Untitled Document

16 June 2004

Sam and Harry's

The word is that the U.S. is starting the long pull-out from South Korea.

It is about time, I thought, and ordered a glass of the house Chardonnay. We have left most of the cool places in Asia. It is an appropriate time to give back Camp Red Cloud under the long range artillery of those Squirrels in North Korea.

They even cut a deal to shut off the loudspeakers that blared back and forth across the demilitarized zone. The whole thing was a propaganda exercise. Only by the treaty village at Panmunjong was there any pretense that the DMZ was anything except a kilometer-wide trip wire, filled with mines and secret trails and ambush points.

Near Panumjong there were fields in the DMZ that farmers from the North were permitted to work during the day, walking in past the minefields from a little Potemkin farm village.

They were not permitted live in the village, of course. The whole thing was for show, that and the gigantic flags of the north and south, so enormous that they were not on flagpoles but rather hung from heavy industrial tripods. The whole thing was calculated to get you ready to look at the North Korean palace at one end of the Joint Security Area.

That was a fraud, too, since the building was wide and impressive but only about eight feet deep.

The propaganda blasted around the clock for fifty years. I remember one night when an irritated South Korean officer shouted a deadly insult across the wire at the Northerners.

The Great Leader Kim il Song had a characteristic disfigurement, a goiter the size of a fist on his neck. It was one of those things that was supposed to be invisible, something never to be discussed or noted if you knew what was good for you. The South Korean shouted that he hoped the goiter would burst and The Great Leader's brains would run down his shoulder.

Well, you can imagine the response to that. We kept a neat log of the number and type of rounds that were exchanged and dutifully reported the whole thing in the morning brief. No one blinked, or seemed to think there was anything out of the ordinary about it.

I was a few minutes early to the restaurant on 19th Street. I sipped the wine, feeling the glow as the cool whiteness passed my tongue. “You are where you eat,” said the motto on the little box of matches in the ashtray in front of me. I lit up a Camel and contemplated my surroundings.

Sam and Harry's is a solid restaurant across the street from the landmark Palm restaurant. The Palm is known as a hang-out for the democrats, and it would have been an appropriate venue for the meeting, since I was here to meet some Opposition politicians from the Philippines.

This was a little dicey, since the company I work for hopes to do some business there. Accordingly, the Opposition is only useful if there is the prospect that they are coming back. I don't know if that is true in the Philippines anymore, but in my experience it is important to have friends on both sides. Only count the Opposition out if they are dead.

The Speaker is most emphatically not that. I know him as an irrepressible guy of great charm. I met him at Harvard, where the Government had sent me in a momentary aberration and he was decompressing after his tour on the Rostrum.

His family had owned the Third District of Carmine del Sur for fifty years, since the Japanese were thrown out and independence came. As far as the Speaker was concerned, it was time to scrap the Constitution and get rid of Federalism. The Philippines need a Parliamentary system as a hedge against the overwhelming tide of corruption.

I left the car in the garage under the office. They advertised valet parking at the restaurant, but I was uneasy with the idea of some kid wheeling the ancient convertible into some tiny lot. I left it where it was and hailed a cab over by the Marriot across the street.

The former Speaker of the House had called late in the afternoon. I was on one of those interminable and quite incomprehensible phone conferences at the time. Most of the people in the office were on the same call, their heavy wooden doors pulled closed so they could hear the speaker phones.

My cell phone beeped on my belt to tell me I had a message. After an hour, the call was winding down. Cell coverage in the building is spotty, so I was not surprised that I got a message but not a call. I left my office and went out the back door of the suite and took the elevator to the street.

I called the Speaker's hotel, the Topaz, over by Dupont Circle. He sounded groggy when I got through to his room, which was to be expected since he had flown across the dateline to get here and his body was completely out of phase.

I asked him if he wanted to do dinner, and he said yes, of course. I told him to meet me at Sam and Harry's at six, painfully early by Washington standards but perfectly fine for jet-lagged legislators.

Most of the big-name steakhouses strive to look like men's clubs. Sam & Harry's, with its rich dark wood and two-tiered dining room, French doors and jazz-themed art, tries for the sophisticated look. I tried to remember if the Speaker had any special dietary restrictions, but could not dredge any up.

The specialty steak here is a porterhouse, custom-cut for the institution by a Chicago packer. They have fish, if you want something other than steak, or lamb or veal chops or lobsters. But the margin is on the wine and booze. The wine list is long and impressive.

I glanced at it while I waited. Sam and Harry are not real people. More precisely, they are a myth thought up by the guys who founded the chain in Chicago at the end of the 1980s, when beef and cigars were becoming cool again. Michael Sternberg and Larry Work were the guys who jumped on the trend, and now there is a Sam and Harry's just about everywhere, and two here in Washington.

The other is out at Tyson's Corner, another imaginary place plopped down fully blown from the sky.

I don't know why their stories weren't good enough for the legend of the restaurant. The story on the menu tells a little story that the place is named in honor of "Harry" Work, and Sam Wenig, an itinerant flying boat designer from Texas and immigrant ragpicker from Galacia, respectively.

I thought about why the Speaker had flown here and why he wanted to talk to me. It was clear that he thought I was still connected to the business. He had asked me for Senator Lugar's office number, and I fished around and found it in my Rolodex. I called the number to make sure it was still good. A chipper young woman and said it was. I thanked her and passed it along.

The Speaker had some bad news, and he wanted to make sure that all his friends in town knew it.

He was right on time, and I left the bar and greeted him in the broad ante-room in front of the imposing Maitre d' station.

He had with him his son, a younger version of the dashing Speaker, who had kept the Third District seat warm for the Speaker when he took a brief hiatus from politics. There was a distinguished older man with thin lips and calm dark eyes behind gold wire-framed glasses. The Speaker introduced him as Ernesto Maceda, former President of the Philippine Senate and Ambassador to the United States.

The complemented me on the Pistons win over the LA Lakers. They are that good, our Filipino brothers, endless plane ride across the Pacific or not. They know us better than we know ourselves. Most of us have forgotten that our colonial empire started in those lovely islands, and that our fingerprints are all over everything.

We made small talk as we waited for drinks. They were tired, and wanted to order quickly. The attentive waiters were disconcerted, but complied. Prompt service is their business and they waited patiently as we talked about the situation on Luzon, the disposition and prospects of the New People's Army, the Marxists who are migrating from their sanctuaries to the east of the mountains and penetrating the cities.

One of the waiters was half-Filipino, his father a Navyman and his mother a dark-eyed beauty with rich flowing black hair. The admiration in his eyes as he spoke to the Speaker and the Ambassador made me realize how strange my role in this conversation was.

I asked if the Marxists had linked up with the Islamic fundamentalists yet. The central core of our policy in the islands is the eradication of the Abu Sayef Group, the franchise affiliate of al Qaida that operates with impunity in the southwestern islands of the Archipelago.

“Not yet,” said the Speaker. “But they are trying.”

As the aged beef arrived at the table the Speaker got to the point. The administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had just stolen the election. Not the garden variety-election fraud like we have here. Big time, institutional machine fraud. Fraud conducted with the complicity of the Army, that manufactured votes to order. Millions of bogus votes.

The Speaker had certified copies of election reports, and a PowerPoint briefing on a CD. He gave me the package and I looked through it as I sipped my wine.

“This is bad,” I said. “far worse than anything I had anticipated.”

‘We may lose the democracy,” said the Speaker, and he looked anything but merry. The Ambassador looked grim. The Speaker's son, who would inherit this mess, was impassive and his eyes glittered in the candlelight. The Ambassador had been one of the three Senators who looked at the Americans who brought their best-and-final offer to keep the bases at Subic and Clark. Then he voted against them and the American presence ended after a century.

We talked about what was going to happen over coffee and it did not sound good. “The centerpiece of our policy to the Philippines is the war on terror,” I said. “I can only speak as a private citizen on this, but we have got to get the policy community to understand that the Maoists have not gone away, and that somehow the corruption must be brought to heel. But we cannot do it with an American face.”

“No,” said the Speaker. “That would not work. But we need help, and that is why we are here.”

I told him I would do what I could. I love the islands, and I have only the best wishes for the people who live on them. I do not want the Maoists to come out of the hills, and do not want to see the Islamic terrorists split off a new Afghanistan in the sprawling archipelago.

We left our table and I clutched the manila envelope with the documentation of the stolen election. The Ambassador was recognized by management, and he was gracious. We walked out of Sam and Harry's and into the fading light of the early summer day.

“I'll do what I can, Mr. Speaker.”

“That is all any of us can do.”