Me: (Laughing.) “I hope they have lots of daughters, so I can get a little of my own back!” (Marilyn laughed and swatted at me.)
Tom: (Smiling) “Looking forward to being a grandfather?”
Me: “I intend to be the grandfather who buys the grandkids the drum set, the guy the parents are always worried about. Then, I’ll load them up with sugar and give them back to the owners.”
Marilyn: “You would, too!”
Tom: “Take it from me, Mister President, you have it figured out already. Mrs. Buckman, let me ask you about what had the entire nation stunned a few weeks ago. What do you think of the President’s new look?”
Marilyn: “I think that’s the silliest thing to worry about, isn’t it? Of course the kids tease him that he’s actually using it to grow hair for a hair transplant.”
Me: “They are out of the will for sure, now!”
Marilyn: “Maybe you can go for the full shaved head look next.”
Tom: “Does kissing your husband tickle now?”
At that Marilyn giggled and I waggled my eyebrows at her, and she giggled some more and swatted me again without answering. After that she retired. They reset the cameras in the Oval Office and we switched to there for discussions of my Presidency.
Tom: “It’s been a tumultuous seven years for you, Mister President, starting with your accession to office.”
Me: “Very true. It’s certainly not how anybody would ever want to get a job.”
Tom: “Would you have ever run for President on your own?”
Me: “Very doubtful. The idea of spending two years traveling all over the country, and spending weekends, if I’m lucky, at home getting ready to repeat the process? No, I don’t think I could ever have subjected myself or my family to that.”
Tom: “You didn’t have the so-called ‘fire in the belly’ for the job?”
Me: “Not for that kind of abuse. I’ve told John more than once I didn’t understand how he had gone through with it, and he did it twice, first in 2000, and then again this year.”
Tom: “Yet you did it in 2004.”
Me: “It’s a whole different game when you only have to fight the other side, and not your own at the same time. Again, I’ll thank John McCain for the help he gave me in 2004. He secured that victory for me. Great guy, and he’ll be a great President.”
Tom: “Do you think President McCain will do better or worse than President Buckman?”
Me: “No idea. I think the question is whether President McCain will be a third term of President Buckman, and the answer to that will be no. John is going to be his own man and, I think, a competent and thoughtful President. Back in 2001, when I asked John to join me and take the job as Vice President, I told him that every once in awhile this country gets an object lesson in selecting their leaders. There have been 44 Presidents, and 9 of us got the job when our boss met his Maker ahead of schedule. That’s a one in five chance, a 20 % mortality rate. You’d never get an insurance company to sell you a policy for that! All too often in this nation’s history, the Vice President gets picked not because he would be qualified to take over, but because it was politically expedient to pick him. Not every one of us has been qualified to take over in case we landed in the jackpot. I told John that if something happened to me, I would be comfortable knowing he would be the next President. I didn’t expect him to do the things I had done, but I did feel confident knowing he would do the right things as he saw them, and not the politically expedient thing.”
Tom: “And Jeb Bush as the Vice President?”
Me: “I think Jeb will do the right thing, too. I feel comfortable with John’s choice.”
Tom: “Who do you think did a good job when, as you say, they landed in the jackpot?”
Me: “Well, Teddy Roosevelt is one of my favorites. He was excellent. The same goes for Harry Truman, and Jerry Ford was very underrated at the time.”
Tom: “And the others? Who didn’t work out?”
Me: “These are just my opinions, but Andrew Johnson was nothing but a political hack chosen by Lincoln to try and hold the country together prior to the Civil War. When Lincoln was assassinated, Johnson was a Democrat surrounded by Republicans, and he was just chum in front of the sharks. Tyler and Fillmore didn’t work out either. I think the most tragic was Lyndon Johnson. He had great domestic plans, but was completely incapable of handling anything overseas.”
Tom: “Where do you think you rate on that scale?”
Me: (Shrugging.) “That won’t be for me to say. I hope on the plus side, but I just don’t know.”
Tom: “What will the historians say in twenty years?”
Me: (Smiling.) “That will be the least of my problems. Strokes and Alzheimer’s run in my family. Twenty years from now I won’t even know my name.”
That was a real stumper for Brokaw. He simply didn’t know how to respond to that, and you could see it in his face. He decided to focus on the overall changes during the past seven years.
Tom: “When you took office the nation was under attack by parties unknown, thousands of Americans were dead, and President Bush was missing in action. On the domestic side, more than a few economists were concerned about future runaway deficits and a recession, if not worse. Today America is the undisputed superpower of the world, and you have managed a net surplus during your seven year administration. Inflation is low and unemployment is low. This is an enviable record for any world leader.”
Me: “I think it’s a matter of knowing what needed to be done, and what didn’t need to be done. When I was sworn in, we had a pretty good idea what was actually happening. The problem was that there were an awful lot of entrenched interests with their own agendas. I came in with only one agenda, which was to keep the nation safe and strong.”
Tom: “What were those entrenched interests?”
Me: “Let me preface this by saying that many of the people involved were acting out of what they honestly felt was the best interest of the country. However, when you total them up, the plans they had would have weakened us, not strengthened us. Defense contractors wanted to sell the Pentagon all their newest goodies, which would have been good for their shareholders, but not necessarily good for the economy as a whole. Congress wanted to use those toys, and a lot of conservatives believed that military action could be used for more than simply defending the country, but could also be used to help build more democratic societies in the countries which threatened us. I disagreed.”
Tom: “How so?”
Me: “My belief was that we needed to take a very hard and realistic look at the rest of the world. We weren’t going to get pluralistic and liberal democracies in nations with rampant unemployment, illiteracy, religious intolerance, and sectarian violence. American has an excellent military, but you use armies and navies to kill people and break things, not to build countries. We needed to play to our strengths, not our weaknesses.”
Tom: “And those strengths were?”
Me: “That plays into our economic strengths. You can’t have a strong defense without a strong economy. That means not buying every weapon ever designed, but investing in America. We needed to invest in our real strength, our human capital and our economic capital.”
Tom: “Could you be more specific?”
Me: “President Bush’s DREAM Act was a perfect example of strengthening our human capital, by fixing parts of our immigration system. His No Child Left Behind Act did the same for education reform. Infrastructure is an example of strengthening our economic capital. For the cost of an invisible bomber, we can buy several very visible repaired bridges and canal locks and sewer systems. Ultimately all of this will make us much stronger than any of our potential foes.”