Marilyn: "He just got me so angry! My son is in a hospital, inches away from dying, and that [BLEEPED!] is shouting to have him killed! Ohhh ... I can't say that on television, can I. Am I in some kind of trouble?"
Jay: "Your husband can always write you a pardon."
Marilyn: "He'd like that, too. I'd never hear the end of it!"
Jay: "What did he have to say when he found out you were in jail?"
Marilyn: "Oh, he was just full of jokes about that! At one point he told me that the kids wanted to see me, and that the normal thing was for parents to bail out their children, and not the other way around! What a rat!"
There was a lot of laughter over that exchange. They also discussed Charlie's condition, his engagement, what all the kids were up to, and other relatively routine family matters.
Letterman was similar the next night, though his tone was a touch snarkier, which was his style. He started off with a Top 10 List from the Home Office in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Top 10 comments from the Pittsburgh Police on seeing the First Lady show up. ("Number One – 'Oh, good, she can bake us some cookies!'")
That weekend we met Megan's family in Pittsburgh. Charlie was in better spirits by then, with the first operation, the one on his femur, his thigh bone, complete. His right leg was in a giant cast, but it wasn't like he was going anywhere. His ribs were healing normally, and his breathing was less painful. Next week they would work on his lower leg. Megan's parents were a bit flummoxed by it all. They knew their daughter was dating Charlie Buckman, but I don't think they had really connected him to me, and they were more than a little awestruck, especially when I had to take a few business calls. It was a little unsettling for a small town lawyer specializing in wills, pre-nups, and custody cases when I had to take a call from the Attorney General of the United States! Nice people.
The following week Marilyn went to New York for a couple of days. She did Jon Stewart on Monday night, and Stephen Colbert on Tuesday. After finishing taping, she caught a fast flight back home, and was in Washington in time to watch Colbert with me that night. One fun segment was about her politics.
Stephen: "Is it true that you are not a Republican like your husband?"
Marilyn: "No, I'm not."
Stephen: "You mean you're a Communist?"
Marilyn: (Laughing) "No, I'm a Democrat!"
Stephen: "Same thing."
Marilyn: "You sound just like my husband."
Colbert: "What about your children? Are they also dedicated to the violent overthrow of the American government and the downfall of Western Civilization and all that is decent and good?"
Marilyn: (Laughing harder) "I don't actually know. They all tell their father they're Democrats, but half the time I think they just like to watch him yell and stomp around the house when they do so."
Stephen: (Eyes lighting up and smiling.) "Really? They like to push his buttons, huh?"
Marilyn: "The girls, especially."
Stephen: (Himself a father of a daughter.) "They can do that, can't they?"
Marilyn: "One time the girls were giving him some grief, and Carl told Charlie, 'I hope you have many daughters, and I hope they're all just like your sisters!', and Charlie asked, 'What did I ever do to you!?'"
I had to joke with Marilyn about what her parents would think of Colbert's denunciation of Democrats. She replied they were asleep by then. True, so true.
That blitz took care of any attempt by the Democrats to tie me personally to the mess with the Westboro Baptist Church and the Secret Service. That didn't mean this was over, though, not by a long shot. The Secret Service was being dragged through the mud, and I told Brian Nagel that I couldn't provide any cover. If something was going to come out, he needed to be upfront about it, and take the beating he was going to get. It didn't matter if there weren't any more problems; if somebody looked hard, and I could guarantee they would, they would find something, even if they had to invent it.
The Westboro Baptist Church was a problem of a different nature. They were suing Marilyn and me for everything under the sun, starting with assault and battery (by Marilyn) and moving on up to abuse of power and wrongful imprisonment (the Pittsburgh Police Department) and finally to a variety of violations of their civil rights (against me.) What joy!
On the other hand, they really overstepped their bounds this time. This wasn't some small town police chief trying to be nice to a local widow and running them out of town. They had managed to piss off the President of the United States and the federal agency responsible for keeping him safe. The Allegheny County Prosecutor might have kicked them loose, but that didn't mean that there weren't any federal charges we could hit them with! First and foremost, as soon as they were cut loose by the Pittsburgh cops, the whole lot of them had been loaded into a prison bus and taken to the East Carson Street office of the FBI, where they were made comfortable in a new set of cells. They were then informed that they had committed a number of federal crimes, including threatening federally protected individuals and assault and battery on a federally protected individual.
After as much delay as they could get away with, the Justice Department reluctantly turned them all loose. With normal people, that would be the end of things. Over the years I had heard any number of ridiculous statements from various radically liberal Hollywood types, including some really stupid ones saying I deserved to die. The usual response would be a couple of extremely unsympathetic and unsmiling federal agents descending on the celebrity, who would then explain what might happen if said celebrity didn't make a quick and abject public retraction. Said retraction was almost immediately forthcoming. The sort of publicity this could generate was not positive publicity.
That only works, however, if the people making the threats were sane, and feared the consequences of their actions. That doesn't actually apply to crazy people. This had been the case with almost all of the various Presidential assassination attempts over the years. Very few (several attempts on Lincoln, an anarchist attack on Hoover, two attempts on Truman) were politically based. The bulk of them were nut jobs who were being told by the voices in their heads that they needed to kill the President. That had been the case with most of the post-Kennedy attempts, like the ones by Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore on Jerry Ford, and John Hinckley on Ronald Reagan. It had also been the ultimate conclusion with Robert Mooradian's attempt on me the year before, although Mooradian had first tried an insanity defense, and had ultimately pled guilty to attempted murder and was serving life without parole at the Federal Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois.
As far as the Justice Department could tell, Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church were a bunch of certified crazies. The crazies liked the publicity they were getting. These guys ran on a shoestring budget, and anything that got them in the news was a way for them to get their message out to the masses. As soon as they were cut loose, they went back to the hospital and began protesting again. That earned them a second trip to a federal lockup, until a lawyer got them cut loose. Their regular lawyer, Shirley Phelps-Roper, was Fred Phelps' daughter, and had been arrested as the person who had given Marilyn the black eye.
When they got out the second time, they really went too far. They decided to go after the hospital, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. They put up on their website, www.godhatesfags. com, the names of some of the doctors and nurses working on Charlie, with their home addresses, and pictures with bulls-eyes superimposed on them. Justice immediately assigned U.S. Marshals to protect all the doctors and nurses, and yanked the kooks all back into jail a third time, and then got a court order to shut down the website.