President Biden has nominated Adm. Lisa Franchetti, current Vice Chief of Naval Operations, to be the next Chief. If it happens, she will be the first woman to serve in that role, along with the seat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That is supposed to set up a conflict in the Senate about confirmation, which is what leads us to this account of another conflict in determining how the Navy is run. Admiral Franchetti is the second woman to achieve the rank of four-star admiral in the U.S. Navy.
There is a trip to the Doctor’s this morning, so we are in a bit of an organizational flap to be correctly attired and presentable. And to prepare for the lecture about smoking which has become a weekly ritual about improving circulation. Our Assistant James is supposed to stop by and pick us up for delivery, so there was some question about what to talk about on this gray Arlington morning.
When we still had a chance to talk to Mac Showers about his remarkable career, it was much easier. He had all his travel orders from 1941 to 1971 all done up in glassine envelopes and arranged chronologically in a binder he kept in his place at The Madison.
He brought the plastic-protected page to the famous Willow restaurant back in 2010. The typed script covered his trip with LTG Bennett, Director of DIA to Southeast Asia in December of 1970. The two traveled alone, to Laos and Thailand and Saigon, and the four military regions of Vietnam.
Bennett had never been to Asia, with the exception of his mandatory Army assignment to Korea. Mac kindly offered to show him around the Navy sides of the theater of war, and the conflict in progress. Displayed on the other side of the envelope was the short memo from the Chief of Naval Personnel directing him to stop being the Director of Plans and Policy at DIA and report there to a different office as Chief of Staff in January 1971.
Bennett did not want that to happen until they got back from Asia, since it would have meant the two senior officers of the Agency were on the same airplane and vulnerable. Anyway, while in Saigon, they dined with Rex Rectanus and then-Vice Admiral Zumwalt,. The two three-stars chatted each other up about matters of the war, and intelligence support while Rex and Mac were seated a little further down the table straining to hear.
The three Naval officers had their careers all entwined, and that would play out back in Washington, but for then, that night before Christmas in Saigon, the war was going well. Two years before the big Pull-Out. To put some context on things, Elvis was visiting President Richard Nixon in the White House to celebrate his Royal status as King of Rock and Roll. .
Anyhow, I wanted to talk to Mac about some of the things that Ted had mentioned when he called last week. He didn’t ring me up to talk about the weather, though goodness knows there is enough to talk about with that. He has not given up being Admiral Ted just because he is not wearing the uniform any more.
Ted was one of my favorite DNIs. He used to smoke a lot- like many of us who had to be places and pass time, waiting for things to happen- and he did so in the DNI’s office. The inner sanctum was on one of the five corners of the “C” Ring of the Pentagon and all sorts of things happened in there, some of them breathtaking in their audacity.
Rex was a heavy smoker, too, back in the day, and that may have been one of the things that contributed to his demise at the end. Jinny scolds me about that- it got her husband, Barnie, years ago as well, and if I don’t clean up my act I imagine it will get me, too.
It was still a pervasive social habit back in 1970. Mac smoked- he just gave me the Zippo he carried for years with the Squadron logo of Fleet Air Reconnaissance Squadron ONE (“The Navy’s Number One Squadron!”) as a keepsake.
It has a EC-121 Super Connie engraved n the back, the outline almost worn away from chrome to brass from years slipping around in the pocket of khakis and Blues.
I remember Ted kept the ashtray in one of the top drawers in the big executive-issue mahogany desk that several generations of Directors had used, including Rex.
In 1970, the ashtray would still have been on the desk, and people would put a pack of Luckies on the conference table with the Zippo lighter for sensitive meetings.
Anyway, Ted grilled me for a while on what I could do for him without wasting too much of his time coming down from Pennsylvania, where he works at what he feels like.
Rex had a place of refuge away from the capital, about twenty miles away from him on the Pennsylvania plateau where the air is crisp and fresh and there are not nearly as many morons on the road. I asked him what it was like to actually work for Rex.
I know first hand, of course, but my time with Rex was late in life, and people have a way of mellowing over time. Ted said he was always a gentleman, very proper, but with a sly sense of humor. He always kept his cool, even when some very strange things happened.
Ted was picked to be the DNI’s EA, even though he was only a LCDR, and he had a couple stories that illustrate the sort of subtly Rex had as the DNI, which was completely necessary.
I told you about Rex’s predecessor as DNI, RADM Frtiz Harlfinger. Mac told me a little bit about him at the bar last night. He is dead, so I don’t have to go out of my way to be nice.
Mac was on cordial terms with him. As a diesel submariner, Harlfinger had no place to go home to in Hyman Rickover’s nuclear navy, so he was determined to carve a path ahead in the intelligence world. He began to gather all the cool parts of the naval intelligence community together in a completely new construct, one in which a savvy submarine officer like himself could command the Cryptologists, the Intel weenies and the Oceanographer of the Navy. He even figured out a way to take the DNI’s car and driver to help establish the new office, which his action officers christened “OP-942.”
Bud Zumwalt left Vietnam in mid-1970, and took over as CNO in July. He knew all about Fritz, and his glad-handing popularity on the Hill. He was eager to get his own team in place, and he was determined to bring the big broom to the Pentagon and sweep all the old flag officers into the dustbin of history.
We will have the chance to talk about that in the days to come. There is a new Chief of Naval Operations, you know?
Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com