Chapter 174: Tying Up Loose Ends

Marilyn and I hung around the White House for another few days, as I made phone calls to everybody and their brother and congratulated everybody. John McCain made a comment that he was going crazy as he began to get ready to take my job in a few months. I simply gave him an evil laugh and told him it would only get worse from here! Mitt Romney was going to lead his transition team. That usually meant that whoever was running the team was going to play a significant role in the future, usually in the Cabinet. That wouldn’t surprise me.

Me? I was tired! In seven years, I think I aged twenty. I needed a serious vacation, and Marilyn agreed with me. By the end of the week, I told everybody they could do without me, and we headed down to Hougomont. As long as the world didn’t blow up before January 20, I didn’t care. John was welcome to the mess. I wondered if I had done a single damn thing to make the world a better place. I really couldn’t tell anymore.

I knew that John had four years to try to make an impact. By the time the 2012 elections rolled around, we would have had three straight Republican administrations, twelve years, an above average record. The big winners had been FDR and Truman, who had racked up twenty years, but that would never be seen again. Reagan and Bush 41 had done twelve years, and Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover had also done twelve years. To go to more than three terms in a row, you had to go back to McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft (four terms), and before that to Reconstruction, when the Democrats couldn’t even run!

No, John would need to be a miracle worker to get a second term. The odds were that by the time of the next election, the economy would be in trouble, either because a bubble burst and we had a catastrophe, or he avoided bubbles but simply had a routine but ill-timed recession. In 2012 I expected a repeat of the fight between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, only Hillary would probably get the nod. The argument would be that Obama blew it against McCain, so let’s give the other team a chance.

Then again, maybe he could pull it off. I truly believed that Hillary wouldn’t be any better a President than Obama would be or had been on my first go. It would be out of my hands in any case. From here on out, I wasn’t just a lame duck, I was a dead duck! There wasn’t much I could accomplish in the next couple of months, and after that, I could only offer assistance. If I volunteered without being asked, the term that would be used was ‘meddlesome old fart.’

The three of us (Marilyn, me, and Stormy) landed in Nassau, and immediately jumped into a car to head to Hougomont. Frank and his fiancée were with us also, taking a vacation as well. As far as I was concerned, vacations are for lazing around. I expected a short briefing in the morning, and everybody could wear shorts and t-shirts for that. The same went for the National Intelligence Officer who gave me the PDB every morning. Otherwise, go make yourself a rum punch and take a load off. Dinner is on the grill at 7:00. Be there or be square!

The next morning, Saturday, I slept late and woke up when Marilyn crawled out of bed to let Stormy out. After the mutt came back inside, she jumped back into bed with me while Marilyn went to take a shower. There was no going back to sleep because Stormy decided to crawl on top of my chest and lick my face. That’s very cute when you are dealing with a puppy. When it’s a 135-pound monstrosity, it can cause pulmonary collapse! I pushed her off and restarted my breathing, and then got out of bed myself. I went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth and took my Lipitor while Marilyn showered.

When she got out of the shower, I jumped in and cleaned up. After that, I was about to shave when I noticed it was time to swap out my razor blade, so I hit the ‘Eject’ button and popped off the triple-track head and chucked it in the garbage. I opened the medicine cabinet and rooted around for a new one. “Marilyn, do I have any razor blades?”

“I don’t know? Did you tell me you were running out?”

“I didn’t know I was running out.”

“And that’s my fault because?”

I rolled my eyes at that. Whether you are the President or a ditch digger, as far as your wife is concerned, it’s always your fault. I rubbed my stubble. “I suppose I can go a day without a shave.”

“Do you want the Secret Service to go out and buy some blades?” she asked. As silly as that sounded, they would much rather do that than send the motorcade out with me so that I could go to the drug store and buy razor blades. There was an elaborate procedure for that sort of thing, so that nobody would be able to predict where I bought things and then be able to sabotage them. Randomly selected stores would be used, with the purchases made under phony names and payments made from anonymous accounts. Similar things occurred with food for the White House

“Later. It’s not an emergency.”

Nobody commented about it that day, maybe because it was a Saturday. Marilyn and I weren’t going anywhere, and I had delayed my usual visit with the Prime Minister until Monday. We just lay around the garden and the beach all day, sucking down the occasional Corona and tossing a piece of driftwood for Stormy to chase. Frank and his fiancée, Jenny, joined us for a nice dinner of grilled shrimp skewers.

Sunday morning was pretty much a repeat of Saturday morning. This time, when I got out of the shower, Marilyn said, “There’s some new razor blades in the medicine cabinet.”

“Thanks.” I opened the cabinet door and pulled out the packet and opened it. A five-pack plastic cassette came out with its load of blades, and I grabbed my empty razor to load it.

And then I stopped.

I looked up at my reflection in the mirror. After two days I had a definite stubble, though it was a mix of my normal gingery dirty blonde and a disturbing amount of whitish-gray. I stared at my face for a few seconds. The last time I could remember not shaving was probably back in 1990, or maybe at the end of 1989, before I officially entered the 1990 Congressional race. It felt strange - and strangely liberating. I slid my razor back into the slot in the holder and put the blades back in the medicine cabinet.

“Wrong blades?” asked Marilyn.

I turned to her and smiled. “No, they’re the right ones.”

“So?”

“So, I don’t want to shave this morning,” I told her.

She gave me an odd look and put her hand on my forehead. “Are you feeling all right? You don’t seem feverish.”

“Why?” I laughed.

“You always shave! I’d send you to the hospital, but the last time that happened, you had to be shaved there, too!”

I stepped back from the sink and went to the closet, grabbing a pink Hawaiian shirt with bright green parrots on it, and slipped into it, along with a pair of bright blue swim trunks. Color coordination, that’s the Buckman way! I turned back to my wife, rubbed my face, and asked, “How’s this for a look? Which of your brothers do I look like now?”

“Ooooh! That’s mean! I am going to tell them you said that!” She pulled a beach cover-up out of a drawer and pulled it on. “Gabriel, maybe.” I snorted out a laugh at that. Gabriel’s beard was so heavy that his five o’clock shadow showed up at four, and his salt-and-pepper hair was more salt than pepper.

“Really? I’d have thought maybe your sister Ruth.”

Marilyn started coughing. “You behave!” Then she giggled. “Besides, you asked which brother you looked like.”

“True, so true.”

“What’s with the beard? You always complain about having to look good for the cameras.”

“What’s the worst that could happen? I lose the next election?”

Marilyn looked stumped at that. “Seriously?”

I shrugged. “Maybe I’ll let my hair grow out, grow a ponytail, start smoking those funny cigarettes...”

“I can’t wait for you to tell Frank and Will that one!” We went out to the kitchen. “A ponytail and baldness? That ought to look good. Maybe you can have the official portrait redone.”

I had to blink at that one. “Let me think about that one first.”

“Good idea.”

Nobody said anything to me again on Sunday, though Frank gave me a very strange look. He did say something to me on Monday, after lunch, because I was going to meet with the Prime Minister for a brief photo op and then a dinner at Government House. “You plan on shaving, boss?”

“Frank, I’m on vacation.”

“Mister President, you’re the President even on vacation”

“I’m only the President for another eight weeks, Frank. Maybe I’m getting a start on my retirement.”

Marilyn and I were sitting on the rear veranda. Frank looked shocked and sat down across from us. “Sir?”

“Frank, if I stop shaving and grow a beard, it won’t be the end of the republic. It won’t even be the pause of the republic. What’s the worst that could happen, Frank? A usurper will rise up to throw down the king? Guess what? It’s already happened. I’ll be nothing but a footnote in eleventh grade history in a few weeks. Who cares?”

“We haven’t had a President with facial hair this century.”

“Frank, this is the 21^st Century. The only Presidents we’ve had are George Bush and me.”

“No, I mean, yes, you know what I mean!”

“Frank, Teddy Roosevelt had a mustache, and that was in the 20^th Century,” I told him.

“Really? We’re going back to Teddy Roosevelt?” he exclaimed.

“Nice mustache, Frank, big and bushy.”

“You’re not helping me here, Mister President!” He looked over at Marilyn. “Did you know about this plan?”

Marilyn laughed. “Frank, I’ve seen him with a beard and mustache. He had one through most of the Eighties, before he got into politics.”

I nodded. “It wasn’t as white. That’s a bit disappointing,” I commented wryly.

“When was the last time we had a President with a beard? Lincoln?” asked my Chief of Staff.

I gave him a disapproving look. “Frank, really, Grant was after Lincoln. And he had a full beard and mustache. Lincoln didn’t have the mustache. There were a few others, too.”

Frank threw his hands up in the air. “I can’t wait to see the press release Will writes about this one!”

“Don’t worry. He can include it in his book,’ I Survived Carl Buckman.’ He’s writing it with Ari Fleischer.”

Frank gave a manic laugh at that and sighed.

Nobody really said anything at the dinner that evening. I said various statesmanlike things, such as that even though I was no longer the President, the Bahamas had no better friend, and I would be happy to act as an Ambassador of Friendship for President McCain. Our regular Ambassador, Ned Siegel, simply smiled and nodded. He wasn’t going to complain about my facial hair, since he also had a beard and mustache. He simply said, “I like the look, Mister President.”

“My Chief of Staff thinks it’s the end of American democracy.”

“Just tell him the truth. Only real men grow beards and mustaches!”

I laughed and added, “And God only made a few perfect heads. The rest he covered with hair.”

Ned had a head full of hair, but he laughed anyway. “I’d ask if you’ve mentioned that to your replacement, but I want to keep my job a little longer.”

“He’s got one hell of a comb-over, doesn’t he?” Ned laughed at that one, too. “Sucker must be glued down!”

We didn’t hear anything out of the press over the next few days, so nobody back home must have been following the vacation trip. I was old news by now, almost forgotten. Everything was now McCain, McCain, McCain, and the changes he planned and what he wanted to keep. The only way I was going to make it into the news was if Air Force One or Marine One crashed in the near future with me on board.

We flew home on Monday, November 17^th, after eight very pleasant days of doing nothing, without the world collapsing around us. None of the Air Force or Marine staff mentioned my beard, which I had trimmed into a goatee. They did stare, but they didn’t say anything to their Commander in Chief. That lasted about as long as it took for me to walk into the West Wing and say hello. Will Brucis said, “Welcome back, Mister President. Have a good vacation?”

“Very nice, Will. Very restful. It looks like the world survived without me.”

“Yes, sir, we struggled through. When do you plan to shave, sir?”

“I shaved this morning, Will,” I answered, smiling. I figured I could drag out his discomfort.

“Uh, yes, sir, I mean, uh, all of your face.”

“Did Frank call you and tell you about this?” I quizzed.

“There might have been some hair-related conversations. Are you going for a new look or something?”

“Why not? Think America will survive the shock? Worried I’ll lose the next election?”

“Well, you’ve seen the uproar every time your wife changes her hair. That will be nothing compared to this!”

That was true enough. Marilyn had changed her cut a couple of times, and the press had given each style its own name! “It’s only eight weeks, Will. The nation will struggle through.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll go warn the barber!”

I laughed loudly at that. Human hair grows about half an inch a month, or so I had been told once. Back when I was a civilian, I used to get a haircut whenever it got a bit too long, maybe every six weeks or so, unless I got caught up in something and forgot. Once I got into politics it became a scheduled event every two weeks! If my hair grew one-quarter inch, it was time for a precision styling. Your hair and appearance can’t change one iota compared to your campaign posters or publicity shots. I could launch a war on somebody, but if my hair appeared mussed that would be the lead topic on the news, before the war.

My new look was national news that evening, with telephoto lens shots of Marilyn, Stormy, and me climbing down from Marine One. The regular networks just did a quick thirty second piece on it, comparing me to other presidents with beards or mustaches, almost all of whom, it turned out, were Republican. (Except for Grover Cleveland, a Democrat; not sure what the significance of any of this really was.) The news networks, on the other hand, spent massive time and money on this, bringing in various experts to consider the significance of my facial hair, and whether I could have been elected with a beard or mustache, and commenting copiously on Thomas Dewey, the last major candidate with a mustache, who had lost to Truman in 1948. Did the mustache cause Dewey to lose? Fox News did a half hour special on this.

Will, who was waging a losing battle against male pattern baldness himself, was at a loss to explain this silliness to anybody. He did point out that if any of the reporters bothered to go into their photo archives from my time with the Buckman Group they would find any number of photos of me with a mustache and goatee. The silliest exchange was on Wednesday morning, when it became obvious that I was ignoring the calls to shave.

Q: “Has the First Lady commented about whether she likes the President’s mustache and beard?”

A: (Staring!) “No, that hasn’t come up in any conversation that I’m aware of.”

Q: “If she complained, would the President shave?”

A: “You’ll need to ask her that.”

Q: “Why are you ducking the question?”

A: “I am not ducking the question. I am giving it the attention it deserves. The Buckmans have been married 30 years. Mrs. Buckman is certainly capable of telling her own husband whether she likes his mustache and beard. He had it for ten years before he got into politics, and he’s had it almost two weeks now. I would think that if she objected to it, she’d have divorced him back in the Eighties! Next question!”

I was dying of laughter watching that, and I made sure we replayed it for Marilyn that afternoon. Everybody wanted to know our divorce plans.

On the plus side, various mustache fanciers and beard lovers’ groups promptly named me their Man of the Year. It wasn’t quite Time’s Man of the Year, but it was a nice touch. Besides, I had gotten Time’s nod in 2004, after being re-elected. Cosmopolitan had a special list of celebrities with beards and mustaches, and I placed in their Top 10. In the same issue was a list of tricks to use in the bedroom if you had a beard or mustache. I made sure to show Marilyn that article, and she turned beet red! Will simply refused to comment when questioned and turned beet red himself.

The nation muddled on through the end of November and into December. Nobody was doing anything legislation wise, not with a new administration coming into power, and the Christmas recess beginning shortly. Assuming nobody attacked us between now and January 20, my responsibilities were relatively limited. Congress and the Senate would be sworn in on January 6 ^th, and John would be inaugurated January 20^th.

The week before Christmas, I had what would probably be my final press interview. I did a one-on-one talk with Tom Brokaw from the Oval Office. Tom was semi-retired from NBC News, having given up his regular anchor spot to Brian Williams several years ago, but he still did occasional stories for them. I never quite figured out how Ari and Will picked out who got to do interviews with me. Maybe it was whoever pissed them off the least lately.

We started off in the Map Room, with both Marilyn and me on a love seat facing Tom in a wingback chair. The plan was that he would ask us some personal questions, and then when we were in the Oval Office would segue into some policy questions.

Tom: “Thank you for speaking to me, Mister President, Mrs. Buckman.”

Me: “You’re welcome.”

Marilyn: “Yes, thank you for coming.”

Tom: “Mrs. Buckman, your time here in the White House is shrinking rapidly. Are you going to be glad to leave?”

Marilyn: (Smiling and glancing at me.) “Yes, I really am. Oh, don’t get me wrong. It is an absolute privilege to live here, and the staff is simply amazing. It’s just, well, when we first moved in, we told the kids that living here would be like living in a museum, and that’s really true. It’s amazing, but it’s not home.”

Me: “I think that’s true. The staff here are simply unbelievable, and we can’t thank them enough. Still, it will be nice to just go back to Hereford and be able to have some friends and neighbors over for a barbecue. You just can’t do that as the President.”

Tom: “Is that where you plan to live? Hereford in Maryland? You also have a vacation resort in the Bahamas and a mansion in Georgetown.”

Me: “Home is Hereford. We love our vacation home in the Bahamas, and we’ll definitely spend more time there. The home in Georgetown is not so much a mansion as it is a really big house and was always more of a residence for when I needed to be in Washington. We haven’t lived there since I was elected as Vice President. We use it for friends and relatives, and Charlie and his fiancée are using it currently, though that’s probably only going to be until they get married and get a place of their own. We’ll keep it, but only for when or if I have business here in town in the future.”

Tom: “You mentioned your children. Mrs. Buckman, when you first moved into the White House, you were still a stay-at-home mom to your daughters and living back in Maryland. Now your children are grown up and moved out. Big change since then, isn’t it?”

Marilyn: “My babies are all grown up! I miss them, but they’re doing fine on their own.”

Tom: “What are they doing? It almost seems like the nation has watched them grow up as well. Your son was in the Marines and your daughters were high school cheerleaders.”

Marilyn: “Well, Charlie can’t race anymore, but he seems to be doing well broadcasting for ESPN. This spring he started with them, and they’ve signed him to be an announcer and commentator. He’s engaged, of course, to a lovely girl and they plan to get married sometime next summer or fall. Holly is still at Princeton and is working on her doctorate and is with a very nice young man who also is a doctoral student, and Molly is living in Maryland with her husband, and they’re starting to talk about children of their own. That would be very exciting!”

Me: (Laughing.) “I hope they have lots of daughters, so I can get a little of my own back!” (Marilyn laughed and swatted at me.)

Tom: (Smiling) “Looking forward to being a grandfather?”

Me: “I intend to be the grandfather who buys the grandkids the drum set, the guy the parents are always worried about. Then, I’ll load them up with sugar and give them back to the owners.”

Marilyn: “You would, too!”

Tom: “Take it from me, Mister President, you have it figured out already. Mrs. Buckman, let me ask you about what had the entire nation stunned a few weeks ago. What do you think of the President’s new look?”

Marilyn: “I think that’s the silliest thing to worry about, isn’t it? Of course, the kids tease him that he’s actually using it to grow hair for a hair transplant.”

Me: “They are out of the will for sure, now!”

Marilyn: “Maybe you can go for the full shaved head look next.”

Tom: “Does kissing your husband tickle now?”

At that Marilyn giggled and I waggled my eyebrows at her, and she giggled some more and swatted me again without answering. After that she retired. They reset the cameras in the Oval Office, and we switched to there for discussions of my Presidency.

Tom: “It’s been a tumultuous seven years for you, Mister President, starting with your ascension to office.”

Me: “Very true. It’s certainly not how anybody would ever want to get a job.”

Tom: “Would you have ever run for President on your own?”

Me: “Very doubtful. The idea of spending two years traveling all over the country, and spending weekends, if I’m lucky, at home getting ready to repeat the process? No, I don’t think I could ever have subjected myself or my family to that.”

Tom: “You didn’t have the so-called ‘fire in the belly’ for the job?”

Me: “Not for that kind of abuse. I’ve told John more than once I didn’t understand how he had gone through with it, and he did it twice, first in 2000, and then again, this year.”

Tom: “Yet you did it in 2004.”

Me: “It’s a whole different game when you only have to fight the other side, and not your own at the same time. Again, I’ll thank John McCain for the help he gave me in 2004. He secured that victory for me. Great guy, and he’ll be a great President.”

Tom: “Do you think President McCain will do better or worse than President Buckman?”

Me: “No idea. I think the question is whether President McCain will be a third term of President Buckman, and the answer to that will be no. John is going to be his own man and, I think, a competent and thoughtful President. Back in 2001, when I asked John to join me and take the job as Vice President, I told him that every once in a while, this country gets an object lesson in selecting their leaders. There have been forty-four Presidents, and nine of us got the job when our boss met his Maker ahead of schedule. That’s a one in five chance, a twenty percent mortality rate. You’d never get an insurance company to sell you a policy for that! All too often in this nation’s history, the Vice President gets picked not because he would be qualified to take over, but because it was politically expedient to pick him. Not every one of us has been qualified to take over in case we landed in the jackpot. I told John that if something happened to me, I would be comfortable knowing he would be the next President. I didn’t expect him to do the things I had done, but I did feel confident knowing he would do the right things as he saw them, and not the politically expedient thing.”

Tom: “And Jeb Bush as the Vice President?”

Me: “I think Jeb will do the right thing, too. I feel comfortable with John’s choice.”

Tom: “Who do you think did a good job when, as you say, they landed in the jackpot?”

Me: “Well, Teddy Roosevelt is one of my favorites. He was excellent. The same goes for Harry Truman, and Jerry Ford was very underrated at the time.”

Tom: “And the others? Who didn’t work out?”

Me: “These are just my opinions, but Andrew Johnson was nothing but a political hack chosen by Lincoln to try and hold the country together prior to the Civil War. When Lincoln was assassinated, Johnson was a Democrat surrounded by Republicans, and he was just chum in front of the sharks. Tyler and Fillmore didn’t work out either. I think the most tragic was Lyndon Johnson. He had great domestic plans but was completely incapable of handling anything overseas.”

Tom: “Where do you think you rate on that scale?”

Me: (Shrugging.) “That won’t be for me to say. I hope on the plus side, but I just don’t know.”

Tom: “What will the historians say in twenty years?”

Me: (Smiling.) “That will be the least of my problems. Strokes and Alzheimer’s run in my family. Twenty years from now I won’t even know my name.”

That was a real stumper for Brokaw. He simply didn’t know how to respond to that, and you could see it in his face. He decided to focus on the overall changes during the past seven years.

Tom: “When you took office the nation was under attack by parties unknown, thousands of Americans were dead, and President Bush was missing in action. On the domestic side, more than a few economists were concerned about future runaway deficits and a recession, if not worse. Today America is the undisputed superpower of the world, and you have managed a net surplus during your seven-year administration. Inflation is low and unemployment is low. This is an enviable record for any world leader.”

Me: “I think it’s a matter of knowing what needed to be done, and what didn’t need to be done. When I was sworn in, we had a pretty good idea what was happening. The problem was that there were an awful lot of entrenched interests with their own agendas. I came in with only one agenda, which was to keep the nation safe and strong.”

Tom: “What were those entrenched interests?”

Me: “Let me preface this by saying that many of the people involved were acting out of what they honestly felt was the best interest of the country. However, when you total them up, the plans they had would have weakened us, not strengthened us. Defense contractors wanted to sell the Pentagon all their newest goodies, which would have been good for their shareholders, but not necessarily good for the economy. Congress wanted to use those toys, and a lot of conservatives believed that military action could be used for more than simply defending the country but could also be used to help build more democratic societies in the countries which threatened us. I disagreed.”

Tom: “How so?”

Me: “My belief was that we needed to take a very hard and realistic look at the rest of the world. We weren’t going to get pluralistic and liberal democracies in nations with rampant unemployment, illiteracy, religious intolerance, and sectarian violence. America has an excellent military, but you use armies and navies to kill people and break things, not to build countries. We needed to play to our strengths, not our weaknesses.”

Tom: “And those strengths were?”

Me: “That plays into our economic strengths. You can’t have a strong defense without a strong economy. That means not buying every weapon ever designed but investing in America. We needed to invest in our real strength, our human capital and our economic capital.”

Tom: “Could you be more specific?”

Me: “President Bush’s DREAM Act was a perfect example of strengthening our human capital, by fixing parts of our immigration system. His No Child Left Behind Act did the same for education reform. Infrastructure is an example of strengthening our economic capital. For the cost of an invisible bomber, we can buy several very visible repaired bridges and canal locks and sewer systems. Ultimately all of this will make us much stronger than any of our potential foes.”

We broke for a few minutes for a bathroom break but then resumed, only this time on my ‘philosophy’ of governing.