Power Play - Gavin Esler

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observations and proverbs like this, rules for conduct in modern politics. He told me once that Washington DC Rule Number One is ‘Don’t Make Unnecessary Enemies.’ Rule Two is that ‘the bigger your friends, the more juice you have’, ‘juice’ being Washington slang for power or influence, though not always in a good way.

      ‘And you have plenty juice, Ambassador Price,’ Luntz said to me, almost as an aside. ‘Anybody whose brother-in-law happens to be Prime Minister has plenty juice.’

      In that first year of the Carr presidency, Vice-President Bobby Black had more juice than anyone in DC, except perhaps Carr himself, and yet he routinely broke Arlo Luntz’s basic rules. Bobby Black stomped on people. He made enemies, necessary and–like Kristina Taft and me–unnecessary enemies too. His own friends were anonymous corporate types from his previous business past, middle-aged balding men in grey suits who ran oil companies, high-tech businesses and private security corporations, plus lawyers and lobbyists from what Washingtonians call ‘Gucci Gulch’–a corridor of nastiness along K Street in northwest Washington. It takes its name from the inhabitants who wear $500 tasselled Gucci loafers along with their $2,000 suits.

      ‘Friends in the shadows,’ Johnny Lee Ironside once told me of his boss, without explanation. ‘FOBs.’

      FOBs meant ‘Friends of Bobby’. I knew some of the names. Just the names. Ron Gold of Goldcrest, the energy and private security consortium, was a long time FOB. So was Paul Comfort, the CEO of Warburton, the high-tech military and construction contractor. Warburton had somehow snagged all the latest contracts for rebuilding Iraq. This caused more bad feeling with Downing Street, much more than the public row about torture, Manila, Muhammad Asif Khan or the United Nations all put together. Fraser Davis was furious. He shouted at me on the secure line that the Americans had their snouts in the trough. More importantly, we did not.

      ‘British jobs are at stake, Alex!’

      He demanded an explanation of how $7 billion in Iraqi contracts went to just one company, Warburton, on a no-bid basis, meaning no British firms could compete.

      ‘A billion dollars worth of these infrastructure projects is in the south–Basra–that’s supposed to be our bailiwick, Alex!’

      ‘I don’t think the Americans see it like that, Prime Minister.’

      ‘But … the Vice-President gave you a copy of that Spartacus document. He must think highly of you, yes? And of his relationship with the United Kingdom government? And yet he did not talk about the Iraq contracts?’

      ‘You know what it is like dealing with the Vice-President, Prime Minister. It’s not easy.’

      I lamely tried to explain that no American firms were allowed to compete for the contracts either, and that Speaker Betty Furedi had promised a Congressional investigation into what she called the ‘Iraqi sweetheart deal scandal.’

      ‘But investigations in this town are like belly buttons, Prime Minister,’ I said, ‘everyone’s got one.’

      Davis was apoplectic but impotent.

      ‘It’s just not right,’ he bellowed, ‘just not right.’

      * * *

      Warburton’s CEO Paul Comfort, like Bobby Black, was from Montana. They were childhood friends. People suspected something in their relationship, but could not get to the bottom of it. Campaign contributions? Soft money? I’d heard Comfort was a ‘bundler’–one of the people who ‘bundled’ contributions together from many sources and provided Bobby Black with serious and above board cash. But Gold and Comfort were just names to me. I read about them in the Wall Street Journal business pages. I knew they were members of NEST–Bobby Black’s National Energy Strategy Taskforce–set up to map out US energy policy for the twenty-first century, but you never saw them on TV, they never gave interviews, I never had the pleasure of meeting them. Men, as Johnny Lee said, from the shadows.

      Johnny Lee Ironside also says that outside the White House there are five permanent Washington Tribes–Diplomats, Congressmen, Lawyers, Journalists, and Lobbyists. The Five Tribes overlap. Their people sleep with each other and sometimes marry. They play golf and poker, entertain together, commit adultery, and their children go to the same schools. Members of all Five Tribes know that, like the Carr-Black administration, the people in the White House come and go, but the Tribes go on forever. Superficially the Tribes defer to the Office of the President, and to the Office of the Vice-President, but all the time they know that the President and Vice-President will only trouble the permanent Tribes at most for eight years before being replaced by the next incumbents. The Office of the Vice-President is, of course, proverbially ‘one heartbeat away’ from the most powerful job in the world, but those of us in the permanent Five Washington Tribes feared Bobby Black, because he was much more important than that.

      Here’s an example. A Wednesday morning, just after 11 a.m., six months after the Inauguration. An intruder, a deranged man from West Virginia, leaped over the White House fence and ran towards the Oval Office, threatening to kill President Carr. He set off the alarms and was stopped by the Secret Service before he could get more than twenty metres. The deranged man had a gun, an old Smith & Wesson revolver, and the Secret Service shot him in both legs. He was lucky they did not kill him immediately. The gun turned out to be empty. Not a bullet in the chamber. I was in the library of the Great House at the embassy on Massachusetts Avenue where I like to work.

      CNN were live in the White House pressroom where Sandy McAuley, the Communications Director, was fielding reporters’ questions about the incident. I put my papers to one side and watched.

      ‘Where was the President–and the Vice-President–at the time of the incident?’ one of the reporters asked.

      McAuley twitched a little. ‘Vice-President Black was at his desk in the West Wing, working on papers.’

      Pause.

      ‘But where was President Carr?’

      McAuley twitched some more. ‘President Carr was in the family quarters.’

      ‘Doing what?’

      ‘President Carr was exercising on a rowing machine in the gym.’

      You could hear the intake of breath from the journalists, and a few titters of laughter. Even those of us who are not professional workaholics usually put in a few hours work in the mornings. It was just after 11 a.m. on a weekday, six months after President Theo Carr’s election, and when a nutty assassin tried to get in to the White House, the President was on a rowing machine? And Vice-President Bobby Black was in the West Wing, at his desk, working on papers? Running the country? Told you something, didn’t it?

      * * *

      Kristina Taft understood this quicker than anyone. She had been confirmed as National Security Adviser and called me a couple of days later. She decreed that our first private meeting would not, under any circumstances, take place at the White House. She suggested breakfast one morning at her apartment in the Watergate.

      ‘At six.’

      I gulped. ‘Six a.m.? Sure.’

      Kristina explained that she usually woke at five, sat on an exercise bike for thirty minutes, read some papers, and then left in time to get to the White House before seven every morning. I considered the private meeting a show of trust and an honour.

      ‘I don’t want word to get out to anyone,’ she warned me.

      ‘Anyone?’ I responded.

      ‘Especially not the Vice-President. I’ll send the help away.’

      By the ‘help’ she meant her security staff as well as her maid. When we met she was alone.

      ‘I’m the new kid on the block,’ she said over poached eggs and muffins. From the start there were whispers that Kristina was too young for the job, and that it was not much of a job anyway–just ‘executive assistant’ to the Vice-President who was driving national security policy himself. In Washington it’s like this. You can go

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