My Presidental Motorcade, Part 3

I raised an eyebrow toward the fat man, but his expression relayed none of what I felt. The sexy European merely ran his hands through this wavy hair and adjusted the camera slung over his shoulder. Everyone was calm, and the Secret Service agent in front of us continued to listen intently to her earpiece.

Suddenly, she stepped out of our way and the chase was on again. We all sprinted up the driveway and past a gauntlet of sentry Secret Service agents, through the wide-open front doors of the embassy. Our various dress shoes clicked across the polished floors and we made a right hand turn and came in full view of the four flights of stairs awaiting our arrival.

So we grunted on, especially my fat friend, and we made it up step after step, flight after flight, until finally we burst onto the correct level of the building and emerged panting and sweaty to the very prim and proper setting of President Bush and the Pakistani Prime Minister standing together in front of their county’s respective flags, doing the strange whispering into one another’s ears that always accompanies photo ops, while what appeared to be the entire staff of the embassy snapped a thousand pictures from card-deck sized digital cameras.

But all that changed quickly, as my squad of photographers showed up and elbowed those poor people out of the way. I put my headphones on, checked my levels, and fired up my recorder, tensed and ready to forever save the sound of this event.

Once the shuffling and wheezing died down, President Bush took one step forward and addressed the awaiting lenses and microphones:

“The people of the United States express their sympathy in your time of need. We will do what is necessary to aid your country in recovering from this disaster.”

He then produced a pen and wrote something I couldn’t see into a ledger that was on a table to his right, in a rather stylized script, I must say. President Bush then shook the Prime Minister’s hand, the cameras when crazy at that, and began to walk behind a curtain than was set up behind the two men.

As he was leaving, some of the reporters shouted out questions (remember, this was in late 2005, when President Bush was still trying to convince people that stony silence was the same thing as strong leadership). But he did not answer the reporters (one asked about Harriet Miers, the doomed-to-be-former Supreme Court candidate, and the other was about Iraq), he merely smiled broadly and waved, although he couldn’t have been more than ten feet away from the reporters asking the questions.

After President Bush disappeared from view the tight knot of people in the center of the room relaxed. I glanced down at my recorder and saw that I had one minute and thirty seconds of garbage. A mindless quote and a wave from the President. Then it occurred to me: what happened to all of those SWAT Secret Service agents?

I looked around for some sign of them: a used machine gun magazine, a muddy foot print, a grappling hook, anything, but there was nothing to be seen. Secret Service agents in suits came in from their posts at the walls and ushered us back down the flights of stairs, across the cul-de-sac and back into our designated Suburban.

We took off again, through the streets of Washington DC, headed back the West Wing and the press briefing room. The prospect of more sitting around was eminent. I decided that the SWAT Secret Service people must just have been practicing some kind of danger scenario. Then I realized that we weren’t so different that day, them and me. We both wanted to leap into heroic action, serving the United States and saving the populace (in our own ways). Yet, in the end, we were both only sweaty, with the memory of a smirk and a wave from President Bush.