said to me:

"I'm mediocre. All Generals are mediocre. If you're too good, your peers -- competitors, really -- will kill you on the way up."

After he told me that, I started watching and discovered he was right -- and the bad news is that negative comments were occasionally the lesser things done. The good news is that in my observation, the typical water walker had only a very, very few contemporaries who would do that -- unfortunately, sometimes just one is enough.

Sad news that. I sorta suspect that in the course of a career, he told the wrong boss to go pound sand, was proven correct and therefor got away with it at the time and delayed revenge was taken...