I smiled to myself. “Tell me more!”
“The Army Chief of Staff announced at the morning briefing in the press room at the Pentagon that he had received orders to arrest you, and then declared those orders to be illegal and resigned as Chief of Staff.”
“I knew that was going to happen,” I told him.
“What?! Yeah, well what you don’t know is that immediately after that, the Vice Chief of Staff marched up to the podium and announced that he also believed those orders to be illegal, but he wasn’t resigning. If the President, Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs didn’t like it, they could fire him, but he would not approve any orders to recall you and arrest you. Then they issued copies of the investigation from back in 1981 we’ve been screaming about,” he told me.
“Oh, shit! I almost wish I had been there.”
Marty continued. “You knew about this, didn’t you?! What the hell, Carl! Do you have a copy of the report, too!?”
“This all broke late last night, Marty. No need to get you involved. Anything else happen?”
“There were a shitload of questions, but the best one was when somebody asked Shinseki, he’s the Chief of Staff, why he did this, and he told them that the White House could clean up its own mess and leave the Army out of it.”
“He said that?! Oh, holy shit!” Shinseki was going to be lucky to avoid a court martial of his own at this rate! “Anything happen since then?”
“That was just an hour ago. Nothing out of the White House since then. What’s happening there?”
“The reporters just twigged to the fact that something happened and they weren’t there. Scully and I have been rewriting the stump speech. Watch the evening news. The game just went into overtime!”
“Screw that. You’re winning!”
I hung up my phone and noticed everybody else in the party was on theirs, undoubtedly getting the same message I just got. When they hung up, we chatted, but didn’t really bother to rewrite anything else. We simply went to the campaign rally and proceeded to bend Bill Clinton over a barrel.
We started by giving a fairly standard stump speech, praising George Bush for his leadership and insight, and of course, the courage and integrity he was showing by standing by me. Then we added a number of comments based on the latest we had of the situation as of yesterday afternoon, before I got the copy of the report and before I was informed of what Shinseki had planned. Then I grabbed the microphone and came around the podium, and sat down on a bar stool in an ‘impromptu’ informal move. I commented that it seemed that something was going on back in Washington, but that my cell phone wasn’t working, and I hadn’t been able to get any details. Would somebody care to fill me in?
There was an immediate hubbub, and a voice yelled out, “Congressman! Do you mean to say that you aren’t aware that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff refused to have you arrested this morning and resigned?”
Trust a reporter to get it wrong. It was easy to look confused and say, “General Shelton resigned?”
“No, General Shinkowski!”
Now I could really look confused. “Do you mean General Shinseki? He’s the Army Chief of Staff, not the Chairman. I don’t know a General Shinkowski. Do you mean General Shinseki resigned? Why?”
“The President ordered him to have you arrested!”
I put a look of surprise on my face. “The President wants the Army to arrest me? He’s got an entire Justice Department to do that! Arrest me for what? Getting my men home?”
“Congressman! The President ordered the Chairman to order the Army Chief of Staff to arrest you!” yelled another voice. “And the Army Chief of Staff said the President could clean up his own mess and resigned.” Finally somebody got it right!
“Huh! Well, it’s true, the President surely has made a mess of this! Now he’s forcing out other good officers? This is what you get when you make a draft dodger the President!”
There was a huge uproar over that, but then a third reporter yelled out, while holding up a phone, “Congressman, I just heard that General Shelton relieved the Vice Chief of Staff for also refusing to order your arrest.”
Holy Christ! This was spinning out of control back home! “Well, I’m sure that the President will fire enough people so that sooner or later he’ll find an ambitious second lieutenant he can bully around. I guess that means he hasn’t released the investigation from 1981.”
From the far side yelled out several voices. The clearest and loudest yelled, “General Shinseki released copies of it this morning!”
“You’re kidding me, right!? The report must have exonerated me! Are you telling me that the President of the United States is ordering me to face double jeopardy on a closed case, simply to force me out of politics!? What happens next? If a new Army investigation clears me, does the Justice Department get a shot at me?! This is outrageous, even for a man as low as Bill Clinton,” I cried out. It was time to go on the offensive. I climbed up off the stool and faced them all.
“Let me tell you something! The President of the United States knows exactly where I am! If he wants me arrested, he can send the Justice Department after me! He can send the Army! He can send the Marines if he doesn’t trust the Army anymore! He can send the Boy Scouts if he wants! I’m a peaceful man just trying to do my job! It’s just too bad for Bill Clinton that my job is to run his ass out of Washington in disgrace! Now, I am going to continue this campaign swing. If he doesn’t like it, he can issue the arrest warrant himself. His personal conduct in this is despicable!”
Part of our strategy was to get Clinton pissed off enough to do something stupid. Make him overreact; be the voice of reason but then goad him into doing something. Make him react to us, and not the other way around. Meanwhile George Bush could take the high road and concentrate on Al Gore, and push the idea that Al was Bill 2.0. At some point maybe Al would manage to do something stupid, like repudiate Clinton. If we could get them fighting, the job was half done.
I was somewhat surprised by Clinton’s orders to have me recalled to active duty, but not flabbergasted. He was simply counting on the military to obey him automatically. He wasn’t the one ordering my arrest! No, it was the conclusion of the Army that I had betrayed them. They were the ones working to fix the Buckman problem. He simply was clueless about the military and had no respect for them, and it generally showed in his actions and in those of his cabinet. The military didn’t respect him either. One of the first things you learn as an officer is to never give an order that won’t be obeyed. Where Bill screwed up was by not making sure the Army would obey his orders. Now he had gone to war with his own Army.
To be fair, the American military firmly believed in the idea of civilian control. We weren’t some third world shithole with the Army routinely leading a coup d’état. A general might refuse the order and resign, but he would never do anything more than that, and sooner or later a general would be found who wanted an early promotion and would stomach what it would require, and orders would be given. In due time somebody would be coming around for me. In the meantime, however, Bill Clinton was going to be fighting this battle in the news and not looking good in the process. It would be a Pyrrhic victory, destroying his Presidency and sinking Al Gore in the process.
Slick Willie didn’t find a general by lunchtime, so after lunch we flew to Helena and repeated the process. In Helena we were scheduled to stay overnight. In the meantime, after dinner, I agreed to a little bargain — the local television station played that morning’s Pentagon press briefing for me and I gave them an exclusive interview. There was more on the national news. They had managed to track down Colonel Featherstone, but he was a dead end, literally. He had died of lung cancer in 1993 (well, he did smoke like a chimney, as I recalled.) In addition, some of the high points of the report and the conclusions were read out and displayed as graphics on the screen, including: