Have become something of a celebrity due to appearance on Today Show. Joan uncomfortable with all the publicity.
—JOURNAL, OCT. 12, 1992
In the history of American military operations, there has never been one quite so successful as Sandman, nor so misunderstood.
The world greeted the news as if President Tucker had reintroduced mustard gas.
The fact that not a single person got hurt should have counted for something. President Tucker chose a course humane, yet firm. (My phrase, incidentally; Lleland stole it for the title of his Bermuda Crisis chapter, adding the question mark.)
“Barbaric,” proclaimed the London Times. “Méchant,” said Le Figaro. “Brutto!” cried L’Osservatore Romano, which carried the full text of the Pope’s denunciation. Pravda ran the famous photograph of them all conked out across its entire front page, with a headline saying they were all dead. This from the same folks who had supplied BUPI with its weapons.
The domestic press wasn’t much better. Only the New York Post approved, with its full-page READY, AIM, WHOOSH! The Washington Post editorial was titled “Jonestown Diplomacy.”
The U.N. convened the Security Council. Greece introduced the resolution condemning us for “crimes against humanity.” The vote was 14–1. We vetoed the resolution, but then our Ambassador to the U.N. was quoted in the Times as saying he had been “privately appalled” at the President’s decision.
The President was truly dismayed by all this. “All I did was put them to sleep for two hours,” he said.
West Wing morale was not good. Feeley looked like a man being led to the guillotine. He wandered through the corridors of the West Wing looking dazed.
“Feels,” I said, catching up with him, “are you okay?”
He looked at me as though he didn’t recognize me. I didn’t like the look in his eyes. “Yeah,” he said in a faraway voice. “I’m on my way to the press room.”
“What’s up?” I said cheerily.
“I have to release this. It’s the chemical breakdown of GB-322.”
“Are they giving you a hard time in there?”
He looked at me with his drugged look. “No. They’re just asking questions about chemical warfare. ABC wants to know if he’s sent an apology to Mrs. Outerbridge.”
“Who?” I said.
“The lady who got accidentally dosed while she was making waffles. The one who fell asleep on her waffle iron?”
“Oh, yes. Her. Dreadful.”
“They’re running pictures of her. Her face looks like a crossword puzzle. Well,” he sighed, “I have to go now.”
I told him I’d draft something for Mrs. Outerbridge. Watching him shuffle off to the press room, I felt sorry for poor Feels.
There were a lot of “unnamed senior White House officials” falling all over each other in the press saying they’d tried to talk the President out of this “rash” course of action, but I knew who they were. Lleland adopted a superior air. Marvin rolled his eyes and spoke of dialogue. It was a dark time for the Tucker administration. I relaxed my prohibition on alcoholic beverages in the White House mess and doubled the number of staff cars, knowing this would help morale. There are times when you have to put aside your personal beliefs.
The President called for Truman biographies—he wanted to know how Truman coped after dropping the atomic bomb. I ordered them from the White House library, using a system whereby the library wouldn’t know who was ordering them. Some of the librarians were holdovers from the Reagan administration. It would not have played well if it had leaked that the President was seeking comfort in the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“This is getting out of hand,” the President said to me in the Oval late on the evening of October 9.
M-and-M had just given a press conference, attended by 800 reporters, denouncing the President as “a war criminal.”
“At least I’m in Henry Kissinger’s league,” he said, looking out the window. We could hear the demonstrators chanting in the distance. “Maybe I should go talk to them,” he said. “You know, like Nixon did.” The idea was quickly dismissed.
To his credit, the President stood firm. The following exchange occurred during the press conference of October 10.
Joel Ackerman, NBC: The world community has condemned your use of chemical-warfare agents in quelling the Bermuda uprising. In light of this, do you feel you owe the world an apology?
The President: No.
Ackerman: That’s—would you care to expand on that?
The President: Let me get this straight: the world wants me to apologize for saving American lives from a mob without killing anyone?
Ackerman: But in using gas, haven’t you lowered the chemical threshold so that this kind of warfare is more likely?
The President: Frankly, Mr. Ackerman, I prefer this kind of warfare to the alternatives.
The President went on to make a very persuasive case for the use of GB-322 instead of bullets, rockets, napalm, and the like, but it was lost in the emotionalism that had enveloped the Sandman controversy. The headline in the Washington Post the next day announced:
TUCKER FAVORS CHEMICAL WARFARE
Petrossian’s polls showed an alarming trend. The President was down six to eight points in his strongholds—the urban Northeast, the upper Midwest, the industrial mid-Atlantic states—but he was up an astonishing fifteen percent in the South.
Hump Scruggs, our Southern strategist, called in. “Gawdamnawmighty,” he said, “the Klan is fixin’ to endorse him!”
I didn’t even pause to get details. I called Manganelli. “Drop whatever you’re doing and get cranking on a vicious attack on the Ku Klux Klan,” I said.
“The Klan? Everyone knows our position on—”
“They’re fixin’ to endorse him!”
There was a pause on the other end. “Herb,” he said, “why are you talking with a Southern accent?”
I explained the situation, and told him to drop a one-page insert into the noon speech before the Asian-American society, a business group.
“It’s a foreign-policy speech, Herb. It doesn’t make any sense to attack the Klan in the middle of a discussion of our Pacific Rim.”
“Charlie,” I said, “I don’t care if it doesn’t flow. Use a lot of conjunctions. Now let’s have one page of insert. And don’t hold any punches.”
I told Feeley about it. He slumped in a chair. “At this point,” he said, “any endorsement would help.”
The Asian businessmen were somewhat mystified to find themselves being treated to an unusually virulent denunciation of the Ku Klux Klan, but the Klan did not go ahead with its endorsement, and afterward the President thanked me for avoiding a potential disaster.
Three days after Sandman, BUPI announced the first “deaths.”
The sealed coffins of the six “martyrs” were buried amidst full BUPI pomp on the fifteenth hole of what had formerly been the exclusive Mid-Ocean Club golf course. M-and-M gave the eulogy, denouncing the “American genocide” and calling the President “The Great Pestilence.” Ironically, the Mid-Ocean Club was situated in a part of Bermuda known as Tucker’s Town. It was now renamed Uhuruville.
We had been warned by Clanahan that they might try something like this.
As soon as BUPI announced that their people had been “poisoned” by GB-322, we asked the International Red Cross to investigate. The Red Cross agreed, but of course BUPI quickly refused, on the grounds that we had infiltrated the Red Cross with CIA agents. The Soviet Union, which steadfastly refuses to allow the Red Cross into any of the countries it invades, seized on this and echoed the denunciation. Indeed, the ties between the Soviet Union and Bermuda were improving daily. This was a valuable lesson. President Tucker confessed to me he was surprised by the developments and was “learning a lot” about the Soviet Union.
This nonsense over empty coffins should have been dismissed as propaganda, but the charismatic M-and-M had been so successful in portraying this as a David-versus-Goliath showdown that a lot of the world believed it.
George Bush was busy saying it was a time for “America to pull together behind the President,” a shrewd tactic. The fact was he had broken a Senate tie back in 1983 and voted for the production of nerve gas. He wasn’t about to start throwing canisters.
At the next EST meeting the discussion centered on neutralizing the “martyr maneuver.” Secretary of State Holt—who seemed to regard the Bermuda crisis as a nuisance distracting him from the Middle East—said we had to discredit the tactic. No one disagreed. Clanahan and Edelstein concurred. There was consensus. The President then made the bold and extraordinary proposal that he be gassed on live television with GB-322.
For the first time since the morning of Sandman, Feeley displayed enthusiasm. He said it might “reverse everything.” I opined that it would certainly be dramatic, if un-presidential.
There was passionate and heated discussion. Admiral Boyd opposed the idea in the strongest language I had ever heard him use. His Brooklyn accent became more and more pronounced. At one point he called it a “lunatic” idea, which in my view was improper, but the President did not take exception.
Boyd’s arguments weighed on the President. But he was intrigued by his idea. Someone proposed gassing the Vice President instead. This idea had broad support, but after discussion the President vetoed it on the grounds that the press knew he didn’t like the Vice President. “They wouldn’t consider it a sacrifice,” he said. “It has to be someone close to me.”
Two days later I found myself in the NBC studios with Bryant Gumbel. Feeley had insisted on Gumbel, in part because he is black and Feels thought he would appeal to Bermudians, but also because he projects an affability that Feeley felt would offset the “chemical warfare” aspect of the show.
My gassing on the Today Show received a Nielsen rating of 13.2, with an audience share of 33, meaning that 27 million television sets were tuned in. In addition, Vision of America broadcast the event live around the world. When I woke up—feeling quite refreshed, I might add—Gumbel said, “Thank you, Herb, from all of us.”
My celebrity was a mixed blessing. There were those who chose not to believe I had volunteered for the demonstration. In some cases I have to conclude the motivation was jealousy. Lleland said in his book that I “had to be dragged, whimpering, to the NBC studio … like a child being taken to the dentist.” It is hardly necessary to dignify that vile canard by saying there is not a mote of truth to it.
The press scoffed. Patrick Buchanan of The New York Times said in his column, “If President Tucker wanted to rectify the catastrophe he has brought about in the North Atlantic, he should have used more potent vapors—on Mr. Wadlough and his other advisers.” I thought it was mean-spirited of him to say such a thing.
The splenetic Michael Kramer of New York magazine attacked me personally, writing, “With this feat of derring-doze, Wadlough is striving to expand his portfolio. No longer content with the role of presidential baggage handler, he has now staked his claim to a more exalted post: administration guinea pig.”
Despite this sort of carping, my Today Show appearance had a significant impact. GB-322 was seen for the harmless substance it was, the Uhuruville burials came under suspicion, and for the first time since the crisis began, M-and-M and BUPI were on the defensive.
Great Britain introduced a resolution in the U.N. calling for exhuming the Uhuruville coffins under internationally supervised auspices. When M-and-M announced that the former U.S. Consulate would be turned into the People’s Museum of American War Atrocities, our foreign-policy people took it as a sign that his offensive had “gone theatrical.” BUPI snipers continued to take occasional potshots at our P-3Cs, but the mob remained on the other side of the causeway, content with its bonfires and nocturnal chanting against the Great Pestilence.
Back home, the Republicans were doing their own chanting, accusing President Tucker of impotence and of not defending America’s interests “the old-fashioned way.”
Marvin, meanwhile, kept pressing the President to reactivate the plan to send him down to Bermuda to hold talks with M-and-M; Marvin’s mission kept getting postponed at Clanahan’s urging, due to the volatility of the situation.
On October 12, the sixth day of the crisis, the President finally instructed Marvin Edelstein to send a communiqué to M-and-M indicating our willingness to talk, but added, “No funny business, Marvin.”
After our meeting Feeley followed the President back to the Oval and tried to talk him out of sending Marvin to Bermuda. “Anyone,” he said, “send anyone except him.” But the President said that Marvin was his NSC director and that it was decided.
Walking out, Feeley muttered, “No good will come of this.”
Marvin devoted the last third of Power, Principle, and Pitfall to the Bermuda crisis. I found it as interesting as some other novels I have read.
At the next meeting Marvin reported that M-and-M was anxious for a meeting. “He sounds like a reasonable man,” he said. The Admiral, Gilhooley, Feeley, Clanahan, and I looked at each other.
“He’d better be,” said the President.
Tucker wanted the meeting to be private and on board a ship. Marvin wanted it to be a media event. He maintained that the public pressure would be a “salubrious influence” on M-and-M. And he wanted to walk across the causeway separating the naval base from the BUPI encampment “as a symbol of U.S. willingness to reach out.”
Admiral Boyd murmured that he’d like to reach out to M-and-M with a “wing of F-20s.” An argument erupted between Marvin and Boyd which the President had to quell.
Lleland offered the use of the Compassion for the meeting. A shouting match erupted between Feeley and Lleland which the President had to quell.
These arguments probably played a fateful role. The President was so weary of the divisions among his staff and so anxious to solve the Bermuda affair, which had seriously affected his re-election campaign, that he approved Marvin’s plan. In a calmer atmosphere he might have made a more judicious decision.
Watching the start of Marvin’s “Long Walk”—as the networks dubbed it—across the causeway, even one as skeptical as I was filled with a sense of history and optimism.
Trailing him, sufficiently behind so as to be out of camera range, were his two deputies, Cromattie and Baum. (I later learned that Marvin had told them to walk thirty paces behind him; clearly, this was to be his walk.)
M-and-M and his cohort met him at the other end. Following the greeting ceremony, Marvin and M-and-M climbed into his Jeep and, with M-and-M at the wheel and half the world’s press following, drove off. But not, as planned, to his headquarters at People’s House. “The Long Walk” turned out to be a long gangplank.