Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

We grew quite close after he chose me for the fitness job. I could go over to the White House and see him anytime I was in Washington. We had that kind of relationship. Anytime. John Sununu was his chief of staff in the beginning, and he also was welcoming to me. It was never “The boss is busy now, come back tomorrow.”

We felt honored to be invited many times to join the president and Barbara at Camp David. The White House can be very confining, and they loved to get away there on the weekend, even though the president always brought along work. I would fly up with them on the helicopter or meet them there. We’d go out to local restaurants and go to church on Sunday. And, of course, President Bush loved physical activity and games.

One time, when a journalist asked him, “Mr. President, did Arnold show you some exercises?” he laughed and said, “Oh, when he comes up to Camp David, we work out together all the time. He teaches me weight training and I teach him about wallyball.”

“Wallyball? You mean volleyball.”

“No, no, wallyball.”

“What’s wallyball?”

“We have this indoor arena where we play volleyball, and we have special rules that let you play the ball off the wall. Arnold has played several times already, and he’s getting better.”

I bowled up there with the president. We threw horseshoes. We swam. We lifted weights. I went trap shooting with him! (When does the Secret Service ever let you carry a gun around the president?) On a snowy weekend in early 1991, just as Katherine was learning to walk, the three of us visited the Bushes and went tobogganing. Unfortunately, I did not know the toboggan. It’s different from a sled, which you can steer with your feet; the toboggan is flat, and it slides differently. The president and I came down the hill too fast and crashed into Barbara, and she ended up in the hospital with a broken leg. I still have the photo President Bush sent me afterward. It shows him and me on the toboggan and is inscribed, “Turn, dammit, turn!”

Heavy meetings went down at Camp David after Iraq’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. It was so strange to shuttle back and forth between a real-world crisis and the make-believe threat to the future on the Terminator 2 set in LA. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and General Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would come up to Camp David to brief the president and hold decision-making sessions. By fall, President Bush had launched Operation Desert Shield, the massive buildup of US and coalition forces along the Saudi Arabian border with Iraq and Kuwait. I made my own small contribution to the military effort after reading a newspaper report that American troops in the desert were doing their weight training using pails of sand. Of course, a person’s muscles don’t care where the resistance comes from. Still, I thought we could do much better for the troops. I remembered how I’d carried weights and a training bench on my tank in the Austrian army. So I went to General Powell and asked him what he thought of sending over proper weight-training equipment. He loved the idea, and within a few days, I was able to enlist manufacturers to donate forty tons of weight machines, benches, barbells, and other gear for Operation Desert Shield. Sending it aboard a cargo ship would have taken many weeks, so instead Powell and Cheney worked out a way to have it airlifted from Oklahoma along with private contractors’ shipments. Within two weeks, the gear was delivered to the troops, and I started receiving extraordinary letters and photos thanking me and describing how soldiers were training in shifts to maximize access to the new equipment.

I’ve always felt appreciative of the armed forces because I’ve benefited from the American dream, and their courage and dedication is what safeguards it. From my early days as a bodybuilding champion, I made a point of visiting military bases and warships whenever I had the opportunity. As I got into movies, it was natural to add USO appearances to my promotional tours abroad. I often visited marine detachments at American embassies too, in Japan, Germany, South Korea, Russia, and many other countries. There’s no school to teach you how to entertain the troops, but I traded notes with other celebrities like Jay Leno and developed a shtick. I’d talk about my movies, do a little standup (the grosser the better), bring along a new movie for the troops to watch, and maybe hand out some stogies. It was all about pumping them up—and saying thank you. Much later, when I was governor, people in the state capital of Sacramento always asked, “Why do you spend so much time on the armed forces? Why are you fighting for them to get a free education? Why are you helping with their student loans? Why are you fighting for them to get jobs? Why are you fighting to speed up the construction of veterans’ homes and build more veterans’ housing than any governor in California history? Why are you battling to get the establishment to acknowledge post-traumatic stress syndrome and help these young men and women when they come back?” The answer was simple: America wouldn’t be the land of the free if it wasn’t the home of the brave. When you see the work they do and the risks they take, you realize what we owe our military.

Only once at Camp David did I personally witness serious business. The conference room that served as the president’s command center was normally off-limits to guests, of course. But one afternoon in February 1991, while I was visiting and sitting in my room reading a script, the president called. “Come on over, meet the guys,” he said.

They were relaxing around the big conference table taking a sandwich break. He introduced me and said, “You know, we’re making some important decisions about the Middle East war.” The air-attack part of Operation Desert Storm was already under way, and for months the United States and its coalition partners had been massing their armored forces. “Look at these pictures,” the president said, showing me aerial reconnaissance photos. Then he played a video taken with a tanker’s helmet camera, showing how close to the border they were. The tank divisions were maneuvering, feinting attacks on the border and then pulling back, and he explained that one day soon they would just keep going into Iraq and Kuwait. “So they’ll get hit by surprise, and at the same time, they’ll get nailed with—” and he showed me the ship positions in the Persian Gulf where the navy was ready to launch cruise missiles plus an amphibious landing by US Marines. “They’re going to get hit with so much, they won’t believe it,” he said.

The war planning picked up informally around the table where it had left off. The conversation had a kind of intensity and focus that made me think of doctors in an operating room. Yes, they were dealing with life and death, but they’d made decisions like this before and knew what they needed to do. There was no panic. The informal tone was just a reflection of Camp David—it was less fraught than the White House, which was why they loved meeting up there.

When they finished eating, the president said, “Okay, I’m going to take Arnold over and show him this horse, and I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

I left the next day knowing that the ground war was going to start in forty-eight hours. It was a Thursday, and two days later, on February 23, they were going to attack. I walked around thinking, “I know something no one else knows except in that circle. Not the press, nobody.” The fact that President Bush put such trust in me had a powerful effect. I felt there would never, ever be a time, no matter what happened, when I would violate that trust or let the man down.

The rest of 1991 was golden for me: at home, in my public service work, and in my movies. Terminator 2: Judgment Day opened in theaters on the Fourth of July weekend and quickly became the biggest box-office hit of my career. Just three weeks later, Christina was born. I also became the proud owner of the world’s first civilian Hummer, whose military counterpart, the HMMWV or Humvee, had played a big role in the Gulf War. I’d noticed the Humvee just the summer before, up in Oregon, while we were shooting scenes for Kindergarten Cop. A convoy of US Army Humvees drove by, and I fell in love. It was the best-looking, most rugged SUV I’d ever seen. The Humvee had as standard equipment features that guys would spend thousands and thousands of dollars adding to their Jeeps or Chevy Blazers: oversize wheels and mirrors, high ground clearance, extra lights, including infrared, a brush bar in front, and a winch for hauling yourself out of trouble. The Humvee looked ballsy without having to add anything!