Chapter 106: Orientation

Things began getting hectic for me as soon as we got back. We packed Granny and Gramps back to Utica and went back to being Mom and Dad for a week. Tuesday, at the office, I had to begin making things official. I called the brain trust into the office, and went over the plans we had worked out, and then we called everybody into our biggest conference room. It was tight, but we made it. Then I stood up and I made the following announcements:

• Starting in January I was going to have a whole new job. I was going to leave the company. As if anybody could have not known this!

• The Buckman Group was not ending. We had a great thing going here, and we were going to keep it going.

• Effective December 31, I would resign my position as President and CEO. I was keeping all my stock, so keep working hard! Meanwhile, I had to start getting out of here.

• Effective December 31, John was becoming Chairman Emeritus. Jake Senior was staying as Treasurer. They were still the grownups.

• Effective December 31, Jake Junior was becoming Chairman and Missy was becoming President. They were effectively running the place now anyway, so let’s make it official.

• I’m not going to disappear! Expect to see my smiling face occasionally. Besides, the voters might catch on, eventually, that I was clueless and throw me out!

• This outfit was about the best thing I had ever built in my life, short of my kids, and I was immensely proud of the work they had done. Thank you!

After the meeting, I shooed everybody back out, but I asked one of the secretaries to stay behind. She was Cheryl Dedrick, and the closest thing I had to a personal secretary-assistant. She had also been one of my earliest supporters and had been a very useful queen bee during the campaign. She would be perfect for what I had in mind. I led her over to the coffee table and said, “Cheryl, have a seat. I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“Of course, Mister Buckman, er, Congressman Buckman,” she said, smiling. She sat down in an armchair, and I sat down in a chair facing her.

“Cheryl, let me ask you, have you enjoyed working with the Buckman Group? With me?”

“Yes, sir.” She looked confused. “Mister Buckman, is there a problem? Have I done something wrong?”

My eyes popped open at that, but then I realized I had started this out all wrong! I waved my hands and quickly answered, “No, no, it’s nothing like that! No, you’re doing fine here. I have a job proposition for you.”

“Oh! For a second there you had me going. Is this something new, here? I mean, now that you won’t be here, who will I be working with?”

I smiled. “Yes, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Here’s my idea. Mister Buckman won’t be here, but Congressman Buckman is going to need somebody manning the office in Westminster. Cheryl, would you be interested in working for me at my local office?”

Now it was her chance to open her eyes wide. “Wow! I never expected that!”

“I wasn’t doing a very good job of asking about this when we started. I apologize for that. No, I am going to need somebody I know and trust back here. I plan to get back here a lot, since we’re so close, but I am going to be using the campaign offices as my local office. You were part of the team that got me there, so how about coming to work for me as my local rep? You live in Westminster, right? It would be a much shorter drive, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, sir. Westminster would be closer,” she agreed.

“Okay. Here’s the deal. I don’t know what the pay would be, but you’ll be a government employee of some sort. If things don’t work out, we’ll keep a place available here, including accruing for seniority, pension vesting, and such. Personnel will write a letter stating you can come back at any time if it doesn’t work out, you know, like when the voters catch on I don’t know what I’m doing.” That earned me a laugh. “We’re going to have to make some phone calls to figure this out. Now, do you want to talk it over with your husband?”

She shook her head. “No, he won’t have a problem with this. I’m your gal for this! This is great! When do I start?”

“I don’t know yet, but let’s tell the others.” I stuck out my hand and we shook on it. Then I led her down the hall and we told the new Chairman and President. They both gave us a thumbs up. Then I sent her off to find a note pad and a pen, and we started making some plans.

Talk to Brew McRiley.

Talk to Andrea Greene about leasing the campaign offices.

Talk to Andrea about buying a home in D.C.

Arrange for accommodations in Washington for the Orientation week. Talk to Taylor Hannity about a hotel room for the week or longer.

Get the final details for the Orientation week,

and finally

Talk to Brew McRiley!

I really needed to talk to Brewster. He needed to give me some last-minute instruction on how Congress worked before I got there. Sure, we had Orientation coming up, but I didn’t even know what I needed to know before I got that far! Behind the scenes in Congress are thousands of people who never make the evening news, but if you don’t do it right, you will be history.

Back when I was in the Army, they had long experience with new people coming into new commands, and they had developed schools and introductory courses so a new officer, no matter how bad he was, didn’t seem like an idiot when he got somewhere. The reverse had been the case with the Buckman Group, but we had the benefit of not actually knowing what we were doing anyway. We made it up as we went along. I had a feeling that Congress might be closer to a shark tank, and I would need to at least know how to dog paddle before I got there.

I had debated asking Brewster if he might be interested in a position as my Chief of Staff, but I shot that idea down as quickly as I came up with it. McRiley wasn’t interested in politics as a means to get anything accomplished. He saw it as a game and liked to play the game. He was a mercenary and simply moved from campaign to campaign, playing the game, and winning or losing. For him, winning simply meant an opportunity to move to a bigger campaign. No, while I would get a lot of information from him, he wouldn’t be part of my team, at least not until I was running again.

I cornered McRiley and got him into my office after lunch on Wednesday. “So, Brew, tell me how to be a Congressman!” I asked.

Brew laughed loudly at that. “Oh, Carl, you’re such a babe in the woods! Nobody cares about being a Congressman! They only care about being reelected!”

I rolled my eyes but smiled. This was in line with what he had told me all through the campaign. “Humor me, Brewster. Imagine that I actually gave a shit about being a Congressman. I know it’s a stretch but try to imagine it.”

“It’s easier to find bacon in Tel Aviv than it is to find a working Congressman in Washington. Okay, I’ll try.” He stood up and went over to my liquor cabinet. “We’re going to need a drink or two for this.”

I smiled and nodded, and he brought back a couple of glasses and bottles of gin and tonic water. I buzzed Cheryl and asked her to rustle up some ice. After she brought in the fixings for the booze, we made our drinks.

Brewster sat down and drank some of his drink and sighed blissfully. “Now, where were we? Oh, yes, discussing science fiction. Well, the first thing you have to understand is that all of the actual work is done by your staff. Forget about the sound bites and speeches from the elected representatives of this our great democracy. They don’t know shit about what is going on. It’s their staff that runs the place.”

“How big is my staff, anyway?” I asked.

“Right now? Zero!”

“None of the existing staff stay on?”

“Nope. They’re all Democrats anyway. No, you need to start lining up a staff now. You can have a maximum of twelve or fourteen - not sure on that - and they do everything.”

“Fourteen? Everybody gets that many? I mean if there’s 535 Congressmen and Senators...” I started doing the math in my head, and then switched to a calculator. “That’s almost 7,500 staffers!”

“Wrong. Congressmen get that many. Senators get three dozen! That’s almost ten thousand staff people. Plus, interns, don’t forget them.”

“Good Lord!”

“It gets worse,” he added. “That’s just the staffers for the individual Representatives and Senators. Congress itself has a staff. Each Congressional committee - you know, like Ways and Means or Armed Services - has its own staff. There are dozens of committees. Then the leadership, like the Speaker and the Whip, has a staff just for that. These are just the people who work on the laws. I’m not including any of the police or maintenance types. I wouldn’t be surprised if the total staff of the Congress was in the fifteen to twenty thousand range. I don’t think anybody knows!”

“Holy crap! That’s like an entire city!”

“Bingo! Now you know why they built the Hart Senate Office Building back in the Seventies. You simply can’t cram that many people into the Capitol. You won’t have an office in the Capitol itself. Only the leaders have those, the guys way up in seniority. You’ll be in either Cannon, Longworth, or Rayburn, down on Independence Avenue. That’s one of the things you’ll do in Orientation, get your office.”

“Huh,” I muttered to myself. “So, what in the world do all those people do?”

“Well, it’s like I said earlier, get you reelected. If you can accomplish anything while you’re at it, more power to you.” I gave him my driest look, and he shrugged and went on. “Okay, since you plan to be so tiresome as to actually want to do your job, here’s more for you to think about.”

We both drank some of our G&Ts and then he continued. “One thing you have to remember is that no single human can possibly read all the crap that comes through your office. It’s written by lawyers, for lawyers, and it would take way beyond twenty-four hours a day to actually go through the mountain of shit that is a single bill. Nobody expects you to read this stuff. That’s what some of your staff does. They sort through it, figure out if it’s what you want, and tell you what you think about it. Even more of this goes on at the committee level.”

I raised an eyebrow at that. “So, if I was being cynical and unscrupulous, and I wanted to screw around with a bill, why bother with the Congressman, just go after the staff.”

“I knew you’d catch on eventually,” he replied, smiling.

“What else do they do?”

We spent the rest of the afternoon discussing staff members. There was the Chief of Staff who ran it all. Maybe an Assistant Chief of Staff, but that might be more for the Senators. A Press Secretary to tell the world what a fantastic job I was doing. A Legislative Director and several staffers to work on bills. An Executive Assistant to tell me what I was doing. You always had caseworkers who would field complaints from the home office and constituents, to help them get their Social Security check or whatever. Plus, assistants and interns and general flunkies to round it all out. The most important person also turned out to be one of the lowest ranking people (isn’t that always the case?) - The person who logs in all the phone calls and letters and makes sure that each and every one is responded to. It is worse to ignore somebody than it is to tell them NO.

The Congressman was the least important person involved!

“So where do I find people to do this stuff? Call StaffRUs?” I asked.

“Pretty much. Don’t worry too much. There’s a huge subculture of staffers and wannabe staffers all around Washington. You’ll meet some of them at the Orientation next week. Find one, and they’ll start coming out of the woodwork.”

I was curious. “What will Stewart’s staffers be doing?”

He shrugged. “Same sort of thing. Looking for jobs on other Democratic staffs or going to work for a lobbyist. That’s one of the ways the lobbyists buy a Congressman. They don’t go after him, but they go after his staff, and promise them jobs in the future.”

“Good Lord! Does anything actually get accomplished?”

“Only when all else fails,” he replied. “Listen, very important, don’t piss off anybody else’s staff. Some of the long-term senior staffers for the more powerful members will have a shitload more pull than you will. Keep that in mind. If you have a chance to be nice to them, take it.”

“Not following you. Be nice, how?” I asked.

“There is a whole subculture in D.C. of caterers, decorators, real estate people, restaurants, travel agencies, and the like that are owned or operated or staffed by people related to Congressmen or Senators or their staff. Pay attention to that. All other things being equal, it would be better to hire a ‘Republican’ decorator than a ‘Democrat’. Follow me?”

“Christ! What a fucking snake pit!”

The rest of the week we spent preparing for the transition. I avoided signing anything important until after Orientation just in case I did something that was a violation of Federal law. In my experience, investigators from the Department of Justice had notoriously small senses of humor. For instance, was I allowed to enter into a long-term lease for the campaign headquarters? Could I use the same space for my local office and the future campaign headquarters? Could the headquarters have a door that opened into the local office, or did they have to be inviolably separate? Andrea thought up all these questions.

Who comes up with this shit? Didn’t the fine folks at the Federal Election Commission have better things to do than produce rules on this stuff? Apparently not. It turns out that I couldn’t use my campaign offices as my local office; they had to be separate, not even so much as a door between them. I got Andrea splitting the space into two sections and developing two lease agreements, one for me to pay for the campaign space and one for Congress to pay for my local offices.

Andrea didn’t handle real estate in the D.C. area, but she knew someone who did. She had gotten enough business off the Buckman Group and referrals over the years that she knew better than to steer me wrong. (The town house and property for me, the office and two expansions for the Buckman Group, John’s new home, the Tusk’s building and home, a house for Jake Junior, etc. - get the idea?) I checked with Brewster and found out that the person Andrea recommended was the wife of an assistant to the Chief of Staff for Vice President Quayle, an acceptable choice. I talked to this new person, a Jacqueline Staymann-Huestis, and made an appointment to meet with her during Orientation Week. I got the impression that she was busy but would be happy to sell me a house. Maybe when Andrea told her I was ludicrously rich she changed her mind.

Something else had been rattling around in my brain, as well. I was really rich now. I could buy lots of stuff, like an island villa - or a plane! How much would that cost me? I was now worth around $1.75 billion. At even a five percent return on my investment, which was ridiculously low, that was an annual income of over $87 million. I had to be able to pay operating expenses on a plane or helo at that level! I could fly home most nights. That redefined commuting!

Marilyn had to be with me for at least a night or two in Washington, but the kids had school, so we had to make plans. We made arrangements for a sitter to stay with the kids at the house for a few days, along with one of the security people. We would drive (well, be driven, anyway; it was so weird to be driven instead of just grabbing the keys and going) down Saturday night, Marilyn would stay through the introductory day on Sunday, and then get driven home on Monday. I could get my security detail to drive me around as necessary during the week, and then get me home at the end of the week.

The orientation schedule took an entire week. We would start out on Sunday at the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel, and we had booked a large suite for me starting Saturday night. One thing I knew was that in this job, more than any other I had ever had, I would need to schmooze. A suite with a parlor or living room could be useful. This was even more important when we bought a home. In this, my wealth was a major advantage. Washington is one of the most expensive cities in America. A large home in a nice neighborhood in a scenic setting, with a nice yard for the kids to run around in, would set me back several million dollars, on a par with what I paid for Hougomont, and way beyond the cost of our home in Hereford. However, did I want to buy a house? What if I figured out I was a disaster as a Congressman? Maybe a lease with an option to buy would be better?