EPTThe first time I met him, he was sitting in a blue oxford sweater and khakis, and flipping through an old-fashioned rolodex. He spoke, in a dry, slightly toned-down but unmistakeably transatlantic accent that made him sound like he was the headmaster in some New England prep school.
We spent the entire interview talking about politics, almost by accident. Later, he would tell me that he normally hated talking about that subject. I showed him my resume--under employment, the only thing there was some telemarketing for the Republican National Committee during the 2006 Congressional Elections--and he chuckled, mentioned that he was glad to see new blood coming into the GOP.
I replied that I wasn't a conservative, and he chuckled again, replying that "a man who is not a socialist at twenty has no heart; a man who is still a socialist at thirty has no head." Hoping to impress him, I smiled, nodded, and said, "Churchill, right?" He smiled back, shook his head, and replied, "nope, that's a mis-attribution--the quote comes from Clemenceau, who paraphrased Guisot."
I got the job. My first task for him was synchronizing his rolodex with his phone and email contacts. It was in alphabetical order. Nothing stood out to me until I got to the Bs. I flipped through a few of the entries until I got to one that read
G H W Bush, XXX-XXX-XXXX, Kennebunkport, Maine
I blinked twice. What the heck? I looked up for a moment and saw him jotting notes on some law student's paper. He caught me staring at him and I quickly looked down, a little embarrassed. He asked me what was the matter.
I didn't really know what to say, so I just held up the card and started to casually ask a very awkward question. He laughed, cut me off, and said that the landline wasn't very useful--that the best way to reach the former President was through his golf caddy's cell phone.
The next three months of work passed uneventfully. The only time he said something even remotely close to criticism was a comment that "none of [his] classmates ever wore shorts to see a professor." I stopped wearing them immediately thereafter.
Oh, and we never talked about politics while I worked for him, but it was sometimes difficult to avoid the subject.
When he and his wife left on vacation I got to take care of Gorky, his golden retriever. I remember showing up at the porch of his town house along "Professor's Row" and easing open the mahogany and stained-glass front door. His golden retriever immediately barked twice, and leapt towards me, knocking over a row of intricately arranged portraits on his mantelpiece. I spent thirty minutes putting them back up. At first, I didn't recognize the faces, except his own, much younger, staring back from an odd assortment of family vacation shots. The landmarks were familiar, though. Big Ben. The Eiffel Tower. The Brandenburg Gate. The Kremlin. The Forbidden City. Mt. Fuji.
Then I came across a set of photos, arranged in a long-ish frame like an old-fashioned Chinese picture scroll. In these, K was always dressed impeccably, sitting at long tables together with other well-dressed, well-groomed old men. It took me a moment to realize that the balding fellow with the age spot was Mikhail Gorbachev and the perpetually grinning gentleman across from him was Ronald Reagan. After carefully placing the long picture frame in its position of honor, front and center of all his other photos, I took Gorky out for her walk.
We lost touch for a month after I stopped working for him. I'd found an externship at an equity research firm, and they paid me twice what he did, as well as letting me wear shorts on the weekend. He was a little sad to see me go. After that, I started taking time out to see him.
Every two or three months, from that moment until now, we'd have lunch at this quiet little diner just up the street from where he lived. At first, we each ordered salads, but soon we were splitting pizzas like old friends. One time, he saw me holding a plastic bag with a book in it; it was Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, a birthday gift for my brother. He took the book and snorted one of his dry chuckles, and we began talking politics, for the first time in years.
He was a lot more forthright now. I don't remember how the conversation went, but I do remember vaguely that my mind was completely blown after about fifteen minutes. Lunch lasted nearly an hour and a half for us that day.
This is what he said:
1) The entirety of the United States was built into a machine to defeat the Soviet Union by the 1970s. The entire strategy was not to attack them militarily, but to utilize economics and diplomacy to bankrupt them. In order to do that, it was necessary to build up a constellation of US allies whose export economies rested on US aggregate demand and whose politicians could be quickly removed with scandalous dirt held by US agencies. In finance, the US switched off gold in 73 and created an eurodollar futures market in 74, and then used that as well as minor tinkering such as the Plaza Accords in 87 to accomplish the goal of letting other countries export as much as they wanted to it; in diplomacy, NATO kept Western Europe far happier than the Warsaw Pact did to Eastern Europe. Oh, and the Presidency became much more powerful than originally envisioned, mainly because all this new "thinking and doing" ran through national security officials rather than legislators.
2) The US never changed the "machine" after the Cold War ended, because those institutions became essentially rent-seeking entities; trade built on well-educated but cheap post-Communist labor created an enormous amount of wealth, which went into deregulated finance, turning it into a casino; the media and military found Islamism to be a great way to justify viewership and defense budgets; the executive branch was able to tap into all these forces quite well to enhance its power at the expense of Congress.
3) This machine won't end, absent a tremendous crisis that provided a new "cause" for the country to orient itself around.
His final quote tied it all together: "The Soviets kept us focused, but there's nothing like them now."
This wasn't the wham line that really stuck with me, though. Near the end of lunch, I was talking about petty politics in the undergraduate finance club, and he said something that I still try to live by today:
"You're trying too hard to be someone important. You almost remind me of Dick Nixon."
Nowadays, he's gone back to playing senior statesman whenever the current administration needs someone to do backchannel negotiations, and the number one counterparty in these talks is China. So ironically, even though we probably have even more to talk about, we have less we can say to each other.
We've gone back to salads, and he had to put Gorky down a few weeks ago. But he's still the most interesting guy I've ever met.
