30 May 2008
 
Paneled Offices

The Times this morning raked over John McCain’s time as a Navy legislative liaison officer in the US Senate. I was not sure what to make of it. It seemed to suggest that the sacrifice of CAPT McCain’s probable promotion to Admiral was a demonstration of some dark ambition. The author mentioned that there was a lot of monkey business on the part of some Senators who are long gone, and who played by the rules as they were back in the day. The inference was fairly clear, and I didn't like it.
 
David Kirkpatrick wrote the piece, and like everything that passes as news, it clunks a bit if you have actually walked through some of the dark paneled offices he describes. That said, it is worth a look if you have a chance. I have learned down through the years that thinking I understand something doesn’t necessarily make it true. Life is a crystal with many prisms.
 
I certainly understand the infatuation one can have with the Senate, since the same Navy that sent John McCain up to the Hill did the same thing to generations of other officers. It was pure chance that I got to be one of them.
 
An old friend treated me to lunch in the private dining room of the Secretary of the Navy this week. It is in the Pentagon, in one of the parts that has been reconstructed. It was quite a privilege, and I was honored to get the invitation. What surprised me was that when my host and I walked into the dark-paneled room I knew one of the men who was having an early lunch.
 
It was the current Chief of Legislative Affairs, head of the office that constitutes the first line of defense force against the whims of the Congress. My host and I stopped to chat for a moment. The Chief is a personable man, and I like him a lot.
 
I knew him from a couple chance encounters down through the years; he had been the Captain of a ship whose mission was to host the imperious staff of which I was a part; he was chief of the White House military office in the challenging and heady days immediately after 9/11.
 
Defense had been tasked to do provide a host of unconventional services in the interest of government continuity, and the Cabinet was involved in all its component parts.
 
The Admiral is one of those very good officers who excels in circumstances where others lose their heads, and I was pleased to see that the Navy had recognized his talent.
 
All the Services have Legislative Offices, as in fact all the Agencies do. The Congress of the United States of America is a curious beast, and anyone who thinks that it does not have to be watched every second is about to have his or her budget zeroed.
 
It is a very fine line to walk, if you expect to keep you’re your integrity intact. The structure of how it all works, or doesn’t work, is bewildering in its complexity. In the interest of clarity, let’s just say that it is all about the color of money, and hence programmatic in terms of who got to scribble with the crayons on it.
 
People like me were used to track the programs that aggregate the cash, and provide useful information to the oversight committees that authorized the budget for national intelligence programs. Other officers worked specific acquisition projects; aircraft carriers, the aircraft themselves, or submarines in our case. Each weapons system under consideration by the Congress had a small “informational” staff, normally working out of the Pentagon.
 
All the Services have them.
 
The Appropriations Committees had parallel and jealously independent liaison staffs run out of the offices of the Comptrollers, which added to the complexity, and that was only the merry band in the Executive Branch of government, never mind the battalions of lobbyist from industry.
 
Someone had to play traffic cop on the Hill itself, and try to keep everything straight between the informational activities of the officers supporting programs, and working the daily liaison with the members and their staffs.
 
The House and Senate offices were the central points of contact for that activity, and they were located on the Hill itself. There is a certain amount of Stockholm Syndrome that goes along with where you work. 
 
CAPT John McCain was the chief of the Senate office, a dark-paneled office in the basement of the Russell Office Building. He was a Senator himself the first time I was called on the carpet there, which was a little threadbare, by the way. I discovered that a shared uniform did not necessarily equate to a shared agenda, and how where you sit often determines where you stand.
 
I will have to get to that tomorrow, though. It was not a pleasant experience, and I left the office feeling disoriented and very much between the worlds. It certainly was educational, and as you know, the day you do not learn something is the day that you start to die.
 
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com