Writers are infamously messy, and I suppose I am too. My Google Drive, desktop and other repositories hold various half-baked drafts of this and that. From time to time I try to clear them out, but I hang on to some of them. One in my blog drafts folder has a headline — The indifferent sea. — and is an unkind look at something one of my husband’s former colleagues, who was college friends with none other than Stockton Rush, wrote about his dead classmate. Alan asked me to maybe consider not publishing it, if for no other reason than it would make future collegial gatherings maybe a bit awkward. I agreed.

Rush is, of course, the man responsible for his own death, and four others’, when his jerry-built submarine imploded en route to the wreckage of the Titanic in the North Atlantic. The U.S. Coast Guard has published its own report on the disaster, and it is…not kind:

At the time of the Titan’s final dive, Mr. Rush possessed a credential issued by the U.S. Coast Guard that permitted him to operate vessels of a certain volume on inland waters.

That credential was based on falsified information, the report said: In 2020, OceanGate exaggerated the volume of the Titan in a letter to the National Maritime Center so that it would appear as though Mr. Rush had the requisite time at sea needed to earn the credential.

…In an interview with the board, the OceanGate director of operations described a dive in which an earlier OceanGate submersible, the Cyclops 1, became stuck beneath the bow of the Andrea Doria shipwreck near Nantucket, Mass., with Mr. Rush at the controls. In response, Mr. Rush had a “meltdown,” the director of operations said, adding that when he asked Mr. Rush to relinquish the controls Mr. Rush threw the controller at him.

All of which made me dig up the original column, and hoo-boy, talk about aging like milk:

From test pilot Chuck Yeager to Mount Everest explorer Sir Edmund Hillary, risk-takers are a special breed. OceanGate CEO Tock was one of them. Unlike the astronauts and explorers who lived to reach the summit of mountains and outer space, however, Tock was fascinated by going to the bottom of the ocean.

…Ask anyone in my Princeton University Class of 1984 which one of us would be brave enough to dare such a mission, and Tock would be at the top of the list.

…When we were 19 years old, he became the world’s youngest commercial airline pilot, commanding Saudi Airlines planes during our college summers.

The part about Saudi Airlines was my first whoa moment. You’re telling me a commercial airline allows college students to fly its planes? Not quite. A little Googling reveals he worked as a first officer, i.e. co-pilot, on DC-8s operated by Overseas National Airways, which was under subcontract to Saudi Airlines to do charters, so kinda true, but not really.

But for the deepest and most unselfconscious look at ol’ Tock, you really have to go to the Princeton alumni publication:

Seemingly round-the-clock news coverage of the missing submersible has led to some unfavorable characterizations of Rush as a risk-taker whose adventures trended toward recklessness. Deep-sea explorers, oceanographers, and other industry leaders were reported to have expressed concerns about OceanGate’s safety precautions in recent years. For example, the Titan was built of both titanium and carbon fiber, which is used in the aerospace industry but considered experimental for deep-sea pressure.

“I mean if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed, don’t get in your car, don’t do anything,” Rush told CBS Sunday Morning last year. “At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk-reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”

Rush’s friends said that quote has been used to misrepresent his “joie de vivre” outlook on life, and that the message of his quote was likely more along the lines of encouraging people to live their lives and not be afraid.

“History shows us that exploration and innovation are inherently risky and dangerous,” a group of alumni wrote in a statement to PAW, signing it “Proud and Grieving Friends of Tock.” “We’re disappointed, if not entirely surprised, at the outpouring of armchair quarterbacking about the science behind his work.”

Was Tock a rich kid? Of course he was:

He kept a private plane at the Princeton airport, and friends recounted adventures they took with Rush at the wheel.

…(A) friend who flew with Rush on his private plane during college remembered the feelings of trust and safety she felt on board. “He cared for people deeply and he wouldn’t want to put me in a position where I was unsafe.”

Bad things never happen to rich kids, as we all know. Ah, well. Now we know, but we always knew. Meanwhile, speaking of rich kids, Croaky has effectively pulled the plug on publicly funded mRNA vaccine research. If bird flu goes big, let me say it now, while I’m healthy: It was nice knowin’ ya:

Mr. Kennedy has been sharply critical of the technology. In a video posted on social media on Tuesday, he claimed incorrectly that mRNA vaccines do not protect against respiratory illnesses like Covid and the flu, that they drive viruses to evolve and that a single mutation in a virus renders the vaccine ineffective.

“As the pandemic showed us, mRNA vaccines don’t perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract,” he says in the video.

“By issuing this wildly incorrect statement, the secretary is demonstrating his commitment to his long-held goal of sowing doubts about all vaccines,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health.

What else is new?

So that’s Wednesday’s stop on the Farewell to American Greatness tour. How’s your week going?