The Great American Saloon Series: Trouble in Eden
Bakshian, Aram Jr.
GREAT AMERICAN SALOONS by Aram Bakst/tan, Jr. Trouble in Eden I n its 120 years Washington's venerable Cosmos Club has seen a lot. Come to that, as one of its members for more than fifteen, so...
...Geological Survey, and the founder and namesake of Gallaudet College, the first higher education institution devoted to the deaf...
...Flacks, hacks, and floozies come and go, but as one-time Cosmos visitor Rudyard Kipling observed, "a good cigar is a smoke...
...Besides, my old Cornish pewter tankard, which has its own special spot on the wall behind the bar, had just been filled with cold Beck's dark and I was in the midst of lighting a Gloria Cubana corona...
...All were chosen on the basis of intellectual contributions made in fields like history, jurisprudence, and engineering, not because they happened to occupy the White House...
...Not any more...
...universe seemed to be spinning 'round and Theodore was the spinner...
...As most well-established clubs do, the Cosmos maintains a wide network ofreciprocity agreements with other prominent clubs around the world...
...Only three presidents in the past 120 years—William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Herbert Hoover—have qualified for membership...
...Presidents and writes frequently on politics, history, and the arts...
...I do now, but only because I have seen the future—and it irks...
...To be sure, he has found a safe haven in the Club...
...The result was an impromptu mini-conference with Ginsburg huddling with the media gang at the threshold of the lounge and Monica treating them to a cameo appearance on her way to the lady's room...
...One of these happens to be the Jonathan Club in Los Angeles, and one of its members happens to be a gentleman named William B. Ginsburg, until recently an attorney specializing in medical law, respected by his peers but unknown to the public...
...but for the rest of us, it has meant coping with a media siege that makes entering and exiting the Club during media feeding frenzies something close to a military operation...
...I curled up on the seat opposite," Kipling would later recall, "and listened and wondered, until the ARAM BAKSHIAN, JR...
...Ginsburg has spun out the fifteen minutes of celebrity bequeathed to every American by Andy Warhol to a seemingly endless round of talk and news show appearances with new "best friends" like Barbara Walters, Mike Wallace, and Larry King...
...Monica herself has been an occasional visitor, a plump, vivacious, young lady who seems to be enjoying herself...
...It is easy to see how The Garden Barflies at the Cosmos Club meet Monica...
...Teddy Roosevelt, who also could have qualified, never actually joined...
...Picture a broader, shorter version of Delta Burke with lip implants and you've got Monica...
...The whole thing lasted little more than three minutes...
...On a recent evening, when she and her mentor had repaid club hospitality by taking the manager, chef, and several other key staffers out to dinner, I entered the Garden Bar to find them all enjoying a post-prandial drink...
...So far so good...
...In fairness, Bill Ginsburg himself is pleasant enough company, a bearded bon-vivant who tells a good joke and enjoys a good drink and cigar...
...At least until now...
...70 May 1998 • The American Spectator a Gadarene Swain like Bill Clinton would be attracted to her slightly overstuffed charms...
...But Ginsburg's gain has been the Cosmos Club's loss...
...While the garden has suffered occasional invasions of rats, it has traditionally been free of serpents...
...The party was hosted by Hill editor Marty Tolchin, and the guests included ABC's Cokie Roberts, her commentator husband Steve, Bill Safire of the New York Times, and several other familiar media types...
...In this town, it pays to keep your priorities in order...
...But that weekend it made two of three network Sunday news shows (Cokie Roberts talking about it on ABC's "This Week," Bill Safire on NBC's "Meet the Press") and was the subject of Safire's Monday column in the Times . While Bill Ginsburg and I had exchanged greetings when I entered a few minutes before, I decided to sit out this mutual stroking session...
...Come to that, as one of its members for more than fifteen, so have I. The club was started in 1878 by sixty scholars, soldiers, and cultivated professionals who sought a conversational oasis in intellectually arid Washington...
...The Garden Bar is so called because it opens onto a snug, sheltered little Eden where members can enjoy food and drink al fresco in the warmer months...
...He is altogether clubbable, but his mere presence at the Club has exposed it—and its members—to the Monica Madness of recent weeks...
...These founders included Henry ("Education of") Adams, explorer and National Geographic Society founder John Wesley Powell, astronomer William Harkness, the first president of Johns Hopkins University, the first chief of the U.S...
...Ginsburg decided to use his reciprocity rights to stay at the Cosmos which, as a private club, offers more protection from plying paparazzi than commercial hotels with public lobbies, bars, and dining rooms...
...Many a convivial quaff and lively, free-ranging conversation have I enjoyed at the Cosmos's Garden Bar, in what Cyrill Asquith once described as that mellow "limbo which divides perfect sobriety from mild intoxication...
...But as a young man, he spent at least one memorable evening at the Cosmos in the early 1890's conversing with an English visitor by the name of Rudyard Kipling...
...I f someone had told me last January that the graceful old mansion on Massachusetts Avenue's Embassy Row that houses the club was going to become a "second unit" site for Bill Clinton's latest bimbo eruption, besieged by mobs of journalistic scavengers, I wouldn't have believed it...
...As attorney for Monica Lewinsky, Mr...
...During his repeated visits to Washington Mr...
...But Washington being the incestuous town that it is, it happened that a dinner of media types was just breaking up in the Heroy Room, a private dining room across the hall from the Garden Bar (and the site a few days later of a memorable luncheon with the historian Paul Johnson hosted by Cosmos member R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...N aturally, they all recognized Monica and—equally naturally—Bill Ginsburg recognized them...
...He is currently editor-in-chief of American Speaker...
...Today the club's Garden Bar, an elegantly paneled lounge presided over by Butch Bird, one of Washington's best bartenders, is still a great place for rubbing elbows, matching wits, and—if only for the sake of the exercise—hoisting glasses with a varied cast of Nobel and Pulitzer winners, leading astrophysicists, attorneys, economists, painters, physicians, public servants, scientists, sculptors, retired spooks, statisticians, fellow writers, and even the occasional working journalist...
...has served as an aide to three U.S...
...The American Spectator • May 1998 71...
...The occasion was the engagement of retired conservative pundit Jack Kilpatrick to Hearst columnist Marianne Means...
Vol. 31 • May 1998 • No. 5
