Aram Bakshian, Jr., has served as an aide to three American Presidents, most recently as Director of Speechwriting for Ronald Reagan. As Editor in Chief of American Speaker, his writing on politics, history, humor and the arts has been widely published in America and Europe.
What is an Armenian community? It's hard to say. We are so wide spread and yet so few and far between. This is especially true in a society as mixed and mobile as America.
Watertown, Massachusetts, and Fresno, California, are small places with large numbers of Armenians. But most Armenian communities tend to be relatively small numbers of people in very big places, e.g. New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Perhaps the most "minimalist" definition of an Armenian community applies to Washington, D.C. It all had to start somewhere, and, in the case of Washington, it started with a single man — my grandfather — at the turn of the century'.
When my paternal grandfather, Artaky Hagop Bakshian first came to the nation's capital more than a century ago, he was a one man Armenian community. When grandfather arrived, there was nobody else. No relatives, no friends or neighbors from the old country, no Armenian clergy, and no church (today there are two, one of them, St. Mary's, designed by my great uncle, the distinguished architect Mirhan Mesrobian).
An ambitious, educated (at missionary schools in Turkey and the old Columbian College — now George Washington University — in Washington) young businessman, A.H. Bakshian soon became the capital's first importer of oriental rugs.
By the time of his death in 1938, the list of his patrons would include the White House, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, Supreme Court justices, senators, senior members of the diplomatic corps and leading society figures.
His award-winning building on Connecticut Avenue, then the city's most fashionable boulevard, was something of a landmark, its owner a popular local character known for his quick wit and sometimes barbed humor.
Visitors like Supreme Court Justice McReynolds would often stop by for the pleasure of his company and a cup of steaming Turkish coffee. The mountainous form of ex-President William Howard Taft would invariably stop and tip his hat to my grandfather on his daily stroll down the Avenue.
But pioneers pay a price. Precisely because he arrived so early, A.H. Bakshian, his wife, Yevkine Martmanian Bakshian, whom he married in 1905, and their three children, Mary, Aram and Arman — all born before World War I — lived in a predominantly American milieu.
For the most part, "Armenia" centered around the family hearth; "America" began at the front door. Grandmother's friends and neighbors were all old Washington families. Her children went to school and to church with their children.
As far as life outside the hearth was concerned, the family was thoroughly assimilated long before the First World War. Of course, close contact was kept up with relatives in Smyrna and Constantinople, and many an ocean voyage was made to visit kindred in the old country.
One such visit almost led to our extinction. My grandmother and her three small children were visiting Turkey in 1914 for the wedding of her younger sister, Zabelle, a talented singer who studied under the great teacher composer Komitas Vartabed. But for good luck, they might have been part of the Armenian holocaust. They escaped just in time, securing passage on an English steamer days before the Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of the Central Powers.
World War I and the horrors of the Armenian genocide changed my family. You might say that it temporarily revived our "Armenianism."
The National Presbyterian Church, which my family attended, became a center of the Near East Relief fund, with my grandmother playing a leading role. Relatives were rescued and brought to America, where they prospered.
And then there was the ideal of independent Armenia. Our poor illusion of a country, given lip service by Woodrow Wilson, but never backed up and soon betrayed to — of all people — the gruesome twosome of Josef Stalin and Kemal Ataturk (whom my great uncle Mirhan Bey Mesrobian had met when he was serving as an Ottoman officer before the genocide).
In the short but happy days before the betrayal, there were naive believers who, heart and soul, committed themselves to a truly independent Armenian republic. They may have been dreamers, but today, at long last, their dream has come true.
My grandfather, despite his worldly wit and skepticism, was one of the dreamers. He contributed to the cause and assisted the short-lived diplomatic mission at the Armenian Legation in Washington.
When General Antranik, the hero of the Armenian independence struggle, passed through Washington, he dined with the Bakshians. A somber, soldierly figure with a leonine countenance and jutting white mustache, melancholy but manly, "Antranik of Armenia" made an indelible impression on my father, who passed it on to me. More than seventy years after his visit to my family, the memory would stir me to write the first English language biography of Antranik in a mainstream publication, in England's prestigious History Today.
How Armenian were we in those years immediately after the genocide? Probably more than we had been before or ever would be again.
Where my family could help the Armenian community and the Armenian cause, it did what it could. But because of our earlier Washington roots, we grew away and apart from the several waves of Armenian immigrants who followed.
When the Armenian Church finally reached Washington, the Bakshians had been Presbyterians for nearly half a century; too long to change. Both of the second generation Bakshians who married chose "Americans" of West European stock and moved in WASP circles.
By the time I was born in 1944, the only Armenians we saw on a regular basis were a few close relatives. Indeed, the first "independent" contact I made with another Armenian-American was the chance assignment to the same seventh grade English class with a kid named Kevorkian.
As the oldest member of the third generation of Bakshians in America, my ties with Armenia — strictly speaking, the Armenian element of the old Ottoman Empire as opposed to geographical Armenia — were drawn from tales my grandmother told me, and books I read with growing interest over the years. It was more of an ancestral hobby than a link to the outside world.
In that outside world, I became a writer active in Republican politics. From Artaky the Founder on down, the Bakshians have always been good Republicans, another departure from the usual immigrant scenario.
My aunt Mary, an attorney who, among other things, served as a counsel during the Nuremberg War Crime trials, was an active political volunteer. Thanks to her, I met my first U.S. Senator, presidential hopeful Robert A. Taft, before I was eight years old.
While still a high school student, as a television panelist on a program called "Youth Wants to Know" (a teenage equivalent of "Meet the Press"), I met and appeared with dozens of statesmen and celebrities — none of them, alas, Armenian — ranging from Woody Allen (who seemed perfectly normal at the time) and bullet-headed Austrian film director Otto Preminger to that charming if slightly oleaginous Illinois orator, Senator Everett Dirksen, and perhaps the most talkative man I have ever met in my life, Senator (later Vice President) Hubert Humphrey.
By the mid-1960s, after an apprenticeship as a copy boy at the Dow Jones National Observer and U.S. News and World Report, and a few early articles on politics, history and the arts, I had started my first full-time political job as a congressional aide.
Politics is like theater; once you get your foot in the door, once you've landed your first good role in a good production, things begin to happen.
While working for Representative Bill Brock of Chattanooga, Tennessee (who later went on to become a Senator, a U.S. Trade Representative, and Secretary of Labor), I developed a reputation as a speechwriter. I also did some occasional broadcasting on the side, sometimes subbing for a friend who hosted a local TV talk show on an early UHF channel.
It was on one such evening that I made contact with my first "celebrity" Armenian, George Mardikian, the San Francisco restaurateur and friend of Presidents Hoover and Eisenhower.
It was a few days before the 1968 presidential election, and my friend the regular host had gone off on a bender. His desperate wife called me at the last minute to take over the show, telling me only that the guests would all be "ethnic political types." Indeed they were, a Croatian, a Ukrainian and, Eureka!, an Armenian.
George and I became friends and, although I never made it to Omar Khayyam's, his San Francisco hostelry, we corresponded until his death, and I still treasure several coffee table volumes of Karsch portraits that he sent — along with delicious boxes of confectionery — as Christmas presents over the years.
As my reputation as a speechwriter grew, more and more congressmen asked for help (gratis of course, as if one actually enjoyed writing extra speeches in one's free time!). But the extra work paid off.
In 1971, when Kansas Senator Bob Dole became chairman of the Republican National Committee, he asked me to come aboard as his chief speechwriter. And this political move, quite by chance, brought me closer to my Armenian roots.
As many readers will know, Bob Dole is probably the best friend Armenian-Americans have in the U.S. Senate. A decorated war hero, he was critically wounded in Italy and barely survived. Even then, it was thought that he would be a cripple for life. Only his own dogged courage, the love and support of friends and neighbors in his home town of Russell, Kansas, and the brilliant efforts of an Armenian-American reconstructive surgeon, Hampar Kelikian, saw Bob Dole through to recovery and a long and distinguished public career.
Bob has never forgotten the Armenian connection and, ironically, I first came into contact with the Armenian-American community in a big way because I was working with a WASP politician from the rural heartland whose sense of gratitude to one Armenian healer had grown into an appreciation for the cause and character of an entire people.
I was lucky. As I began to become better known myself, the community I had failed to reach out to reached out to me. For me, there were no factions. I would participate with equal eagerness in events sponsored by the Etchmiadzin and Cilician churches.
But some of my most enjoyable Armenian encounters were unplanned. A visit to a dentist who turned out to be named Abrahamian, and who had once tended the Shah of Iran's molars. A chance meeting with Vladimir Mikoyan - grandson of Stalin's right hand man - whom I met on the terrace of a Georgetown restaurant overlooking the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, where an elderly black man had attracted a crowd by reeling in a gigantic carp.
Haig Kafafian, an eccentric but inspired inventor who turned his creative genius from designing weapons of destruction for the defense establishment to creating ingenious devices to help the severely handicapped, also proved to be an excellent jazz clarinetist, and a boon companion for the occasional night on the town; the owner of Davidoff's on Jermyn Street in London, where I walked in to buy a cigar only to discover an elegant, eloquent kinsman who had migrated from Tehran to London and set himself up as an upmarket tobacconist (what a versatile people we are!); the owner of the nicest restaurant in Brussels' stately Grand Place; that wise and kindly Holy man, Supreme Patriarch Vasken I, for whom Barry Zorthian and I helped arrange a last grand tour of the United States.
Artists, scholars, lawyers, businessmen, scoundrels, ascetics and know-it-alls; I've met plenty of fellow Armenians I didn't like, but none who were boring. And in all of them, I felt a glimmering of recognition, a sense that we were all distant cousins bound by common blood and a common tragic sense, not to mention a sense of the absurdity of the world.
Perhaps the greatest Armenian coincidence in my life occurred when I began my first stint in the White House, as a speechwriter for Richard Nixon in June of 1972. I had just settled into my spacious office in the palatial Executive Office Building when one of my new neighbors came by to introduce himself.
His name was Ken Khachigian (who has since served as a trusted advisor to both President Reagan and California's first Armenian governor). For Armenians, it's always a small world; out of a staff of hundreds, fate had managed to create an Armenian ghetto in one small corner of the Executive Office Building!
How Armenian am I? As Armenian as any true American can be.
I am moved by the majesty of the Armenian liturgy because — without knowing the meaning of the individual words — I know what they have meant to more than a thousand years of Armenian martyrs. Armenian song and music speak to something buried in my blood. And whenever I am sitting at a table with other Armenians, the food and wine take on a special savor, as does the conversation.
Armenia started for me as a strictly family affair, but over the years, the family has grown. Armenia will always be my family, just as America will always be my country. I hope that, like any good family member, I will be there when I am needed, even as I continue to live a public life that is thoroughly American.
