The White House Mess Read online

  ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY

  Steaming to Bamboola: The World of a Tramp Freighter

  My Harvard, My Yale (contributor)

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  Copyright © 1986 by Christopher Taylor Buckley

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

  Copyright Conventions.

  Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Buckley, Christopher

  The White House Mess.

  I. Title.

  PS3552.U339W5 1986 813’.54 85–45586

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80034-3

  v3.1

  FOR MY WIFE, WITH LOVE

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  BOOK ONE

  HONEYMOON 1 IN THE OVAL

  2 THE STAFF

  3 FIRST FAMILY

  4 OPEN DOOR

  5 CITADEL

  BOOK TWO

  FIRST FLUSH OF POWER 6 ASSIGNMENT: HAVANA

  7 LESLIE

  8 24 NORTH, 82 WEST, HIKE

  BOOK THREE

  MID-TERM BLUES 9 MORNINGS AFTER

  10 THE MUFFIN INCIDENT

  11 LOST ACCESS

  12 IN THE PITS OF POWER

  13 DAYS OF RAGE

  14 FLOTUS BLOSSOM

  15 FIRST FRIENDS

  BOOK FOUR

  DISARRAY 16 PEACOCK AND PETUNIA

  17 SLINGS AND ARROWS

  18 PEACE BREAKS OUT

  19 CAKEWALK

  20 EDWARD VIII

  21 TREASURE HUNT

  22 THE HUNT FOR THEODORE

  23 TAKEDOWN

  24 STRATEGIC APPEARANCE LIMITATION TALKS

  BOOK FIVE

  PITFALLS 25 INJURY

  26 REST AND RESPITE

  27 SAMARITAN

  BOOK SIX

  CRISIS 28 WE HAVE A SITUATION

  29 GB-322

  30 ESTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY

  31 DESPERATE MOLAR

  32 URGENT LAUNDRY

  33 AMERICA GOES TO WAR

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  At 11:48 a.m. on Friday, January 20, 1989, the heavy iron gates of the White House grounds swung open and moments later the President-elect’s motorcade drew to a halt beneath the North Portico. In accordance with custom, the President-elect and Mrs. Tucker were escorted inside, where they would escort President Reagan and the First Lady to the motorcade for the trip to Capitol Hill.

  It was a clear and cold Washington winter day, a fine day for an inaugural ceremony. There was an air of excitement and history in the air. For the Tucker team, this was not the end of a twenty-two-month-long road, but the beginning of a dream.

  Mike Feeley, the President-elect’s press secretary, and I waited in our own limousine several Secret Service cars behind the President-elect’s. Feeley filled the inside with so much cigarette smoke that I began to worry I might have a bronchospasm.

  Ten minutes passed. Feeley began to fidget. Then I became concerned. Presidential movements are scheduled down to the minute. A delay like this, with the entire nation waiting, was unusual.

  An advanceman in the front seat of the limousine pressed his earpiece to his ear, then said into the microphone clipped inside his shirtsleeve, “Echo One Tango. Say again, Headmaster?” He listened intently to the repeated message and turned to face me.

  “Mr. Wadlough, Firebird wants you immediately in the Roosevelt Room.” Firebird was President-elect Tucker’s Secret Service code name.

  “Christ,” said Feeley, looking at his watch. “This is an outrage.”

  “Relax, Feels,” I said merrily, for I was feeling very gay that morning. “It’s probably just a photo op.”

  I was escorted through the West Lobby directly to the Roosevelt Room. The President-elect, Mrs. Tucker, and several Reagan officials and cabinet members who were to accompany the President up to Capitol Hill were clustered at the far end of the room. The looks on their faces were grave. The President-elect waved me over. As I approached, I was conscious of entering a scene charged with drama, though that may just have been the inset spot lighting.

  “Herb,” said the President-elect barely above a whisper, “we seem to have a situation here.” He drew a deep breath. “The President won’t leave.”

  I did not at first understand.

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “His doctor’s in with him now. They’re talking about maybe giving him a shot of adrenaline.”

  During the transition President Reagan’s inner circle had privately and delicately confided to me that their chief had been showing increasing signs of his advanced years. (He was at this point only weeks short of his seventy-eighth birthday.) The Defense Department had recently drawn up a contingency plan to provide, in their gruesome idiom, “command-chain continuity.”

  My immediate concern was less for the integrity of our nuclear response than for the 120,000-odd spectators, VIPs, media, security agents, air-traffic controllers (I had even arranged for landings and takeoffs from National Airport to be suspended during the President’s inaugural speech), and others who were waiting for the start of an inaugural that was now threatening to be a logistical nightmare.

  “Have you spoken to him?” I asked.

  “Yes, I have,” said the President-elect. “He told me his back was bothering him, that he was feeling tired, that it’s cold outside, and that he just didn’t feel like moving out today.”

  “Oh,” I said, for I could think of nothing else to say.

  “He was very nice about it. Hoped it wouldn’t inconvenience me.”

  “I see. Did he say when he might feel like moving?”

  “Yes. Spring.”

  “Spring.”

  I had spent weeks drawing up contingency plans for everything, including the disposal of 1,800 pounds of horse manure that would be “processed” during the parade. I had not anticipated this.

  Mrs. Reagan and Jim Knott, President Reagan’s deputy chief of staff, were in the Oval Office trying to persuade him to get dressed. Apparently he had not changed out of his pajamas that morning.

  President-elect Tucker turned to the cluster of officials and said softly, “Gentlemen, perhaps we should discuss this in private. Why don’t we convene in the Situation Room?”

  As we all walked down to the ground floor of the West Wing, Defense Secretary R. Hannibal Bowditch grumbled quite audibly, “Acting like he’s already President.”

  A fine sentiment, I thought. The transition had been a difficult one.

  Eight of us, a mix of Reagan and Tucker officials, took our places around the burled-white-ash conference table in the Situation Room. The room has the feel of the inside of a bank vault. A hissing sound emanates from the floor that makes the room impenetrable to electronic eavesdropping. Every time the door opens, a red sign lights up red and flashes: ROOM STATUS: NOT SECURE FOR SENSITIVE DISCUSSION. There were seven phones in front of us, six white and one red.

  Steady, Wadlough, I said to myself. I confess that red phones make me nervous.

  Apart from the President-elect and myself, the others were all Reagan inner circle: Bowditch; Knott; Mortimer “Skip” Billington of the National Security Council; Virgil “The Butcher” Hooper, Office of Management and Budget; Attorney General Atticus Simpson; Commander William Crimmins, the P
resident’s physician. Vice President Bush had injured himself playing racquetball the day before and was still in the hospital. I rather missed Bush. He would have brought the average age of those assembled down considerably.

  It was now 12:06 p.m.

  “Gentlemen,” began the President-elect, “I know this is awkward, but I think we’d better try to find a solution quickly. There are a lot of people waiting for us up there. You know the President much better than I do. Do you have any suggestions?”

  Bowditch volunteered his. “Go to DefCon Three.”

  Def(ense)Con(dition) Two is the designation for a high-level nuclear alert. The lowest is DefCon Five; the highest is DefCon One. DefCon Two puts U.S. forces worldwide on a virtual war footing. The Secretary’s suggestion was thus, well, surprising.

  The President-elect said in what I thought was a very reasonable tone of voice, “I see. The reason being—?”

  “Mr. President-elect,” said Bowditch heavily, “we have here a situation of extreme”—he lingered on the word—“criticality. Never during my four years at Defense have I moved higher than [DefCon] Four.”

  “For which we are all extremely grateful, sir,” interjected the President-elect.

  Bowditch furrowed his brows. “This speaks to the President’s and my temperance, despite the more”—he cleared his throat noisily—“intemperate charges made during the campaign.”

  Here it comes, I thought.

  “Your friends in Moscow—”

  “My what?” said Tucker. It was an interesting contrast, the forty-eight-year-old President-elect and the hoary Bowditch.

  Bowditch let the question pass. He then launched into a harangue the point of which—as I understood it—was that the Soviet Union was at this moment undoubtedly about to take advantage of our present dilemma. When the President-elect asked him why he thought this was the case, Bowditch merely harrumphed that it was “instinct” and then rambled for some minutes about his lengthy career of public service. It was necessary to interrupt this flow of words, which seemed greatly to annoy him.

  Faced with this rather awkward and deteriorating situation, President-elect Tucker turned to Mr. Billington, the seventy-nine-year-old director of the National Security Council, and asked him for his assessment. Unfortunately, Billington had not been following the discussion, owing to his hearing problem.

  The President-elect rubbed his forehead with the tips of his fingers. “That’s all right, sir,” he said wearily.

  He turned to the President’s physician. “Commander,” he said, “is there something you can do?”

  The Commander said that the President might respond to two cc’s of adrenaline, but that at his age it might provoke an “undesirable reaction.” When the President-elect asked what sort of undesirable reaction, the commander replied, “Death.”

  A tabloid headline played before my eyes:

  REAGAN KILLED BY INJECTION GIVEN ON TUCKER’S ORDERS

  I am not usually forceful at meetings, but I spoke up and offered my frank opinion that this was not a viable option.

  Virgil Hooper of OMB began speaking of actuarial tables and the savings on Secret Service protection and pension in the event of President Reagan’s demise. I was beginning to understand how he got his nickname, though I do fully understand the need for a tough helmsman at OMB.

  One of the white phones rang, interrupting Mr. Hooper’s gloomy discourse. Jim Knott took it.

  “Trouble,” he said. “The networks are reporting a White House news ‘blackout.’ It’s affecting the stock market.”

  “Mr. Tucker,” said Bowditch, clearing his throat, “I think it’s time I made that call.”

  “In a minute,” said Tucker with a trace of annoyance. “In a minute.”

  Atticus Simpson, the Attorney General and at eighty-one the second oldest member of Reagan’s cabinet, rasped that he thought Tucker should invoke section four of Amendment 25, the constitutional provision whereby a President is declared unable to serve out his term of office.

  The President-elect was silent a few moments. Then he said, “I don’t want him to go out that way.”

  Bowditch snorted. “Didn’t think you cared how he went.”

  For a moment I thought the President-elect was going to speak sharply to this rhinoceros, but he displayed admirable reserve.

  I looked at my watch. 12:25. We were now alarmingly late. I asked an aide to switch on one of the television monitors. The camera panned the front row of the west front of the Capitol, where justices of the Supreme Court were conspicuously looking at their watches. I had a fleeting glimpse of my wife, Joan, sitting to one side of a pillar. She looked very presentable in her new overcoat with the beaver trim. There was much hubbubing, everyone looking at their watches and shaking their heads.

  Think, Wadlough, I said to myself. But no solutions presented themselves. It was most vexing.

  A phone rang—the red phone, to my great dismay. Both the President-elect and Bowditch reached for it. Bowditch practically snatched it out of his hand. Most unseemly.

  Bowditch listened, grunted, and cradled the receiver on his collarbone.

  “Mr. President-elect,” he said with great solemnity, “we’ve just received word a squadron of Blackjack [long-range bombers] has just passed out of Soviet airspace.”

  The words sent a frisson—French for “a tingling sensation”—up my spine. For a moment all that could be heard was the hissing noise.

  The President-elect was obviously taken aback. “I see,” he said. “Are there hostile indications?”

  Bowditch treated the question with impatience. “Do you consider forty megatons hostile?”

  The President-elect considered this. “If they’re dropped on my head, I do,” he said.

  He reached over and took the phone from Bowditch. He asked if the flight pattern appeared other than routine. His face creased into a smile. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much. You’ll keep us informed, then? Thank you.” He hung up and shot Bowditch a hot glance. Bowditch’s lower lip protruded unpleasantly.

  “Where were we, gentlemen?” said Tucker.

  One of the white phones rang. Knott took the call.

  “That was the First Lady,” he said after hanging up. “It’s no use. He won’t change out of his pajamas. And I’m afraid he’s just ordered lunch.”

  There was murmuring around the table. I leaned over and said to the President-elect in a hushed voice, “We have to leave for the Capitol in five minutes. With or without him. We can’t wait any longer.”

  We huddled. “Let’s look at this rationally,” he whispered. “We’ve got a doctor who may kill him, an Attorney General who wants to declare him bananas, and a Defense Secretary who wants me to start World War III.”

  I agreed. The options were not encouraging. First, we ruled out starting World War III. We were down to killing the President or having him carted off by the men in white when the phone rang. An aide handed it to me.

  “What the fuck is going on in there?” It was Feeley. In a hushed voice I quickly explained the situation.

  “For Chrissake,” he said. “The nets [networks] are going out of their heads. Tell him the Soviets are attacking and he’s gotta get the hell out of there.”

  I whispered Feeley’s idea in the President-elect’s ear. He nodded. I also made a mental note to speak to Feeley about his language.

  “Gentlemen,” he announced, “I believe we have a solution. Mr. Bowditch, please inform the President we are under attack by the Soviet Union and that he is to assume direct command of operations.”

  With the expression of a bulldog that has just been given sixteen ounces of fresh red meat, Bowditch picked up the phone. The red one.

  “This is Caesar,” he said. “DefCon Two, stand by.” Cupping his hand over the receiver, he said to Tucker, “Intelligent decision, sir. My compliments.”

  It took a few moments for the President-elect to realize what had just happened. “Mr. Secretary,” he
said, “what have you just done?”

  “I’ll call the President. He’ll need to be briefed.”

  “Wait a minute. Do I understand you have just ordered a nuclear alert?”

  “As you directed, sir,” said Bowditch.

  “Cancel that order, Bowditch. Immediately.”

  Bowditch scowled. “If this is to appear convincing—”

  “Cancel the order, Bowditch.”

  Beneath the oceans, submarine commanders were requesting verification. From Guam to South Dakota, bomber crews were scrambling.

  “It seems to me, Mr. President-elect—”

  “It seems to me, Mr. Secretary, that you have taken leave of your senses. Cancel that order.”

  With a histrionic clearing of phlegm, Secretary Bowditch reluctantly gave the command and rescinded the nuclear alert he had moments previously issued. Around the world, U.S. forces stood down. The President-elect loosened his tie.

  The President-elect left the Situation Room for the Oval Office. There he told President Reagan that NORAD had confirmed over two dozen incoming SS-28 missiles which would strike their targets on the eastern seaboard within twenty-one minutes. He told the President that it was essential to the national security, under the provisions of established White House Emergency Procedures, that he leave at once for Andrews Air Force Base aboard his helicopter, Marine One. At Andrews he would board NEACP (the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, a converted 747 nicknamed “Kneecap”), from which he could conduct World War III. Apparently the President was quite animated by this last prospect, and began immediately to change out of his pajamas.

  Arrangements were conducted swiftly. Five minutes later Marine One was on its way to the South Lawn of the White House. Once the President’s helicopter reached Andrews, he would be transferred not to NEACP, but to Air Force One.

  There was, however, a problem. What if he began issuing retaliatory atomic orders? He was still President. It was decided that if he started giving orders to annihilate Soviet cities, his military aide would go through the motions of following his orders. Indeed, the President could have himself a grand old time on the way back to the ranch.