So, it is the Ides of March, the murder of a man on the Rostrum in Imperial Rome that now marks the transition from the Roman Republic to the Empire. I am suspicious of metaphors, and think they are way too pat a way to make a point. I had this nice story going that collides directly with what has me alarmed, and I don’t think that is too strong a way to put it.
I have a Ham radio pal who reported this nugget the other day about a foreign Navy that has not abandoned manual Morse (the USN has, long ago):
“I looked at the CW skimmer at 0730 this morning. The skimmer software copies thru a software radio all the CW (morse code) signals on the 40m amateur band overnight. The Russian sub bases on their Pacific coast and elsewhere have beacon transmitters that rotate beacon duty to keep in touch with their boomers. This morning the skimmer copied for the first time, and strongly, four beacons (CW letters F- Vladivostok, R- Izhevsk, M- Magadan and K-Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky> ) at the same time, honking away. I have never seen all of them on at the same time, so maybe they are at higher DEFCON due to the situation in Ukraine.”
I responded: “Yes, and I am hoping someone reminds the NSC what it means.”
Between that and the missing airliner I wound up with two stories this morning, and I honestly don’t know where to go, except maybe punt and just go with my original thought. I feel now the way I did in the weeks that lead up to 9/11. To this day I can’t figure out how all the personal and professional events of that summer got rolled into the feeling of anxiety about the fact that something big was about to happen and there was not a damn thing I could do about it.
Anyway, the story I was going to do presented the way Harry Truman lived after his time in the White House was done. I was going to compare and contrast with the way recent occupants of the White House do by comparison, but I can’t do it.
Some would tell me indignantly that W spent 31% of his time out of the capital down on the ranch in Crawford, and he used Air Force One as a personal taxi. On the other hand, it takes 56 armored vehicles, including 14 limousines and a pre-positioned aircraft carrier and special bulletproof glass to add to the hotel windows to support a one-week executive trip to some other continent. I mean, what’s the big deal?
You can see on a visit to the Little White House that Harry and Bess Truman’s lives were very different. The desk upstairs is a modest thing, and at that simple piece of furniture, Harry left a significant body of accomplishments behind him: desegregation of the military, the 1947 restructuring of the national security establishment into the Department of Defense, that sort of thing.
(The unassuming desk to the middle left is where some of the most significant events in the history of America’s national security were reviewed while Harry was on vacation).
But the way he left Washington is even more impressive than his accomplishments.
After turning over the White House to Mr. Eisenhower was inaugurated, Harry and Bess drove home to Missouri by themselves. There was no Secret Service following them.
The only asset Harry had when he died was the house where he lived back in Independence, Missouri, and that came to the Truman’s via Bess’s Mom. After leaving politics, his sole income was a U.S. Army pension reported to have been $13,507.72 a year and a modest Social Security check. Congress later granted him an ‘allowance’ and, later, a retroactive pension of $25,000 per year.
Harry was a bargain. Oh well. Anyway, you can see that could lead you directly into a discussion of which of the post-Imperial Chief executives was the most flagrant in the exercise of the perquisites of the modern office, and I am not going to go there.
Let’s just dance off that with a casual observation that things seem a little out of control, but that is true about everything, isn’t it?
(Harry in sand at the Little White House in Key West).
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303