I was out doing gentleman farmer things early against the coming rain today. It was just coming light when I got the hose out, the long extension cord and the power drill to make an attack on the barn gutter that was knocked down by the weight of the compacted snow of the great […]

(Cheap Port from the 1986 Naval Intelligence Dining In. Photo by Socotra)   It would have been in 1986. I was sitting in the NMPC office on the first floor of the sixth wing of the Navy Annex. I had not yet moved over to the junior assignment desk next to the window, and I […]

(Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko)   I found a picture of the Junk Bond King Michael Milken, and compared the images of him with the bad toupee and Douglas and still bewildered. (Milken as Milken, The Junk Bond King, in the day)     On the one side we had the go-go reality of the […]

(Symbol of an Era, the Dreaded Disco Ball. Courtesy Hailey and Heather of Atlanta) Rex took off the uniform after thirty three years to join the investment banking world of Arthurs, Lestrange & Short of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as a municipal finance underwriter and originator of financial instruments. He retired one month before two guys named […]

(Reflections on Black Granite)   Rex retired in 1976, at the rank of Vice Admiral. As you know, there is no permanent grade for officers above that of Rear Admiral; retirement in the grade of Vice Admiral requires concurrence by the Senate. That body remembered his service with satisfaction, and agreed.   It was a […]

  It is one of those mornings, you know the kind.   We had planned an evening-in, talking about the events of 1974 last night, the Doctor and Mac and I, and from that would have come a lucid discussion of the painful transition from the Nixon to Ford Administrations, and how Rex and the […]

Anyway, I walked up to the glass entrance with a white plastic bag and two trickle-chargers I had purchased at the motorcycle show to accommodate the constantly discharged batteries on the classic muscle pick-up truck (six years to antique plates!) and the Harley that sleeps in the garage.   I guess I fit the profile […]

(Left to right, Henry Kissinger, Jerry Ford and James Schlesinger) The rain is gentle this early morning down here in Culpeper County. We are into a January thaw, a break from the shin-licking cold of the last five weeks.   There is some storm damage at the little farm. Bit sheets of snow compacted into […]

  Here is The Wink, in all it’s strange glory. Congressman Thomas is in the bow-tie just over Lady Bird Johnson’s right shoulder).   Shoot, if you go back and look at the 1970s with fresh eyes you see the Season of the Witch. I don’t know what Rex or the other grown-ups at the […]

Gentle Readers, It was an emotional and uplifting afternoon at Arlington. Uplifting because John is done with us now, and his ashes returned to the soil. Uplifting because the shining swords and crisply presented rifles represented the very best of the Few and the Proud. Emotional because we stood on the grounds made sacred by […]