Chapter 118: Armed Services

Winter 1994-1995

Now that we were the majority, everybody got to play musical chairs with the various committee assignments. Science, Space, and Technology was interesting, and I thought I did well there with the Internet bill. Likewise, Veterans Affairs gave me the place to do the Gulf War Veterans Bill, and that was both timely and useful. Still, both were backwaters as far as anything useful was concerned. Science would do all sorts of wonderful things, like hold hearings on the NASA budget or the Superconducting Super Collider, but these budgets would be the first places raided when ‘important’ stuff needed doing. For the price of a few fairly useless B-2 stealth bombers, the world’s top heavy particle collider could have been built in Dallas, and not in Europe. Veterans Affairs was equally a dead end; why the Veterans Administration needed to be upgraded to a cabinet department was way beyond me.

Floyd Spence was the ranking Republican on the committee and would become chairman when we reconvened. I managed a quick meeting with him and got myself assigned to the Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces. This was one of the bigger subcommittees, bigger in the sense of importance. We oversaw the Army and Air Force, the National Guard, the Reserves, and several logistic and modernization areas. There were other subcommittees related to the Navy and Marines, Intelligence, Oversight, and such. I probably knew as much about the Army as any of the other members, for good or for bad. Floyd made a call and got me a meeting with the Chief of Staff for the committee, which was also quite helpful, since those guys do most of the work.

As I had told Newt and the others, Bill Clinton wasn’t going to roll over and let the Republican Party have their way with things. He was already scrambling to recover, like a quarterback moving as his pocket collapsed around him. He was promising to work with the Congress to pass this, that, and the other thing, and simultaneously trying to rally the Democrats into a coherent response. We were still planning to keep up the pressure, with a plan to spend the first two weeks of the new Congress introducing our Contract with America bills and giving speeches on them.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough for Newt. He wanted to destroy Bill Clinton. I simply think he just didn’t like the man. We spoke about this mid-January when he came over to the house on 30^th for a working dinner. There were just a few of us, not the entire Gang, John Boehner, Jim Nussle, Newt, and me. I had promised them my signature coq au vin meal.

John was the first to arrive, and I let him into the house and brought him back to the kitchen. He sat down on a tall bar stool on the side of the kitchen island facing the stove. “So, you know how to cook? Every other time I’ve eaten over here it’s been catered, or you’ve had a chef in doing something.”

“Yes, I know how to cook! I’ve been cooking for myself ever since I left home as a kid.”

“You mean when your parents threw you out?” he asked.

I nodded. “It was a little more complicated than that, but yes. Wine?” I held up a bottle of Riesling I had pulled out of the wine cooler, and John nodded. I began to open the bottle and continued talking. “For most of the last two years of high school I was on my own, so it was either learn to cook or eat at McDonald’s three times a day. That stuff will kill you. Besides, my girlfriend liked that I could cook.”

He grinned at that. “What did her parents think about you having your own place?”

“Funny, but somehow that never came up in our conversations.” That earned a barking laugh from him. I finished opening the bottle and poured some in glasses I pulled from an overhead rack. We sipped some, and John and I talked for a few more minutes about my bachelor days. I began pulling out the pots and pans and setting things up.

The doorbell rang and I glanced at my friend, who said, “I’ll get that. You keep cooking.” He hopped up and came back a minute later leading both Newt and Jim.

“Gentlemen, welcome again. Toss your coats somewhere and have a seat. John can pour the wine.” I was cutting some boned chicken breasts in half and placing them to the side; next to be cut up was a large and thick slice of boned ham and some fresh button mushrooms.

Both Jim and Newt made the same comment: “So you really can cook! It’s not something you made up?”

“Some friends you guys are! Yes, I can cook! It’s an excellent method of separating young ladies from their virtue! If you pull it off you look suave and sophisticated, but if you fail, you look helpless, and she gets to be maternal and helpful. Keep that in mind for when you are shopping for a mistress.” They all laughed at that.

“What does Marilyn think about that idea?” asked Newt.

“What, the cooking or the mistress?” I riposted.

We continued joking about cooking while I finished preparing the ingredients, and then I pulled out my electric skillet and set it on the island in front of us all. If I cooked at the stove, my back would be to everybody. I set the skillet to 300 and tossed in a stick of butter, and then began dredging the chicken breasts through flour. As the butter melted, the chicken went in, to begin sautéing. I grabbed a set of measuring spoons and began measuring out my spices.

I noticed my glass was empty and the others were getting low. “How was the wine? I need to open another bottle. The same or something different?”

Newt answered, “It was very nice.” The others nodded as well, so I pulled out a second bottle and passed it and the corkscrew over to John. Newt looked at the label on the empty. “Where is this from, the Finger Lakes?”

“Yes. Marilyn and I did a nice tour of some of the wineries up there the last time we visited her folks. We like wine, so we picked up several cases. It’s really quite reasonable.”

Jim asked, “What is reasonable to your budget and what is reasonable to mine might be different.”

I simply shook my head. “Just because I have enough money to get silly doesn’t mean I do get silly. This runs about ten or twelve bucks a bottle and is very nice. Just because I can afford something ten or twenty times that, it doesn’t mean I can taste the difference.” I flipped the breasts and let them cook on the other side, while measuring out the wine and brandy. “We live fairly simply. You should come out and visit us sometime. You’ll have to share a bathroom with the kids, but that’s not my problem, that’s yours!” That got a few laughs.

We continued talking about our homes. When the chicken breasts were lightly browned, I dropped the temperature on the skillet down to about 200 or so and dumped in the other ingredients. They would stew and steam in the wine, cooking the chicken and swapping flavors. “All I need to do now with the chicken is to keep an eye on things and add water to keep it from drying out.”

“Has that ever happened?” asked John.

I nodded and ruefully admitted, “Yes, once back in Fayetteville, Marilyn and I ... well, when I went back into the kitchen, it was burned black in the bottom of the pan. I had to throw the pan away, it was so bad!” That earned me a fair number of snickers!

I got the Minute Rice ready to cook. That would only take about ten minutes total, so we had plenty of time to chat, another half hour or so, before I had to worry and do more than just watch and stir. Inevitably the conversation turned to business, our business - politics. The big discussion was with people tossing out names for who would run against Clinton in 1996. Bob Dole was named, and I knew he would win the nomination (at least he did my first time) but whether he would win this time around I wasn’t sure. Had I changed things this time? Several other names got tossed around as well, some of whom were definite and some of whom were maybes. The selection was from all over the map - politicians like Dick Lugar and Phil Gramm, businessmen like Steve Forbes and Ross Perot were wild cards, and even newspaper columnist and pundit Pat Buchanan was interested.

I wondered through all this what effect my actions would have. Would Bob Dole win the nomination again? Would Ross Perot still be a spoiler and third-party candidate? Would somebody else do better? I had a lot of respect for Senator Dole, both then and now, and said I was going to support him. It would be interesting to see how this worked out from a front row seat. I remember it being a wild and wooly primary season, and I suspected it was still going to be.

We kept talking through the rest of the preparation time, opening a third bottle of the Riesling in the process, and then I called quits to shop talk while we ate. That didn’t work out all that well, since we were all a bunch of political junkies. What I found disturbing, though, was when Newt was telling us how much he wanted to hurt Clinton, to grind him into dust. It was almost personal with the man. I simply shook my head in disagreement.

“You disagree with me, Carl?”

“Yes and no, Newt. It’s not so much your intention as it is your degree. It’s one thing to beat the man but leave him some wiggle room. There is nothing more dangerous than a wild animal that has been wounded and then trapped. You learn the same thing in the Army. It’s better to let an enemy on the run keep running. It demoralizes the other troops facing you. If you corner them, well, desperate men do desperate things, and they have no reason not to take you down with them.”

“You overestimate him, Carl. Bill Clinton is spent. He’s a has been. We can wipe him out and replace him in two years,” Newt bragged.

“Newt, I am going to keep backing you, you know that, but this may not turn out as neat and easy as you think it will. There’s a reason they named him ‘Slick Willie’ back in Arkansas. You may not like him, but you sure better respect him,” I replied.

“You think he’s going to be that tough in ‘96?” asked John, in between bites of chicken. “Oh, this is so good!”

I laughed at that. “The secret isn’t in the chicken, it’s in the spices and the stew they make with the flour you dredge the chicken in.” Then I gave it some thought. “Yeah, I think it would be very easy to underestimate Slick Willie. We have the tiger by the tail right now, but it would be very easy to end up inside the tiger!”

I went home the next night and told Marilyn I had cooked dinner for the boys, after which she pointed me towards the kitchen and made me cook for the kids. I made shrimp scampi for them, although I insisted that Marilyn had to help me with peeling the shrimp. We were able to eat by about seven or so. Now that the kids were older, we didn’t have to worry about them going to bed early. The girls were still only ten. They still listen to you at that age. That would change too damn soon for my taste. Charlie was now thirteen and had recently discovered that he was smarter than I was, or at least so he thought.

He was a pushy little bastard, too! On his birthday back in October he had asked about getting a tattoo or an earring, and he brought it up again. He didn’t have anything particular in mind, just asking, but I decided to shut that idea down real fucking quick! “You get no tattoos that don’t say U.S. Army, and no extra holes in your body that the Good Lord didn’t issue as original equipment! YOU GOT THAT STRAIGHT?” I thundered at him. He just laughed at me and scooted out of the room.

“You think that was clear enough?” I asked his mother.

“Probably not,” she said with a smile.

“I think I’ll show him a rerun of Heartbreak Ridge, where Clint Eastwood rips an earring out of a recruit’s ear. Maybe that will get through.” My wife rolled her eyes at that. “Wait until your daughters get in on the act and want their belly buttons pierced.”

“My daughters are good girls and would never do that,” she replied, rather primly.

I snorted. “Yeah, well my daughters would do it and then lie to us!” On my first go, Maggie had not only gotten her belly button pierced, but she also got a ‘tramp stamp’ at the base of her back. I don’t have a problem with the piercings so much as the tattoos. They don’t enhance the scenery and just wait until you’re a grandmother and weigh fifty pounds more, and your grandkids want to know why you have a tattoo on your ass.

On the plus side, Charlie was fundamentally a good kid. He was still in the Boy Scouts, although I had my doubts whether he would make Eagle. I could see him doing the Explorer routine like I had done, or just staying in the Scouts, goofing off and going camping with them. Then again, Marilyn had caught him looking through my latest issue of Playboy, so I figured he might also develop a different interest to take up his time. Well, you can’t get into trouble just chasing girls; you only get into trouble when you catch one!

I remember when he asked me what ‘overly developed’ meant. He had been looking at a copy of The National Enquirer, which struck me as odd. Certainly, neither Marilyn nor I ever read it, so I asked him, and he said he got it from the Parkers. I could imagine Lurlene reading it and rolled my eyes. “So, what’s it mean?”

“What does what mean?”

“It says that Mom is overly developed. What’s that mean?”

“WHAT?” I went over to him and grabbed the ‘newspaper’ from him and looked at the page he was reading. It was an article on Congressmen with good-looking wives or girlfriends. There was a picture of Marilyn and me at the Kennedy Center, me in my tux and Marilyn in a black evening gown. That had been a few weeks ago, when the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which I supported generously, was having a Tchaikovsky night. The photo made me pay attention, since Marilyn’s dress had been low cut, though not untasteful. This shot, maybe because of the angle, or maybe because they doctored it, showed an awful lot of very healthy cleavage.

Charlie was pointing at the words. “See, it says that Mom is pretty but overly developed.”

Marilyn came out at that moment to find us looking at the picture. I was trying to keep from laughing, working my jaw to keep steady. Marilyn looked at the Enquirer as Charlie asked again. I glanced at her and stifled a grin, and replied, “Let’s just say that it means your mother still looks good in a swimsuit.” Marilyn looked daggers at me. I guess that’s not something a father is supposed to tell his son.

Suddenly a light went on in Charlie’s head. His eyes opened wide, and he gave a loud, “Ohhhh!” Then he looked at Marilyn, and his eyes glanced at her chest for just a split second, and then darted away, and he repeated, “Ohhhh!”

“CHARLIE!” she protested.

“Get out of here,” I said, swatting him with the paper. He grabbed it and laughed and ran out of the kitchen.

I was silently laughing at my wife, while she stewed at me. “What do you have to say?” she demanded.

“Who? Me? Nothing, nothing at all! Would you rather I explained to him that it meant his mom has big tits?”

“Behave!” I was sent from the kitchen, but she had a smile on her face, too. I figured I’d talk to her about this later that evening, much later, in our bedroom.

Back in Washington we had all sorts of fun on the Armed Service Committee. For one thing, the latest round of the BRAC system was happening in 1995. BRAC stood for Base Realignment And Closure. During World War II and the Cold War, the various armed services had built bases all over the place, and as a result we had substantial numbers of very expensive bases. Since nobody would allow a base in their district to be closed (“It’s strategically important to defend [fill in the blank]”) but everybody thought that somebody else’s base should be closed (“It’s an outrageous duplication and wasteful spending to defend [fill in the blank]”), they came up with a system. An independent commission would produce a list of bases to be shrunk or closed. The list could be voted yes or no but could not be modified. It gave everybody political cover when things started closing.

I had seen this up close and personal on my first go. When Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome was put on the list in 1993, the uproar had been deafening, and the locals all screamed that their base was a critical part of the nation’s defense. Instead, they argued, shutter that wasteful and duplicative base north of us, Plattsburgh Air Force Base! Well, the Commission promised they would look at Plattsburgh and the people in Utica and Rome went away happy. Nobody was happy when a few months later the Commission recommended both bases be closed!

Closing bases is a very painful thing. In addition to whatever soldiers or airmen or sailors or Marines are stationed there, you usually have lots of locals working at a base, as well as businesses who sell stuff to the base. It is a major source of income. On the other hand, military spending by its very nature is inherently wasteful. If you want to do well spending government money, a better investment is infrastructure or research or something. You’ll waste less and hire more. I remember that when Griffiss shut down it was very painful for a few years. Lefleur Homes wasn’t selling very many homes in the Rome area when you could buy an existing structure for fifty cents on the dollar. Still, the area came back even stronger.

Anyway, the latest round of BRAC was ongoing, and looked to be as contentious as the earlier ones. We still had too much military for the budget and the threat. The Soviet Union was no more. They hadn’t been able to control Afghanistan, which was a major reason they had collapsed in 1989, and now the U.S. was the undisputed and sole superpower left. Furthermore, the military we had was the finest in the world. Just a fraction of our force had been enough to whip Saddam Hussein in a matter of days.

It was too big and too expensive to maintain an army and a navy at the levels we had built up to during the Cold War. The process had started under George Bush and accelerated under Bill Clinton. Congress and the Pentagon hated it, but it needed to be done. By the time the Republicans took back control of Congress in 1994, the Army had shrunk from eighteen divisions down to twelve, and the National Guard had from ten down to eight. The Navy was equally shrunk, from almost 600 ships at the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall down to about 400 at the time the Republicans took control. The Air Force and Marines were equally slimmed down.