Presidential encounters and near-misses

Part 2: Embarrassingly, outdone by my wife, mother, and sister

I have previously told readers about my encounters with U.S. Presidents over the years. But as it turns out, I was outdone by three other members of my family—my wife, Margaret, who had a photograph taken with a former President (Richard Nixon) and met another almost-President, George McGovern, and my mother and sister, who actually attended a campaign event in 2008 for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton—and got to hear a speech by former President Bill Clinton. Attractive women, it seems, must be better at this than nondescript males …

In the spring of 1988, I was working as a press officer in the State Department in Washington, after coming home from a two-year tour in Copenhagen. A week after we got off the Northwest Airlines plane from Denmark on 1987, my wife had lucked into a part-time job at a Washington, D.C., hotel—a smallish, boutique-style hotel called the Embassy Row, on Massachusetts Avenue, NW—when she went in to have lunch with a friend who worked there. The full-time concierge needed a part-time assistant—and Margaret, a glamorous former flight attendant, fit the bill perfectly.

That was how she ended up at the concierge desk in 1989, when both Richard Nixon and George McGovern dropped in. She had moved up to full-time concierge when the previous one left, and really enjoyed her wide-ranging duties—and was full of interesting stories about the celebrities she liked (and a few she did not like at all). At the time, the Embassy Row was still a family-owned and -run hotel, located across Massachusetts Avenue, from the Ritz-Carlton Jockey Club and within walking distance of many foreign embassies. It catered to celebrity guests who preferred discreet, personalized attention, as well as its low-key presence, to the many far larger, busier, and ostentatious chain hotels.

The grainy wire-service photo shown here, snapped December 3, 1989, startled many readers of both local and national newspapers. It depicted a seemingly chance handshake between bitter rivals: former Republican President Richard Nixon, who had resigned office in 1974, two years after defeating former Democratic Senator George McGovern in a landslide. Both men had recently delivered separate private lectures at the Embassy Row, but their actual meeting may have been staged just for cameras.

Former President Richard Nixon(1913-1994), who met my wife in 1989. Courtesy Richard Nixon Foundation

By that time I had been transferred to a new position as administrative section chief at the U.S. Embassy in Paramaribo, Suriname, and was not in town to witness that historic handshake—or an earlier one, involving my wife Margaret and former President Nixon, whose aide that day decided an official photograph was needed as Nixon was about to pass by her concierge desk in the small Embassy Row lobby.

Only momentarily flustered when the aide approached her, she quickly accepted. After all, not many people get to shake a former President’s hand! When she told me about it by telephone, she was still excited. I was proud of her for saying yes—having missed my only chance to shake President Reagan’s hand a year earlier—but cautioned her not to rush out to tell my mother whose hand she had shaken.

Margaret greets former President Richard Nixon at Embassy Row Hotel, 1989. Personal photo

Growing up in a strongly Democratic household in North Carolina, I had listened to Daddy’s regular, less than flattering tirades about Republican Nixon as both vice president and president. My father, still unrepentant, had passed away in 1986, but I remained uneasy about Mother’s attitude toward Nixon, not sure it had mellowed much in the 15 years since his forced resignation over the Watergate scandal and his impending impeachment. By 1989, his public image had been suitably “rehabilitated,” I guess.

To this day I am not exactly sure how that photograph ended up getting to my Mother—probably through my sister Beth, the next time she and Margaret talked—but my ears are still ringing from the chewing out I got for not telling Mother, a patriotic citizen to the very end, regardless of party, what a signal honor her daughter-in-law had received.

But Mother, it’s Richard Nixon we’re talking about, I meekly responded—and I thought you both disliked Nixon, didn’t you?

That doesn’t matter. A former President is a former President. You should have sent me a picture.

Lesson learned …

* * * * * * *

Years later, Mother and Beth managed to outdo me again—this time by having a ringside seat at a campaign appearance by former President Bill Clinton in my hometown. It was early May 2008, and the former president was campaigning on behalf of his wife, Senator Hillary Clinton, then the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Local Democrats supporting her campaign had arranged for him to speak at a rally in front of our town’s only real landmark: a museum honoring World War II Army Major General William C. Lee, the “Father of the U.S. Airborne.”

The Baltimore Sun even carried a story on Clinton’s appearance in Dunn, part of a barnstorming tour of rural North Carolina—including stops later that day in Hope Mills and Whiteville [you can pay read the Sun article—behind its paywall—at https://www.baltimoresun.com/2008/05/04/meet-bill-clinton-man-of-the-people ]. In Whiteville (not Dunn, thank goodness!), the extreme heat made one woman in the crowd faint, and Clinton even joked a little about his effect on women—but only after learning she was okay. Check out the alternately humorous and serious radio article—for free!!—at https://www.npr.org/2008/05/02/90127168/bill-clinton-takes-his-political-game-to-small-towns .

Former President Bill Clinton, in Dunn for wife Hillary’s 2008 campaign. Public domain

A little personal history might be helpful here: I grew up in a house on South General Lee Avenue in Dunn, just six blocks down Divine Street from that museum, which was the General’s home from 1935 before his death in 1948, and his widow’s home for another quarter of a century thereafter. The handsome three-story brick mansion had been built in 1903 by a prosperous local businessman named Jefferson Davis Barnes (check the ironic Southern name!) It stood next to the Lee homestead, now torn down, back in the days when large dwellings occupied a full quarter of a small-town city block or more.

General and Mrs. Lee—Dava to everyone who knew her—had no children of their own, but he had a special affection for Mother and her siblings, as the children of his own first cousin, Vernon Howell Massengill, who died in 1929, and with whom he had served in Europe during World War I. [General Lee’s mother, Emma Massengill Lee, was younger sister to my great grandfather Preston.]

He was also Daddy’s commanding general at Fort Bragg in 1943, and attended their wedding that same year as an honored family guest. He was not much on ceremony, preferring to be called “Just Plain Bill” his whole life. He retired for reasons of very poor health in 1944, after his first major heart attack, and died four years later after a second fatal attack. He did not get the chance to jump with “his boys” into Normandy on D-Day in 1944—something he said he always regretted.

Beth and Mother found seats toward the rear of the crowd, out of direct sunlight, and had a good view of Clinton during his speech. (They had to drive the six blocks—Mother could no longer walk that far and finding a parking place nearby was the hardest part…) They did not get the chance to meet him—his schedule was tight, and they were not near enough the temporary stage to be in any kind of receiving line. And no, they did not stay for the well-advertised pig-picking afterward, which Clinton himself mentioned with obvious delight! But Mother told me later, even from a distance, he “sure was handsome”! (Even at 60, with white hair … my older brother’s age!)

For the record, Mother did not faint, but she and my sister were undoubtedly the two best-dressed—and best-looking!—women in the crowd. Even at 85, Mother was not going anywhere in public without getting her hair done first, and only in her Sunday best!

The General William C. Lee Airborne Museum in Dunn, N.C. Photo courtesy www.visitnc.com

They probably would have had a better view from the side yard of her childhood friend, Daisy Deane Anderson, who lived just across the side street from the statue of Just Plain Bill. But for some reason, that was not possible—Daisy Deane, a former journalist, was in poor health, and died a year later; in any event, I don’t think she was ever much of a Hillary Clinton fan. Mother liked Bill, at least—as disgraceful as she considered his personal behavior …

You are probably thinking it, already, so I’ll admit it: I have taken a lot of kidding over the years about growing up on General Lee Avenue—mostly from folks who only know much about one General Lee—and assume I must have been an unreconstructed Rebel growing up. The town renamed a street to honor its most famous native son after his death, and my parents built a house on that street just before my third birthday, in 1952.

General William C. Lee (1895-1948), whose Dunn, N.C., museum hosted Bill Clinton on 2008. Public domain photo

Not too many years ago, someone vandalized the white marble status of “our” General Lee in the museum’s front yard—apparently by trying to set it on fire, from the rear—and after effecting repairs, the town leaders spent a lot of time trying to educate the public to the truth about our General Lee (and not that “other” one, Robert E., whose name has become anathema to so many in recent years—not to me, as a historian, but apparently I am in the distinct minority these days).

As an added precaution, they even expanded the name of the street on street signs—if in print so small you can barely read it now—to “General William Carey Lee Avenue.”

Mother passed on in 2019—aged 96, still sharp, though slowing down with a walker in the last year of her life—and her ashes are interred next to Daddy in Dunn’s Greenwood Cemetery, not so far from the small mausoleum housing Just Plain Bill, her father’s cousin. To the end, she retained her fond memories of the General and her close encounter with Bill Clinton at his house …

Next time: It’s a small world, after all: Celebrities and other folks I barely missed meeting