Wag the Dog Read online

  I also hear stories I have heard before: the AIDS rumor and that he is working for the Japanese on production technology for HDTV that will make nonelectronic production obsolete within one or two years.

  The party is both indoors and out. We are situated in such a way that we can see part of what goes on in the backyard. From time to time, I glimpse Maggie. She appears, from this distance, to be both very enticing and very flirtatious. I feel that if I were one of the men she is talking to, I would think she was coming on to me. Several times I see men touching her. What we used to call in junior high, copping a feel. Pisses me off. Of course, she can handle it.

  One of the chauffeurs sidles over to me.

  “You have an interest in Lincoln Beagle,” he says out of the corner of his mouth, like an old-time con from a Cagney prison picture or a dastardly spy out of early Hitchcock.

  “I’m just a fan,” I say. “I love his work.”

  “Uh-huh,” the guy says.

  “Do you know what he’s up to?”

  “I know him.” He winks. “What if I were to tell you,” he says, “that Lincoln Beagle is working on . . . Are you ready for this? . . . Are you?”

  “I think so.”

  “You won’t be. But I’ll tell you anyway. Because it’s so incredible. He is working on the reincarnation of John Wayne.”

  “It makes sense to me,” I say. “We could use him.”

  “You have to understand,” he says, “the Age of Aquarius is over.”

  “Yeah, I knew that,” I say.

  “That was the age of the spiritual. We are now in the age of Neo-Science. New Science which is beyond science. Where art and spirituality and technology and biogenetics are all going to meet in a new synthesis. These people who are talking about HDTV, that’s nothing. Talk about virtual reality. That’s something. Walk into living dreams and have them talk back to you and touch you. Hollywood has always taken ordinary people and made them into stars, with training and publicity and plastic surgery and hair experts and makeup. But it’s so hit or miss. Very wasteful. They’re going to go to the source. They’re going to take the remains of the best of the old stars and, using genetics and microsciences, re-create them. And that’s what Beagle is really working on—the reincarnation of John Wayne. The rest—a smoke screen.”

  19 Huey: Bell’s UH-1 Iroquois helicopter, armed with two 7.62-mm machine guns and rockets.

  “Now everyone knows about the airborne interrogation—taking three people up in a chopper, taking one guy and saying, ‘Talk,’ then throwing him out before he even gets the chance to open his mouth. Well, we wrapped det[onator] cord around their necks and wired them to the detonator box. And basically what it did was blow their heads off. The interrogator would tell the translator, usually a South Vietnamese intelligence officer, ‘Ask him this.’ . . . the guy would start to answer, or maybe he wouldn’t—maybe he’d resist—but the general idea was to waste the first two. They planned the snatches that way. . . . By the time you get to your man, he’s talking so fast you got to pop the weasel just to shut him up.” Elton Manzione, self-described Navy Seal in Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (Morrow, 1990). Similar stories abound. See also Mark Baker, Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There (Morrow, 1981), and, finally, Mitchell Siegal in Vietnam Memories (New Woodstock Press, 1988) claims to have witnessed a Korean interrogator who killed with his hands to intimidate other suspects.

  20 Westmoreland said this on camera. It can be seen in the documentary film Hearts and Minds.

  21 General Paul D. Harkins, who preceded Westmoreland, should also be credited with originating some of these concepts and designing the very destructive, and ultimately losing, strategy of a war of attrition. Westmoreland continued and elaborated on it.

  22 The book was originally written in ideograms and apparently with the intention of creating pithy rules general enough to have universal application. The result is that English-language editions vary quite widely.

  In the Thomas Cleary translation this phrase appears as “the form of military force is to avoid the full and attack the empty.” B. H. Liddell Hart in Strategy quotes the Samuel B. Griffith translation: “The way to avoid what is strong is to strike what is weak.”

  This oracular vagueness, which forces each reader to develop his or her own interpretation, may be the reason these cryptic Oriental philosophies always seem so apt. Readers will always develop readings that suit their own situation—like reading the daily horoscope.

  23 Peters left Columbia in May 1991. In order to get him out, Sony gave him a deal so rich that he remains at the time of publication, a Hollywood Power.

  24 We assume that this is nonsense and would like to so inform the reader. It has so little probability of being true, it doesn’t even show up in Kitty Kelley’s scandal-mongering biography of Mrs. Reagan. However, it is so exactly symptomatic of Hollywood gossip that it would be hard to imagine it not being said in this conversation.

  25 It’s easy but silly to dismiss Jon Peters as some sort of male bimbo who slept his way to the top. He is the producer—post-Barbra—of Flashdance, The Color Purple, The Witches of Eastwick, Rain Man, and Batman. The something that raises people to the top in Hollywood, as in politics, is incredibly difficult to define. More often than not, the winners are a total surprise and more often than not, those who try to walk in exactly the same trail, fail.

  Chapter

  THIRTEEN

  PRESIDENT BUSH HAS rarely been described as a racist or as anti-Semitic. But it would be fair to say, at the very least, that he is enthnocentric and by choice prefers a fairly narrow range of people. If one envisions diminishing concentric circles—like illustrations of the rings of hell from Dante’s Inferno—the outermost ring would be WASPs. Moving inward the rings would be: males, who wear suits and ties, have a lot of money, play golf, are in business, are from old money, are eastern establishment, Ivy Leaguers, jocks, Yalies, from prep schools, members of Skull and Bones,26second-generation Yalies.

  He therefore looked forward to going to a fund-raiser in Orange County, that area south of Los Angeles County which is a bastion of folks who would be just like Bob Hope if he weren’t funny and had a straight nose. That is to say they loved the Republican Party almost as much as they loved golf, they lived for martinis, disapproved of sex but could appreciate a pretty girl, still danced to the music of Lawrence Welk, knew that we lost Vietnam because of the media and lost China because of traitors in the State Department. They knew better than to trust the Commies even in 1990, and it was obvious to them that Gorbachev’s reforms were a trick to lure us into disarmament. Disneyland is in Orange County.

  A relationship between Bush and Hartman—one that ultimately required an incredible amount of faith and trust on the president’s part—was not likely to come about as a happy accident, and in fact, it did not. It was sought out and engineered by Hartman with avarice aforethought. Though what he expected from that relationship did not even remotely touch on what actually came of it. That was determined by the genius, or mad despair, of Lee Atwater.

  To understand David Hartman it is necessary to reference Lew Wasserman of MCA, Inc.

  Lew Wasserman is to agents what Henry Ford is to automobiles, not necessarily the best, but the first one to transform what was essentially a personal-service business, subject to all such an enterprise’s inherent limitations, into a major multibillion-dollar corporation.27

  For Hartman to feel he had become the greatest agent in the history of the world, he would have to surpass Wasserman.

  Like almost anyone who enjoys big-time success in business in America, Wasserman was a major player in politics. He cultivated relationships and gave generously to both sides. A discreet and secretive person, his influence was either far less or more than it appeared to be. In either case, it enjoyed legendary proportions and it bore fruit. While MCA did not win every battle that was decided by government, it won a lot of the big ones. Its business pra
ctices suggested antitrust violations. It enjoyed relationships with unions that were so favorable that it is difficult to believe that they were achieved without illegal forms of collusion. MCA was investigated frequently, but whether the bottom line was that they were basically honest or that they had as much influence as reputed, they were never convicted, and only occasionally submitted to a consent decree.

  Hartman had kept a relatively low profile in politics. He had not yet needed heavyweight political clout. But it was time to take that next step, from mere agent to something that owned and controlled vast tangible assets. He was looking at certain possibilities. Some of them involved large investments from Japan. Others involved possible antitrust violations. It would be good to know that if he dialed a number in Washington his calls would be answered. Not that he would ever expect to have a president in his pocket. That would be presumptuous, excessive, and crude. All that anyone wanted, and if they knew what they were doing, all that anyone needed, was access.

  Then, in 1988, with Reagan out and Wasserman a key figure in raising funds for Dukakis—for the loser—Hartman sensed a major vacuum. Although there were several very visible conservative celebrities, there was no big-time entertainment business power broker hooked in to the national Republican power structure. Hartman was not about to simply throw money at Bush or his party. If he did that, they would treat him the way a prostitute treats a John. Hartman wanted a relationship. He wanted the inner circle to know his name, to be thought of as the person to go to when Washington needed something from Hollywood.

  Hartman had seen Lee Atwater as a person to bridge the two worlds, and in 1988 he arranged to meet the political consultant. When the criticism of Lee was at its height, David had called him and taken him out to lunch and praised his creativity. He listened to Lee’s ideas and told him that he was a genius of politics in the same way that Hitchcock had been a genius of suspense films and Elvis a genius of music: that all three had taken forms that were not even recognized as arts and personally raised them to such high levels of cultural significance that they could no longer be ignored. He knew that Atwater’s three favorite books were The Art of War, On War, and The Prince, so he told Lee that his tactics reminded him of Sun Tzu and that no one since Machiavelli had seen politics with less hypocrisy. After the election Hartman arranged some speaking engagements that gave Lee a lot of ego gratification and about $10,000, plus expenses, for each. Not bad for an hour or two of gab. The relationship was firmly established. Hartman had his White House entrée. But then came the brain tumor.

  With the link through Lee lost, the most obvious line from L.A. to Bush would have been through Ronald Reagan. But even if Hartman had had good connections to the Reagan crowd, he wasn’t at all sure that the Reagan route was the best way to reach out to the new president. After all, Reagan had beaten Bush quite badly in the 1980 Republican primaries. Then as VP. Bush spent eight years eating Ronald Reagan’s shit. Hartman had once been a vice president at Ross-Mogul, at that time the third-largest talent agency in the business. The head of the agency, Allen Ross, recognized David’s talent. He helped Hartman to rise very fast and to make a lot of money. That didn’t mean that David would ever forgive Allen Ross for once having been his boss. Every star that RepCo stole away from Ross-Mogul brought Hartman deep personal pleasure and the day RepCo finally billed more than Ross-Mogul had been the happiest single day of David Hartman’s life.

  So Hartman next reached out to Bush through Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger, a clever and ambitious man who had gone further on an astute combination of iron will, pig iron, and steroids28than anyone would ever have dreamed, had his own political ambitions and understood very clearly the importance of personal connections.

  Arnold dropped David’s name at the White House a couple of times. He suggested Bush meet him, that Hartman might be the kind of key money fulcrum that Wasserman had been. At some point after Arnold spoke, but before the suggestion was acted on, the president read Lee Atwater’s plan. If Hartman, who seemed to be a key part of it, turned out to be one of those loud, pushy, offensive types, that would give the president the opportunity to drop the whole thing. And at least part of him wanted to forget he’d ever read the bizarre but compelling concept. So it was the president who chose the meeting ground. The contrast with the Orange County crowd, he hoped, would help him dislike the agent.

  Hartman researched and studied people he wanted to deal with. He did not intend to underestimate the president. He was prepared to think the president was shrewd, manipulative, and vindictive, just as he was himself He had his best reader29prepare a synthesized synopsis of several Bush biographies. It hadn’t been difficult for him to figure out that he should dress like an eastern banker who had taken a major cut in pay to perform government service. And that he should sound like one. He’d made a list of what to talk about and what not to talk about. He would not, for example, talk about his son’s upcoming bar mitzvah and the incredibly lavish plans for it. Although he truly hated golf. he was prepared to talk about greens and bogeys and birdies. He would play down his practice of kendo and play up his jogging.

  Air Force One landed at Orange County’s John Wayne Airport at 6:00 P.M. California time, 9:00 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. The limo was waiting along with the various police and Secret Service escorts. The route had been precleared. The president was whisked to the dinner within eighteen minutes. He got out, standing tall and smiling, looking athletic and energetic. He waved at the cameras, said, “Hello, California! Great to be here. I wish I could stay for a round of golf But if I can’t maybe Dan30can do it for me.” He gave a big thumbs up. Then he went inside.

  There were five people for him to say hello to. Four of them were big contributors from previous campaigns. Two were associated with finance and banking, the other two represented defense industries and aerospace. The fifth was David Hartman.

  Bush was pleasantly surprised to see that if this had been a police lineup, he wouldn’t have picked Hartman out of the group as either the agent or as the Jew. In fact, he looked rather like Brent Scowcroft: balding, serious, but capable of avuncular good humor, with lots of wrinkle lines in his forehead. He was wearing a simple gray suit, a plain white shirt, a muted tie, and, except for a simple gold wedding band and one of the less ostentatious Patek Philippe watches, no jewelry. The image was not shattered when he spoke. He sounded like one of Bush’s own kind. No slang, no jive, no Yiddish, none of those funny intonations.

  Bush touched the memo tucked in his jacket pocket. He hadn’t found Hartman offensive enough to call it off But with the downside so enormous, he hadn’t yet decided to go forward.

  So he plunged ahead with what he was there to do. Shake a lot of hands, grin and wink, and make his famous thumbs-up gesture. Everyone in the room had given a minimum of $5,000, most of them $10,000 or more. They were entitled to a little pressing of the flesh and they wanted to go home feeling good. He went through the speech—he eventually went ahead with the speech-writer’s version, it was so little different than what he himself wanted to say—with reasonable fervor.

  Dinner was over at 8:00 P.M. California time, 11:00 P.M. EST. Air Force One was scheduled for lift-off from John Wayne at 9:00 P.M. California time, midnight on the president’s biological clock. He was scheduled to meet with the director of the CIA in the White House at 9:00 A.M. EST, with the un-Soviet ambassador at 9:15, then with the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee about the selection of nominees for federal judgeships. The only way to survive that sort of schedule was to fall out as soon as he lay down on the presidential bed aboard the 747, sleep all through the flight, no matter how turbulent, even through touchdown, and not wake until the steward came in at 8:00 A.M. EST on the ground back in Washington. The human body won’t behave that way on its own. Therefore, with his dessert, crème brûlée, the president dropped a Halcion, figuring it would kick in just about the time he got on the plane.

  On the way out, as the president
was making his final handshaking rounds, the chairman of the California Republican Party fund-raising committee told him that Hartman had just made a $100,000 contribution. Bush was impressed. Not just by the amount, but that Hartman had not waved the money in his face or given it to him directly. The impulse that had been working on him for half the day finally broke through.

  He invited Hartman to ride with him back to Air Force One.

  Hartman had twelve to eighteen minutes to make a friend. He’d done it far faster than that lots of times. The first thing he said was, “1 want to confess something, Mr. President. My conversion to the Republican Party is very recent.” This was an old story. Reagan, Heston, Sinatra, and lots of others were all ex-Democrats. Bush was not impressed. “Most of my life I regarded myself as a nonpartisan person whose true loyalty was to business, to the creativity of the economic impulse.” More bullshit. “Actually, I was on the fence right up until 1988.” Now the president listened. There were lots of so-called Reagan Democrats. No one, he suddenly realized, ever spoke of Bush Democrats. David Hartman had already endeared himself as the first one. “I wasn’t that impressed with Mr. Reagan. But you truly impressed me.” Music to the president’s ears. So many people spoke of Bush as if he were a pale imitation of his predecessor, when it was Reagan who had napped through most of his two terms, never reading or studying, just popping up to perform when the cameras rolled, returning to somnolence as soon as the power was switched off “I don’t want to embarrass you, but I will tell you why. It’s not the obvious thing, that you have, probably, the best résume of anyone who’s ever held your office. To me you’re the real thing because you were a war hero.” The president put on his aw-shucks face.