Part 8. Bush gets Chatty
Jack Adams, the Secret Service agent charged with assassinating President George W. Bush and being held for psychiatric evaluation, is telling about how President Bush finally started talking to him personally. ( Note: Diadem= the Oval Office. )
'I said once that Eagle, I mean President Clinton, was the only president who ever talked to me as an individual, but that isn't totally accurate.'
'You mean President Bush did, too?' Dr. Haber asked.
'Sometimes he talked to me like I was a prop.'
'A prop?'
'Like someone who was there to help him practice his lines. There were a couple of times, late at night, when he paced around the room talking to me. Talking at me might be more accurate. He would ask me questions and then orate on the topic. For example when he was grappling with the Iraqi invasion and Powell and a couple others were giving him a lot of crap about it, one night he started telling me why he had to do this.'
'He just started telling you this without you prompting him?'
'You have to remember that to him I wasn't really a person. I was a hired gun. I was like the British butler who hears, sees, and says nothing. One night, it was about eight o'clock and he was getting ready to go upstairs for dinner. He was waiting for Laura to get back from Andrews; she had been in Texas and he wanted to wait to have dinner with her, so he decided to do some work in Diadem to kill time. So I pulled out a magazine and buried it in a file folder and was reading. Funny thing is it was a New Yorker piece about why we shouldn't be invading Iraq because there were no WMDs—Trailblazer's casus belli—or else the UN inspectors would have found them. All of a sudden there's the president walking around the room telling me why we had to go in.'
''One,' he said, 'do you know why we have to do this?''
'Do what, sir?'
'This war. Why we have to bring down Saddam.'
I was about to say, 'Because the world will be safer,' but he didn't wait for a reply.
'Because it's unfinished business, that's why. It's not just the oil. Oh, yeah, I admit it; the oil is always part of any dealings in the Middle East. But the oil isn't just the oil if you know what I'm saying. The oil is our future. It's our economy. It's our stability in the world. Not to mention the ability to heat half the homes in America this winter and for a bunch of winters to come. There will be little children freezing to death in New England and Appalachia if we don't do this. It's security, too, of course. Saddam's going to try to nuke us as soon as he gets the chance. Granted, he's a long way from having that capability now, but sooner or later he'll have those WMDs and then we're up Crap Crik without a paddle! But it's more than that, One. It's about our status in the world as a superpower. It's about unfinished business.'
'You mean Desert Storm.'
'Exactly!' he said, halting for a moment and pointing a finger at me. 'No flies on you, One. Desert Storm. My dad is a good guy and he means well. And he's one hell of an ace when it comes to subterfuge and espionage. Can't beat him in that department. He was the best Director the CIA had. But he's not a killer, One.'
'A killer, sir?'
'You have to have the killer instinct, One, if you're going to be a real leader with a capital L. Otherwise one day some godless pagan like Saddam comes along with absolutely nothing to lose and he decides to go for broke, see if he can take out the most powerful guy on the planet. You know, like Hitler and Mao and Stalin and those guys like that. If Stalin and Mao had had nucular capabilities they would have used them, you can bet on it.'
It wasn't my place to give him a history lesson, so I just let him talk. He obviously needed to.
Follow this 44-part serialized book in Windy City Times for the next several months. See www.WindycityMediaGroup.com for past columns.