Norman Mineta: Shipping Out

By Laura Blumenfeld
Thursday, June 29, 2006

On Saturday morning, Norman Mineta ambled past his wife's vegetable garden, through the grass and the duck droppings, out to the pier on Maryland's Rhode River, and onto his boat.

"Come on, honey," Norm, 74, said to Deni, 61. Deni was on the dock, poking at the crab trap. "I envy the crabs, because she cooks them in beer," Norm said. "That's the way to go."

Norm started the motor and backed out of the slip. He smiled into the sun: "I let my mind hang out in the water."

For the secretary of transportation, whose office windows do not open, a few hours of river winds revive him. Next week he will step down as the longest-serving transportation secretary in U.S. history, the official charged with the safety of all trucks, buses, trains and planes. When he pilots the Rhode Runner, a 29-foot 1986 Chris-Craft cuddy, he can take off his shirt, clip on his Leatherman knife, and cruise, drop anchor or drift.

And one more thing.

"I imagine I'm a pirate," Norm said. "Of the Caribbean."

The motor roared over his words. Deni, in the stern, couldn't hear what he was saying. Norm stood at the helm, his expression elder statesman, his black hair dignified by a streak of white. "Get one of the orange life vests out for me," Norm called to Deni. The big ships coming up the bay were daunting; he doesn't know how to swim.

"Honey, look at that Formula!" Deni said, pointing her suntanned arm at a speedboat. "Those are so fast!"

Their own boat was slogging at eight knots. Norm pressed the trim tabs, trying to keep the boat even, but the bow wouldn't level out. He looked through the windshield, scanning the water through a splat of osprey muck, at the wave runners, the sloops and the powerboats zipping by.

"Those are the treasure ships," he said, with a straight face. Those were the boats that Norm would plunder. He'd been a respected Democratic congressman for 20 years, secretary of commerce under President Bill Clinton, and immortalized by the Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport. But on his own little boat, inside his imagination, Norm wore an eye patch, a black pirate hat and a hook hand.

"As the captain of the ship, I'd be directing my crew," Norm said quietly. "I'd have cannons, depending on how large the target I'm after. I always like to think my boat is more powerful, at least 160 feet -- a multi-masted 200-footer."

And also, he'd be missing a tooth or two.

The oldest Cabinet member (on Norm's birthday every year, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who is eight months younger, asks Deni, "So how's the old guy doing?"), it seems, has a young man's sense of adventure. His wayfaring ways date back to his first big trip, an overnight train ride, during World War II.

"There was an air of excitement," Norm recalled. He had to get typhoid and tetanus shots to travel. He was 10 years old and living in California. His family was being evacuated to a Japanese American internment camp in Wyoming. Norm wore his Cub Scout uniform to the station and stretched across his parents' laps. He understood that the trip was a sad one -- guards had seized his baseball bat, and his father cried as the train pulled away -- but he also saw the promise of someplace new.

"Life is not a destination, it's a journey," Norm recalled learning from his father. "You never know how it's going to unfold -- we didn't know on the train."

His family's displacement inspired a lifetime of crossing frontiers. He learned from his first expedition: Those in power decide where you drive. In 1971 in San Jose, he became the first Asian American mayor of a major city; in 2000, the first Asian American Cabinet member; and in 2001, the first Cabinet member to move directly from a Democratic to a Republican Cabinet.

After all these years, as the wake from a cigarette boat thumped against his hull, he contemplated his next step. "More than anything, I think about my folks a lot," Norm said. "Is what I'm doing something my parents would've approved of?"

Now he has an opportunity in the private sector, a position that he is negotiating and will not name until he leaves the Department of Transportation on July 7. It will be so demanding, an aide said, that his schedule will be tighter than his current one, which budgets sleep from midnight till 5 a.m. (He presses the snooze button twice, stretching it till 5:18.)

"I tend to sleep at meetings," Norm likes to joke. "Not bad, unless I snore."

When he leaves, Norm will miss the folks at those meetings. "A.J. is my closest friend," Norm said of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson. And he likes dining with Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings: "The Spellings are a kick in the pants."

As he recounted transportation tales -- watching the planes land at the San Jose airport when his sons were young; getting stopped for speeding on a jet boat with then-Veterans Affairs Secretary Anthony J. Principi; ordering the planes out of the sky on 9/11, "I said, screw pilot discretion, bring 'em all down" -- the Rhode Runner plodded on.

They passed an osprey nest, perched at the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay. The Bay Bridge spanned the horizon. "See, even when we're idling, we're bow high," Deni said, concerned. "Try playing with the trims."

"I've been fooling with the trims all the time, honey," he said. "I can't get it on plane." The boat was riding nose up. At such a steep angle, Norm steered with his left hand, and gripped a rail with his right.

Deni went below to add weight. "I'm going to make you buy a new boat so I don't have to be ballast," she said. "There's grinding in the engine. It's working too hard."

"There's something wrong," Norm said. "We've got to go back."

The boat turned around, and churned the water like an airplane stuck in a takeoff climb. Neither seemed bothered; they had traveled too much. Deni, a trim blonde, was a flight attendant when they met. Norm was flying United from Tokyo to San Francisco. At 36,000 feet, they talked about their children, two sons each, from a first marriage.

"There were three passengers in first class," Norm recalled. "One was drunk. One was asleep. And I was neither."

He pulled the boat into the dock at Galesville for lunch. "Life will forever be a journey for Norm," Deni said.

He stepped over a piling, and onto the pier. He strolled toward his favorite restaurant, a breezy place along the water, where the rigging clinks like wind chimes against the masts. The sign said "Pirate's Cove."

Off Camera is a monthly column by Laura Blumenfeld featuring Washington's top decision makers in their off-hours -- outside the office and inside their lives.