I shrugged but smiled. “I don’t know yet, but we can figure it out. Does that mean you’ll switch to State?”
“When do you want to do this?” he asked.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” I replied, smiling. Powell didn’t gainsay me. “Soon. We’ll be responding to this in the next few weeks. As it stands, I can’t trust what I am being told. If I leave it up to Cheney and the other neocons, we’ll end up invading some damn place that has nothing to do with this. They have an agenda that has nothing to do with what really happened.”
“The question still stands. When do you plan to do this?”
“I can see a response by the end of the month, or maybe the first week of October. Once that is done, he’s gone. If I fire him first, I have no idea what he will do in response. He might just spout off and say something, all with the best of motives, of course, that will screw something up. In the meantime, you need to get your bomber crews dialed up and the other assets in place. I want to have some options to discuss early next week.”
“Al Qaeda?” he asked.
“And the Taliban. And I don’t need to attack the other billion Muslims around the world while we’re doing this.”
“Who do we put in Defense? And CIA, for that matter? And the Vice Presidency?”
I gave a minor shrug at that. “I’ve got an idea or two for the CIA, but I’m not sure yet on Defense, and I will be more than happy to listen to suggestions. I’m thinking about the VP slot, too. If you can come up with a name or two for Defense, I’ll sort out the Vice President slot and CIA. We need to completely rebuild our intelligence capabilities. Go back to the Pentagon and see what your sources are up to.”
“Yes, sir. Understood.”
I stood up, and Powell stood with me. I reached out to shake his hand. “General, I appreciate the assistance. Thank you, sir.”
I was also able to meet with several foreign leaders on an individual basis. For these we had to have interpreters and the Secretary of State was present. Some leaders were happy to see me, others quite wary. The neocons had been getting more and more bellicose as the year had worn on, and Vladimir Putin was not amused, among others. Most of all, everyone wanted to meet the new boy President. I was 45 years, 10 months, and 6 days old when I was named Acting President, the third youngest President in American history. I told Cheney we would need to make a foreign trip before the end of the year. I received a sneer in response.
Fine by me. I’d hang him out to dry before then.
Chapter 142: Intelligence
Monday, September 24, 2001
The funeral was finished by Thursday afternoon. Laura and the girls officially moved out on Friday. I needed to take a few days off myself. Marilyn and I flew back to Hereford on Thursday for a long weekend. In the meantime, the White House Chief Usher, the head of the residence staff, would coordinate getting the Bush’s belongings out of the place and out of Camp David, and getting our stuff moved over from the Naval Observatory. We would officially move in Monday morning.
When I was elected as Vice President, we had moved our clothing and my office from the house on 30th over to the Naval Observatory, though we left the furniture. I had debated putting the home on the market, but quickly realized that it might be useful to keep it around as a backup residence. If I had somebody visiting that I either couldn’t put up in an official residence, or didn’t want to, or didn’t have the room for, I could let them stay there. It wasn’t like I had to sell it to pay the new mortgage.
We were both exhausted by the time we got back to the house, but there was no rest for the weary. Almost immediately I was asked where I wanted the commo bunker installed. “Excuse me?” I asked the Secret Service agent.
“The communications trailers. There are actually two of them, plus antennas. We didn’t think you wanted them out on the front lawn, so to speak.”
I looked at my wife and muttered, “Good grief!” She looked distressed so I dragged the fellow outside and pointed to a place out in the field on the other side of the landing pad. Then I looked in the other direction, and saw a clearing in the woods I owned on the other side of the street, a clearing that hadn’t been there before. “What’s going over there?”
“A security trailer.”
“Just how permanent are you making these things?” I asked.
He shook his head and said, “Not too crazy. No basements or anything. They’ll be self contained units on slab foundations. The day you leave the White House, we can just unbolt everything and haul it away.”
Leaving me with new concrete lawn ornaments. I sighed in acceptance. “I assume you’ll be doing this at Hougomont, too?”
“Where’s that? I know we have to do it in the Bahamas.”
“Hougomont is the name of our place in the Bahamas,” I told him.
“Oh. Yes, sir, there too. That’s a different team, though.”
“God help the Bahamas! They’ll probably declare me an undesirable by the time this is done!” I wandered back inside and told Marilyn what was going on.
To be fair, they kept the disruption to a minimum. Ever since that first day after the election, when I managed to get a really obnoxious and arrogant agent packed off to Nome, Alaska, or somewhere north of there, the Secret Service was generally a lot politer to me. Okay, there had been the asshole on Air Force Two, but that was a pretty odd day to begin with. Some of the changes we were getting were simply upgrades of various things that had been put in when I became the Vice President. They had replaced our phone system and Internet/cable connections then, and increased security also. Now, as the President, I just got more.
I couldn’t wait until they brought in the anti-aircraft missiles! That was no joke, either. I heard somebody mentioning an I-HAWK battery, but they couldn’t figure out how to camouflage it, and were debating using Stingers instead. Joy!
I had 25 acres around the house and about 10 across the road. I wondered if it would be sufficient!
One thing I had to deal with over the weekend was a ridiculous case of racism. It had been simmering all week, but what with the memorial services, I was prevented from dealing with it appropriately. It all dated from Monday, at the funeral for Harlan, when during the eulogy I had said that in basic, ‘I was on the top bunk and Harlan was beneath me.’ Reverend Al Sharpton had been taking me to task ever since then about my obvious racism and how black people were beneath me!
When Ari Fleischer told me this, I simply stared at him in disbelief. Finally, I got my brain to working and asked, “Are you kidding me?!”
“I am dead serious, Mister President!”
“Ari, we were assigned our bunks. I never chose, or I’d have chosen the bottom bunk! Are you shitting me?!”
“He is also claiming that your position carrying the coffin meant something demeaning. That one I don’t understand myself.”
I gave him another odd look. “There were six of us, and I was in the center on the left. I’ve got a bad knee, and if I bobbled the thing, the guys in front and behind could catch it. This is nuts.”
“Al Sharpton doesn’t have to make sense. All he wants to do is keep his name out there. He thinks he’s the next Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King, Jr., all rolled into one.”
“Shit! Okay, if you have to put out something, simply say that the bunks were assigned and that is all that means. Jesus Christ! I have to bury a President and this asshole thinks it’s a good time to grandstand!” I told him.
Ari put out an appropriate statement, but that didn’t shut Sharpton up. He loved the sound of his own voice, and facts never swayed him. It came to a head that Sunday morning on Meet the Press. Tim Russert, who I had known for years, had Sharpton on in an early segment, and as a counterpoint, had a retired Major General Jonathan Buller. It took me a second to recognize him, but then it dawned on me that General Buller had been my battalion commander when I had Bravo Battery. The interesting thing, though, was that Buller, who had been a fine battalion commander and who had continued rising through the ranks, was as black as the ace of spades. That had never been important to me when he had been Lieutenant Colonel Buller and I had been First Lieutenant Buckman. He said ‘Jump!’ and I said, ‘How high?’ How they ever dug him up I will never fathom.