Chapter 152: Changes

2002-2003

I spent the rest of the summer letting my ribs heal, which put a real crimp in my Krav Maga training and workouts. Doc Tubb heard, probably from the Residence staff, that I had a beer with my pain pill, and promptly chewed me out and put me on ibuprofen instead of anything more amusing. Marilyn gave me an insufferably superior look when she heard that. The twins were concerned that after jumping on me and then landing on the ground, Stormy might have been hurt. They were less concerned about their beloved father. I simply looked at Marilyn and asked, “When do they go to college?”

She sighed and smiled. “Not soon enough!”

“Think it will seem lonely? Just you, me, and hundreds of staffers and servants?”

She simply rolled her eyes at that.

Dick Cheney managed to self-destruct over the summer. He could have been a major pain in the keister if he had decided to mount a primary challenge in 2004, and for quite a while it sounded like he was going to do just that. By August, however, he was finished. The Special Joint Committee had issued subpoenas to damn near everybody with any link to the intelligence system prior to 9-11, and some people cooperated, and some didn’t. Radziwill, the State Department flunky ordered by his boss to shut down the DIA’s Able Danger program turned State’s Evidence in order to stay out of jail, and he fingered Scooter Libby. Scooter was caught perjuring himself and ended up on trial by the end of the summer.

Also on trial was Dick Cheney, who refused to cooperate. He was too smart to lie, so he clammed up and claimed executive privilege. The administration said ‘No’ on this, which did not sit well with him, so he sued me. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that he had no standing to claim executive privilege, and a surprisingly fast appeal was turned down. At that point he went in front of Congress and after being sworn in, made a statement. “On the advice of counsel, I hereby refuse to testify, and I invoke my Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.” Then he stood up and walked out of the hearing room, while the rest of the room erupted in shouting and recriminations, with the gavel banging and demands to return under penalty of a Contempt of Congress charge.

The contempt charge passed the committee unanimously, though Cheney had enough friends in Congress, so the House vote wasn’t unanimous. It made no difference. There was a lot of rigamarole surrounding it, and the Counsel’s office kept me apprised, but the result was that Cheney pled guilty to the contempt charge but didn’t have to testify or admit to anything. Cheney treated it as an acquittal, but not so the rest of the country. Brewster McRiley, my long-time campaign consultant, told me that Cheney was sniffing around the Republican Party moneymen, and was getting nowhere.

The coup de grace came in August, when Scooter pled guilty to one count of perjury and one count of obstructing justice and was sentenced to 8 months in Club Fed and a $100,000 fine. There was the de rigueur request for a pardon, which I refused. Cheney was invited on This Week to give his opinion. He stated that, “President Buckman’s cold-hearted and cynical refusal to pardon an honorable public servant was akin to leaving a man on the battlefield!”

At that point, Fletcher Donaldson, a guest journalist on their ‘Powerhouse Roundtable’ who was now Washington bureau chief for the Baltimore Sun and an accredited White House Correspondent, replied, “Mister Secretary, you received five military deferments during the Viet Nam War, and President Buckman earned a Bronze Star for not leaving men on the battlefield. Are you sure you want to be making a comparison like that?”

Dick pretty much lost it at that point, and told Fletcher, Sam Donaldson, and Cokie Roberts that I wasn’t supposed to be the President, that George Bush had wanted me gone and wanted me to resign, and he should have been the President because Bush had promised it to him. Then he ran me down as a traitor to the office and to the Party. The looks of disbelief were astonishing. Ari brought me out to the morning Press Briefing the next day to refute everything Cheney had said, and I told the truth, that there had never been any such conversations, that no promises had been made, that I had never been asked to resign, etc. No, I couldn’t explain Mister Cheney’s bizarre behavior. All I had to do was look mystified and refuse to speculate when somebody asked me if I thought Dick Cheney was suffering from something stress related.

So much for the current crop of neocons.

That didn’t mean any of us could relax. All it would take was a single incident to go bad for the conservatives to call for my replacement, with somebody who would ‘fix the problem, once and for all!’ We had almost had such an incident with the ‘Shoe Bomber’, Richard Reid, last December, when an Islamic nutcase tried to ignite a shoe filled with explosives on a plane from overseas, and he couldn’t manage to light the fuse. Dick Clarke was doing a decent job with the CIA, and Winston Creedmore with coordinating intelligence, and Congress had put the fear of God into a few bureaucrats with their investigation. We had managed to stop or capture at least a dozen bombers since 9-11, some foreign born and some home grown. One major help was that people had figured out all on their own that if somebody was fucking around, it was perfectly permissible to gang tackle them and let the authorities sort it out later. Thank you, Flight 93, for that valuable lesson.

One major discussion was about how much we let the public know. If we told people we had foiled a plot, the bad guys would invariably get information on how we foiled it, and then be able to change their tactics. If we didn’t tell people, then they had no idea of the level of danger and would think the problem was over and we didn’t need to be careful. Whatever we did, we all pretty much concluded that we couldn’t tell Congress jack shit, since it would be on television before we ever made it home. The Congressmen who heard about that were not amused, and called on the Administration to be more forthcoming, not less, and how they were trustworthy. That made it to the press as well, and how anybody was able to read that and listen to it with a straight face was miraculous.

Nobody had heard from bin Laden, though plenty of old videos were still circulating. Had he been killed? Was he buried in the rubble or a collapsed cave? Was he in hiding? Nobody knew, or if they knew, they weren’t telling. Without a body, none of us dared claim he was dead; you just knew that five minutes after that were to occur, he would resurface on live television.

One thing popped up very quickly, and that was that the name Al Qaeda had lost its trademark status. Just like all copiers got called Xeroxes, now all Islamic terrorists were calling themselves Al Qaeda. Groups of assholes who had never heard of Osama Bin Laden before 9-11 were now calling themselves a branch of Al Qaeda. They figured it was good advertising, and a way to gain recruits and funds. CIA was reporting Al Qaeda groups popping up all over the world, most of whom had never met anybody in the original group.

Afghanistan had settled down into a low-level civil war. Al Qaeda and the Taliban had taken a massive pounding, and the few survivors had fled across the mountains into Pakistan, leaving the country in the hands of the new warlords from the Northern Alliance. The Alliance was an alliance of convenience. The individual warlords had their own tribes and their own interests, and promptly settled down to low level fighting among themselves, usually over poppy territories and heroin distribution. Meanwhile, the Taliban was reconstituting itself in Pakistan, with help from the ISI, and was beginning to come back into Afghanistan, killing along the way. I would get reports from Clarke and Creedmore every few weeks, and it sounded like another low-level civil war, much like what had evolved over more than a decade after the Russians left the country in 1989. All our personnel had been yanked months ago, though Clarke still had a handful of agents present with the various Northern Alliance warlords. We funneled some arms to them to help them fight the Taliban, but otherwise kept our noses clean.

If Afghanistan didn’t exist, somebody on acid would have had to invent it. Why anybody in their right mind wanted us to be there was beyond me!

Iraq simmered along much as it had during the Clinton and Bush presidencies. Every few months they would make bellicose noises and violate the no-fly zones or light up an American warplane with their fire control radar. Our response was predictable. We would shoot down the wandering intruder or destroy an anti-aircraft missile battery, and then toss a few cruise missiles at them. It was a low level of combat, enough to keep the Air Force and Navy pilots on their toes, and keep people well trained, and cost us a few billion dollars a year, but no lives. Compared to the cost of either invading the country, or letting Saddam Hussein run loose, that was cheap insurance.

As part of our surveillance on Iraq, Richard Clarke had what assets he had available, admittedly not many, on the ground in Iraq. One group of Arabic speakers was stationed in the Southern No-Fly Zone, where they spied on the Shiites and the Sunnis. They weren’t noticeably successful at this. The Sunnis were the people supporting Hussein, and the Shiites were friendly with the nutcases over in Iran.

Much more successful were the agents we had on the ground in the Northern No-Fly Zone, which was centered over Kurdistan. The Kurds were mostly Sunnis, like Hussein, but of a slightly different flavor. Much more important was the fact that the Kurds were not of Arabic descent and did not consider themselves Iraqi. This was one of those wonderful examples of the Western colonial powers sorting things out by just drawing lines on a map. Kurdistan, the ancestral homeland of the Kurdish people, was centered on northern Iraq, eastern Turkey, western Iran, and the northern tip of Syria. They had been carrying on a low-level guerilla war in most of these places, and really hated the Iraqis, who had gassed them on at least one occasion. Colin Powell and the State Department strongly recommended making nice with these people and trying to get them to make nice with Turkey, a NATO ally. I shrugged and went along with him. I still didn’t trust the ragheads, but that was what we were paying Colin for, to jaw-jaw and not war-war.

In late August we took another family vacation, probably our last as a family, at Hougomont. Charlie took a few days of leave and joined us the weekend before the girls were supposed to go to college. It was hot, but nice. We didn’t get there very often anymore. It was one thing when I was a Congressman. The Maryland Ninth was a small district, and most of the residents knew I had a place in the Bahamas when I first ran for Congress. It was simple for me to defuse the problem if anybody commented.

Not so as the President. It was an example that I was too rich and not one of the common people (like there were actually poor Congressmen and Senators who didn’t vacation well.) Worse, I was vacationing somewhere in a foreign country, and not in the good old U.S. of A! My God, I was damn near a commie! At least half a dozen state governors, on both sides of the aisle, made public comments that there were many wonderful places in their states that would have been even nicer. (North Dakota? Really? I must have missed the sandy beaches in the travel brochure.)

We managed to cover it as a ‘business trip’ by calling it a Caribbean Summit and inviting about a half dozen ambassadors to a nice dinner at Government House. We all smiled and shook hands and did some speechifying and posed for pictures. Meanwhile, while all the cameras were on me and Marilyn, Charlie took the girls over to Paradise Island. He dressed in civvies and a straw hat and sunglasses, and not too many people knew what he looked like. His sisters had been much more in the limelight since I had started campaigning for Bush in 2000. They had a great time figuring out disguises.

We warned them all about not doing anything stupid while reporters or cameras were around, and then sent them off with a small team of Secret Service people, right after Marilyn and I left the house in a limo and entourage. They went out in a very nondescript pair of cars. Charlie took them shopping in a few stores and then over to the casino, where he gave them a few bucks for the slots, and bought them too many drinks. They came back after Marilyn and I had gone home and gone to bed.

We woke up to hear a racket in the living room, and I grabbed a robe and wandered out down the hall to see what it was. I wasn’t expecting trouble since the place is guarded 24-7 even when we aren’t around. Charlie and one of the agents were half carrying the twins into the house. I could smell the booze from across the room. “Didn’t I ask you not to drink too much?” I said.

He dumped Molly on the couch and held his hands up in surrender. “Hey, I’m the sober one. I tried to keep them under control, but they’re legal now, at least around here.”

I glanced over at the agent who had decided to simply put Holly over his shoulder and head for her bedroom. “It’s true,” he said, “Charlie was being the responsible party.”

“For once?” added my son.

“You said it, not me.”

Marilyn came down the hallway, looking bleary eyed. “What’s going on?”

“Your daughters tried to drink the island dry,” I commented.

“Don’t blame me, Mom! I bought them the first round, but they had their own money. If it had rum in it, they sampled it,” said Charlie. He picked Molly up and began leading her down the hall to her bedroom.

“Oh, dear. Well, they’ll learn, I suppose,” said my wife.

“Did anybody see you guys? Is this going to be on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow?” Ari was enjoying a few days in the sun with us; would I have to let him know about this?

The Secret Service agent shook his head and said, “Not that I could tell. None of us noticed anybody paying attention to them.” The security team had all been wearing casual clothing, and while I knew they were all armed, I had no idea how they were hiding their guns. “To be honest, they looked like a couple of girls who managed to get away from their parents for the night. It’s not like that’s never been seen on this island before.”

I just grunted at that. It wasn’t worth worrying about now. It wouldn’t be the worst scandal ever seen in the White House. I touched Marilyn’s elbow and said, “Let’s go to bed.”

“Will they be all right?”

“I sure hope not. I hope they have major league hangovers, so they know enough not to get stupid like this again.”

“You’re not a very loving father,” she commented, as we headed back to bed.

“Just a very practical one.”

I followed Marilyn down the hall, enjoying the sway of her rear under the thin silk of her robe. We had made love earlier in the evening when we went to bed, but Carl Junior seemed interested in another round. I went into our bathroom and relieved myself, and then Marilyn used the bathroom. When she came out of the bathroom, she found me naked on our bed, stroking my erection.

“Why do I think we aren’t going back to sleep right away?” she asked.

“Sleep is overrated,” I replied. I crooked an index finger and motioned her towards me.

Marilyn smiled as she got onto the bed. “What would the voters think about this? It doesn’t seem very Presidential.”

I undid the sash on her robe and pulled it off her. “Complaints, complaints!” Marilyn moved to turn off the light, but I stopped her. “I like seeing you naked. Get on top so I can suck your tits while you bounce on my cock!”

“Horny bastard!” she giggled. Marilyn did as I asked, and we screwed our way to a mutually happy conclusion. Only then did I let her turn off the light, and I spooned up behind her and threw an arm around her as we drifted off to sleep.

We woke up our usual time and dined out in the sunshine the next morning. Charlie was up then, too. We didn’t see the twins until almost noon, and they looked like death warmed over. They moaned and groaned and wanted to see a doctor. We just snorted and let Doctor Tubb examine them. He pronounced them fine, suffering from dehydration and excessive alcohol consumption, and prescribed orange juice and aspirin. In other words, major league hangovers. The girls denounced him as a quack, and we laughed and thanked him, and invited him and his team to dinner that night. Holly and Molly didn’t make it to dinner but spent the rest of the day moaning and groaning in their rooms.

Charlie skipped out, too, but not because he was sick. He said that he had seen a few clubs he wanted to visit and see if he could get lucky. Marilyn gave him some motherly and disapproving comments, and I simply reminded him to take some protection. Charlie laughed and left, and Marilyn decided to chew on me for a while instead. I just nodded and agreed with everything she told me, and then laughed. “Do you want me to tell them about that first trip to Ocean City we took?”

That earned me a finger wagging and her trademark, “You can behave!”

I just hoped the girls would settle down some when they went to college. I doubted they would, but I could hope. That occurred a week later, when they had to report to the University of Maryland for Freshman Orientation. So, just like every other college parent, we helped the kids pack their gear and go to school. Marilyn took them up to Hereford for a few days to sort through things and pack whatever they were missing in Washington, and then they drove down and stayed a night at the White House. The next morning, bright and early, we tossed their crap into the back of a War Wagon and rode in a discreet convoy over to College Park. It was an informal day, so I was in khakis and a Hawaiian shirt, and deck shoes with no socks, and Marilyn was in jeans and a checkered blouse and flats. After checking in, the girls got their dorm keys, and off we went to dispose of our children.

The word of the day to the agents was, “Lighten up!” I didn’t need a phalanx of bodyguards in black suits, earbuds, and sunglasses shadowing us. They could dress a little more casually and blend in and hide the War Wagons around the corner. The University knew the girls were attending, and there were some special security arrangements needed. For the first time in their lives, they weren’t rooming with each other but had regular college roommates. Across the hall from each room was a dorm room containing a young female agent assigned to each girl and commo gear, and they were already in place. Security would be light, but there would be security.