(Admiral James D. Watkins as Chief of Naval Operations. Photo USN.)

My pal Joe shipped a note to me this morning, which he does regularly about issues in the Community, either government or contractor. This was different. It was an obit, and it was one of a famous guy. I looked at it with curiosity. I had two personal interactions with the Admiral in my life, though he had an impact that was much more profound than a couple drive-by encounters.

I was going to re-package the formal obit for the magazine I edit, since Big Jim Watkins had an impact on our little Spook community, but the impact of his forthright approach to issues military and civilian was amazing. Here is the way my version of the formal thing starts:

“26 July 2012. ADM James D. Watkins, USN-Ret., 85, Alexandria, of congestive heart failure. In addition to a distinguished Navy career that included service as the 22nd Chief of Naval Operations, Jim Watkins later served as Secretary of Energy. He was CINCPACFLT for a cadre of notable 1630 officers, including Mike McConnell, Vince Fragomene, Joe Mazzafro and a host of junior FOSIC Officers who went on to careers of note in the community.”

I could tell you who the JOs were, but that would imply I was one of them and I won’t go there. It certainly was an interesting tour, and it taught me the basic methodology of the analytic trade that served me well enough down through all the years.

The first time I talked to him in person I was in ranks in the crater at Makalapa. For some reason, the Admiral decided to have a personnel inspection. All the officers on his staff were commanded to be present, whether they were on the watch-bill or not.

We were resplendent in tropical white long uniforms. I was wearing one of my best (and non-controversial) Philippine belt buckles. Honestly, I had forgotten that the non-regulation adornment was not appropriate to the inspection ritual, and Big Jim stopped to tell me that, gently, as he walked down the rows and columns.  He was an imposing figure in his Navy whites, the golden dolphins glittering above his rows of ribbons. He stood 6-foot-4 and was known to his peers as “Radio-Free Watkins” for his blunt outspokenness. To us he was just The CINC.

There were no dramatic repercussions from my first encounter with him, and I appreciated the personal insight without career penalty. Our paths diverged thereafter. The Admiral had bigger fish to fry than the wide Pacific. ADM Sylvester “Sly Bob” Foley, an aviator with a roguish Airdale sense of humor, relieved him at Pearl Harbor, and by the time I arrived back in Washington, Watkins had retired.

During his time as the Service Chief from 1982 to 1986, he was considered an architect of the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative, the proposed missile shield and muscular planned response to a Soviet nuclear attack. We saw that even out in Hawaii, harnessing some special materials to channel an aggressive posture against the Soviet Ballistic Missile Submarine Force that would have been unthinkable under Jimmy Carter.

Ironic, really, since Jimmy had been a nuclear submarine officer.

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan named Watkins to lead the President’s Commission on the AIDS Epidemic. Watkins was both a Catholic and Republican, both of which qualifications would seem to have made him an unlikely candidate for the job, not to mention that he openly admitted that his lack of medical experience.

In the obit, they quote his second wife Janet as saying: “He told the president, ‘I’m a sailor and a submariner, and I know nothing about medicine. Reagan apparently told him, “You’re exactly who we’re looking for.”

Those days seem so far away now. I recall reading Randy Shilts’ path-breaking  non-fiction book “And the Band Played On” at the time, and feeling that the shadow of something profoundly evil was abroad in the land, and moreover that the policymakers and the activists did not have a clue on how to deal with it.

Shilts died of AIDS in 1994- just as the nation was waking up to the magnitude of the threat. Jim Watkins turned out to be the perfect guy for the job. Blunt spoken, outgoing, and able to harness superb organization skills to marshal resources against a threat as immediate as nuclear deterrence.

Naturally, his appointment to lead the commission was a lightning rod for activists, many of whom had previously been vocal in insisting that safe sexual conduct was not an essential- if not the essential- tool to stop the spread of the disease.

Big Jim’s leadership reinvigorated the panel, and the strong and forthright recommendations of the panel to address the “unfolding public-health calamity” never got the credit it deserved from the Reaganauts.

The Admiral did a lot of other stuff. His background as a nuclear submariner made him a natural as a pick for Energy Secretary in 1989, in the first Bush administration.

Oddly, I have met three of the men who presided at the James V. Forrestal Building downtown: Big Jim, Bill Richardson and Spence Abraham- and looked all over the wreckage of the Manhattan Project that still occupies the landscape and which the department oversees- but of the three Big Jim was the one who had the technical street creds to actually do the job.

He was a ’49 grad of the Naval Academy, and an early protégé of Hyman Rickover, the eminence gris of safe and reliable nuclear power. When he took over the Department, the problems were as bad as you can imagine. Rocky Flats, where they manufactured the nukes was a shambling environmental disaster. Big Jim made some significant progress in bringing order to a chaotic legacy of secrecy and neglect.

Big Jim formed an intelligence unit to collect data on foreign warhead stockpiles and established a spy-hunting office to safeguard America’s nuclear secrets. He actually brought the Department into the Intelligence Community, recognizing that even non-traditional customers required a seat at the national table.

But it was not that experience that brought us briefly together again. It was late 2002, I think. Dr. Tony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health was a frequent visitor to the Secretary’s office suite at Health and Human Services. It still boggled my mind that I had a chance to work there, and it may have been the most broadening experience in my government career. Where else could you wind up shooting the shit in the waiting room outside the Secretary’s office with the doctor responsible for all AIDS research at the National Institutes of Health?

Tony mentioned to me that Big Jim as “an early and crucial advocate for AIDS patients,” just as they said in the formal obit. I had mentioned to him that Big Jim had called me out of the blue in my little windowless office in the Public Health Emergency Preparedness division of the HHS secretariat.

“He wanted our support in an effort to support victims of the disease,” I marveled. “I told him I was one of his sailors at PacFlt, and we almost lost the reason for his calling me. He was an effective arm-twister even in retirement. He was still strongly against stigma and discrimination.”

Dr. Fauci nodded, and then we were called in to discuss SARS or monkey pox or bird flu or whatever the deadly threat de jour might have been that day.

Big Jim’s military decorations were lavish, though submarine officer sdid not flaunt the fruit salad that the aviation Navy sported after Vietnam. He wore two awards of the Defense Distinguished Service Medal; three of the Navy Distinguished Service Medal; three Legions of Merit and the Bronze Star.

They don’t have a lot of fruit salad for civilians, which I think is fine. But I think that Big Jim Watkins ought to be remembered as one of those Naval Officers who may have made a bigger contribution to his country out of uniform than he did in it.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com