Wag the Dog (16 page)

Bush touched the memo tucked in his jacket pocket. He hadn't found Hartman offensive enough to call it off But with the downside so enormous, he hadn't yet decided to go forward.

So he plunged ahead with what he was there to do. Shake a lot of hands, grin and wink, and make his famous thumbs-up gesture. Everyone in the room had given a minimum of $5,000, most of them $10,000 or more. They were entitled to a little pressing of the flesh and they wanted to go home feeling good. He went through the speech—he eventually went ahead with the speech-writer's version, it was so little different than what he himself wanted to say—with reasonable fervor.

Dinner was over at 8:00
P.M.
California time, 11:00
P.M.
EST.
Air Force One
was scheduled for lift-off from John Wayne at 9:00
P.M.
California time, midnight on the president's biological clock. He was scheduled to meet with the director of the CIA in the White House at 9:00
A.M.
EST, with the un-Soviet ambassador at 9:15, then with the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee about the selection of nominees for federal judgeships. The only way to survive that sort of schedule was to fall out as soon as he lay down on the presidential bed aboard the 747, sleep all through the flight, no matter how turbulent, even through touchdown, and not wake until the steward came in at 8:00
A.M.
EST on the ground back in Washington. The human body won't behave that way on its own. Therefore, with his dessert, crème brûlée, the president dropped a Halcion, figuring it would kick in just about the time he got on the plane.

On the way out, as the president was making his final handshaking rounds, the chairman of the California Republican Party fund-raising committee told him that Hartman had just made a $100,000 contribution. Bush was impressed. Not just by the amount, but that Hartman had not waved the money in his face or given it to him directly. The impulse that had been working on him for half the day finally broke through.

He invited Hartman to ride with him back to
Air Force One.

Hartman had twelve to eighteen minutes to make a friend. He'd done it far faster than that lots of times. The first thing he said was, “1 want to confess something, Mr. President. My conversion to the Republican Party is very recent.” This was an old story. Reagan, Heston, Sinatra, and lots of others were all ex-Democrats. Bush was not impressed. “Most of my life I regarded myself as a nonpartisan person whose true loyalty was to business, to the creativity of the economic impulse.” More bullshit. “Actually, I was on the fence right up until 1988.” Now the president listened. There were lots of so-called Reagan Democrats. No one, he suddenly realized, ever spoke of Bush Democrats. David Hartman had already endeared himself as the first one. “I wasn't that impressed with Mr. Reagan. But you truly impressed me.” Music to the president's ears. So many people spoke of Bush as if he were a pale imitation of his predecessor, when it was Reagan who had napped through most of his two terms, never reading or studying, just popping up to perform when the cameras
rolled, returning to somnolence as soon as the power was switched off “I don't want to embarrass you, but I will tell you why. It's not the obvious thing, that you have, probably, the best résume of anyone who's ever held your office. To me you're the real thing because you were a war hero.” The president put on his aw-shucks face.

“To me,” Hartman went on, “the great presidents were Ike and Jack Kennedy. I had no use for Johnson, Carter, and Reagan. I didn't think to analyze it until you came along. What was different about you, from Reagan, from Dukakis? I'll tell you. George Herbert Walker Bush, Dwight David Eisenhower, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, they all saw real combat. Let's face it, where was Ron Reagan when the world was at war? He was in Hollywood, with clean sheets and pretty girls, and his uniforms were fresh-pressed every day by the Santa Monica dry cleaners.

“You were out there. Youngest pilot in the Navy. You put your life on the line. You know what that means.”

“Those were great days,” the president said, and then asked, as Hartman had wanted him to, “Were you in the service?”

“Yes, sir,” Hartman said, making his move.

“Well, you're a little young for the big one, when were you in? What branch of service?”

“I was a Marine, sir. In Korea.”

Bush was pleasantly surprised. “Well, some Navy men don't think too much of the Army”—this was a good-humored, manly remark—”but by God, you can't say anything against the United States Marines. Tell me about your service, Dave. And forget the sir and Mr. President bullshit. Call me George.”

“I have to tell you, sir. It's hard to call the commander in chief George. I'm just too much of a Marine, still, to do that.”

“Well, you can relax, Dave. What'd you do in the service?”

Hartman saw how the table lay, which was exactly how he expected, so he went ahead and played his ace. “Tell you the truth, sir. I was a pilot. Fighter jock.”

“I'll be a son of a bitch,” the president said. It had never occurred to him that a Jewish Hollywood agent would have been a Marine fighter pilot in Korea.

“How many missions you fly? How many kills?”

“I only flew five combat missions.”

“How come?” the president asked.

“I had to ditch in the ocean. I wasn't shot down. I had a fuel-line malfunction, then the engine caught fire. I ejected. Good thing too. On my way down I got to see my plane explode. Thank God for those Air-Sea rescue boys. I got pulled out by a Navy chopper off of a carrier. You know, sir, better than I do, what it's like to be sitting in a freezing ocean, wondering if it's the first day of the rest of your life. Or the last.
³¹
Anyway, I hurt my back when I hit the water, and when they couldn't fix it, they gave me my discharge.”

“So I guess you understand how important it is,” the president said, “to keep America strong?”

“The most important thing in the world,” Hartman said. “Not just for America, for all mankind.”

Again, it's possible to ponder the role of coincidence: that Hartman had chosen a way to win the president's confidence which spoke directly to the things the president wanted to discuss with him. But it's more likely that all three of them—the third being Atwater, although he was dead—had simply tuned in to the same thinking about basic themes. Maybe the president would have gone ahead even if Hartman had spoken about banking standards or the need for celebrities to support family values or of his commitment to free trade.

“I have a project,” the president said. “You remember Lee Atwater?”

“Very well. I admired him.”

“He wrote a memo. He was a good friend,” Bush said. “The baddest good ol' boy. I had a lot of fun with Lee. He thought well of you. Did you know he played blues guitar?”

“He was an excellent person.”

“This is a concept thing. He said, before he died, that you're
the person, what with today's Hollywood. When a friend writes a deathbed memo, you have to do what you have to do. I have to swear you to secrecy.”

“You have my oath. As an American. As a Marine.”
³²

“The word of a United States Marine. You can't ask for much more than that,” the president said. It may be that at this point the Halcion was kicking in. According to the president's own schedule, it certainly should have been.
³³

The president sat silent, trying to figure out how to formulate what Atwater had proposed. Then he suddenly wondered if they were being recorded. Not by some foreign spy but by his own people. Look what had happened to Nixon. Speech was never safe. Although they had decided never to show the memo to anyone, he and Baker, somehow showing it seemed—better. Clearer, easier, and safer. He reached into his pocket.

“I want you to look at this,” the president said, and gave Hartman the memo. The limo turned past the gate and entered John Wayne. As it crossed the tarmac to
Air Force One,
Hartman read.

Hartman had admired Atwater's destruction of Dukakis. Lee had happened to see that the America of '88 would vote for a
waving flag and
against
violent sexual, black males. He happened to be running a presidential campaign, so that's the choice he offered the public. What else, Hartman thought, should he have done? Most people either lack the capacity for thought or they're too lazy to employ it. They shroud themselves in the fog of conventional morality and substitute knee-jerk sentimentality for thought-out reactions. Lee had refused to be that sort of cripple. Good for him.

But this memo put Atwater in a whole different class. This was beyond intellectual rigor and unsentimental honesty—this required real audacity, this was true clarity. Atwater had proved a most worthy student of SunTzu and Clausewitz and Machiavelli. If he had been there, Hartman would have bowed in a formal gesture of respect, as they do in the East, to a teacher, someone to learn from and to emulate.

But Atwater was dead and gone. Hartman didn't believe in ghosts, or at least not in ghosts who listen. His tribute to Atwater was that he was the first to read the memo who didn't say, “Jesus fucking Christ. Atwater's fucking in-fucking-sane.” He turned to the president. He thought of a hundred different things he could say. His actual favorite was: George, I don't know if you've ever used an agent before. We get ten percent. Of everything. But it's not what he said. He thought of Oliver North, sat up as straight as the limo seat allowed, his back in a fair imitation of military posture. “Sir,” he said, raising his right hand, touching his fingertips to his eyebrow in a salute, “you do me great honor. In giving me this opportunity to serve you and my country. Thank you, sir.”

 

 

 

²⁶
Yale's, and America's, most famous publicly secret society. What Yalies are to the rest of us, members of Skull and Bones are to Yalies. Until 1992 it was an all-male group. Some of the practices include lying in a coffin, ritual masturbation (will this continue now that sexual integration has come? and if it does, will it change the psychic impact of the practice?), and written confessions. These written confessions are kept in logbooks which are, it is said, intact since the beginning of the practice, with one exception. Legend has it that the year which would have included George Bush's entry is missing. Only
Spy
magazine, wouldn't you know, has seen fit to print this information.

²⁷
Wasserman's biggest breakthrough is fascinating for a number of reasons. MCA—and Wasserman personally—was Ronald Reagan's agent. They did very well for Reagan even when his career as a film star was quickly fading. In 1952, when Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild, he negotiated a deal that permitted MCA and
only
MCA to get a blanket waiver to both represent actors and produce shows. This gave MCA an incredible advantage over both rival talent agents and rival producers. It gave them power over the studios. For example, they forced Paramount Pictures to produce a Hitchcock film on a lot at Universal—by then owned by MCA—even though Paramount had its own studio space.

In the late sixties MCA helped arrange real-estate deals for Reagan that made him a millionaire and put him in a position to run for governor. A more detailed exposition can be found in Dan E. Moldea,
Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob
(Viking, 1986). Moldea paints Wasserman as an
éminence grise
who took care of Reagan and was, in turn, taken care of. Ronald Brownstein, in
The Power and the Glitter: The Hollywood-Washington Connection
(Pantheon, 1990), portrays Reagan and Wasserman as two individuals on separate tracks that sometimes ran congruently and sometimes ran at odds.

²⁸
Like the other gossip and casual character assassinations in this book, we regard this as an unsubstantiated rumor, although
Spy
magazine treats it as established fact: “So let's get this straight: A man who took huge amounts of steroids becomes head of the President's Council on Physical Fitness, but his main worry is that people will think he smokes cigars.” (Charlotte Fleming, 3/92)

²⁹
Readers are very important lowly people in Hollywood. Anyone with any power or pull has scripts and books and treatments shoved at them all day long. No one has time to read them all. Yet everyone with power or pull is looking for a great property to produce. Hence they employ readers. Readers read and then write the equivalent of a high-school book report, a review that mostly summarizes but also rates. In the rare instance a reader says something is so hot the reader's employer decides to run with it, he or she must then convince others—stars, directors, studio chiefs, name screenwriters—to jump onboard. None of them will have time to read the property, and they in turn will give it to their readers. Readers are among those thousands in Hollywood with the power to say no. It is also a position from which, legend has it, it is possible to rise.

³⁰
Vice President Quayle. A jocular reference. Quayle was at that time involved in moderate scandal about the use of military jets to take him on golfing trips. A mild irony is that he took most of them with Samuel K. Skinner, later the White House chief of staff—who was then secretary of
transportation.
OK, it's a very mild irony.