What It Takes (3 page)

The air-conditioner guards were part of the Astrodome security force, as were the men in vigil at every janitor’s closet and bathroom he would pass, as were the men who closed off the hallways he would tread. For the evening, the steady complement of thirty full-time security personnel was swelled by ninety temporary hires, mostly off-duty cops from the Houston and Harris County forces. Each was paid eighty dollars for the evening, the cost defrayed by the Astrodome—a small price to pay for the honor.

Anyway, a drop in the bucket, compared to the public cost for the FBI and the Houston Police Department’s Special Ops. As there were no new threats, the FBI team had to locate only the kooks who’d made threats before, and all suspicious characters in the Houston area. Nothing intrusive or heavy-handed, just a check on their whereabouts. The Houston PD Motorcycle Squad had to cover the motorcade, but that was only thirty miles, easily handled by the normal team of twenty-two men and two sergeants. Of course, the department also had men on every bridge over the route, and officers at most intersections. Still, the bulk of the load fell to the Dignitary Protection Division, fifty men who guarded the Vice President inside and outside the Dome. The bible called for the Vice President to come off the field to the owner’s box, field level, on the first-base side. He’d only stay for a while, until they moved him up to a skybox. Fortunately, the command post was set up on the third-base side, up in the catwalks, where the HPD Special Ops, the Astrodome men, and the Secret Service could keep a minute-by-minute binocular vigil.

At least they could be sure the VP would stay where they put him. Some VIPs don’t, and then it’s white-knuckle city. Once, on a visit to Houston, Eisenhower snuck clean away; it turned out he went to play golf. Years later, the Houston force lost Dick Nixon for a panicky hour in the old Lamar Hotel; finally found him in the coffee shop, chatting up a waitress. John F. Kennedy was the worst: he’d throw himself right into a crowd; worst thing you can do to the cops, tears them up; someone could get him with a pocket knife, an ice pick ...
anything
... no way they could see it. Thank God, George Bush wouldn’t do that.

He was good about being on time, too, which the motorcade fellows really liked. As it was, they spent half their lives waiting; it was dreariest when the schedule got busted and H-hour came and went and nobody even knew anymore what was
supposed
to happen. But with George Bush, they could fire up their gleaming Harleys at H-hour minus five, and he’d be there, with his crew in the cars, right on the hour. Then came the part that was their specialty, as they roared away from Ellington Field, southeast of town, and onto the wide open concrete of I-45, where seven or eight of their buddies had already closed the first few ramps and held back traffic on the northbound side. Not a car, not one truck in the way! And another half-dozen men in jodhpurs would peel away from the motorcade, and throw their hogs wide open—sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour!—roaring up to the next ramps to close them until the motorcade sailed by. And after the trailing Harleys passed, they’d open those ramps again and thunder on past the motorcade, with the wind keening off their farings and flattening their smiles inside their helmets—ninety, a hundred, if they could—past the motorcade again to block off the ramps and road ahead. Forty minutes! From the stairs of his airplane at Ellington to the door of the Houstonian. You couldn’t do it any faster at midnight Sunday—not legally, anyway. That limo was
never
gonna need a brake job. Never had to stop—not while these boys were around. And they knew the Vice President appreciated their work, the way he liked to see them lined up on the tarmac at Ellington, at the end of every trip. Always wanted them lined up there, even in the rain, when he’d get wet if he stopped to wave.

But that’s the way he was. Everybody who was in on the trip talked about it—the way he was. Like when they’d get the Army to chopper him from Ellington right to the Houstonian: he wouldn’t land on the hotel grounds—didn’t want to disturb the guests. They’d land him instead nearby, at the Polo Club. Of course, that meant another motorcade to move him a quarter-mile, across the road to the hotel door. But that wasn’t his fault. In Washington, when he went to the office, he wouldn’t let them block the streets, he made them stop at the lights! A whole motorcade pulled up,
waiting for a stoplight
! He didn’t want to disturb the other drivers. He’d tried that in Houston, too. But not tonight—forget it! He came in only three hours before the game, and that meant rush hour. They weren’t going to have him tied up in that—no way—not in Houston traffic. And if some drivers got hot and started honking, or jumped out of their cars to see what the hell was blocking the way—well, they could always stop traffic at the
top
of the ramps, so the Vice President wouldn’t be bothered.

No, from within the motorcade, you couldn’t see anything like that. There was just the calm, empty highway, and the soft hum of the tires on the asphalt of the center lane. With a little motorcade like this, there wasn’t even a press bus, diesel-rumbling behind. No, this one was short and sweet: only a couple of patrol cars, with the Lead Advance and the Lead Agent riding in the first one; and a lead Secret Service car, discreet, just a blue light flashing on the dash; and then the backup, which was only a sedan, carrying Dr. Gasser, the personal physician; and then the real limo, with the Vice President, and Mrs. Bush, and their old friend Jack Steel, the head of the Houston Office of the Vice President; and then the Secret Service wagon, the hulking black Chevy Suburban with the shaded windows and four agents, two facing front and two facing rear, armed with submachine guns and heavier weapons, as they were the CAT squad, the Counter Assault Team, which might have to stay and fight off attackers while the rest of the agents got the hell out with the Vice President; and then the Control Car, which carried the Chief of Staff, and the Director of Advance, and the Military Aide; and then the Support Car, with the Lead Wocka man, and the Press Secretary, and the Personal Aide, and the Vice Presidential Photographer; then, the first Staff Car, which carried the Staff Secretary and the Secretary to the Staff Secretary; then the first Guest Car, for Lee Atwater, the head of the Vice President’s political action committee, which was called the Fund for America’s Future, but was really his Presidential campaign in mufti; then, just one Staff Van, for the rest of the staff, typists and low-level Wocka geeks; and just one Press Van, for a few reporters who had to tag along; and then, of course, the ambulance, with its strobes flashing, red bubble-lights whirring; and another patrol car, or two at times, with their blue lights and strobes flashing, and a few of the men on Harleys, who were there in case any cars broke through the rear motorcycle cordon, a half-mile or more behind, and got too close to the Vice President ... and that was about all.

With the volunteer drivers for the Staff and Press vans, there were occasional gaps in the train, but mostly they stayed tight and smooth. Certainly, they did at the front of the column, with the Secret Service drivers, men who could handle a motorcade without any fits or starts. In Washington or anywhere near, the Vice President always had his own Secret Service men driving, or occasionally his Capitol office driver, the soldierly Korean, Mr. Kim. But even in another city, the Vice President was almost always driven by a member of his own detail. The thinking was, he’d prefer a man from his own world, a face he knew, and a name to go with it. He’d be more secure that way, more comfortable.

Those were the twin imperatives in the Vice Presidential motorcade, and in all the effort around the Vice President: security, and comfort. They were the givens of his life, along with the thousands of hours of intense unseen labor by others. In this case, some four hundred people, a couple of hundred thousand dollars, and a couple of hundred million dollars in government equipment got the Vice President to the ball game in perfect security, and comfort. They also made it possible for him to spend the better part of a day, leave his office, board an airplane, travel halfway across the nation, land in another city and travel overland thirty miles to a ballpark, and never see one person who was not a friend or someone whose sole purpose it was to serve or protect him.

This is living in the bubble, and George Bush had long since perfected the art. By this time, midway through his second term, he had almost ceased to note the special circumstances of his being. After almost six years as Vice President, the bubble was his milieu. He had learned to accept its cost, as he had its perquisites, as his destiny, even his due, owed not to him, as he’d sometimes point out, but to the high office he held. Actually, he was seldom asked about it anymore. The public and the press expected it. They seemed to like it, really, for the glamor they imagined therein. The few who asked were old friends who came to visit and saw what had become of his life. They’d inquire, in uneasy near whispers: “Doesn’t it ... drive you nuts?” And he’d shrug it off with a quick joke, which they’d retell, as evidence of his grace, his discipline under pressure, his will to serve. But, really, they didn’t see the half of it. No one who hadn’t lived in the bubble could know what it was like: a trip of a thousand miles, two thousand, or more, across a
continent
, around
the globe
, without one word exchanged with a stranger; a year, two years, four years, without driving a car, without being
allowed
to drive a car; instead, the hush of the limousine and the silent smile from the Service man at the wheel; the stewards in the plane, hovering to know his pleasure; the jacket with his name embroidered as memento of his visit to the ship or the plant, the campus or the launchpad; the visor, the ball cap, the golf shirt, the golf bag, tennis racket, squash bag, T-shirts, cufflinks, tie tacks, tie clips, memo paper, matchbooks, lighters, ashtrays, swizzle sticks, the coasters, glasses, mugs, china teacups, plastic drink cups, plastic bags, all with his name and seal upon them; the minute-by-minute schedule, instructing him where to stand, whom to greet; the men in suits and earplugs, always around, talking into their wrist microphones; the men in slightly better suits, handing him typed pages, telling him where he’d be going and whom he would see, who his friends were among the crowd and what he was supposed to tell those friends, what the press would be asking and what he ought to say in response; the simple, awesome fact that from the moment he opened his door in the morning until he retired for the night, no matter what he chose to do, or where he went, or what he wanted, he would
never
be alone.

By this time, by October 1986, he took it for granted; wouldn’t have said a word about it, even if he didn’t. The few hints to his attitude, the bright sparks of reaction, flashed only briefly, more than five years before, when the fact of his Vice Presidency began to sink in on him.

There was the first trip, to Massachusetts, 1980, even before inauguration, to represent the White House-to-be at the funeral of the venerable Speaker, John McCormack. It was as George Bush left the church, and all the other mourners were held at the door, as he was guided through a gauntlet of men to the limousine waiting in a ten-car train, as the agents closed him in behind bulletproof steel and glass, and stood round the car, scanning the sidewalks and the empty street ahead, as the motorcycles roared to life and George Bush could no longer hear the men and women with whom he had prayed only minutes before, and he could see only the backs of the agents and the streak of two-wheelers past his shaded window, as even the church was rendered invisible by the men and machines walling him away, then George Bush drew one deep breath, as he turned from the window, and he said to friends in the car:

“God! ... Isn’t it
great
? D’ya ever see so many cops?”

It takes a special man to enjoy the Vice Presidency, but George Bush was the man for the job. Didn’t matter that the writers and the pundits couldn’t see it—he had talent, and he knew it. It wasn’t brains, although he wasn’t stupid: Phi Beta Kappa at Yale, if anybody cared to look. Anyway, the job didn’t call for deep thinking: if you thought too much, brought your insight and intellect to bear on the problems of the nation, you’d get out front of the President, or worse still, off to the side. That’s the surest way down the trash chute in the White House. There’s only one question that the Vice President needs to ask: “What’s the President saying on this?” Anything else is begging for trouble, and George Bush had brains enough to figure that out.

“A bucket of warm spit,” was how Vice President Garner described the job. At least that’s how they wrote the quote from Cactus Jack, the first Texan to hold the position, as FDR’s Number Two (till Roosevelt dumped him in the 1940 campaign). Problem was, no Vice President was really Number Two, or even Three or Four: a Chief of Staff, Secretary of State—
any
Cabinet officer—a Senator, even a Congressman ...
hundreds
of people had more legal and practical power over how things went in the country, even how things went in the White House. In fact, Walter Mondale, the last man but Bush to sit this pointy flagpole, was the first Vice President to have an office in the White House. (Before that, VPs were warehoused safely out of West Wing earshot, in lofty and ornate offices across the street in a gray granite pile called the Old Executive Office Building, or in a suite even more remote, equally grand and futile, in the U.S. Capitol, the locus of their only Constitutional duty, presiding over the U.S. Senate, and voting in case of a tie.)

It also fell to Mondale to pioneer in the stately Victorian house on Massachusetts Avenue, NW, the Official Residence, provided for the Vice President’s use in 1974. Joan Mondale used to give over the whole ground floor to art exhibits and tour groups. It wasn’t enough poor Mondale’s job was to sit around in mothballs; now he was living in a damn museum! But that wouldn’t happen to George Bush—not with Bar in charge. When she took over, the tours stopped and the old wooden house got homey, with tablesful of framed family photos (kids at play on the rocks in Maine), funny hats for George and his friends in the front hall closet, and grandchildren pounding through the halls to the kitchen, to see if the stewards had cookies. (They did.)