of suffixes on the caboose to tell you what the guy actually does. So you get things like the Deputy Assistant Under Secretary of Defense for Facilities Management and Building Restoration. Translation: janitor.
I would limit everybody to one prefix, one suffix, and fire the rest. If it takes more than four syllables to describe your job, there is no job. Period.
But the danger is, when you meet one of these clowns with a multisyllabic title, you don't know whether you're dealing with a superfluous taxmuncher or somebody who can really mess up your paycheck. Generally, the more prefixes, the less they can hurt you. Not always, though.
Anyway, the office of Albert Tigerman, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, was located on the most prestigious wing, and on the most prestigious floor, a mere six doors from his lordship, the Secretary of Defense. If proximity is influence, this guy had his tongue deep in the boss's ear.
Waterbury gently eased open that door and we entered an anteroom where a pert, efficient-looking young assistant was hidden behind a large wooden desk covered by a forest of computers and phones.
She looked up, and Waterbury said to her, "Please inform Al that we're here for his six-thirty. He's expecting us."
"I know." She lifted the phone, punched a few numbers, and said, "The OSI people are here." She listened and hung up. "He'll be a few minutes. Please have a seat."
I mentioned to Waterbury, "Wow . . . chairs. This guy's a managerial pussy."
He tried to ignore me.
Bian, I noted, had retreated into a sort of meek silence. From my dealings with her this seemed out of character, though I thought I knew what was behind it. She was using me as a foil for the idiot she worked for, which was politically shrewd, and possibly even entertaining for her, and probably dangerous for me.
Well, whatever her reason, she wasn't in a talkative mood, and I wasn't being paid enough to chitchat with Waterbury. What would we talk about, anyway--how many people you can fit inside a boxcar?
So the three of us were seated, somewhat awkwardly, on a stiff leather couch with a coffee table to our front. Neatly organized on that table was a thick stack of magazines I quickly browsed through for something to kill the time. Unfortunately, they all had such interesting titles as Foreign Affairs, the New Republic, Orbis, the Economist, and such. I wondered, did the man inside the office actually read this stuff? Probably yes--and probably Albert spent his weekends watching C-SPAN and gardening, and his children rode horses and played squash, and his wife was on a first-name basis with all the helpful salesladies at Bloomingdale's. My lower-middle-class snobbery aside, I didn't think Mr. Tigerman and Mr. Drummond drank the same brand of beer.
So, with nothing better to do, I spent my time reviewing what I knew about this man we were about to meet. Before we departed my building to drop in on Theresa Daniels, Bian had made a trip to the powder room, and I had made a trip on the Internet to see what I could discover about our presumptive host. I located his official CV on the Defense Department Web site and, a few entries later, a more enlightening article from Washington Insider that fleshed out the juicier personal parts.
Chronologically, he was born in the year 1946, in the city of Boston, on the better side of town, to a wealthy family. What followed was a prototypical northeastern rich boy's passage to adulthood: St. Paul's prep, Yale, Yale Law, then a fast-track partnership at a top New York firm. Not exactly a Horatio Alger, rags-to-riches tale; his was the more archetypal American riches-to-riches struggle. I love this country.
Anyway, over the proceeding thirty years, Albert had bounded between Washington jobs when Republicans were in power, and back to the New York money mill when not. Along the way, he acquired a venerated reputation as a defense intellectual.
Regarding this term--"defense intellectual"--for the life of me, I wouldn't recognize one if he pontificated on my lap or blew a brilliant opinion in my ear. For one thing, war is hardly an intellectual exercise; it's visceral, not cerebral, a contest of wills settled by pounding the crap out of each other until one guy screams uncle.
But, from the best I can tell, you get to be a defense intellectual by attending a lot of windbag conferences and writing scholarly articles that employ big theoretical and largely abstract