Chapter 171: Family Matters

Marilyn’s blitz of the talk shows did what we intended it to do. It put a human face, a very likeable human face, on the clusterfuck in Pittsburgh. Marilyn was polling in the low 90s, and across the country people were rallying to her side on this. Only the ACLU was defending them, and they had offered their services. (Westboro Baptist promptly condemned them as being part of the ‘Jewish power elite’, but with their assets frozen, it wasn’t like they could pay for lawyers; they couldn’t afford to be picky.) Harry Reid and Congress were not going to be able to come after me by chewing on Marilyn.

Likewise, Elizabeth Warren was out of the line of fire at Treasury. The Dems who wanted to fry me were simply consternated by the fact that the Secretary of the Treasury was also a Democrat. That took care of another concern.

On the other hand, the Secret Service was about to get a reaming the likes of which they hadn’t seen since the Kennedy assassination. Politically, attacking me through the Secret Service was cheap and easy. I wasn’t all that interested in helping to fend off the attacks, either. Her detail had screwed up across the board, and if anything had happened to her, I would have never forgiven them. The Senate Finance Committee assigned a Special Investigator to the case and turned him loose with a budget that would have made Ken Starr drool.

Well, if you look hard enough, you can always find something. A Special Investigator isn’t simply a single person but is everybody who he hires to investigate things. A lot of it is just incredibly boring! Follow the money - hire a bunch of accountants to go over every file related to money. Follow the emails - hire a bunch of computer guys and print out libraries full of emails. Follow the testimony - hire a bunch of lawyers to take depositions from anybody and everybody.

Follow the money, and that’s what they did. There is no bill too small to notice, and that is what killed the Secret Service. By the end of October an accountant with nothing better to do was going over the expense reports of everybody assigned to anybody on the Presidential Protective Detail. This wasn’t just the people assigned to me, but also the agents assigned to Marilyn and the kids, as well as anybody else around, such as the advance parties that go to various places to prep for a Presidential visit.

One such preparation trip came in advance of my speech at the Organization of American States in Brasilia, Brazil, in March 2006. I flew in, made a speech notable for its lack of notability, enjoyed a state dinner, and then flew home. I didn’t even stay the night. Regardless, several dozen Secret Service agents flew down ahead of time to go over motorcade routes, speaking locations, itineraries, and the like. They then went home with their report. It took them several days. When they are in a country, they generally use cars assigned to the embassy, although sometimes they use rental cars.

Why then was there an expense account charge for $20 for a cab ride for someone with the initials VF? Who was VF? Nobody at the embassy had those initials, and neither did anybody on the prep team? Why did the agent who put in the expense report suddenly clam up and refuse to answer? Why don’t we just send somebody from the Special Investigator’s office to Brazil on the taxpayer’s dime and ask the cab company about this VF?

It was like watching a sweater unravel when somebody pulled a loose bit of yarn. Within a matter of days, and with the entire disaster being leaked to the press via speed dial, the Secret Service was gutted like a fish! VF turned out to be Victoria Federica, a ‘model’ and part-time prostitute hired by some of the team as entertainment. They sent her home the next morning, and since nobody wanted to pay the $20 cab fare, they charged it to the U.S. of A. The cheap and stupid bastards managed to sink themselves because nobody wanted to pay a hooker an extra $20 to cover her cab fare.

I learned about this comedy of errors from Frank and Will. The Washington Post had a photo of the young lady in question, and she was quite attractive. I commented to them that I was getting screwed by the young lady and hadn’t even managed to get screwed. Will simply promised that if I ever said that in public, he would personally beat me to death with the microphone, and Frank promised to hold me down and help. I nodded in acquiescence.

Harry Reid and Max Baucus managed to get their scandal, big time! This was front page news for two weeks, as the numbers and names of the agents came to light, and the phrase ‘Wheels up, rings off!’ came into the American lexicon. It seemed that this was an accepted practice amongst the prep teams. I called in Acting Director Nagel and read him the riot act and ordered him to clean this mess up immediately. I was both unable and unwilling to deflect any blame that might be forthcoming. The Secret Service was going to get slammed on this, and they had nobody to blame but themselves.

John McCain was furious about all of this. Mud splashed on the President was the same as mud splashed on the Vice President. The primaries would begin in January, and the Senate Finance Committee was promising Congressional hearings on the Secret Service beginning after the winter recess. What that would do was to insure that after the holidays, the press had some nice and juicy bloodletting to go along with the primaries. John was my presumptive heir apparent. If I looked bad, he looked bad, and Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee were loudly demanding an even larger investigation, including sworn testimony from Marilyn and my family. (I called Brewster McRiley and Mike Duncan of the RNC and told them to explain how that was never going to happen.) Their theory was that if I looked bad, John looked bad, and if John looked bad, they would look good.

We did what we could do to mitigate the problem. Nagel cleaned house in the prep teams, and a dozen agents resigned or were fired by mid-November. It wasn’t enough, and I let Nagel go as well, replacing him with an Assistant Director from the finance side of the Secret Service. That was the investigatory unit responsible for counterfeiting and other securities related crimes. The only ones lower in the hierarchy than them were the uniformed guys, and I promised that if it became necessary, they would be the only ones left. I didn’t care how much blood had to be shed, but I wanted the Secret Service cleaned up!

It wasn’t entirely the winter of my discontent. By the end of October, Charlie had recovered enough to get booted out of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. I had been going up most weekends to visit, and Marilyn and Megan had worked out a schedule where one of them was always around for him. Megan had flown to Los Angeles in September for a small part but had been unhappy about it and declined the role. It was obvious that she had been chosen because of her relationship to Charlie, and her outfit was on the skimpy side of skimpy. She had a long talk with her agent and then flew home to Omaha for a few days before coming back to Pittsburgh. Marilyn wasn’t completely sure, but she told me that she thought Megan’s acting career was over.

Charlie was either oblivious or simply smart enough to know when to keep his mouth shut. By the end of September his ribs had healed enough that he could begin some rehabilitation on his upper body. He told me privately that it was worse than anything he had gone through when he got shot in Monrovia. He still had a giant cast on his right leg, and a much smaller cast on his right arm. A month later his casts had come off and his catheter had come out, and he was able to walk upright and use the bathroom, although he needed a lot of help. He balked at moving into the White House but was amenable to the idea of moving into the house on 30 ^th Street. We converted my first-floor library into an infirmary and arranged for Charlie to begin rehabilitation therapy at Walter Reed.

First, however, we had to get him out of there. Aside from the substantial bill from the hospital’s accounting office (he had medical insurance through his racing team and the track, but he would still have been bankrupted if he was a normal guy) I donated $10 million to found the Buckman Wing for Really Dumb Children Who Ride Insane Motorcycles and Become Organ Donors. Strangely, they insisted on a more conventional name involving the use of the words Orthopedics and Rehabilitation. I told Marilyn my title was more accurate and for once she agreed with me. We had a very nice ceremony, thanked everybody and their brother, and had some nice people from the Pittsburgh City Hall in to help; they had their hands out, too, and they received a nice little payoff to the Police Benevolent Association. Afterwards we loaded Charlie onto Marine One and we flew him to the Naval Observatory, which was the closest helipad to the house on 30 ^th Street.

Marilyn wanted to stay around for a bit to make sure Charlie settled in properly. I dragged her away, whispering to her that Charlie and Megan looked like they could ‘settle in’ just fine on their own. She elbowed me in the side and said her son was better behaved than that, but when I rolled my eyes at her, she giggled and said, “He’s as much of a barbarian as his father!”

I shrugged and gave a bland smile. “She’s an actress. Maybe she has a nurse’s costume available.”

“You are a dirty old man!”

“You’re the one with the AARP card!” I laughed.

“You have one, too!”

That was true. It had showed up in the mail at Hereford when I turned fifty. I used it as a bookmark.

“Do you know why Ben Franklin preferred older women as mistresses?” I asked, needling her because she was five months older than me. Marilyn had already turned fifty-two, while I was still fifty-one for a few more weeks.

“No! Why?”

I lowered my voice and whispered, “Because they were so grateful!”

“OOOOHHH! You are a rat!” Marilyn tried to slug me, but I wrapped her up in my arms and laughed. “I’ll show you old!”

“I certainly hope so!” I laughed.

Marilyn didn’t believe me about Ben Franklin, so once we got back to the White House, I made a call over to the Library of Congress. I managed to speak to the Librarian, Doctor Billington, and he laughed and promised to send over a copy of the letter that Franklin wrote. He also warned me that I was playing with fire. I just asked what was life without a little heat.

For Thanksgiving we stayed at the White House for a traditional feast. Last year we ate in Kurdistan. This year the Iraqi border was quieter, and we had fewer troops in place. We managed to get the entire family down. Molly and Bucky came down from Lansdowne, Charlie and Megan came over from 30 ^th Street, and Holly showed up with the same guy who had been at the wedding with her. He still looked like a scruffy bum. When I asked Marilyn if they were serious, she said they were very serious and were moving in together into a new apartment. “You met Jerry at the wedding! Where have you been?” she replied.

“I don’t know, running the free world, maybe?”

“Hmmmph! Some father you are!”

As a family we had to actually appear in public together the day before Thanksgiving, at the annual Pardoning of the Turkeys. For years and years turkeys were given to the President as gifts from various poultry boards, but the general rule was to thank those giving the bird, praise the quality of the bird, and a day later, eat the bird. Trust Ronald Reagan to screw up a really good idea. He decided to give the turkey a ‘Presidential pardon’ and make it into a national event. Personally, I would be more than happy to go back to the old way of doing things. We now had two turkeys to pardon, and they always had cute or patriotic names, like ‘Liberty’ and ‘Freedom.’ I would privately call them ‘Juicy’ and ‘Delicious.’

The entire ceremony had some problematic issues. The worst was that Jerry still looked and dressed like a scruffy bum. Charlie, Bucky, and I were wearing suits and overcoats or trench coats, and the ladies all had on smart suits or dresses and matching overcoats, scarves, and gloves. Jerry was wearing jeans, a Pearl Jam t-shirt, a ratty parka, and a wool cap with a hole in it. I took one look at him and muttered, “Are you kidding me? Hold it a minute.” He was near enough my size, though taller by a couple of inches. I went to the closet and pulled out a spare dress coat and a clean watch cap. “Here, put these on,” I told him. “You can stand in the back for any photos.”

He stood there and gave me a hostile look. “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”

I rolled my eyes. “Nothing is wrong if you are camping with the Boy Scouts. This isn’t camping. This is the White House, the official residence of the President of the United States of America, and you are about to be on national television in the Rose Garden. Do you really want your parents to see you on the evening news in an outfit that looks like you’re homeless and hanging around a trash fire in the Bowery?”

“DADDY!” squawked Holly.

I looked at my eldest daughter. “Daddy nothing! This isn’t the lab at Princeton. This is the real world, where you have to dress up every once in a while. And speaking of dressing up, it’s too late to do anything about it now, but a haircut and a beard trimmer would go a long, long way towards making your boyfriend look a whole lot more presentable.”

“Excuse me?” Jerry asked incredulously.

“Carl, don’t you think you’re going a little overboard?” asked Marilyn, smiling.

“No, I don’t! I don’t care if this guy is the next Einstein. Einstein wore suits. One of these days he’s going to graduate and have to get a job. People hire people who wear suits and have haircuts and trim beards. That’s the way the real world works.”

“DADDY!”

“We’ll go into this later, but Jerry, if you want to be with Holly in this, you need to change out of that coat and hat. If you stand in the back, nobody will see the jeans and sneakers. A scarf will cover up that thing you call a beard.” I left so that everybody could stew and run me down. Marilyn would calm them down. Twenty minutes later, Jerry - now in the clean coat, scarf, and cap - and Holly and Marilyn came down to the Oval Office, where I was hanging out with the others. Jerry and Holly looked mulish, and Marilyn looked amused. I nodded and smiled, and reminded everybody “Remember, big smiles!”

Holly grumbled, but Marilyn pushed me towards the door.

We ended up standing out in the Rose Garden in the cold, the whole mob of us dressed in overcoats and scarves and gloves, with two gigantic white turkeys standing there on a table. I had just given the turkeys their pardon, wishing them a long life. (That rarely lasts more than a few weeks or months longer; these birds are so big they have major health problems.) Normally this gets maybe 30 seconds on television. There are usually a few softball questions from the press. Then I was asked,” Mister President, what are you thankful for this year?”

I couldn’t help myself. I simply couldn’t stop. It was just too easy! “ Well, I’m just like any other American father. I’m thankful my son has gotten out of the hospital, my daughters have gotten out of the house, and my wife has gotten out of jail!” As I could have expected, Charlie, Megan, and Bucky broke down in laughter, Jerry looked confused, and Holly, Molly, and Marilyn all slugged me.

We made the news that night and got more than just 30 seconds! Will was hard pressed to spin that one, because he was laughing too hard to be taken seriously.

Marilyn calmed down Holly and Jerry. She promised to take the pair of them to a decent men’s store to get some new clothes. To be fair, he didn’t have a lot of money, being just an average grad student, which is sort of like indentured servitude to the college, only without the more enjoyable aspects of slavery. She told them it would be our Christmas present.

Charlie’s cost of care irked me. I was rich and could take care of any deductibles or maximums, but so many people couldn’t. For the average American, treatment like he was getting would bankrupt them. I contemplated starting a legislative battle to do something about the abysmal state of health insurance in the country, but shitcanned the idea immediately. There were so many problems with the whole idea! First off, the only program that made any sense was a nationwide extension of Mitt Romney’s plan from Massachusetts. If I did that, I was directly supporting John McCain’s biggest Republican rival. I was also pushing a Democratic proposal; I remembered how this had chewed Hillary Clinton up in the 1990s (and Barack Obama in the 2010s, though nobody but me knew that.) If this was going to ever get done and make it through Congress, a Republican President would need to do it! I sat John down one afternoon and tossed this out. My suggestion? Win the primary (quite probable) and win the general election (quite possible) and then do it. He would have a third term Republican Presidential mandate and a Republican House. He could name Mitt Romney as his Secretary of Health and Human Services and develop something that just might work.