Chapter 150: Graduations

June 2002

Charlie came home about a week later, his latest deployment finished. The Tarawa Amphibious Ready Group, which consisted of the Tarawa, the Duluth, and the Fort McHenry, Charlie’s ship, had arrived back in Norfolk. I had Captain Miller keep us apprised of the dates. Charlie had a fair bit of accumulated leave, and we told him that we expected him to spend at least some of it with his ancient and creaky parents, before old age and senility took us from him.

So it was that on May 8, a Wednesday, I got a call transferred to my office. “Hello?” I said, answering the call. I hadn’t been told who it was, just that I needed to answer it.

“Is this the President of the United States? Really? Wow! You must be important!” sounded a familiar baritone.

“Smart ass! It’s good to hear from you. You back on solid ground, where real soldiers work?”

“Only the candy ass ones. Yeah, we just docked this morning. I’ll be out of here in an hour. We should be there by late afternoon,” he told me.

“We? Who else is coming?” I asked.

“You’ll know when you see him.”

“Don’t try and be sneaky. I could give you lessons. Your cousin Jack was on the Tarawa, right? You bringing him?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Sounds fine. I’ll see you then.” For my next call I called Marilyn, at home with the girls. She promised to bring them down for the night.

Proving that not all pigs are equal, once Charlie and Jack made it off the ship, Charlie called a phone number he carried in his wallet and contacted the Secret Service. Within an hour a nondescript car picked them up and ferried the boys to the White House. It was probably a heck of a lot simpler that way. Charlie had a motorcycle up on blocks in storage outside of Camp Lejeune, and Jack had a car there as well. Without the car ride, they would have to travel with their compatriots back to Jacksonville, dig their vehicles out and get them running again, and then travel. We could cut out at least a day or two of that.

At about three in the afternoon, Captain Miller was admitted to the Oval Office. “Captain Miller, reporting with party of two,” he announced with a smile. Behind him marched in a pair of Marines in jeans and tee shirts.

I stood up from my desk and moved around it. “And a more disreputable party of two has yet to be found. Thank you, Captain Miller. I appreciate it.”

“Sir.” Miller took off and left me with my son and nephew. Jack Rottingen, Jr. was a little bigger and heavier than Charlie, and took after his father. Both boys were tan and muscular, with that high-and-tight semi-shaved head look the Marines liked.

I shook both their hands. “Damn, you two look good. How was the cruise?”

“I’m glad to be home!” announced my son.

“Same here,” agreed Jack.

“Have you had a chance to call your folks yet?” I asked my nephew. I looked over at Charlie. “Your mother and sisters will be coming down as soon as school is out. We’ll grill something if that’s okay.”

“Yeah, sure,” he answered.

Jack said, “I called and left a message on the machine, but Dad must not have been home yet, and Mom must be at the hospital. We left a message to call you if that’s okay.”

“Sure, no problem.” I led the boys towards the door. Opening it, I saw Mindy with my schedule in her hands. “Mindy, you’ve met Charlie before. This is my nephew, Corporal Jack Rottingen. I need you to do two things. Let housekeeping know Jack will be staying with us tonight and cancel everything else for the day.”

“Welcome home, Charlie. It’s good to see you again. Nice to meet you, Corporal.” She turned to me and said, “Yes on one and no on two. OMB and the Council of Economic Advisers just got here for a meeting with you.”

I looked back at the two young men. “I sometimes wonder who is working for whom. Listen, I’ll join you as soon as I can. Charlie, show Jack around and get settled. We can figure things out when I get there.”

“OO-RAH!” was the reply, and they looked around and caught the eye of somebody who led them from the West Wing. I grabbed a few things and went to my meeting.

I can’t say as I remembered much about the meeting. I basically rubberstamped some plans to end the deficit and the recession. Military expenditures were much more in control on this go. We had ramped up certain items, cut back on some others, and the Coast Guard had gotten a major refinancing. On the other hand, while Saddam Hussein was still being a mouthy asshole, I wasn’t spending a fortune keeping him under control, and had no plans to invade. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had cost us $200 to $300 billion a year all on their own, and none of that had been funded. In fact, Bush would have lowered taxes, and by some projections that would have created deficits of half a trillion dollars a year for as far as the eye could see.

Most of my thoughts were on the two young men by now drinking beer on the Truman Balcony. Jack had already re-enlisted, getting a promotion from Lance Corporal (E-3) to Corporal (E-4) out of the deal. He was making the sounds of a lifer. Charlie was a Lance Corporal and was probably going to get the same offer soon. He still hadn’t decided if he wanted to go career or not. I was going to have to talk to him about that. Despite what I had told him about not interfering, that simply wasn’t realistic. It was much too dangerous to put him into a combat situation, not for his sake, but for the sake of those around him! In Afghanistan, for instance, if the Taliban and Al Qaeda knew that the son of the U.S. President was around, they would be making human wave attacks for the chance to capture or kill him, putting his entire unit into massive peril. Would he want to stay in knowing that for the rest of my term he would never be allowed to serve with his unit if they were sent into combat?

I was interrupted halfway through my meeting by a call from my sister, so I put her on hold and had the call transferred up to the Residence (“And if those two nitwits don’t pick up, call me back and I’ll go kick some Marine ass!”) Eventually I was able to break free from the meeting and head up to the Residence.

As I suspected, the two were lounging on recliners out on the Balcony, working on a cooler of beers. Jack was legal, Charlie not so much. He wouldn’t turn 21 until October, not that I intended to chew his ass over it. I grabbed a beer and headed into the bedroom to change, and then re-joined them. I was about to say something when we all heard the turbine whine and rotor flutter of an approaching helicopter. Marine One was bringing Marilyn, the twins, and Stormy in for landing on the South Lawn, right out in front of us. Technically, it isn’t Marine One unless I am personally aboard, but I have no idea what the call sign would be then. There are two types of helos flying for HMX-1, the Marine helicopter squadron assigned to carry me around. They flew either H-3 Sea Kings or, as was the case today, H-60 “Whitehawks”, a fancy variant on the standard Blackhawks the Army used.

The women all disembarked and I could see my wife’s semi-amused look when the three of us stood up and waved at them with beer bottles obviously in evidence. She pointed at us to the girls and said something none of us could hear, but I was sure was snarky. They all came in, and a minute later pandemonium reigned for a few minutes. Stormy rampaged in and almost knocked over the cooler as she greeted us.

“Good Lord! This thing really is a monster!” commented Jack as Stormy tried to jump into his lap.

“I told you,” replied Charlie. “You just didn’t believe me.”

Marilyn said, “Starting without me?” as she picked up an empty bottle of beer.

“It was a long day. I earned this,” I told her.

“A likely story!” She turned to Charlie and gave him a hug. “Oh! I have missed you!”

“It’s good to be back, Mom.”

“You, too, Jack!” She hugged him next. “Have you talked to your folks yet?”

“Mom called a little while ago. She knows I’m here,” he responded.

“Well, tell me your plans and I’ll call her back. I haven’t talked to her in a week or two anyway.”

The boys looked at each other, and Jack said, “We’ve both got a couple of weeks of leave. We were thinking of hanging out here, or somewhere in town, and then going up to Rochester for a week. After that I need to get back to Jacksonville. As soon as my leave is up, I transfer to Twentynine Palms, 1 ^st of the 7^th.”

“Huh. Twentynine Palms, that’s the middle of the Mojave Desert. Better take your suntan lotion,” I commented.

“OO-RAH! They also tell us it’s a dry heat, but I don’t know whether I believe that or not. Mom and Dad said they’d come out and visit after I get settled.”

I snorted at that. “Tell them to do it over the winter.” I looked over at Marilyn. “You might as well call Suzie and tell her the boys are safe but trying to drink Washington dry. We’ll fly them up on the G-IV when they want to go.”

She nodded. “If they fly up on Friday, I might want to take the girls up for the weekend. I haven’t seen your sister in months.”

“Fine by me. You two sort it out and get it set up. If it’s just you and the girls, it will probably be okay. If I go it will turn into a zoo. Invite them down for a vacation sometime, too. We can put them in President Blue’s Room.”

Marilyn gave me a dry look. “Very funny.” Then she picked up the phone and got the switchboard to connect her to my sister.

The visit to Marilyn’s family had been a disaster at Christmas. The entourage surrounding me, and the security required, was simply beyond belief. You have to see it to believe it. It was far beyond what I had traveled with as the Veep, and light years beyond the private security I had used as a Congressman and businessman. Marilyn and the kids needed protection, but not like what went with me. It would be a fraction of the cost to fly Marilyn’s entire family to Christmas at the White House, compared to flying us to them. It affected everything, too. I couldn’t just drive over to Tusk Cycle to see my friends any longer, either. Leaving aside the apoplexy that the Secret Service would have if I wanted to visit a biker hangout, it practically shuts down a business when I make a visit.

I didn’t have a chance to speak to Charlie about his time in the Marines until after he got back from Rochester. I kept my mouth shut, but I was heartily thankful when he said he was getting out at the end of his hitch. “I like it okay, and I’m not sorry I joined, but floating around on a steel tub for months at a time isn’t quite as enjoyable as you might think.”

I smiled. “I never thought it would be. Leaving aside the seasickness part, that would have driven me crazy. At least your grandfather only had to go out for a few days at a time.”

“What do you mean? Your father?”

I nodded again. “Yeah, my dad was an ensign, and then a lieutenant jay-gee during the war. That would be World War II by the way, smartass. Anyway, he served on PT boats in the Caribbean. They weren’t much more than cabin cruisers with giant engines and some guns and torpedoes. They didn’t have enough fuel for more than a day or two.”

“You never talk about your father, not much anyway.”

I shrugged at that. “What do you want me to tell you about him, Charlie? The man disowned me, for Christ’s sake!”

“I don’t know. What was he like?” he asked.

I sighed. We had never really talked about my family. He knew my history, like practically every other American who could read, but that was it. His mother’s family was a part of his life, and so was his godmother’s. My mother and father, not at all. “Listen to the rest of the world, he was a great guy. He was the kind of guy you wanted living next door. He mowed his lawn, kept his house up, went to church, sent his kids to school, never cheated on his wife - you know, all the routine boring stuff. To me he was a royal prick. Mom was crazy and Hamilton was crazier, and as far as my old man was concerned, I was just collateral damage. I moved out when I was sixteen and I wished I had done it sooner.”

“Huh.”

“Hell, Charlie, go read a book. There must be a half a dozen biographies already written about me by now. None of the authors have ever spoken to me, but they are all experts.” I shrugged again. “Moving on to more interesting topics, what do you think you are going to do when you get out of the Corps?”

“I’m going to go back to motocross, but I might also try grand prix, you know, road racing. I got a chance right before I went into the Corps to try that, and it was really wild. I’ve been in contact with Bucky, and he and his father are still interested in sponsoring me. At least long enough to see if I can keep up with the younger guys.”

“You’ll be twenty-one, and you’re worried about younger guys?” I asked, incredulous.

“When I went pro, I was sixteen, Dad.”

I shrugged at that. Twenty-one and over the hill? Ridiculous! “Okay. That should be a lot more interesting than the Marines, anyway.”

“Huh?”

“Charlie, if you wanted to stay in, the Corps is going to restrict your duty.”

He gave me a dirty look at that. “You promised you wouldn’t do that!”

“I lied.” I held up my hands to ward off any attacks. “Listen, I don’t worry about you, but think about what would happen if it became known to the bad guys that the son of the American President was around. Suppose you had been in Afghanistan? There ain’t a one of those bastards I would trust with a busted nickel. Both sides would have been gunning for you, and even if you stayed safe, how many of your buddies and squadmates would die keeping you alive. I am responsible to them, just like I am responsible to you.”

“Huh.”

“What kind of casualties would we take keeping you safe? I won’t take that chance. As long as I am the President, you can’t get anywhere near combat,” I told him.

He looked out the window and muttered a quiet, “Shit!” After a few more minutes he looked back at me and nodded. “I want to finish my tour with the 3^rd of the 2^nd. Can I at least do that?”

“Sure. I’ll try to keep from invading anybody through next fall.”

“Thank you.”

I wasn’t overly sorry if he didn’t get a chance to be a hero. In my experience, the only people excited by action were those who hadn’t seen any. Once you had been up shit creek, you never really wanted to paddle back up there. You went, because you had signed up and said you would go, but you did it with clear eyes and a clear head. Kids wanted excitement. Grownups could live without it.

As far as being Presidential was concerned, I had known that I was going to face opposition to the weapons program cuts, and I had known it was going to be serious. Even so, knowing intellectually was not the same thing as seeing it in action. For the last few months things had been building, ever since the National Security Summit I had convened in March at Camp David. The cuts had become official on April 4, when the individual Deputy Undersecretaries in charge of the Army, Navy, and Air Force announced the specific program cuts and changes. That made the evening news, for sure, as well as the Sunday news programs. It wasn’t just the military that was pissed, so were the chickenhawks and neocons, and every Congressman or Senator from a state or district where the stuff was being built.

It was by pure happenstance that the Army came out the best, simply because they didn’t have any gigantic spending programs planned. They had invested the money in the Eighties and Nineties, and their newest major acquisition program was the Stryker, which I was leaving alone. Still, since I had been in the Army, this was used as ‘proof’ that I was biased in the Army’s favor.

In some ways, the Navy hadn’t been as badly hurt as it could have been. Even the admirals knew that the DD(X)/CG(X) simply wasn’t needed and was just way too expensive to build. It was already projected to cost almost half of what a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier cost and would probably go higher. Likewise, the Littoral Combat Ship was still on the drawing boards and was nowhere near any kind of production point. On the other hand, I was happy to keep funding the stuff that worked, like the Arleigh Burkes, and new transports and auxiliaries, and the Navy kept the Spruances and Kidds in commission.

The admirals and generals weren’t stupid, because dummies don’t make it to the top in any system. They knew they couldn’t fight me on every single weapons program. This was one of those useful rules of war, he who attacks everywhere, attacks nowhere, and he who defends everywhere, defends nowhere. You have to be picky. Some battles you can’t win, so be choosy and fight the battles you think you can win. They decided to fight for the F-35 Lightning II, the Joint Strike Fighter.

The F-35 was the latest and greatest aerial wonder-weapon, a state-of-the-art airplane that could almost think for the pilot and would protect him from anything while dealing out death and destruction to everybody. Well, that was the advertising spiel, anyway. On paper it looked great. We would take everything we learned from making the F-22 stealth fighter, and make it into an all-in-one fighter-bomber, capable of both attacking other planes and carrying bombs and missiles to attack ground targets. It would be somewhat slower than the F-22, so that would make it less expensive. Even better, it would come in three versions. One version would be owned by the Air Force and would be a conventional fighter to fly from regular landing strips. Another version would be the same plane for the Navy but converted to operate from carriers, with a tail hook and the modifications to be catapult launched. Finally, you had a version just for the Marines, which took all this whiz-bang wonderfulness and turned it into a vertical lift off and landing platform. You would get marvelous economies of scale from selling the three planes to the military.

That was the theory, anyway, and Lockheed-Martin was pushing it hard. The plane had been on the drawing boards since 1996, and the Pentagon had run tests on it and a competitor from Boeing. They had built prototypes, and in early October of 2001, shortly after I became President, the Pentagon had picked the F-35 over the Boeing F-32 and moved it into the next step of the system, which was a more detailed design and engineering program that would lead to a contract to build the planes. Now it was in my lap to kill it off.

I knew, from my knowledge from before that this gizmo was going to be a monumental boondoggle. While I had never really followed the technical stuff then, the program had been such a disaster as to make all sorts of national headlines. The Navy version never really worked; the stealth features and the overall shape of the plane didn’t allow a tail hook to be installed, and by the time they fixed that it was a totally different bird from the Air Force version. The Marine vertical takeoff version was even more dangerous than the AV-8 Harrier it was replacing, and the Marines issued orders to not use that feature, which made it an incredibly expensive land-based fighter. Only the Air Force version performed as expected, and at $100-plus million a plane was several times more expensive than the perfectly fine aircraft it replaced. Already foreign buyers were starting to ask some pointed questions about affordability, and the price was still less than half what it would ultimately become.

Lockheed-Martin fought back on several fronts. This was going to be a major moneymaker for them and might well be the last manned combat jet ever made before the robots took over. They were pushing on two fronts, one public and one political. The public front was the most obvious. The costs really weren’t that high, each plane was three to four times as effective as older planes, America had to stay Number One, and this was the way to do it - if Jesus was going to fly a fighter, he would fly the F-35! There were a lot of numbers that could be spun to show that the F-35 was the plane to buy.

The political attack was much more dangerous. For decades now the weapons manufacturers had realized that the real buyer of their gear wasn’t the Pentagon, but Congress. As a result, they spread out subcontracting and parts supplies across as many states and districts as possible. The F-35 might be assembled in Fort Worth, Texas, but the parts were coming from everywhere, from Maine to California, and from Florida to North Dakota. In some cases, they went to the extreme of buying parts from a supplier barely capable of making them, in a state farther away and for more money, simply to get the production into another Congressional district, and get that Congressman on board. Even the Maryland Ninth had seen this sort of thing. We didn’t build weapons in suburban Maryland, but we did build some electronics, some of which went into weapons.

When we announced plans to cancel the F-35, the pushback was immediate. Lockheed-Martin sent a representative, usually retired military, to every Congressman and Senator with any kind of production for it in their state or district, even if it was simply a ball bearing. They were informed that the F-35 was vital to America and that without it the angry hordes would be swamping our borders and eradicating our way of life. Worst of all, it would end up closing a factory, and throwing thousands of people out of work! ‘ By the way, Congressman, this other fellow I am with is representing a lobbying group for our nation’s defense, and he would like to discuss campaign contributions with you.’ The various military suppliers had this down to a fine art by now, and often used each other as subcontractors and component suppliers, so that we ended up facing a unified wall. More than a few politicians have caved in over the years.

I was willing to take a lot of heat over this, and our counterattack focused on things we could do cheaper, like continuing to buy newer, updated versions of the existing proven airplanes. The F-15, F-16, and F-18 all worked, so let’s keep improving them. Also, for times when you absolutely need stealth, or simply can’t risk pilots, let’s use drones, which cost a fraction of the price, and were getting more powerful and useful by the day. Above all, Congressman, which programs in your district should we cut to pay for this? Have you talked to the old folks there about closing that hospital they like, so the funds can be given to the Pentagon? No, well, I am sure you’d like to see taxes rise, because President Buckman is not going to pay for this stuff by borrowing the money from the Chinese!

Some of these conversations took place privately, and some took place on the Sunday news shows. A valuable ally proved to be the defense industry itself, since one of the things I was promising was that we weren’t necessarily cutting the budget, but we were certainly rearranging it. Lockheed-Martin was fighting for the F-35, but Boeing wanted all that money so it could build F-15s and F-18s, and there were drone manufacturers who were promising things for their chunk of the change. A certain portion of my plan involved getting them to fight each other. Their plan was to increase the military budget, so that they could have their cake and eat it, too. They wanted the Pentagon to buy all those other planes and F-35s!

There were several political initiatives that spring aimed at forcing me to back down and reinstate the F-35 development program. First, by mid-May, came a non-binding resolution out of Congress urging a reconsideration of the program, which got overwhelming support. Even the most liberal of Democrats could vote for a resolution to keep studying something, especially if it came wrapped in a campaign contribution. I ignored it and didn’t budge.

The next step was a series of amendments to other spending bills. This is a marvelous and time-honored tactic to get something passed, sometimes for good and sometimes not. You take an ordinary bill that everybody wants, say a highway spending bill, and then you tack on a rider or amendment, for something else. That other thing can be on anything under the sun, such as a subsidy for cotton candy manufacturing (sponsored by sugar manufacturers). Sometimes they are harmless. Often they are controversial, like an amendment to ban Federal funding of birth control or a requirement to only teach abstinence. They could even affect overseas policy, by attaching a rider to a bill that would ban exporting condoms (right wing) or require the recipients of foreign aid to not be military dictatorships (left wing).