by H. L. Mencken (channeled)
There has always been, in the annals of statecraft, a certain grandeur to the leader who faces peril alongside his men — who stands, however foolishly, on the same deck, breathes the same smoke, and takes his chances with the ranks he commands. It is a grandeur, I am obliged to report, that finds no purchase whatsoever in the recent adventures of the President of the United States, who, upon being informed by Israeli intelligence that Iran meant to put a missile through Air Force One as it left Turkish airspace, did not so much face the peril as arrange — with real ingenuity, and from the vantage point of a rented catering truck — for several hundred other people to face it in his stead.
The particulars, as they have leaked out of Washington in the halting, embarrassed way that particulars of this kind generally do, are almost too delicious to require embellishment. Following the NATO summit at Ankara, the great man boarded Air Force One in full view of the press corps, waved from the top of the stairs in the manner he has practiced since 2015, and allowed the doors to be sealed behind him — except that he was, by that point, no longer aboard. He had slipped down the far side of the aircraft, out of camera range, and climbed into the elevated container of an airport catering truck, the very vehicle whose usual cargo is stale rolls and reheated chicken for a planeload of tired congressmen. This device lowered him, presumably among the beverage carts, to the tarmac, whence he was spirited aboard a smaller government jet flying under a nondescript call sign. That jet carried him to Britain, and from Britain, in due course, he was quietly slipped back aboard the very aircraft he had appeared to board in the first place — a maneuver of such baroque duplicity that a French farce would blush to stage it.
Meanwhile the actual Air Force One, the big silver one with the seal on the fuselage and the flag on the tail — the one an Iranian missile crew would naturally aim at — took off on schedule, carrying the White House press corps and a quantity of lower-ranking officials who had not been let in on the joke. When these unfortunates noticed that the window shades had been ordered shut — an unusual precaution on a presidential aircraft — and asked why, they were told nothing of substance. Not one of them knew that the man they believed they were flying with had, by then, already made his exit by catering truck and second airplane, and was nowhere near the seat they imagined him occupying. When a reporter later worked up the nerve to ask the President about the shuttered windows, he replied with the sort of sentence that ought to be carved somewhere, if not on the Kennedy Center then at least on his tombstone: “I’m No. 1 on their list.” Which is to say: I knew I was the target, I said nothing, and I let the rest of you fly the decoy.
It would be unfair, I suppose, to demand physical courage of every President; the office has been held by hypochondriacs, gout sufferers, and at least one man who conducted a war from a wheelchair with tremendous distinction. Courage of the body is not, strictly, a job requirement. But courage of the sentence — the plain, decent willingness to turn to the men and women whose safety you have just wagered without their knowledge and say, before the story leaks, “I owe you an explanation” — that used to be considered a minimum. Instead the White House let it come out sideways, through the newspapers, weeks on, dressed up as a tale of derring-do and tradecraft, when what it actually describes is a Commander-in-Chief who, tipped off by a foreign intelligence service that he personally was marked for death, elected to let his own press pool serve as the flaming decoy while he rode to safety amid the salad trays.
There is, admittedly, a certain professional pride the catering-truck driver of Ankara might take in all this; not every man gets to smuggle a head of state past an assassination plot using equipment ordinarily reserved for smuggling club sandwiches. And there is a species of low comedy in it too, the kind Aristophanes would have recognized at once — the great blustering hero of the piece folded double in a food box, sweating among the cutlery, while trumpets of departure sound a hundred yards away for an airplane he has already quit. But strip away the comedy and what remains is a more sober arithmetic: a foreign government warned an American President his life was in danger, and the President’s chief response, so far as the record shows, was to protect himself, brief his inner circle, and leave the uniformed correspondents of the American press — the “Fourth Estate” he so enjoys deriding as enemies of the people — to fly on, unwitting and unwarned, aboard the very airplane he had just abandoned as bait. Had Iran’s aim been true and its intelligence merely a beat behind his getaway, it would not have been the man in the catering truck who paid the bill for the arrangement. It would have been the reporters he left holding it, several miles up, in a very large, very silver, very conspicuous airplane, wondering only, as the shades came down, why nobody would tell them anything.
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