Sorry to do this to you on an otherwise pleasant morning. The internal discussion that follows would have been in the mid-1990s, during the 104th Congress. It got recycled in 2003, only twenty years ago, and some of it cleaned up only this morning from old notes. It had another title when it first appeared: “Lost on the Way to the Lobby.” It will have a resurrection, of sorts, and will appear in the next literary volume about arranging Official Travel for Congress.

This morning, one of the Salts forwarded his morning essay about the nature of ancient Rome and the way the Empire operated in their time as absolute masters of the Mediterranean Sea, or what we think of in retrospect as the Whole Wide World.

As a group, we winnow the window of ideas for our morning essays. It can be an iterative process, and more than a bit of an Overton Window, or course, with the aperture of breaking news sliding around above us to determine what is acceptable for public discussion. This morning, for example, the consensus was to ramble through what the Romans did when they sat on what became “The Pax Romana.”

There are some echoes there, and naturally we apologize. The Pax Romana was a roughly 200-year-long timespan of Roman history identified with some platitudes of progress. It was a Golden Age of increased and sustained Roman imperialism. It was also a period of relative peace and order, prosperous stability, hegemonial power, and regional expansion. We have something in common with the Imperialists of Rome.

These days we are watching the death of the Pax Americana. That was the period extending from the Malta Seasick Summit in 1989 roughly to the Pandemic days of 2020. The Berlin Wall had fallen just a few weeks before. When USS Forestall and the other units of our Battle Group steamed away, our nation stood as The Sole Remaining Superpower. This morning, there seems to be three or four of them emerging. Russia is back to some degree. China may be imposing the Belt and Road initiative to funnel trade through the Middle Kingdom. Yet another might be coalescing around the BRIC nations. We will see about that.

The image that accompanied some of the stories of the Roman Empire caused us to sit upright. The similarity with times today is striking, although it conveyed some minor confusion while discussing Rome’s ancient times. The striking one captured the bronze sculpture of the Capitoline She-Wolf suckling the mythical twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus. What struck us was the pristine condition of the artwork. It had not looked like that the way we had last seen it. That meant a trip to the archives to find the image that included a modern addition. We remembered when it was captured, looking out at the sun-drenched streets of Taipei, capital of Taiwan.

We had thought for a moment that it might be the same sculpture. We are relieved to report that it is not, though the expanse of the Roman Empire traveled across miles and centuries. Instead, it captured one of the dissolute members of the modern world standing next to the legendary canine and kids.

Twenty years Isobel, Bill Richardson’s Chief of Staff had called and told me there was an emerging requirement for where the then-Representative of the 3rd District of New Mexico wanted to go and what he wanted to do while traveling. On behalf of one part of the government acting to support another, it was almost breathtaking in scope. I began to conceptualize how we could do it.

I decided we needed a high concept, a strategic direction for the planning process. I thought the places we were going demanded a cool theme. Maybe it was something like “The Pariah Nations Cool Hotels World Tour with Bill.” She highlighted the part of most importance at that moment, which was North Korea’s atomic weapons program. It is a matter that is with us still and right here. Isobel gave me gave me some phone numbers to contact the North Koreans in New York.

It was a time that shares something with this morning. Manhattan is flooded with senior representatives of international order. Other things are colliding this morning under the spotlight of the news, breaking or solvent. There were additional factors that had our blood pressure pick up. This was going to be my last major trip to arrange for Legislative Affairs. I determined that we were going to stay in the great hotels of the Empires that had once existed. I took the list of countries Bill wanted to visit and arranged them geographically in my mind. Then I tried to fit the best hotels into them.

Let’s see: Rangoon. Now known as “Yangon.” That would be The Strand Hotel on the Strand Boulevard downtown near what used to be known as the Rangoon River.

Bangkok. That was 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 was a sentimental slob in those days and 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. We were actually going to land there, though the names had been changed for bureaucratic convenience.

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? It was above the per diem rates for government travel, but I had always wanted to stay on official business at the grand 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. I had visited North Korea once before, though it was only the part on the northern end of the conference table at the Joint Security Area (JSA). In duration, it might have been a minute or two on the other side of the table and soldiers watch my every move before returning to the friendly side of the table with troops who were not prepared to kill us if directed.

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 aspect of travel was out of my control, though I hoped that trip had demonstrated Bill’s trustworthy status as a guest.

We found the picture that caused confusion. One of us was standing in Taipei, Republic of China, at a local hotel that had good bar service. We used to remember the name of that place, but we did not stay there overnight. We just stumbled across the reference to another empire in the face of a rising one, uncertain if the image from Taipei was actually the one from Roma.

We hope to issue the saga of life on Official Travel next month, and it is a bit of a wild ride. Some of it is curious and some routine and nondescript. We hope to display that shortly, since the wonder and mystery of jetting around Asia based on Bill’s desires was interesting. The controversies this year abound about who is traveling on private jets much smaller than the commercial options generally available. The Congressional view of that sort of travel is best described by the story this morning about Senator Bob Menendez is illustrative.

The flatscreen this morning says Bob had a safe in his house with $482,000 in cash available in case he needed some. But we are going to get to that presently. It was a great job and we recommend the small jets for travel since you can tell them where to go. That doesn’t work out that well with United or Delta, you know?

Coming out again we had to make nice with the South Koreans in Seoul. I would normally have selected the luxury Shilla Hotel to host our visit. It was suitably grand, at least in the public areas. But the rooms are a little rigid and the chairs were not comfortable the last time I was there. It had been a recent trip, and the lodging was not convenient to the Embassy or the Foreign Ministry. The Hilton would just have to do.

This week, Bill is on the list of those resting in peace. He was a good man and a wonderful travel companion. We let him shout at the cockpit from the cheap seats. We had done all we could to make the trip tidy, and any vocal demonstrations were his alone to decide. We had done all we could, you know? The towns and hotels worked out, and that was all we cared about in 1996.

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