Cocktails With the Admiral

The beginning of my fifteen-year friendship with Mac-RADM Donald McCollister Showers lived the American Century with a front-row seat. An Iowa Depression-era kid, Mac's desk in a Pearl Harbor basement enabled the Secrets to be used for victory at the greatest naval battle of modern times-hatched near his desk.

He headed the Estimates Section on Admiral Nimitz's forward head- quarters and briefed the breathtaking casualties involved in the coming invasion of the Home Islands. He stayed in the Navy after the war and entered the New One in style, dining with Marshall Tito and helping to sweep up the wreckage in the Intelligence Community after Watergate.

Mac befriended a younger crowd at a bar across the street from his retirement community, listening to the follies of Washington from the people still doing it, telling us exactly why some of the strange things happened in DC and how they came to be when he helped implement the provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for the Director of Central Intelligence.

It was the scope of a life lived in full and right in front of the electric panorama of the American Century.