Jackhammered

by Ed Bethune

  As we entered Cape Cod Bay, we hoisted the sails. Now free of the canal currents, we set a direct course for Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine, some 130 nautical miles northeast. It was late afternoon so it appeared that we would most likely spend two nights at sea before reaching port. There is a way to coastal-cruise north to Maine, stopping at various anchorages along the way thus avoiding nighttime on the open sea but that is not blue water sailing, and it is not how we wanted to do it. We planned to sail direct to Maine in the blue water and coastal-cruise our way back to the Chesapeake.

  The first night was pleasant with not much wind, but we managed to cover about thirty miles. The second night was beautiful, perfectly clear skies, many stars, and a good breeze. When the sun rose, we started making plans for our landfall and decided to divert into Boothbay Harbor instead of going to Monhegan Island. We were tired and that cut a few miles off our trip. We arrived in Boothbay, picked up a mooring, put the dinghy over the side, and headed to town. Our hairy experience in the fog near Block Island, and the lesson we learned in the swift current of Cape Cod Canal would stick with us forever. The lessons you learn from experience are the ones that make you a better sailor.

  We had a glorious two weeks going from one anchorage to another in Penobscot Bay and Casco Bay. We ate lobster almost every day. The best place we found was in Boothbay Harbor at the Lobsterman’s Co-Op, an operation run by the families of the men who catch the lobsters. By cutting out all the middlemen, they offer steamed lobster and corn on the cob for a fantastically low price. Occasionally we would go ashore, buy three or four steamed lobsters and retreat to the cockpit of Salute for a lobster feast. The gulls loved us because we would throw the leftovers up as high as we could and they would pluck them out of the air and then fight over the scraps.

  When it was time to leave Maine we headed southwest along the coast, managing to find a number of good anchorages before the end of most days. Our last stop in Maine was at Kennebunkport, and as we headed into the Kennebunk River, we heard someone calling our boat name on the radio so we answered. It is a good thing we did because the caller was notifying us that we were about to go aground. In the days before GPS, it was especially critical to pay close attention to the buoys and fixed markers. It is easy to confuse markers because they are often different and hard to see but I thought I had read the markers right, so at first I did not understand what the caller was trying to say. Then it hit me: We were heading straight across a rocky shallow that might not be deep enough for Salute. Another lesson learned, I diverted and avoided the rocks. In Maine and most northeastern waters, the bottom is not soft sand or mud like the Chesapeake bottom. In the Northeast if you hit bottom a rock is probably going to make a hole in your boat. So far, on this trip we had gathered experience with fog, currents, and now rocky bottoms that can sink a boat in a matter of minutes.

  Finally, we were safely in the Kennebunk River. We put the dinghy over the side, and when we got ashore Lana saw a pay phone and said she was going to see if she could reach Vice President George Bush. The Bush family has long owned a marvelous home on Walker Point on the north side of the entrance into the river. I pooh-poohed the idea, saying he would not appreciate the interruption but Lana ignored me. Within minutes, she had Vice President Bush on the line and he told us to wait where we were.

  Soon he came roaring up to Chick’s Marina in a fast cigarette boat, followed by another boat full of Secret Service agents. He tied up and since the tide was out, he had to climb up a long ladder to reach the place where we were waiting. He was dressed in an old floppy hat and a suede jacket that must have been twenty years old. He was enjoying every minute of the day, a trait I admire and Lana practices. He invited us to come to Walker Point for lunch and a swim, so Lana, Paige, and I piled into his cigarette boat and off we went. He gunned it as we left the river, dodging one lobster pot after another.

  We tied up at his private dock and walked up to the house where Barbara Bush and the vice president’s eighty-two-year-old mother, Dorothy, met us. We had a nice lunch with soup made from bluefish that the vice president had caught that morning. Then we sat for several hours around the pool. Mrs. Dorothy Bush asked me a lot about my congressional district and asked me about the issues that were important to me. We talked about many issues, but when I mentioned the nerve gas issue, it set her off. She was on my side and opposed to the position of the Reagan Administration. I quickly ended the discussion because her son, the vice president, had to support President Reagan’s position on nerve gas. In fact, he had been in the meeting that I had with President Reagan on May 25, 1983, just three months earlier, when Clem Zablocki and I argued against the nerve gas program. (In 1989, Vice President George Bush became president of the United States. In 1990 and 1991, he took several bold steps that led to a ban on the production and use of chemical weapons.)

  As we were getting ready to leave, Mrs. Dorothy Bush asked me where we were going after Kennebunkport. I told her we intended to stop in Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard and then head on to New York City via the Long Island Sound. She said, “Oh, you must see Cuttyhunk, it is magnificent. You must tell your captain to stop there.” I told Mrs. Bush we would definitely stop in Cuttyhunk, but that we had no captain. She was stunned that we had sailed a thirty-one-foot boat from the Chesapeake to Maine and that we had no captain.

  The Bush family has money, lots of it, so Mrs. Bush’s vision of a blue water cruise was quite different from ours. I finessed my way out of the delicate moment by telling Mrs. Bush that Lana and I decided long ago that I would be captain of Salute, but Lana is the admiral and she makes all the strategic decisions about where to go and how long to stay. Mrs. Bush liked that division of labor and wished us well, but with characteristic feistiness, she repeated her insistence that we stop in Cuttyhunk.

  Vice President Bush, Barbara Bush, Lana and me at the Vice President’s Residence in Washington, D. C. in 1983.

  As we were getting ready to leave Walker Point, I mentioned that I had tried to catch a fish on the way to Maine but had no luck. The vice president, claiming to be a “great bluefish fisherman” got out his tackle box. He showed me several lures, proudly explaining how each had landed a record bluefish. Then he gave me a strange looking lure and guaranteed it would catch a fish. I trolled that lure all the way from Walker Point to the Chesapeake and never got a strike. I have reminded Mr. Bush of that ever since, and he always gets a big laugh out of it and then says, “It must be the fisherman because that is a great lure.”

  We timed our return trip through the Cape Cod Canal to coincide with a current that was going our way. We made it through the canal in an hour, two hours less than it had taken when we transited against the current. When we entered Buzzards Bay we headed for Woods Hole, the passage that leads into Vineyard Sound and gives access to the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. We spent three glorious days anchoring in and around the islands, including an all-important stop in Cuttyhunk, and then we headed west.

  We stopped in Newport for a couple of days and then continued west into Long Island Sound. We took a slight detour to spend a day in Mystic, Connecticut. There we toured the excellent Mariner’s Museum and boarded several old sailing vessels. The next morning we headed back into Long Island Sound, bound for New York City.

  When we approached Oyster Bay, which lies on the south side of the Long Island Sound near New York City, we saw many little white sails going in all directions. It was a regatta sponsored by a ritzy club in upscale Oyster Bay. The day’s race was about to begin and as we approached the sailboats, we saw a large motor yacht loaded with scores of finely dressed New Yorkers. It was the hoity-toity crowd in their starched white shirts and navy blazers out for a proper afternoon of yachting and race watching. We were on a course that would take us right through the middle of the racing boats and close to the big boat of observers.

  No one would ever mistake Salute for a racing boat. She was a blue water cruising vessel and she looked li
ke one. We had our dinghy stowed upside down on the foredeck and our life raft was lashed astern of the helm. Lana, Paige and I were not dressed in finery, we were in blue jeans, and to cut the description short, we looked like a waterborne version of the Joad family in Steinbeck’s classic, The Grapes of Wrath.

  I was not smoking at the time, but I had a pipe and some old tobacco on board so Paige and I challenged Lana to light up the pipe and put it in her mouth when we sailed past the hoity-toities. I did not think she would do it, but we kept goading her, and to my surprise, she lit up the pipe and clenched it between her teeth. We tried as hard as we could to keep a straight face as we sailed right through the racing boats and within ten yards of the motor yacht. We were so close that Paige and I could see the stunned reaction of the hoity-toities. Paige had the best take on what they must have been thinking. She said, “They were in the middle of their ritzy Oyster Bay yachting club event, and here we came, a boat load of white trash sailing right through as if we owned the place.”

  As soon as we were out of earshot Lana, Paige, and I laughed like crazy. It was the most memorable part of the trip, at least so far. That night we tied up on a mooring at City Island and witnessed another spectacular lightning show. Paige and I went forward in the middle of the storm to check our lines, and Lana was screaming her belief that a lightning bolt would strike us dead, but it did not. After the lightning stopped, we collapsed in our bunks and got a good night’s sleep.

  The next morning, having learned about currents, we timed our passage through Hell’s Gate, the notorious passage from Long Island Sound into the East River. Using what we had learned about currents, we figured out when it would be slack tide, and that is when we went through.

  As we headed down the East River, Paige, in a bikini, was steering Salute. She was standing in the cockpit with one foot on the tiller, guiding our boat down the river toward New York Harbor. As we passed the United Nations, there was a bunch of construction guys working on a building right next to the river. When they saw Paige, they stopped working and gave out with their best New York catcalls and whistles. I think Paige and Lana enjoyed it. I did not like it, but the workers on shore could do no harm. We were moving smartly down the river so I considered it a case of “no harm, no foul.”

  We entered New York Harbor, dodged the Circle Line tour boats, the Staten Island Ferry, and a fleet of barges. Then we headed east toward the point of Sandy Hook, New Jersey and the Atlantic Ocean. The Statue of Liberty was off to starboard, and quite a sight she was. It was a rough ride because the tide was coming in and the winds were going out. That always causes the waves to build up, but we cleared the point and headed down the coast to Cape May, New Jersey.

  It was our last overnight blue water sail of the trip, but we were close enough to the coast to see the glow of the lights onshore. Just as the sun rose, we passed through the inlet into Cape May. We had only to go up the Delaware Bay, through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal and we would be back in the safe confines of the Chesapeake. The next day as we neared Annapolis, we heard a radio broadcast with the news that a colleague, Congressman Larry McDonald, a Democrat from Georgia and a medical doctor, was a passenger on board Korean Air Lines Flight 007, the plane that was shot down by Soviet interceptors. An archconservative Democrat and a member of the John Birch Society, Larry believed powerful groups in the United States were covertly trying to bring about a socialist world government. Liberals in and out of the media ridiculed Larry then but today, major news outlets regularly debate his thesis.

  Our first venture into blue water sailing was a checkered experience, but we proved we could make a voyage, even if we did have some tense moments along the way. This trip, during which we learned about fog, shipping-traffic, tidal currents, rocky bot toms, and a host of other hazards, became the foundation for a career decision we would soon make. Now, however, it was time to get back to work.

  38

  JIM WATT RESIGNATION

  Never attribute to malice that which can

  be adequately explained by stupidity.

  Anonymous

  In the early 1980s, The Beach Boys performed at the Independence Day concert on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The annual concerts on the Fourth of July were popular, attracting hundreds of thousands of people. In 1983, Jim Watt, the secretary of the Interior, announced that he would not allow rock bands to participate in the annual celebration because they encouraged drug use and alcoholism and attracted “the wrong element.” Watt then chose Wayne Newton to perform at the 1983 Independence Day celebration instead of the Beach Boys, and his decision created a whirlwind of criticism. The Beach Boys were offended, and said so. Nancy Reagan apologized for Watt and Vice President George H. W. Bush said, “They’re my friends and I like their music.”

  It was a typical Jim Watt screw-up, and White House staff tried to defuse the issue by presenting Watt with a plaster foot with a hole in it, symbolizing his having shot himself in the foot.

  I have always been slow to criticize people in high office for gaffes because it is easy to misspeak and, like most Americans, I am willing to forgive and forget but Jim Watt was a problem. He was an ideologue with little or no tolerance and that led to a long list of dumb, public comments. As an example, in 1982, he said, “I never use the words Democrats and Republicans. It’s liberals and Americans.”

  In September, l983, he crossed the line with me. Secretary Watt, in a speech to the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, mocked affirmative action by saying this about the makeup of the Interior Department’s coal-leasing panel: “I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. We have talent.”

  When I heard what he had said I came unglued. His insensitive remarks were wrong. His gratuitous use of the word “cripple” reminded me of the time my father was looking for work and a man told him, “We don’t hire cripples.” Daddy, uncharacteristically, whacked that man senseless with his cane. When I asked my dad why he hit the man, he said it never bothered him for someone to say he was crippled, but it did bother him if he believed the person meant to disparage him.

  I went directly to the House floor and called for Secretary Watt to resign. In my speech, I said, “The greatest man I ever knew was a cripple and he never walked a step in his life without a cane, a crutch, or an artificial leg. That man was my father.” It was my way of whacking Jim Watt for Daddy. I think the secretary’s comment was stupid, not malicious, but it was disparaging and unbecoming for a member of President Reagan’s cabinet.

  A public controversy erupted and a few weeks later Watt submitted his resignation letter.

  39

  CONCERNS ABOUT OUR

  SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT

  The historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not do away with

  alienation but rather increases it, adding to it a lack

  of basic necessities and economic inefficiency.

  Pope John Paul II

  As my understanding of our federal government matured, I became concerned about getting something done in a system that is—more often than not—entangled in gridlock.

  Our constitution, conceived and written in simpler times, is a masterpiece. The founders made it hard for the federal government to expand, fearing that expansion would take freedom from the people. They put shackles on the federal government, a few of which are these: the separation of powers, a bicameral legislature, an independent judiciary, and presidential veto power. They envisioned a union of states and reserved rights to the states. They did not contemplate the wide-ranging, all-powerful federal government that has emerged since the Great Depression. They certainly did not expect the creation of a management-hierarchy with the federal government lording it over all other polities.

  The arrangement we have today is not working. The federal government is involved in every twist and turn of American life. We need to get back to federalism, a system suited to our constitution. Otherwise, pressure will mount for us to forsake our
constitution in favor of a European-style parliamentary system. Such a system would allow the current management-hierarchy, dominated by the federal government, to function quickly and with less political wrangling.

  When people speak of the nation being at a crossroads, and they do it every election, it is a fair comment. We have faced the same choice—federalism or management-hierarchy—every two years, for decades. The difference now is that time is running out. The argument today is essentially the same argument framed by Harrington and Simon in the late 1970s. If we do not soon reverse the inexorable trend toward big, centralized government and get back to federalism, it will be too late. Year after year, compromises made for the sake of getting something done lead to more and bigger government at all levels. I believe there is still time, but without strong action the management-hierarchy will win by default.

  Lately, proponents of a management-hierarchy are resorting to an undemocratic technique to circumvent the limits imposed by the constitution. They are using executive orders, administrative rules, official regulations, and other bureaucratic techniques to get around the complicated protections set up by our founders. The most egregious example of this occurred in late 2010 when the head of Medicare and Medicaid Services issued a regulation authorizing “end of life consultations,” and “advance planning for seniors.” A few months earlier the liberal Democrat Congress attempted to authorize the same concept, but when the people found out about it they saw it as an attempt to create government “death panels” that would pressure end of life decision-making. The people rose up en masse to register their objection to death panels. The liberals backed off, dropping the provision from the ObamaCare legislation but the bureaucrats in the Obama Administration could not have cared less. The head of the Medicare and Medicaid Services thumbed his nose at the people and issued the regulation anyway. These examples of bureaucratic insensitivity—there are many others—illustrate the urgent need to deal with the fundamental question: Are we to have a management-hierarchy or federalism?