19 August 2003

Teddy Bear

Bill Clinton turns 57 today. He used to be President of the United States, if you recall, a great big Teddy Bear of a guy. I miss him sometimes.

I had a marvelous time yesterday at lunch, revisiting his time in the Oval Office. God it was fun. We were at The Tune Inn, a little hole in the wall up on Capitol Hill. There were a few regulars nursing some beers at the bar and a booth full of young men with badges on lanyards around their necks. People don't drink at lunch the way they used to, and Congress is out of session, which amounts to the same thing. Consequently we were able to get a decent booth near the bar. The Tune Inn is a long shotgun of a room with the usual clunky bric-a-brac on the wall, mounted sailfish and pheasants, pressed tin roof. It looks a lot like Whitey's in Arlington used to look before it went out of business.

There are not many places like the Tune Inn left. I don't know how we got on the subject of the former President, or rather the way we got there was tortuous. We had started on the Doctor's new Porche Boxster, and then got to talking about anti-Semitism in general, and then the hold that Senators Feingold and Feinstein had put on the Administration's Catholic judicial nominees, and why that concern over the Pro-Choice issue seemed so right.

I took a sip of Budweiser and said that I remembered President Kennedy said that the Pope wasn't going to tell him how to run America if he got elected, and then we were on Teddy because he almost got to be President, too, except for poor Mary Joe Kopechne. The burgers came and they were juicy and delicious. We talked about that for a long time, since I see the Senator around town. He came to the building where I work to see the Secretary a few weeks ago. He always travels with his two dogs, regardless of where he goes. He is quite a guy, the Senator is. A regular Teddy bear of compassion and outrage for the innocent, a lion for those unable to help themselves.

Here is what tripped him up on his career path. I remember the press conference like it was yesterday, the swimming across the channel and bald faced lie after lie. And we still weren't sure he wouldn't be nominated for President. They took the whole whopper of a story and tore it apart step by step, the way an investigation would have been done if it was you or me driving around real drunk. Detective Bernie Flynn, who did all the grunt-work for the official inquest that happened after the Senator had beaten the rap. (You can read the whole thing at www.ytedk.com" if you feel like it.

"I figure,we've got a drunk driver….He's with this girl, and he has it in his mind to go down to the beach and make love to her. He's probably driving too fast and he misses the curve and goes into Cemetery Road. He's backing up when he sees this guy in uniform coming toward him.(That would be Officer Look, who was returning from special security duty at the Regatta that the Kennedy party had attended earlier) "That's panic for the average driver who's been drinking; but here's a United States Senator about to get tagged for driving under. He doesn't want to get caught with a girl in his car, on a deserted road late at night, with no license and driving drunk on top of it. In his mind, the most important thing is to get away from the situation."

"He doesn't wait around. He takes off down the road. He's probably looking in the rear-view mirror to see if the cop is following him. He doesn't even see the f---ing bridge and bingo! He goes off. He gets out of the car; she doesn't. The poor son of a bitch doesn't know what to do. He's thinking: "I want to get back to my house, to my friends" - which is a common reaction."

"There are houses on Dike Road he could have gone to report the accident, but he doesn't want to. Because it's the same situation he was trying to get away from at the corner - which turned out to be minor compared to what happened later. Now there's been an accident; and the girl's probably dead. All the more reason not to go banging on somebody's door in the middle of the night and admit what he was doing. He doesn't want to reveal himself."

We laughed about what a flamboyant swath the Senator cuts these days, and how the passage of time can make you a character instead of a murderer. Then we started talking about Vince Foster, and Judge Webster and who was sleeping with who in the White House. There were times I really missed the Clintons. Washington was an entertaining place where they were here, and you didn't have to go to New England to watch the fun. In fact, they carried things to a new limit. We laughed over the cattle futures and real estate shenanigans and what all those yellow carpet fibers were doing on Vince's body which was found on federal property so the Park Police had to do the invesitagtion. The Doctor laughed and said: "Remember the telephone logs that showed up in the private residence at the White House two years after they were subpoenaed? What a hoot!"

We finished our burgers and the waitress asked me if I wanted another beer.

I thanked her, but said "Nah, just get us the check, Ma'am. After all, we didn't want to drive off the 14th Street Bridge going home."