The importance of being important....

One day in 1998, I was invited to have an off-the-record chat with an important staff person on the Clinton administration's National Security Council.  We met, at the important person's suggestion, at the important person's important club, where the major domo was kind enough to lend me a tie.  We sat in important old chairs and drank important old whiskey and had a made-for-TV version of an important old Washington conversation - the personage from the White House setting me right, one important man to another, on the real and complex forces at work behind our government's seemingly mindless, but actually deep and subtle and clever, actions.  And me trying to nod in a way that suggested a fine blend of Kissingerian cunning and Lippmannesque wisdom, which is hard to do in a borrowed tie.
-Michael Kelly, as excerpted from his essay In a Borrowed Tie from his collected writings