his opinions mattered. If you ask me, Vice Presidents should be seen and only infrequently heard.
I also felt that Bamford Lleland was a bit too cozy with him. It was he who suggested Bingo be given charge of the President’s Task Force on the Infrastructure. I demurred heavily, convinced as I was that in his lust for influence Bingo would turn it into a personal power base. But I suppose he had to have something to do. To my horror, Lleland suggested he be given Metrification—and on the spurious grounds that it “didn’t matter anyway.” My Initiative. I sent him a stiffly worded memo telling him exactly what I thought of that. I could see that Bamford Lleland and I were not destined to be easy partners in history. The back-stabbing had already begun.
One day the President called me into the Oval and said, “Herb, I want to open this place up, get some fresh air in. It still feels musty from those Reagan years.” I did not at first understand the President’s meaning, but he often spoke elliptically.
“I don’t want to lose touch with the American people,” he said. “Don’t want to isolate myself.”
“Noble sentiment, sir,” I replied.
“If I ever start using ‘we’ instead of ‘I,’ promise me something.” I agreed, of course. “You’ll pull the plug.”
I promised I’d do the honorable thing, though of course in jest. Then he told me that no matter how busy or important his schedule got, he wanted to meet with one “ordinary American per day.”
I was, well, speechless. As admirable an idea as it was, it was hardly practical.
“Just how ordinary?” I asked.
“Ordinary, Herb. I want dirt under their fingernails. I want to be able to smell them.”
This was certainly an unpleasant prospect. I could not help myself. The words came out before I could check them: “And will we be having barn dances in the East Room?”
He did not seem to “get” my sarcasm. “That’s not a bad idea,” he mused. I decided not to pursue it. I was confident, anyway, that he would soon come to his senses. In the meantime I was put in charge of Operation Open Door.
Jean Logan’s reaction was predictable. Hysteria.
While it was true that Jean had made herself invaluable during the campaign putting together fund-raisers, she was a woman of obvious limitations. It was Lleland who persuaded the President to give her the Public Liaison shop. (Feeley suspected the two were having an affair, but of course that was beside the point.) Feels and I had rather hoped he would give her something out of the way, such as the National Endowment for the Arts.
“You can’t be serious!” she screamed at me over the phone.
“Calm yourself,” I said. “We have work to do.”
She was sputtering. “Where are we going to find them?” Social ambidexterity was not one of Jean’s talents. She was a Washington hostess, and, as the popular jingle from the early eighties put it, she was not the sort to reach out and touch someone—unless she had first been introduced.
This was silly. “I don’t know, Jean,” I said tartly. “Maybe your servants know some.”
“Yes,” she said, “I suppose they do.”
Thus began a distinctly unpleasant period of my life. Jean fought me every step of the way. Our ideas of what constituted an ordinary American were quite unalike. Hers dressed in Laura Ashleys and drove Volvos.
My ordinary Americans were ordinary: drab, dull, and fragrant. I saw to that personally. If the President wanted to smell real people, then let him have a good whiff—maybe they might change his mind and cause him to cease this undignified spectacle. I was especially proud of one aromatic chicken-packer from Maryland. “Come as you are!” I told him over the phone.
Jean found my “ordinaries”—as we called them—grotesque, and we tussled constantly. “Why is it,” I said one frustrating afternoon after reading the briefing sheets of her next two weeks’ worth of ordinary Americans, “that four of them went to Harvard, two to Princeton, one to Yale, one to Stanford, one to Vassar, and the other to Wellesley?”
“You know,” she said, twirling her frosted bangs with a forefinger, “I wasn’t sure about the Stanford person.”
“Jean,” I said, “I’m not sure I’m getting through. It’s bad enough they all went to college. But to Harvard, Princeton—”
“What’s wrong with a good education?” she snapped.
After a month I no longer had the energy to argue. I took her off Open Door (she didn’t complain) and turned her work over to Hu Tsang. For a while there was a preponderance of Oriental ordinary Americans, a tendency I had to correct.
Hu showed real zest for the job. It was he who set up the Office of Human Background, which processed and evaluated the ordinary Americans, weeding out the extraordinary and subordinary ones. Candidates for presidential interviews had to be carefully screened by Secret Service, then by OHB’s health, economic, and ethnology experts. Only then could they be pronounced truly ordinary.
The press, in its callous, cynical way, was suspicious of the program at first and called it pure symbolism. The President chafed at this baseless criticism. At a press conference he said, “I hear more common sense from these ordinary Americans than I do from reading most editorial pages.” The press shut up after that, and Bob Petrossian, our pollster, reported a one-point rise in the President’s approval rating that week.
A few weeks later the right-wing journal Human Events reported that the Ordinary Americans program had been penetrated by the KGB. Honestly.
The President thrived on his sessions with his ordinaries. When affairs of state were overwhelming and he had spent too many hours in meetings with soft-spoken, pin-striped men, he would buzz for an ordinary American. (I kept one on standby at all times just across the street at the Hay-Adams Hotel.) They were his link to the America he loved and understood, and he always emerged from his sessions with them refreshed and ready once again to take up the heavy mantle of leadership. In time, I confess, even I became a convert. Truly, the President was a visionary man.
But then two unsettling incidents occurred that marked the beginning of the end of ordinary Americans in the White House.
The President was given a two-page “backgrounder” on whomever he was to see that day. This meant that valuable conversational time was not wasted on such irrelevancies as “So, tell me about yourself.”
It had been a trying day for the President: a morning speech to the National Association of Manufacturers, legislative strategy session, appointments with Admiral Boyd of the Joint Chiefs and members of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Then a private lunch with Ambassador Massot of France.
Massot was a pleasant but impossibly long-winded Gaul whose briefest reminiscence about his days in the Resistance tended to last an hour. The President was not fond of submitting to these gaseous sessions with Massot, but, as Massot’s son was President of France and as he placed great value on Franco–U.S. relations, he did. But he also made sure that Aquinas, his Filipino steward, kept him well fortified with martinis. (He was otherwise abstemious at lunch.)
Their lunch ran twenty minutes over schedule, and when I brought in the afternoon’s agenda, the President looked tired. The knot in his tie was askew and his breathing was heavy. A three-martini lunch, from appearances.
“How was the Ambassador?” I asked.
He rolled his slightly bloodshot eyes. “Glorious. We relived the siege of Rouen. Who’ve we got?”
I handed him a backgrounder. “A Mrs. Smith to see you.”
“Good. I could use a Mrs. Smith about now. You know, Massot must breathe through his asshole, he never even stops talking.”
“One of these days, Mr. President, you’re going to say something like that in public and—”
“Okay, okay.” He usually got impatient with me when I admonished him about his language, but I felt it my duty.
We went over the rest of the day’s schedule and I went back to my own office and busied myself with arrangements for the upcoming European pre-advance trip I was making with Leslie Dach, director of Presidential Advance.
At 2:18 p.m. he buzzed me. I got the distinct impression he was displeased. “Wadlough,” he said, “get the fuck in here.”
He shoved a piece of paper at me. It was the OHB backgrounder on Mrs. Smith. “Read this.”
It told a tragic story. Mrs. Smith’s daughter was an alcoholic. Her only son had been killed in Vietnam. Social Security had just cut the benefits of her husband, who was in the hospital with emphysema. And two months earlier a tank truck had hit a telephone pole outside her home, causing a firestorm from which she had escaped with only her negligee, slippers, and dentures. I grimaced. How had Hu let this quite un-ordinary woman through the turnstile?
“A tragic story, Mr. President,” I said. “I anticipate your criticism. But I’m sure her visit with you was a great comfort.”
The President lit a cigarette and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I talked,” he said, “for five minutes. I told her this country owed her more than it could ever repay for the loss of her son. I told her I was sorry about her daughter and offered to help get her into the Betty Ford Center.”
“Generous of you, sir. Very generous.”
“I sympathized about her husband. I told her about my Uncle Luke, who had it too. And I told her that before sundown the skin of the GS-7 who cut her husband’s disability would be hanging from the top of the Washington Monument. It was a pretty inspired performance, Wadlough. You’d have been proud of me.”
“I’m sure I would have, sir,” I said a bit uneasily, for I saw that something was out of kilter here.
“Do you know, Wadlough, how I felt when I was finished?”
“Relieved, sir?”
“No, Wadlough. Imbecilic.”
The trouble lay in the fact that the woman was a Mrs. Cora Smith, of Mamaroneck, New York. The backgrounder was for a Mrs. Sylvia Smith.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh, dear.”
The President crumpled the backgrounder into a tight ball and threw it in the wastebasket.
“No, Wadlough. Oh, shit.”
The worst of it was that Mrs. Cora Smith subsequently sold her story to the Ladies’ Home Journal and of course the President became the butt of many jibes. He was deeply wounded. Lleland saw it as an opportunity to criticize my handling of Open Door. His henchmen taunted Hu, renewing their “Rice Bowl” epithets. But President Tucker was not a quitter, and he got right back on the horse. Three days later he buzzed for another ordinary American. But one month later the unfortunate incident with Mr. Leverett occurred. Somehow the fact that he was under a psychiatrist’s care for exhibitionist tendencies had eluded OHB. I was mortified.
As I look back on it, the whole episode showed the need for tighter security screening. I made that point at the staff meeting the next day, but Lleland hardly acknowledged my comment or my presence, and the President informed me, through Lleland, that the Ordinary Americans program was henceforward discontinued. The era of Open Door was at an end.