Chapter 125: Vetting

The campaign unfolded just about like I thought it would. About half or more of the candidates dropped out even before the primaries started, when their exploratory committees went exploring, and discovered that the far horizon had no money on it. About half a dozen stayed in, but the only two who counted were Bush and McCain. Neither of the two choices thrilled me. I knew Bush would be a disaster, but after seeing the hash McCain made of his campaign in 2008 on my first go, I wasn’t overly sanguine about him either.

Bush smacked McCain around in the Iowa Caucus, but then McCain won in the New Hampshire primary. After that pretty much everybody else dropped out of the race, although there were a few primaries they ran in because their names were already on the ballots. After South Carolina, though, things really went against McCain. Bush began running a very dirty and negative campaign, with intimations that McCain had fathered a child with a black prostitute. Karl Rove, Bush’s campaign director, swore up and down that he had nothing to do with it; nobody believed a word he said.

By Super Tuesday it was all over. On March 7, 2000, there were thirteen Republican primaries, and except for a few small states in the Northeast, George Bush won big. It was the final nail in the McCain coffin. The convention was to be held in Philly at the end of July, but by the end of March the pundits and politicians were already chattering about who would be Bush’s nominee for Vice President.

Dick Cheney, a longtime Republican power player, was placed in charge of George Bush’s search for a Vice Presidential candidate by the end of April. Cheney had been in Washington forever, going back to being an intern for Dick Nixon. He had been a Wyoming Congressman for years, and had once had my job, as Republican Whip. Then he served under George’s dad (the smart Bush) as Secretary of Defense. Since then, he had been out of the public spotlight, and in Dallas running Halliburton. He was also the most disingenuous choice possible for the job of picking a Vice President. After much deliberation and soul searching, he found the perfect candidate - himself! I couldn’t wait to be ‘surprised’ again at this.

Well, I was surprised, when at a dinner with George Will, his wife Mari, and Marilyn, George commented, “I heard the other day that you were on the list for Vice Presidential choices.”

I stared at him for a second, before replying, “I think you better check your sources on that one. If I’m on the list, it’s only because the Tooth Fairy had a conflict of interest.”

Marilyn looked at us curiously. “You’re being considered for Vice President? When did you plan to tell me?”

I arched an eyebrow and answered, “As soon as somebody tells me. I think our friend here is just trying to get a rise out of me and see if I snap at the bait.”

“Congressman Buckman, how can you think such a thing?” said a pious George Will. Mari simply rolled her eyes.

I pointed towards him and looked at Marilyn. “Uh, huh! See!” I turned back to him and said, “Nice try.”

“So, who is on the list?” asked Marilyn.

I shrugged. “The long list or the short list? The long list is just about anybody who’s a Republican with a pulse. The short list is the serious one.”

Mari added, “By that standard, Carl actually is on the long list.”

“So, Congressman, for the record, what is your response?” asked George.

I put my most serious face on and grasped my lapels, trying to look pompous, and replied, “I fully intend to support whichever candidate is chosen, and assist them in their run for the White House.”

“So, you are saying nothing.”

“You have grasped the overall concept. Who’s on your short list?” I countered.

He shrugged. “Eh, the usual suspects. The safe bet is McCain, simply because he was number two, and it shows party unity, but that won’t happen.”

“Why not?” asked Marilyn.

“Because he doesn’t need him, and they generally don’t like each other,” I said. Turning back to George, I asked, “Who else? What about Liddy Dole? It would be good for the women’s vote.”

“That’s an interesting idea.” We tossed around a few more names, and Cheney never popped up once. George finished with, “So you’re not interested?”

“In what? In playing this game? Sure, I love the game. In running for Vice President? I think the Tooth Fairy has a better chance. Hell, throw your name in the hat! You’re smarter than most of them anyway.”

“I couldn’t afford the pay cut,” he laughed.

That evening, as we drove back to the house on 30^th, Marilyn asked me, “Was he serious about that?”

I laughed. “NO! He was just trying to push my buttons and get me to say something that he could then use to go after some other poor schmuck. He’s just trying to stir the pot and see what bubbles to the top.”

“Oh. Would you want to run for Vice President?”

I opened my mouth for a snappy rejoinder, but then closed it again. It was a fair question. I glanced over at her and said, “I don’t know. Leaving aside that the odds of this ever happening are somewhere lower than the odds of me ever seeing Heaven, I don’t know. As Majority Whip, or some other House leader, I would probably have a lot more power than the Vice President. The only reason it makes sense is if I wanted to run for President someday.”

“Would you?”

I was saved from answering by our arrival in our driveway. “Saved by the bell, the doorbell in this case!” We went inside without finishing our conversation. I opened a bottle of wine and we shared that while snuggling together on the couch, but all the while, I was thinking about those two questions.

Would I want to run for President? God forbid! To spend two years shaking hands in Iowa and New Hampshire, crisscrossing the country, begging for money, never seeing my wife and children for weeks upon end, while reporters and investigators climbed so far up my ass that I would see their smiling faces when I brushed my teeth? I shuddered at the very thought! If you need to have ‘fire in the belly’ to run for President, I could honestly state that I didn’t.

Vice President was a different topic, though. For one thing, you really don’t campaign for the job so much as you campaign for the Presidential candidate. You only have to be in campaign mode for the summer and fall, maybe four months. After that, you either lose and go home, or you win and go to sleep until the President dies. In my case, as a Congressman, I would need to run two campaigns, one for Vice President and the other as Representative of the Maryland Ninth. It looked as if the Democratic candidate for my House seat was as ham-handed as some of his predecessors, so I was reasonably confident I would win again. If I lost as VP, I would still have my day job. If I won, they’d have a special election to replace me. That’s one of the reasons Presidential nominees often ask Senators to be a VP; if they pick one who isn’t up for re-election, a loss doesn’t mean he’s out of a job.

One of the best reasons to be Vice President is if you want to become the President! If the President is good and successful (Reagan) his Vice President (Bush) is a shoo-in. However, if the President is unsuccessful or unpopular (Johnson) it’s a much tougher row to hoe. Hubert Humphrey did not beat Dick Nixon. Still, it’s good for name recognition. More than a few failed VP nominees have then gone on to run for President.

Vice Presidential selection is as much of an art as it is a science. At one point in our history, a Presidential candidate selected a nominee who would complement the Presidential nominee. If the top guy was a northerner, the other guy was a southerner. Mike Dukakis from Massachusetts selected Lloyd Bentsen from Texas, for example. (The same thing applied with JFK and LBJ, curiously enough.) Maybe you select a moderate (George Bush) to tone down a conservative (Reagan) or maybe you select somebody who can carry an important state for you (Ike picking Californian Nixon, or JFK and LBJ again.)

That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, you get some very strange results. Kennedy and Johnson had just come off a brutal primary season, and they hated each other’s guts. Supposedly, Kennedy used Johnson to get him the critical Texas votes in the election, but I also heard that the election was rigged by Mayor Daley and the Chicago machine and a wonderful graveyard vote count.

It is much truer that the VP nominee rarely helps and almost always hurts. Dan Quayle looked like an eager little kid next to Bush 41 and Sarah Palin was a whack job with the IQ of a mouse. One of the worst examples was in 1972, when George McGovern selected Thomas Eagleton as his choice, only to have it discovered that Eagleton had received psychiatric treatment for depression. He had to be replaced, which did wonders for McGovern’s campaign after he announced he would back Eagleton “100 percent!” Certainly, with my ‘billionaire murderer’ stigma, there was no way anybody would ever want me running.

We were finishing our wine when the girls came downstairs and found us still snuggling on the couch. They were in sweatpants and t-shirts, and Holly asked, “What are you doing?”

Marilyn giggled and answered, “I’m snuggling with my sweetie!”

“Mom! Oh, that is so disgusting!”

I bit my tongue to keep from laughing. Marilyn said, “Give me a break! Where do you think you two came from?”

“GROSS!”

Molly chimed in, “I think I’m going to vomit!”

The pair of them made gagging noises and headed towards the kitchen. Marilyn giggled again and groped me through my pants. “Gross!” she said. “Want to go upstairs and see if we can be disgusting?”

I snorted in laughter and led her up the stairs. “As long as we don’t vomit!” I whispered.

It became doubly curious a few weeks later, when on one of the Sunday morning talk shows, my name was mentioned as a ‘long shot’ candidate. I was considered a leader in the House (as Whip that was true enough, I suppose, though after less than a full two-year term you really couldn’t call me ‘tried and tested’) and a leading intellectual in the young conservative movement. That one had me scratching my head since I wasn’t all that conservative. Monday morning Marty was asking me about it, and the only thing we could come up with was that somebody was using my name to drive their own agenda. It was certain that nobody had approached me from the Bush campaign.

A week later Fletcher Donaldson tracked me down and called me to ask me my thoughts on being on the short list. “Fletcher, if I was on the short list, don’t you think somebody would have told me? Where are you getting this stuff?” He refused to tell me, and I let Marty and Marilyn in on this latest rumor. In most cases, being known as being on the short list was considered a good thing. It showed you to be a ‘serious’ leader worthy of consideration for higher office, and who wouldn’t want that? I’d even heard of Congressmen and Senators lobbying Presidential nominees to leak that they were in the short list, so that it would help them in their regular re-election bid.

The second week of May Marty announced that I had an appointment with a couple of staffers from Governor Bush’s election campaign, but it was to be in the Whip’s office. In some ways this didn’t surprise me; in fact, if they hadn’t wanted to meet with the Whip it would have surprised me more. I took the subway train from my office in Rayburn over to the Whip’s office in the Capitol. What did surprise me, once they had been shown in and we seated ourselves, was when they announced that they weren’t from the campaign, per se, but were from Dick Cheney’s office. “Congressman,”, one of them started, “we wanted to talk to you about whether or not you’d be interested in becoming the Vice-Presidential nominee.”

I tried to keep the surprise off my face. This wasn’t what I had suspected the conversation was to be about. “Is that a job offer?” I asked, smiling.

“That might be a little premature,” commented the other man. “We’re just curious about your thoughts on the rumors floating around the Capitol these days.”

“I’ve heard those rumors. I’ve been curious about them, too. I know I didn’t start them, so who did? Any ideas gentlemen?”

Staffer Number One simply smiled and shook his head. “Not really, Congressman.” Yes really, we leaked it.

My mind was racing at this point. Was this part of the selection process? Leak a name and see what happens? Does the candidate start some kind of response? Does he begin pushing his name in the press, or stating he doesn’t want the job, or complaining about the other candidates? So far, I hadn’t done any of those things. My responses had all been a variation of two themes, and I gave them both again. “Well, of course I want to do anything I can to help Governor Bush in his bid for the White House. I’m just surprised that my name ever came up when there are so many much higher profile candidates.”

“Congressman, you never actually came out in support of Governor Bush during the primaries. Why is that?” asked Number Two.

I gave a noncommittal shrug. “It was always my position that I would support the eventual winner. My concern was for the future. If I supported the Governor, I’ve just made Senator McCain unhappy, and I have to work with him. If I support Senator McCain, I have the same issue with President Bush if the Governor wins, and even if he loses, I didn’t want to insult his father, the first President Bush, who I hold in the highest respect.” That seemed a decent enough argument. “Besides, I’m damn near the only Republican in the Maryland Ninth, and I don’t think I am going to sway anybody else in the state to vote Republican. I suspect Maryland will vote for Al Gore.” I gave a wry smile as I said this.

I received a smile in return. Two asked, “You were a supporter of the Governor’s father, correct?”

“Very much so. He was in office when I first came to Capitol Hill, and I consider him a fine gentleman and a good President. I definitely supported him in his re-election run,” I answered firmly.

One nodded and asked, “Back to the reason we are here. What would your thoughts be as to being on the ticket?”

I stared at the man for a moment, and then looked back and forth between them. They weren’t smiling or joking. “This is serious? I’m being considered for the short list?”

“Yes, sir. This is serious. Your name has been brought up in conjunction with the short list.”

I sagged back into my chair at that. My brain was running in about a million directions. After about thirty seconds, I repeated it. “Seriously?”

“Yes, sir.”

I blinked at that. “Well, it’s certainly not something I had considered. I figured somebody was just trying to stir the pot and see what rose to the top. All I can tell you is that I would have to give this some serious thought.”

Two said, “I would think, Congressman Buckman, that in the last few weeks, since these rumors started, that you’ve had a chance to think about this already.”

I gave him a hard look. “There’s thinking about it and then there’s thinking about it. I would certainly have to discuss this with my wife and family.”

They glanced at each other and nodded imperceptibly. One opened his briefcase and brought out a thick manila envelope. “Congressman, as you can imagine, there are certain time constraints we are operating under. We are just starting the process of vetting all the candidates. If you are interested in being on the short list, we’ll need to know within two weeks, and we’ll need this paperwork filled out by then.”

I raised an eyebrow at that. “Oh? What is this, a job application?”

One gave a small shrug and an even smaller smile, and Two simply nodded. “It’s simply some background material Mister Cheney and Governor Bush will need to help make the decision.”

I eyed the envelope. “Let me look this over. I’ll be in touch.”

“We’ll need this filled out in two weeks, sir.”

“I’ll be in touch.” I stood up, ending the meeting.

One then said, “This needs to be kept in the strictest confidence, of course.”

I eyed him and cocked my head to the side. “Well, that ends my plans to tell the New York Times, doesn’t it? I need to talk this over with my wife.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Good day, Congressman.”

“Good day.”

I showed the staffers out the door and then closed it behind them. I went back to the couch and sat down. Grabbing the envelope, I opened it up and leafed through the paperwork. It was a lengthy form with over 80 questions. If I thought the vetting process had been bad when I ran for Congress, this was ten times worse! Vast sections were about my finances, they wanted details of all my living relatives (and Marilyn’s) out as far as we could find them, and details about my education and military experience I wasn’t sure I could ever remember. I needed to provide copies of my voting record since I entered Congress along with copies of all speeches ever given. There were releases which needed to be signed so they could obtain transcripts, public records, and even my medical records. There was stuff in there I had never heard of. No way would I ever be able to fill it out; this would require my lawyers and accountants. The response would probably involve enough paperwork to fill a van.

Still, none of it meant anything unless Marilyn gave me her approval. Did I even want to do it? Maybe, if I could have any kind of influence on George Bush, if I was selected, if we made it into office. There were a lot of ifs in that statement. First things first. I pulled out my phone and hit the speed dial for Marilyn.

“Hello?”

“Hi. You busy?”

“Not particularly. I was just about to switch the laundry from the washer to the dryer. What’s up?”

“Are you alone?”

“No, I have the pool boy, the lawn boy, and a couple of maintenance guys waiting for me in the bedroom. Why?”

“Marilyn!”

“Of course, I’m alone! The girls are in school. What’s up?”

“Listen, you can’t tell them, or anybody else. You know, like you wouldn’t tell your mother all the things you like having me do late at night...”

“CARL!”

“Okay, you know those rumors about me being on the short list for the VP slot? They aren’t just rumors. I’m really under consideration,” I told her.

“What? Really?”

“That’s about what I said,” I admitted. “I just had a couple of staff guys from Dick Cheney’s office in here sounding me out. They left me with some paperwork I need to sort through, and I have to give them an answer in two weeks.”

There was silence for a moment, then she asked, “What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know. What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know. Do you want to be the Vice President?” Marilyn asked.

“Yes. No. Maybe. If I could actually do anything, then maybe, but no way do I want to do this if you don’t want me to.”

“They didn’t ask me.”

“Marilyn, I’m serious. I know you’ve said I should do something if I thought I could, but this is a whole different level of weird! If I say yes, and if I get selected, and if we win in November ... well, it really affects all of us!”

“Huh.” There was some more silence, then she said, “I’m not saying no, but I want to talk about it tonight.”

“Fair enough. See you later.”

I couldn’t think enough to get anything else accomplished that afternoon, so I called for my driver and packed the envelope into my briefcase. I was home about an hour later, arriving just after the girls came home from cheerleading practice. Tonight, was spaghetti night. I really wasn’t in the mood for small talk, but no way did I want to discuss this over the dinner table with my daughters.

They noticed as well, and Holly said, “What’s going on? You two are up to something!”

Molly piped up, “Yeah, you two are doing something!”

I gave them my innocent face. “No idea what you are talking about.” Marilyn smiled and rolled her eyes.

“No! See! Look at Mom’s face! She can’t keep a secret! You two are trying to hide something!” pushed Holly.

Marilyn grimaced at that, though I was tempted to laugh. She really can’t keep a secret and has no ability to hide anything. I shrugged and responded. “It’s really nothing. Well, the Swiss boarding school called this afternoon and told us the check cleared, but other than that...”

“Not funny, Dad! Not funny!” squealed our youngest. Her sister just glowered at us.

I shrugged and Marilyn buried her face in her napkin, hiding her smile. We finished our dinner and the twins headed into the living room to watch television. I helped Marilyn in the kitchen, and then we headed off to my office. I made sure to close the door, and then positioned my chair so that I could see if the girls tried to sneak up and listen. I had caught them doing that once or twice, but the door was a French door with glass panes, and I could see them approaching if they tried.