Wag the Dog by Larry Beinhart Page B

Top Secret—Limited Distribution, for Ultra and even, technically, for YEO, but she certainly did not want to be caught handling a YEO that she had not been handed by a very authorized hand. Now that it was in her hand, with her fingerprints on it, she had to make a decision. And, unlike Stan, she noticed that it was not addressed to Bush but to J.B.III. Of course, she knew who that was. She did not doubt that the president was authorized to see it, but she could visualize a scenario in which J.B.III missed it, went searching for it, and, when it was found, even in the presidential briefcase, demanded an investigation. The FBI would come in, check for fingerprints—she realized she didn’t know how to wipe fingerprints off paper, and even if she did, she did know that criminals always made a mistake and left some trace. She decided to come clean.
    She handed George Bush the envelope with the scrawls and then the neatly refolded memo from Lee Atwater. She apologized for having seen it and she swore that she had read no further than the letters YEO.
    If the president’s regular secretary had been in the room, he might have reflexively handed it to her and said to either file it or shred it. If the secretary of state to whom it was addressed had been in the room, Bush might have turned it over to Baker. But without those options and with so many presidential things to think about, it became that 2,134th detail that the presidential mind could not handle, akin to, Should the black socks be to the right or the left of the blue socks in the sock drawer or should “Me” follow “Mac” or come after “Max” in the contributor’s-list filing system or where to actually put bills when he vetoed them. 17
    Because there was no one there to take it from his hand immediately and because he couldn’t decide if he wanted to shred it or re-reread it and because he had no idea how to file it, George Bush put Lee Atwater’s deathbed memo in his pocket. Where it bulked and crinkled and reminded its carrier that it was present.
    It was there when the president climbed into his helicopter. Still there when the copter brought him to Air Force One.
    This was a working flight. Several members of his undistinguished cabinet were onboard. Each with urgent matters to attend to. In addition, there were his press secretary; the presidential pollster, Kenny Moran, on loan from the Gallup Organization, ostensibly employed by the Department of Agriculture, 18 and the current head of the Republican Party, who had arranged the West Coast fund-raiser to which they were all on their way.
    The five hours of flight time passed quickly. There was a lot of business. None of the news was cataclysmic or catastrophic. But none of it was good.
    Noriega’s lawyers were fighting to unfreeze his assets. This was delaying the trial, and until the trial ended and Noriega was convicted, the invasion of Panama teetered on the edge of an abyss named Farce. The economy was the lead depressant. It was just stagnating. The savings-and-loan scandal stumbled along, growing from billions to tens of billions to hundreds of billions lost, lurch by lurch. Bush’s son—why was it that the sons of great men,excepting himself of course, were such disappointments?—was ensnared in one of the messes. Anyone dumb enough to invest in a bank named after a shoot-’em-up movie, Silverado, should be willing to take their loss and not complain. Fortunately, the sins of the son were not being visited on the father. He didn’t expect them to be. After all, Jimmy Carter had survived Billy Carter, Reagan had survived both a “ballet-dancing son” and a Mommy Dearest daughter. But that could change. Just as what a grown man did with his own penis had suddenly become a matter of public policy under the heading of “character”—a man carries the weight of the world on his shoulders and he isn’t even