Even Congress Isn’t This Rough

For a moment, let’s put aside all the heroics: the gun-slinging president-turned-pilot; the F-15s turning their missiles, at the president’s command, on the presidential aircraft; even the Cabinet rebellion fought off by the loyal vice president. That’s pure fiction.

Instead let’s consider Step No. 1: Surely, terrorists couldn’t board Air Force One, the most secure airplane in the world, capture its crew and passengers, including the president, and turn all into hostages--as portrayed in the movie “Air Force One.”

Wrong.

“The presidential part of it is plausible--how the terrorists got on board, the physical layout of the plane is almost perfect. The first 10 minutes are very realistic and plausible. . . . You really didn’t have to suspend disbelief.”

That’s Marlin Fitzwater speaking. As White House press secretary during the final two years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency and throughout the four years of George Bush’s tenure, Fitzwater became intimately familiar with the presidential airplanes--the military version of the old Boeing 707 that went into service in 1972 and the Boeing 747 that Bush inaugurated in 1990.

And after the first 10 minutes? Reality goes flying out the back door, along with half the cast. The jumbo jet careens--on the ground at Ramstein Air Base in Germany--with the abandon of an MG-B taken for a joy ride, and then pulls miraculously into the air. Parachutes galore. On-board gunfire. Inevitable escapes.

Well, never mind, because by then we’re rolling through a summertime adventure and the suspension of reality no longer matters. In short, the premise works.

The premise is this: The president’s plane, departing Moscow, is taken over by terrorists posing as a Russian television crew. They pull off their deed with the help of a turncoat Secret Service agent.

The plotters are foiled, in the end, by the president himself, played by Harrison Ford: Indiana Jones morphed into the three most recent presidents. There’s a touch of tough-guy Ronald Reagan successfully ordering a terrorist in midair to “get off my plane”; there’s lanky George Bush, down to his background as a military pilot and his devotion to a college-era baseball glove; and a touch, too, of Bill Clinton, traveling with wife and young daughter.

And it’s not all that far-fetched.

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Step back a few years to the Bush administration in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When the networks began wrestling with their news budgets, they figured that when the president of the United States traveled abroad, they could save money by substituting foreign crews for the more expensive, union-scale camera and sound teams assigned to regular White House duty.

First one crew member was substituted, then another, and with the practice about to become standard, the Secret Service put its collective, loafer-shod foot down. Secret Service officials persuaded White House political types that the practice left the airborne president vulnerable because the crews’ backgrounds could not be adequately checked.

“The Secret Service was very uptight about it,” Fitzwater said after watching a private screening of “Air Force One” on Monday. So uptight, indeed, that the practice came to an end. Still, said Fitzwater, “that could have happened.”

A key government official, sworn to give his life to defend the Constitution of the United States and the president, instead proving to be the pivotal link in a terrorist plot?

Out of the question?

Just ask the CIA about its experience with Aldrich Ames. Ask the FBI about its turncoats.

“There are a lot of soldiers in the world the drug cartel could buy off--$100,000 to look the other way for a day,” Fitzwater said, recalling the dangers of a one-day visit Bush made to an anti-drug summit in Colombia. “So the plausibility of the scenario is accurate.”

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The president as a would-be D.B. Cooper? An “escape pod” blasting out of a 747 in flight? The president’s jet opening up aft like a paratrooper’s C-130 cargo plane? OK, so some of the details don’t work--as far as we know. So we won’t go into them--why take away the fun? But so many others are so precise that it had to be an inside job.

Consider, for instance, the behavior of the Cabinet, meeting with the vice president back in Washington while the president, his senior staff, wife and 12-year-old daughter are under siege in the darkened skies. Should they overrule the vice president and hand power over to the defense secretary--an Al Haig clone declaring, “I’m in charge here”?

This may have been an exaggeration. Would all line up against the vice president? Perhaps not. Still, said Fitzwater, in time of crisis “there’s always one or two who act foolish. It’s always that way.”

The conference room aboard the airplane, the angle of the doorways, the president’s office, the positioning of the seats, the color scheme, the aisles, corridors and spaciousness, even the below-decks baggage hold: With the exception of the president’s desk--rectangular in the movie and odd-angled on the real plane--it all looks just like that.

And more: The first pilot of the jumbo jet was Col. Danny Barr. So in the movie the president, returning to the plane after a hasty trip to Moscow, greets the pilot, “Danny,” by name at the doorway. Never mind that in real life when the president arrives on board, the pilot is generally in the cockpit and the chief steward greets him.

And yet another detail: A steward wears the same sort of blue sleeveless sweater that chief steward Howie Franklin wore when he flew aboard Air Force One for 18 years and served every president from Gerald Ford to Bill Clinton.

Only the ubiquitous M&Ms; in white boxes decorated with the presidential seal, coveted Air Force One souvenirs, are missing.

Fitzwater hasn’t been aboard since Jan. 20, 1993, when the plane took Bush and crew to Texas at the end of his presidency, but it all came back to him.

“I liked that Harrison Ford was hiding under my seat. It was sagging enough. It hid his body,” he said, recalling the leather chair that was his regular post in the four-person senior-staff cabin he shared with the chief of staff, national security advisor and senior-most guest on most flights.

But one thing was missing, he said:

“I thought the press secretary should have had a more active role. I’d have saved at least 100 people.”