29 July 2002

Mr. Bartley's Burger Cottage

The smell dragged me in off the street. It was palpable. There were a few tables outside, happy diners with their fingers clenched around solid rolls and  fried and never-frozen fresh ground beef. The place had been in operation since 1961, right around the Missile Crisis. That would be the Cuban one, for you kids. In student time that is more generations than I want to think of, ten undergrad degrees laid end to end. Grease clung to the ceiling. Ronald Reagan was hawking Chesterfield cigarettes on a poster, one of hundreds that decorated the walls. The help was courteous and young.

I stood near the door, by the cashier, and drank the place in. It was irresistible. I wound up at the counter and was waited on by a poet named Katie with short spiky hair and a blue tee-shirt. Her last poem was about a serial sexual predator in her neighborhood. She is slinging burgers until she is certified as a teacher.

I was daunted by the number of choices of toppings for Mr. Bartley's fresh beef. An older gentleman in wire-rims and a tee-shirt slid onto the stool next to me and confidently ordered a cup of gazpacho and a "traditional" with fresh onions and American cheese.

"It sounds like you have had a couple hundred of those" I commented. He smiled and said he had. I turned to Katie and told her I would have what he was having. 

I was on foot in Cambridge. The light was low and I had missed the barbecue dinner for the college. The up side was that I had completed my homework, reading case studies on the reinvigoration of the New York Police and the adventures of Barry McCaffery in the Office of National Drug Control Policy.  He was born to be a Czar. I used to see the General when I went over to the Old Executive Office Building, a shark surrounded by his pilot fish from the ONDCP. It was a good case study. It even had the anecdote about his being snubbed by a young Staffer early in the Clinton White House in a footnote. "I don't talk to the military" she sniffed after the General gave her a crisp "Good Morning."

The thing I remember about Barry McCaffery is his relentless ambition. I was first made aware of him in the combat reports of the big "left hook" around the Iraqi defense and deep into their rear area. Barry led that, and he led with the first reports of the great victory, too. He jumped right over the tight central control of Norm Schwarzkof's implacable action officers in Riyadh and he was the first one to the blackboard, the first unvarnished account of the action. Barry was front and center, and he was the hero of the hour whether Norm liked it or not. The story about the snub was promptly leaked to the press, part of that unsettled swirl of the Clinton's settling into the White House. Clinton knew he had to manage that crisis, and he invited the General over. They jogged, part of that little ritual Mr. Clinton used to do, and sure enough Barry got his fourth star and the job as the CINC at SOUTHCOM. That is how he waltzed into the drug eradication mess and our case study for today.

We had a featured speaker after lunch, Ash Carter. He was a strategic thinker from the Department of Defense of the early 1990's. He was to give an informal twenty-minute talk followed by Q's and A's. I skipped it, thinking I had an old beef with him. Later, safe on the anonymous street, I realized it was Strobe Talbot I had the problem with, the Assistant Secretary of State who prevented me from flying the congressional delegation into Port au Prince during the President Aristide crisis. We wound up flying helicopters out of Santo Domingo to the border and crossed over from the Dominican Republic on foot, just like I was tonight.

I hope the whole Clinton first-term team forgives me. God knows I muttered some things when they came in, just like Barry McCaffery. The talk was to proceed the third period of the day. I finished a vaguely oriental lunch after sitting between my Nigerian seminar mate and a taciturn international from some other place. There is a hefty percentage of international students attending the course. We have two Validimirs, an Abdulraman and several other people from south Asia. The Vladimir in my seminar is from Belorus, a little slice of the old Evil Empire.

Our Vladimir, not the Peru Vladimir, has worked for the UN for twenty years, right through the collapse. His kids have grown up in New York, and for all intents and purposes, they are Americans. There are three internationals in our seminar, Vladimir, Sahle the Nigerian in his pill-box hat and Fariq, the distinguished diplomat from Azerbaijan. When he introduced himself he said his little nation of eight million was bordered by Russia, Iran, Georgia and Armenia. He said it was an interesting neighborhood.

Instead of listening to Ash Carter talk about strategic policy I wandered through Cambridge Old Town and the Christ Church. There are still a few bullet holes in the façade. If you talk about The War back home you are talking about the Civil War. Here it is the Revolution. I walked back toward the Kennedy School through the old burying ground, the headstones of slate. Most of the inscriptions are all gone. It is an island of tranquility amid the bustle of a brick college town. I was still a little unsettled from our morning, trying to figure out what really was going on with the student body. Our first case study was about Director of Central Intelligence Jim Woolsey and how he handled the Aldrich Ames spy fiasco. I know many of the players in that awful drama and I looked at the internationals in the room and resolved to just keep my mouth shut. I don't know how many intelligence services are here besides our own.

We are organized into three classes per day, four if you include home-room. We were all there at the Forum for breakfast, which was billed as starting at 0700. I didn't intend to make that but some food sounded good. Loren is my large housemate from the Bureau of Prisons. He did his home-work in the morning and we walked over to school together. We are both from Michigan, and he got hired into the government as a corrections officer at the Penitentiary at Milan, just down the road from Ann Arbor. We talked about Michigan Football as we walked over the bridge on the Charles River. The rowers glided under us, looking over their shoulders to ensure that they did not crash into the bridge piers.

First days are always a little stressful as we began out student experience at Harvard. You don't know how to pace yourself. I got up at five and answered some e-mail and drank coffee. I listened to the oldies station. McDonald's Regional Taste Menu is in operation here. I don't know what the equivalent is back home in DC. The ads this morning on the radio were hawking "lobster rolls." I remember them from Down East. No reason Ray Krock's people couldn't sell the tasty morsels. Lobster tails chunked up and mixed with mayo and relish, a sort of upscale tuna salad. Done properly, the chunks of white lobster were heaped up on frankfurter rolls, split down the top. We used to eat dozens of them the day after a lobster dinner boiled up by my pal’s Mom at their cabin just up the road in Belfast, Maine.

Not that t there is a Mickie D's in Cambridge. I'll be back at the Burger Cottage after I finish my homework tonight.