Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (11 page)

 
          
 
To many members of the White House staff,
assignment to the E.O.B. was exile. It did not correspond to their vision of
their own importance. They were not working in the White House; they were not
working at the President's side. Through the corridors of the West Wing of the
White House there coursed a constant current of excitement, of drama, of
historical moment. Through the corridors of the E.O.B. there coursed an
occasional messenger with a supermarket cart full of routine mail and, now and
then on slow summer days, a rubber ball thrown back and forth between two of
the President's writers who had nothing to do but didn't dare go home.

 
          
 
Burnham loved the E.O.B. He had an enormous
office, twenty by thirty feet, on a ground-floor comer of the building, with a
pleasant view of the South Lawn and the Ellipse. The windows were tall and the
ceilings were high, and there were easy chairs and a great conference table
(for gin rummy) and a massive oak desk and a typing table and a word-processor
that he hated and an electric typewriter that he loved and a phone console with
sixteen buttons and three television sets (one of his early assignments had
been to monitor the evening news on all three networks and to analyze each for
anti-Administration bias) and a huge leather couch which came in very handy
when the quest for le mot juste became exhausting.

 
          
 
Burnham's boss did work in the White House.
His name was Warner Cobb, and he was a conduit and coordinator of the
President's spoken and written words: Speeches, letters, proclamations,
messages to Congress, personal mail, congratulatory blather, political
nonsense—it all passed over Cobb's desk. The President's Appointments Secretary
gave Cobb a list of the upcoming week's speeches; legislative assistants
outlined the needs for messages and statements; the correspondence office sent
batches of mail. Cobb then assigned the work to the six White House writers,
read the results of their efforts before forwarding them to the President for
signature or delivery, and passed back to the writers the President's response
to their work (when and if the President chose to respond), which was the
writers' only measure of their worth as craftsmen.

 
          
 
Cobb's office was in the basement of the West
Wing. The

 
          
 
President had personally insisted (the highest
of all flatteries) that Cobb work in the business end of the White House
itself, so that he would be available instantly on summons. There had been no
office space available.

 
          
 
Then make him an office, the President had
said.

 
          
 
And because he was the President, it was done.

 
          
 
And though Cobb had nothing to do with the
construction of his office, he became the object of loathing of the women who
worked in the White House, for his office was built by removing two stalls from
the four-stall ladies' room in the basement of the building.

 
          
 
The office was furnished with one small metal
desk, one small metal swivel chair and, facing the desk, one small
straight-back chair where a secretary could sit to take dictation. Dictating
took longer in that office than in most, for it was usually punctuated by the
sound of rushing water. There was no window, so Cobb never knew what the
weather was doing outside, and because he chain-smoked Gauloises in his airless
cubicle, when he emerged into the world he was surrounded by a miasmic reek
that led cosmopolites to wonder if he was an attendant on leave from a Parisian
W.C.

 
          
 
Burnham's resistance to working in the White
House itself was not only hedonistic; it was also practical. There was no need
for speechwriters to reside close to the President, and with a White House
staff of 314 in a building that could accommodate 50 or, at most, 75 workers,
office space had to be assigned on a need basis.

 
          
 
Burnham further disagreed with those of his
colleagues who believed that each writer should have a POTUS phone in his
office. Another status symbol. Those who had the special phones had been deemed
vital enough to the welfare of the Republic to be kept on the shortest leash
possible: When the President of the United States (P.O.T. U.S.) wanted to reach
you, he wanted to reach you now, without having to diddle around with busy
signals and secretaries and switching delays, so he picked up the phone and
punched your number, and in your office your POTUS phone buzzed with a nasty,
urgent noise like when something goes wrong with your convection oven or when
you want to push your English muffin down for a bit more browning but the
toaster's too hot and rebels. Whatever you were doing you stopped, and you
snatched up the POTUS phone and said, "Yes, Sir!"

 
          
 
The second most important man in the federal
government had two POTUS phones in his suite of offices. He also had a phone in
the government car assigned to him, a phone in his own car, and, at his home in
Cleveland
Park
, sky-blue phones with locks on them in his
bedroom, his study and the kitchen.

 
          
 
Mario Epstein's title was, simply, Special
Assistant to the President. His real job slot was, not so simply. Deputy
President of the United States for the Economy, for Keeping Malcontents from
Burning Down the Cities, for Convincing All Minorities that the Administration
Cherished Them, for Mollifying Women, for Convincing Old Folks that Social
Security Checks Could Be Stretched Beyond Cat Food, for Delivering the Jewish
and Italian Votes, and for Counseling the President as to Which of His Foreign
Policy Advisors Were Trying to Blow Smoke Up His Ass.

 
          
 
The President didn't like Epstein very much,
but he needed him. "He's so mean he wouldn't give you the clap," he
told a Cabinet meeting one day, with Epstein sitting in the background against
the wall. "But I'll tell you this: That man can spit miracles."

 
          
 
Epstein did not want to be liked. He wanted to
be feared, for he believed, quite rightly, that fear was the only engine that
could galvanize a bureaucracy as huge and obdurate as the federal government.
He knew every man, every position, every salary, over which the President had
control, and he used that knowledge as a whip. He also knew how to deal with
those over whom the President did not have control, those with Civil Service
tenure. There were all manner of intricate weapons that could be used to make a
man's life miserable if he would not cooperate—shrinking his office, reducing
his staff and finding fault with everything he did being among the more
innocuous options.

 
          
 
The President had barely known Epstein prior
to hiring him. The President had embarked upon his first term with a coterie of
cronies that the press had immediately dubbed "the B Men," because
every one of them was a banker, a broker, a businessman or a booster. They had
a lot of splendid ideas, and no idea whatsoever about how to implement them.

 
          
 
What these guys know about government, went a
favorite line of the time, you could stick up a gnat's ass and still have room
for the Vice-President.

 
          
 
The B Men had nothing but contempt for
Washington
, and

 
          
 
Washington
returned the sentiment. So, naturally, they
accomplished nothing but the alienation of everyone with whom they came in
contact. .

 
          
 
The President stood by his friends with
admirable loyalty until one day when the assistant in charge of the President's
reading matter made a slip and let him see an editorial in The Washington Post,
which said, in part, "In terms of leadership, decisiveness and
accomplishment, this President makes Jimmy Carter look like F.D.R."

 
          
 
Even then, the President did not march through
his staff with a scythe. He hired one young man, whose name he had forgotten
but whom Evelyn Witt, his personal secretary and one of his oldest friends (she
had been with him for thirty years), helped him recall: Mario Epstein.

 
          
 
Epstein had applied for a staff job when the
President was still in the Senate, and he had impressed the senator mightily,
but on hearing that a run for the presidency was not only possible but
imminent, he withdrew his application. A run for the presidency meant a long
campaign, extensive public exposure and daily contact with people of various
opinions, abilities and personalities.

 
          
 
"I'm a perfect staff man," Epstein
had told the senator, "but I'm a perfectly terrible politician. I'll do
you more harm than good. For you, success is being loved and admired; for me,
it's being hated and feared. After you win, think of me again."

 
          
 
Evelyn Witt discovered that Epstein had since
worked for two senators, one liberal and one conservative, and had been fired
by both because of his inability to deal with the constant demands for
compromise. He had gotten a job as the untitled deputy to the chief executive
officer and sole owner of a company that supplied tungsten elements to Defense
Department contractors, weapons manufacturers and a handful of unnamed foreign
governments.

 
          
 
The President admired many things about Mario
Epstein. He had graduated from
Harvard
College
,
Harvard
Law
School
and
Harvard
Business
School
, which was good because it gave him
first-strike credibility on the Hill and with the press. (You have to prove a
Harvard man wrong; somebody from, say, Bucknell, has to prove himself right.)
He was married (good, because he wouldn't be a flagrant tail-chaser) to a woman
who taught endocrinology at Johns Hopkins (good, because she had a life of her
own and wouldn't lie around the house watching General Hospital and bitching
about the hours he worked). She looked like the love-child of a bulldog and a
ten-speed bike—all wrinkles and bones and teeth and nails (good, because nobody
in his right mind would try to get at the President through Epstein through
her). He coveted power for its own sake, for what it could accomplish. He loved
to watch the ripple effect of a presidential command, and sometimes he issued
presidential commands solely for the pleasure of watching them work. He had no
personal ambitions. At forty-one years old, he was in day-to-day control of the
largest, most complex, most powerful machine the world had ever known.

 
          
 
There were valid knocks about Epstein, and the
President was aware of them. The man was completely, unashamedly amoral. He
could not be consulted about what was right, or just, or compassionate, but
only about whether a certain program could be made to work. He had respect for
decisions, but not for the process, the give-and-take, that led to decisions.
He had no patience with discussions, only with conclusions. It had taken him
longer than most to assemble a functioning staff because of what he and the
President referred to as "the Epstein paradox": He had to employ, to
implement his orders, people who could deal with other people, but such people
were often constitutionally incapable of working for a person who could not
deal with other people—namely, Epstein.

 
          
 
Eventually, though, he did build a staff, and
his operation, which consisted of about two dozen men and women, some in the
White House, some in the E.O.B., became known informally and with no affection
whatever as Attila & Co.

 
          
 
Epstein removed—quietly, one by one—all the B
Men. First, he cut their access to the President. Second, he replaced their
assistants with his own people and made sure that every decision they made was
cleared with his office. Third, those who were not impelled by boredom and
frustration to quit were assigned as ambassadors to backwater countries. Ronald
Reagan had raised to new heights the art of dumping incompetent political hacks
into the ambassadorial ranks, and his administration had taken so much
criticism that Epstein could pump at least two dozen yahoos into foreign
embassies without risking unfavorable comparison in the media. He defused
objections by the appointees by having the President announce the
appointments—with fulsome- praise and outrageous promise—before informing the
appointees. Any man who declined an appointment would seem churlish, ungrateful,
un-American.