Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [35]
I used the analogy of two children fighting over the same toy. How do you stop it? Take away the toy, then neither of ’em gets it. Standard Child-Rearing 101.
Well, you should have seen the look I got. I could only assume that this hadn’t come up in the negotiations. Or with any of his advisers. A stunned expression is putting it mildly. President Clinton didn’t say anything, but if I could put words in his mouth, they were: “You’ve gotta be shitting me.” As best I could determine, he wasn’t quite ready to consider my solution. He might even have been thinking, “And this guy could end up with his finger near the nuclear button?”
Unlike Bush, who goes to bed around 9 p.m. every night, Clinton was a night owl. He never went to sleep until three or four in the morning. But we finally said our good nights, and I walked alone down to the Lincoln Bedroom. It’s on the second floor, almost directly opposite the President’s bedroom.
This is where the feeling of being here really got to me. I stood in the bedroom looking around. Under glass off to one side is Lincoln’s entire handwritten Gettysburg Address. Signed by him. Lincoln’s penmanship is some of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. I sat on the edge of the bed and thought, my God, he wrote this almost 150 years ago! Then I lay down, and began thinking of everything I could possibly remember about different presidents who had occupied the White House.
I have a disease that some people get, a ringing in the ears, so I have to sleep with another sound in the bedroom. If it’s dead silent, it’s difficult for me to sleep. Usually I sleep with the TV on very low, so it gives me background noise. It was about four in the morning now, and I started channel surfing. Suddenly, right there in Lincoln’s bed, I began laughing so hard that the iron bedposts were shaking!
What had come on the TV while I was trying to fall asleep? Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men, the movie with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. Here I am in the very same White House where Nixon had probably walked up and down the halls, swearing like hell, trying to figure—“How do I get out of this one?” And there’s Deep Throat at four in the morning down there in the bowels of the parking lot, telling Woodward, “Follow the money.”
It’s a funny dichotomy. You start imagining the history of this amazing place, and it makes you feel small, insignificant. On the flip side, you realize that these were only men, too. Mortals, human beings; no different in many ways than you or I.
President Clinton and I ended up not playing golf. Something happened that he had to deal with, and some business came up that I couldn’t cancel. But when I got up the next morning and checked out what the golf game would have been like, I’m just as glad it never happened. There were seven Suburbans lined up outside the White House, and each one was loaded with personnel and automatic weapons. I thought, how do you relax and play golf, when behind every sand trap is going to be a fellow holding an H&K MP5?
Driving across Texas, listening to our favorite CDs and a couple of books-on-tape.... Terry wants to know, “What is it with you and Louis L’Amour?” He wrote dozens of what used to be called “dime novel Westerns,” and I was a big fan.
“When I deployed overseas the first time,” I recall, “we all got into reading his books. When you wrote home to your parents, you didn’t ask for money—only more Louis L’Amour. You could literally leave one on your bed next to a hundred-dollar bill, you’d come back and the hundred would still be sitting there but the book would be