Authors: Hedrick Smith
Because some months into Mr. Reagan’s term, Senator Baker used the occasion of a visit to the White House to propose that the president give a boost to the World’s Fair in Knoxville by appearing at its opening in the spring of 1982. Delighted by Mr. Reagan’s acceptance, the senator shared the good news with his wife, Joy. But she went him one better. “Well, why don’t you go back and ask him if he’ll stay with us that night?” she suggested. “That’d be a great thing.”
For all their years in politics, the Bakers were a pair of innocents. Neither fully anticipated the logistical tornado that is unleashed by an overnight presidential visit. But something else checked Senator Baker briefly. Like most politicians, he holds the presidency as an institution in considerable awe. That made him initially somewhat shy about actually asking President Reagan into his home. Moreover, since the attempt on the president’s life in 1981, the security restrictions on Reagan’s movements had been so tight that the president had not spent the night in any private residence.
“I didn’t want to do it,” the senator confessed, remembering his hesitancy. “But I finally decided I would. I mentioned it to a couple
of his aides and they thought it was a great idea. So I worked up my courage and I asked the president, told him I appreciated his coming down, would he and Mrs. Reagan care to stay with us in our home up in the country outside Knoxville that night? And he said, ‘Sure, but I tell you what—Nancy’s coming in a day early. Could she stay an extra day?’ ”
2
The Bakers owned a large rambler-style home, which they had built in the 1950s on the family’s secluded landholding. The nearest house was half a mile away, and on three sides, you could see nothing but virgin mountain forests. What the senator had in mind for the Reagans was a four-room guesthouse, about a hundred yards down a grassy knoll from the main house, with a stunning view of the mountains from a ledge overhanging a gorge on the New River. The guesthouse had been fashioned from barn sidings but was lavishly furnished for a cabin, with porches front and back to let visitors drink in the mountain panorama. For many years, the late Senate Republican leader, Everett McKinley Dirksen, who was Mrs. Baker’s father, used the guesthouse when he came to see his grandchildren. The quiet of the place was medicinal. From its high perch, one could hear the gurgling of the river, the evening crickets, and the mountain breeze rustling the oaks.
At word of the president’s acceptance, Mrs. Baker redecorated the guesthouse and fixed it up fresh. But the White House managers had in mind a much more ambitious overhaul than merely spiffing up the cottage. To the Bakers this might seem just a tranquil overnight interlude for a busy president and his lady, but the White House bureaucracy viewed the Baker homestead as a temporary global command post for the commander in chief. The trappings of power go with the President wherever he goes; they are the instruments of his power.
Automatically, the elaborate machinery of presidential travel geared up preparations for the president’s coming—for his safety, his movements, his communications, even his food. Nothing could be left to chance or, indeed, to well-meaning amateurs. From the White House view, it takes an imperial retinue to insure the president’s safety, his contact with the rest of the world, his access to staff and to the press.
The first step was to install sufficient links to the president’s global communications network so that from the Baker’s rustic homestead, Mr. Reagan and his aides could hook up instantaneously with anyone in Tennessee or in Washington or, for that matter, anyplace on earth. And Senator Baker’s ordinary telephone service was deemed grossly inadequate.
“They sent a technical crew in there, days ahead of time, and asked
for fifty-six telephone circuits into my guesthouse,” Senator Baker recalled with a mixture of amusement and irritation. “And the poor little old telephone company out there, which is an independent telephone company, I don’t imagine had fifty-six telephone circuits or trunk lines for the whole community. But they dutifully put them in, and they drilled holes in my floor where they ran telephone cables up and which, to this day, are a matter of aggravation to my wife. They brought in a voice encoding machine, you know, one of these secure-line jobs, and put it in the room adjacent to the President’s. They set up a tie line, not one, but several direct tie lines to the White House switchboard. They had a direct tie-in to the airport, direct tie-in to the hospital, direct tie-in to the highway patrol.”
“The phone people really had nightmares,” echoed Larry Crowley, chief of the Huntsville Volunteer Fire Department. “For a little town like us, a small company like us, this was out of the ordinary,” said Charlie Welch, who put in the lines for the Highland Telephone Cooperative. “There were phones in places you’d never dream of putting phones, like outside the church.”
3
Then there was a debate over where to put the portable switchboard. The Army Signal Corps, which operates the president’s military communications network, arrived with a whole switchboard packed into a communications van, which they wanted to park beside the guesthouse. But Senator Baker, sensing his hospitality about to be desecrated, was adamant against scarring the pastoral setting. “I don’t want it there,” he declared. So the trailer was duly dispatched to a less prominent site near the senator’s dog pens, setting up howls from Mr. Baker’s beagle and his Saint Bernard. “The dogs were terribly perplexed by all this,” the senator recalled.
Although the Baker home seemed a particularly secluded spot in sparsely settled Huntsville, the Secret Service began throwing its security cloak over a large region about ten days ahead of time. Its agents lined up the Scott County sheriff and his deputies, plus the thirty volunteer firemen, to reinforce sizable detachments brought in from outside. Police dogs were sent to sniff for explosives in the Huntsville Presbyterian Church, where the Reagans were to attend Sunday services. Metal detectors were set up for the congregation. The president’s bulletproof limousine was flown to Knoxville and driven up to Huntsville for the short Sunday morning ride from the Baker home to the church. Secure space was set aside for a figure out of
Dr. Strangelove
: the military aide who carries what White House aides call the “football,” a briefcase full of secret codes available for ordering a launch of
nuclear weapons, kept near the president twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year.
4
On the bluff outside the guesthouse, the Secret Service mounted high-intensity floodlights to shine down onto the woods and river below. As May 1, the day of the Reagan’s visit, approached, the woods on both sides of the river and all around the Baker property were seeded with heavily armed federal and military security teams. “They had SWAT teams on the mountain, which is more than a mile from the guesthouse,” Senator Baker reported. “They had SWAT teams on the road. They had SWAT teams down below the bluff. I never saw so many people.”
By the time Saturday May 1 dawned, security barriers had been erected on all approaching roads. The fire department’s “attack pumper” truck took a position on the far edge of the Bakers’ lawn, the local volunteers flanked by a clutch of Secret Service agents. Some, according to the daily paper in Oneida, were clad in camouflage fatigues “not unlike a SWAT police unit you might see on television.”
5
The real show was about to begin. About forty longtime friends and supporters joined Mrs. Baker and her daughter, Cissy, around the Baker’s circular driveway. They were about to be initiated into a scaled-down, informal version of a modern American ritual: the Arrival of the President. It is an event staged in waves.
First, a huge helicopter landed five hundred yards to the east of the Baker home to drop off forty-five White House reporters and photographers, who were trucked to the president’s landing site. Next, a smaller helicopter touched down near a big red “pillow” landing marker on the Bakers’ front lawn to deposit White House aides. Finally, Marine One, the president’s huge white-capped helicopter, came into view, roaring in from the east at treetop level, making a sharp ninety-degree turn and then hovering for a moment before settling on the high ground near the house. Its throbbing rotors kicked up such strong prop stream that not only did it flatten the grass and whip up dust, but the people around the driveway had to lean into its backwind to keep from falling down.
Neil Sexton, the Bakers’ longtime handyman, had been fearful all along that the presidential visit would wreak havoc. To his dismay, the helicopter whirlwind blew the lawn furniture down the hill and unceremoniously unwrapped Cissy Baker’s wraparound skirt. “I knew it,” Sexton muttered.
Whatever the inconvenience, Senator Baker recalled that moment with the satisfaction of a country squire extolling his favorite Tennessee walking horses. “I had a yard full of presidential helicopters,” Senator
Baker later recalled. “I had three or four of them. Big old things. And people were more intrigued with that than they were with the president, to tell you the truth. They’d stop and stare at the helicopters longer than they’d stop and stare at the president.”
As soon as the president landed, the senator could not wait to show off to the Reagans his real pride and joy: the picture-postcard view from the guesthouse. “I was just chafing at the bit to show the president that magnificent view off the back porch of the guesthouse, looking over the river gorge to its unspoiled mountain beauty,” he said. At the guesthouse, he said, “I started to raise the blinds, and they wouldn’t come up. I found out the damned Secret Service had nailed them shut.”
In rising frustration, the senator whirled on the ranking Secret Service agent. “What have you done?” he demanded. “You’ve nailed the blinds to the floor.”
“There might be a sniper out there,” the agent replied.
The senator dismissed that as ridiculous. “But it’s two miles to the nearest hill!” he protested.
The agent was unmoved. “Yeah,” he said, “but we can’t afford to take the chance.”
Trapped by security demands even in this tranquil setting, Baker, who had made a run for the presidency in 1980 and harbored ambitions for 1988, found doubts suddenly flitting through his mind about whether he really wanted to be president. “I was beginning to think, you know, I don’t think it’s worth being president if you have to live like a prisoner.”
But as those second thoughts preoccupied him, President Reagan bent over and started pulling the blinds up, ripping the nails right out of the floor. It was an impulsive act like those of other presidents—Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, or John F. Kennedy plunging into crowds against the warnings of the Secret Service, determined to assert their authority and independence. Moreover, it turned out that the blinds had only been lightly tacked down, giving Senator Baker a moment of liberation. “The Secret Service was huffing and puffing and carrying on, but we went outside,” he recalled with a broad grin, “and at that point, I knew this man is sure enough president.”
After the Reagans had duly admired the view, Senator Baker played tennis doubles with some White House aides while the first lady massaged the president’s neck and shoulder muscles and the president, in shirt-sleeves, nibbled on grapes.
Just before dinner, the security forces suffered another setback. Not only had they closed off all approaching highways and roadways, but
they had theoretically erected a security barrier overhead by ordering all air controllers to close the airspace over the Baker homestead. Even soy Dinah Shore, the singer, who is a Tennessean and a friend of the Bakers, slipped through the net. She arrived for dinner by air, unannounced. “She came flying over in the tiniest helicopter I ever saw, directly over the guesthouse, and landed not fifteen feet from the president’s bedroom,” the senator explained, “The Secret Service was just apoplectic, but they couldn’t do much about it.”
With shades of Oriental food tasters, the security precautions for the Reagans even affected the Bakers’ barbecue dinner. Several days beforehand, the White House had obtained two place settings of Mrs. Baker’s china and her silverware which were flown off to Washington. “They fixed his dinner at the White House
on her china
and brought it down, which created a real problem in our kitchen,” the Senator said. “They brought their own White House stewards, and they were dressed just like the caterer that we had. I don’t know whether they brought the food down hot or not, but they cooked it in Washington.”
6
By the time dinner was over, things were quite relaxed. Dinah Shore suggested that if the president and Mrs. Reagan didn’t “mind some pickup musicians, we’ll just play awhile.” Governor Lamar Alexander took over the piano, country-western singer Chet Atkins pitched in with a guitar, and the Reagans joined the Tennesseans in a sing-along with Dinah Shore.
Outside in the darkness among the chirping crickets, the Secret Service had assembled an army of about 250 agents, highway patrolmen, military SWAT teams, and local officers. “The irony of the whole goddamned thing,” Senator Baker recalled, “is the entire, tiny, town constabulary, which is two or three people, the county sheriff, who had about twenty, and the highway patrol were all gathered up in the intensive security operation for the president, and while the dinner party was going on, somebody robbed one of my neighbor’s houses—Ross Faires’s—because they knew full well there wasn’t a policeman left anywhere around.”
Quickly he added, “We had a marvelous time that night.”
The Image of Power: The President as John Wayne
The presidential circus that enveloped the Bakers and Huntsville may be a more intimate and amusing glimpse of the chief executive than most people experience. But the Huntsville story fits the public’s general image of a Gulliver-sized president. At close range, any president
and his entourage are overwhelming—filling every available room, setting up their global command post, tunneling telephone lines, swarming the woods with SWAT teams, commandeering every local deputy within miles, flying in hordes of reporters. Action. Power. Even at a distance, the massive apparatus of the White House radiates the impression of almost limitless presidential power.