Big Miracle (23 page)

Ronald Reagan was wrapping up one of the most successful presidencies of the modern era. He enjoyed the highest approval rating of any president that late in his term. Kenneth Duberstein's job as White House Chief of Staff was to ensure this legacy was not squandered in the final days. No last-minute missteps. The longest economic recovery in American history, pushing the Soviet Union to the brink of extinction without a shot being fired, a renewed sense of American pride—all were his legacy.

Nonetheless, there were only a few areas where the president's image appeared less than glorious. Among them was the environment. Despite his popularity, a majority of Americans still felt (incorrectly as it turned out) that Reagan was a poor environmental steward. George Bush, his heir apparent, foolishly bought into the fallacy when he pledged to be the “Environmental President.”

The plain truth is that increased living standard correspond directly to a cleaner, healthier environment. Economists call it “the wealth effect.” Increased wealth leads to increased spending. That applies as much to environmental protection as to anything else. Watching their assets and incomes rise leads people to feel more confident to spend more. Wealthier societies spend more to protect their environments than poor societies. They protect more because they have more. In the last third of the twentieth century, the United States spent more than one trillion dollars protecting its environment—far more than any other country. If the U.S. were not creating more wealth, it could not spend more wealth to protect the environment. The same process that drives economic growth is the same process that results in less pollution. Pollution is inefficient. It is what happens when something isn't done efficiently. Becoming more efficient means getting more out of what we have; wasting less, polluting less, and protecting more—a cleaner, safer environment.

In presiding over the greatest economic boom in U.S. history, Ronald Reagan did more to protect the U.S. environment than many other president. Besides, he loved whales, too. If President Reagan helped the whale rescue, his handlers thought, maybe he could burnish his environmental image. But anyone who thought that was why Reagan got involved in the whale rescue to burnish his image didn't know Ronald Reagan. The key to Reagan's image was that he didn't care about his image. He cared about his policies.

Duberstein assigned a little-known but critical White House department to take charge of the rescue. The Office of Cabinet Affairs (OCA) worked to iron out policy differences on issues ranging from acid rain to three whales trapped at the edge of the American dominion. The OCA tried to get all cabinet officers to arrive at a consensus before offering the president an option. Sometimes a consensus was impossible to reach. Not so with the whales. Everyone agreed: save them.

Bonnie Mersinger first heard about the whales at 7
A.M.
, Friday, October 14. She was sitting in her small cubicle in the West Wing of the White House sipping on a thin straw pierced through the side of a cardboard apple juice container. A few stolen minutes with Jane Pauley and Willard Scott were the only contact the attractive woman had with the outside world. Rarely did attractive thirty-one-year-old women become executive assistants to the president of the United States by pursuing interests other than work.

Mersinger swung around when she heard the word “whales” mentioned on her small Sony Watchman television. Her colleagues referred to Bonnie as the “resident White House environmentalist.” Like millions of others, the instant Mersinger saw Oran Caudle's footage of the trapped whales, she wanted to see more. She didn't know why exactly, but there was something about whales that unleashed her empathy. Maybe it was her background. Before changing professions in the early 1980s, Bonnie had worked with animals, big graceful animals. She made her living breaking race horses, including Genuine Risk, the 1980 Kentucky Derby winner. Until Mersinger was given the chance to work for Ronald Reagan, she loved more than anything else to train thoroughbreds.

Mersinger knew Reagan would want to help the whales. Their plight played to two of his most profound emotions: his love of animals and his soft spot for hard-luck tales. She wrote him a memo about the stranding on Friday, October 14, but it was too late in the day. President and Mrs. Reagan had already ascended Marine One, parked on the White House South Lawn, to spend the weekend at Camp David.

By 10
A.M.
Monday the 17th, ten days after the stranded whales were first discovered, the president of the United States was officially involved in the rescue and Bonnie Mersinger became his personal representative. She knew that protocol limited the president's direct authority to federal agencies. Since two of the rescue's four independent factions, the NOAA and the National Guard, answered directly to him, Operation Breakout presented the president with a rare choice. Everyone in the White House knew that when such an opportunity offered itself, President Reagan always liked to exercise his authority as commander in chief. Mersinger advised Ken Duberstein's office to route the White House involvement through the Alaska National Guard.

She collected newspaper articles about the whales on her computer. Skimming through them, Mersinger jotted down the names of key players: Cindy Lowry of Greenpeace, Ron Morris of NOAA, the oilmen, the Eskimos, and a National Guard colonel named Tom Carroll. A guardsman herself, Bonnie called Frank O'Connor, an old friend in the Alaska National Guard, to see what he could tell her about Operation Breakout. O'Connor said that until the National Guard entered the picture, there was no one in charge with the authority to set priorities. Now, maybe a sensible command structure could emerge. O'Connor assured her that in Alaska, Tom Carroll was the most qualified person to deal with the problem.

Colonel Carroll was the man Bonnie needed. Through him she could convey the president's interest in the rescue and relay his offer of help. Together, she and Carroll could keep the Chief Executive completely informed on the well-being of the whales. Around noon, Washington time, Bonnie called the National Guard's mobile command headquarters at Prudhoe Bay. Although it was still an hour and a half before first light on Monday morning in Alaska, Colonel Carroll had already stepped outside into the bitter cold to cross off checklists so the Skycrane could start towing the barge. A civilian on loan from ARCO answered Bonnie's first call, who informed her the colonel would soon be back. With the windchill, it was close to 100 degrees below zero on the frozen tundra.

If Tom Carroll had been like other men, he would have returned in a few minutes. But Colonel Carroll was obsessed with the problem. The colonel stayed outside, exposed to the life-threatening cold for nearly twelve hours. He relentlessly barked orders over his walkie-talkie to the helicopter pilots and the crew on the barge. The men from ARCO and VECO who just met the colonel thought he was out of his mind. Before the towing began, Carroll solved the key logistical problem: fuel. He estimated the helicopters would need at least 20,000 gallons of high-octane Arctic aviation gasoline to pull the barge 270 miles from Prudhoe to Barrow. The colonel devised a self-contained operation to load the barge with enough fuel for itself and the helicopters. He sent for special refueling pumps from Anchorage. He also ordered his men to work with the VECO crews to load all 20,000 gallons aboard the hoverbarge in customized storage tanks.

Every item on Carroll's checklist was crossed off and ready by 11
A.M.
, two hours earlier than he hoped. However, when he gave the order to begin and the powerful helicopter started to pull, the barge did not move. The downward thrust of air that lifted the 185-ton hovercraft broke the thick layer of ice that covered the shore. Carroll watched helplessly as his pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Gary Quarles, valiantly kept the Skycrane from spinning wildly out of control and crashing into the frozen bay. After Quarles safely landed his craft, Carroll went over to investigate. The barge was mired deep in the mud.

A thick coat encrusted the rubber skirt needed to trap air in order for the barge to hover. Carroll had no choice but to call on the VECO crews, still recovering from the previous two days of backbreaking work, to don their Arctic gear, grab their pick axes and shovels, and get back to work. They chipped off as much of the frozen mud as they could before collapsing in exhaustion. Gary Quarles tried again. He pulled his chopper with 22,500 pounds of thrust. After failing a second time, Carroll knew it was no use: the barge was just too heavy. He ordered the 20,000 gallons of fuel stored on the deck of the barge unloaded before trying yet again. Carroll arranged for the helicopter fuel to be repositioned on the ice. Special Arctic tanker trucks drove all night, traveling hundreds of miles across the surface of a frozen sea to place 600-gallon refueling tanks every two miles along the route to Barrow.

The colonel pondered the latest setback while supervising the shutdown of the hoverbarge. His press aide, Lieutenant Mike Haller, handed him a message. The colonel wiped frozen mud from his numb face as he clumsily tried to unfold the note in a howling wind. It was from a woman in the White House named Bonnie Mersinger. Carroll didn't have time to be bothered. He told Haller to take care of it.

“But, sir,” Haller gently protested, raising his voice loud enough to be heard over the wind and engine noise, “she said she wanted to talk with you.”

“All right,” the colonel relented. “Tell her I'll get back to her as soon as I finish out here.”

Finally, around 10
P.M.
, Alaska time, Carroll picked up the phone and dialed the number written on the message. He registered no surprise when Bonnie Mersinger answered. There were too many thoughts swirling through his restless mind for Carroll to realize that it was 2
A.M.
, Washington time. He politely but professionally introduced himself to the female voice on the other end of the remarkably clear line. Bonnie told the colonel that the president wanted to schedule a phone call to Prudhoe sometime on Tuesday afternoon. At first, Carroll thought it was a joke. He figured the whole thing was perpetrated by one of his buddies back east in retaliation for one of Carroll's infamous pranks. He decided to play it cool. When she didn't seem amused, Carroll figured he should take her seriously.

He told her he would love to talk with the president but he just couldn't commit to a time. The president of the United States, his commander in chief, wanted to talk to him and he wasn't sure he could take the call? What kind of a guy was this, Mersinger asked herself. Instead of becoming angry, she was intrigued and wanted to find out more. Bonnie asked the colonel what the Arctic was like. His answer sounded like a formal press statement. Bonnie thanked the colonel for his time and told him she would speak to him in the morning.

Her hand hadn't let go of the phone when something came over her. She had to call him back. At first no one answered. Without knowing why, she let the phone ring over a dozen times until someone finally picked up: “Guard-Prudhoe.” She immediately recognized the voice. It was Tom Carroll.

“Are you always so formal?” she boldly asked, which startled the colonel. It was the first time anyone had spoken to him like a human being since he left Anchorage. Colonel Carroll was constantly under stress, but he never acknowledged it. When he heard Bonnie's friendly tone, he succumbed to an overwhelming wave of relief and collapsed into his chair. Suddenly the weight of all his worries vanished. He found himself opening up to a woman he barely knew, uncharacteristically confiding that so far at least, the operation was a disaster.

This frank admission broke down the barriers between them. Ignoring the fact that she called him, she jokingly asked permission to go home and get some sleep. After all, she reminded him, it was almost 2:30 in the morning and she had to be back in the White House in four and a half hours.

Carroll couldn't believe how open he was with a woman he had met over the telephone just a few hours before.

It had been almost three days since Tom Carroll last slept. Yet the high-strung colonel seemed immune to exhaustion. At 10:30, the night before another grueling day, the colonel looked around for someone to “spot” him while he worked out with free weights in the ARCO gym. Normally, to the dismay of the detail officer assigned to him, Carroll took his own weights with him wherever he went, but to everyone's relief, Carroll learned before leaving Anchorage that the ARCO exercise facility had their own. After working up a heavy sweat by pumping iron, Carroll wrapped a white towel around his broad shoulders and walked back to his office through the heated hallways of ARCO's $300-million self-contained living complex. He wanted to talk to Ron Morris, the NOAA coordinator, to close the books on Monday, October 17, day two of Operation Breakout.

Carroll was certain that a phone call from Prudhoe to Barrow, 270 miles away across the frozen tundra, would be expensive. But he didn't even have to dial the number one to reach it; it was a local call, cheaper than a crosstown call in Manhattan. He called the Airport Inn and asked to be connected to Ron Morris's room. Ed Benson, the owner of the hotel, told Carroll that Morris was up on the Top of the World, drinking with his new friends.

Throughout the day, Carroll checked on the whales and their rescuers by radio phone. By Monday afternoon, October 17, several Eskimos with their own chain saws were on the ice, helping Arnold Brower Jr. keep the lone hole big enough for the whales to breathe. But the shifting winds and dropping temperatures iced it over almost as fast as the Eskimos could open it. The day's worst news came not from the failed helicopter tow in Prudhoe. Instead, it originated with the whales themselves. Their condition appeared to be rapidly deteriorating.

The night before, Sunday, October 16, Cindy Lowry lay awake in her tiny Barrow hotel room, worrying about her first day on the ice and anticipating what the whales would look like. She wanted to see them that very minute. But the pitch-black darkness made doing so an impossibly dangerous risk. Anyone foolish enough to venture out on the ice became easy prey for hungry polar bears looking for their next meal.