Miss Joan, but feel it important to be with President for last peaceful days before general election begins. Is pleasant here, despite allergies.
—JOURNAL, AUG. 30, 1992
As Labor Day and the official start of the general presidential campaign approached, the President was in low spirits. At my urging, he spent the last week of August at the Summer White House on Monhegan Island, refreshing himself for the grueling ordeal that lay ahead. I was anxious that this period be a pleasant one for him, free of any friction with the local inhabitants, so I quietly arranged for a Department of the Environment grant whereby each Monhegan resident received $500 for answering a quality-of-life questionnaire.
A nearly disastrous incident was narrowly averted when I discovered that Lleland had invited the President for a two-day cruise aboard the Compassion. In a moment of weakness the President had accepted the invitation. The thought of the President being photographed aboard this floating embarrassment on the eve of the campaign was nightmarish. When I confronted Lleland, he told me the “salt air” would do the President a “world of good.” This so annoyed me that I told him I suspected he was merely trying to inflate the resale of his yacht by lending it the presidential aura. Our conversation ended abruptly and heatedly, and for several weeks he refused to acknowledge my existence, even during meetings in the Oval Office. But I was successful in persuading the President to eschew the salt air aboard the Compassion.
By now the President had his doubts about Lleland anyway. He had been given a job of trying to convince Senator Kennedy to withdraw from the primaries and had failed rather spectacularly, when the Senator not only didn’t withdraw but publicly asked Vice President Reigeluth to be his running mate. Quel fiasco! as the French say.
I had been instrumental in convincing the Vice President not to accept the Senator’s offer. (It is not true, as the former Vice President wrote in Jet Lag: My Four Years Aboard Air Force Two, that I suggested to him the IRS might be interested in his 1984–1987 tax returns.) At any rate, as a result of my ministrations, I was in good odor with the President.
I wanted the President’s time to be his own during that one week of peace with his family. To that end, I accompanied him—amidst much grumbling among the other senior staff, who were not invited to go along—and stayed in one of the cottages on the fringe of the presidential compound.
During this period I acted as a kind of “buffer” or “conduit,” and made sure that all paper flowed through me to the President. In the interests of the presidential tranquility, I attempted to keep that flow down to a trickle. This is a difficult task, inasmuch as the average daily number of document pages that flow to the President is 204.6. I was able to reduce that to five. I took some pride in that accomplishment, though I was harshly criticized for it by the press and by certain senior members of the staff, one of whom told the New York Times I was a “constipating influence.”
The President had asked me to supervise the digesting of news reports during that week inasmuch as he desired to catch up on his book reading. I directed the White House News Summary Office to be especially terse; working together, we managed to reduce the day’s New York Times to a concise fifty words, and the Washington Post to twenty. Actually, I felt the Times could have been tightened even further.
I saw no point in disturbing the President’s “quality time” by keeping him advised of the hourly Republican denunciations. Given the choice between being informed of the latest reckless charge by George Bush or hunting for periwinkles among the seaweed-covered rocks with his son, I had no doubt as to which the President preferred. Yet the world pressed in on him.
Bermuda was also much in the news on account of the August 27 dynamiting of the Mid-Ocean Golf Club and its subsequent effect on tourism. The little gray fellow from CIA who gave the President his daily briefing looked even more harried than usual when he arrived the next morning. And when Chase Manhattan raised its prime lending rate to twenty-one percent on the last day of the month, there was strong pressure for a statement from the President. Rather than trouble Charlie Manganelli, who was taking advantage of the President’s vacation to undergo another detoxification at Bethesda Naval Hospital, I drafted a statement myself and gave it to The New York Times. Frankly, I was rather pleased with it at the time, since it went straight to the heart of the problem and put the banks where they belonged—on the defensive. But, in retrospect, perhaps I overstated the case by proposing that we nationalize the banks. I had not been informed that Treasury Secretary Lindsay had come out against bank nationalization at the June 27 cabinet meeting, and that the President had concurred. The whole incident, overblown though it was, points out the need for greater coordination within government.
We had tried to keep the press entirely off the island by getting the Monhegan assessors to pass a temporary ordinance against their presence, but the town selectmen were obstinate. (I privately resolved that these wretched people had seen their last Department of the Environment grant.) So the press was there, though only twenty of them. They spent their time seeking out the more eccentric and discontented Monheganers, who gave them boozy harangues about how the noise caused by the presidential helicopters was causing the lobsters to molt.
I did not actually spend much time with the President during this period, but late in the evening of the next to the last day the President called and asked me if I would like to walk with him. I was already in my pajamas, but of course I said yes. He met me outside my cottage, “Poopdeck,” and handed me a flashlight. Accompanied by only six agents, we set off. I could smell bourbon on his breath. But this was, after all, his vacation.
To my consternation, he headed toward the shore, instead of following any of the quite lovely paths that wind their way through the pine forest. The President was fond of taking people for “walks” along this shore. In truth, these peregrinations required the talents of a mountain goat. The route went over boulders, under two gigantic driftwood tree trunks, through slippery seaweed-coated gullies, culminating in an exceedingly unpleasant stretch of foot-wide walkway cut into a cliff face twenty feet above the water. It was difficult enough during the day; at night it resembled the set of one of those Alistair Maclean World War II movies. Whenever the President announced he was going for a walk, Secret Service alerted the medical staff and positioned agents in a Zodiak rubber boat at the foot of the cliff walk. A year earlier the President had taken the Sri Lankan Prime Minister on one of these walks. That was the reason the Honorable Mr. Chiribindigar had left without signing the mutual-defense treaty, although I understand the Prime Minister has since regained full use of his left arm.
I was grateful for the three-quarter moon. It permitted me to see about three feet in front of me. My night vision is not good at all, and when I exert myself, my glasses do have a tendency to fog.
“Remember,” said the President, leaping from one rock to another, “no hands.” He maintained it was only challenging if you didn’t use hands. Frankly, I would have found it challenging with crampons and rope.
He did not say much. I sensed in him some gloominess or apprehension. And why shouldn’t there be? He recognized the obvious: that it would be a hard, uphill campaign. The four years had taken some physical toll. He looked older than fifty-two. His face had lines that hadn’t been there on inauguration day. His cough was worse too, though he had “absolutely promise[d]” to give up smoking by Labor Day. I earnestly hoped he meant it this time, though the start of a campaign was not an easy time to give it up.
“Herb,” he said to me as we paused atop a slimy boulder, “I don’t know about this election.”
I sensed he wanted reassurance. I am not a “yes man,” but there are times when a counselor best serves his principal by saying soothing things. I told him that the entire staff was “in very high spirits.” This was not exactly the case, but it was all I could think of at the moment.
“High spirits,” he repeated. “You must mean Manganelli.” I had had to tell him about Charlie’s problem after the incident at the convention. It was a measure of the man’s generosity of heart that he kept him on as his chief speechwriter.
I laughed, and he skidded on some sea moss and fell between two rocks. The agent looking down on us from above said something into his walkie-talkie and all of a sudden the entire area was bathed in harsh light. It was the searchlight beam from the Coast Guard cutter fifty yards off.
The President clambered up. “Shut that thing off.”
Seconds later all went black, with retinal exploding spots. Blinded, I took a cautious step forward. There was a loud squish under my foot, then both legs were up in the air and I landed on my posterior, causing me to champ down on the tip of my tongue.
“Did you use your hands?” asked the President.
“I think I bit off part of my tongue,” I said.
We walked—so to speak—some further distance along. Even in my pain I could see that it was a beautiful evening. All seemed at peace. The moonlight undulated on the water and seagulls flitted overhead—if seagulls flit; otherwise they were bats.
We came to a particularly nasty-looking piece of cliff that in some glacial age had split off the face and toppled over at a thirty-five-degree angle. The President had a name for it: Old Snaggle Tooth. “Come on up,” he said gaily. “We can talk here.”
I asked if I couldn’t talk to him from the foot of it. “I can hear you quite well from here.”
“Come on.” It is difficult to say no to the commander-in-chief. He didn’t do these kinds of things out of mischief. It was simply that there was a touch of the boy in Thomas Tucker.
I was a few feet up when I pitched forward and fell flat. The rock was coated with globs of the wretched rockweed. I slid back down, covering the entire front of my body with slime.
“You have to take a running start,” said the President.
“I don’t understand,” I wheezed. “How are you supposed to get up there?”
“Momentum!”
“Right,” I said, and started up at a great clip. I succeeded in getting almost all the way up before the seaweed arrested my progress. “Oh!” I said, feeling myself about to start sliding back. I didn’t want to. It was a good fifteen feet down.
“Here,” said the President. “Grab my hand.”
As I reached for it, I began to slide. My fingernails dug into the rockweed and scraped, rather painfully, down several feet. Finally, I was able to brake myself by grabbing fistfuls of weed anchored to the rock. I had stopped myself from sliding any further; on the other hand, I couldn’t move back up. Every time I tried to pull myself up, my fistfuls of rockweed ripped out. The only thing to do was to hold on in this awkward position.
“Aren’t you coming up?”
“I’ll just stay here,” I said, spitting out a bit of marine algae I was sure was infecting the wound on my tongue.
“I love it here.” He sighed and called up to the agent, “Ask them to move that vessel out of the moonlight, would you?” He chuckled, “I don’t think any fish will try to kill me tonight.”
If there was any dying to do tonight, no doubt I would be doing it.
The cutter gunned its engines and maneuvered a hundred yards to one side.
“Much better,” said the President. My forearms were starting to cramp. “I guess I won’t have to worry about Coast Guard cutters fucking up my moonlight much longer.” He leaned back and laughed. “I’ve really fucked up, haven’t I?”
I didn’t think it was right for him to go into a campaign with that kind of attitude. “Just because you’re trailing in the polls—” I was unable to finish my sentence because one of my handfuls of weed tore loose, causing me to swing to one side.
“Twenty-five points isn’t trailing, Herb. It’s drowning.”
“But the advantages of the incumbency—”
“When they start throwing eggs at you—on Pennsylvania Avenue. What did Feeley call it? ‘Like Caracas.’ Caracas!” He laughed.
“A handful of radicals,” I puffed, having regained my handhold. “The majority of the American people—”
“Hate my guts.” He reached into the pocket of his windbreaker and took out a flask. “Well, at least I don’t refer to myself in the third person. When they write their fucking memoirs, they won’t be able to say that about me.”
Let him get it out, I thought. Then work on his self-confidence.
“So,” he said. “Have you got a publisher lined up for yours?”
I was surprised, and not a little hurt, at the question. “Of course not. I don’t plan to write a memoir.”
He laughed. “That’s not what Feeley told me.”
“What?”
He took another swig. “The day Jessie beat you up. That’s why I hired you back. He said you’d already signed with a publisher and were going to spill everything about our marriage.”
Feeley! So that was it. I clenched my fistfuls of rockweed tight, imagining they were his throat.
“I gotta admit, Herb, I really hated you there for a while. Then I figured, what the hell. Everyone’s going to write a book.”
I began to tell him it was an outrageous falsehood, that Feeley was only—in his devious way—trying to get me my job back.
He only shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Ah, I love it here.”
I clung on, raging inside at Feeley. The President was gazing out to sea.
“You want some?” He offered me the flask; peered down at me. “You okay down there?”
“I’m all right,” I said, still piqued.
“Say, Herb,” he said, “something I always wanted to ask you.”
“What?”
“You like being an accountant?”
I was not in the mood to discuss my work, frankly. I mumbled something about how I enjoyed working with numbers. You could trust numbers.
“I dunno,” he said. “Sounds boring.”
“I quite liked it,” I said. My arms were knots of pain.
“The South is going to be a real problem. You saw what [Mississippi Governor G. V. “Sonny”] Montgomery called me last week?”
“Maybe if we had a few more unity breakfasts,” I groaned.
The President grunted and pulled on his flask. “Unity breakfasts! You’ve gotta beat these people over the snout. Cut off their highway funds, close their military bases. It’s all they understand.”
“We tried that. It doesn’t seem to have gotten us anywhere.”
“Us? What is this, a hospital? ‘How do we feel this morning?’ ”
“I was speaking,” I said with mounting anger, “of our administration.”
“Maybe it was the staff. Maybe that’s where I went wrong. Sorry—we.”
I sighed. This was old ground. “If you’re not happy with the staff we selected, why didn’t we do something about it?”
“Well, maybe we should have!”
“Fine,” I grunted. “I could suggest a number of changes right off hand.”
“So could I!”
We were now snarling at each other across an incline of moonlit seaweed.
“Well, if that’s the way you feel about it, I resign!”
“Accepted! Effective immediately!”
“Good! Maybe I’ll go work for George Bush—”
“Great! It’ll give me an edge over him!”
“—after I write my memoir!”
“Go ahead! Put me down for a recommendation. They won’t hire you to run a Tastee Freeze!”
“Ha!,” I said. “I bet they won’t even give you a presidential library! Who’d want your papers and your terrible speeches?”
“Harvard!”
“University of Caracas, you mean!”
In the midst of all this I let go of one handful of weed to shake my fist at him. I should not have. I slid to one side and the remaining fistful started tearing off the rock. I began to slide.
“Ahhh!” I cried. I managed to grab two fresh fistfuls and stopped sliding.
“Here,” said the President, reaching down, “take my—”
I looked up and saw him starting to slide. “No!” I said, but it was too late.
His head slammed into the space between my shoulder and neck. The impact caused my fistfuls of weed to rip off the rock with a sickening, slimy, ripping sound. I endeavored to brake, but succeeded only in causing the most extreme and painful sensations under my fingernails. Thus locked together like two belligerent elks, we slid down the slope of Old Snaggle Tooth.