17 February 2010
Burying a Giant
This was a funeral that I didn’t care about in the slightest, from the human perspective, anyway, but it did have its surreal aspect. The Congressman’s long shadow ran right across a business meeting we held with a company in Johnstown, PA, in the early afternoon.
After all the recent funerals it is a relief not to have a dog in the fight, so to speak. I mostly regard Johnstown for having floods in the mountains and being a cop magnet for gratuitous tickets on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
Our contact said it was snowing again outside the window of his office, and that the drifts in his driveway had been well over four feet tall over the weekend.
I asked him if he owned a snow-blower, and he snorted. “Of course!” everyone does up here.
Our discussion was held almost precisely the time they buried Chairman Murtha there yesterday, and the greats of this increasingly ungovernable nation came to wish him farewell. A complication from gall-bladder surgery is what killed the 77-year-old congressman, and I wondered when I heard if it was at Behtesda, where I am likely to get any similar procedure done, though with less attention.
In death, the Chairman got pretty much the full Arlington treatment, less horses, of course.
The company to which we were talking was founded as one of the many recipients of the Chairman’s directed earmarks, the little packets of pork that he was able to regularly insert into the Defense Appropriations bills down through the years. It exists- or existed- to exploit the direct connection between the Congress and its power to spend your money.
In that regard, the Chairman was always regarded as an opportunity, even back when I was in the line of work of exploiting the seams of the system to fund good ideas. He rose through the ranks of the House to grab the reins
I won’t go into the whole nature of the Approps process; that would take too long, and I have tried it before. It is closed and deliberately impenetrable.
The short version is that by the zenith of his career John Murtha approved all the checks in the Department of Defense, and wrote out some of them himself. He used the Department as a sort of personal piggy-bank for his home district, funding things like airports that no one uses except the people coming to his memorial service.
That is too harsh, but accurate enough for the short brush.
That is why former President Clinton was there, and Speaker Pelosi, sixty sitting members of Congress and fifteen or twenty other former Members like my old boss Bill Richardson.
The Speaker was other things, too. He was a decorated Vietnam-era Marine, first elected to Congress, which is why the Commandant of the Marine Corps attended. Gen. James Conway mentioned that Murtha dropped out of college to enlist in the Marines.
Several planes were required to carry the dignitaries to the John Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport, sited on a mountaintop two hours east of Pittsburgh. It is a metaphor for the Chairman: a 650-acre spread of flawless asphalt, spacious buildings, a helicopter hangar and a National Guard training center and a place where the TSA personnel often outnumber the passengers. Snow removal resources were diverted from the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport to Johnstown to help with the travel.
Father William George, president of Georgetown Prep and friend of the family, quoted the book of Ecclesiastes: “For everything there is a season.”
Then the reverend cocked an eye and said the words of the Good Book could be changed for the Chairman to read: “a time to make law, a time to change law and, yes, a time to earmark.”
I have a pal who served as an interlocutor/fixer for several Murtha earmarks to USMC C4I projects during the dry 1990s in DOD acquisition. He said initially the MARCORSYSCOM PMs (mostly Colonels) were wary, and said they wanted nothing to do with it.
He was able to convince GS13 one project officer that all of the great equipment plus a sizeable chunk of OM&N could be his just for playing ball.
Consequently, my pal told me he had the contractor’s lobbyist come down to his Quantico offices for a morning coffee, laid out the scope of the deal (amount of equipment, $s for warranty repair, spares and parts) plus the need for an additional $1M in first-year dollars for the project office for integration and other items as necessary. The lobbyist quickly agreed while the project officer said nothing. Including the obligatory chat about the Redskins, they were done in 15 minutes.
The lobbyist later provided the draft earmark legislation, which my pal reviewed with the project officer over happy-hour cocktails. Thus began a long and extremely beneficial relationship in the service of the perennially-broke USMC Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (C4I) system projects.
You had to understand how the Marines funded things in those days, as the perpetually Red-Headed Stepchildren of the Department of the Navy. The Marine leadership was very wary of the Chairman, since several of his earmarks had backfired on their cherished big ticket Acquisition Category 1A (ACAT) processes in multiple budget cycles in the 1990s. Big Navy had gotten sick and tired of the appropriators nicking their projects to fund the lil’ guys and in turn messed with the Corps’ money a bit until the Marines got the message.
Consequently all of the Chairman’s itty-bitty earmarks were closely scrutinized and often rejected to avoid 3 and 4 star throw downs and the launching of staff director knives at each other’s Program Executives.
That why all the bullshit secret squirrel stuff was done to provide HQ boys and girls plausible deniability Back in the day, the right players would meet quietly met at Murphy’s in Old Town or some nice place in Crystal City or the Hill for a drink and chat. Ba-da-boo, bad-a-bing.
Sometimes the legislation was submitted on the cocktail napkins from the night before. There was one memorable year in the mid-1980s that the highly classified General Defense Intelligence Program appropriation bill had some extraneous DC restaurant stuff included as passed-and marked-up law of the land.
It was a strange time and place, but that is just the way it worked with the Chairman, and he was only first among many on the Committee.
I heard later that Speaker Pelosi ended her remarks by calling the Chairman a “Patriot. Champion. Hero. Giant…We will never see his like again,” she ended solemnly.
That is for sure. They are much better at tracking abuse these days.
The question in my mind, the one I did not ask, was whether the passing of the Giant was going to put the company we were talking to yesterday afternoon out of business.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Subscribe to the RSS feed!