What It Takes (24 page)

About this preoccupation there can be no dispute: knowledge is power, and the capital is a city built on power, which means knowing and being known. But this is more than a business in Washington. It is life. Only in the bars of Capitol Hill will you hear a normal, healthy young woman responding to the blandishments of her handsome swain with the delighted, breathy question, “You
know
Kerrey?” Only in a half-dozen Washington restaurants can a man’s reputation be so quickly enhanced (and the object of his knowing so quickly diminished) by the half-bored, half-dismissive assertion: “Oh, I know Jack ... forget it.”

This is knowing in the sense of acquaintance, of
connaissance
, but this is only the most basic way To Know. Large and lucrative careers, great firms filling many marbled floors of fine buildings are built on a combination of
connaissance
and a judicious smatter of knowing in the sense of knowledge,
scientia
, as in facts or familiarity with a branch of government endeavor. “Well, you can go ahead and file the appeal,” the consultant-lobbyist says to his speakerphone, “but I know the Assistant Secretary is no friend to Section 289, so we might want to pursue that avenue at the same time ...” (Men and women with
scientia
but without
connaissance
tend to pursue less lucrative careers as policy wonks in the agencies, do-good lobbies, or think tanks.)

Then there is the matter of being known, which can be more important than knowing. If a Washington man is well known as a man in the know, then his knowing is seldom tested. In fact, it is fed daily by people who come to him to see what he thinks about what they know. This new knowledge is greeted by him with nods (I know, I know ...) that begin before the other person has finished talking. As a result of this, he ends up knowing pretty much what everybody else knows, which is usually enough. There are companies or interest groups, officeholders or office-seekers, who will hire him to be their man in the know. He is, after all, well known.

In fact, being well known is a quality as close to a bankable asset as a Washington man can have. It’s what talent is in other towns. A politician who is well known as a foe of oil and gas regulation is not going to have trouble raising money for his next campaign. In fact, a man well known for his
connaissance
of the oil and gas interests may have no opponent in his next campaign. (Why run against a guy who’ll have two million in the bank?) A man who knows the President may get invited to a couple of state dinners. A man who is well known to know the President is himself a new president—of a successful consulting firm.

Then there is another shade of the verb. To Know, in the sense of
awareness
. It is about what’s going on
right now
, and as such, it is Washington’s highest branch of knowledge. Encyclopedic
scientia
on the theory, history, and practice of progressive taxation in America is nothing,
less than nothing
, compared to knowing (a week before the vote) Chairman Rostenkowski’s bottom line on depreciation of timber assets. One brand of knowing (
scientia
) earns a ratty office and a shared secretary at the Heritage Foundation. The other (
awareness
) brings power, money, fame. ...

But as the highest form of capital-knowing, the quest for awareness is also the most dangerous. Clearly, the lack of this knowing can undermine reputation or power, especially if one’s position, or one’s
connaissance
, indicates that one
ought to know
. To be unaware, to be Out of the Loop, is allied in the tribal consciousness with impotence, inability, imbecility ... and ultimately with the fatal affliction of ridiculousness. But there is also, in success, in wide awareness, a danger just as mortal. For this is the brand of knowing that is closest to Eating from the Tree of Knowledge, and can result in expulsion from Eden. When things foul up in a massive way; when
The Washington Post
, like God, is angry; when Committee Chairmen vie for jurisdiction of the hearings that will make them well known as the scourge of evildoing, then this is the knowing implied in the most portentous of capital questions:

What did he know, and when did he know it?

And so, there has developed, in Washington, a kind of knowing
without being known to know
, for which there is no word at all. It is a nonoperational, untraceable knowing, which can seldom be proven or disproven. Indeed, its vaguely oriental essence can barely be expressed. It is yin-and-yang, knowing-not-knowing. It is knowing all about the thing without being culpable of knowing the thing itself. All of which brings us to that veteran capital personage, that longtime practitioner of the Washington arts, that most knowing of men, Vice President Bush.

Here was a man whose very job, whose only job, was To Know, as the capital understands the verb. He started early each morning, in his office in the Old EOB, getting to know someone or something over breakfast, which might last for only fifteen or twenty minutes, and always ended in time for the Veep to receive the little man with the briefcase, the gnome from the CIA who appeared each day at 8:00
A.M.,
to offer the Agency’s knowledge, its awareness, not as a Vice Presidential perk, but as a courtesy, a tip of the old school cap, to the former Director, Mr. George Bush, who liked to know what his old shop had been doing for the last twenty-four hours; and when that was finished, he was off across the driveway to the West Wing, to the Oval Office, there to sit in on the President’s Chief of Staff briefing and his National Security briefing, to sit in not because the President wanted or would seek his opinion, not because the briefings would offer material on which he’d work, that day or ever, but simply To Know, which, after all, was the point; and when those briefings were over, Bush began his formal work for the day, getting to know and to know about some federal or local officials who’d convened en bloc in the capital, or sitting in with the President to refine and reinforce his acquaintance with the President of Zaire or the Foreign Minister of Malaysia, or jetting off to meet and to know the officers and enterprise of the nation’s first tall-stack-clean-coal power plant, or returning to his office for an informational briefing on the federal narcotics interdiction effort, or sitting down at his desk to work through the report on ... no matter. ... Every meeting, every act, each step in his daily Vice Presidential march, down to the last skip-and-jump through the briefcase full of papers which he’d tackle in his study at home, at night, had simply to do with knowing, and knowing in the Washington Way. Here was a man, after all, who owed his job to his
connaissance
, and maintained his standing in it almost solely by one pinpoint of that
connaissance
: his knowing relationship with Ronald Reagan. At the same time, his Constitutional duty required him to master the
scientia
, to know at least enough of the arms-control-throw-weight-multiple-reentry-warhead
scientia
to be President, today, should disaster strike. At the same time, his political standing, his sole shield against the dread and fatal ridiculousness of the job, depended on his ability to enhance the precious
awareness
... and yet ...
and yet!
... He could not know,
could not afford to know
, in the full operational sense of the word, anything beyond what the administration was known to know, or anything different from what the administration Officially Knew, or anything that put the lie to any of the fond and rosy myths that swaddled, like a blessed baby, the mind of the most know-nothing President in the capital’s known history.

Here was, in short, the most creative and subtle knower of knowledge in the capital.

Which brings up, again, that lamentable word: for when Iran-contra transpired, and God, like
The Washington Post
, was angry, and millions of Americans eagerly awaited a single, supposedly simple fact—yes or no?—and an answer was sought a thousand times, by a thousand of the nation’s best journalists ... it was sought only with the blunt tool at hand, the edge of that mealy flapjack, always with a question that came out this way:

Did George Bush know?

Now what could they possibly mean by that?

On the eighteenth of November, 1986, George Bush was to host a night at the movies:
Top Gun
was on the bill, just the kind of action flick the VP liked. In fact, it should have been a perfect night: friends, mostly Governors, in town for the Republican Governors’ do, all convened in comfort and security in the armchairs of Jack Valenti’s private theater on Sixteenth Street in the capital, a plushy screening room maintained for VIP entertainment by the Motion Picture Association of America. It was just the sort of soirée—twenty or thirty people he knew, gathered for activity and no heavy talk—the VP always enjoyed. He’d have them out to the house for drinks before the film. Perfect! Then he could pick off two or three, take them off to his study for a moment—no arm-twisting, nothing like that—just a friendly word or two ...

“Well, I feel we’re doing all right ...

“And I hope you could feel, you know, I’m qualified ...

“If you could help ...”

It always worked like a charm. After all he’d done for them, now he was asking, so intimately, gently ... it was so respectful and decent. If it came to arm-twisting later, well ... Atwater did the heavy lifting with the Southerners. Andy Card was working on Governor Sununu from New Hampshire. Bush’s friend, Nick Brady, went back a long way with Governor Tom Kean in New Jersey. In fact, Kean appointed Brady to the Senate, to fill out an unexpired term. So, if it came time to announce:
Hey! Bus is leaving! Get on board or be left behind
... there was always someone else to do it. That left Bush as the genial host ... such a decent guy! That’s the part he liked, anyway. He’d have Kean over that night, after the movie. He could stay the night! There was plenty of room! Bar would get everything set up upstairs. ... It’d be fun!

But that was all arranged before the deal with Iran started to come out on Election Day. Since then, there was nothing else in the news: ten minutes or more at the top of each newscast, guaranteed—they loved this crap! Ted Koppel, every night after the late news, making mincemeat out of anyone who dared say a kind word for Reagan. Turn the channel, there were Johnny Carson jokes: a cake and a Bible for the Ayatollah! That was before the
Post
started doing a special section each day, turning over every rock in town on that question: What did they know, and when did they know it? By the time the Governors came to town and Bush was to host his night at the movies, nothing seemed much fun.

Kean could tell right away when he got to the Residence: Bush wasn’t happy. He was alternately pensive and snappish. He couldn’t concentrate on what anybody said. Of course, Kean knew Bush from politics, and had for almost fifteen years, ever since Richard Nixon made Bush the National GOP Chairman. But Kean and Bush had also known one another in the ways that children of good families know one another. Kean’s sister had met young Poppy in Connecticut. Kean’s father had served with Prescott Bush in Congress. In the early years of the century, their grandfathers were classmates at a private college in New Jersey. So Kean had more than politics in mind when he took Bush aside to ask: “What’s wrong? You just don’t seem yourself.”

“Aw, this thing with Iran,” Bush said, when they got a chance to talk alone. Bar had gone to bed. The old, rambling house was silent, save for the quiet voices in the study.

“I don’t know what the hell happened,” Bush said, “and neither does the President. But they’re gonna put him out there tomorrow for a
news conference
. ... They’ll
kill
him out there!”

Just the thought of it ... Bush couldn’t sit still in his chair. He felt so helpless. And it was his ass out there on the line! Reagan wasn’t running again. If the whole second term sank into this Iran swamp, Reagan was still going back to his ranch and horses. It was Bush whose future was ruined. Of course, that’s not how he said it, wouldn’t even think that way. No, it was the price of being Poppy that his first thought, in fact, all his concern, had to bend to the rescue of “this good man, who has become my friend,” Ronald Reagan. The code left no options. When the deal came unglued and the papers started digging up the whole sad tale, Bush didn’t call any meetings, didn’t take polls, didn’t even talk to his political guys. There was only one thing he could do: stand by his friend in the shit-storm. Anything else ... well, it’d be like ratting on a school chum.

But he could help, if they’d give him a chance. He knew something about this, sure as hell knew more than the President. Reagan didn’t see what all the fuss was, thought he’d just go out there and say what he’d done. He didn’t understand! That’s why Bush went into the Oval Office that day—did what he’d almost never done in six long years. He went to the mat on this: went to the President to tell him to back off—just for a few days! Just until they knew what the facts were, what they were supposed to be. This was a covert operation! Shouldn’t be coming out like this! George Bush had joined his first secret society at age fourteen. He’d been keeping secrets ever since, been Director of the CIA! He knew this stuff in his bones! Just back off, till everybody knew what they were supposed to know, what it was they could admit they knew.

But they brushed him off like a fly ... Reagan, Meese, Don Regan. Bush talked into the President’s face in a way he never had ... but Reagan simply couldn’t understand. Meese thought the Gipper could just deny it—make it all go away in front of the cameras. Regan was only interested in his own reputation—wanted the world to know it wasn’t him, dropped the ball. Bush had gone at all of them, spent the capital of loyalty he’d been hoarding for six years, and got nowhere. It was incredible.

“Afterwards, I went at Regan again,” Bush said that night. “Believe me, I went in there ... as hard as I
could
.”

He knew Reagan was going to dig them a deeper hole. Bush knew what the President was going to say out there. (Fuller’s wife, Karen, helped Pat Buchanan get the statement together.) And Bush knew some of it was plain wrong, dangerously wrong. That business about the arms fitting into one cargo plane—dead wrong. Bush had taken a private meeting (at Ollie North’s request) with the Israeli middleman who started the whole deal rolling. He knew they were talking about more than one planeload, as he knew they were dealing with the genuine fanatics at the right hand of Khomeini. He never bought that “moderates” fantasy.