Rensselaer crossed west on the Key Bridge early in the morning when the traffic was light, the wind was cold, and the ducks on the Potomac still slept, their heads tucked beneath their wings. To supplement his midday hour at the gym he almost always walked from Georgetown to and from his work at the Pentagon.
Like all politicians, Freeland, the Secretary of the Navy, was deliberately inscrutable, unpredictable, and unreliable: you couldn’t know what he was really about or where in his eyes you stood. His thinking was mainly a form of calculation, and people were nothing more than either encouragements, accessories, or impediments to maneuver.
As he crossed the bridge, Rensselaer thought back to a hot day in June the year before, in Freeland’s Mercedes convertible with his personal aide, an irresistible, underemployed redhead known to all—despite her discretion, intelligence, and fluency in several foreign languages—merely as “Rusty.” She was driving him back to Georgetown from the secretary’s estate in Middleburg, where several of the staff had been summoned to work on a weekday when Freeland wanted to stay near his horses, his helipad, and his pool.
To avoid the crowded main arteries, she took the back roads. Many of them were very old, and their white macadam unfurled leisurely amid the huge trees and horse fences of great estates. The Michelins on the Mercedes rolled steadily along the hot pavement as the sun shone down on Rusty, moistening her skin and liberating her perfume, which, Rensselaer imagined, she had applied to her low-cut, seersucker sun dress as well as liberally to herself. She was not unaware that her presence was having an effect upon her passenger.
“Is something wrong?” she asked. The question was loaded.
“No.”
“Really? You’ve been staring at me,” she said, shifting gears, and responsibility.
“I was looking at the road.”
“You were turned toward me, and you had a sort of dinosaur look, like you wanted to eat me.”
“I was looking at the road . . . on the left side of the car.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And, besides, there’s the Navy Secretary with the estate, the car you’re driving, the horses, the ships, and the Savile Row suits.”
“Him?”
“Yeah, him. You never leave his side. He’s handsome, rich, formidable.”
“He is formidable,” she confirmed. “No question. And he’s as wealthy as a cat.”
Rensselaer thought for a moment. “He’s what?”
“He’s as wealthy as a cat.”
“That’s something I’ve never heard.”
“It’s an expression. Everybody says it.”
Rensselaer closed his left eye skeptically and as if looking through a loupe. “Where are you from?”
“Chicago.”
“In Chicago, people say someone is as wealthy as a cat?”
“In my family they do. You say, ‘Oh, he’s as wealthy as a cat.’ But I’m not his girlfriend. Or his mistress.”
“Everyone thinks you are.”
“That’s the way it’s supposed to be. He’s gay.”
“Oh,” Rensselaer said. He had had no clue.
“It shouldn’t get in the way, but he doesn’t want to complicate things. It would ricochet around the fleets.”
“Yes, it would ricochet around the fleets.” “Most people close to him know, but he just wants to get on with business.”
“So, you . . . ?”
“I live with my boyfriend. He’s at State.”
“I see.”
“At the Pakistan Desk.”
“And he doesn’t mind that people think you’re Freeland’s mistress, or whatever? I admit that I did.”
“No. He knows I’m not, and he’s supremely confident: I love him for that. Jealous people get left. Jealousy repels, trust attracts. He calls me Trusty Rusty. I know it’s stupid, but I like it.”
In Georgetown when she stopped to let him off, the smell of good leather and her perfume rose in the heat of bright sun flooding into the car, and Rensselaer was enveloped in a kind of hallucinatory red. But that was that. Even had their ages been better aligned and she were unattached, after the divorce he could hardly imagine himself, at his age, finding someone else and starting over. She put the car in gear, pulled out, and drove back toward the Key Bridge, where before dawn as the ducks slept in the cold wind rippling the water below, he remembered this.
*
On his walk to and from work he passed through Rosslyn, with which he felt a linguistic kinship in that Rosslyn wasn’t spelled Roslynn and Rensselaer wasn’t spelled Renseleer. Both names managed an unexpected double s to begin with, and then to do without the expected double letters at or toward the end—e’s in his case, n’s in Rosslyn’s. The best part about Rosslyn was its name. Otherwise, like so many cities, it looked like a bunch of discarded appliances.
He had Arlington Cemetery and its almost palpable spirits entirely to himself. It didn’t open until eight, but he knew the guards, and when he was in uniform they let him pass. Twice a day he walked the length of this ground and experienced a devotion more genuine and powerful than any that might be sworn absent the many long lines of graves that validated it. To swear allegiance to and defend the Constitution was a wonderful thing that brought as much feeling as something of primarily intellectual import might.
But no matter the oath, those who had lived and died in service of it were what made it holy, not just as an article of faith but as a story of doing. It was to these men, and women—some of whom, and increasingly so, were soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines; and others who were the wives who waited—that his love and gratitude radiated, only to echo back as if somehow they had answered.
For the chain of command did not stop at the president. Hardly so. It rose far beyond him, to the people and the history of the United States, to the principles and stories of the living and the dead—nothing disappearing, nothing ever to disappear, at least in the lives of the faithful. The guarantors of this were those who lay silently beneath the elms as Rensselaer passed by.
*
Though he had to report sooner than usual, he was early even so, and he paused on a hillside amid the long rows of patriot graves and the massive trees risen from this hallowed ground as if to be their constant and devoted guardians. He would neither sit on a gravestone nor, because of his uniform, on the ground, so he stood in the wind and the rising sun, looking toward the Capitol as east light left the classical buildings on the Mall shadowed across their west facades.
Though saturated with history, Washington was less than four and a half of his life spans thus far: nothing compared to Jerusalem, Athens, or Rome. There was a lot to come, a lot to be weathered, and a lot to be done. Because the city was young, spacious, calm, and gleaming white, it promised the ideal. However. . . .
Only weeks before, his first assignment had been to sub for the Navy Secretary on a visit to a well dug-in senator perpetually hostile to defense, and naval appropriations in particular. “He’s from Minnesota, and uses us as a punching bag to get the ice-fishing vote,” the NAVSEC told Rensselaer. “He treats me like a waiter, so I’m sending you as a reminder that we’re part of a separate branch. You’re there to gather information so that I’ll be prepared when I do show, which I won’t. You’re my representative. Be diplomatic. We’ll have you driven over so you’ll be fresh, but take your time and walk back so you can get the idiocy out of your system.”
“You think that’s necessary?”
“Oh, I do.”
Rensselaer arrived at the Hart Building half an hour early and was kept waiting in the senator’s outer office for another hour. He wasn’t surprised. In government’s treasured hierarchies, those lower down must always wait. This gave him plenty of time to scan the hundreds of framed photographs—Senator Hamburger with presidents, with the justifiably deceased leaders of his own party, and alongside a few foreign potentates who had conspicuously tortured expressions. He thumbed through the senator’s spirited (i.e., ghostwritten) campaign manifesto, Hamburger’s Recipe for Minnesota. It was published by a New York publishing house owned by a conglomerate that had a lot of business in areas to which the senator’s committee assignments were highly relevant, and it fetched what Publishers Weekly termed “a rather high advance for a book that could have been written by a moth.” To add insult to injury, the senator’s political opponents went into bookstores and covertly shifted it to the regional cookbook sections, as if it were Minnesota’s Recipe for Hamburger. And when the senator was accused of touching a woman’s lower back, newspapers could not resist the headline, “Ethics Committee to Grill Hamburger in July.”
For team spirit and uniformity, the senator made his long-suffering staff wear embroidered baseball caps, even indoors. Not exactly in tune with the times, and never having been in a supermarket, he offered a choice between two slogans: “Ice Fishing Isn’t for Broads,” and “Hamburger Helper.”
The ceilings in Hart were pompously high to make up for the small offices necessitated by its pompous atrium. In the waiting area, a giant oil portrait served to inform Rensselaer that Hamburger had a tiny head and a pencil mustache. Eventually, the real thing said, “Have a seat, Captain. You are a captain, right?”
“Thank you, sir. I am.”
“So where’s your boss?”
“He had urgent fleet business, Senator. I can relay your concerns for when you do meet.”
“That’ll be in committee,” Hamburger threatened.
“Sir,” Rensselaer said, taking out pad and pen and trying to be as deferential as possible, “I’m ready to listen.”
The senator looked up at the high ceiling as if to check with God. “When the Ford was off New Jersey—people are always trying to invade New Jersey, right?—I went out to it in a helicopter. I was supposed to be impressed.”
“You weren’t?”
“Why would I be? It’s hollow. Twelve billion dollars and counting and it’s as hollow as a barrel.”
“If I understand you, sir, yes, there are problems with the EMALs and the munitions elevators, but they’re not going to persist, I can assure you.”
“That’s not the point. It’s hollow!”
“Hollow?”
“Empty, man. Just air. A giant, empty cavern. It’s a fake.”
“That’s the hangar deck, Senator, where the airplanes are kept.”
“Why not keep them outside, and fill the inside with something useful?”
“We can’t keep them outside all the time. There’s the weather. In extremis they could be swept overboard. Corrosion, being able to work on them. They need a lot of maintenance.”
“So? Build shelters for them on the outside, up top.”
“Sir, the flight deck has to be clear for launch and recovery. You know, when the planes take off and when they land?”
“Why not have elevators that would lower the shelters, then?”
“We do have elevators, only we lower the planes, and put them on the hangar deck, the hollow space.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to have pop-up shelters? The planes would be ready all the time, and they wouldn’t have to squeeze into the elevators. Have there been studies of this method?”
“I don’t think so. At least not yet,” Rensselaer answered, feeling seriously unmoored.
“You go back and you tell your boss that the people of the United States of America are sick of spending twelve billion bucks a copy for empty shells full of nothing but air.”
“I will.”
When Rensselaer returned, he said to the SECNAV, “He’s an imbecile.”
“No kidding.”
“A senator, a United States senator,” Rensselaer added in disbelief. “How can that be?”
“Oh,” the SECNAV said, amused, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Reflecting on this amid the dead of so many wars, Stephen Rensselaer naïvely resolved to be more assertive in the face of ignorant authority. There were plenty of fools in the Navy, but because their ideas were tested in flight, on the often wild oceans, and in their depths, it was not the same as in politics, the hollows of which were far deeper and darker than those of any ship, ever.
*
Before the secretary arrived, Rensselaer turned on the lights and sat down at a long table perpendicular to the secretary’s desk, which was itself a table with a leather top. In back of the secretary’s chair were ship models (one in a glass case), family photographs (divorced, with grown sons, he still kept a photo of his ex-wife), a complex government phone with more buttons than an accordion, and, partially hidden, a muscular shredder. An enormous gold-framed painting of a clipper ship on a green sea covered the wall behind these. The office windows looked out at the modest capitals of the Pentagon’s columns. The windowsills held several ceremonial swords on stands, and a sextant displayed in an open, mahogany box.
The Wall Street Journal, the Times, and Washington Post were laid out on the conference table. Rensselaer was about to review them for pertinent articles when the secretary came in, closely followed by Rusty. Freeland was white-haired, square-jawed, of medium height and build, in a tailored suit and red silk tie. Rensselaer stood.
“Anyone want coffee?” Freeland asked.
“No thank you, sir,” Rensselaer answered. The walk in the air had banished what might have been a hangover. Rusty shook her head almost imperceptibly. They sat down, Freeland at the head of the table, his chair askew and his legs crossed parallel to the table’s shorter edge.
“Last night,” Freeland announced, “the president made known that he wants to see the Navy Secretary and the Chief of Naval Operations this morning at nine. So, we and the CNO will get there at eight, and wait. Have you ever been to see him, Stephen?”
“No sir, never met him.”
“Or any other president?”
“No sir.”
“By the end of their terms, most presidents are as jaded and as easy to irritate as a forty-year-old dog. They just want out, and who could blame them?
“He completely ignored our posture statement. I’m sure he didn’t read it. Frankly, I’m not even sure he knows how to read. I do know that he wants larger ships because they’re more impressive. They are. I’m fine with more large ships as long as we can have smaller ones too. But he wants to get rid of the small ones, if you can believe it, because they’re small. Jesus Christ.
“He sprang this on the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs, who managed to talk him down somewhat. But maybe to save face or just out of belief, he wants some small vessels to sacrifice. He’s decided to scrap the Patrol Coastals.”
Now Rensselaer knew why he but none of the other military aides was there. “Having commanded a PC, you’re coming along. Rusty, you’ll take notes, and, of course, the president—like every president I’ve known—is made happy by the presence of uniforms and beautiful women. That’s just the way things are. Sorry, Rusty, if he won’t see through to your soul.”
“That’s all right. A lot of people don’t see through to my soul, and, to tell you the truth, I’d rather the president wouldn’t either.”
“Got it,” Freeland said. “And, Stephen, it’s not just because you’ve commanded a PC and are an eloquent and expert advocate, it’s because you’ll impress the president with your academic credentials, because he has none—although tread lightly.”
“Why would I even mention them? There’s no reason. And he did go to—”
“Yes, he did,” Freeland interrupted. “He was expelled for invading the president’s office. Ironic, isn’t it? And he got his degree in a special program that was kind of like work release.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Neither did the voters. The record was expunged.”
“Yikes,” said Rusty.
“I never said all this,” Freeland told them. “Right? He’s impressed by academic credentials, but he might be jealous, and then you’ll be cooked. Certainly it’s good that you were a SEAL. He loves the SEALs. They’ve got the best PR and the most movies. It’s a crapshoot, but I want to try to save the PCs. So let’s go. They have a coffee and tea service over there, with great cookies. On the way, we can get the etiquette straight.”
*
It was always dramatic, cinematic, and slightly ridiculous when the secretary’s motorcade rocketed out of the Pentagon’s underground garage—four black SUVs with smoked windows and corkscrew antennae. He and his aides could have taken the Metro, which would have been faster.
Crossing the Potomac, Rensselaer saw in his imagination the capital waterfront as it appeared in 1900: sailing ships in the main, but steamships as well, small launches and schooners; heavy trade, busy wharves; boats to Boston, New York, and Philadelphia; seagulls that had followed clippers up from the bay; and in the sunshine, floating like a cloud, the Capitol dome, taller than anything on the hill, white and new, or so it seemed. He yearned not for the past, but for a country and a people that in understanding mortality and knowing austerity lived simply, modestly, and in tranquility. It was comforting that the water below was unchanged, still master of the world’s surface, its memory of hundreds of millions of years unyielding and untouched.
“This president,” Freeland said, “cannot be contradicted. You can suggest a counter to what he says by prefacing it with ‘What if . . . ?’ or ‘I’ve been under the impression . . . ’ or ‘Do you think . . . ?’ or ‘Would you prefer . . . ?’ But you don’t interrupt him, or speak unless he calls on you.
“That president,” Freeland contrasted, pointing to the statue of Lincoln as it looked outward between the columns and then disappeared, “was a brave genius. This one thinks he is. What one hopes for is that you can walk out of there with your head. He thinks he knows everything, and he’s not friendly to defense. But no matter. It’s always interesting to be in the presence of the commander in chief. Presidents, Rensselaer—and I’ve known a few—are divided into distinct types: those who understand that they are just men, and those who don’t; those who loot the office of its honor, and those who bring honor to it.”
“And this one?”
“No comment. You’ll follow me into the Oval as my aide; Rusty will come in as the seductive note taker. I have no idea how many the CNO will bring. But the fewer people the better. When his chief of staff—or he himself—says, ‘Thank you,’ you get up like a rabbit. No, a pheasant. Bang! You’re up. You say, ‘Thank you, Mr. President,’ and exit quickly. That’s the drill.”
The SUVs rolled in past the first White House checkpoint, after which the three with the security contingent peeled off to the right toward the Ellipse to park and wait. Before the gate dropped at the second checkpoint a uniformed Secret Service officer looked in the windows and asked if there were any firearms in the secretary’s vehicle. Told there weren’t, he took a step back, the gate opened, and the SUV drove into the rectangular parking lot known as West Executive Avenue, past limousines with flags, and hulking Secret Service SUVs exactly like the one in which Rensselaer was riding.
Then they walked beneath the kind of canopy one doesn’t see very much these days even in New York where once they were legion, and after being greeted at the last checkpoint, ascended some cramped stairs into the West Wing Lobby. There they would remain for almost two hours.
Although the seating was not that comfortable, it was a lovely place in which to wait. Huge, museum-piece paintings lined the walls of a room of major if not palatial proportions, and the impeccable uniforms of the skinny, bored, young Marines who had to stand all day like cigar-store Indians lent a great deal of color. It varies from administration to administration, but White House secretaries are usually elegant and well turned out. The feeling is like going on a date in the days when there was such a thing as courtship, and when college girls came down the stairs to meet their boys they wore formal dresses and white gloves.
“As you’ll see,” Freeland said to Rensselaer, quietly, “everybody who waits here will be talking on a cell phone. I don’t. I think it’s rude, so I’d appreciate if you’d turn yours off.”
“I already did.”
Pleased, Freeland leaned back on the striped settee the three of them occupied. “I don’t know why, but I’m twenty years your senior, Rensselaer, and you remind me of my father, who’s ninety-five.”
“That’s a compliment, sir.”
“It is. Believe me, it is.”
Then they got a lot of reading done—newspapers, cables, and reports. When called to see the president they were confidently well prepared and informed. The CNO and two aides arrived on the instant, and they all proceeded at once, the secretary and CNO in the lead.
*
As they walked down the hall toward the Oval Office—for some reason they had been ushered in past the vice president’s suite—Freeland noticed that Rusty was a little shaky. “Rusty,” he said, “this is no big deal.”
“That may be easy for you to say,” she said tensely.
“We’re not going to see Saint Peter,” he whispered. “You’re superior to the president in every really important way, and don’t you forget it.”
As they waited in the Oval Office for the president, the secretary and the CNO chatting, their staffs silent, Rensselaer wasn’t thinking of or taking stock of himself, but he, a mere captain about to meet the President of the United States, would have had nonetheless every reason for equanimity.
Marines who have risen through the ranks and are older almost always have a lean and rugged look, which is not as common in the Navy. But Rensselaer, having been a SEAL and forever bound to extremely high levels of fitness, resembled those tough Marine generals who never betray the slogan, “Every Marine a rifleman.”
He had been in the military since 1985, when at the age of eighteen he had entered the Naval Academy. Now, at fifty-two, he stood six-foot-one. He was dark-haired, sharp-featured, clear-eyed—they were blue—and seemingly much younger than his years. Adding to every qualification earned over his career was the confidence derived from his great physical strength and endurance (for his age). This alone allowed him to care little for advancement and status, as if he measured everything in terms of surviving on an enemy coast.
He knew this strength would leave him. It was already beginning to ebb. Eventually, having paid little attention to position and career, on what would he rely? Nothing, but it didn’t matter, because by the time strength was gone he would be old enough to have realized that ceaseless competition among men offers no elevation at the end, no immunity to suffering and death, no insight as to purpose or what comes when life finishes its reign.
So, absent plot or maneuver, his career had meandered to follow his interests, his talents, and chance. At age twenty-five, a lieutenant, junior grade, and a SEAL, he had deployed in the Western Desert of Iraq, tracking and blowing up Scud missiles from a mile away in a camouflaged trench, with a 50mm sniper rifle and one incendiary round shot into the fat, volatile, liquid-fueled body of the missile. Before anyone could hear the report, the bullet had arrived, the missile had exploded, and most of those nearby were dead. Nonetheless, at times the Iraqis swept in with helicopters and troops, and at times Rensselaer and his team had to fight their way out against disadvantageous odds.
At twenty-seven, a full lieutenant, he became an SWO (surface warfare officer), and served on several ships for five years, at the end of which, in 1998, he arrived at Harvard, where after four years he exited with a Ph.D. in government and a thesis on nuclear strategy—the same subject of his thesis at the Naval Academy as a Trident Scholar—and was promoted to lieutenant commander. The next year, in the Second Iraq War, he commanded a Patrol Coastal in the Persian Gulf—or, as the Arabs insist, the Arab Gulf.
In 2005 at age thirty-nine he was promoted to commander, and then served for two years as the XO (executive officer) of a destroyer, after which he was detailed to staff duty for two years under Admiral Johnson, the Director of Strategic Systems Programming. Following that, he spent a year at the Naval War College, exiting as a captain, taking command of a destroyer squadron for two years, and, at fifty, commanding an amphibious ready group, and then, at fifty-two, being assigned to the Secretary of the Navy.
He was of senior rank, expert in nuclear strategy, an experienced combat veteran and SEAL, and he had held numerous commands at sea. The doctorate, the War College, and his overall presentation made him a natural for his current position, which, it was understood, would be followed by virtually assured promotion to rear admiral, lower half, where he had been headed anyway.
The doctoral thesis had become a well regarded book, and he was known in the highest reaches of the Navy through his articles in the Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute. They were carefully done, beautifully written, and two of them had stimulated important policy changes.
But despite the fact that his uniform was bedecked with the Naval Special Warfare Trident and almost as many ribbons as the CNO’s, including the Navy Cross, which the CNO lacked, and there he was, sitting in the Oval Office, soon to be an admiral, by his own lights and in fact he was a failure.
A late marriage had become a broken marriage with no children. The beautiful young woman sitting next to him reminded him of what he did not have: the completion, via union with such a woman, of something that he feared would always elude him. What he felt was sterility: not of achievement but of purpose. Nonetheless, he knew that it is hardly unusual to have lived and died in failure and puzzlement, and he knew as well that sometimes it is possible to redeem yourself in service.
*
Then the President of the United States walked in. Everyone stood, and the officers saluted even though their hats were at their sides and generally in the Navy one did not salute when uncovered. But it was the president. For a moment it seemed that anything could happen. And anything could, for there is no question that power is the reckless catalyst of great and improbable events.
With a rumble in his throat, the president fell arthritically into a chair at the head of two sofas in parallel like a giant equal sign, to which his visitors returned after he was settled. He used this chair for meetings rather than speaking from behind the Resolute Desk, because he needed a hearing aid and refused to get one. Being close to his interlocutors often gave them a thrill—unless they knew him. Various of his minions, familiar faces across the television channels and on the front pages of every newspaper in the country, stood around the room in languid poses. One, leaning against the wall, with his hands in his pants pockets, reminded Rensselaer of a cowboy.
Perhaps more than any of his predecessors, this chief executive had been elevated by fate. His father, a country doctor and member of the New Hampshire legislature, had saved the life of the governor’s only daughter when the governor was a young state employee driving a snowplow. When one of New Hampshire’s U.S. senators died in office, the man now President of the United States, who was then a lawyer in Hanover, was appointed to the Senate out of gratitude to his father the country doctor.
He won the next election, and the next, serving in the Senate largely at the behest of inertia. Without so much as a peep, he had consistently voted the party line and been conveniently absent for controversial decisions, and as he had virtually no accomplishments and a phobia of taking a stand, he decided to run for president.
Unlike any other candidate in the race, he neglected everything and put all his money on Iowa, where he won the caucuses by a stunning margin. Then he won New Hampshire as a favorite son and irritatingly familiar face (it was said that they wanted to get rid of him), and went on to sweep South Carolina partly due to his previous momentum but helped for sure by the fact that his wife—a former Miss South Carolina and a Ravenel—campaigned there while he was running around like a woodchuck in the Iowa corn.
Winning the first three primaries gave him great momentum, but he probably would have been knocked out by any one of his nastier, smarter, better-known rivals were it not for the fact that, while campaigning in California, a lunatic who thought his victim was Walter Cronkite shot him in the chest. For months he was touch and go in a coma. The entire country followed the medical reports like a soap opera, and as the primaries came and went even voters of the other party pulled the lever for him much as they might have clapped for Tinker Bell. By May it was all sewn up, just as he had been, though he didn’t know it. Upon awakening (for him) on the twentieth of June and being told that he was the presumptive nominee, he said, “I am?”
All the money that lay unspent in the primaries was diverted to the general election. At the convention, he was brought out in a wheelchair as they played “Happy Days Are Here Again.” With no sense of irony, the standing ovation lasted an hour. That fall he ran into a bit of a problem when his drunken driving convictions were discovered, but he won. And he understood, as did everyone else, that for better or worse God had made him president, for only God could have.
That isn’t to say that he had no political skills, for certainly he did. And he had a ruthless side perhaps somewhat like that of Jack the Ripper. This had allowed one of his many detractors to tag him with the description, “cruel but stupid,” a phrase that stuck to him relentlessly.
“I’ve got fifteen minutes and then I’ve got to greet the president of Babylonia or some shit,” said the head of state. “I asked that we get rid of those little boats and get more big ones. And you say no. What’s the problem?” He was irritated, drumming his fingers against the arms of his chair.
As unruffled as an English butler, Freeland said, “We can certainly do that, Mr. President, but there might be repercussions.”
“Like what?”
“I’ve brought along Captain Rensselaer. He was a SEAL, he has a Harvard Ph.D., and he’s commanded a Patrol Coastal. With the CNO’s permission, perhaps he can comment.”
The CNO nodded.
As suddenly as falling off the edge of a cliff one hasn’t seen in the dark, Rensselaer knew he had been brought along as cannon fodder, or at the very least the big bumpers between a ship and a pier or wharf that are known as camels. Rusty had the same revelation, and was glad she herself was not to be sacrificed. Rensselaer was new at the SECNAV’s, and could be replaced without much loss of efficiency.
“Who the hell are you?” the president asked.
“Stephen Rensselaer, sir.”
“I like your shoulder stuff more than the Admirals’.” The CNO’s shoulder boards were gold and white with thin blue edges. A captain’s was blue with four gold stripes and a star. “It looks more naval.” The president turned to the CNO. “Frank, yours is kinda wishy-washy, almost effeminate. We should do something about that.”
The CNO’s lips moved very, very slightly, until finally he said, “Sir.”
Turning back to Rensselaer, the president asked, “Rensselaer. Is that . . . that’s Dutch, isn’t it?”
“Yes sir, in origin. American since sixteen fifty-one.”
“In the Hudson Valley.”
“Yes sir.”
“Aristocrats.” This was not said in a friendly fashion.
“No, sir, not since seventeen seventy-six.”
“Well, it tends to linger, doesn’t it,” the president declared quite nastily, and as if he had won the point merely by his rhetorical question.
“Not in my family, sir.”
“Oh? Harvard?”
“The Naval Academy, sir, and then Harvard.”
“As I said, it tends to linger.”
“No sir, with all due respect. Where I come from, Columbia County, there are Rockefellers who are poor. One even died in Vietnam. My father was a foundryman upriver in Troy. My mother was a nurse. They weren’t aristocrats, and neither am I.”
Already, Rensselaer, the mere captain, had argued with the president.
“Okay,” the president said, more animated than usual, which at first was received by everyone as something good. But he was stirred by anger. “So, you tell me, what’s the downside of getting rid of the PCs?”
“Yes, sir. To begin with, PCs can go to vastly more contested areas in the littorals than can other ships. The PC is the smallest ship we have—”
“I know, that’s why I want to get rid of them,” the president interrupted.
“Yes, sir. Smaller than the PC are boats, which have neither the endurance nor the punch of the PC. The reason PCs can cover so much more area is that they have an eight-foot draft. The littoral combat ship, the next step up, has a fourteen-foot draft, and is a zillion times”—here he deliberately resorted to exaggeration—“as expensive. We no longer have the Perry-class frigates, but even their draft was twenty-two feet. And destroyers such as the Arleigh Burkes have thirty-two-foot drafts, sir.”
“What about an aircraft carrier?”
“Thirty-eight feet, sir. The PC is cheap to buy and cheap to operate. It’s a diminutive target. It’s equipped for surface combat against the kind of small-boat swarms the Iranians have in the Gulf, and against low-flying aircraft and some anti-ship missiles. It’s ideal for weapons interdiction, anti-piracy operations, and the protection—or destruction—of oil facilities such as drilling platforms and docks. It can infiltrate and exfiltrate SEALs, and sending it in harm’s way is not, due to its low cost and small crew, a major risk.”
“Captain, how much do you know about our black programs?”
“I know only the ones I know about, sir. If there are others, I wouldn’t know.”
“Directed energy?”
“I’m familiar, sir.”
“As far as you know, do these PCs have the ability to bed down a directed energy weapon?”
“They do not. They have neither the electrical generating capacity nor the hull space.”
“So?”
“I understand sir, but we’re building an extension to the class—the Athena. She’s bigger, with all-electric drive, and she’s intended eventually to bed a small, directed energy weapon.”
“You know, we’re not going to be in the Middle East forever,” the president said. “We’re energy independent and exporting. That place is a hellhole. As far as I’m concerned, if the oil supply is interrupted we can fill in, the price will stabilize, and we won’t have to pay for any more goddamned, two-mile-high, Bedouin office buildings built on sand.”
Rensselaer said, “But you know, sir, in response to the recent decades of warfare in the Middle East, Germany and Denmark have shifted to more blue-water forces. Already there’s a shortage of smaller-displacement warships in the Baltic, which requires them. If we scrap the PCs we’ll have to build them again from scratch. But if we gradually shift to the Athena class we would have assets of great value for use in the Baltic and the South China Sea, particularly in the Philippine archipelago.”
The president turned to Freeland and the CNO. “All right. Can we afford them?”
“No,” the CNO said.
“But we can!” Rensselaer exclaimed, carried away by the truth and forgetting all other considerations. “It’s not difficult. The Danes built their Iver Huitfeldt–class frigates for three hundred and seventy million dollars apiece. To build the equivalent ships in America would require double or triple that. But not if we take a lesson from them. How did they do it?” he asked rhetorically.
The president leaned forward, not out of interest but as if to say again, and newly imply, Who the hell are you and how the hell did you get in here? To do his job, or rather, to attempt it, the chief executive had to depend on hierarchy, delegation, and deference, none of which was present at that moment.
Rensselaer went on. “They asked their shipbuilding industry how they could do it, and heeded what was said. That is, pre-qualify shipyards, use international classification rules and civilian standards where possible, and provide very high levels of specifications. The navy rather than the contractors did the integration, they reused many components common to other ships in their fleet both for economy of scale and quick modular replacement. And to extend the lives of these ships, they installed double the electrical, cooling, and fiber-optic capacity needed at present. In short, they were smart, they worked hard, they weren’t weighed down by bureaucracy. Let the line officers, the engineers, and the shipbuilders build the ships.
“Trying to get anything done through the bureaucracy is like drying yourself with a soaking-wet towel.”
“Thank you, Captain. Russia and China are building up their blue-water navies. We have a limited budget. We’re going to have to do without some things if we’re going to build our three-hundred-fifty-five-ship fleet. I’m proud of that. When I go to rallies in Norfolk, Biloxi, San Diego, it’s incredible. Really high energy. The biggest naval build-up since Reagan.”
“Yes sir,” Rensselaer said, though actually the naval build-up was at a slowing in the rate of decline.
Relieved, the NAVSEC and CNO thought this would be the end of it and were just about to break in when they had the painful realization that it wasn’t. Without pause, Rensselaer followed on. “Mr. President, the truth is, the three-hundred-fifty-five-ship fleet by twenty forty-eight is sleight of hand.”
For a moment, the only one in the room breathing normally was Rensselaer. The president’s eyes narrowed like a boxer’s. “Do you mean to tell me,” he asked pointedly and threateningly, “that what my Navy Secretary and the CNO are telling me, and then what I tell the American people and the world, is sleight of hand?”
Rensselaer swallowed, looked down, and then looked up directly at the president. “Yes sir.”
The president leaned far forward, as if to spring. “Let’s hear it. And it better be good.”
“Mr. President, you’ve done far better than your predecessor in regard to the fleet, but, still, the only reason that by twenty forty-eight we may have three hundred and fifty-five major combatants—if indeed we reach that number—is because of the drastic service-life-extension programs. That is, keeping ships long past their planned retirements. Specifically, the DDG-51 destroyers up to ten years beyond their thirty-five-year lives, seven Los Angeles–class attack subs from thirty-three to forty-three years, and obviously many more when you take into account that even the published plan, subject to realistic cost estimates, would leave us fifty-four ships short.”
“Who said?”
“The Congressional Budget Office.”
“What the hell do they know?”
“They know.”
“It’s still up to me, not Congress.” This declaration terrified everyone else in the room, but they were used to it. The president went on: “I’m the commander in chief. I’m going to take care of the Navy.”
Once again, Freeland and the CNO thought—hoped—it was over. But it wasn’t, as Rensselaer added, quietly, and in full knowledge of what it would do, “And every year, Mr. President, Congress has appropriated more money for shipbuilding than either you or your predecessor has requested, sir.”
“Jesus Christ,” the president said. Then, turning to the secretary and the CNO, asked, “Where did you get this guy?”
They looked wonderfully sheepish and said nothing.
“Mr. President,” Rensselaer interrupted, “the Athena is built. She’s new, and has started fitting out. Are we going to just scrap her, sir?”
“Look, you have to contend with whatever small part of the Navy you have to contend with. I have to contend with the whole Navy, the whole Army, the Air Force, the Coast Guard, the budget, the Congress, the states, the parties, the electorate, every goddamned country in the world, and history, too. I have to have a different perspective, and I do. Give me that, will you?”
The president moved his head from side to side, looking down and letting out a kind of whistle. “I’ll try to understand your concern, Captain.” He glanced at his Patek Philippe.
“I know. I just want to make the most accurate case in regard to this particular decision, so that from your perspective you can appreciate the details closer to the ground. Because it’s from the ground up that events take their course. And, Mr. President, you make a good case, but it’s completely unconvincing.”
“What?!” the president said, shocked. The feel of the room was as if a dozen crossbow bolts had crashed through the windows and lodged in the walls.
Rensselaer responded as if the president had actually asked a question. “Sir, I know you have all that responsibility, but having a farm of a hundred acres doesn’t excuse planting one of them in brambles and poison ivy.”
As the mere captain appeared to be speaking to an equal or perhaps a subordinate, the president’s jaw dropped slightly. And then, as if an alien spacecraft had landed on the White House lawn, he said, “What the hell?”
And that was it.
“Thank you,” the chief of staff said.
Everyone rose at once, repeating, though not quite at once, “Thank you, Mr. President.”
As they were walking out, the president got up from his chair, looked over at the CNO and Freeland, and asked that they stay a moment.
“Who was that? What’s his position?”
“He’s my aide, Mr. President, newly appointed.”
“And afterward? What?”
“Rear admiral, sir, lower half. Given his record he’s past due for an important assignment. He’s an unrestricted line officer with the Navy Cross and a C-level suffix for billet requirements—that is, a Ph.D. Under his belt he’s got the Naval Academy and successful command of a Patrol Coastal, destroyers, a destroyer squadron, and an ARG. Sir, we need this kind of officer.”
“Fine, but for the year that I’ve got left, I want him outta here.”
“Sir?”
“The PCs will be retired without replacement or service-life extension. What do you call that, SLEP? Yeah. Strike the follow-ons to the new PC from the list. That’ll be a little more money for other ships. But you can finish up the. . . .”
“Athena.”
“The Athena. Let my successor deal with that. It’ll be soon enough. Meanwhile, put Rensselaer in charge of it, fitting it out, whatever is done with a new ship. And when it’s ready, put him in command.”
“Mr. President,” the CNO said. “It would be unprecedented for a captain to command a PC. Usually it’s a lieutenant commander, or, at most, a commander. A captain on the promotion list for admiral would be very noticeable. He’d almost surely resign.”
“Well wouldn’t that be tragic. The Athena is his baby, and he gets nothing more. Understand? I want to be very clear. Nail him to it.”