As I mentioned before, I became a member of the Cosmos Club in 1979. This private social club in Washington is now almost 200 years old. It was started to be similar to the Royal Geographic Society in England. That was the group that sent Doctor David Livingston (I presume) to Africa. The early members were explorers and geographers. Over the years, they added other categories since there were not that many explorers.
Over the years, its members have included three Presidents, two Vice Presidents, 12 Supreme Court justices, 36 Nobel Prize winners, 61 Pulitzer Prize winners and 55 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. None of them was me.
The usual way to join a social club is to have some friends who are members put you up for membership. Then you send in your check. That is still true with the Cosmos Club. However, you need letters of recommendation from the leaders in the field that you are applying.
For me, medicine was not one of them. I was an author of science.
The original Cosmos clubhouse was on Lafayette Square. Then a member by the name of Richard H. Townsend donated his mansion, which is the present clubhouse. We have added several buildings to it, so we now have a bar, restaurant and sleeping rooms.
The old cocktail lounge is very unique. The walls are painted depicting the original buildings of Lafayette Square bounded by the White House. The room is still there, but it is not used as a cocktail lounge. Sally and I always looked forward to getting there early and having a drink before dinner.
Above the new bar is a famous painting. It shows the members that were at the first meeting where they started the National Geographic Society in 1888. The most famous member at the meeting was Alexander Graham Bell. I think the last explorer that was elected was Frank Borman the astronaut.
During the early years, we always made my December visit to coincide with the annual Christmas dance. We usually had a modest party and always took over the National Geographic room, which had all the copies of the magazine since the beginning in 1888. I still look forward to my visits even today.
One of their quaint habits used to be when they would send you a letter on your birthday. In that letter, they congratulate you on your new age. They made a big mistake several years ago when the letter congratulated me for turning 96. I can’t wait to see what I get when I turn 100.
Needless to say, I come here all the time and do not frequent Matt Kane’s bar anymore.
Dining with Friends
As the years moved on, I had lunch at the club with old friends like Ambassador John Countryman from Xavier and Doc Schardt from Korea and West Point. I even had dinners with an old friend, Justice Scalia, and his wife Maureen. I was his company commander at Xavier.
It all began when a Neuro-Op friend of mine, Mel Alper, asked me down to be Visiting Professor at Washington Children’s Hospital. I went and he took me to dinner at the Cosmos Club. I was impressed, and he sponsored me for membership. I stopped going to Matt Kane’s and never regretted it.
That evening, a fellow member, Herb Block, came over to say hello to my friend Mel. He was a famous D.C. newspaper cartoonist. He was at the club to give a lecture titled, "Cartoons I Have Never Published.” One of them was a picture showing President Dwight Eisenhower standing on the Capitol steps with Vice President Nixon. This was dated just after Ike’s heart attack in 1955 with Nixon saying, "I’ll race you to the top.”
Mel received a signed copy. I asked him for a Xerox copy, but I never received it.