Give (and Take)
(Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. He has been described as “the driving force in pushing the Republican party toward an ever-more rigid position of opposing any tax increase, of any kind, at any time. Photo Gage Skidmore.)
I imagine there are people who are just enjoying a delightful summer. Certainly the respite from the humidity and the magnificent cool waters of the Big Pink pool make the surreal antics on the Hill pale. That, and the death rattles of this fiscal year are causing some small requests for proposals (RFPs) to issue from our Government customer.
Hence the bile that went along with mashing the button on the story yesterday morning, since I knew I had to go to the office and knock out a proposal for some work in Sub-Saharan Africa. Hell of a way to spend a July Sunday, though I know I am lucky to have a job.
I knew it was going to spoil the coffee in Ann Arbor, and irritate the hell out of my Attorney in San Diego, and generally piss off parts of Colonial Williamsburg. But dammit, these clowns who cannot govern need to be held to account- a pox on both their houses.
I was not disappointed. My pal in Williamsburg- he has an “H” to his John Hancock, but is diametrically opposed to John-with-one at Willow. He used to be Commanding Officer of the schoolhouse, and is a man of subtle and expansive intellect. He actually called me up as I was preparing to head for the office, where I knew the HVAC was secured to conserve energy on the Lord’s day.
“Hello?” I said cleverly.
“Well…” started my pal. “We were at the same ceremony Friday- at least we have that in common. On the economy, we have no common ground at all. Are you on distro for the Grover Norquist tax talking points?”
“You know, I heard him on the Dianne Rhem show last week, but no. I don’t read him. Dianne seemed incensed at his quote that government ought to be starved enough that it fits in a bathtub so you can drown it.”
“Well, that’s what you sound like. I would like you to outline for your readers the rationale for your use of the term “spendthrift” in regards to the President’s program.”
“I am not sure the President has a program except making speeches about fairness. What would you call Quantitative Easing II and calls for a third installment on top of TARP?”
“Listen,” he said, warming to his topic. “When the President was handed the keys to the economy, here is what Bush would have had to say to do the turnover:
“We are going to spend nearly 3.5 trillion in your first budget, the one you have no control over. The breakdown goes like this:
(1). Entitlements and the social safety net are going to be $2 trillion. But, since I screwed up the economy so much, you are going to have to add some continuations of unemployment insurance. Oh, and since your timing is so good, you get to add baby boomers to the roles at the rate of one every 8 seconds. I also thought it would be fun to throw in an unfunded Medicare Part D for you to tackle. Enjoy!
(2). $800 billion goes to National Security. That’s not full funding for all the wars I started but what the heck! I also built up the bureaucracy as my gift that keeps on giving. You’re welcome to try to cut it, but that’s not going to help your job numbers. Good luck!
(3). $200 billion or so will go to pay interest on the national debt. Don’t tell anyone Barak, but most of the debt ($9.2 trillion) was created by me, my Dad, and Reagan. We kind of bought in to the “laugher curve.” Sorry it didn’t work out! Guess it was “voodoo economics,” but what the heck. As my VP taught me, “deficits don’t matter.” They sure don’t matter to me because I’m out of here.
(4). The non-defense, “discretionary” part of your obligations is on the order of $450 billion or so. This will be your sweet spot because these folks don’t add any value. We all know the EPA is a waste of money (don’t worry about those people dying from MTR and fracking), the FDA sucks (until you get an e coli outbreak, but what are the odds?), and the rest of the gang just regulates the hell out of the job creators. You know, the Coast Guard, the Treasury, and the rest of those lazy bastards. Hey! Eliminate all of them and you will have eliminated a huge 1/3 of your deficit problem. Sounds like a plan to me.
Good luck, Barak. I have to go write a book on how great I was.”
“Do you mistake me for a Republican?” I asked. “Great summary. The bastards that mugged me for a hundred grand were all in the GOP.”
“Well, that is another discussion. Two points – it’s ALL about cost avoidance – no matter whose plan (or non-plan) you are looking at. Secondly, re: taxes, in 2006, Warren Buffet distributed a questionnaire to his staff and learned that they all pay a higher percentage of their income to the IRS than he does- I think he pays 14.5 percent. He was astounded, as was the conservative economist Ben Stein, whose article was entitled, as I best as I can recall “Class wars indeed – guess who’s winning?”
“Well, it sure as shit ain’t me,” I said grimly. “And all the chowderheads who claim to be running this thing are taking it to the bank. Wall Street pays their salaries as capital gains, not ordinary income. I would kill for a 14% tax rate. It is all about the tax code and being wealthy enough to take advantage of it. What was wrong with a flat tax?”
“Final fact,” said John. “Republicans have had control of the Presidency and both houses of Congress for a total of 60 years and have delivered exactly ZERO balanced budgets. Economics is complicated. There are business cycles, bubbles, regulations, etc. But 0 for 60? I call that a clue. Better to “tax and spend,” than just “SPEND.”
I looked at the phone and sighed. “The current Administration hasn’t produced a budget in two years. That incompetence does not make me Grover Norquist. I say we are 0-for-2 on political responsible political parties.”
“I left out one data point,” said John. “Annual Federal revenues are $2 trillion. All subsequent discussions of deficits stem from that. It is a simple equation.”
“Taxes are going up anyway in FY-13, and I am not arguing that there should not be a modest increase in the marginal rate. But I think I am paying my share, and the demagogues have got to shut up and do what is right.”
“That is a progressive viewpoint for a Neanderthal,” said John.
“Who would have thought that Simpson-Bowles would wind up sounding like something we could all agree on,” I said. “And have a great day. They say the heat is coming back.”
“That is so true on so many levels,” said John. Then he hung up.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Progressives
(Pennants at the Navy-Marine Corps Intelligence Training Center. Photo Socotra.)
“The Administration’s bill to raise the debt limit is a sign of leadership failure.”
– Senator Barak Obama, D-IL, 2006
I just drove in from VA Beach and a quick visit with ENS Socotra and his classmates. The Hubrismobile is a swell way to travel on a sunny and cool July weekend. If it seems like a mobile fool’s paradise, I guess that is just the way it is.
There was a great party to celebrate the wedding of a classmate’s wedding after the more formal 25th Anniversary of the Navy-Marine Corps Training Center Friday morning. It was a little bittersweet. The class-load is high right now as the training center struggles to get the kids through. The budget outlook has only about 90 kids coming through all next year, a reflection of what is coming for the whole defense establishment.
It is a sobering prospect for those of us in the business, and I suppose it is time to join the rest of the country in the new reality. I confess I am more than a little perplexed by how we got here, and the remedies being proposed to get us out of it.
What with the driving, I was off the net and subjected to the take on the budget struggle from the voices of three differing radio stations along the way.
The President’s bully megaphone seems to be working, and the press seems to be very much in his corner, though he has yet to put anything on the table that he is willing to talk about publicly. One opponent described the $4 Trillion grand design as including a Trillion that will be avoided interest payments, which strikes me as a bogus saving, and another Trillion from the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, which fails the math test.
The closest I can get is a little north of $900 Billion, which leaves a hundred billion short of a real number, which used to be a big number, but we have gone so far beyond reality that we appear to be living in an alternate universe.
My understanding is that the restoration of the Clinton-era rates will garner around $60 Billion per year, which taken over the bizarre new budget horizon of a dozen years would start to scrape a billion. The Bush-era tax brackets expire at the end of 2012 unless Congress does something to extend them, which is highly unlikely. Accordingly, I am mystified by what we are talking about.
I assume the President is talking about taxes above and beyond that, but he doesn’t seem to be saying much about his plans, which from what I can gather is going to consist of those taxes, interest avoidance of a trillion, and some unspecified cuts to Defense and unspecified “efficiencies” in the entitlement world.
That is all nonsense, of course, and will never happen. The President has managed to rack up an additional $4 Trillion in debt on his watch alone, and sooner or later he is going to have to take ownership of his share and stop campaigning. In the meantime, the idiots on both sides of the aisle want to tag each other with the blame, since the next election is apparently more important than the future of our kids and grandkids.
The President by-passed the national media late last week to talk to the more friendly local DC television outlets. He of course was talking to his base n the Democratic Party, and it was enough to make me sit bolt upright. Here are his words:
“I say that if we truly believe in a progressive vision of our society, we have the obligation to prove that we can afford our commitments. If we believe that government can make a difference in people’s lives, we have the obligation to prove that it works.”
The record of the last two administrations is perfectly clear. Government run like this does not work. The Republicans managed to hose up the economy by lack of attention and oversight, to put it charitably, and the Democrats, with supermajorities in both houses of Congress and the White House could not produce a budget.
Instead, they labored mightily to produce a gigantic health care bill that was so long and so convoluted that none of the idiots managed to read it.
I don’t know about you, but I would really like the government to stop making a difference in my life.
Between the asleep-at-the-switch Bush Administration and the spendthrift Obamanauts, the government fostered a housing bubble that cost me a hundred grand on my little apartment and now is merrily running up a tab that will inevitably destroy the currency, wipe out our savings, devalue our pensions if we were lucky enough to get one, and gut social security.
What is most galling about the rhetoric is the assertion that the government, between Federal, State and Local incarnations, already takes half what I make. Half. Then, the President has the effrontery to scold me that I am not doing my share.
What I would like is for the government to leave me alone to pursue liberty and happiness on my own. There never was any guarantee that I would get them, but the pursuit was supposed to free for all.
Now it is just a freaking free ride for those greedy Wall Street bastards and some Bozos from Chicago.
(Tony, Sam, Vic and ENS Socotra.)
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Quick, and Angry
(Slain Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Photo CBP.)
“Gun lobby sycophants in Congress are calling the regulation a smoke screen to distract attention from a gun-tracking operation botched by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Known straw buyers made purchases that were supposed to lead to the cartels’ main brokers. But hundreds of guns disappeared into Mexico, and two turned up at the scene of a shootout where an American Border Patrol guard was killed. If anything, the ill-conceived operation, which deserves the fullest investigation, is a measure of the firearms bureau’s frustration in dealing with porous American law.”
– Editorial in the New York Times, 14 July 2011
I was going to tell you about the 12th Director of the Central Intelligence Agency this morning. Admiral Stansfield Turner was dispatched to Langley to facilitate the transition of the Agency from relying on human agents of dubious lineage and transitioning the Intelligence Community to a more pristine model that relied on satellites to collect imagery and communications intelligence from lofty orbits.
President Jimmy Carter was determined to rein in the Agency. Enough was enough. The testimony that reveals the background to the Family Jewels before the Church and Pike Committees was bad enough, and there was the suspicion that there was a lot more. Carter selected Admiral Turner, a Naval Academy classmate with a distinguished career in the surface line to go and fix the agency.
That he had no background or understanding of the Agency was irrelevant to the President. What the Agency had been up to, in his mind, was wrong, and the whole culture needed to be weeded out and transitioned to something else. He acted quickly, and with a cold anger at what he perceived as inappropriate conduct by an agency out of control.
The first thing the Admiral did was terminate 800 human intelligence (HUMINT) agents and case officers in what became known at Langley as “The Halloween Massacre” as the pendulum began to swing away from a culture of free-wheeling operations to a tightly controlled and well-overseen operation.
I will get to that, presently, since the last part of Mac’s career we can talk about is his role in helping to set up the special courts that reviewed all operational actions between the intelligence and Justice communities and those who were known as “US Persons” under law. And it was about the law, passed by Congress, and the establishment of the Federal Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA).
I will try to get Mac to talk about that at Willow in the near future- it must have been an exciting and unsettled time out there at Langley. My pal Charlie, who was a Navy Captain who went along to keep Admiral Turner company, said it was sort of eerie. No one would talk to the Director, or his people.
Anyway, what got me going this morning was the editorial that wouldn’t use the name “Fast and Furious,” the strange step-child of Operation Gunrunner orchestrated apparently by no-one in the Department of Justice or the ATF.
The idea behind Fast and Furious was to allow semi-automatic rifles to be sold and smuggled into Mexico. Then, the weapons would be tracked to drug cartel end-users and build criminal cases against them. The contention is that the contents of the gang arsenals are procured from gun dealers in U.S. Border States.
Now, the fact that thousands of the weapons were actually provided by the US government to the cartels might increase the number of guns that originated in America, right? Oh well, cause and effect should never get in the way of a good story, right?
Once Fast and Furious got under way, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms agents realized they had no way to keep track of the guns. Of the 2,020 guns involved in the operation, 363 have been recovered in the US and another 227 in Mexico, leaving more than 1,400 assault rifles still missing and presumed to be in the hands of bad guys.
The weapons began appearing at crime scenes on both sides of the border, and U.S. Immigration agent Jaime Zapata was assassinated in in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi. In December of last year a Fast and Furious gun was used to kill U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. His family is considering a civil suit against AG Eric Holder, who claims not to have heard about the operation until after the murdered.
There are many more dead, of course, some Americans and many Mexicans, part of the 40,000 who have died in the struggle over drug violence that stems from the self-perpetuating American need for drugs and the Mexican desire to service the lucrative market.
Brian Terry is the young man referenced facelessly in the editorial from The Times quoted above, while Jaime is ignored altogether. The prim acknowledgement about the negligence and cupidity of the ATF aside, the Gray Lady of Manhattan manages to wind up supporting a government whose conduct is clearly out of control.
The Times is a funny beast, isn’t it? It runs hot and cold on civil liberties, which it considers in a purely situational context. I mean, guns are bad, right? Therefore, anything that restricts a public health menace must be good, right?
So, let me recap what has been going on. The Department of Justice was supplying Mexican criminals with illegal weapons, at US taxpayer expense, and over the objections of the gun dealers who were directed to conduct the sales, even with provisions of immunity.
This is about pendulums, and it is about bipartisan Executive desire to expand authority and control.
The Intelligence Community that I served in, 1977-2003, was strictly limited in many activities. We had to learn Executive Order 12333 by heart. The provisions went from the highest to the lowest levels of the community.
In world famous Air Wing SIX, for example, I had a series of directives with which I had to ensure compliance. It included the admonition not to conduct assassinations, and specific prohibition against conducting medical experimentation on the pilots.
We had to laugh about it then, since the only such activity was normally self-inflicted by American Persons and conducted at Happy Hour at the NAS Cecil Field Officer’s Club, or a variety of venues across the Mediterranean, but I knew where the directives came from.
9/11 changed everything, of course, and George Tenet’s famous memo directing the Agency to “take off the gloves” turned back the clock. The pendulum swung rapidly. We have heard about some of the extraordinary things that have gone on since: renditions, black prisons, torture and all that.
The Obama Administration has hardly worked to scale things back. In fact, the pendulum has continued to swing.
The jury is out on whether it all worked to keep us safe, and at what cost. I am inclined to think that many things were useful if unpalatable, and I am OK with “mistakes were made” on some of them.
I am particularly pleased that Osama paid the price, and I want to avoid putting the gloves back on. But we have a real hard time finding the happy medium.
I find it disturbing that the DOJ had a direct hand in supplying the Mexican cartels with weapons, at taxpayer expense. It is disturbing that no one knew about it, with everyone from the President and the AG to the FBI and ATF shrugging that “they didn’t know.” I find it really weird that guns provided by our government to the criminals are counted as evidence that there is a need for increased enforcement.
It sounds a little like what they said back in the 1970s, doesn’t it?
Plus ça change, you know? Plus c’est la même chose.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Intersections
(Official Portrait of James Earl Carter as President of the United States. Government photo.)
Now, as you know, I started jotting down Admiral Mac’s stories on the paper napkins at Willow years ago. Talking with him was a way to time-travel to the years of great danger to the Republic, both economic and in armed conflict.
Talking to him about the years of the Great Depression in his native Iowa was novel, at least until we entered into our own version of economic bust, and is a useful companion to put our current pain in context. Then, the stories of going to war, and being present right through the course of the whole dramatic narrative of the savage war in the Pacific, are riveting.
At least they are in the hearing- if I don’t get across how astonishing it is to have Mac as a pal, the fault is entirely mine.
I am reading a fabulous account of the early action in Iron Bottom sound off Guadalcanal on my Kindle and iPad by the pool. It is called “Neptune’s Inferno” by James D. Hornfischer, and it contains matter-of-fact descriptions of the horror of violent death in the machine age that make a Cold War-era sailor blanche.
Being stuck in a steel box as your ship is pulverized is beyond the worst nightmares that come when you think of all that water under the keel, and the potential fire above. It was hyper-real in a way that boggles the mind.
Mac’s post-war career, and his rise to flag rank in the Cold War and against the backdrop of the war in Indochina neatly spans the decades to the days when I wandered into a recruiting office in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and decided I wanted to go to the show myself and see what the elephant looked like for myself.
That was late in 1976, when Eddie Boland was sizing the job of bringing the Intelligence Community to heel with his Select Committee on Intelligence that he stood up the next year when I went on active duty.
It was an intersection, of sorts, since my younger son called me up in the crushing heat of the late afternoon to inform me he had been formally indoctrinated into the mysteries of the Family Business, and would be willing to talk to me if I could demonstrate current access and a need-to-know.
That wasn’t the only collision of past and present. My attorney pal called me up to comment on Congressman Eddie Boland. I mentioned that Jim Bush used to regale us with stories of the colorful legislator. Eddie was a piece of work. He went to Washington with the man who would become speaker of the House, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, in 1952. Eddie was a bachelor for the twenty years they roomed together in what they called a real-life “Odd Couple,” with Boland being the Jack Lemmon to Tip’s Walter Matthau.
I often wonder what Eddie thought about the matter of John Kennedy’s murder. In 1963, he had accompanied the President on a trip to Ireland just a couple months before the Deranged Lone Gunman story was invoked to account for a dramatic change in government. That might have accounted for Eddie’s interest in dismantling the operational arm of the Agency, I don’t know. I know that Mac has his suspicions on what went on in Dallas, and the aftermath, and maybe it is best to just leave it alone.
In 1965, Eddie Boland marched with Dr. King Jr. at Selma, AL, and of course Martin was shot down as well by a red-neck assassin who was picked up in London after the shooting at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis.
Certainly the King family has always had their doubts about motive and opportunity, and the assassination of Bobbie Kennedy made a trilogy of political murder that certainly has its queer symmetry.
Anyway, the Attorney called me up on the cell. “Funny you should mention Eddie Boland,” he said. “You refreshed my memory of him being the fourth guy who rode in my old Rambler when I took Tip O’Neill, Jim Delaney, and Eddie to Mass in Washington in 1966 on the Feast of the Assumption.”
“Intersections,” I said. “Mac’s story blends right into ours.” The thought stayed with me after the Attorney clicked off to go to court in sun-kissed San Diego. Besides Mac and Jim Bush, there were all sorts of old pals who had ring-side seats to what was going on in Washington.
A shipmate named Bill is retired up near the old naval station at Cape Henlopen in Delaware. He dropped me a note to remind me that during the days of the Pike and Church Committees, Admiral Rex had left his post as the Director of Naval Intelligence and been appointed (with a third star) to be Deputy Assistant Secretary for Intelligence, and Bill had been his Exec in the Pentagon.
Mac was on the IC Staff then, trying to implement the directives contained in the Schlesinger Report about the out-of-control intelligence community. Jim Bush was still on active duty as a blue-suit Colonel. Jim had left the operational side of the Air Force and developed a specialty in the intelligence budget, which was the site of desperate skirmishing against the dramatic cuts in authority that came with the end of the Vietnam War.
Jim was working for a budgetary legend named Jim Vance, who bill recalls as being the “the biggest budget magician of all time. Vance knew where the skeletons were buried and who had buried them.”
They got Vance, though he went with his life intact. Things became much more gracious in Washington after the ‘60s. He made the mistake of taking on Fort Meade. NSA was in the middle of a desperate downsizing effort when, in 1973, it was hit with a round of-budget cuts which became known as the “Clements cuts.” The real author of the directive was Vance, who worked for Dr. Albert Hall in the budget shop of what we know now as USD-I.
Through his Boss, Vance contended that cryptology was overfed and under worked, and he embarked on a detailed study of the cryptologic system. The upshot was a recommendation that NSA absorb an additional three percent salami-slice in resources.
Clements imposed a total CCP billet reduction of 12,999 to be completed by fiscal year 1978.7 (Since the cryptologic budget already showed a large reduction during that period, the real additional manpower cut was “only” around five thousand jobs.
Vance specifically called out the problem with NSA- “a bloated management system with overlapping authorities” and the potential of new technology to increase efficiencies.
Stop me if any of this seems familiar.
I was in Grand Rapids the night before the election in 1976, when Jimmy Carter was elected to his disastrous experiment with being a moral President.
President Ford was making his last public appearance before voting the next morning, and I had got fried at the bar in the basement of the Pantlind Hotel before emerging from the basement staircase to find myself pressed by the crowd from outside into a position right before the Presidential Podium in the lobby.
I think I said something eloquent when the unelected President from Grand Rapids finished his brief remarks to a wildly supportive home-town throng: “We love ya, Jerry!” I thought about that with the news of Betty Ford’s funeral
Then, with Jimmy as Commander-in-Chief, and a profound malaise abroad in the land, I went to Asia.
When my pal Bill retired and recycled his uniform for a suit, he reported as the civilian Exec Assistant to Admiral Dan Murphy Sr. Jim Bush was gone, working for Eddie Boland on the Hill, but Vance was still there, working his budget magic.
The Agency got him, though, pushing him out under a cloud along with the NRO’s legendary Jimmy Hill.
I met Hill once out at Westfields at a conference about the next round of budget cuts, and was pretty amazed to encounter the guy who engineered Spooks in Space. My pal Bill intimated it was Jim Bush who had orchestrated the departure of Vance and Hall in alliance with Fort Meade as pay-back for the budget cuts.
Funny how it is the budget people who wind up making policy. Watch what is happening on the Hill right now. It is amazing.
but soon to go under a cloud along with Jimmy Hill at NRO. I always assumed that it was Jim Bush who orchestrated their departures.
But of course, Mac was struggling to set up the framework of preserving American liberty while maintaining an intelligence capability compatible with the Constitution and the wild-eyed idealism of that Georgia peanut farmer.
But to talk about those days, we have to talk for a minute about Stansfield Turner, the Twelfth Director of CIA, and the man who was sent to clean up Langley once and for all.
He might be the most hated man who ever served there. I was sitting in the rotunda of the National War College a few years ago when I realized who I was sitting behind. It was the Admiral, all right, the guy who single-handedly purged the Directorate for Operations. My pal Charlie was there for that, a naval officer seconded to the Agency as a guy Turner could trust, since there wasn’t anyone else he could.
It may be a tribute to Mac and the Community Management Staff that Admiral Turner lived through it.
But more on that tomorrow. I gotta tend to the day job, and thereare several intersections between me and the desk at the office.
(Jimmy Carter is inaugurated. US Government Photo.)
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
The Storm on the Hill
(Harry Truman leaves the White House in the 1960s. Photo LIFE Magazine.)
“For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. …We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.”
– President Harry S. Truman, Washington Post, December 22, 1963
I hate working in Chantilly. I mean, the big stimulus bill that didn’t work is still shovel ready and in progress out there on I-66, from Arlington out to the Beltway. It is more concrete than I have ever seen, shimmering in the refractions of the heat index that threatens to get to 106 degrees again today. Getting out of town, even on the reverse commute, was fevered and the other motorists seemed as delusional as I was.
It being July, though, it is the time when sane Washingtonian (oxymoron?) head for the DelMarVa beaches. Once past the major sweep of the new Metro tracks over the highway heading for Tysons and Dulles things got better, and I almost had time to think about what I was doing. I am going to get to the intelligence community in which Mac served after retiring from the Navy, but in order to do so, we have to pass through the lens of the two committees that looked at what had been going on since Harry S Truman set up the national security infrastructure in 1948.
Harry grew concerned about the impact of the document he had signed in the Little White House at the Naval station on Key West.
Institutions have momentum- inertia, if you will. It brings to mind the Newtonian proposition that “A body in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force.”
Mac’s story in Naval Intelligence paralleled that of the community. In 1948, he joined the nascent organization that was transforming itself to deal with the new Main Adversary- the Soviet Union. Along the way of glowering at the Soviet Bear, he supported the surrogate war against the agents of the international communist conspiracy.
The community writ large did what its president’s directed, whether it was training and equipping an invasion fore to overthrow Castro, killing tin-pot dictators in the Congo, or overthrowing elected officials at outside force impacted the intelligence community in 1975, the year of the great retrenchment after the spectacular events in SE Asia was finally done.
Saigon fell while the Pike Committee in the House was getting stonewalled by the CIA, and the Church Committee was industriously chipping away at the secret world.
A guy named Jim Bush used to come and see me when I had an office near the E-Ring of the Pentagon. He was an older man, and long retired, but he was extraordinarily well connected. He had been on the House Select Committee on Intelligence- one of the institutions that was established in the wake of the disclosures about the community- and eventually became the Budget Director.
In that position, he interacted with Mac, on the Community Management Staff, another institution of the Great Reform, and that is what piqued my interest in what happened.
Jim needed a government sponsor for his clearance, and in exchange for a once-a-quarter briefing on what he knew about what was really going on, I was happy to accommodate him. Jim had come out of the Air Force, where he started in B-29s, flying against the Empire of the Sun, and wound up as a full bird Colonel before specializing in the oversight of the intelligence agencies.
He used to tell me stories about the first Chairman of the Committee, legendary lawmaker Eddie Boland of Springfield, Massachusetts. Eddie came well equipped to deal with anything that might come up from the Secret world. After all, his roommate was Tip O’Neil, whose wife stayed back in Boston, and ultimately became famous for continuing the war with the executive branch that resulted in the Boland Amendment, which blocked further funding of the Contras in Nicaragua.
Jim told me that one of the most impressive things about Chairman Eddie was that he did not marry until he was 62, and then fathered four children.
Gives me hope, in some vague direction. I will have to tell part of Jim’s story for him, since he passed a couple years ago, taking many of the secrets with him. Not all, though.
But we will deal with the Committees and their legacy tomorrow, when I am done with Chantilly.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
The Pike Committee
I think this place is full of spies
I think they’re onto me
Didn’t anybody, didn’t anybody tell you
Didn’t anybody tell you how to gracefully disappear in a room
I know you put in the hours to keep me in sunglasses, I know
And so and now I’m sorry I missed you
I had a secret meeting in the basement of my brain
It went the dull and wicked ordinary way
It went the dull and wicked ordinary way
And now I’m sorry I missed you
I had a secret meeting in the basement of my brain
I think this place is full of spies
I think I’m ruined
Didn’t anybody, didn’t anybody tell you
Didn’t anybody tell you, this river’s full of lost sharks
I know you put in the hours to keep me in sunglasses, I know
And so and now I’m sorry I missed you
I had a secret meeting in the basement of my brain
It went the dull and wicked ordinary way
It went the dull and wicked ordinary way
And now I’m sorry I missed you
I had a secret meeting in the basement of my brain
And now I’m sorry I missed you
I had a secret meeting in the basement of my brain
It went the dull and wicked ordinary way.
– “Secret Meeting,” performed by The National
Mondays always sucks but this Monday is right up there in the Suck-o-meter constellation. The company compliance police finally ran me to heel about a financial management course that I thought I had taken years ago, and I have to be in a seat with a company laptop in Chantilly by 0900- a place that is a three day ride west of town, and a one-day run home if you happen to be the Army of the Potomac.
I like the lyrics to the song by The National. They are a post-punk revival band of the late ’90s, out of Cincinnati. The band takes inspiration from a wider set of influences, including country-rock, Americana, indie rock, and Britpop. And, I think, from Rep. Otis Pike.
I used to carry the pocket-sized version of the Congressional Directory when I was working on the Hill, serving the whims of the 104th and 105th session. In the days before smart phones and belt holster access to the Internet, the Directory served as a handy and compact way to figure out who to visit, based on what committee assignments the Members had, and what they looked like. The 89th Congress edition sums up Otis Grey Pike this way:
“Representative from New York; born in Riverhead, Suffolk County, N.Y., August 31, 1921; attended the public schools; A.B., Princeton University, 1946; LL.B., Columbia University Law School, 1948; served as a Marine Corps pilot in the Pacific Theater, 1942-1946; awarded five air medals; justice of the peace of the town of Riverhead, 1954-1960; member of the Riverhead Town Board, 1954-1960; lawyer; private practice; elected as a Democrat to the Eighty-seventh and to the eight succeeding Congresses (January 3, 1961-January 3, 1979); chairman, Select Committee on Intelligence (Ninety-fourth Congress); not a candidate for reelection to the Ninety-sixth Congress in 1978; president, South Oaks Hospital, Amityville, N.Y.; syndicated columnist, Newhouse newspapers, 1979-1999; is a resident of Vero Beach, Fla.”
The abrupt departure of Rep. Lucien Nedzi from the chairmanship of the Select Intelligence Panel left the seat to Otis Pike. He was typical of the lawmakers of his era. He had World War Two experience, and was decorated for action against the Empire of the Sun.
By comparison, today’s lawmakers and Administration have only vicarious experience with anything like service, and a sense of shared commitment to something larger than re-election. Even the Vets in Congress understood that a lock-step approach to the war in Vietnam was problematic, and taken wit the clear abuses of the Nixon Administration, it was time to bring the Executive Branch to heel.
There was plenty of stuff to look at, from Eisenhower on. LBJ may have sat on the biggest secret of them all, which was the forceful and un-planned transfer of power from Camelot to the Great Society, and if you look at things through that lens, perhaps Dick Nixon’s paranoia about who was doing what in the Executive Branch might be justified.
Jerry Ford was left holding the bag on a lot of crap. The perceived weakness of an un-elected president brought the years of minimal oversight of the intelligence community and DoD to an end. The Congress was determined to rein in the imperial presidency, and the Select Committee on Intelligence- now the Pike Committee- in the House and the Church Committee in the Senate were ready to go to town.
The Agency was not going to make it easy for anyone.
I have read some claims that the Family Jewels list of activities was part of a larger campaign to let some damaging things hang out there and keep the big secrets. Or provide so many leads that no one could really track it back to something profoundly and utterly incompatible with the principles of the Republic.
I don’t know, any more than Congressman Pike did. There is, of course, an element of political theater in it all, and the then-permanent Democratic majority in both houses lent a partisan aspect to the inquiry that was inevitable, even if the crimes were purely bi-partisan in commission by all the presidents’ men. Republican and Democrat alike.
As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, before the trip Up North, and before Mac went to the beach, the damn began to break with the revelations of Chistopher Pyle about the Army’s surveillance of anti-war protestors in 1970.
Senator Sam Ervine of North Carolina rode that pony for a while in the Senate, and then in December of 1974, rogue journalist Sy Hersh broke the big story of the Jewels in the newspaper of choice for national security-related leaks, The New York Times.
That caused the formation of the Nedzi Committee in early 1975, and his strange resignation a few months later.
That put Rep. Otis Pike, Marine, Lawyer and lawmaker front and center for the most astonishing revelations of a decade that would, in the end, be remembered for Disco and Jimmy Carter.
The whole thing is more than a little depressing, but we will have to get to that after I get back from Chantilly.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
What Nedzi Knows
(Rep. Lucien N. Nedzi, 1969 from Congressional Pictorial Directory.)
“Trooper Bart” Stupak was my Congressman from Michigan’s first district, a ruggedly handsome former State Patrol officer. He was a Democrat, and a relatively conservative one as reflects the philosophy of the First, who are country working people, though he went with his party on 96% of his votes.
At the end of his elected time, he came in conflict with the leadership of his party on the healthcare debacle, largely over the issue of Choice, which was a hot button Up North, and ultimately impacted his decision to leave the Congress. I saw him dozens of times when I worked on the Hill, and met him on at least one occasion. When I marched up and introduced myself as a constituent, he seemed vaguely alarmed.
I don’t know how often folks from the second-largest Congressional district east of the Mississippi get down to the nation’s capital. The First, as you know, encompasses the entire Upper Peninsula, and depending on the population level, a good chunk of the lower one, too.
That includes the Trolls who live in the Little Village By the Bay. I say “trolls” because that is what the independent-minded residents of the proud UP call all of us who live “below the bridge” at Mackinaw. For our part, the only things in the UP worth knowing are Lake Superior, the pasties, iron ore, moose and the odd bear. And snow, of course, that goes without saying.
(Trooper Bart Stupak. Photo House of Representatives.)
And Trooper Bart, of course. He was a transplant, serving with the Patrol up in Escanaba, and getting elected to the state legislature out of Menominee. Covering his sprawling district was a challenge. In a moment of lunacy, a Sevengali pal of mine had advanced the proposition of my running against Trooper Bart, and considered my utter lack of experience in politics to be a plus, sort of like President Obama’s record of voting “present” in the Illinois Senate.
A blank slate in politics is infinitely better than having actual positions on things. It preserves your flexibility.
Anyway, getting elected to the First means essentially that you live here in Washington most of the time, and knowing far more about the several unpalatable ways to get back Up North, my ardor for elected office flagged. The divorce wouldn’t have helped me anyway. The district makes up about 44% of the land area of the state of Michigan. It contains the second-longest shoreline of any district in the United States, behind the at-large district of Alaska where Annook lives when she is not cleaning out the house in the Little Village by the Bay.
Talking about the First is confusing- it used to be the 14th until the big redistricting of 1962, and parts of it the 11th. That was a giddy time in the Wolverine State. The census of 1960 represented the zenith of the population of the Motor City, and Michigan gained a congressional seat.
I remember Big Mama was heavily engaged in the process of the 1961-62 Constitutional Convention as President of the Grabbingham League of Woman Voters. They held discussion groups to focus issues. George Romney was leaving American Motors where Raven was designing Ramblers like the ’59 sedan that is sitting on flat tires in the Taj Garage Up North.
Mr. Romney had seized the opportunity of Con-Con to wrap himself in the cloak of reform and cast out the Democrats from the governorship. The future looked bright for George, and could have included the White House. We didn’t know any better at the time, you know?
They are redistricting again, as a result of the 2010 Census. The Republicans control the State house, senate and the governor’s mansion, so as they have to lose a seat in Congress, it will not be in a red district.
(The Honorable Johnny Convers. Photo House of Representatives.)
The 14th is safe for Rep John Conyers, the iconic second-senior serving member of Congress. He has been returned safely in more than twenty general elections, which places him in a position to overlap the time of the guy who used to represent the 14th, before they changed the name in 1962.
The 15th, incidentally, is represented by John Dingell, the Dean of the House of Representatives.
(Dean of the House Johnny Dingell. Photo Congressman Dingell.)
Taking his father’s time in the seat before him, the Dingells have owned west Detroit and the adjacent suburbs since 1933. As far as I can tell, Rep. Dingell grew up in the District and never spent much time in Michigan, but that is up to the voters in Detroit.
John Conyer’s 14th has been hemorrhaging population since he was first elected in the huge Democratic wave of freshmen in 1965, and they are doing the best they can to gerrymander him out of a job.
Anyway, prior to 1993, Up North Michigan was the 14th, so I understand how people can get confused. The whole redistricting thing is very emotional, since Michigan is losing a congressional seat.
A statement from the Michigan Congressional Delegation Democratic Caucus is suitably outraged:
“We are very disappointed in the partisan hijacking of the redistricting process. Never in Michigan’s history has a redistricting map been gerrymandered to be so overtly partisan and disrespectful of community interest to build a partisan political advantage. This map zigs and zags throughout Southeastern Michigan to create non-competitive seats that do not represent the demographics of the state and will ultimately disenfranchise voters.”
I don’t know about that, since if they were in power, the gerrymandering would gone the other way. Besides, getting elected ought to have something to do with what you believe, right?
Trooper Bart was a Democrat, and the First District has always had a populist leaning, which increased after they gave the populous Republican-leaning Traverse City area to the 4th District in 2002.
Now, that is a long way around not having to talk about the last Shuttle mission in progress, or the ignominy of having to hitch rides to the International Space Station that we built with the Russians for the next maybe forever.
Mac is back from the beach, I am back from the First Congressional District, and it is time to get back to Willow and talk about what happened in the Ford Administration that changed the intelligence community.
Jerry Ford represented Michigan’s Fifth District for a quarter century, the one with all the block-headed Dutch in it. His last eight years in Congress were as the Republican Minority Leader in the House when that seemed like a permanent position. He was a reliable enough apparatchik to be pulled onto the Warren Commission whitewash of the Kennedy killing, remember?
With Betty Ford passing away this weekend, that sort of brings the Ford Administration to a final end, with many of those loose ends still raveled. My son and I went down to the National Mall when Jerry passed, and his cortege made the pilgrimage of the monuments. Between the Warren Commission, the pardon of President Nixon and the conquest of the Republic of Vietnam nine months into his unelected Presidency, you would think he would be a more controversial figure than history has cast him. But I say the hell with it.
He was a good congressman for us in Grand Rapids, when the Socotras lived there, and people genuinely liked him.
During Ford’s incumbency, foreign policy was characterized in procedural terms by the increased role Congress began to play in that sand-box, and by the corresponding curb on the powers of the President. That is what ultimately brings me around to the matter of Lucien Norbert Nedzi (born the year after Raven) who was the Democratic Congressman from the 14th, later the 1st, between the special election in 1961 and the time he threw in the towel in 1980 and did not seek re-election.
Nedzi may be the last guy in a position to know what was going on then, besides Mac. Nedzi was born in Hamtramck, the Polish enclave surrounded by Detroit. He was a Wolverine, like Bonds and Muhammed and me, and went to the U-of-D law school in between stints in the Army in the Pacific War and recall for Korea.
Like I said, Nedzi was elected as a Democrat in 1961 after Thaddeus Machrowicz died in office. The key to his being remembered at all is the curious thing that happened in May of 1973. Lucien had the unique position to be a member of the House Armed Services Committee, and Chairman of the Special Subcommittee on Intelligence.
Director Colby had inherited the toxic “Family Jewels” from Jim Schlesinger which detailed the activities conducted by the CIA that might have “exceeded the charter of the Agency.” Colby was summoned to discuss the matter with Nedzi on the Hill in an extraordinary session detailed by a declassified Memo-for-the-Record drafted by CIA Inspector General William Broe.
The two hour-session included a discussion of the full report, item-by-item, including the sensitive portion that remains redacted to this day.
According to Broe, the congressman found it found sobering. Some of the topics included:
a. Alien documentation furnished to the Secret Service. He desired more information concerning the reason why issued, the use, and how controlled.
b. Financial support to the White House in connection with the replies to letters and telegrams as a result of the President’s speech on Cambodia in 1970. He requested more information on this subject.
c. Beacons furnished Ambassadors. He was interested in the number issued to Ambassadors and the position the State Department took on the use of these beacons. He was interested if the Department of State was pushing this program, as he believed they should be.
d. Logistics’ acquisition of police equipment. He questioned whether LEAA, Department of Justice, should not be doing this rather than the Agency.
e. He noted Logistics furnished telephone analyzers, and desired to know what they were and how used.
f. [redacted]
g. OER’s crash project concerning Robert L. Vesco requested by the DCI. The Congressman was interested in who outside the Agency instigated the project and why was it stopped.
h. Several ORD projects indicated research done without knowledge of the host system or on unwitting subjects. He was of the opinion that this was risky and recommended it be terminated. He stated he would like to see a directive go out to the researchers concerning these practices.
i. John Dean’s request re Investors Overseas Service. He reviewed the six reports that had been furnished. He noted, however, that the item stated “there were multiple channels to the Agency from the White House” and requested information concerning these channels.
j. Alien passports. Mr. Colby advised that he planned to review this whole subject and the Congressman agreed with the need to do so.
The Congressman asked Mr. Colby if the Agency had considered how much of the information just reviewed with him could be made public. Mr. Colby stated this had not been done yet, and spoke to the question of sources, methods, and the impact on the institution. The Congressman stated that in the current climate he felt it was necessary to open up more information to help clear the air.
Mr. Colby stated the Agency would give the matter deep consideration, and added he had been thinking of a general statement along these lines to be used at his confirmation hearing.
The cat was about to come out of the bag- or at least part of the cat out of one of the bags. Tip O’Neil acquiesced when Congressman Nedzi demanded to be placed in charge of a Select Committee to formally “clear the air,” a position he assumed in February, 1975, and which he abruptly resigned in June.
I wondered about that, since Otis Pike replaced him as chair for a tumultuous and shocking set of disclosures about what had been going on for years. I will be interested to see what Mac has to say about that. I wonder if Nedzi found out something about the IC that he did not want to have on his permanent record. After all, he was in a position to suddenly be investigating the work he should have been doing as the senior oversight official on the IC.
I know this: in the Congressman’s remaining three terms in Congress, he never got closer to the intelligence community than the Joint Committee on the Library. I am not going to speculate any further, though.
There is a way to find out, though. Like Trooper Bart, and John Dingell and John Conyers, he didn’t return to Michigan. He lives right here in McLean, and his number is in the phone book.
If he is not in the same boat as Raven, he might answer a few questions if I called him up. You never can tell.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
The Hugging Saint
(Amma, the Hugging Saint, doing her thing in Reston, VA, this week.)
The good folks of Minnesota are dealing with their ninth day of the closure of their government this morning, as the last Shuttle mission orbits overhead, and Betty Ford checks out of her clinic and off the planet.
Bless them all. The Golden Gophers are showing us what lies ahead if our purported grown-ups do not get their collective shit together.
I am so relieved not to be on the road. I felt my mental image coming into sharper focus yesterday at the office. The radio kept burbling about the employment numbers- 18,000 jobs created in the month, a really crappy number that it is impossible on which to put a positive spin.
Not that the President, bless him, didn’t try this morning. He said we might be turning a corner, but I think it might be in the opposite direction from what he intimated. Some folks have been out of work for so long they have stopped looking.
The President has not had a lucky week. He had to cancel the vacation out in Whitefish, Montana, where Mr. Cheney used to hunt lawyers. Michele and the girls needed a break after taking a break in Africa.
The shenanigans over the debt ceiling had me seeing red through the solid dark clouds that rolled in from the west and lashed the city yesterday afternoon. I had to search the trunk of the Hubrismobile to find my old Harvard umbrella to get to Willow unscathed.
Tracy O’Grady was standing at the bar in her shite chef’s blouse, pressing the flesh with the usual suspects, and positively glowing. She had just completed an all night vigil with the Hugging Saint at the Hyatt Regency in Reston.
I was impressed. I had read about the visit but not known anyone who was spiritual enough to go. The Saint’s name is Amma, and she is conducting a humanitarian tour of North America, She normally works in her native India, managing charities that raise millions for medical care, disaster relief, and women’s education.
“They say she had a goal of hugging 5,000 souls here in Northern Virginia, adding to the 31 million she has thus far hugged around the world. When she hugged me, it just five in the morning. It filled me up,” said Tracy. “I just started crying. It was just so beautiful. It was pure love.”
“We could use some of that here in DC,” I said.
“The Dali Lama is coming next week,” observed John-with-an-H. “My Member was good buds with him when I was up on the Hill. He is a good guy, too, besides being the living example of the Godhead.”
“I remember when the White House had him use the back door to leave his audience with the President,” I said. “They didn’t want to irritate the Chinese. That was during the big snow storm and the trash had not been collected, and there was the image of the Spiritual Leader of all Tibet with the garbage. What a way to treat a head of state.”
“He cracked up. Like I said, he is a real guy.”
“There were hundreds of people waiting in line for their hug with Amma,” said Tracy. “There was music playing and the smell of incense. Then Amma reached out her arms and embraced me. It felt like my relationship with the Spirit,” she said. Her face was serene.
“Far out,” I said. “We could all use some serenity around here.”
Tracy smiled beatifically, and made her way back toward the kitchen. Holly-with-a-Y topped up our glasses and John-with glowered at me. “You know the President is in league with the radical Republicans in speeding to the brink (and beyond). I firmly believe that Harry Reid and the Dems believe they can tag the Tea Party Republicans with the default, just as Mr. Clinton tagged Newt with the government shut-down and continue to blame the Bush administration for his accumulated and spectacular errors.”
“Oh, come on,” I said.
Jon-without looked over and said he thought there was something to it. “Remember the Cloward-Pivin strategy,” he said thoughtfully.
“What was that?” I asked.
John-with to my right chortled. “It is the radical strategy to get so many people on welfare that the system collapses and the vanguard of the Proletariat arrives to save the day with enlightened Socialism.”
“Weren’t those two sociologists from Chicago? And wasn’t that what Saul Alinksy wrote about in his book ‘Rules for Radicals’?”
“You guys are paranoid,” I said. “There couldn’t be anyone dumb enough to want to shut down the government like in Minnesota.”
“There is a track record for it,” said John-with. “Mr. Clinton was hurt by the 1995-96 antics, though his poll-numbers rebounded to the highest of his eight year tenure thereafter, based on the perception of his leadership through the crisis. Obama is going to try the same thing.”
“Holy crap,” I said. “But this isn’t going to be a shut down if they don’t raise the debt ceiling. It is going to be a freaking default of the US Treasury.”
“Fox News said the Republicans don’t really know what will happen if there is a default. Some of them don’t think it will be a big deal,” said Jon-without.
“I would argue that they have their heads up their butts,” I said. “Minnesota seems to be just fine without a government. They can go on until tomorrow, or next week. The idea that we can’t sell bonds to pay the interest on our debt is something completely different. It will be an utter disaster. In a shut-down, we furlough unessential workers, but the social security checks get paid, right? If you default, social security doesn’t get paid. That is half of what Raven and Big Mama get by on. If the Government defaults, they default and they are out in the parking lot at Potemkin Village.”
“Failing to raise the debt ceiling in a timely way would be self-defeating if the objective is to chart a course toward a better fiscal situation for our nation,” said John-with.
“Don’t be so freaking pompous, John. You sound like that idiot Bernanke at the Fed who helped get us into this mess.”
John-with looked dolorous. “Even a short suspension of payments on principal or interest on the Treasury’s debt obligations could cause severe disruptions in financial markets and the payments system,” he said. “It could downgrade U.S. government debt, create fundamental doubts about the creditworthiness of the United States, and damage the special role of the dollar and Treasury securities in global markets in the longer term. So there.”
John-with drained his happy hour white. “I think I will drive down to Layton Hall in Clarendon for dinner. The waitresses are cute. I can take a cab back if I get too bombed.”
“I think I will go home and get in the pool.”
Jon-without frowned. “I think we all need a good hug,” he said.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsoctra.com
Re-Boot
(Map of the trip Up North, with airports, major geographic features and important landmarks as annotated at the Willow Bar. Photo and map Socotra. Drink by Big Jim and consumed by Jon-with-no-H.)
I flew in from Detroit- Man, my arms are tired- and went to the office to make a 1400 meeting. The re-boot on what passes for my life was tough and it was a challenge to get the gain and squelch dials in the right position.
For one, I didn’t look right at the office. I had traveled in chinos and a polo shirt from which the ink on my left arm flirts with daylight.
Not the crisp Brooks Brothers professionalism I strive for, but screw it. I was trying to synch back up with Washington reality- you know, the surreal suspension of common sense so common out there in real America, and the adoption of several impossible things to believe.
It was wrenching to go through the email queue of things to do, and I could feel the hard chrysalis starting to cover the vulnerable flesh that was exposed by the time with Raven and Big Mama. In a way, I really envy her, now that she has become unstuck in time. She no longer has to worry about whether the idiots here in town will allow the government to default on its debt, or whether in fact that is the point of all this.
Or the price of silver, which apparently is linked to the Chinese like everything else. Talking to people in Canada and Sweden, I discovered they like coming to the US because everything is so cheap- and Chinese.
This morning Silver is through the roof, and as the little commodity brother to Queen Gold, might have been affordable if I had thought about it in time. Someone said gold might hit $3,000 an ounce soon, and it was not too late to start dumping Greenbacks out the window of the apartment toward the Big Pink pool.
I kicked myself again for not strategically buying commodities back when I could have, or moving to some other planet back when we still had a space program.
Lead on the obligations list was to acknowledge my annual appraisal, which I did, but the task also had a requirement to update the resume in the corporate database.
If you were smart enough to actually move to an adjacent planet, you might have missed the Great Compromise of everything in the information technology world. The Swedish bank my pal works for has erected a firewall so formidable that the employees can’t get in. My company, for its part, migrated from Lotus Notes, a bizarre IBM business operations suite, to Microsoft Office, and it took a while to synch up.
In fact, it still hasn’t, since the basic data resources are still on the old system, though we don’t use it routinely, and apparently all my security tokens have expired. I am not precisely sure what those are. At the paranoid government agency I used to work for there was a physical key fob that generated random number sequences that had to entered with chronological precision along with the password in order to gain access to the system.
It was viewed as a fool-proof system, which is to say that in the end the fools won. Since it was viewed as impregnable, apparently someone hacked the token manufacturer and gained access that way, since people are notoriously unable to remember the confoundedly difficult 16-character number and letter and special character passwords we are supposed to use for enhanced security.
Anyway, whoever did it- Chinese, North Korean, Russian, whoever- managed to nail Lockheed Martin to everyone’s huge embarrassment and a potentially vast national security risk.
So, of course with that compromise came another wave of enhanced security which will render the corporate and government safe from scrutiny by everyone, hackers and legitimate employees alike.
I had to update the resume for reasons best know to Corporate, so I called up the help desk and had my software tokens updated with just the mention of my employee number, which I have to write down since it doesn’t make any more sense than the constantly changing passwords.
I plugged at several tasks over the course of the long humid Washington afternoon, dreaming of the pool and the crisp happy-hour white at the Willow.
As the clock on the upper right hand corner of my screen turned over 1700, I gathered my crap together and ran a stack of documents with personal and corporate proprietary information down to the secure shred bin. There is a company that manages a tidy business in the destruction of all this stuff so the dumpster-divers can’t steal our information.
Of course, that company had a semi-trailer of sensitive trash boosted, and even the National Archives had to quietly announce that everyone’s financial disclosure forms from the Clinton Administration had gone missing. But screw it. This is the future and we made it for ourselves.
I walked over to the Willow and discovered there was a new bartender named Holly-with-a-y. She is pert, dark, and completely in the tradition of the vanished Sabrina and Aimee. I asked Jon-with-no-H about that, when I could pry his attention away from the Lovely Bea, who looked cool and refreshing.
I had to diagram the time away to help synch things up, and the map of the Mitten of Michigan turned out pretty well. The orange slice in Jon’s drink sufficed to represent the setting sun over the wide mouth of Little Traverse Bay as viewed from the deck of the Little House by the Bay.
It took a minute to get synched up to the change behind the bar, but in the end, the re-boot was completely successful.
Good to be home, where the waters of the pool are cool, and the happy hour white is too.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
The Little Project By The Bay
(Classic Mackinaw Bridge-themed license plate found in Socotra Garage.)
Alert Readers have asked if the famed Socotra work ethic has fallen off the cliff. The staff here at the Daily is eager to reaffirm their commitment to the daily blather; this has been a daunting trip to the Northland, and with each act here in the Little Village by the Bay, another series of separate actions is manifested, equally compelling.
Standing in the kitchen with some object in hand- the little machine that cuts perfect circles being one of them- another cascade of actions becomes evident, the parallel cascades running simultaneously- does the circle cutting machine have any intrinsic value? If so, should it go to the garage for later sorting, or just get pitched?
The Library remains stacked up with objects- I don’t know what the goal is. The closets in the living end of the main house are cleaned out, the walls pristine and freshly-painted.
The workmen are all paid and the project is done. Gary, the oily general contractor, has the last of his cash, and promised to give me an estimate for re-shingling the roof of the garage.
Thankfully, the good contractor recommended a fellow named Scott, who came by in his giant truck to clamber about the eaves of the detached structure and pronounced the shingles good for another year, at least.
He threw his ladder up and peeled back the lowest level demonstrating that the underlying sealant was still good, and although the lower edges were curling up, the underlying layer was sound.
“See,” he boomed down from above “The shingle is actually three courses long. Two thirds of it is just fine underneath.”
“Will it last the winter?” I asked, thinking of the chill blast off the frozen bay.
As a professional, Scott was reluctant to commit to anything specific and flexed his massive tattooed arm as he pursed his brow. “Nothing is for sure, but I think you could get a year or two out of it without a problem.”
“OK,” I said. “I will inform the Trustees that we can defer another capital expense this calendar year and with luck we will keep the enterprise afloat long enough to care for Raven and Big Mama.”
“Who are they?” asked Scott.
“The senior Trustees,” I said. “The ones we have to take care of. I will commit to doing this next year if you will do it yourself.”
“I was going to cut the work to the general contractor, but if you want me, I can get a guy to help and I will.”
“I would rather have you than that Gary guy,” I said. “I don’t trust him.”
We agreed to exchange e-mails, and Scott rolled his giant truck out of the driveway. There were eight things to be done, so I decided to do a ninth. Annook had advised where in the great stack of boxes in the garage the lawn mower might be found, and there was a smidgen of gas left, maybe enough to keep the machine turning through the rich crop of native grasses that had sprung up from the rains of June.
The old lawn guy had disappeared, and I cast about for a new lawn service to keep the place from looking too bedraggled in the uncertain gaps in Trustee presence at the residence. One of the several calls that morning was to identify a replacement; two calls were dry holes: “Not taking any more work,” Said the first and second voices on the list, but the second kindly added: “You might try Alice, though.”
I actually think people turning away business in this economy was actually good news for the village, and I was just pushing the lawn mower into the garage when the woman herself appeared in a much smaller pickup than Scott. She was a pleasantly tanned young woman with a good smile.
She walked the ground, inspecting the potential task. She walked back to me and said “$30 a cut.” I thought for a moment, comparing the work with the price of my pasture guy down in Brandy Station in Virginia.
“Done,” I said. “Use your judgment on how often. “ I scrawled my contact information on her clipboard and shook her hand. She had a strong grip, and I felt good about her.
Then back to carrying magazines and boxes out of the house to the trunk of the rental car or to the garage for later survey. I worked steadily until dinner time, and broke down the mass of cardboard boxes in the staging area to the main house.
I did not know what to do about the years and years of accumulation of HazMat stuff- the paints, solvents, automotive fluids and chemicals from Raven’s days as a high-functioning photographic hobbyist. It looked like scary stuff, and that accumulation would have to be a matter for another day.
I ran the simple stuff- cardboard and plastic on a trial run to the recycling center behind the Bay Mall to see the level of difficulty, cooked some dinner, and ran the numbers for the younger members of the Trust on the construction project.
Thank God the new roof can be deferred. This was a near thing, and money is a real and depressing factor. It has already resulted in the siblings addressing each other by their formal roles in the Trust.
I punched the note out to those concerned, with the total bill and how it had been paid. Then I poured a tall vodka and looked out at the blue waters of the Bay. I get to start home, and I felt as guilty as usual at the rising joy I felt for the prospect of not being in a place I love.
Here is an example. Since Big Mama has become unstuck in time, she drags Raven down to lunch sometimes an hour or more before they begin serving. The other morning I walked in and saw that he had been hungry enough to attack the little bowl of Smuckers-Brand jellies in the middle of the table.
He can no longer negotiate the little plastic tab at the corner that opens the top to the little tub of apple butter or grape jelly, so he has taken to simply putting them in his mouth and chewing. There were neat arcs of jam and brown apple butter across he table cloth, and he had neatly placed the gnawed packages back in the bowl.
Cripes, I thought, as I cleaned him off with a moistened towelette. Who is going to shave him when I am gone? And man, I want to be gone.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com