The Tribune

By Richard Coulson

To get a better perspective of our wonderful little country, I sometimes have to get away from Nassau. I need to see the pulsating energy in the wider world, the stimulation that comes from new ideas, from innovation, from controversial debate. In a recent trip of just three days to Washington, I had full exposure to this spirit of ferment. None of what I saw was precisely about the Bahamas, but each was an example that can trickle down to our young people who, while staying essentially Bahamian, are thirsty for change, for escape from the tired conformity that holds us back.

In any debate in Washington about public affairs, the Constitution comes first and foremost - what it permits or prohibits - after wrangles between the President, the Congress and the Supreme Court. At a party on my first night, I heard a passionate lady denounce the court decision that has allowed corporations, not just individuals, to make major contributions to political campaigns. “That’s got nothing to do with free speech,” she declaimed, “It’s just giving power to big money.” Her husband, my law school classmate, quoted some quiet technicalities, but nobody disagreed with her; she is a prominent psychologist and, born in Israel, knows something of how governments work. Another lawyer friend expressed dismay at the recently-disclosed Justice Department strategy of tapping journalists’ phones without court order, and subpoenaing their files to catch alleged ‘leakers’ of Government secrets. He is no trendy-lefty, having once served as the hard-boiled general counsel of the CIA, and is thus accustomed to defending official confidentiality, but not this time. The wholesale invasion of free expression was too much for him.

The next day I had a long meeting with a retired US Army Lieutenant-General, who I met 50 years ago when we were both young artillery lieutenants, he a freshly-minted graduate of West Point assigned to the crack 82nd Airborne Division. He was the first in his Academy class to get the star of Brigadier, and won combat decorations for the Korea and Vietnam campaigns. But Bob Gard dispels any caricature view of generals as ‘blood-and-guts warriors’ with few thoughts beyond the point of a bayonet. He now serves as chairman of the fully-staffed Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, with an office near the Capitol, where he often testifies before Congressional committees.

Far from quoting a belligerent line, he has been an outspoken opponent of many US international military adventures. He opposed entry into the Iraq war, and later went public against John McCain’s presidential bid, admiring his heroism as a prisoner of war but denying his aptitude as a leader. He has advocated reducing conventional weapons systems in favour of counter-insurgency measures, and admitted succumbing to a temper tantrum at a press conference when told about the Justice Department, in effect, approving torture as a legitimate investigation tactic. He gave me his precise views of how President Bush abysmally failed to catch Osama bin Laden when cornered in the Afghanistan mountains in December 2001.

In short, General Gard confesses to being something of a maverick among many of his fellow retired officers. Lean, pink-cheeked and vigorous in his 80s, he enjoys his mission and has no intention of shutting up or recanting his views. I found it encouraging that America has room for such spokesmen, qualified soldiers who know combat but discourage the US Government from joining the kind of interventionist policies that led to Iraq. He remains wary about military support for the Syrian rebels, and is forthright against the nuclear attacks against Iran that are continually threatened by Israel.

I walked down the street to have lunch with author and Washington insider, Al Felsenburg, who is working on a biography of my friend, the late William F. Buckley Jr. When Buckley wrote his first book in 1951, complaining about the lack of Conservative teaching in Yale’s education, he was dismissed as a reactionary crank, an obscure eccentric backing a long-discredited ideology.

By the time he died in 2008, he was renowned worldwide for befriending and influencing President Ronald Reagan; for creating the irrepressible magazine National Review; and for rejuvenating Conservatism as a powerful political force. A celebrity whose wit and charm led to innumerable speaking engagements, he got there by seizing a virtually forgotten idea and making it both controversial and highly visible.

That evening I went to a reception at the Army-Navy Club that reflected America’s vacillating embrace of people who serve in the military. It was a gathering of about 50 Yale alumni who had joined the University’s ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps), followed by active duty in the Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines. In my undergraduate era in the 1950s, many of my class joined ROTC as a normal reaction to the Korean War. Twenty years later, facing national revulsion at the Vietnam quagmire and crass contempt for returning GIs, the intellectual leaders of Yale and many other universities caved in to left-wing pressures and firmly barred their doors to ROTC programmes. College kids were not supposed to become soldiers.

Only over the last 10 years has opinion reverted to rationality, and ROTC has been welcomed back to the campus. So the Washington reunion consisted of old guys like me, who served pre-Vietnam, and fresh-faced grads who were once again proud to don a uniform. I talked to one snappy young lady alumna who had a five-year tour in the Navy and was now in the FBI’s Internal Intelligence department. She could have passed for Jodi Foster, so I called her Clarice Starling, the gutsy FBI agent played by Jodi in the unforgettable film, The Silence of The Lambs. She cheerfully laughed at the comparison; as she looked very fit, I didn’t ask if she was carrying.

On my last day I sought inspiration from a different source. I visited the National Gallery of Art and bought a $50 coffee-table book titled Masterpieces of Russian Stage Art, 1880-1930. The full-colour plates are magnificent, but what caught my interest were the names on the cover: Nina and Nikita D. Lobanov-Rostovsky, the collectors whom I have known since 1960.

Nikita, an heir of the Russian Romanov dynasty, was born an exile in Sofia, Bulgaria, which fell behind the Iron Curtain, firmly controlled by the Soviet Union, bitter enemies of the Romanovs since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

Nikita and his family tried to escape Bulgaria to freedom over snow-bound mountains. They were captured, dragged back to Sofia and sentenced to prison as political dissidents. At age 12, Nikita, separated from his parents, was held for a year, before being thrown on to the streets to fend for himself, surviving with petty criminal scrounging skills that he had learned in jail. After release from prison, his father was soon seized by the secret police as an “enemy of the people” and vanished into captivity never to be seen again. With the aid of Russian �migr�s in post-war France, Nikita and his mother finally got exit visas from Bulgaria to Paris, where she soon died from the many years of privation.

Nikita made his way to London, where at age 17 he had his epiphany. Having never been exposed to displays of art in the grim world of post-war Communism, his eyes were opened by an exhibition of the vivid stage designs commissioned by the Russian ballet impresario, Serge Diaghilev. On the spot, he decided he would create an even better collection of his own. But, of course, he was broke.

He won a scholarship that gave him a good Oxford geology degree, and moved to New York, where I first met him, still a penniless refugee just starting work as a low-paid banking minion, with new wife, the energetic Nina, half-Russian herself. My wife and I helped Nikita get US citizenship, and for the next 40 years watched his career progress in New York, London and back in Russia, as he used his brains, his charm, his linguistic skills and, above all, the steely determination to survive that he learned in prison. He excelled in specialised trade finance, became an expert in diamond dealing and renowned as a collector, with Nina ever at his side, seeking new acquisitions of Russian stage art.

The climax came when acquisitive President Vladimir Putin got wind of their collection and insisted that Russia be its home. With a decision straight from the Kremlin, Nikita’s asking price of several million dollars was accepted without haggling. In June 2008, Russian media showed Nikita and Nina at a champagne reception in St. Petersburg’s Theatre Arts Museum, being honoured for handing over 800 of their laboriously collected works of art. Nikita stood tall, wearing Russia’s Medal of Freedom on his chest and named with his hereditary title of Prince. It was the apex of a lifelong dream, far from his early days as a shivering prisoner in a police cell.

Over lunch at the National Gallery, I was unexpectedly introduced to the story of another dream. I got talking to an art lover who had a second passion, automobiles. “I’ve probably owned 50 cars. The best ever is the latest – the Tesla.” I had read vaguely about this new all-electric creation, and his enthusiasm led me outside to show off the new purchase, a sleek sedan with dashboard controls that I had never seen before. “Drives like a dream, 200 miles, then I re-charge, free. OK, so it cost me $75,000, but it’s the future. The real story isn’t the car, it’s the creator, Musk. First original since Henry Ford. Look him up.”

So I googled Elon Musk, the strangely sci-fi name of a guy born to a white South African father just 42 years ago. He emigrated at age 17 to avoid military service under the Apartheid regime. His terse reason: “Suppressing black people just didn’t seem like a really good way to spend time.” Education and early jobs in Canada and the US showed his gift for computer technology. By 31, he was a billionaire, having created, developed and sold the ubiquitous on-line payments system, PayPal. He promptly plunged into a new obsession: transportation.

With a $465 million Government loan to develop electric automobiles, he created what became the Tesla, and just this year pre-paid the loan and showed his first quarterly profit, while the major auto-makers are still tip-toeing around electrics and hybrids. Within three to five years, he promises to have a $30,000 model on the market, ready for mass sales.

But that’s not all that keeps him busy. He’s the principal backer of SolarCity, successful developer of solar-power systems; and also the founder of SpaceX, which earns money producing re-usable rocket vehicles for NASA, while researching more visionary projects, like the Hyperloop, an electro-magnetic ‘bullet train’ that Musk claims will make the 350 mile San Francisco- Los Angeles run in 30 minutes. A dreamer’s utopian ideal? Well, so were the earlier Musk projects.

Dr Jonathan Rodgers has titled his new book, The Bahamian Dream, and its cover blurb, by financier Larry Gibson, underlines “the necessity to challenge the status quo, to think out of the box”. I give my recent adventures as lessons of what Bahamians can aspire to accomplish. The stage is smaller here than in the US, but there is no less opportunity for vigorous political debate and dissent, and for grabbing an early dream and turning it into tangible success. Our younger citizens need no longer be locked into hoary platitudes like ‘That’s not the Bahamian way’.