Relationships and Response
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Relationships and Response It was a great holiday weekend. Four days off, right in a row, no Quarterly to publish, and I let the daily just slide. I felt a little guilty about it, but I had company and other priorities. It was a great holiday, but everything comes with a price. It all depends on how you respond. I had been productive enough, even if the results were not visible. I have a great relationship going, and great optimism about the future. I finally took a break last night and watched Peyton Manning and really enjoyed how he runs an offense. I have no feelings for the Colts, they were either Johnnie U’s guys, or Brand X up the road before they decamped from Baltimore in the night. The way that Manning mixed it up on the line, took command based on his read of the Steelers defense, well, that was inspirational. That was leadership. It had not penetrated to my dim awareness that the Colts were undefeated. I left the game at half-time, as one must do on the East Coast, and I hope they got their money’s worth on the first two quarters worth of advertising, and I hope the West Cost market enjoyed their game with dinner. Bastards. Anyhow, I was cleaning the upstairs unit after the wreckage of the holiday weekend. I had company, of course, and it was splendid. But since I don’t really live there, and can’t for tax reasons for another week or so, everything I picked up had the recollection of a moment of Thanksgiving. There were the containers of Chinese food in the fridge- we had that after coming back from shopping for real estate out in horse country- and some other stuff that would not last the week unless I took it downstairs. The Green Bean casserole, the garlic mashed potatoes. The Holiday detritus. I would not have cleaned the place ordinarily. I would have just left the sweeping for the weekend. But my folks are coming in this Friday, and I need to have it looking ship-shape. I came home early to get a start on it. I had walked from the Bus Station over to the Center for Strategic and International Studies to listen to an afternoon seminar by former Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating, former FEMA Director James Lee Witt and former Army Chief of Staff Denny Reimer. It was unseasonably warm in town, and threatening to rain. It was just misting when I got to the building and went down to the basement where the seminar was to be held. I saw Doctor John Hamre, the Clinton DepSecDef, who is the chief CSIS policy wonk. He looks a lot more relaxed than he did when he was in government, and he flitted around the room talking to the concerned citizens in suits. He recognized Mike Doubleday, the retired navy Captain who was the Defense Public Affairs spokesman, and Admiral James Loy, who I met before he became Commandant of the Coast Guard. I should have said. It is a funny city. Doctor John is indirectly responsible for my employment at the phone company, though he would not remember me. It is all about relationships, and it is a very small world. Denny was a two star when I first met him, not that he would remember. he had the locker two stacks over from mine in the Pentagon Athletic Center, and we used to get anonymously naked together when our work-out schedules happened to coincide. Later, I think he was a three-star as the Army Deputy Chief of Operations during the first Gulf War and I had to brief him and some other crusty operational types before I got to go brief Mr. Cheney and Chairman Powell. I am just another bug on the windshield of his career, and like I said, I doubt he would remember me. James Lee Witt came to lobby my Boss when I worked at Health and Human Services. He had been a cabinet-level official under Mr. Clinton, who was determined to fix the lethargic Federal response to flooding along the Mississippi River in his first year in the White House. James Lee handled something like 350 disasters in his time at FEMA, and is as good a bureaucratic as you get, regardless of party. We were showing off the Secretary’s Command Center at the Hubert Humphrey Building, and he was hoping for a contract to consult with us. he seemed like a good guy, though I was wary of people who wanted something from the Government. I had never met Governor Keating before, but I remember the morning in Las Vegas when I heard about the blast at the Alfred P. Murrah Building that cast him into the national limelight. He called himself the Disaster Governor, since in his first term Tim McVey murdered a couple hundred people in Oklahoma City, and in his second term, the tornadoes roared across the state with winds of three hundred miles an hour and came right at the big city, wiping out whole neighborhoods, killing at least 41 people and injuring hundreds. Keating called the twisters the worst disaster in his state’s history. He had to call out the National Guard under his Title 32 Authority to patrol the streets and seal off a 25-mile square section of southern Oklahoma City, where nearly a thousand homes were destroyed. Part of the reason for this discussion was the collision between natural disaster and mass murder, and the tension between the Defense Department’s Title 10 authorities and the Governor’s Title 32 control of the National Guard played out across the role of the Federal government in local disasters. It was a good line-up, what with the Governor’s experience as the commander of troops, Denny Reimer as the Commander of the Army, and James Lee as the architect of Federal response. It was entertaining, for a technical policy discussion. Governor Keating seemed like a great guy, unusual for a Republican these days, and he joked that if he had not been term-limited, his third term would probably have featured the plague of locusts. The three distinguished leaders avoided pointing fingers at the people who failed so badly in the Katrina debacle. This was not supposed to be about personalities, after all, but about making a sensible policy recommendation for the Congress to take for action when it returns in January. That is the CSIS mission: providing smart policy for a changing world. The Governor and James Lee were of the opinion that FEMA needs to come out of the Department of Homeland Security, at least for Natural Disaster. Denny just growled and said the whole thing was about leadership. With a skilled commander, he said, any bureaucratic line-up can work. I jotted down some key points and when it was over, I left the building without talking to anyone. I decided against going back to the office, and there was a Metro stop right down the block. I got on the train and went home to start cleaning up my own domestic disaster area, preparing for the next one. I took a break to look at e-mail, and saw that Randy “Duke” Cunningham had to resign from Congress over the $2.4 million he took from a defense contractor. He had a Rolls Royce and everything. I never thought he was a particularly bright guy, but that relationship was spectacularly stupid. I dealt with him when he first came to Congress. He was the Navy’s Jet Ace from Vietnam, and he had a print on the wall of his most famous engagement. Randy wound up with four kills, and Major Tomb was credited with thirteen for North Vietnam. Duke killed him on May 10, 1972. It was a big deal, the biggest of his life until today. Duke told me the story, as he did everyone, and he asked me to do things for him. He had some interests that I found more than a little upsetting. I’ll tell you about them sometime. The day Major Tomb died is my ex’s birthday, and it came as absolutely no surprise that she called me up, assailing me bitterly to spoil the aftermath of the holiday. I don’t know why I answered the phone, since it is never good news when she calls. But I did, and I shouldn’t have been surprised that it was awful. But, hey, it is all about relationships, and disaster response, right? Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra |
