16 May 2003

The Untouchable

Today bands of rain are sweeping across the District. The commute will be lousy, and a hundred thousand grim-faced drivers have already climbed into their cars for the slog toward their jobs in the Imperial City. It is Friday, that is the good news, but there is the troublesome last 20% of the working week to get through. The commuters are listening to the reports of the recent past, and some events that are remarkably old. The BBC has a litany of diplomatic news, some important developments in the structure of the European Union, the departure of a top official in the Palestinian Authority. Colin Powell is continuing his procession across the Continent, and security is tight in Berlin.

Doesn't that sentence did not sum up the last half century quite nicely?

I am fixed on some of the lesser events from Wednesday, reported in the pencil press. It was a huge day. Robert Stack, the lean hawk-eyed actor who played Untouchable Eliot Ness on TV He did a lot of film work in a long career which started in a pedestrian vehicle in 1939, co-starring with the lovely Deanna Durbin in 1939. He was 84. His wife found him slumped in his chair Wednesday. She said he had suffered a heart attack. He was a tough guy in his prime, or at least played one pretty well.

Wednesday was also the crescendo of our nation-wide exercise. We were wrapping up the response to the dirty bomb in Seattle, and beginning to react to the Plague in Chicago. We had dozens of VIPS to tour the high-tech Command Center and the greats and near-greats of the response community were all there. The Secretary gave an expansive press conference while seated at his command desk at the front of the room, the mikes on long booms and the cameras going off. The media circus is an amazing thing. You can get used to stumbling over the cameramen after a while and in a recurring surreal moment, we had footage of a tour of our Center on the fifteen ginat plasma screen TVs while we were still working the exercise. The watch team cheered as they got their fifteen seconds of fame. TopOff 2 was the biggest bio-terror exercise ever conducted in the United States.

I stayed out of the way. There are those who crave the spotlight with an intensity that is breathtaking. I am more circumspect. I have had my moments on the stage, my part of the great story filled with sounds and fury, told by someone-or-other and signifying exactly….well, you know.

I knew yesterday that history had moved on and the exercise was going to expire of disinterest by the Grownups. Governor Ridge took a press op in Chicago, and we took pretend drugs out of simulated boxes. Just after noon the memo came in that the Deputies and Principles Videoconferences were cancelled for the afternoon. Even as Chicago Public Radio was reporting the mass distribution of placebo antibiotics at five distribution sites in the Windy City. Meanwhile, the Grownups here had gone on to other business in the real world. We quietly cancelled our 7:00pm conference and I sprinted for the parking lot at 5:30 and was asleep by 8:00.

I may have dreamed it, or maybe it was part of the morning story that drifted from the radio. In 1961 Mimi Beardsley was a senior at Miss Porter's School when she came to the White House. Because the First Lady was an alumna of the prestigious institution she was invited to interview Jacqueline Kennedy. She never got a chance to meet her, but she did manage to attract the roaming eye of the youthful President.

The press is all over this one. Mimi was 19 when the affair began and a year later she won a White House Internship, which meant something before Monica and Mister Bill turned it into something else. JFK had class, and so did Mimi. She kept her silence for over forty years, and would have kept it yet if they had not unsealed someone's salacious memoir, sealed for decades to make the telling of true history possible without repercussion. Remember Marilyn? Best kept sealed even if you have to get it off your chest.

Mimi was a striking young woman and at sixty she still is very attractive. She went to the parties downstairs in the pool that FDR had constructed so he could exercise his atrophied legs. She flew on military jets to secret liaisons with Kennedy at resorts and summit meetings. Once she was caught hiding on the floor of a limousine in the Bahamas, moments after the President left. She seems to have had a level head on her pretty shoulders and moved on just before Lee Harvey Oswald, or a vast conspiracy on the grassy knoll, shot the President in Dallas. She apparently did not believe that she and the President were fated to be together the way Monica did. It is a little sweet, and a demonstration of some national aberration that we still care so much about the dashing young Irishman. Maybe it is because we are confronting a world we simulated by TopOff 2, one filled with vague flu-like symptoms and the realization that it just miht be aq little case of the Black Death.

There are more tales out there. A family friend used to go out with Ted Kennedy, the original Frat Party dog. If Mary Jo had been able to swim, he might very well have been President, too, and think of the stories we would be enjoying now! Anyhow, our friend told me one time she had met Jack's first wife. I have held my silence too long. She might still be alive. She might want to talk, get it off her chest, so to speak, and the hell with the gag that must have come with a hefty financial settlement. There is nothing as interesting as Camelot. Forty years later we are still hungry for news of it. Elliot Ness had nothing on President Kennedy.

He was the real Untouchable.