Energy
(Forrestal Building)
It is raining in Arlington, cold black pelting rain, and it saps the energy I need to get to the office. I dragged myself out of the rack anyway, since there are workmen coming early- they swear- to fix the closet doors.
They seemed to be energetic enough to actually do it, which is why I selected them from the four contenders for the job. It was kind of fun, pretending to think I was like the government running a source selection panel, and putting on airs of importance, but that is how it is in a recession. People want the work and seem prepared to show the bright-eyed prospect of results.
I made my pick, and glanced at the Times as I waited to see whether I had been ripped off or not. There was a Op-Ed that suggested Bush should resign immediately, and cut short the transition of power, just like President Wilson was apparently prepared to do in 1915, and avoid the long interregnum of uncertainty between the election and the inauguration. It has a distinct appeal, you know?
I saw a different version of the plan a week or more ago that was filled with spite. In that version of the plan, Vice President Cheney would resign and appoint Condoleeza Rice in his stead, and then resign. That way the first woman and first African-American Presidents would be Republican, even if it was only for a few weeks. It would be an Asterisk Administration, granted, like Barry Bond’s home run record, but record none-the-less.
A quick resignation is actually something that could work. The President-elect has been pretty impressive in his selection of a new cabinet. His national security team is solid, just as his economic advisors are. He is light-years ahead of both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush II, and the quality of his nominations have been solid enough to provoke howls of protest from the left. In my experience, if you are pissing off both sides of a governmental argument, you are probably close to doing the right thing.
I was impressed again when I saw the prospective picks for the Environment. It is a curious category, since it lumps the Environmental Protection Agency and a Global Warming advisor with the Manhattan Project, which still churns along in the Department of Energy.
DoE is a queer beast. It is responsible for nuclear weapons, which were sheared off from DoD in the wake of the oil crisis of 1973. It did not become a Cabinet post until the Carter Administration, and I find it very weird that I have actually interacted with three Secretaries of the new Department, and a fourth if you count Dr. Steve Chu, the man picked by the Obama team this week.
Secretary Jim Watkins was the first. He was a retired four-star Admiral and Chief of Naval Operations when he took over. As a nuclear submariner, his credentials for managing the national atomic stockpile were superb. In retirement, he was a member of the boards of the usual suspects. He made a cold call on me when I had a minor desk in the government to ask for a favor, and I pointed out that he had been my commanding officer in Pearl Harbor long ago, and would be happy to do anything legal and without funding for him if I could.
Bill Richardson was the second. My ties to the Secretary were as profound as you can imagine as a government functionary, though it was during his time as a Congressman from New Mexico. He was gracious enough to receive me on a slow morning at the Energy Headquarters in the Forrestal Building in 2000, and we had a rollicking reminiscence of times in Burma, Haiti and North Korea.
The Wen Ho Lee espionage scandal was going on at the time, and I think a friendly face was a pleasant interlude at the time.
During the same time I traveled with Bill, a nice Staffer from the Energy subcommittee took a shine to the way I organized an itinerary and whistled up jets, and wanted to get out from under the minders assigned her by the Department. Under the fig-leaf of making a call on a Navy installation, made a comprehensive tour of the Manhattan Project that culminated in a hole in the ground at the Nevada Test Site, the place where the last underground test had been conducted. Weird.
I have been a fan of the Department ever since, including the precious National Labs that made the vastly expensive and wholely improbable atomic project work.
Secretary Spence Abraham was the third, appointed to the job by George W. after Debbie Stabenow beat him for his Senate Seat back in Michigan. I wish I could tell you more about the weird week we spent together in an undisclosed location, but I can’t.
I did wind up in some very odd meetings as he tried to run the Department from a hole in the ground, but that will just have to be filed away with some of the other more surreal aspects of life in semi-wartime. Maybe we will get to talk about it some time.
Steve Chu is going to be the fourth Secretary I have met, not that any of them except Bill would remember. He is also the only Nobel Laureate with whom I have had the chance to sit back and shoot the shit with. I offer him my complete endorsement, hands-down.
I took an immediate liking to the laureate on a visit to his sparely elegant office at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory high on the hill about UC Cal in Oakland. I was with a vivacious colleague at the time, out of government, and hooked up with the telecommunications firm that owned Bell Labs. I fronted certain technologies that they developed to certain customers in the government, and had a jolly good time of it.
Dr. Chu had developed certain remarkable applications in low temperature physics, and was the product of a scientific farm system that groomed young talent for the Nobel Prize. He was remarkably candid about the process. Berkeley Lab was founded in 1931 by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a physicist who had won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron. It was a key building block in the effort to unleash the atomic genie.
Since then, eleven scientists associated with Berkeley Lab (including Steve) have won the Nobel Prize. Fifty-five more have either trained there or had significant collaborations with the institution.
Anyway, it was a great visit, and Dr. Chu is a gracious host. My colleague advanced her networking agenda, and I got some insight into how the Nobel Prize is one. I also got a glimpse of the future, when Steve confided that having won the highest honor in his field as a young man, he had set his sights on nothing less that the energy independence for the United States. At Lawrence Berkeley, he was sponsoring research into biofuels and solar power, among other things, and had wandered fairly far afield from nuclear warheads.
I don’t know if I will run into him again, since we have little in common except government service. But you never can tell. The network works in a strange way.
Steve had been willing to see us partly due to his alumni link to Bell Labs, and partly because a friend of his had been named president of the Labs in 2005.
Jeong Kim was born in Korea, and did not speak English when his Dad dragged his three kids, sans wife, to Anne Arundel County in Maryland when Jeong was just fifteen. They lived in public housing, and he was kicked out of the house when he was sixteen. He made his way through school working at the Kwiky Mart on the night shift, sleeping only a few hours after school.
He did pretty well, winding up commissioned in the Navy submarine force, and later inventing the asynchronous transfer mode of wireless communications, a technique that gets high-bandwidth communications to things like your cell phone, or the fiber optics that hook up to your television.
Steve Chu admired him, since even if Kim was not on the Nobel track, he made a billion dollars, and Steve was able to hitch a ride on his private G3 jet to places like Shanghai. They are both remarkable Americans, and I wish Steve well as he comes to Washington.
In that spirit, I offer a recipe for dinner that you might like, and scalable in size depending on whether you are feeding the family, or have the energy to feed an inaugural crowd. It is all in the proportions, just like nuclear weapons.
Gal-by, often mis-rponounced “kowl-bee” by Americans. Best known as Korean Barbeque, this is a tremendous energy food:
Ingredients:
As much thin-sliced Korean beef as you feel like eating. Ask your butcher if it is not in the meat locker
Marinade:
By proportion: One-to-One-to-Three:
(1) unit soy sauce
(1) equal unit sugar (brown if you got it)
(3) units water
Green onions
Vidalia onion
Sesame oil
Sesame seeds
Whole clove of colossal garlic
Black pepper
Sea salt
Stir. Marinate beef overnight, 24 hours. If you have room and time
’t use oil in the pan, since there should be enough from the marinade and you want to keep the amount of soupy stuff down. Don’t include the onions in the pan, since they will caramelize and char. The smell is unbelievably pungent, so take a shower after cooking if you are going to socialize. Serve with basmi rice and red pepper kim-chi in full strips to eat with fingers or fork and knife, though some like to cut in thirds to eat with chop-sticks. I do it that way when I have the energy.
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com