TRICKY DICK'S COFFEE HOUSE: 9) WASHINGTON, D.C.
A Throwback Thursday Serial About Living in London (and DC) in the 1970s
This time I didn't leave London and Tricky Dick's for the USA until just a few days before school began (September 1975).
I wanted to jump right into my studies, not give myself time and space for second thoughts. I wasn't looking for autumn '71 anymore. I had a better idea of what to expect Stateside.
My first flight on a Boeing 747, I sat next to an elderly gent who lived in Georgetown, and he told me about Washington, about Georgetown; advice I quickly forgot. It's the prerogative of the young to learn from their own mistakes. He gave me his phone number, saying I should call and come for dinner once I settled into college life. I never did.
I saw the Washington Monument for the first time as the jumbo jet descended into Dulles Airport and soon walked out the terminal into warm, bright sunshine and caught a bus into the city, trying to keep the rawness of this new place at a respectable distance behind glass.
The AU campus bustled with registration activity.
Assigned to Leonard Hall, fifth floor,I found my bunk and spent a day or two signing up for courses, picking up an ID card, learning my way around the campus. It felt surreal: One day I'm running a lunatic coffee house, my own boss; the next, I'm a number, one of many thousands, assigned a shoebox to live in.
While signing up for political science courses I observed Pat Ryan sitting in a chair, filling a form. Pat, from 4Cs, Mister Student Body President, Mister Cape Cod.
Pat startled when I called his name. He couldn't believe someone else from 4Cs was at AU, and it was pretty unbelievable. We became immediate friends.
Then I bumped into Lee R in Letts Hall, the same Lee who had stayed at Westfield College and found Tricky Dick's a year-and-a-half earlier and used to pretend he was retarded on red double-decker buses.
My roommate Jeff C was a very likable fellow who loved aircraft, airports and airline schedules. We signed up for a landline telephone together.
My very first call was to Carroll Quigley at Georgetown University.
Dr. Quigley quickly set me straight on None Dare Call it Conspiracy: “I am a professional historian, the author of that book is a political activist—our occupations are therefore geometrically opposed."
I told him it was the grain of truth I was after; I wanted to focus on Bilderberg.
Quigley said: "You could find yourself in trouble dealing with this topic."
I liked the sound of that. It was, after all, this very kind of destiny that had brought me to Washington!]
Quigley was curt, but he left the door open, saying I could come see him. We made an appointment to meet the following week, and I found his office in the School of Foreign Service building, near the university campus. Someone had scratched the letters CIA on his wooden door.
He must have seen in me a person who ached to learn something special, not the tired old knowledge of most college courses, and I guess this must be irresistible to a real teacher.
Quigley told me I could find a copy of Tragedy and Hope at the GU bookstore; that he used it as a text for his course on Western Civilization. I bought a copy and he signed it for me. I still have it.
I asked Dr. Quigley why he titled his book Tragedy & Hope. He explained that when the book was published in 1966 he still had hope for Western civilization. However, he added, he had since lost all hope and the title was an error.
Quigley felt his name had been blackened by conspiracy theorists, author Gary Allen and the John Birch right wing. He had debated Allen and others on talk radio, tried to shoot down their wild theories, but he felt the stigma of engaging them had served only to hurt him professionally; that he'd have been better off ignoring them. Because the concentration of a mass audience is so short, so superficial, they'll go with the quick fix of a propagandist every time. Look at our elected representatives and tell me if it's not true.
My interest was Bilderberg. Quigley said it was real, yes, but he wasn't familiar with it and therefore could not assist me. But, he said, he'd point me in the right direction (far right) and, smirking now, suggested I call Liberty Lobby on Independence Avenue, near the Capitol.
"They're kind of strange," said Quigley, savoring his understatement, "but I think they published something on Bilderberg."
I went down to see Liberty Lobby and got an earful of their beliefs: Bilderberg, according to their beliefs, was part of a Rockefeller-Rothschild-Jewish conspiracy to take over the world by creating a one-world government, the Far Right's definition of communism.
I wrote to many embassies, asking what info they had on Bilderberg. Almost all had never heard of it. When I contacted the State Department, a public affairs adviser named Francis Seidner advised me to mind my own business.
My own business was The Tavern, the college bar (drinking age was then 18), where I'd hang with Pat and his roommate Wesley. And I partied with Kenny F, a friend of my older brother's who attended Howard University Medical School, the only white person in his class. Kenny was forever checking his pulse and leering at my new girlfriend, Rhoda; he'd tilt his head, like a dog when it hears a high-pitched whistle, and he'd stare, like he was not only mentally stripping her clothes but her flesh too.
When we went downtown, it would be for steak and beer at Emerson's on K Street. For six bucks you'd get a porterhouse and baked potato, an open salad bar and all the beer you could drink. It was a popular college go-to. They eventually went bankrupt.
Bruce S came down to visit from upstate New York, where he'd enrolled at Paul Smith's College, a redneck outdoorsy college. Although we longed for it in our dreams, we young expat Americans were incapable of fitting into such rustic settings (Paul Smith, Cape Cod Community College) though we never stopped trying.
You get awfully mixed up after living overseas. You never again belong in the company of rusticators. For a long time afterwards you find common ground only with other expats or former expats.
My brother Jim came out to visit over Thanksgiving, which we spent with Rhoda and Kenny F,driving around northwest DC looking for a decent place to eat. Everything was shut tight and we had to settle for Hot Shoppes, a fast-food coffee shop that was serving turkey and cranberry sauce banquet-style to people with no place else to go. It remains one my most memorable and fondest Thanksgivings.
Later, Jim and I drove to New York City, stayed at the old Americana Hotel on Seventh Avenue and walked around Times Square absorbing street action.
I took the opportunity to pay a surprise visit to Murden & Company, which doubled as American Friends of Bilderberg, Inc.
I had already exchanged letters with a Mr. Muller, who ran the place. And the zaniest thing happened: When I showed up by surprise at their offices—wood-panneled walls and antiques and table-lamps like a venerable law firm—a secretary said, "Ah, yes. You're from American University. We've been expecting you."
It blew me away.
I completed my term paper on Bilderberg, got an A from the much respected Dr. Abdul Said, who taught international relations—and could hardly wait to return to London and Tricky Dick's for Christmas.