“I am aware of that, Sergeant, and I am also aware that clerical errors get made.” I then looked at my son, and gave the rest of the answer. “Charlie, I am a rich and powerful man. Most of the kids you have grown up with, most of the girls you have dated, you first met them when I wasn’t anywhere near as rich or powerful. But out there, out in the rest of the world, the people you meet will only know you as the son of a rich and powerful man. Bobby Buckman, of Washington, however, nobody has ever heard of. The friends you make, you’ll know they’re your friends because of you, not because somebody wants something from me. The same goes for your duty assignments. There will be people who will want you to do things in the Marines because they think they will be able to get stuff from me.”
“Huh?”
“It happens, Charlie. Maybe you get assigned somewhere nearby, or maybe you want to have one type of duty and somebody in the Pentagon sees your name and decides you should do something different. Hey, it happens,” I told him.
Then I looked back at the sergeant. “So, there it is. I can’t expect it of you, and I can’t even really ask it of you, but for his sake, not for mine, change his name. If he wants to do this, let him, but let him just be a regular guy.”
Sergeant Rodriguez wouldn’t commit himself, but simply promised to think about it. I couldn’t ask more than that. After a bit more, we let him leave, and told both him and Charlie we wouldn’t stand in his way. After he left, though, I tapped Charlie on the shoulder and pointed back to the living room. “Why the Marines?”
“Because it’s not the Army,” he said. I was quite hurt at that, and it must have shown. Charlie, said, “Dad, I need to do something different. I know you were in the Army, and I can’t go through life being compared to you. I have to do something different.”
“Is it that bad?” I asked softly.
“No, it’s not like that. It’s just… I need to do something different. The girls, they’re more like you. Holly and Molly… I can see them going to college and becoming scientists or something, like you did, but that would drive me crazy! I’m never going to be an office type of guy, so let me try something else.”
I looked over at Marilyn and we gave each other a resigned look. Marilyn sent our son to bed and then looked over at me. She didn’t say anything.
I simply said, “The Marines?!”
She just started laughing at me.
There proved to be limits to my power as the Majority Whip. I could delay legislation and influence legislation, but I couldn’t stop legislation. Case in point — the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill, otherwise known as the Financial Services Modernization Act. Wall Street was pushing this hard, very hard! In the sake of modernization, they wanted us to dismantle the Glass-Steagall Act from the Depression. There were also other minor issues, but this was the big one to me.
Glass-Steagall mandated the separation of commercial banks from investment banks. Commercial banks were what normal people thought of as banks, where they got car loans and mortgages and cashed their paychecks. Investment banks, on the other hand, were the basis of what is known as ‘Wall Street’. You might have stocks and bonds with them, or a retirement account. To a considerable extent, the Buckman Group would be considered part of Wall Street, since we did so much investing and had clients and investors. There was a big difference in how the two groups were regulated, and what they could do. The biggest difference was that if a commercial bank went under, the depositors were safe. The Feds would come in, examine the books, shut it down, and sell the bank, in most cases overnight. If an investment bank made the wrong bets on Wall Street, tough luck! You lost your money! You want to play with the big boys, wear your big boy pants.
I knew how this story would end, and it wasn’t pretty. In fact, it was a major factor in the financial sector collapse in 2008. After Glass-Steagall was repealed, investment banks and commercial banks bought each other up and became indistinguishable. Then, when something bad happened, like an investment bank failed, it took down any commercial bank part of it, and the Fed ended up investing almost a trillion dollars cleaning up the mess.
I fought it, and I fought it hard, but too many people wanted it. I tried to delay it and modify it, but everybody thought they were smarter that the market and the economy. Depressions? They were a thing of the past! We had out-regulated and outsmarted the bad things that could happen. What a clusterfuck of thinking. The best part was that everybody seemed to think that since I made my fortune on Wall Street I should be in love with this. I made a few speeches and went on the talk shows and said that I was a big boy, and if I fucked up, I would lose my money but nobody else’s. If I was brave enough to bet my money, why did they want to gamble with the public’s? I might as well have talked to the wind. I was well in the minority when it came time to vote on this abortion.
I didn’t have to worry about behaving properly around the President and the First Lady. Bill and Hillary weren’t about to invite me over to dinner unless it was a scheduled and formal event. That occurred in January when the freshmen Congressmen and Senators were invited for the regular welcome dinner, along with the House and Senate leadership. As the lowly Whip, I didn’t make a speech. I was involved in various group photos, some with the President and some without, and some with our spouses and some without. Likewise, at the start of any new legislative session, you get the wonderful group photos of the President meeting with the leadership of the House and Senate in a big conference room, along with various Cabinet members. Everybody smiles for the cameras and promises to work together for the benefit of all. Then we pull out our knives and sharpen the points, the better to stick in each other’s backs.
The overall impression I got from most of Bill’s staff was that if they could drown me in a barrel of used motor oil, it still wouldn’t be sufficient.
I didn’t much care. I left a lot of the care of the district in the hands of my regular staff, and did like a good Representative should — I obeyed my staff! Marty and the Constituent Services people would decide what I had to do, Mindy would write it up for me, and I would do their bidding. It was a lot like an upside down pyramid, with a dozen or more chiefs ordering around a lone Indian. It made you wonder who worked for whom.
The Whip’s office worked a little differently. I actually had two separate offices and two separate staffs. The Whip’s staff was totally separate from my district office and only worked on leadership items. I spent a fair bit of time working with DeLay and Hastert figuring out how to get legislation passed, and then I would go back to the staff with instructions. There is still an immense amount of really piddly fiddlework involved in getting things done, and it’s the Whip’s job to do it. You have to meet prospective Congressmen, the guys who want to challenge somebody for a seat. Then there’s the mundane aspects of running a big bureaucracy. Who gets on what committees, when do votes get scheduled, where people are at any given moment — it all has to be kept track of! If a vote on some legislation is scheduled, are the good votes present and the bad votes out of town? Make it happen! There was one memorable case where a senior legislator who happened to be in Washington State needed to make it to D.C. in time for a critical vote, and the Whip arranged for him to go to the local Air Force base to get an ‘orientation flight’ in an F-15 to fly to Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington in time for him to vote.
It wasn’t all bad. True to my word, I worked across party lines to deal with the Democrats. In fact, if somebody, especially a Republican leader, couldn’t be seen to be consorting with those evildoers on the other side, they might have a word with me to get me to do it. Since I was going to burn in the fires of Republican eternal damnation anyway, why not? The same was true for the Democrats. If something needed to be whispered in a Republican ear, they could easily whisper it in mine.