Vic Socotra

03 June 2008

The Master Chief

Master-Chief-Doctor-Senator the Hon. John Tower

If you like hockey, the news was good, since this was good hockey. The Red Wings put 58 shots against Marc-Andre Fleury in the crease, and came up with only three goals. I was on my feet with thirty seconds to go in regulation, Wings up by one, when Maxime Talbot put in the tying goal for Pitttsburgh, and then settled sullenly back into my brown chair.

They had unpacked the Cup down in the basement of Joe Louis arena, since it looked like a lock for the Wings in five. It was not to be, and there was more drama to come, not that anyone needs more drama on a Monday night. Petr Sykora took a slap-shot power-play try at the ten-minute mark in the third overtime and put if past Chris Osgood.

I turned off the big screen and padded off to bed, the place as silent as the lot where the Lindell AC bar used to be in Detroit.

The Lindell would have been rocking, had the Wings pulled it off and if it still existed. But we will have to wait a couple days to find out if the Penguins can pull off a miracle on ice. If the Wings can’t win back in Pittsburgh on Friday, and the series goes seven games, the final will be back in Detroit.

Another Monday, and another week with sleep deficit and a surly attitude.

It is enough to make you want to move to California where this would all make sense.

I was going to tell you today about how John McCain came to know Master Chief Boatswain's Mate John Tower, who was also known as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

That is going to take a little time, since the Navy that Captain John McCain was in had little in common with John Tower’s, except some salt water.

McCain reported to the Senate as a liaison officer the same year I was commissioned as an Ensign, and shipped out to the Pacific. He had been down at NAS Cecil Field down in Jax, doing his squadron XO/CO rotation after rehabilitation for the wounds that still have not healed.

I did a tour at Cecil, which was one of two Master Jet bases on the East Coast, back in the day, but it is shut down now. That is not the only career coincidence: I have a picture of myself with a goofy grin standing in front of the monument to the event that the Vietnamese have erected in Hanoi by the lake where he floated down in his parachute.

I was there at taxpayer expense, carrying the bags of a Congressman, and doing pretty much what Captain McCain was doing when he met Master Chief Tower.

Tower was a teenager in 1943 when he volunteered to fight the Japanese, and spent his war on an LCS (L), a tiny craft that bristled with guns and was intended to be driven right up into the muzzles of the beach guns to disgorge Marines.

John McCain was accustomed to aircraft carriers, and sliders for mid-rats in the dirty shirt wardroom after the boat secured from flight quarters.

Of course, to really get to the heart of the matter you would have to understand why Doctor Tower (he had a Phd) stayed enlisted in the Reserves after he got home, and particularly why he preferred to be a Master Chief to anything else he could have wished to be. He had the power to do it.

He liked who he was, and that is one of things I liked about the little sailor from Texas. I also liked the way he lived, on his terms. It was a pity that times had changed by the time Bush 41 named him to be Secretary of Defense, and it was a shame about the posturing in the Senate that killed the nomination.

John McCain stood up for his mentor, decrying the hypocrisy of his former colleagues in bowing to the prudish conservative Christians who claimed Tower was a drunk and a womanizer. McCain displayed the Boat School stubbornness that got him through hard time in the Vietnamese cooler, and it set up the problems he had with the Religious Right that is not done yet.

As to the allegations about the carousing, what can you say? The Senator was a bo’sun’s mate, for Christ sake.

The only time I got close to meeting the Master Chief was when he was the Chair of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board during DESERT STORM. The post was a sort of consolation prize for the savaging he had received on the President's behalf. I recall waiting in the outer office at the Old Executive Office Building while one of the small hearings was being conducted. I assumed there would be other business to be conducted with him later, since the Joint Staff Intelligence officer I worked for was often summoned to appear.

It did not work out that way, since in April of 1991 he was running late on a trip to Brunswick, Georgia, due to a mechanical problem on the Embraer commuter prop-jet. Just after turning onto final approach, the aircraft suddenly rolled left until the wings were perpendicular to the ground and went into the ground, nose-down, two miles short of Runway 07 at Glynco Jetport.

The National Transportation Safety Board said that the left engine propeller control unit had failed due to a lousy design and lax approval by the Federal Aviation Administration. The Master Chief was 66 years old when he died. He would have been in his early eighties, if he had lived, and the last time John McCain ran for president in 2000, he would still have been a vigorous supporter.

As a legendary Texan, he might have been able to force down that weasel Carl Rove, who orchestrated the slanderous campaign of lies and innuendo that stopped Senator McCain in the South Carolina primaries in February of 2000.

Or more likely, knowing how Rove operates, there would just have been more slander.

Anyway, it is interesting to consider what might have been as we deal with what we have to, this year. If the Master Chief had lived, we might not have had a second Bush as President and all this might be a lot different.

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