Tom chuckled and said, “Yes, sir.”
Josh added, “Scary, isn’t it?”
I turned back to Ari and nodded. “Let Mike and Matt know what’s going on and tell them I need a short statement. If we do this Friday morning, somebody will have blabbed by then. We’ll need to have some talking heads for the Sunday news shows.”
Ari nodded in return. “Josh and Frank. Frank’s young but surprisingly good. By the way, I wanted to speak to you about Carter. Don’t get me wrong. Carter’s nice, but he’s really not a spokesman type. We are going to need somebody else.”
I shrugged. That had been a long shot. “Okay. I will let you figure that one out. I really don’t know what that entails and how you find a guy. Have you talked it over with Carter?”
“Yes. We both knew this was coming. He can move into more of a legislative role of some sort. That’s more his interest, anyway,” Ari replied.
“I’ll confirm this with Carter, but if you need somebody different, so be it. If Carter doesn’t like the change, I know he can find a home over on K Street anyway. I’ll talk to him this afternoon,” I answered.
“Thank you, Mister President.” At that the meeting broke up and everybody left.
We had the official luncheon on Thursday in a room on the ground floor of the Residence across from the Map Room. By then, two days after the decision to do this, there was already some leaking from the White House. I was a little surprised by that, but not much. Nobody was really saying anything yet, but Ari commented that there had been a few questions in the hallways by the Press Corps. He seemed to think this would be good. One of the Congressmen would yap, that was guaranteed, and ‘speculation’ would be on the nightly news. This would prime things for our announcement Friday morning.
Lunch was to be relatively simple, soup and salads and sandwiches, but all eaten on White House china. Over the years, some Presidents discounted the need to schmooze Congress, and they tended to be less successful. As I had told John McCain, I wanted to work them like a salesman working a customer. The fellows who were going to be at the luncheon wouldn’t be all that impressed, because they were senior people, and had all been there multiple times before. However, you get some first or second term Congressman from Butte, Montana, or Pigs Knuckle, Arkansas, and invite him to the White House? Wow! That’s impressive! Work him, make him feel important, ask him about something from back home — I don’t care what party he’s from, it makes it easier to sell the fellow. Throw in some of the swag available, and the vote is half in the bag.
What was swag? All sorts of things, simple stuff with the Presidential Seal, like cuff links, tie clips, business card holders, cigarette lighters, match books, pens and pencils, fake coins. Some is for men and some is for women. Give it to somebody personally, along with a handshake. If you go to a John Deere dealer to buy a tractor and he throws in a ball cap, that’s swag. You just bought a half million dollar combine and got a free ball cap, and now you think the dealer is your best friend. Guess what? We had White House ball caps, too. It was similar to what I had for the constituents back in Congress, only I had more stuff and a bigger budget.
Some of that wouldn’t work on the leadership, but it still paid to be polite and break bread. Most of them knew the lunch was more than just a meeting, and nobody was surprised to find Clarke, McCain, Ridge, and Powell in the room. Josh, Frank, and Ari were with us, also. Before we had lunch, I went to a small podium and made the official announcement. “Thank you all for coming. One of the things I promised all of you was that I intended to work closely with Congress. I apologize if I wasn’t able to meet with you all last week, but you all know how busy that schedule was. One of the things I want to talk with you about today is coming up with a more formal schedule for lunches, both with the leadership and with other members of Congress. In any case, I asked you here to meet some of the candidates we have to fill some of the current vacancies in the Executive branch.” At that I gave a quick rundown of who was doing what, and a request that the leadership work with me to see that everybody was confirmed quickly.
Nobody gave me any grief over McCain or Powell. There was a bit more comment about Ridge, but only because he wasn’t as well known. The same applied to Richard Clarke, with the added difficulty that several people knew that the Bush White House had fired him, and here I was bringing him back. It was a very obvious sign the Buckman Administration was going to be different, and not everybody in Congress was going to be thrilled with that. I simply asked that the confirmation hearings be expedited, and that the various Committee Chairs in the Senate contact us to set up meetings.
I actually got a bit more grief about the upcoming response to the 9-11 attacks. Pretty much everybody wanted to know what I was going to do about it and when, and why hadn’t we already done it, and why they hadn’t been told weeks ago, like on the 12th. I just kept pushing the answer that it would be soon, and that security restrained me from letting anybody know until it started. There was some grumbling at that, but I kept a stoic look on my face.
It was also obvious that people knew something was up, just not what. I was told they were hearing from constituents that family members had been updating wills and going into lockdowns on bases, and that planes had been flying out to parts unknown. I was being asked about every country from Libya to Pakistan. I just shook my head and refused to answer. I simply promised that it would be sometime in the near future.
If I actually said what was going to happen, the Afghanis would be filing a complaint in the United Nations before I made it back to the Oval Office.
As predicted, all four names were leaked by somebody in time for the Thursday night news, along with a comment that the White House would make a response Friday morning.
Friday morning, Ari had us all troop into the Press Room, read our statements, and then we all trooped out again. There were no questions and answers, but we weren’t worried. The four men were all known quantities. The news would be full of them, and on Sunday Frank and Josh would make the rounds of the talk shows, extolling their virtues.
I couldn’t fly home that weekend.
Monday was X-Day, and I needed to be in place. I was ordering our troops into combat. The bombs might not start falling until Monday, but the planes had to take off hours ago, in some cases, early Sunday. Everything was compounded by the fact that Afghanistan was 8–1/2 hours ahead of us. We had decided to bomb them at 9:00 AM local time. That made it 12:30 AM Washington time. The most complicated factor was the need to tell the Pakistani Ambassador we were committing hostile acts in his nation’s sovereign airspace. They would be well within their rights to disagree with that. Violently.
We asked the Pakistani Ambassador to arrive at the White House at about 11:00 PM. Both Colin Powell and I would greet him. Condi Rice was supposed to be there, but she had been looking a little green around the gills earlier in the day, and had ended up at Bethesda with a bad bout of the flu.
By the time we told the ambassador what was happening and he got back to the embassy, even if he managed to make an immediate phone call home, it would be too late. Our birds would be across the border and over their targets before they could do anything. “Anything you can tell me about the ambassador?” I asked Colin. “What’s his name?”
“Her name is Doctor Maliha Lodhi. She’s been here a couple of years or so. According to her file, she’s a big wig in their Foreign Office,” he answered.
“So she probably speaks better English than I do?”
“No probably about it. She used to be their ambassador to the Court of St. James before this.”