06 November 2010
The Clip-On Bow Tie
(Willow bar. Mac and Vic normally set up camp at the two stools to the front left. Photo courtesy Tracy O’Grady.)
Mac took a satisfying sup of Bell’s dark lager. “So, where was I? Billie and I went to London in May of 1950. We rented a flat, picked up our 1949 Mercury four-door sedan at Southampton and had transportation, so we could get around, even though the London public transportation was excellent.”
“And instead of relieving Ted Rifenburgh as the Current Intel Officer on the CINCNELM Staff, you wound up with Nick Cheshire at the Admiralty,” I said, glancing at my notes.
“Yep. Ted was in the first class at the Naval Intelligence School. He was an outstanding officer. Captain Eismarsh founded the NIS.” Mac frowned. “I was offered orders there in 1948, but turned them down to work on the cable in the Pentagon. Wyman Packard’s book explains the politics of the establishment, which Admiral Ernie King supported to professionalize the business. Forrest Sherman did, too.”
“Useful thing, professionalism in your Spook Corps,” I said.
“Eismarsh was a pompous guy, the senior academic in the Navy and he never let you forget it. He was a Harvard language professor ONI hired during the war, and after it was over Navy decided to establish and intelligence school after the war. The Naval Intelligence School was housed at Anacostia in a bunch of temporary World War Two buildings. Where the park is now.”
(Anacostia Naval Station, circa 1947. Official US Navy Photo)
“I think that is where my Grandfather camped when he came here with the Bonus Army in 1932 and General MacArthur ran them out of town.”
“I met the MacArthur once. He came to Guam for the morning meeting one time. He was another pompous guy, though Admiral Nimitz forbade us to ever say so.”
“Yeah, you said you met all the five stars.”
Willow’s bar was filling up. Both the Mike’s were there, propping up the end of the bar.
Peter and Jim were solicitous, filling up my tulip glass with a crisp and impertinent white wine as I scrawled notes. Foppish John had departed for dinner at the Lyon Hall, the new restaurant that occupies the art modern façade where Dan Kane’s trophy shop had been located for years in Clarendon, across from the big Agency facility where I used to work. He made a point of telling Peter he would not be dining at Willow on the way out.
He used to work on the Hill, and never lets you forget it.
(The neon of the Lyon Hall Restaurant in the old Dan Kane Trophy Shop building. Classic Arlington architecture recycled. Photo Lyon Hall.)
“They should have named the place “The Trophy Shop,” said Old Jim.
“I don’t think the feminists would appreciate that,” said the shorter Mike.
I looked up pensively. “So your two year tour in London was actually a little over six months on the front end, ten months in Naples with Admiral Carney to set up Allied Forces Southern Region as a NATO command under General of the Army Ike Eisenhower, who was in Paris as the Supreme Allied Commander.” I had to raise my voice to be heard over the din.
“Right,” said Mac. “AFSOUTH. That was before the French threw NATO out and the Headquarters moved to Brussels.”
“Then you did the trip to visit Marshall Tito?” Mac nodded as I ticked down the list in my notebook.
Dapper Jon-with-no-H arrived with his hand-tied bow tie and blazer, looking like he had just come from a day at the races and ordered a dirty martini.
“I love the way you tie that tie,” I said to Jon. “I wear clip-ons. It is a personal fashion statement. At my old company they had a dress code that said you didn’t have to wear a tie unless you were with customers. When I joined my current outfit, they said we were professional, and wore a tie ever day. I said, “Fine.”
“So what did you do?” asked Mac.
“I went on eBay and bought thirty vintage clip-on bow ties in very strange patterns. It is my way of sticking it to The Man.”
“But aren’t you The Man?” asked Jon, tugging on one side of his rep-striped tie.
Mac laughed, he being the one grown up in the group who had actually been The Man.
“That clip-on thing reminds me of the trip to see Marshall Tito. We wore mess-dress to the luncheon, the uniform with the little jackets and formal shirts, cufflinks and studs. Well, it turned out I had forgotten to pack the black tie. I was pretty frantic about trying to find one in Belgrade on short notice, but Art Newel suggested that I ask the Ambassador to borrow his. I was a little nervous approaching George V. Allen, but he was a North Carolina gentleman and very kind. We went up to his quarters and he rummaged around in a bureau and found one. He handed it to me, and I opened up the butterfly hinges to clip it on.”
I looked at him expectantly, wondering what the point was. Mac smiled.
“The Ambassador’s mouth fell open. He had owned the tie for years and had no idea that it folded open. He must have ruined dozens of shirts trying to get it on closed up.”
“We have rocket scientists in the diplomatic corps,” growled Old Jim.
(Ambassador George Venable Allen. Photo CorbisImages from the Bettman Archive.)
I was starting to lose the thread of my narrative as Jim topped off my glass again. The notebook was getting a little blurry. “Then there was that wild odyssey with Admiral Carney across his area of responsibility, from Naples through Turkey and Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Morocco.”
Mac nodded again. “We were running the oil trap-lines where the Soviets were meddling. The tee-totalers who refused the whiskey after dining with the Saudis got sick. The Arabs never washed anything. That wasn’t true in Iran, of course, but there was trouble brewing and we have not seen the end of that yet.”
(Iranian Prime Minister Mosaddegh. Photo Life Magazine.)
“What aspect of the chronic bad behavior of those jerks do you mean, Sir?”
“The elected Prime Minister was a guy named Mosaddegh. With a near-unanimous vote in the Majlis, the lower house of Parliament, he nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian oil company in 1951. That was Britain’s largest overseas investment, now that India was independent, and you can imagine that made some people very cranky.”
“He was overthrown by MI-6 and the CIA, right?”
“Well, Pahlavi had some help. But that happened in 1953, when I was back in Washington then. But we could all see there was going to be trouble.”
“End of the colonial age,” I said, underlining the word “Shah of Iran.”
“Not the way the Iranians look at it,” said Mac. Then he finished his beer.
(Clip-on Bow Tie similar to that of Ambassador Allen. Photo Socotra.)
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
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Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
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