The Grounding of Air Sununu

...They don't...

...They portrayed every revelation in the worst possible light, as they always do...

...But on June 24, as he arrived to make a speech just outside Washington, Sununu found himself pursued down hallways by TV cameras and reporters demanding to know if he was about to be fired...

...A wise man might have cut down his travels for a while, taken a few well-publicized commercial flights, and poked a little fun at himself...

...And new domestic programs can't even be offered without some way to pay for them—either by cutting some other domestic program or by proposing new taxes, neither a politically attractive alternative...

...Despite Mr...

...He had to call in "every 15 minutes to make sure what was going on," he said...

...For instance, on "This Week with David Brinkley" (June 16), Sununu, speaking of a recent Bush address, dispensed this gem: We felt that it was a good event, that the kind of speech that it was was one in which the content was significant...

...They can amass enormous power and even some celebrity, particularly as lightning rods deflecting criticism from their bosses...

...He did make a small joke around the White House: Question: What's the difference between the Iraqi Air Force and Air Sununu...

...N of that Sununu should seek advice from reporters, let alone kiss them anywhere...

...Sununu has long been famous for his difficulties in getting along with Washington's press corps, even those members of it favorably disposed to him...

...Taking advice isn't Sununu's way...

...But that should have been the end of the whole thing, and, after a couple of days of stories, it seemed it was...

...After much confusion over whosponsored the trip, it was finally determined that Washington real estate developer Stuart Bernstein had done so at Sununu's personal request...

...But around the White House, few believed it...

...Sununu has also played the political heavy, taking on—among others—the environmental and civil rights lobbies...

...It is possible to live with them, if one is willing to make some accommodations...

...Sununu had had his wings publicly clipped and reporters were picking through the details of his dental appointments and trips with his family...

...Gonzalez, then the committee's chairman, canned him, explaining, "Staffers should be on tap, not on top...

...Under the new rules, he couldn't take an Air Force plane because it wasn't official business...

...Reporters began asking the White House about another Sununu political trip to Chicago aboard a private jet...

...A new travel policy was issued, with White House counsel C. Boyden Gray (another millionaire) the new arbiter of the chief of staff's requests for Air Force planes...

...He came in and the reporter asked him to clarify a minor point in his travel report...

...Sununu stopped talking, and with a gesture of disgust, turned and stalked out of the room, leaving the reporters staring in wonder...

...Although much would later be made of the cost to the taxpayers, it was, in fact, marginal...

...There may have been a reality to the structure of that answer, but it surely failed to bear all that verbiage...

...The staff, in the person of the White House military office, informed him upon his return that it was White House policy, dating back to the Reagan Administration, for the chief of staff to travel on Air Force planes, where he would always be reachable by phone...

...He said the President had communicated with President Gaviria of Colombia "through the structure...

...This led to yet another change in White House travel policy, forbidding Sununu or his staff to solicit private plane rides...

...Sununu stopped talking, and with a gesture of disgust, turned and stalked out of the room, leaving the reporters staring in wonder...

...Sununu has long claimed that he has subordinated his own interests and identity to serve the President...

...Sununu, who probably works harder than any of them except Baker, lives paycheck-to-paycheck, trying to take care of eight children, two 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991 still at home and two—until this spring —at college...

...Sununu is a principalarchitect of the successful veto strategy that has kept the White House a major player in domestic legislation despite the Democrats' control of both houses of Congress...

...When officials relayed the inquiries to the governor, he said he knew nothing about how it was arranged, or who actually paid for it, that all such details had been handled by others...

...So he had his government chauffeur drive him to New York, which allowed him to work and use the phone in the car during the four-hour drive...

...No big deal, right...

...Political trips, to GOP fundraisers and other such events, would now be taken in private corporate planes...

...There were inevitable questions about how Sununu's use of Air Force planes to go on ski trips and to the dentist squared with the President's pledge to avoid even the "appearance of impropriety...

...The nation's capital has been described as a land of clerks and kings, in which the elected officials are the kings and everybody else, no matter how powerful, how overworked, is a clerk...

...Though that agreement was widely derided, it looks better to Republicans all the time, as the President's opponents now find themselves cut off from the familiar pre-election game of passing costly new benefit programs and daring the President to veto them...

...They can't invade the military budget, for example, to pay for new social spending...

...Small wonder that he came to appreciate and feel he deserved his few White House perquisites—a car and driver and use of government planes...

...For a professional politician, however, John Sununu seems strangely unaccustomed to accommodation...

...On June 12...

...He accused the Democrats of favoring a "socialized structure" for health care...

...But it is an abiding rule that they must never, ever confuse their status with that of their elected principals...

...The car trip to New York was permissible under the rules, practical in allowing the governor to get some work done, and cheap...

...The New Republic's Fred Barnes, who has written both admiringly and critically of Sununu, suggested on "Nightline' that Sununu's high-handed style had made other White House staffers only too eager to tell reporters about his peregrinations aboard Air Force jets, and had left him without friends or defenders when the stories broke...

...In addition, Sununu is a certified conservative, and an effective ambassador to the Republican right from a President who is often thought of as a closet moderate...

...Sununu walked by in the hallway and one of the reporters called to him...

...But there would be no commercial flights, nor any self-denigrating witticisms in public...

...Wrong...

...That responsibility is there and it is not only a critical part of my being able to do that, but it is in the national interest...

...But the image of a White House bigshot whistling up Air Force planes to fly him wherever he chooses is the kind of story the media love...

...It was a humiliation...

...limas congressman Henry Gonzalez put it succinctly after he fired Philadelphia prosecutor Richard Sprague as the chief counsel of the House Assassinations Committee more than a decade ago...

...But there is a flabby grandiloquence to Sununu's speech that matches his concept of his job, and of himself...

...Even self-important Washington correspondents like to think they are abiding by the old journalistic motto: "Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable...

...Bush's reputation as a "hands-on" chief executive, he is no micro-manager...

...It can't be easy for Sununu, a political figure presumed to have presidential ambitions of his own, to accept that and the relative obscurity that comes with it...

...Never mind that this put the governor, his staff, and the GOP in the position of soliciting favors from private interests, nearly all of which have some stake in government policy...

...Such plane rides are legal, as an "in-kind" political contribution...

...When it all came to light in Newsweek, Sununu was driven to new levels of self-aggrandizement to justify it...

...This time, the Democrats not only agreed to ceilings on spending, but also to "walls...

...Structure" is one of the governor's favorite words...

...Barnes said that wasn't what he had in mind, but Sununu didn't ask what he did have in mind...

...O n April 23, the day John Sununu released the first public accounting of his travel as the President's chief of staff aboard government planes, a group of network TV correspondents was sitting in the White House Roosevelt Room awaiting a foreign policy briefing by Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates...

...It may seem unfair to make fun of the language of a public official picking his way through the minefield of a Sunday talk program...

...In other words, the plane had a radio...

...And the corporate ride-bumming looked just as bad...

...What matters is the President's political standing, and anything any staffer does that diminishes it is a cardinal no-no...

...And Sununu, on Saturday, June 22, issued a brief statement saying that "mistakes were made' and "my own mistakes contributed...

...Along with it came Sununu's report on where he had flown and how much he had reimbursed...

...That left the White House with little choice but to "review" (read: revise) the travel policy, and Sununu with little choice but to make a public accounting of his travels...

...He was also a key figure in the negotiations that led to last year's budget deal...

...But by now it had become clear to everybody but Sununu himself that what was at stake was not his responsibilities, but his pride...

...But the Washington media are a lot like the Washington summer weather: an unpleasant fact of life, but a predictable one...

...I have to be able to communicate, to work on sensitive papers, to coordinate the White House activities, even when I'm traveling...

...It is, to be sure, a murderous job...

...The next Brit Hume is White House correspondent for ABC News...

...On the Brinkley show of June 16, he told Sam Donaldson, in effect, that he had had to take the car because the nation could not endure the risk of his being out of touch for even an hour aboard the New York-Washington shuttle...

...Wonder, but not surprise...

...But the image of Sununu getting into his government Chrysler sedan (it's not a limousine, though the media would inevitably describe it as such) and ordering the driver to take him to New York just looked terrible, especially in the midst of a controversy that turned on the appearance of impropriety...

...But then Sununu, like other Washington magnificoes who have come to grief before him, showed that beingsmart is not the same as being wise...

...He spoke of looking forward to the happy day when the chief of staff wouldn't have to be in 24-hour contact with the President as "getting to that structure...

...Sununu stayed behind that day in New Jersey, and his return by commercial flight was delayed for hours because the plane was late...

...Bush, Baker, Scowcroft, Brady, Darman—all rich men to whom it is no problem to abide by the fastidious ethical standards Bush has set for his administration...

...Compared to that, a little obscurity might be just the thing...

...It was the kind of speech that we really do think the substance was well reported and that's what we wanted to get out, the message that there is a reality to the structure of what the President is doing and that the Congress has failed to act...

...The President, a gregarious and likable man by nature, has been freed to play Mr...

...There's more...

...But he let pride get in the way and forgot an important Washington maxim: staffers ultimately don't matter...

...This does much to explain how what should have been a brief and trivial embarrassment turned into a protracted controversy that diminished Sununu's influence and threatened his job...

...My job is a seven-day-a-week, 24- hour-a-day job...

...Answer: Air Sununu makes a lot more flights...

...Sununu at first scoffed at the idea, but agreed when a copy of the memo setting out the policy was shown to him...

...What's more, he agreed only reluctantly to use the planes...

...He just doesn't get it," said one senior official not normally given to such criticisms...

...He imagines that in the political scheme of things, his personal travail with the Washington media, his perquisites, and his pride matter...

...John Sununu's mistake is similar to Sprague's...

...the governor took the morning off to go to a stamp auction in New York...

...The car and driver would have sat around the White House all day if Sununu had not used them...

...W hat Sununu doesn't get, it seems, is the peculiar status enjoyed by Washington's vast army of unelected staff...

...That's why I have a door-to-door car and driver assigned to me," Sununu declared...

...Sununu is a witty man and there is nothing like a bit of self-effacing humor to redeem a politician on the spot in Washington...

...Sprague had come to town on a wave of publicity, and immediately began holding news conferences to announce the direction in which the investigations of the Kennedy and King murders were going...

...The only added cost was the gasoline and tolls...

...The media bear much of the responsibility, as they always do...

...But he might try talking to them—and to the public—in a way that doesn't invariably sound like obfuscating doubletalk...

...But that policy had been abandoned...

...He even explained his use of a corporate jet to get home from a political trip by saying, "The structure of the jet was that if there was an emergency, they could get me in the air...

...T nstead, Sununu, ever the smart guy, 1 found ways around the new White House regulations, thus avoiding the indignity of an airport boarding lounge where someone might make a crack about his reduced circumstances...

...It happened after a Bush visit to New Jersey in April 1989, at the height of that year's budget negotiations...

...He put out word that his trips were all done by the book, which by and large they were...

...In the meantime, though, Sununu would have us believe he had become such an indispensable public servant that not an hour could pass at the White House without him...

...It was the closest thing to an apology anyone had heard from Sununu, and it seemed possible he had learned his lesson...

...The White House had been trying to reach him about the budget deal, but didn't want him paged over the loudspeakers in Newark Airport...

...Nice Guy with everybody but Sad-dam Hussein...

...Well, bull...

...As Sununu was explaining, Mary Tillotson of CNN began making notes...

...He is surrounded by them, though...

...John Sununu, with his large family and small means, might be the least comfortable member of the Bush team, but with his bay window and know-it-all manner, he fits the mold of a fat-cat...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991 15...

...W hat Sununu is not is a millionaire...

...day, Sununu telephoned Barnes to ask derisively if that meant he should "kiss the press's ass...

...On that same broadcast, he couldn't stop saying it...

...Sununu works long hours and the President's preoccupation with foreign policy has left much of domestic policy to him, with help from budget director Richard Darman...

...While it has made Sununu many enemies inside the White House, Sununu's hard-nosed management style has also made life easier for the President...

...Remember, this is the same Sununu who at first balked at the idea of using Air Force planes because he thought it unnecessary...

...So the governor had lied about his role in arranging it, as Marlin Fitzwater acknowledged in one of his daily briefings, albeit without using the word "lie...

...He was persuaded to do so because it was White House policy...

...So imagine his reaction when the Washington Post, a newspaper that had shown him little favor, broke the story of his travel by government jet...

...But what about personal excursions...