Chapter 134: Attack Dog

The plan at that point was for me to resume a normal touring and speaking schedule, but for the time being, limit myself to strongly Republican areas where I wouldn’t be challenged on this. Matt Scully was redoing the standard stump speech and would be traveling with me to edit it as new information came in. We would work up a healthy portion of outrage into the speech based on this, with me attacking Bill Clinton at every conceivable moment. Ignore John Kerry; damn Bill Clinton; Al Gore is Clinton Light. Pound on those three items. We were flying out in the morning for stops in Boise and Helena.

I went over to my office in the Capitol and called Marilyn at the end shortly before dinner to fill her in on the latest. I told her I would spend the night in D.C. and then fly out west in the morning. After that, I worked several hours making phone calls to various committee chairmen to let them know I wasn’t dead yet and was in fact showing surprising levels of life. Then I went home. I ordered in a pizza and decided to have a few beers for dinner. It had been a long day. Then it got a little strange. My cell phone rang and when I answered it, it was an Army colonel. “Congressman Buckman?”

“Yes.”

“I am Colonel Andrew McFaggin from the Chief of Staff’s office.”

I could feel my brow wrinkling at that. “Who?”

“Colonel Andrew...”

“I got that part, Colonel. Which Chief of Staff?”

“General Shinseki, sir. The Army Chief of Staff,” he explained.

“Not Shelton?” Hugh Shelton was a four-star general and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the most senior leaders of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. Eric Shinseki was currently the Army Chief of Staff, one of those senior leaders.

“No, sir, not General Shelton.”

“How can I help you, Colonel?”

“Sir, can I come over to see you?”

What was going on? “You know where I live? Come on over. I’m having some pizza and beer. Hustle and it might still be warm. The pizza, I mean, not the beer.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” The colonel hung up on me and I was left to ponder what the Chief of Staff could want with me. For the life of me I couldn’t remember much about Shinseki. I must have met him at a cocktail party or something, but if we had ever actually had a conversation, I couldn’t remember it. Shelton, I remembered as being a bit more politician than general, but I suppose at that level you have to be. The same was probably true of Shinseki.

About ten minutes later there was a knock on the door and an officer in a dress uniform was shown into the kitchen. “Congressman Buckman?”

I stood and shook his hand. “Colonel. Welcome.” Before he got started, I turned to a cabinet and pulled a plate out and slid it across to him. Then I pulled another beer from the fridge. “Here, have something to eat. I’ll never finish this, and I’m flying out in the morning. You can help.”

“Uh, thank you, sir.” I don’t think the colonel had been actually expecting pizza and beer, but he put a slice on his plate and opened the beer.

I pointed at a bar stool. “Sit. What can I do for you, Colonel?”

He swallowed the bite he was working on and said, “Congressman, I am here on behalf of General Shinseki. He asked me to give you some information, and he asked me to ask you to come to the Pentagon in the morning.”

“Well, I’m all ears, Colonel, but I’m on an early morning flight to Boise in the morning. I’m scheduled for a campaign tour,” I told him.

“Sir, the General was hoping that you would change your schedule.”

“You’d better explain that, Colonel,” I replied.

He took a deep breath. “Sir, at approximately 2030 today General Shelton told General Shinseki that tomorrow he is to issue orders recalling you to active service. At that time, you are to be taken into custody pending a formal investigation into charges of murder relating to your duty in Honduras and Nicaragua. Pending the outcome of that investigation, you will either face court martial or be extradited to Nicaragua to face charges there. Perhaps both.”

I stared briefly. “You must be joking!” What the hell was going on! We were hoping to force Clinton to overreach, but this was ridiculous!

“No sir. I am not.”

“And you expect me to turn myself in tomorrow morning? Is that what this is about? You can kiss that idea good-bye, buster.” I stood up and pointed towards the hallway. “Get lost.” Time to call my lawyers!

“Congressman, allow me to finish. General Shinseki told me that General Shelton received these orders earlier in the evening directly from President Clinton. General Shinseki would like you to be present tomorrow morning at a press conference he plans to hold. At that time, he will announce that he is refusing the order, and then he will resign his position as Chief of Staff.”

I stared and my jaw dropped. After a few seconds I said, “Excuse me? You want to run that by me again.”

“Sir, tomorrow morning, at a live press conference at the Pentagon, when General Shelton and President Clinton expect that your imminent recall and arrest will be announced, General Shinseki will instead state that the orders given to him are illegal and he will refuse them. He would like to invite you to be present. The General is disgusted by the treatment you are receiving,” said McFaggin.

I sat down again and sat there pondering what the colonel was telling me. I reached out and sipped my beer, but I could barely taste it. “Colonel, while I really appreciate what General Shinseki is offering, what would really help is the release of the investigation report from 1981. Is there any word on that?”

McFaggin sat back down and drank some more beer. He reached inside his uniform jacket and pulled out a folded-up sheaf of papers. He tossed it on the bar top. “You might find this interesting reading.” I reached for it, and he continued, “The General plans on handing out copies of this at the press conference tomorrow.”

I looked at the pages and flipped them right side up. It was the Article 32 Investigation Report prepared by Colonel Bruce Featherstone. So, there had been an official Article 32 investigation after all. “I’ll be damned,” I muttered.

“This might not be my place to say it, but after General Shinseki got his hands on this last week, he lost any remaining respect for the President.”

I gave the colonel a hard look. “Mister, he might not respect him, but he damn well better obey him.”

“Congressman, I think we settled conclusively at Nuremburg that not all orders are created equal.”

I grunted noncommittally at that. Then I looked at the man. “What’s your deal? Why are you flushing your career down the toilet? Shelton is going to find out about you telling me, and even if you say that Shinseki told you to, you’re finished.”

McFaggin sighed. “I don’t know if you know this, Congressman. The General stepped on a land mine in Viet Nam, blew off a chunk of his foot. My old man was a corporal in the same unit. He told me that if Shinseki hadn’t stepped on the mine, he would have. He always felt like he owed the General. When he learned I was assigned to General Shinseki’s staff, he told me to watch over the man.”

I shrugged and nodded. “Good a reason as any.” I looked briefly through the report. Looking back at the colonel, I said, “It’s best that I don’t go to the press conference. I show up, there are going to be questions about my setting something up with Shinseki. It will be better if I go about my regular business.” I waved the report in the air, though, and added, “Still, tell him this is useful and appreciated, and that a beat-up old battery commander still knows the value of good intelligence. I plan to read this and put it to good use.”

“Understood, sir.” He stood up and headed towards the door. I walked him out. “Congressman, good luck.”

“Same to you, Colonel. Same to you.”

I went back to the kitchen and grabbed another beer and took it and the report into my office. I sat down and read the report. It was strange reading the military legalese, but it was all there, a complete investigative report - names, ranks, timelines, accusations (many), evidence (nothing), conclusions, and recommendations. I went through it a second time, and then a third, remembering back to that clusterfuck, and never going to bed. Eventually I got up and made several copies and stashed one, and then went upstairs and showered and shaved and dressed. Maybe I could sleep on the plane, but I doubted it.

The flight out of Reagan National was to lift off at 5:50 AM and landing in Boise seven hours later, around 10:50 AM Boise time. It was a charter flight in a 737, so maybe they could shave some time off it. The plane looked to be packed. Up in the front end, the first-class section was reserved for me and my staff, with a curtain giving us some privacy, and a bouncer type to smile and keep the reporters in the back. The back was jammed with reporters, all waiting on me to A) go after Bill Clinton, and B) step on my crank doing so. I planned to do the first and to try and avoid the second.

I waved to everybody as we boarded the plane, but I simply smiled and waved while they yelled questions at me. I waited until everybody was on board and the plane was lifting off to speak to my staff. I swapped to an aisle seat with Frank and motioned Matt and Brewster into seats across the aisle, and then handed them copies of the investigative report. “This thing is going to break wide open today. I got this out of the Pentagon last night. It’s the missing investigation report that we’ve been screaming for.” I outlined what Shinseki’s messenger boy had told me was going to happen. They were stunned, but then everybody tried to speak at once, whispering at each other.

Brewster managed to out-whisper the others. “Okay, Carl, what do you plan to do?”

“Brewster, I plan to bend Bill Clinton over a barrel and ram this report straight up his ass! You got any better ideas?”

He grinned at me. “This ought to be fun!”

We spent the rest of the flight figuring out talking points and rewriting (by hand - no electricity for a laptop and our batteries were all dead) the stump speech. We had to modify it to take into account the latest attacks from the White House. Meanwhile in the back of the plane a certain level of buzz was building. We had left too early for anybody to have heard anything about a press conference, but somebody back there must have heard something. After it got loud enough, I went back and schmoozed them some, simply walking up and down the aisle, smiling, shaking hands with the new people, joking, and saying absolutely nothing. Nobody knew anything, but the team from ABC must have heard late last night that there was a Pentagon press conference that would be about me. I just looked blank and asked what they had heard.

It was my dumb and stupid act. Whenever Marilyn gets pissed at me, she tells me it comes naturally. The rest of the time she tells me I’m too smart for my own good. I wish she would make up her mind!

As we approached Boise, however, the buzz in the back got louder! We were getting in range of cell towers, and even though the stewardesses were yelling at everybody to turn off their electronic devices, nobody obeyed. By the time we landed most everybody on the plane knew something was going on. After the landing we hustled our asses off the plane before anybody could ask and headed over to the campaign rally. On the way, I called Marty for the latest.

“Carl, you won’t believe, it, but we have a full-blown constitutional crisis going on back here!”

I smiled to myself. “Tell me more!”

“The Army Chief of Staff announced at the morning briefing in the press room at the Pentagon that he had received orders to arrest you, and then declared those orders to be illegal and resigned as Chief of Staff.”

“I knew that was going to happen,” I told him.

“What? Yeah, well what you don’t know is that immediately after that, the Vice Chief of Staff marched up to the podium and announced that he also believed those orders to be illegal, but he wasn’t resigning. If the President, Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs didn’t like it, they could fire him, but he would not approve any orders to recall you and arrest you. Then they issued copies of the investigation from back in 1981 we’ve been screaming about,” he told me.

“Oh, shit! I almost wish I had been there.”

Marty continued. “You knew about this, didn’t you? What the hell, Carl! Do you have a copy of the report, too?”

“This broke late last night, Marty. No need to get you involved. Anything else happen?”

“There were a shitload of questions, but the best one was when somebody asked Shinseki, he’s the Chief of Staff, why he did this, and he told them that the White House could clean up its own mess and leave the Army out of it.”

“He said that? Oh, holy shit!” Shinseki was going to be lucky to avoid a court martial of his own at this rate! “Anything happen since then?

“That was just an hour ago. Nothing out of the White House since then. What’s happening there?”

“The reporters just twigged to the fact that something happened, and they weren’t there. Scully and I have been rewriting the stump speech. Watch the evening news. The game just went into overtime!”

“Screw that. You’re winning!”

I hung up my phone and noticed everybody else in the party was on theirs, undoubtedly getting the same message I just got. When they hung up, we chatted, but didn’t really bother to rewrite anything else. We simply went to the campaign rally and proceeded to bend Bill Clinton over a barrel.

We started by giving a standard stump speech, praising George Bush for his leadership and insight, and of course, the courage and integrity he was showing by standing by me. Then we added a few comments based on the latest we had of the situation as of yesterday afternoon, before I got the copy of the report and before I was informed of what Shinseki had planned. Then I grabbed the microphone and came around the podium and sat down on a bar stool in an ‘impromptu’ informal move. I commented that it seemed that something was going on back in Washington, but that my cell phone wasn’t working, and I hadn’t been able to get any details. Would somebody care to fill me in?

There was an immediate hubbub, and a voice yelled out, “Congressman! Do you mean to say that you aren’t aware that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff refused to have you arrested this morning and resigned?”

Trust a reporter to get it wrong. It was easy to look confused and say, “General Shelton resigned?”

“No, General Shinkowski!”

Now I could really look confused. “Do you mean General Shinseki? He’s the Army Chief of Staff, not the Chairman. I don’t know a General Shinkowski. Do you mean General Shinseki resigned? Why?”

“The President ordered him to have you arrested!”

I put a look of surprise on my face. “The President wants the Army to arrest me? He’s got an entire Justice Department to do that! Arrest me for what? Getting my men home?”

“Congressman! The President ordered the Chairman to order the Army Chief of Staff to arrest you!” yelled another voice. “And the Army Chief of Staff said the President could clean up his own mess and resigned.” Finally, somebody got it right!

“Huh! Well, it’s true, the President surely has made a mess of this! Now he’s forcing out other good officers? This is what you get when you make a draft dodger the President!”

There was a huge uproar over that, but then a third reporter yelled out, while holding up a phone, “Congressman, I just heard that General Shelton relieved the Vice Chief of Staff for also refusing to order your arrest.”

Holy Christ! This was spinning out of control back home! “Well, I’m sure that the President will fire enough people so that sooner or later he’ll find an ambitious second lieutenant he can bully around. I guess that means he hasn’t released the investigation from 1981.”

From the far side yelled out several voices. The clearest and loudest yelled, “General Shinseki released copies of it this morning!”

“You’re kidding me, right? The report must have exonerated me! Are you telling me that the President of the United States is ordering me to face double jeopardy on a closed case, simply to force me out of politics? What happens next? If a new Army investigation clears me, does the Justice Department get a shot at me? This is outrageous, even for a man as low as Bill Clinton,” I cried out. It was time to go on the offensive. I climbed up off the stool and faced them all.

“Let me tell you something! The President of the United States knows exactly where I am! If he wants me arrested, he can send the Justice Department after me! He can send the Army! He can send the Marines if he doesn’t trust the Army anymore! He can send the Boy Scouts if he wants! I’m a peaceful man just trying to do my job! It’s just too bad for Bill Clinton that my job is to run his ass out of Washington in disgrace! Now, I am going to continue this campaign swing. If he doesn’t like it, he can issue the arrest warrant himself. His personal conduct in this is despicable!”

Part of our strategy was to get Clinton pissed off enough to do something stupid. Make him overreact; be the voice of reason but then goad him into doing something. Make him react to us, and not the other way around. Meanwhile George Bush could take the high road and concentrate on Al Gore, and push the idea that Al was Bill 2.0. At some point maybe Al would manage to do something stupid, like repudiate Clinton. If we could get them fighting, the job was half done.