I was feeing pretty good for a Sunday morning. A little sunburned from the afternoon at the pool, but I had to be downtown fairly early, since I was meeting a group from Oz to give a waking tour of the landmarks near the White House and along Pennsylvania Avenue.
It is only appropriate, since The Swamp we call home has resembled the Emerald City for a long time, and in the Wonderful Wizard series, it was the capital of the fabled land of Oz. We have our own version of the man behind the curtain we are not supposed to notice, too.
When referring to Australia in a casual manner, the first three letters becomes Aus. When ‘Aus,’ or ‘Aussie,’ the short form for an Australian, is pronounced for fun with a hissing sound at the end, it sounds as though the word being pronounced has the spelling Oz.
This was a special group: an old shipmate retired to take an educational job at the University of Melbourne, Down Under. He teaches the Masters-level course on International Security and takes the class on an extended field trip to Washington and New York at the end of the Spring semester. The students are engaged, bright and not only represent the Antipodes, but countries as far away from Oz as France and Norway.
Accordingly, Fred enlists some old comrades as guest speakers on a variety of topics. Our pal Jake gave a lecture at the Front Page on his views of the role of the intelligence professional in supporting policy-makers and other sundry aspects of keeping the focus on the intelligence, not the domestic personalities. That is in slightly short supply around here at the moment, so it was a useful presentation.
My contribution is acting as advance liaison to The Front Page bar and grill here in Arlington, and conducting the walking tour of points of interest.
Last year it was the Udvar-Hazy collection of large aircraft out by Dulles, since the big planes (and one of the Space Shuttles) will not fit in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum downtown.
So we had a date to meet and do the circuit I have told you about before, some very cool places, with an eye to tailoring the tour to the national security side of the house. Not hard to do in the Emerald City.
The problem with using the bus to actually see the campuses of the Big Three intelligence Agencies is that the tour would consist mostly of chain link fences with guards and distant buildings with the American Flag waving out front. This would be human scale, on foot, and there were some worthwhile things to see and talk about.
Parking downtown is bad at best, but with the buses and tourists flooding the city, I decided to take a Red Top Cab down to the Willard Intercontinental Hotel where we had agreed to meet.
It was a lovely day, not soggy and humid as we tend to get in late June. Or at least it was until we got near Pennsylvania Avenue and I could see the flashing blue and red lights in front of the hotel.
These days I never quite know what to expect, and even routine law enforcement activities can cause you to wonder if some zealot has done something awful. We mad the left turn from 14th St onto E street, and although there were two prominently placed police cruisers, no one seemed to object to our presence. Then I saw the camera crews and the armored black SUVs and realized we were dealing with a VIP moment.
I asked the cabby to stop, paid him, and walked over to the car concierge to ask what was up.
“Prime Minister Modi, from India will be staying here,” he said, clearly peeved at the limos cluttering his working space.
I nodded in thanks for the information and thought about a cup of coffee while I waited for Fred and the group to arrive. I walked up the marble steps went through the revolving door to find that metal detectors had been installed and a long queue was waiting patiently to surrender their keys and wallets and personal items. I knew this wasn’t going to work, certainly not for a group of twenty or more, so I smiled at the guard and went back to the street to wait.
That was an ominous start to the tour, since I wanted to show them the classic lobby- one of my favorites along with the lobby of The Peninsula in Hong Kong- as well as Peacock Alley, where renowned (or at least self-renowned) celebrities have strutted their stuff for a century and a half.
And of course, the fabled Round Robin Bar, where it is claimed the mint Julip was invented by U.S. Senator Henry Clay during his residence in the city. I studied my notes. [he term “julep” is generally defined as a sweet drink, particularly one used as a vehicle for medicine. It was the kind of medicine I could have used right then, but the Prime Minister was in the way.
Eventually a gaggle of young people I recognized and we joined up. All we could do was look in the window of the bar. I had great hopes for the Occidental Hotel next door, so we wandered down the broad sidewalk, and I explained that a table in the restaurant is where a nuclear war was averted.
“It was 1962,” I said, waving my arms expansively. “ABC correspondent John Scali was a diplomatic reporter when JFK announced the existence of offensive missile sites in Cuba. That intelligence was produced by the legendary satellite imagery analyst John Hughes at the brand-new Defense Intelligence Agency, which gives you an idea of how influential your careers could be. I even remember when the President said that if any missiles were fired at America, we would retaliate against Moscow, not Havana.”
Description: http://articles.latimes.com/images/pixel.gif
Two days later, Scali was contacted by Alexandr S. Fomin, a senior apparatchik assigned to Washington- we have about twenty or more foreign intelligence services operating here, after all- and a personal friend of Nikita Khrushchev.
“Is Kennedy serious? Would he really do that?” Fomin asked Scali. “You’re goddamn right he would,” Scali replied, according to a friend. We hung on the brink, all of us.”
“Over a tasty Occidental lunch, Fomin said the Russians were going to blink, and outlined a proposal to dismantle the Cuban missile bases if the American government would pledge not to invade Cuba. Scali relayed the message to the President and nuclear war was averted. There is a brass plaque on the table where they had lunch now.” I marched up the steps to discover the dining room was under construction, furniture and tables stowed safely away. Strike Two.
We lurched around the corner to visit the W Hotel, the re-named old reliable Washington, and I described the fabulous roof garden with the most remarkable views of the Emerald City. It is said diners could look in one of the windows of the White House in the residence section below and see the occupants, which until recently would not have been particularly appealing.
We moved on to the Old Ebbett Grill, the oldest saloon in Washington where many a deal was cut. It has been gentrified, but it was once a dive to tough that it withstood the aftershocks of the rioting after the assassination of Dr. King.
Inevitably, that lead directly to a discussion of the decline of the Emerald City, and its current renaissance. “It was bad. If you walked out of Building 213 at the Navy Yard, you could regularly hear gunfire, and female employees were walked to their cars for safety.
Violence and mayhem became the topics as the people from Oz looked in amazement at the homeless in the park on New York Avenue, and passing the New York Presbyterian Church, I mentioned that Mr. Lincoln’s pew was still marked in case he returned for services. That in turn morphed into an account of the Lincoln killing, so I pointed out the fancy and exotic gate to China Town, where the Surratt Boarding House still stands. That is the building where the assassins modified their plan to kidnap the President, and decided to kill him and all the senior officials they could find now that General Lee had surrendered. As we came to the corner, I pointed out the former Greyhound Bus terminal, a hybrid mixture of the original Art Deco architecture and the newer high-rise that sits towering above it.
We took a sidetrack to walk past Ford’s Theater where he was shot in the head by actor John Wiles Booth during the Third Act of the play “Our American Cousin.”
“They carried the wounded President across the street to the Anderson House across the street,” I said solemnly. “It was the White House that long night before Mr. Lincoln died in the dawn’s early light.” We walked on, past the J. Edgar Hoover FBI headquarters- a Stalinist-looking edifice if there ever was one- and the kids seemed impressed. “They are going to move the Headquarters soon, so the structure is not looking its best at the moment.”
My legs hurt and a drink sounded like a good idea. I bounced the concept off Fred and the group, and decided that is how the tour would en. We walked down past the Justice Department, talking about current events, of which there are entirely too many at the moment, and came once again to Pennsylvania Avenue. Across the street looms the Romanesque-style old Central Post Office building which is now a hotel owned by a Mr. Donald J. Trump, or at least by his blind trust. We crossed the broad ceremonial avenue and went in the side door, passing through a dark vestibule and into the brilliant brightness of the central atrium.
Industrial steel girders left by the days when tons of mail were sorted each day were a stark contrast to the loving restoration of the rest of the building. The hour being what it was, and on a Sunday, there were plenty of seats at the bar and a couple couches free by the juice buffet left over from the brunch service. A bloody Mary cost $17 bucks, with tip a round twenty. Not a place like Front Page, where a Happy Hour rail drink will only set you back $3.50. The food looked good, though but probably matched the drink prices. One has to keep up appearances in The Swamp, after all.
But it was definitely a change of pace, and I had been wanting to see it since it opened and before all this madness started. I alternated between the bar and the couch, chatting away and swearing eternal friendship. Fred had them planned for a Washington National’s baseball game that afternoon, so they started to head back toward the rented bus. I hailed a cab and rode back to Big Pink for an afternoon swim and some Prime Ray Time in the sun.
Fabulous morning,and it helped me remember what I once found appealing about The Swamp and its varied creatures. Come on down and I will show you sometime.
Copyright 2017 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com