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The Crucible
Once They Were Four Young Military Aides Thrown Into Lyndon Johnson's White House.
Now They're At the Top of Media, Finance, Education and Politics. The Only-in-Washington Story of Brian Lamb, Ed Mathias, Alan Merten and Chuck Robb.
by Garance Franke-Ruta

Alan Merten was sitting at his desk at the Pentagon in the fall of 1964 when he got the call.

The White House was on the line. The young Air Force first lieutenant had been recommended as a candidate for a part-time position as a White House military aide. Would Merten be interested in coming in for an interview with Bess Abell, President Lyndon Johnson's social secretary?

Merten, then just 25 years old, jumped at the chance. The posting was an honor, offered only to some 20 personable young officers stationed in the Washington area each year. The nomination process was informal (Merten still doesn't know who recommended him), but the criteria for selection were strict. The White House was looking for recruiting-poster types - socially graceful, unmarried men who didn't wear glasses. Men who would impress White House guests, assist the President, and put visiting dignitaries and other assorted VIPs at ease. In March 1965, after several rounds of interviews and the requisite security clearance, Alan Merten found himself playing host in the most important house on earth. Heady stuff for a young officer. This was before Vietnam had fully penetrated the national consciousness. Before Johnson removed himself from the 1968 election fray. Before the assassinations of Sen. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Before Kent State or Watergate. In the mid-'60s, the brightest young men from the finest schools still flocked to the military. And a select group of those young men would, on a given evening, put on dress uniforms and come to the White House to dance the night away. It was a great gig.

They mingled among guests at State dinners, whispered forgotten names in the President's ear, and picked up dropped napkins. When they saw Governor George Wallace or some other pariah standing alone in a corner, ostracized by other guests, it was their job to talk to him. And at a glance from the President, the military aides knew to cut in and relieve Johnson of his dance partner so he could move on to other, prettier young ladies. For the year or two they were in the aides program, these young men spent two to four evenings or lunches a week at the White House, schmoozing, squiring, and soaking up insight into the ways of some of the most powerful, connected and famous people of their era.

Fast forward thirty-plus years: Four of those elite young officers, acquaintances or friends in their White House days, have emerged as leaders in their chosen fields. Brian Lamb, the media guru, is the president and founder of C-SPAN, the revolutionary cable channel. Edward Mathias, the financier, is a managing director and cofounder of The Carlyle Group, a premier, DC-based investment shop with over $5 billion under management. Alan Merten, the academic, is president of George Mason University, the fast-growing, tech-focused institution in Fairfax, VA. And then there's Charles Robb (D-VA), the politician, who for more than a decade has been a U.S. Senator from Virginia. All served as military aides in the Johnson White House around 1966 and 1967.

A snapshot of the four men, then and now, presents a revealing portrait of Greater Washington. In the Sixties, politics and the military dominated. No surprise, then, that Lamb, Mathias, Merton, and Robb found themselves as military aides in the White House: That's where the action was. But today it's different. Washington's not just politics and the military. It's about the convergence of that old establishment with the cornerstones of the new economy: communications, information and finance. That these four men have emerged in their current roles is not only a reflection of their abilities, but a sure sign that the prevailing forces in the region have changed.

Casting a Long Shadow
Once upon a time, C-SPAN's Lamb, a Navy lieutenant junior grade, used to read off the weekly body counts from Vietnam as a Pentagon press aide. Carlyle's Mathias came to the White House, also as a Navy lieutenant junior grade, after two years on a destroyer plucking downed pilots out of the Gulf of Tonkin. GMU's Merten was an Air Force first lieutenant who, in 1964, received a masters degree from Stanford in a strange new field called computer science. And Chuck Robb, who was a captain in the Marines, first in his class at the Marine Corps Officer's Basic School at Quantico, VA, would go on to marry the President's daughter and earn a bronze star in active duty in Vietnam. Being in the White House is an intense experience at any time. But Lamb, Mathias, Merten and Robb served between 1966 and 1967, the years that the Johnson administration began to unravel. By the end of 1967, the economy had soured, imperiling Johnson's Great Society programs, the Vietnam War had outraged America, and the Democrats had lost a stinging number of seats in Congress.

For the military aides, the view from inside helped put things in perspective. The everyday details of the lives of important people were laid bare: Once you've had to walk an elderly Supreme Court Justice William Douglass to the bathroom, it becomes harder to be too intimidated by rank and position. "It was a very maturing experience," says Mathias. Mathias recalls catching sight of the Italian immigrant founder of Bank of America tearing up in a corner one evening from the sheer wonder of being there, in the American White House. Mathias credits the military aides program with getting him into Harvard Business School, from which he graduated in 1971. "It gave you insights. And in my case it cast a very long shadow. It made my application stand out in a highly competitive environment," he explains. And it was his stint at the White House, Mathias says, that impelled him to come back to the District for business, even though there were better cities for a business student. "At that time, Washington as a business and financial center was a backwater," he says. Mathias took a job in the Baltimore offices of T. Rowe Price, where he went on to become a managing partner. Today, as a managing director of The Carlyle Group, a private global investment firm he helped found in 1987, Mathias watches over more than $2.5 billion in investments.

Though the firm has the usual offices in New York, London, and Hong Kong, it is unusual among investment funds in that it's based in DC. The Carlyle Group's beautifully appointed offices lie on Pennsylvania Avenue, just six blocks down the street from Mathias's old haunt. He adds: "The experience [in the White House] not only created opportunities and helped build self-confidence, but it gave me a tremendous appetite for politics and the role of government." Nights spent popping stuffed mushrooms and chatting with Secret Service officers bored by Johnson's continual visits to the same Texas ranch paid off in an unexpected way - in a life helping bring high finance to Washington business.

They're Just People
"The thing you learn about Presidents," says Brian Lamb, sitting back in his chair at C-SPAN's executive offices on North Capitol Street, "is that even very big people are overwhelmed at being in the presence of a President." Lamb, who has been called America's best listener, is taking some rare time to talk about his own experiences. "People would get captivated" when talking with Johnson at White House events or in the reception line, says Lamb, and not know how to end the conversation or move on. "Our job was to keep it moving."

The military aides quickly learned to be at ease. In a way, it was one of their duties. "One of the first things this experience did," says Lamb, "was take the awe away from being around famous and important people. I was 24 when I first went to the White House. You're young and impressionable and overwhelmed by big names, but then you realize they're just people."

Alan Merten came to similar conclusions. "As someone in my twenties, I met very powerful people I liked and I didn't like and I learned that power doesn't make you nice and power doesn't make you evil," he explains. "People were nervous in the White House - kings and princesses and governors. I'm sure in their own environment they were comfortable. But the White House made them nervous." It was the job of the social aides to make people feel at home in the President's house. Of course, it wasn't always possible.

"I was told off by Joan Crawford," recalls Lamb of a particularly unpleasant attempt to chat up the Hollywood star. "She was not a friendly human being."

"You were almost like a servant," he adds, crinkling his eyes at the memory. "Barbara Walters treated me with disdain. I'll never forget that."

Snotty Hollywood stars, grasping political flunkies elbowing each other for a little slice of power, surprising off-the-record chats between the President and union leaders, military men trying to impress women or feather their nests with White House connections, intimate moments with the First Family - Lamb, ever the observer, took it all in and filed it away for future reference.

"I was just part of the wallpaper," he says. "Johnson paid no attention to me for the first year. He didn't know my name." But when Johnson's poll numbers hit their all-time low in 1967 (a crushing favorable rating of only 39 percent), Lamb was at a podium reading aloud the details of an evening's event to the guests. Afterwards, Johnson surprised him by coming up to shake his hand and say thanks. "It was like he was reaching out for support to everyone he could, and I was there," says Lamb. Suddenly, the support of this anonymous young man in a uniform meant a great deal to the President.

Social Aides, Social Animals
Selected for their social skills, the aides were also a gregarious group in their private lives. Smart, single, and thrown together in the White House, the bonds they formed went beyond the usual military ones.

"It was an interesting group," says Senator Chuck Robb. Sitting in his office in the Russell Office Building, Robb still has, all these years later, the stiff and formal posture of a military man. "Most of us socialized together. We went to parties at the White House, after the White House."

Merten lived at a bachelor officers quarters in Arlington called the Glass House, while Robb lived at Center House at the Marine Barracks at Eighth and I streets Southeast. The two buildings became the loci for a weekend military aide party circuit. The Johnson daughters, Lynda and Lucy, sometimes joined the military aides at the bashes. Robb recalls first meeting his future wife, Lynda Bird Johnson, at a Center House party that took place before he joined the White House aide program. Later, "the social aides gave Lynda and me our favorite pre-nuptial party at Glass House," recalls Robb.

These days, Chuck Robb mainly sees Brian Lamb on C-SPAN-and vice versa. But in the late sixties, Robb and Lamb were much closer, and Robb's engagement to Lynda Bird Johnson gave Lamb his first taste of what it's like to be embroiled in a press controversy.

"They assigned him, or he volunteered, to be my PR officer after Lynda and I came to announce our engagement," says the Senator. Lamb recorded a Q & A session while rehearsing Robb for questions he might get from the press.

For Robb's bachelor party - which was attended by President Johnson - Lamb spliced these audio answers with a set of far wilder questions, and then ran the audio under a film of President Johnson at a press conference. "They did it in such a way that everybody howled," Robb remembers. "I asked him to escort Lynda's mother at our wedding." "The objective was to try to embarrass him in front of his father-in-law," says Lamb. "It was hilarious."

But the press flack job became a lightening rod for criticism. "Fran Lewin - he's at CNN now but was then with the AP - said I was Robb's personal press secretary," Lamb says. "The President was watching Channel 7 when an announcer came on and said his son-in-law to be had a press secretary. The President was a control freak." He went ballistic, and called up Lamb's bosses at the Pentagon. Only one person in the White House was important enough to have a press secretary, and it was definitely not a certain junior-level military aide. By the time Johnson was done with the officers, Lamb had been reassigned to desk duty. "Being that close to controversy was very interesting to watch," says Lamb. "It was very instructive to watch how news flows."

The War Hits Home
And there were moments when the frivolous duties of the aides ran up against the gravity of the times. Merten recalls one evening after a party, three or four military aides were hanging around, chatting about the event. The President and his political aides came out of the East Wing. Johnson approached the young men and said "I want to thank you all for doing a fine job here tonight," Merten remembers. Then he walked off down the hall.

"I remember watching him," says Merten. "It must have been sometime in late 1966, and he walked slowly. Sort of hunchbacked. And we talked about this concept of the weight of the world being on someone's shoulders. He went upstairs to bed with this phone next to him." Merten trails off. "It hit me that night what it meant to be President."

Merten's first assignment in the military was to get his master's in computer science from Stanford. Later, while working in the Air Force computer center at the Pentagon, he began his tour in the White House. It was, for him, a time of great internal growth - and conflict. As the war began to heat up, the shadow of Vietnam began to hang over everything at the White House. By 1966, the conflict had escalated from an isolated military brush-up to a full-scale war in which Merten's colleagues were being killed. One of these early casualties was a former social aide.

"We were in the White House and someone came up and said Lieutenant Commander Coakley's plane went down," says Merten of the day he got the news. After that, Merten became acutely conscious of the contrast between his cushy assignment and the more dangerous ones being faced by his contemporaries.

The internal conflicts remained, though in a different form, after he left the White House toward the end of 1966 for a Ph.D program in computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin. Madison was a hotbed of anti-war radicalism. By September 1967, Merten had his first smell of tear gas, released to disperse an unruly protest against on-campus recruiting by Dow Chemical. Though he supported the goals of the protesters, he was also deeply disturbed by their means. As in the White House, Merten handled the conflict by focusing on his job and the work he had yet to do.

Ed Mathias also reports being extremely focused in graduate school. Some forty percent of students at Harvard Business School in 1969 had previously served in the military, and many of them, like Mathias, had already been to Vietnam. They had zero interest in thinking about the meaning of Vietnam, he says.

Building a Network
Robb left the White House with a wife and a lifetime's worth of political and fundraising contacts. "In my political career, I benefit from many of the people active in Linda's father's administration," the Senator says. "I'm constantly interacting with people from that time." As he prepares for an expected 2000 campaign showdown with another former Virginia Governor, George Allen (R), Robb will again put his contacts from those years to work.

Lamb's first taste of political scandal came in the White House during his stint as a military aide. This would begin to sour him on the traditional media flow of information, feeding the passion that would grow into C-SPAN. And while the others had effectively spent their entire adult lives in and around Washington, Merten used his military aide connections to get back into the flow when he returned to the region in 1996 as president of GMU after a stint as dean of Cornell University's S.C. Johnson School of Management.

When Merten returned to Washington in 1996 as the president of George Mason University, he decided to give Robb a call. The two men had not seen each other in some 30 years. But talking about their days together in the White House gave them an instant rapport. Robb and Lamb had stayed in touch over the years, with Lamb attending the Senator's wedding anniversary parties every five years. But Lamb and Merten did not reconnect until Merten gave Lamb a call. The same thing happened with Ed Mathias.

A Different World
Service as a military aide is not the only common link between the four men. All four men, to varying degrees, owe part of their success to embracing technology. Robb, governor of Virginia from 1982 to 1986, went on to found the state's Center for Innovative Technology in Herndon, a focal point for the technology explosion in Northern Virginia. Merten is in the process of transforming GMU into a regional high-tech powerhouse. Mathias' firm seeks to fund the ventures that the young techies create. As for Lamb, the cable revolution that began in earnest in the 1970s and early 1980s allowed him to build his idiosyncratic public affairs channel into a powerful national political force.

This group may well be among the last generation of national leaders to see military service as a defining experience. Twenty years from now, Greater Washington's political and business leaders will no longer be shaped by military experiences. "Today," says Mathias, "the military is not attracting the best people. At one time, half the people we would interview for jobs were former military. Today, I can't remember the last time."

Already, tomorrow's leaders are being forged in different Washington crucibles. They're not just coming out of politics or the military. Washington, like the world, has gotten a lot more complex.

FOUR FOR THE FUTURE

FINANCE TITAN

Edward Mathias is a managing director of the Carlyle Group. Chaired by former Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, The Carlyle Group has over $5 billion of capital under management. Based in the District, The Carlyle Group has, in just twelve years, established itself as a major player in the high-stakes world of private equity investment. Offices in New York, Hong Kong, London, Milan, Moscow, Munich, Paris, Riyadh, Seoul, and Newport Beach, RI employ over 247 people. Group affiliate Carlyle Venture Partners, a $210 million venture capital fund, focuses on information technology, communications, and the health care and financial services industries. Internet investments include VarsityBooks.com, AnyDay.com, and NorthPoint Communications.

PROFESSOR-PRESIDENT
Alan Merten is president of George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. Under Merten's leadership, GMU has become one of America's 100 Most Wired Colleges, according to the Yahoo! Internet Life magazine. The GMU School of Information Technology and Engineering opened in 1985, and was the first in the country to offer a doctoral degree in information technology. Today it has 2,850 students, including 1,150 undergraduates, and gets support from the National Science Foundation and NASA, among others. The university, which will host the 2000 Global Internet Summit next March, has opened telecommuting centers in three Virginia cities in conjunction with the City of Fairfax and the federal General Services Administration.

SENATE STALWART
Charles (Chuck) Robb is a two-term Senator from Virginia who is up for reelection in 2000. The former governor of Virginia, Robb is a moderate Democrat who serves on the Senate Finance, Intelligence and Armed Services  Committees. He is also a member of the Joint Economic Committee. As governor, he established a commission that led to the creation of the Center for Innovative Technology. As senator, he spearheaded a public-private partnership called Net Day East to wire Virginia's schools to the Internet, and was one of only two Democrats to receive the Spirit of Enterprise Award from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1988. In September, he introduced legislation to create a new visa category for foreign nationals with advanced science and technology skills and U.S. job offers.

CABLE'S CONSCIENCE
Brian Lamb is president and founder of C-SPAN, the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network. Launched in 1979 to provide live, unedited coverage of Congress, the non-profit funded by the cable industry employes some 250 people in its Washington, DC offices and operates four different stations. C-SPAN, the original cable public affairs channel, provides live 24-hour coverage of the House of Representatives and is available to more than 70 million households. C-SPAN II covers Senate debates and current events, with 2 days of non-fiction book programming each weekend; C-SPAN Radio 90 broadcasts a signal to the Washington-Baltimore market; and two-year old C-SPAN Extra airs one live event per weekday.