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