Sharpton was being broadcast from a studio in New York City, and Buller was in the studio with Russert. Sharpton started off with a litany of woes about the racism of the Buckman administration, which had only been in office about 12 days at that point. As proof, he cited my long personal history of racism, starting with my statement about Harlan being beneath me. When Tim stated that I had explicitly stated that I was in the top bunk and Harlan was in the bottom bunk, Sharpton replied, “That’s what Mister Buckman says, of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s true!”
Tim looked over at General Buller. “General? You used to command the President. Is he a racist?”
“Absolutely not! This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard of! Lieutenant Buckman was one of the finest officers I ever had the privilege of commanding, and I never saw a trace of racism in his words or his actions. I recommended him for early promotion twice, and if he had stayed in the army he would have had an outstanding career. He was an excellent officer.”
“Then what about the significance of which bunk he was in? Or is there a significance?”
Buller snorted. “This happened when he was in cadet training, which for an officer is the same thing as boot camp. They start at one end of the barracks and a sergeant assigns each boy a bunk alphabetically. It’s a bunch of 18 and 19 year old kids, and the sergeant just goes you… you… you… right down the line. Buckman… Buckminster… next! They sleep where they are told, they march where they are told, they do what they are told, and they do it with whoever they are told to do it with! That’s all it is. Every soldier and every officer goes through it. It’s basic training and that’s how it works. If Al Sharpton had ever served the country like he serves his mouth, he’d know better!”
It only got better from there! I watched with vast amusement as my old friend had to put up with Sharpton and Buller trading insults. Sharpton called my former commander a ‘Tom’ and a ‘house boy around the plantation’ and Buller called Sharpton a ‘damn fool’ and a lying sack of [bleeped]!’ I was laughing my ass off at that point, and Russert pulled the plug on the pair of them. I told Marilyn we would have to invite General Buller to dinner some night, maybe to speak to the NAACP, at which point she told me to ‘Behave!’ and gave me a finger wagging. Somehow I suspected the problem was going to go away at that point. I dreaded to think of what Harlan’s family thought of it all.
Monday morning, I took Marine One back to Washington while Marilyn stayed home with the girls. This was their senior year in high school. We needed to somehow make a two-home family work, just until they graduated. This was going to be tricky, since Marilyn was now the First Lady, and needed to be in Washington with me. It wouldn’t be easy.
I left the house early and got to my office about 8:00, and went directly to the Oval Office. First things first — I received a Presidential Daily Briefing without any attitude now. The official intelligence was still that everything pointed towards Iraq. The intel I was getting from the Three Amigos was pointing towards Al Qaeda and Afghanistan.
Priority Number One — Sort this shit out! My first call was to Collins Barnwell, and tell him I wanted the three of them to be here at 11:00 with the latest info. Barnwell was the titular head of the investigation, and an Executive Assistant Director of the FBI. The other two, Secret Service Assistant Director William Basham and CIA Deputy Director of Analysis Winston Creedmore, were to come along with him.
Until then I puttered around doing odds and ends. That’s not saying I was goofing off, but at the Presidential level, even the odds and ends are important. The secretaries try to keep things straight, but there are never enough hours in a day. Even going to the bathroom seems to be on a schedule. Forget about goofing off and reading a magazine or playing Solitaire on the computer. You are already booked for that time. Meanwhile, something is bound to come up that throws everything out of whack. By the way, everything that lands on your desk can literally involve life and death decisions.
Nobody has yet come up with a way to determine if somebody will be up to the job of being President. Some business executives ran on the basis of their ability to run big operations and multi-task. These are useful skills, and are also found in a number of governors who had held the job. Then again, over the years we’ve had some governors who didn’t do as well as others (Carter and Bush 43, not great; Clinton, better than average) and Senators without executive experience that had done okay (Kennedy) and others who hadn’t (Obama). All the scholars could do was make wild ass guesses about what it took. From what I could see you needed to be a world class juggler and as flexible as a contortionist. Maybe they needed to start recruiting at the circus.
Barnwell gave the presentation on what they had discovered so far, and it was impressive. The FBI technique is to throw a zillion agents at a problem, with each one assigned to a specific task, and that agent becomes an expert on that task. So, the simple answer was to take the passenger and crew lists from each airplane and assign an agent to each passenger or family of passengers, and to each crew member and investigate them thoroughly. Could they have been involved? Where were they sitting? Who were they sitting next to? What was that person doing? What was their background and history? If they were clean, that agent got assigned to something else.
In short order they were able to write off ninety-plus percent of the crew and passengers. Joe Schmoe, a stock broker from Milwaukee, flying home from Boston, on the way to see his blonde wife and 2.3 children, was not the guy who did this. Instead, let’s look closer at this swarthy fellow, Mohammed Mohammed, who paid for his trip in cash, one way, is on an expired visa from Saudi Arabia, and who got a pilot license in the States. Yeah, let’s look at him, especially after an interview with his flight instructor reports that Mohammed Mohammed wasn’t paying any attention to the ‘landing’ portion of the lessons. At that point, they start tearing this guy’s life apart. Where was he living? What was his itinerary like? Where did he get his money from? Where were his bank accounts? Can we tie him to anything overseas, with the CIA? Did he show up on Secret Service lists?
Nineteen foreign born men, most of them from Saudi Arabia, were tagged and investigated. They all had ties to the terrorist group Al Qaeda, and had some history in Afghanistan. None of them had anything to do with Iraq.
“Okay, gentlemen, you’ve told me the good news, such as it is. We know who did it and we know how they did it. How did they slip through? Or did we catch them and ignore them?” I asked. At that point I started getting some hemming and hawing, and guilty looks from both Barnwell and Creedmore, with Basham having the good taste to try and look sympathetic. I eyed them and said, “Let me put it another way. Just how bad did your departments fuck up?”
Barnwell answered first. “Bad enough, sir. We are still digging through our own files on this, but it is obvious that we had some early reports on at least some of these men, something that twigged various local agents, and that got buried by higher ranking agents.”