Terrific evening yesterday at the New York Athletic Club. This was the third annual Mess Night held by the New York City Marine Corps Council as a fundraiser for the many good causes they support. With no disrespect whatever to any of the other notables present (especially not this one), the star of the evening was undoubtedly Gen. Al Gray, twenty-ninth Commandant of the Corps (1987–1991). Still full of wit, energy, and vinegar at 82, General Gray laid down a barrage of Corps folklore, irreverent wisecracks, and satirical observations about working in Washington, D.C. Then he hit a serious note. (I’m quoting from memory here.)

There are some hard times a-coming for our Corps. For years the politicians have been spending money like it’s going out of style. That’s going to have to stop real soon. Defense is the biggest discretionary item in the national budget, and it’ll take the biggest hit. When the politicians talk about cutting defense, it comes down to two things: cut big programs, or cut people. That’s the fight you go into; and when the smoke clears, it always turns out that the big programs had more and better lobbyists than the people…

General Gray told us he spent a lot of time in Washington just justifying the Corps’ existence against politicians whose entire notion of USMC operations was John Wayne storming up the beach in Sands of Iwo Jima. They would say things like: “We don’t need guys taking beaches any more. Paratroopers…helicopter-borne…precision-guided munitions…” etc. I was sitting there listening to this and thinking of Harry Truman. Harry had a chip on his shoulder about the Marines — something to do with his service as an artilleryman in WW1. “A police force for the Navy” was his best-known put-down of the Corps. There were actually plans to disband the Corps in the late 1940s. It wasn’t just Harry, either. The atom bomb had scrambled all traditional ideas about military strategy, and there was a school of thought that argued we didn’t need any differentiated military services — Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines — just an all-in-one integrated force to go in and clean up the mess after the nukes have been dropped. That school of thought suffered an untimely death on June 25, 1950 when North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel. All of a sudden the Marine Corps didn’t seem like such a bad idea. Later in the evening, when the toasts were being proposed, and while I still had that train of thought at the back of my mind, I had half an impulse to propose a toast to the guy who quite possibly saved the Marine Corps from oblivion: Kim Il Sung. Fortunately I restrained myself. Anyway, the NYCMCC is a terrific foundation and they run a tight mess. If you want to do something to support a really good cause, there’s a donation button on that website. And if you’re in the New York area by the way, newscaster Ernie Anastos of our local Fox channel is a keen supporter of the NYCMCC and was present at the Mess Night yesterday with a bunch of cameramen in tow, so we got good TV coverage. If you missed us on last night’s late news, the clips will be re-broadcast on Fox’s 5 o’clock news this evening. You may get a glimpse of me scowling at the world, very rare footage of my son in a suit and tie, and Mrs. Derb being her incomparably beautiful self.