The President is cranky of late.
—JOURNAL, APRIL 4, 1991
The year that followed the High Seas Summit was not a happy one for those working at the White House. The scandal at the Interior Department, the mid-term elections, the Soviet invasion of Pakistan, the President’s brother’s conversion to Islam—it was one thing after another.
The President was working grueling eighteen-hour days trying to save the Great Deal. But with the loss of so many Democratic seats in the House in the November ’90 elections, he had to fight like a bobcat to save this far-reaching legislation from the long Republican knives; nothing so seemed to please those eager, well-scrubbed freshman faces as the prospect of disemboweling it of its most progressive elements.
It was during this period that the President began to despair of his cabinet.
Cabinet meetings had grown so unproductive and depressing that we had to plead with the President to schedule them. We would have to remind him that one of his campaign promises had been a return to cabinet government.
“My cabinet,” he grumbled, “gives me a pain.”
Secretary of State Holt’s perfervid desire for a breakthrough in the Middle East led him to pay little attention to the rest of the world. Thus the news that one third of Pakistan had been rendered radioactive seemed hardly to disturb him, except insofar as it “impacted” on Jordan.
At one meeting he launched into a forty-five-minute disquisition on an opaque nuance made in a speech by Foreign Minister Rubal of South Yemen. The President’s eyes looked like eggs in aspic. Feeley, exasperated well beyond his five-minute attention span, crushed his tenth cigarette of the meeting and declared, “Mr. Secretary, with all due respect, this doesn’t amount to a sockful of shit.”
Holt’s face turned the color of an overripe pomegranate. The President reprimanded Feeley, but with a mildness suggesting sympathy. He agreed with the assessment.
Then in September the Post broke the story about Interior Secretary Chief Fred Eagle. That was a particularly black day for those of us who had urged the President to take on the Chief at Interior. Indeed, I had been his prime sponsor, believing as I did—and still do—that this country’s treatment of our Red Brethren is its saddest chapter.
The press distorted many aspects of the case, but the nut of it was that as a regional commissioner in the Bureau of Indian Affairs he had sold off an ancestral Sioux burial ground to a South Dakota Rooty-Toot Root Beer franchise. It did not mitigate the controversy that the Chief was a member of the Cheyenne, historical enemies of the Sioux.
The President stood by the Chief, though privately he was furious. More than once he made tart comments in my direction, such as “Where do you find talent like that, Wadlough?” It was a period of great stress for the Chief, what with the special prosecutor and the Senate hearings. We squeaked through, but it took its toll on him. He became irregular in his sobriety and would launch into disconnected, hortatory speeches about such matters as space exploration.
It was all we could do to prevail on the President to hold one cabinet meeting every two months. And even those he approached as if they were trips to the dentist.
The fact was that the President had changed in two years. He was less patient. His Great Deal zeal had been frustrated by the Congress, that cacophonous body of do-nothings. Every time he announced a bold initiative, a hundred obstacles were thrown in his way. He wanted things done, not “acted on.” Anyone who has worked in government will appreciate the difference.
I believe that explains his short-lived proposal, following his moving visit to an inner-city drug-rehabilitation center, to have the government grant letters of marque and reprisal to private individuals, authorizing them to sink or shoot down any ship or airplane carrying drugs into the United States.
Now, letters of marque and reprisal had not been granted since the War of 1812, when privateers were empowered to plunder British vessels. Attorney General Struzzi, a strict civil-libertarian, was visibly shaken by the President’s idea, though he understood that Congress would never go along with such a program.
Relations with Congress were, in fact, at a very low point. When Senator Bliffen of Louisiana denounced our Metrification Initiative as “un-American,” not one of his colleagues rose to protest this frankly absurd charge.
Tim Jenkins, our congressional liaison person, thought we should lay on more candlelight dinners for Congressmen and their wives. The President did not think highly of the proposal. “We’ve had so goddam many candlelight dinners,” he said, “my eyes are failing.”
During a budget session in the Oval he grew heated when told there wasn’t enough money to fund a Department of the Infrastructure. When someone suggested he might shave a few more billion off the defense budget, he grumped, “If I cut any more out of the Pentagon, the Navy’s going to have to go back to tall ships.” Relations with Admiral Boyd of the Joint Chiefs were not very good either.
I had noticed that the President had started to quote conversationally from his speeches. Though disturbing, this was not without precedent. Historians have recorded President Kennedy’s tendency to ask his wife, “Ask not when is dinner; ask what is for dinner.” And at least TNT had not yet begun referring to himself in the third person.
The President had always enjoyed self-deprecation in his speeches, little touches such as apologizing for “ruining your dinner” in an evening talk. Charlie Manganelli, our chief speechwriter, always included such a self-deprecatory line. But now one day he called me in a state. He’d just gotten a speech draft back from the President, and the President had X’d out the self-deprecatory line, writing in the margin: “Unpresidential—let’s drop this sort of thing.”
“Herb,” said Charlie, “tell me. Is the man going Nixon on me?”
I told him the President was under some stress at the moment.
“Stress?” said Charlie. “Stress? I’ve got four writers who haven’t seen their wives in three months. I spend more time on that plane than I do on the ground. I’m getting too old for this, Herb. One of my researchers—Julie—fainted last week on the West Exec. If the man wants less stress, tell him to stop making so fucking many speeches!”
It was true the speech schedule had been heavy, but the President felt firmly that the worse things were going in Washington, the more important it was to be on the road, taking his message to the people.
Three days later the President looked up from a pile of papers and scowled. “What’s gotten into Manganelli?” he demanded.
“Sir?”
“Read this.”
It was Charlie’s latest speech, the one for the Eleanor Roosevelt Society Dinner. It began: “I don’t deserve this honor you’re bestowing on me this evening. The way I’ve been screwing things up lately, about all I deserve is early retirement.”
I must admit it was extreme.
“You tell him the President is furious. One more chance, then he goes back to writing ad copy for yogurt.”
There it was—the third person. Oh, dear, I thought. Not a good sign at all.
Jovially, I told him that Charlie was just using a formula that had served him well in the past.
“This is the White House, Herb.” He sounded sincere. “I’m just thinking of the office.”
“I see,” I said.
“You’ve got to have respect for the office.”
“Yes.”
“Manganelli has no respect for the office.”
“He—”
“What does he think this is? The Kiwanis? They’re giving me the Eleanor Roosevelt Medal.” He gestured with his hand at the text in my hands as though it were a stray dog that had wandered in. “Tell him I need a completely new draft. Tell him a completely new approach.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And tell him to stop quoting John Kenneth Galbraith. I want new ideas.”
By now it had become obvious that the Vice President had his own agenda. His speeches—which I now insisted on reading beforehand—rarely made any mention of the President. A historian of the future, in fact, might have inferred from reading them that Reigeluth was the Chief Executive, such was the proliferation of references to “my vision for America.”
Admittedly, the man had a dynamic speaking style and was a first-rate fund-raiser for the party. But when his interview with Ann Devroy of the Gannett newspapers came out, the one in which he said he wasn’t sure if he’d run again in ’92 because he might want to spend a few years “getting back in touch with the people,” we decided we had a bona-fide problem on our hands. We also learned that certain elements at the Democratic National Committee who envisioned a Reigeluth run in ’96 were quietly encouraging him to put some distance between himself and Tucker.*
Thus it was decided to send the Vice President on a series of foreign trips to such countries as Mauritius, Oman, and Sardinia.
“Let him get back in touch with them,” sniffed Lleland. The Vice President took to buttonholing people in the West Wing and telling them he had been misquoted, but it was a bit late for that.
* It is not true, as Lleland alleges in his book, that I tapped Reigeluth’s phone. I had good contacts at the DNC, and I hardly would have had to resort to such an underhanded method.