Things sticky.
—JOURNAL, OCT. 13, 1992
If you look closely at the TV footage of M-and-M roaring back across the causeway in the direction of the naval base, you can tell by Marvin’s expression that he was stunned by what was happening. (I never disputed that much.) There was also that tense, memorable moment when it appeared that M-and-M was going to charge the front gate: the Marines cocking their weapons, their confused looks as they wondered whether they should also shoot the director of the National Security Council. When M-and-M started giving Marvin a tour of the site of the “massacre” instead of charging the base, the soldiers were greatly relieved.
The only ones relieved.
As M-and-M, with a mute Marvin in tow, began pointing out spots along Kindley Field Road where the “martyrs” had fallen during Operation Sandman, my phone rang. It was the President. His voice was a croak. “Better get everyone in here,” he said.
I canceled the President’s appointments for that afternoon. Together with Feeley and Lleland—Clanahan arrived shortly—we watched the events of that stressful day unfold on television.
There was not much talking during the wreath-laying ceremony at the Uhuruville cemetery. By this time Marvin clearly realized that he’d been had. Unfortunately, that did not project on TV. During the playing of the revolutionary anthems and the nineteen-gun salute, the President leaned forward and shouted at the screen, “Frown, god-dammit—frown!”
The next stop on the itinerary was the April 17 Re-education Facility, formerly the Ocean View Golf and Country Club. I remember well the President’s expression as M-and-M ushered Marvin into that room where dozens of former sweater magnates now spent their days sewing uniforms for the BUPI Revolutionary Guards. He looked like a man on the verge of a stroke. The spectacle was a distressing one, and sure to inflame Republican voters. The incident involving Mr. Brown—one of the imprisoned magnates—spitting on Marvin and being rifle-butted by the guards was especially unfortunate. Feeley made low groaning sounds.
The President said quietly, “Get him on the phone.”
This turned out not to be immediately feasible. The White House advance team had not installed phones at these places since they were hardly on the itinerary, and the kind of talk the President desired to have with his NSC director would have been imprudent to conduct on a line supplied by BUPI.
Urgent messages were dispatched to the naval base. I found myself in unproductive—and extremely vexing—conversation with a BUPI “communications officer.” By the time the messenger from the base arrived at the Re-education camp, the Jeepcade had departed for the next stop. Clanahan and the President discussed the possibility of “complicating” the itinerary—CIA talk, I presume, for sabotaging this ridiculous dog-and-pony show. Though my views on the use of force are a matter of record, at this point I would have favored “complicating” M-and-M’s little tour with a low-yield nuclear device.
The next stop, of course, was the former American consulate on former Par-La-Ville Road. Here the leitmotif was Iranian, with M-and-M leading a now-zombielike Marvin through the rooms of the former “spy nest,” pointing out various telex machines and descanting upon their counterrevolutionary functions. At one point he held up a calculating machine and began denouncing it as a “spy tool.” Clanahan burst out laughing. The President did not join in.
By now his anger and frustration had spent themselves. He merely rubbed the bridge of his nose as he watched the TV. He did show some evidence of renewed interest when M-and-M announced that the consulate would henceforward become the October 7 Political Consciousness and Physical Fitness Center.
The President took a call from Sig Beller, our campaign manager. I did not listen in, but the gist of it was clear enough from the number of times the President had to ask Sig not to resign.
The President finally reached Marvin as they were leaving the consulate. The Navy had dispatched a portable KYX-2 field-unit scrambler. M-and-M, on learning that Marvin was about to have a conversation with the President, insisted on being permitted to send the President his “warm personal regards.” This was relayed to the President. The suggestion was quickly vetoed.
The first several minutes he was on the phone with Marvin, the President expressed himself freely. My notes of the conversation show that the word “idiot” occurred twice. When that phase of the discussion had ended, the President told Marvin to get back to Washington “on the double.”
But Marvin was not eager to be recalled with his portfolio between his legs, so to speak. He went to work on the President, telling him that to retreat now would be to accept humiliating defeat. The President replied that defeat would be a “relief” compared to this.
At this point Marvin told him that he was “on the verge of a breakthrough.”
The President expressed mirth of a sardonic variety.
Marvin said that M-and-M was putting on the show for domestic consumption, and that once they sat down at the bargaining table, “the concessions [would] flow like honey.”
I wondered at the metaphor, since honey does not flow easily. As the President listened to this tommyrot, Feeley and I made frantic hand gestures. Clanahan, also listening in, tapped his foot. Lleland, on another phone, merely nodded as if listening to Pericles.
“Now’s our chance,” said Marvin in his best Alliance-for-Progress tone, “to prove we meant what we said in our inaugural.”
Feeley grunted, “ ‘Our’?” Marvin was always doing this, trying to make the President feel he was breaking promises by not following his advice.
He told the President that M-and-M wasn’t anti-American, that he was just trying to keep his constituency happy. “He knows whole chunks of the Bill of Rights by heart,” he said. “He’s been quoting them to me in the Jeep.”
Feeley, working on an embolism the size of a golf ball, broke into the conversation and started screaming at Marvin. The President had to order him off the line. Marvin concluded his plea by telling the President that M-and-M was a “vibrant personality.”
The President scowled. “Then you better pray,” he said, “he does a lot of vibrating soon. And no more sightseeing, you got that?”
Marvin said there were no further stops on the schedule, and with that the conversation ended. Feeley would later tell me this was the moment he finally knew the Tucker Presidency was “cooked.”
In his own memoir, The Sorrow and the Power, President Tucker writes that once Marvin arrived in Bermuda, the die was cast, and that to recall him, as his “closest” advisers urged him to do, would only have “ratified a disaster.” While I always admired the President’s capacity for not giving up, perhaps a diplomatic “disaster” would have been preferable to what ensued.
After he had hung up, the President sat without speaking for a moment or two. He smiled wanly, buzzed for his steward, Aquinas, and asked if anyone would like anything.
“Barbiturates,” said Feeley.
The “concessions” Marvin had been so confident of did not materialize over the next three days. The international press, meanwhile, spoke of the negotiations at People’s House in Versailles Conferencelike language, building a supercharged atmosphere that had the world thinking its future depended on what Marvin and M-and-M had for lunch.
The President was denounced in the British Parliament for “condoning” the “inhumane” treatment of former British subjects. The Soviet and East Bloc countries found the President’s handling of the matter “statesmanlike,” causing great worry in the West Wing.
Tucker and Marvin spoke three, four times a day. The President would press for something tangible, and Marvin would tell him that the atmosphere was “encouraging” and so forth. The Joint Chiefs looked gloomier every day. The afternoon of the second day, the President called Marvin from Chicago after an especially disagreeable demonstration outside the hotel. His patience was ebbing.
“Why,” he said after listening to Marvin’s report, “can’t you get some of the sweater people released or something?” Marvin replied that M’duku considered them an “internal matter” and that he hesitated to inject it into the negotiations over the bases.
He then told the President that M-and-M was willing to renew the base’s lease for one billion dollars.
The President winced.
“I think we should take it,” said Marvin. “And he’s willing to let us claim we bargained him down from four.”
Grinding his molars, the President said, “Our lease on that land—which did not even exist before we dredged it up—expires fifty years from now.”
“Not the way Commander M’duku sees it.”
“I don’t care if he sees purple hippos. I’ve bent over backwards for this clown, and every time I’ve had something unpleasant shoved up my ass. Now you tell him I’m in a nasty mood, Marvin, in a neo-colonial kind of mood, and that you don’t know what the hell I’m capable of when I’m like this, but if he’s smart he will cessate fucking with me.”
He certainly was exercised. The veins on his neck were bulging above the top of his bulletproof Kevlar undershirt. We now wore this most everywhere, even to small receptions.
The President concluded that conversation by telling Marvin his “visa” was good for twenty-four hours. In his book Marvin claims this put “intolerable” pressure on the negotiations, precipitating subsequent developments.
They spoke five times the next day. Each time the President’s blood pressure shot up and he would mutter the word “honey” with a sort of “Rosebud” inflection that frankly worried me.
The last call to Chicago came shortly after seven p.m. Central time.
“Five hundred million,” said Marvin. “He’ll do it for five hundred million. And we can still claim we screwed him down from four bil.”
If M-and-M had been more “romantic”—to borrow Clay Clanahan’s phrase—in his dealings with Thomas Tucker, the President might have agreed to the settlement. But this was not seduction, it was what law-enforcement people call “penetration.”
“Get on the plane, Marvin,” sighed the President.
Three hours later we were flying home on Air Force One. The President was holding a drink and staring out the window. “I should have made him Secretary of State,” he mused, watching the strobe light on the end of the starboard wing. “He shows a remarkable talent for lobbying on behalf of countries that don’t like us very much.”
Somewhere over eastern Virginia he was handed a message saying that our naval air station on Bermuda was again under attack.