Motorcycles: A Magnificent Obsession, Part Two

From My Open Salon Blog: NOVEMBER 21, 2008 4:50PM

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Top: Old Executive Office Building (EOB) viewed from White House side.

Middle: Old Executive Office Building viewed from front, Pennsylvania Avenue, side. West Wing of the White House can be glimpsed on left.

Bottom: West Wing White House Portico entrance viewed from West Drive. West Drive runs between White House and Old EOB.

There are 10 parts to this motorcycle memoir. Quick links to each are in the Archives side bar on the right.

Part Two:

I immersed myself in work, almost giddy about the fact that I was working in the Executive Office of the President. I wanted to do the very best I could and immediately realized that until I learned to competently do what was assigned to me I would be a drag on the system; and that would make a perfectionist like me miserable. That only spurred me to work longer hours as well as coming in every Saturday and some Sundays.

Soon I was spending almost all of my time at work, ignoring my family. I told myself that was alright because I was working for a wonderful President who would help change the world, and that this was the chance of a lifetime. As I became better at my job my superiors heaped praise on me. Rather than just saying “thank you” and slowing down to a normal pace, that only further spurred me on.

My private home life did not really exist. My children were an after thought and my then wife, Jan, fit nowhere in the equation. It wasn’t that I didn’t like my kids or wanted to shun my wife. It was that they simply were not relevant to my ambitions. I told myself that if I were to really make it in Washington, well, there would be plenty of time for them then.

As for now, they should understand and support me in my career. I was bringing home more money each year. We were saving a little all along. My school loans were being paid back on schedule. And we should be able to buy a house in a few years. They had it good. That is, I thought that they had it good. I never asked them what they thought.

Motorcycling was relegated to an after thought for the first year at the Executive Office. I rode my Honda to work almost every day, year round. But it was only a convenient source of transportation that got me the eight miles to and from the Executive Office far quicker than I could in a car. And, with the bike, I never had a parking problem.

In those days the White House staff and the Executive Office staff were far smaller than today. There were less than 100 people working directly in the White House and about four times that many working across the alley in the Executive Office Building (EOB) where I worked. The EOB, the former Navy, War and State Department building, is on the corner of 17th and Pennsylvania Avenue.

In that building, joined to the White House by an underground tunnel, were the Offices of the Vice President and the Offices of the staffs that formed the Executive Office of the President. The largest of the Executive Office organizations, the Bureau of the Budget, where I worked, occupied all of the first two floors except for a small suite of offices for the Vice President.

The rest of the building was occupied by the other, much smaller, branches of the Executive Office: the Council of Economic Advisors and the Office of Science and Technology. Maybe a half dozen other small, semi-permanent groups had offices there as well, such as the Water Resources Council and some environmental task forces.

The Secret Service has some of its detail stationed in the EOB on the ground floor (the floor below the “First Floor” that one could enter at street level.) The tunnel to the White House connected to the Basement level further below.

To give an idea of the small size of the President’s support team and the looseness of security, the first time I rode my Honda to work I stopped at the west Pennsylvania Avenue front gate of the White House, waved a photo ID at the guard and entered the lane between the White House and the EOB.

The guard had never seen me in his life, knew nothing about me, and the laminated photo pass could have been made by anyone. I then proceeded to the parking area immediately opposite the White House entrance and parked my bike on a cement pad reserved for bicycles and a couple of motorcycles. There was no further security as I turned west and entered the EOB.

Had I turned east into the White House there was one guard sitting just inside the double door entrance. Later I would routinely enter the White House that way and the security was the same; wave a photo ID and be waved through. This was true even after President Kennedy was killed in Dallas. After that the gates around the White House were kept shut except when in use and employees and visitors had to sign in as well as producing ID before entering the area.

I got to know a couple of the guys who parked their motorcycles there and one, Earl Darrah, turned out to work in the same Natural Resources Division that did. Earl would come to be my best friend and motorcycling buddy. Twenty years later he would be the best man at my wedding to Sue. He died three years ago from cancer. We visited him at his home in Tampa shortly before he died.

From 1963 until 1968 I worked in the Executive Office, being promoted annually from grade GS 9 to GS 14 in less than four years. It was not possible to rise in the Civil Service faster than that. My workaholic nature was paying off in my career.

My family life was a shambles. My children were growing up for all practical purposes without a father. My wife soon gave up on trying to have a life in which I was a true partner and decided to go back to work once the kids were all in school.

She was quite successful in designing and running a technical library for a nuclear energy consulting firm. It provided her some satisfaction, but that was small solace for the virtual loss of a husband.

It was at about this point where I started spending more time with a mistress that I had started hanging around sporadically since high school. Her name was alcohol. She was sly, forever agreeable, offered no resistance to my advances, and didn’t object to sharing me with either my work or my motorcycling.

Next: Unfortunately Booze, Work and Motorcycling DO mix.

Monte

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It Only Takes One: Inviting Violence

From my Open Salon blog: October 21. 2008

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I moved to Washington DC in July, 1963. A bright eyed and anxious 23 year old, I was nearly overcome by my good fortune to be invited to work in the Executive Office of the President, Bureau of the Budget.

I was the low guy on the totem pole and often got the duty of covering the phones when others went out to eat, or to work at the agencies we reviewed for budget and legislative consistency with the President's goals.

One day in late November I was half listening to some elevator music playing on the radio when an announcement interrupted to say, "The President has been shot!" I was of course stunned, and decided that I had to tell someone so I ran down to the Division Director's Office. He wasn't there, so I ran down the long hall in the Old Executive Office Building, up the stairs and barged into the Office of the Director of the Budget Bureau.

There was a meeting going on in the conference room and I, out of breath and likely hyperventilating, shouted, "The President has been shot!"

Two of the White House political staff were there as was the Budget Director, the Deputy and several Division Directors. The Deputy Director, Elmer Staats, who knew me, looked at me with disgust and said, "Monte, that is not funny. How could you even think to say something like that?"

While that was going on, someone turned on a TV that was in the room and the fact was confirmed. About the same time the two White House staffers were calling across the alley to the West Wing to confirm.

There are certain times when the world turns inside out; times when we will remember where we were and what we were doing when a major event happens. For much younger people than me, and most are, a day that is sealed in their memories, and mine, is September 11, 2001.

Unfortunately, by the time the '60s were over those of us who lived through those years would add the April 4, 1968, assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, and the June 5, 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

Those years were years of great political division in this nation, and until now, we have seen nothing like the kind of bitter, hateful rant that fueled the hatred then, and fanned the flames of intolerance.

We would all like to think that we have, as a nation, gotten past all of that. And, had we not been witnessing the fanning of the flames, the desperate acts of spinning a great lie about Barack Obama; a lie about his "otherness," "Un-American," "Socialist," and, today, "Communist" leanings.

These purveyors of hate continue to foment the unrest and play to the prejudices of race and class warfare. The litany of false descriptors piles up, lie upon lie: "Palling around with Terrorists," "Terrorist," and "Traitor."

Mainstream media, even the so-called liberal left media, allow such words to go unchallenged saying such things as, "Well. Its all that McCain has left to do." As if that makes it OK to scream "Fire!" in a crowded theater.

We have succumbed to something we would tell ourselves to our dying day that we do not believe: "that the end justifies the means." In a stupefying attempt to be "fair" we have turned our heads and allowed the intolerant rants of hate to be "tolerated."

If I had not lived through the short few years when three leaders of my hope for our nation were destroyed, when I, and the rest of the nation, had to grow up and realize that there is evil in this world, perhaps I would not feel so uneasy, and could just let it go as "Well, its just the politics of desperation."

Unfortunately, it only takes one nut, one crazy who is sent over the edge by the talk of terrorists, traitors, socialists, communists and the questioning of patriotism, to destroy the best hopes of us all.

It only takes one.