(The King and a fan, White House, December 1970. Official US Government Photo.)
 
I had drinks with Mac last night. Better said, he had a couple Virgin Mary’s that Peter the bartender fixes up like liquid salads, and I had a couple whiskeys to fortify myself against the coming snow. The cold is about beating my brains in, I don’t know about you.
 
I had a note pad and a pen, which beats the cocktail napkins I use sometimes when Mac gets on a roll about the ghosts of the past.
 
He is just back from an extended holiday with family up in Michigan, and I am still trying to dig out of a series of interactions with the Great Beyond for which I was unprepared. Rex was one, of course, and John, and the two lovely girls who perished on the roads in Fairfax.
 
To dodge the present, I was fixed on 1970, the year Rex was selected for flag and the King of Rock and Roll visited president Nixon at the White House. Dan Damon on the BBC this morning mentioned it was The King’s 75th birthday, and mused that the Elvis could have still been with us as a senior statesman of the music business, if he had just taken better care of himself. Look at David Bowie. For God’s sake, Ziggy Stardust is 63 today, too.
 
Ziggy has taken good care of himself, eschewing the “Live fast, die young,” mantra of the popular culture of 1970. It is still a mantra I remember, though the possibility of that happening has vanished along with youth.
 
Liza Minelli sang about it in Cabaret, and it has been sort of a theme song for me ever since I first heard it:
 
I used to have a girlfriend
known as Elsie
With whom I shared
Four sordid rooms in Chelsea
 
She wasn’t what you’d call
A blushing flower…
As a matter of fact
She rented by the hour.
 
The day she died the neighbors
came to snicker:
“Well, thats what comes
from to much pills and liquor.”
 
But when I saw her laid out like a Queen
She was the happiest…corpse…
I’d ever seen.

Then she invited you to come out to the bar and have a few. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and so long as you still have friends in this world it seems like a viable strategy.
 
Anyway, Mac has all the travel orders from his long career, 1941 to 1971, all done up in glassine envelopes. He brought the page that has his trip with the LTG Bennett, Director of DIA to Southeast Asia in December of 1970. The two traveled alone, to Laos and Thailand and Saigon, and the four military regions of Vietnam.
 
Bennett had never been to Asia, with the exception of his mandatory Army assignment to Korea, and Mac kindly offered to show him around the Navy sides of the theater, and the war in progress. On the other side of the envelope was the short memo from the Chief of Naval Personnel directing him to stop being the Director of Plans and Policy at DIA and report as the Chief of Staff in January of 1971.
 
Bennett did not want that to happen until they got back from Asia, since it would have meant the two senior officers of the Agency were on the same airplane. Anyway, while in Saigon, they dined with Rex and then-Vice Admiral Zumwalt,. The two three-stars chatted each other up about matters of the war, and intelligence support while Rex and Mac were seated a little further down the table.
 
The three Naval officers had their careers all entwined, and that would play out back in Washington, but for then, that night before Christmas in Saigon, the war was going well and Elvis was in the White House.
 
Anyhow, I wanted to talk to Mac about some of the things that Ted had mentioned when he called last week. He didn’t ring me up to talk about the weather, though goodness knows there is enough to talk about with that. He has not given up being Admiral Ted just because he is not wearing the uniform any more.
 
Ted was one of my favorite DNIs. He used to smoke a lot- like many of us who had to be places and pass time, waiting for things to happen- and he did so in the DNI’s office. The inner sanctum was on one of the five corners of the “C” Ring of the Pentagon and all sorts of things happened in there, some of them breathtaking in their audacity.
 
Rex was a heavy smoker, too, back in the day, and that may have been one of the things that contributed to his demise at the end. Jinny scolds me about that- it got her husband, Barnie, years ago as well, and if I don’t clean up my act I imagine it will get me, too.
 
It was still a pervasive social habit back in 1970. Mac smoked- he just gave me the Zippo he carried for years with the Squadron logo of Fleet Air Reconnaissance Squadron ONE (“The Navy’s Number One Squadron!”) as a keepsake.
 
It has a EC-121 Super Connie engraved n the back, the outline almost worn away from chrome to brass from years slipping around in the pocket of khakis and Blues.
 
I remember Ted kept the ashtray in one of the top drawers in the big executive-issue mahogany desk that several generations of Directors had used, including Rex.
 
In 1970, the ashtray would still have been on the desk, and people would put a pack of Luckies on the conference table with the Zippo lighter for sensitive meetings.
 
Anyway, Ted grilled me for a while on what I could do for him without wasting too much of his time coming down from Pennsylvania, where he works at what he feels like.
 
Rex had a place of refuge away from the capital, about twenty miles away from him on the Pennsylvania plateau where the air is crisp and fresh and there are not nearly as many morons on the road. I asked him what it was like to actually work for Rex.
 
I know first hand, of course, but my time with Rex was late in life, and people have a way of mellowing over time. Ted said he was always a gentleman, very proper, but with a sly sense of humor. He always kept his cool, even when some very strange things happened.
 
Ted was picked to be the DNI’s EA, even though he was only a LCDR, and he had a couple stories that illustrate the sort of subtly Rex had as the DNI, which was completely necessary.
 
I told you about Rex’s predecessor as DNI, RADM Frtiz Harlfinger. Mac told me a little bit about him at the bar last night. He is dead, so I don’t have to go out of my way to be nice.
 
Mac was on cordial terms with him. As a diesel submariner, Harlfinger had no place to go home to in Hyman Rickover’s nuclear navy, so he was determined to carve a path ahead in the intelligence world. He began to gather all the cool parts of the naval intelligence community together in a completely new construct, one in which a savvy submarine officer like himself could command the Cryptologists, the Intel weenies and the Oceanographer of the Navy. He even figured out a way to take the DNI’s car and driver to help establish the new office, which his action officers christened “OP-942.”
 
Bud Zumwalt left Vietnam in mid-1970, and took over as CNO in July. He knew all about Fritz, and his glad-handing popularity on the Hill. He was eager to get his own team in place, and he was determined to bring the big broom to the Pentagon and sweep all the old flag officers into the dustbin of history.
 
Rex was going to be his Director of Naval Intelligence. Mac did not take it personally, and he and Rex were cordial all their professional lives. Considering what was going on in the covert world, it seemed only appropriate that there be more professional intelligence officers involved in some very sensitive operations.
 
The CIA had a project they were working on that had some real exciting aspects. It was more spooky than anything you can imagine, and Mac was in the middle of it, as was Rex. By virtue of his position at DIA, Mac was chairing a group called “The Ad Hoc Committee.”
 
It was purposefully vague in name, but painfully specific in mission. The group was laying out the intelligence requirements for what might be interesting if you happened to come upon an entire Soviet ballistic missile submarine. Nuclear missiles? Code books? Encyphering machines?
 
How would you prioritize those requirements, if you had the chance?
 
That is one of the things that Rex was up to. As I said, one thing is never done before something else comes along, and the war in SE was hot even as something even hotter lurked in the depths, approximately 1700 miles northeast of Hawaii. It was positively amazing.
 
It was something that Rex talked about in the corner office on the fifth floor of the Pentagon, when the ashtrays were still on the desktop.
 
More on that tomorrow.

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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