THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

THE TRUMP CARD | 2005-09-30

Shortly after I began to work for Congressman John Ashbrook (NOT ASHCROFT!!!) in the late 1970s, his brother in Ohio was taken out one night by organized crime and strangled to death in a field.

His brother had run up huge, unpayable gambling debts.

Yes, Virginia, these things don't just happen on the Sopranos.

An adventurous person like John Ashbrook often just loves gambling. On one of the trips to the race track that John took some of us staffers along on he hit his first trisecta, which, as I understand it, is a big payoff when you pick the winning horse in three races.

He took me along when he was in a poker games with enormous stakes. The amount of cash on the table was staggering.

It was a very fun, friendly game all the way through.

But no one at the table was allowed to have a weapon on him. I had no idea where we were going the first time, but as we were ready to go in, John handed me his gun.

There were a couple of his regular older staffers with him from the Ohio office, so I didn't realize until a few years ago why it was he handed ME the gun.

I was raised with a gun in the pocket of my car. That is called the "glove compartment" by folks whe are not from the South. We didn't have a lot of use for gloves outside of work, so we ended up calling it the "pocket." So I sort of assumed that the Ohio guys, being from a largely rural area, would take a gun for granted the way I did.

It was only a few years ago that I finally realized for the first time that John had not given ANYBODY a gun before that. He was kind of proud that he finally had a staffer he could give a gun TO.

The other staffers were civilized people who were not familiar with the practical use of a firearm.

You might say that you could give your pistol to anybody who had been in the armed forces.

That is DEFINITELY untrue. The last thing a person in the armed forces is trained to do is to have a gun on his person with no SPECIFIC rules about how to use it. That is the opposite of what military training is about.

For me being handed a gun in this way was about as shocking as being handed a shovel on a work site. John gave me no instructions.

John knew my background. John Ashbrook was Ranking Republican onthe House Select Intelligence Committee. His access to information on people like me was awesome. A congressman in that position seeking information on a staffer he was hiring was not bound up by the rules that the executive branch must adhere to.

More important, John's interest in me was PERSONAL. There was nothing routine about the search he did on me. He knew it ALL.

OK, I could handle a gun in an unpredictable situation. So what instructions did he give me?

None.

I was senior staff. I was supposd to know what to do. That's what he hired me for.

His judgment was confirmed when I changed guns.

The weapon John handed me was a very expensive-looking pistol ("handgun" to you modern folks).

But it was a .32 caliber. FAR too small.

The next time we went to a poker game, I brought my own .45.

I carried a .45 for exactly the reason the .45 was adopted by the army in the first place. In the early 1900s during the fighting in the Phillipines, American soldiers would shoot doped-up guerrilla attackers with their .38's.

They did kill the attackers with those .38s, but there was a small catch. All too often, by the time the attacker went down, he had killed the American shooting him.

In combat you are usually using your rifle. By the time it gets down to the time you have to reach for your pistol, you are dealing in seconds of precious time.

To put this in the vernacular, when an American soldier in the Phillipines had to reach for his pistol he had lost all interest in adding to the enemy body count. His only obsession was in knocking that sucker DOWN.

Which is why the army adopted the knock-'em-down .45 in the first place.

I did not want a gun that would look good. I wanted one that would protect me and John.

It never occurred to me at the time that I was the first staffer John had ever had who would know little housekeeping hints like that.

COMMENTS (5)

#1 lemon | 2005-09-30 14:15

Boy, you have had some life. My grandfather would have known things like that. He had been a deputy sheriff, gunsmith and avid hunter. My husband and two sons would know as well, I'm happy to say. Myself, I have never paid much attention. Shari

#2 | 2005-09-30 14:29

As a (very) minor point of history Bob, I believe the army actually had to revert to the old single action Colt .45 revolver in the Philipines, there being no .45 ACP in the inventory till 1911.

Not the first time a brilliant new idea had to be abandoned for something old and presumabley obsolete.

#3 Bob | 2005-09-30 18:40

Shari, you are proud to say that your husband and your two sons would know about things like that, so you don't bother.

You seem to have the old-fashioned bigoted idea that a man should do the protecting.

Your thinking would strike Modern Thought as reactionary.

I think it's very, every healthy.

#4 Bob | 2005-09-30 19:03

Anonymous, your comment is very interesting to me.

Readers, I will not bore you crosseyed here with gun talk. Just let the old man ramble on for a couple of paragraphs and I'll have something ingteresting at the end.

I am a gun nut, but not a MODERN gun nut. Like today's automobiles, all of todays weapons look alike. They are all light plastic, they fire 600 rounds a minute, they are all very, very modular. One of today's REAL assault weapons can do what a company of British soldiers in a firing line could do in 1900.

No doubt about it, they are awesome,

But they are not INTERESTING. The last time one of them was interesting was when I accidentally ended up in a firefight with a very early Vietnam M-16, the ones that jammed. Boy, was that ever interesting!

At the time I would greatly have preferred a boring weapon that WORKED.

But when you mention the old .45 revolvers, they are like the old Plymouths and Hudsons -- cars that existed in the 1950s. You could tell which was which from all the way across a parking lot. Today cars are all shaped alike.

I got my .45 revolvers for $17 apiece by mail in the 1950s. But those gunns dated from the 1920s and you used the "C" clip for automatic ammunition.

I wonder if those .45 revolver you mention were the same make as the 1920s variety?

Anyway, before the non-gun nuts riot, there is one thing about .45 revolvers that was interesting: You can OVERLOAD them.

You can double the powder charge behind the bullet you stick in a .45 revolver and it will hit twice as hard. If you could get that double-loaded bullet into an autmoatic, the automatic would be ruined, and so would your hand.

I had a bullet reloader who was a student at the Columbia Bible College. I wouldn't try it in a million years. There were far too many people at gun shows who wore an eyepatch.

Those overpowered bullets made the cheap .45 revolver into what was called "The Poor Man's Magnum."

#5 antonion fini | 2005-10-01 00:02

Actually Bob that was my comment, but my web browser at work doesn't store my screen name.

The single action Colts of the 1920's were mechanically identical to the models used in the Indian wars. They were mothballed around the turn of the century then refurbished for Philippine action when the .38 struck out, much like today's M-14 rifle, which now enjoys a rennaisance in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The pre WWII Single action Colt's are valuable collector's items today, but it requires some expertise to distinguish the most desirable models. I think the Texas Rangers still issue the Single Action Army for regular carry to this day, but Rangers have always been a breed apart.

Incidentally, a historian once argued that you could precisely trace the decline of the Roman Empire by observing the deteriorating quality of their army equipment over the decades. Any Viet Nam vet struggling with a jammed M-16 could have figured that one out.

Rampant gun-nutism aside, what attracted me to your post on Rep. Ashbrook was the suggestion that a political career need not lead to a life of joyless workaholism.

How in the world did he avoid scandle and ruin?