31 October 2003

Vicki’s last broadcast was this morning. I got up, although I could have slept, and I stayed in bed to listen. She was good, on the top of her game and didn’t say a word about leaving until she introduced Dan Damon to recap the headlines from around the world. She said that she had been doing the show for six years and that this was her last one. She said that she was tired of getting up at 5:45 each morning to prepare the show, which airs there at 10:00 sharp. I thought about Carl Castle and Bob Edwards, who get up at 1:00am to get their shows together. Much as I admire her formidable talent, I think I could get used to sleeping in until 5:45.

I am really going to miss her. She helped get me focused, and I was not surpised to find out months after I tuned in the first time that she had a sly smile that was to die for. Dan Damon will take the chair on Monday and it will not be the same, though I'm sure he is a fine fellow. I actually left the safety of my bed at 5:45 to go out and poke at a story on Haiti for a while. This one tells the story of the time we went to Port au Prince by crossing at a junle check point in the Dominican Republic. It is a good story, but the further I get into it the more I think needs to be done with it. It is easier to write these soap bubbles and be done with them. 

I showered and got to the first of my daily offices over on Wilson Boulevard. I checked e-mail, answered messages and had a quick meeting to determine how we were going to meet the Customer’s requirement for a monthly performance report. It was glorious outside. I decided not to go underground and enjoy the day while I could. I walked in the crisp sunshine from Ballston up Fairfax Drive to the big building the Customer rents on Clarendon Boulevard. As I rounded the corner I saw a cloud of pipe-smoke and the Division Director was out in front of the building, another tobacco leper.

He was standing with his Deputy, an imposing Naval officer in dress khakis. We had quite a chat about strategies to get his budget back under control, and how a competing Federal Agency might be directed back on the reservation, back into its box. I provide policy advice these days, which is almost as valuable as the contribution of the two construction workers across the street watching a third swing a hammer.

I passed through security and went upstairs and worked up the weekly report that the Executive Secretary desires as part of the contract. It’s a bullshit requirement, but hey, "Whatever the customer wants," that my motto. I re-formatted the same information from last week. "Provided hard-hitting budget recommendations," was one. "Provided thoughtful strategic policy advice"  was another. Hell of a product line, I thought. I looked at the bullets and thought about last night.

I had intended to go straight home from the Assistant Secretary’s farewell from my old Department yesterday afternoon. I assumed it would be fairly high on the nausea scale, and I was gratified to see that my assumption was correct. But there were shrimp on ice, and sushi, and scallops wrapped in bacon, and a large cut of steamship round under a heat lamp. So it was bearable.

Dr. Richard, the esthetic ER Doc, wanted to have a drink afterward. It turned out that he really wanted to understand what happened and why. So we jumped on the Metro at Federal Center and rode up to Metro Center. We took the exit and found ourselves trapped in the basement of Het’s Department Store, near the kitchen equipment and the discount linens. We finally were directed on how to find the exit, one flight up, and looked for a place to get a drink. There wasn’t one as we walked toward 14th Street, and wound up at the Old Ebbitt, a perfectly fine place. It was jammed and jumping. We were in the back, at the Oyster Bar, and we had to stand with our martinis. Must be the Halloween crowd, I thought. We all were wearing costumes that made us look like self-important and slightly overstuffed bureaucrats.

"So how did it happen?" He wanted to comprehend the office melt-down, the crocodile tears from the Secretary, the oddly tinged remarks from Deputy Secretary and the absence of some key players, and the role of my prospective customer who may have orchestrated my downfall. I explained it as best I understand it, how it was The Assistant Secretary’s truculence with everyone in this town, all the players, and the open warfare with our major component agency. But I maintained it was his failure to manage the staff efficiently to meet the many commitments he made prior to my arrival that alienated the White House. My personal failure was to have the hubris to think I could do anything to fix it.

But as you know, hubris is just one of my failings.

I take some solace in the fact that I did make a difference around the margins. No one quit after Slats melted down, and no one was observed weeping, which was quite an improvement. I will see whether they want to implement some structural change now that he is gone, or whether they want to go back to sleep.

Too strange. Richard asked about what was up with the Deputy, since he has been nominated by the President  to one of the Federal Court of Appeals, the one responsible for the national security cases that acts fast. They call that one the "Rocket Docket." I told him they must be getting near a vote, since the press was full of vitriol about his lack of qualifications. Having known the man, I am impressed by his reasoned common sense approach to things, his elegance in word and dress. The fact that he is African American makes the venom that much more interesting, since he is apparently a Republican and thus a traitor who must be destroyed. It is a funny town. He was a staffer for Jesse Helms, an obdurate and prickly individual who was more subtle than his many (justified) critics could fathom.

But despite it, the Deputy seemed to be in good spirits as he told a gently ironic story about the departing Assistant Secretary. He seemed that way the morning I saw him after reading he had been jeered off a podium by some AIDS activists. I marvel sometimes at the apparent ability of these public people to take the vitriol in stride, and Richard did, too.

"The Deputy is one of those people you would trust with your kids" he said. I agreed with him.

I know what you think about Republicans, and I must say that I have been startled by the ability of the current Administration to shatter decades of voting patterns. But the Deputy is one of those common-sense individuals who can identify what is important and move efficiently to get it done. Suddenly two seats opened up at the bar and we squeezed in. Richard had to meet his wife for dinner, but decided to order some kind of designer bourbon for the road. I ordered a second martini, though I was making an uncharacteristically slow go of it.

I asked him what he would have done with the head wound I encountered the last weekend, and we went back and forth on the Airway, Breathing and circulation issue and the level in the glasses went down. Then he got unto a literary thing. He insisted that I read some German named Sebald who, he claimed, was the definitive author from the late eighties to the middle nineties. I had not heard of him, which is one of the perils of being an autodidact, and Richard said that The Rings of Jupiter and The Emigrants were defining works. His glass was empty. "But you have to promise me that you will read  The Emigrants first."

I assured him that I would. And then he talked of Alfred Kazan, the great New York literary critic, and of spending time with him on his deathbed. Richard marveled that he had the opportunity to meet him and become a friend. He was a resident at the hospital, too, and thus could stop and check on him each day. Kazan had prostate cancer, that bane of all men, and that is what took him in the end. But on the way to dusty death he lived and loved with a towering passion. He was reading a book about what men took to the Vietnam War as he was preparing to die, still analyzing and feeling. Richard was there on afternoon as Kazan’s mind wandered. His wife came in and greeted him and Kazan’s eyes suddenly opened. "It is about human loneliness!" he exclaimed, exploring that most forbidding of frontiers himself.

We talked about literature on the way out, the waitresses and waiters busting about in their starched white shirts. I admired the big painting of the three nude bathers as we left. There is a new memorial collection of Kazan’s critical works out, edited by Ted Solatoroff. I will have to buy that along with the Sebalds. It was full dark and Richard was well and truly late. He left in a cab headed toward dinner and I walked briskly to the MacPherson Square Metro next to the Veteran’s Department Headquarters. I ran my ticket through the electronic turnstile and cursed under my breath as I looked down to the tracks. A westbound train was just leaving, and the next Orange Line was twelve minutes away.

It is hard to live in a city that combined northern charm and southern efficiency. I had nothing to read but plenty to look back on. The wild six months at the Department. SARS.  The painful establishment of the Department of Homeland Security (I’m not sure which was more debilitating).  The Top Officials Two exercise, with simulated dirty bombs in Seattle and plague in Chicago. The Vice Presidential visit, showing off our brand new Secretary’s Command Center and how prepared we were for the next disaster, what ever it will be. And seeing the system fail to recognize for three weeks a disease that is a first cousin to Smallpox, the almost Monkey Pox plague in Illinois. And two Orange alerts with the war in Iraq in the second one. I wondered if I should have stayed on, beyond the one-year appointment.

A Blue Line train came and went. Finally, with ponderous grace the Orange Line showed up. If this were the Moscow Subway I would have been home already. I got on a middle car and leaned against the Plexiglas. A bald man at the front of the car leaned against the emergency escape. His forehead rose above his eyebrows and the front of his cranium towered above his face. His dark eyes looked fatigued. The train rocked slowly as we headed west beneath the District streets toward Virginia. He got off at my stop at Ballston, but I hung back, letting him precede me up the escalator. He was a disquieting vision and I have enough of those as it is.

When I was clear of the escalator I strode off toward my office building where my car and e-mail queue and phone messages waited. But here was the kicker. The former Assistant Secretary wants to do lunch next week.

Is this a great town, or what?

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra