It was a great weekend for sports- if you ignored the kneeling thing, and Major League Baseball provided some amazing class in the Dodgers-Astors World Series.
I didn’t pay much attention to football it was pelting chill rain here- except the poor bedraggled Deadskins- since I decided to get serious about completing a project I have been working on for the last fourteen years. As I am sure you are tired of hearing, I was determined to collect the interviews that Mac Showers, last of the Midway Codebreakers. We started the first one at Uncle Julio’s, the formulaic Mexican place that shared the ground floor with another restaurant- with the best bar I have ever known- Tracy O’Grady and Kate Jansen’s fabulous Willow.
I don’t know how many formal sessions we did at Willow, which became part of the story of both of our lives. Certainly there were more than a hundred, I think, between the time our friendship began in 2003.
I got pretty close to closing on the first draft of “Cocktails with the Admiral: Drinks, Espionage and the Secret History of the American Century.” There are 437 pages of it. Not all will make it into the final draft, of course, but it is all in one document, has the necessary publishing boilerplate at the front. Adding the table of contents and a few pictures are what is left to do. This morning, I jotted down what might become the introduction:
RADM Donald McCollister Showers was one of those specialmen who made an enormous impact on everyone around him in a long and productive life.
By turns, he was a farm boy in Depression-era Iowa. He once explained how his family survived the bank closures that locked up all the ready cash. His family traded farm animals for house-calls by the Doctor, who shared the same problem of liquidity as everyone else.
As the New Deal was changing the face of America, Mac could see the war clouds looming. After completing college (journalism and bagpipes) in 1940, he had to ask his mother for permission to join other 90-day-wonders in Navy Officer Training and arrived at his first duty station in Hawaii in February of 1942, when the great capital ships of the Pacific Fleet still rested on the bottom of Pearl Harbor.
Through pure chance, he was assigned to the staff of Station HYPO, the code-breakers led by CDR Joe Rochefort, and whose wizardry enabled the Navy’s greatest maritime victory in the waters off Midway Atoll.
The rest of his war in the Pacific was fought from the vantage of the personal staff of FADM Chester Nimitz, and serving as Chief of Estimates at the forward headquarters on Guam, produced the forecast of American casualties in the impending invasion of the Home Islands of Japan.
His numbers helped support the decision in Washington to open the Atomic Age.
He strode the streets of Yokosuka five days after the surrender.
Despite the rapid demobilization as America went back to work, he decided to stay in the Navy, since he had no civilian job being held for him back home.
Along the way, he met all the five-star Admirals, dined with Marshall Tito and chatted up the Queen of England. He rose to make Admiral himself against the backdrop of the conflict in Vietnam. Retiring from active service, he became a trouble-shooter for the Director of Central Intelligence, and had a ring-side seat
He and his lovely wife Billie (Sarah) raised great family, and in the end, he became his wife’s caregiver for a decade after her illness was revealed. His support to other families in dealing with the 36-hour-day of dementia helped me personally as my Father succumbed to the same awful disease.
He was a man in full, and his story is one that encompasses the dizzying moments of the American Century. Let’s take that journey with him, in his own words.
– Vic Socotra
Arlington, VA
Copyright 2017 Vic Socotra
www,vicsocotra.com