Chapter 143: War

Monday, October 1, 2001

My most important Cabinet post left was Defense, what with Powell moving over to State. I thought about this some over the weekend but didn’t really do anything. Most of the time I simply played with the dog, and let the twins drag me and Marilyn all over the place showing me what they were finding. A lot of stuff is down in the basement. Also, there are several elevators and hidden stairwells and hallways. As amusing as it might be, you really don’t need the First Lady wandering through the Main Reception Hall on the ground floor looking for the swimming pool while a tour group comes through. Marilyn was pretty cute, but some of the First Ladies in swimsuits could be downright scary!

Saturday afternoon, Marilyn and I spent some time getting to know each other again. After breakfast I did some paperwork down in the Oval Office and then returned to the Residence. In our bedroom I found Marilyn lounging on the bed wearing a short silk robe. “Is this some sort of secret White House ritual I missed during Orientation?” I asked.

My wife smiled at me. “If you don’t like the idea...”

I waved my arms at her. “Now, don’t be hasty. I didn’t say anything like that. I’m just a little surprised, is all.” I began to unbutton my shirt.

Marilyn smiled. “I have to tell you, I had a visit from a very discreet Secret Service Agent, a woman, and we had a little discussion. Were you aware that we get every station broadcast anywhere in the world here? Or something like that. Stations like the Playboy channel? And a few others?” Marilyn blushed at that. “She showed me how to dial them up.”

I’d had the same conversation with somebody equally discreet but male. Not only did we have all sorts of stations, but if I wanted any sort of ‘marital aids’ or lingerie, I could place various orders using some fake addresses and account names. By the time he was done I was damn near rolling on the floor laughing. We had both had the same conversations when we had moved into the Naval Observatory, but somehow, in the White House, it seemed even sillier.

I kicked off my shoes and sat down on the bed, to start pulling off my socks. “I would have paid a pretty penny to have listened to that conversation. Did you have a question-and-answer period, or a test?” I stretched out on the bed next to Marilyn. She could do some of the work. “Just what kind of stations did she tell you about?” I decided to leave my glasses on.

Marilyn reached out and found a remote control on the nightstand and placed it on my chest. She snuggled up against me and told me to hit the ON button. She must have been playing earlier, because it immediately went to a movie that was already on, and in the beginning scenes of a very graphic blowjob on a very large television. I knew it wasn’t the Playboy channel, because as I remembered it, that was more of a hard R sort of station. I put an arm around her shoulders, and she snuggled up against me, and began running a finger through my chest hair.

“Is this really Presidential, do you think?” I asked.

Marilyn giggled. “From what I’ve seen of the President, this would be an improvement!”

“Oh, really? Maybe you need to get closer to double check!” I pushed on her shoulders and Marilyn giggled some more, and she began kissing her way down my chest slowly, while one hand began to undo my pants. A minute later Marilyn began imitating the movie, by sucking my cock and jacking on the shaft. Unfortunately, the scene changed, and the blonde on the screen moved to sit on the bald stud’s face. Marilyn decided that life needed to imitate art, so she peeled off her robe and sat on my face.

I couldn’t hear shit from the movie in this position, and certainly my vision was extremely limited. On the other hand, Marilyn wasn’t complaining, and after a few minutes was becoming rather vocal in her appreciation. Even before the movie went to the vaginal sex, Marilyn had moved down and decided to sit on me and bounce on my cock. “Couldn’t wait for the movie?” I teased.

“Just shut up and fuck me!” she hissed, lowering her tits down to my lips.

I licked at her nipples teasingly, and added, “What’s with you today? Not that I’m complaining. Just curious.”

“I only get to see you a few days a week now. I really need you. Now shut up and fuck me!”

I glanced over at the screen, and found they had changed positions, to doggy style, so I rolled Marilyn off me and moved into position behind her, and that was how we finished. Afterwards, I lay on my back, with Marilyn cuddled up against me, as the movie finished. “Now, let’s do that again,” she sighed.

I snorted a laugh at that. “Give me a few minutes, okay? By the way, were you aware that the President is always under surveillance?”

“Huh?”

“Well, you’ve seen the cameras around the West Wing and downstairs, right?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“Well, they are monitored in real time downstairs. You don’t think that’s the only part of the White House being monitored, do you?” I asked innocently.

Marilyn’s eyes snapped open, and she grabbed at the bedcovers we were unfortunately lying on. “No way! You don’t ... no!”

“Marilyn, ask any cop, ask Suzie’s husband, John, they’ll all tell you that most murders are by the spouse.” This was probably bullshit, but it sounded like something off Law and Order. “They have to protect me. Look, there’s a camera over there.” I pointed at the molding up by the ceiling at the foot of the bed. “And another over there.” I pointed across the room. I was just pointing at the molding; there were no cameras inside the Residence.

“You bastard! You are full of shit!” she said poking me in the side. “There’s no cameras here. Besides, we’ll just do it at night, then.”

“They have infrared cameras, too. See in the dark. And they probably are keeping a record of what channels we are watching,” I added.

“You are so full of shit!”

I shrugged and pushed on her shoulders again. “We just might as well give them a show.” She was right. It had been a week or so. Longer really, since last week back in Hereford, it had been that time of the month. We both needed to relieve some stress.

Marilyn and the girls and Stormy went back to Hereford Sunday evening. I promised to come home Friday afternoon.

Sunday afternoon I received a call from McCain, telling me he was onboard with the choice. He told me he had discussed it with Cindy and gotten her agreement. I thanked him and asked him not to tell his colleagues yet, but that we would do something this week.

Monday morning, I talked to Josh Bolten about some of the Cabinet choices. Tom Ridge was the governor of Pennsylvania, and like me and a few others, had been on the short list for Vice President. He had prior Congressional experience, and I knew that in a different life he would be picked to head Homeland Security after 9-11. I thought about Frank Keating for a moment but set him aside. I liked Frank and had met him several times during the Springboro tornado pleasantries, but his background was law enforcement. I like the idea of having him on tap as a possible replacement for Ashcroft. The current Attorney General was considerably more conservative than I was, and his overt religious tendencies tended to grate on my nerves, but his performance in the aftermath of 9-11 was superb. He had showed considerable strength and integrity, and I had no good reason to get rid of him.

I discussed all this with Josh and asked him to invite Ridge down for a chat. By lunchtime he reported that the Governor would be in my office Tuesday morning.

I didn’t have a replacement for Freeh at the FBI yet, or for Garvey at the FAA. In the case of the FAA, I was tending towards naming the Deputy Director to the spot. He seemed to be capable and was tightening things up over there. As for the FBI, I was at a loss. We needed somebody with law enforcement experience, and I just didn’t know that sort of thing. I hadn’t been impressed with Freeh, and while both his Deputy and Barnwell seemed capable, I didn’t see either of them as being the Director. I was going to have to talk this over with a few people.

My meeting with Tom Ridge went well, and he accepted the offer of Defense on the spot. At that point I called in Josh. “We need to make some announcements about this,” I told him.

“Then we need to get Ari in right now.”

“Good point!” I picked up the telephone and asked Ari to step in, and he joined us a couple of minutes later.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Ari, this is Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania. I asked him to become Secretary of Defense, and he has agreed, so we will need to make an announcement. Several, in fact. I think you know what’s been happening but let me make it clear. Colin Powell will move from Defense to State. Richard Clarke will be nominated for CIA, and John McCain will be coming onboard as the Vice President. What would be the best way to handle this?” I asked.

He was nodding to himself as I told him what was happening. Ari wasn’t dumb, so he must have been considering some of the latest comings and goings as possible appointments. “Have you discussed this with Congress yet? Not the whole Congress, but the leadership?”

“No, but I should. The Senate is going to have to sign off on Colin, Tom, and Richard Clarke, and both houses have to vote on John, as I recall.”

“Let’s kill two birds with one stone,” commented Josh. “Get the Group of Eight over here for lunch and tell them. I don’t care how much you stress this needs to be kept quiet. One of them is bound to talk to somebody. That primes the pump, so to speak. You make the formal announcement by the end of the week. You aren’t expecting any grief on this are you?”

I shook my head. “Colin’s already been through a Senate confirmation hearing, and I don’t see them refusing John McCain. Tom used to be in Congress himself, so again, I don’t expect problems. The only one I wonder about is Clarke, and I think we can push the fact that we need to shake up the agency.” I looked over at Josh. “Can you make a few phone calls and set up a nice lunch over here tomorrow or Thursday so we can let them know?”

“Even better, have the nominees here as well. Give them a chance to meet and greet,” added Ari. “Do you plan to do a broadcast on this?”

“Do you think I should? I’ll be doing another broadcast next week, and I don’t need to wear out my welcome with the networks.”

“Iraq?” he asked.

“We’ll talk later, Ari. One problem at a time,” I answered.

“Okay. Then Friday morning you read a prepared statement in the Press Room naming your choices, with them in the background. They each read something short and sweet. No questions.” I raised an eyebrow at that, and he explained, “The first question everybody is going to ask is when we are invading Iraq, and the second will be why you fired Dick Cheney. We don’t need either.”

I looked at the other two and nodded. “He makes a certain amount of sense.”

Tom chuckled and said, “Yes, sir.”

Josh added, “Scary, isn’t it?”

I turned back to Ari and nodded. “Let Mike and Matt know what’s going on and tell them I need a short statement. If we do this Friday morning, somebody will have blabbed by then. We’ll need to have some talking heads for the Sunday news shows.”

Ari nodded in return. “Josh and Frank. Frank’s young but surprisingly good. By the way, I wanted to speak to you about Carter. Don’t get me wrong. Carter’s nice, but he’s not a spokesman type. We are going to need somebody else.”

I shrugged. That had been a long shot. “Okay. I will let you figure that one out. I really don’t know what that entails and how you find a guy. Have you talked it over with Carter?”

“Yes. We both knew this was coming. He can move into more of a legislative role of some sort. That’s more his interest, anyway,” Ari replied.

“I’ll confirm this with Carter, but if you need somebody different, so be it. If Carter doesn’t like the change, I know he can find a home over on K Street anyway. I’ll talk to him this afternoon,” I answered.

“Thank you, Mister President.” At that the meeting broke up and everybody left.

We had the official luncheon on Thursday in a room on the ground floor of the Residence across from the Map Room. By then, two days after the decision to do this, there was already some leaking from the White House. I was a little surprised by that, but not much. Nobody was really saying anything yet, but Ari commented that there had been a few questions in the hallways by the Press Corps. He seemed to think this would be good. One of the Congressmen would yap, that was guaranteed, and ‘speculation’ would be on the nightly news. This would prime things for our announcement Friday morning.

Lunch was to be relatively simple, soup and salads and sandwiches, but all eaten on White House china. Over the years, some Presidents discounted the need to schmooze Congress, and they tended to be less successful. As I had told John McCain, I wanted to work them like a salesman working a customer. The fellows who were going to be at the luncheon wouldn’t be all that impressed, because they were senior people, and had all been there multiple times before. However, you get some first or second term Congressman from Butte, Montana, or Pigs Knuckle, Arkansas, and invite him to the White House? Wow! That’s impressive! Work him, make him feel important, ask him about something from back home - I don’t care what party he’s from, it makes it easier to sell the fellow. Throw in some of the swag available, and the vote is half in the bag.

What was swag? All sorts of things, simple stuff with the Presidential Seal, like cuff links, tie clips, business card holders, cigarette lighters, match books, pens and pencils, fake coins. Some is for men, and some is for women. Give it to somebody personally, along with a handshake. If you go to a John Deere dealer to buy a tractor and he throws in a ball cap, that’s swag. You just bought a half million dollar combine and got a free ball cap, and now you think the dealer is your best friend. Guess what? We had White House ball caps, too. It was similar to what I had for the constituents back in Congress, only I had more stuff and a bigger budget.

Some of that wouldn’t work on the leadership, but it still paid to be polite and break bread. Most of them knew the lunch was more than just a meeting, and nobody was surprised to find Clarke, McCain, Ridge, and Powell in the room. Josh, Frank, and Ari were with us, also. Before we had lunch, I went to a small podium and made the official announcement. “Thank you all for coming. One of the things I promised all of you was that I intended to work closely with Congress. I apologize if I couldn’t meet with you all last week, but you all know how busy that schedule was. One of the things I want to talk with you about today is coming up with a more formal schedule for lunches, both with the leadership and with other members of Congress. In any case, I asked you here to meet some of the candidates we have to fill some of the current vacancies in the Executive branch.” At that I gave a quick rundown of who was doing what, and a request that the leadership work with me to see that everybody was confirmed quickly.

Nobody gave me any grief over McCain or Powell. There was a bit more comment about Ridge, but only because he wasn’t as well known. The same applied to Richard Clarke, with the added difficulty that several people knew that the Bush White House had fired him, and here I was bringing him back. It was a very obvious sign the Buckman Administration was going to be different, and not everybody in Congress was going to be thrilled with that. I simply asked that the confirmation hearings be expedited, and that the various Committee Chairs in the Senate contact us to set up meetings.

I got a bit more grief about the upcoming response to the 9-11 attacks. Pretty much everybody wanted to know what I was going to do about it and when, and why hadn’t we already done it, and why they hadn’t been told weeks ago, like on the 12^th. I just kept pushing the answer that it would be soon, and that security restrained me from letting anybody know until it started. There was some grumbling at that, but I kept a stoic look on my face.

It was also obvious that people knew something was up, just not what. I was told they were hearing from constituents that family members had been updating wills and going into lockdowns on bases, and that planes had been flying out to parts unknown. I was being asked about every country from Libya to Pakistan. I just shook my head and refused to answer. I simply promised that it would be sometime soon.

If I said what was going to happen, the Afghanis would be filing a complaint in the United Nations before I made it back to the Oval Office.

As predicted, all four names were leaked by somebody in time for the Thursday night news, along with a comment that the White House would make a response Friday morning.

Friday morning, Ari had us all troop into the Press Room, read our statements, and then we all trooped out again. There were no questions and answers, but we weren’t worried. The four men were all known quantities. The news would be full of them, and on Sunday Frank and Josh would make the rounds of the talk shows, extolling their virtues.

I couldn’t fly home that weekend.

Monday was X-Day, and I needed to be in place. I was ordering our troops into combat. The bombs might not start falling until Monday, but the planes had to take off hours ago, in some cases, early Sunday. Everything was compounded by the fact that Afghanistan was eight-and-a-half hours ahead of us. We had decided to bomb them at 9:00 AM local time. That made it 12:30 AM Washington time. The most complicated factor was the need to tell the Pakistani Ambassador we were committing hostile acts in his nation’s sovereign airspace. They would be well within their rights to disagree with that. Violently.

We asked the Pakistani Ambassador to arrive at the White House at about 11:00 PM. Both Colin Powell and I would greet him. Condi Rice was supposed to be there, but she had been looking a little green around the gills earlier in the day and had ended up at Bethesda with a bad bout of the flu.

By the time we told the ambassador what was happening, and he got back to the embassy, even if he managed to make an immediate phone call home, it would be too late. Our birds would be across the border and over their targets before they could do anything. “Anything you can tell me about the ambassador?” I asked Colin. “What’s his name?”

“Her name is Doctor Maliha Lodhi. She’s been here a couple of years or so. According to her file, she’s a big wig in their Foreign Office,” he answered.

“So, she probably speaks better English than I do?”

“No probably about it. She used to be their ambassador to the Court of St. James before this.”

I snorted at that. Colin finished with the Cliff Notes version of her background right up until 10:45, when the Ambassador’s arrival was announced. Both Secretary Powell and I were standing when she was ushered into the Oval Office. I moved forward and said, “Thank you, Madame Ambassador, for coming at such a late hour. I know this is unusual, but a situation is developing that requires this of all of us.”

She had a pronounced British accent. “Of course, Mister President. Allow me to say how sorry the Pakistani nation is at the events of September 11, and that the entire nation despises what occurred that day.”

“Your words are most kind, Madame Ambassador.” And not quite true, I thought to myself. More than a few of the dancing and chanting crowds had been in Islamabad and Karachi.

She turned to Colin and said, “It is a pleasure to see you again, Secretary Powell. Might I ask if you are here in your role as Secretary of Defense, or your future role as Secretary of State?” Technically, in the event the Secretary of State was unavailable, his Deputy would be present. Unfortunately, that was Scooter Libby, now on a paid leave of absence while dealing with the Department of Justice.

“For tonight, I must report that would be both roles,” replied Colin.