05 November 2003

Airplanes and Hotels

Isobel, Bill Richardson's Cheif of Staff called me and told me where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do. It was almost breathtaking in scope. I began to conceptualize how we could do it. I decided I needed a high concept, a strategic direction for the planning process. . I thought the places we were going demianded a cool theme. I mused on it. Maybe "The Pariah Nations Cool Hotels World Tour with Bill." She gave me gave me some phone numbers to contact the North Koreans in New York.

This was going to be my last major trip to arrange, and I determined that we were going to stay in the great hotels of the Empires that had once existed there. I took the list of countries Bill wanted to visit and arranged them geographically in my mind. Then I tried to fit the hotels into them.

Let's see: Rangoon. That would be The Stand Hotel on the Strand Boulevard downtown near the Rangoon River.

Bangkok. That is a no-brainer. It had to be the fabled Oriental Hotel, arguably the best hotel in Southeast Asia.

Hanoi. That was a hard one. The capital was just starting to come back from the hardships of the war and the bombing. It was twenty years almost to the day since Saigon fell, the moment of the North's greatest triumph. So in that spirit, I selected the Metropole, the old French colonial place just down the street from the Foreign Ministry where Jane Fonda stayed when she tormented our captured pilots.

We were to head south to Ho Chi Minh city next, so that was a no-brainer, too. There were some new places that had opened to accommodate the European business community, but I am a sentimental slob. I picked The Rex Hotel, the main billet of the American Military Assistance Command, and the site of the wartime daily press briefings they called The Five O'clock Follies. The Rex was kitty-corner from The Caravel, which was no longer a tourist hotel but had been The Place to have a drink after the briefing and before filing copy for back home. The rooftop bar at the end of a busy day at war and watch the fiery arc of Viet Cong rockets heading for Tan San Nhut Air Base.

Hong Kong. Let's see, it is a couple days in Hong Kong, so why not just stay at the flagship hotel of the Empire? So what if it was above the per diem rates for government travel. It would have to be The Peninsula Hotel.

We were not staying overnight in the PRC, only meeting the country team in transit, and Pyongyang was a mystery in more than one regard. We would have to rely on the tender mercies of the North Koreans. The last time Bill had been in the North they kept him sequestered in a countryside villa where he was held when not meeting Government officials. That one was out of my control.

Coming out again we had to make nice with the South Koreans. I would normally have selected the luxury Shilla Hotel. It was suitably grand, at least in the public areas, but the rooms were a little rigid and the chairs were not comfortable. I had stayed there recently and it was not convenient to the Embassy or the Foreign Ministry. The Hilton would just have to do. .

From there it was drafting a concept and linking it all together to see if I could make it work. In this case it was sitting down with the Travel office, a little cubbyhole on the fifth floor of the Pentagon around the corner from the Legislative Affairs shop. The wonderful and long suffering woman who worked there had made a career of dispatching her officers out into the wide world, and making sure we followed the regulations while we did it. With a working list of countries and hotels in hand, we logged onto the SABRE computer system that provides on-line access to commercial airline schedules. Was it even possible to link the hotels together?

If one is to go to Burma, how would one do it, if one was to make a quick stop to consult on the island of Taiwan before visiting Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China and both Koreas? Her fingers flew on the keyboard. The SABRE computer gave us a wild grab bag of airlines to make the connections. Across the pond heading west it was super first class on Eva Air, a subsidiary of the Taiwanese Evergreen company that treated us very well. It flew all night from LA and landed in Taipei in the early morning. Royal Thai air would whisk us on from there to Rangoon, then Myanmar Air could get us back to Bangkok. In Bankok we could get the Embassy C-12 to fly up country to visit the refugees. Then Royal Thai to Vietnam and connect us between Hanoi and Saigon. Cathay Pacific would jet us to Hong Kong from Saigon, and then again on to Beijing. From there it was dicey. You had to fly Air Koryo, North Korea's national carrier. That was the only way in and out. From Beijing we could get a KAL down to Seoul, and leaving the capital to come home there was finally a United heavy that would get us as far as Chicago. I frowned.

There was no direct flight from Seoul to Washington. We could only justify First or Business Class when we were out of the country. Damn.

That was a heck of a note, finishing in Economy. But the good news was that we could pull it off. All I had to do was get the Congressman to sign off on the concept and start filling in the details.

After all, what could go wrong?