The President has got it into his head to take walks in the park.
—JOURNAL, DEC. 8, 1991
We were a happy family once again. The First Lady returned from New York, and I plunged into Metrification. I took the keenest pleasure in expelling Phetlock from my old office, two doors down from the Oval. I informed Withers I would be needing my old parking space. I am not a vengeful man, but I would be dishonest if I said this was not a happy homecoming for me. This, I mused, must be how it had felt to retake Paris in 1944. Lleland grunted that it was “nice” to have me back. My security clearance was upgraded from DRIZZLE to TYPHOON.
I told the President that I would like to have the mess back again. Immediately, it was done. Sanborn assembled the staff for a full-dress review. I had difficulty suppressing a tear when they presented me with a wooden fork to match the spoon they had given me when I departed. It was inscribed, in their quaint handwriting, WELCOME HOME MR WADLOUGH. All was well with the world.
Except that the President seemed not to confide in me as he had in the past. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but he seemed to be keeping things from me.
I thought it might have to do with the distraction of his continuing domestic situation. On the whole, things were happier between the President and First Lady, but she was taking quite a number of trips to New York that pre-Christmas season. These were announced as shopping trips—to the continuing distress of the Greater D.C. Merchants Association. The truth was that the peace between them was an uneasy one. The First Lady had also been dropping remarks about how much she wanted her husband not to run for a second term.
The President was more often than not depressed. His attention span diminished and he grew unresponsive, even in the (rare) event of good news. When he was told the Senate had passed his handgun-reform legislation, the Bullet Control Act, he looked up from his briefing papers, murmured, “About time,” and went back to work. Considering that he was the first President to get action on this most pressing social need, this was an understated response, to say the least. Considering it was his only major legislative victory since taking office, it was even more surprising. That he seemed to take no joy at all in this important achievement worried me. He was also smoking heavily. Major Arnold was frustrated, and kept telling me he didn’t want to be the first Presidential doctor to be blamed for a case of lung cancer. “These are difficult times for him,” I told the Major.
He was also starting to rebel against the tight security. He had never been comfortable in the fishbowl. Now he kept saying things like “I should be out there talking with my people.” Feeley worried he might use that phrase, “my people,” in a press conference. Unfortunately, the number of death threats coming in from his people, as well as the egg assaults on his limousine, precluded his being out there.
Then, on the afternoon of December 5, it happened. He got it into his head to take a walk in Lafayette Park, across from the White House. At first I didn’t know why; then I remembered he had been reading biographies of Harry Truman lately.
Rod Holloway, chief of the Presidential Protection Detail, called me. Rod has a calm disposition, and I had never heard him so alarmed. The egg that had struck the President’s limo three weeks earlier had been thrown from the park.
“You’ve got to do something, Mr. Wadlough. He’s serious. He told me he only wanted two agents.”
“Two?”
“I don’t think he understands. He also wants it ‘spontaneous.’ No advance.”
That meant the Secret Service wasn’t to “sanitize” the area before the President arrived.
“What time does he want to go?”
“Six.”
I looked at my watch. It was 5:42 p.m. Good Lord.
“We have work to do, Rod,” I said.
I immediately called Marvin. I explained the problem and told him he had to make up a foreign-policy crisis. (I almost added, “You shouldn’t find that very hard.”)
He refused. “Out of the question.”
“I don’t have time to argue with you. We need a crisis.”
He was sarcastic. “What did you have in mind? Mechanized divisions in the Fulda Gap, or something in a Sino-Soviet border clash?”
I said, “Fine. When I’m called before the investigating commission, I’ll tell them your scruples wouldn’t permit you to prevent his assassination.”
That got his attention. When he started telling me it went against his better judgment, etc., etc., I cut him off. “Never mind the preamble. Call him at exactly two minutes to six. Get on the line and stay on the line as long as you can. Tell him it looks like war.”
“I can’t do that!”
“Marvin,” I said, “your President needs you. He doesn’t realize it, but he needs you. You may be the only one standing between him and a deranged killer.”
“I don’t like this,” he said. “It’s not right.” I got the distinct feeling he was taping the conversation.
“Never mind. What are you going to tell him?”
He sighed. “That we have a report of a sinking in the Strait of Hormuz.”
It sounded awfully routine to me. “Can’t you do better than that?”
He became abusive. “What do you want me to do? Blow up Leningrad?”
“All right, all right. Strait of Hormuz it is.”
Rod Holloway and I then went to work like first-generation immigrants. My office became the temporary command post. He rounded up every available agent. We would have raided the Vice President’s detail, but at the time Reigeluth was representing the American people at a “cultural conference” in Muscat, Oman.
Counter Assault Teams were rushed to the rooftops of buildings lining the park. Rod was very nervous having to do without his usual helicopter coverage.
The next problem concerned the troop of scruffy and mentally unsound hoi polloi who keep their constant vigils in the park with their signs calling for the elimination of the atom and fornication. (While I sympathize with both those goals, I believe in trying to accomplish them through the democratic process.) Rod wanted to “neutralize” them, whatever that meant. But there wasn’t time.
It was now 5:59. Marvin should be one minute into telling the President that war was about to break out in the Persian Gulf. The first wave of agents had arrived in the park. The CAT teams were in place; one of them had caused a commotion in the lobby of the Hay-Adams hotel when they were mistaken for terrorists. Major Arnold was on his way to the ambulance that would wait around the corner of H Street with the motorcade. We wanted to keep the whole operation “en famille”—as the French say—so we hadn’t alerted the D.C. police. Instead, Uniformed Secret Service agents on motorcycles were poised along the Pennsylvania Avenue intersections between Lafayette Park and George Washington University Hospital. We wanted intersection control in the event of “takedown,” as Holloway kept ominously calling it.
At two minutes past six Holloway pressed his earpiece. He listened; grimaced. “It’s Firebird,” he said. “He’s moving.”
I blanched. “He can’t be. He’s on the phone with Marvin.”
Holloway just shook his head and was out my door. I rang Marvin.
“What happened?” I demanded.
“It didn’t work.”
“Why? What did you tell him?”
“Exactly what we discussed. I told him we had a report that a tanker of uncertain registry had been attacked and sunk in the Strait.”
“And?”
“I said it was an extremely grave potential situation. Or a potentially extreme grave situation, I forget which.”
“Never mind. And?”
“He said he didn’t care.”
“What do you mean?”
“His exact words were, ‘Fuck the Strait of Hormuz. I’m going for a walk.’ Then he hung up.”
I dropped the phone and ran out the West Wing door. The Marine guard was standing stiff as a barber pole, but his face showed a residue of great surprise.
“Did the President come out this door?”
“Oh, yes, sir, he did, sir. Just now, sir. He’s just walked out the gate. Sir.” He pointed toward Pennsylvania Avenue. It was dark. I shivered with the cold and realized I was in shirtsleeves.
There was a wind blowing from the north. The streetlights shone brightly. Washingtonians were going home—to their wives, to a cocktail; to play with their children and have supper. For a moment I stood there and it suddenly hit me how removed the President was from life’s comforting, ordinary rituals. I thought of all the men who had walked out the door I had just come through, flushed with self-importance at the thought they had just been with the President of the United States. Suddenly it seemed not so strange or even alarming that the President should want to do something denied to the most powerful man in the world: take a walk in a park. Why not let the Strait of Hormuz conflagrate itself? It could wait the length of time it took a man to refresh himself with December air.
Still I struggled against the temptation to go after him. What if …? I didn’t want him to die surrounded by Secret Service agents and emergency-room technicians, people he did not know. Heavy with presentiment, I turned around and walked back to my office.
We were surprised the next morning that there was nothing about Operation Cakewalk—as we’d dubbed it, ironically—in the papers. The President was in better spirits than he had been in six months. He teased Feeley and joked good-naturedly about the incompetence of his cabinet. In the midst of a discussion about my plan to change the Mile One marker near the White House to the Kilometer One marker, he said to me, “Nice people.” He described an encounter with a lady in the park who told him she had voted for him and would again in ’92.
“You know what she said? ‘Any President who’d take a walk in the park is just what this country needs.’ ” His eyes glassed over. “Know what she said? ‘Don’t give up, Mr. President. We’re pulling for you.’ ”
Oh dear, I thought. This will mean more walks.
As I was leaving, he said, “I want her invited to the next state dinner.” He told me her name: Charlotte Quillan. “She’s in the book.”
When I got back to my office, I called Rod Holloway and asked him for his assessment of last evening’s operation.
He exhaled purposefully. (Secret Service agents don’t sigh.)
“I’m just glad it’s over, Mr. Wadlough.”
“I’m not so sure,” I said. I asked him how many agents he’d deployed in all. About seventy, he said.
I was impressed. I told him the President had remarked on how many people there were in the park so late on a cold winter’s afternoon.
He smiled and said that as a matter of fact everyone in the park was a security agent.
“Rod,” I said, “does the name Charlotte Quillan mean anything to you?”
Indeed, he said. She was “one of ours.”
I asked him if they’d had a long conversation. He said they’d “conversed for approximately four minutes.”
It was most annoying. I said, “Rod, you know how I feel about the agents fraternizing with Firebird.”
“Under the circumstances, Mr. Wadlough, it was hard to prevent.”
“Yes, I suppose it was. But I don’t see why she had to strike up a conversation with him. All he wanted was some fresh air to clear his head.”
“Actually, he approached her.”
“Oh,” I said. “Any particular reason?”
Rod cleared his throat. “She’s—attractive-looking, you might say.”
“Attractive? How attractive?”
“Well, she’s about five nine, a hundred and twenty pounds, blonde, green eyes. Full figure.”
“All right,” I said. “I get the picture.”
Rod said, “She’s single, you know.”
“So?”
He was uncomfortable. “She’s a little unconventional by our standards.”
“What do you mean, unconventional?”
“Well,” he said, “she doesn’t fit the mold.”
“I know what unconventional means, man.” I was getting alarmed.
“She has a kind of vivacious personality.”
“Vivacious?”
“Lively.”
“I know what vivacious means. What do you mean it means?”
“Well, outgoing.”
“Let’s speak frankly, shall we, Rod?”
“She gets around.”
I moaned.
“She’s extremely capable. And she’s definitely not a security risk. She gets polygraphed every six months, just like everyone in her division.”
“I want her transferred, Rod.”
He looked at me with surprise. “Is that necessary?”
“Necessary? He wants her invited to dinner!”
Rod was not happy when I prevailed on him to have her transferred to the Secret Service office in San Francisco. We arranged to move her up two GS pay grades as consolation. Though my decision may seem Draconian, bear in mind what the consequences would have been for the nation if the President had found out that the “people” he’d met on his little constitutional through Lafayette Park were in fact Secret Service agents; or, worse, what the consequences would have been had he been attracted to the “vivacious” Miss Quillan. Myself, I shuddered to think.