John McCain was furious about all of this. Mud splashed on the President was the same as mud splashed on the Vice President. The primaries would begin in January, and the Senate Finance Committee was promising Congressional hearings on the Secret Service beginning after the winter recess. What that would do was to insure that after the holidays, the press had some nice and juicy blood-letting to go along with the primaries. John was my presumptive heir apparent. If I looked bad, he looked bad, and Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee were loudly demanding an even larger investigation, including sworn testimony from Marilyn and my family. (I called Brewster McRiley and Mike Duncan of the RNC and told them to explain how that was never going to happen.) Their theory was that if I looked bad, John looked bad, and if John looked bad, they would look good.
We did what we could do to mitigate the problem. Nagel cleaned house in the prep teams, and a dozen agents resigned or were fired by mid-November. It wasn’t enough, and I let Nagel go as well, replacing him with an Assistant Director from the finance side of the Secret Service. That was the investigatory unit responsible for counterfeiting and other securities related crimes. The only ones lower in the hierarchy than them were the uniformed guys, and I promised that if it became necessary, they would be the only ones left. I didn’t care how much blood had to be shed, but I wanted the Secret Service cleaned up!
It wasn’t entirely the winter of my discontent. By the end of October Charlie had recovered enough to get booted out of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. I had been going up most weekends to visit, and Marilyn and Megan had worked out a schedule where one of them was always around for him. Megan had flown to Los Angeles in September for a small part, but had been unhappy about it and declined the role. It was obvious that she had been chosen because of her relationship to Charlie, and her outfit was on the skimpy side of skimpy. She had a long talk with her agent and then flew home to Omaha for a few days before coming back to Pittsburgh. Marilyn wasn’t completely sure, but she told me that she thought Megan’s acting career was over.
Charlie was either oblivious or simply smart enough to know when to keep his mouth shut. By the end of September his ribs had healed enough that he could begin some rehabilitation on his upper body. He told me privately that it was worse than anything he had gone through when he got shot in Monrovia. He still had a giant cast on his right leg, and a much smaller cast on his right arm. A month later his casts had come off and his catheter had come out, and he was able to walk upright and use the bathroom, although he needed a lot of help. He balked at moving into the White House, but was amenable to the idea of moving into the house on 30th Street. We converted my first floor library into an infirmary and arranged for Charlie to begin rehabilitation therapy at Walter Reed.
First, however, we had to get him out of there. Aside from the substantial bill from the hospital’s accounting office (he had medical insurance through his racing team and the track, but he would still have been bankrupted if he was a normal guy) I donated $10 million to found the Buckman Wing for Really Dumb Children Who Ride Insane Motorcycles and Become Organ Donors. Strangely, they insisted on a more conventional name involving the use of the words Orthopedics and Rehabilitation. I told Marilyn my title was more accurate and for once she agreed with me. We had a very nice ceremony, thanked everybody and their brother, and had some nice people from the Pittsburgh City Hall in to help; they had their hands out, too, and they received a nice little payoff to the Police Benevolent Association. Afterwards we loaded Charlie onto Marine One and we flew him to the Naval Observatory, which was the closest helipad to the house on 30th Street.
Marilyn wanted to stay around for a bit to make sure Charlie settled in properly. I dragged her away, whispering to her that Charlie and Megan looked like they could ‘settle in’ just fine on their own. She elbowed me in the side and said her son was better behaved than that, but when I rolled my eyes at her, she giggled and said, “He’s as much of a barbarian as his father!”
I shrugged and gave a bland smile. “She’s an actress. Maybe she has a nurse’s costume available.”
“You are a dirty old man!”
“You’re the one with the AARP card!” I laughed.
“You have one, too!”
That was true. It had showed up in the mail at Hereford when I turned 50. I used it as a bookmark.
“Do you know why Ben Franklin preferred older women as mistresses?” I asked, needling her because she was five months older than me. Marilyn had already turned 52, while I was still 51 for a few more weeks.
“No! Why!?”
I lowered my voice and whispered, “Because they were so grateful!”
“OOOOHHH! You are a rat!” Marilyn tried to slug me, but I wrapped her up in my arms and laughed. “I’ll show you old!”
“I certainly hope so!” I laughed.
Marilyn didn’t believe me about Ben Franklin, so once we got back to the White House, I made a call over to the Library of Congress. I managed to speak to the Librarian, Doctor Billington, and he laughed and promised to send over a copy of the letter that Franklin wrote. He also warned me that I was playing with fire. I just asked what was life without a little heat.
For Thanksgiving we stayed at the White House for a traditional feast. Last year we ate in Kurdistan. This year the Iraqi border was quieter, and we had fewer troops in place. We managed to get the entire family down. Molly and Bucky came down from Lansdowne, Charlie and Megan came over from 30th Street, and Holly showed up with the same guy who had been at the wedding with her. He still looked like a scruffy bum. When I asked Marilyn if they were serious she said they were very serious, and were moving in together into a new apartment. “You met Jerry at the wedding! Where have you been?” she replied.
“I don’t know, running the free world, maybe?”
“Hmmmph! Some father you are!”
As a family we had to actually appear in public together the day before Thanksgiving, at the annual Pardoning of the Turkeys. For years and years turkeys were given to the President as gifts from various poultry boards, but the general rule was to thank those giving the bird, praise the quality of the bird, and a day later, eat the bird. Trust Ronald Reagan to screw up a really good idea. He decided to give the turkey a ‘Presidential pardon’ and make it into a national event. Personally, I would be more than happy to go back to the old way of doing things. We now had two turkeys to pardon, and they always had cute or patriotic names, like ‘Liberty’ and ‘Freedom.’ I would privately call them ‘Juicy’ and ‘Delicious.’
The entire ceremony had some problematic issues. The worst was that Jerry still looked and dressed like a scruffy bum. Charlie, Bucky, and I were wearing suits and overcoats or trench coats, and the ladies all had on smart suits or dresses and matching overcoats, scarves, and gloves. Jerry was wearing jeans, a Pearl Jam t-shirt, a ratty parka, and a wool cap with a hole in it. I took one look at him and muttered, “Are you kidding me?! Hold it a minute.” He was near enough my size, though taller by a couple of inches. I went to the closet and pulled out a spare dress coat and a clean watch cap. “Here, put these on,” I told him. “You can stand in the back for any photos.”
He stood there and gave me a hostile look. “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing!?”