ANNIVERSARY OF KING ALEKSANDAR'S ASSASSINATION (1): The King's chair

From the publication by Ambassador Dragan Bisenic "The American chair of King Aleksandar"

Even before leaving for the embassy in Cairo, I heard from former ambassadors and former embassy officials that there is a certain chair of King Peter II Karađorđević that was left there from his refugee days. The chair, however, was like a ghost. No one knew exactly which one it was, from the numerous armchairs and sets that are located on the ground floor of the salon part of the embassy located in the posh neighborhood of Cairo, an island in the Nile, Zamalek.

The Egyptian style of furniture design is specific, pompous, and heavily influenced by French court interiors. Every furniture store in Cairo sells exactly such replicas that are the standard furniture of better-off Egyptians, and in the vicinity of Alexandria and Damietta, hundreds of stores and factories produce this massive, glamorous, and archaic furniture. This probably made everyone believe that the "king's chair" was exactly one of those bulky armchairs that were made to come as close as possible to an imaginary imitation of the throne of any monarch. But none of them was exactly that chair.

The "King's chair" would probably have remained a phantom for me as well if one day I had not visited the inventory that had been standing apart for a long time and was waiting for the time to be written off. Cairo is a city where everything can be restored and adapted, especially used and aged furniture. We have already done this with several sets that have been restored to their elegance thanks to the skilled carpenters and craftsmen of Cairo. Under the rays of the sun that fell directly on the dark brown leather back of an almost imperceptible and rather unsightly chair in the side office, which stood isolated in a corner buried in old newspapers, I noticed the glitter of engraved letters. Apart from the unusual color of the skin, she was not presentable in everything: the armrests on her were completely worn out, and the legs were completely wobbly, so I guess that's why no one could even sit on her, and that was the most important reason to put her in line for the final parting with the place in the Embassy.

On the leather parts of the chair, on the back, and on the sitting part, in all four corners, the letters CFR were engraved, in a total of eight places. CFR is the well-known abbreviation of the "Council on Foreign Relations", a New York organization that is the most famous and prestigious factory of American foreign policy ideas, which conspiracy theorists have long classified as the "secret rulers of the world".To some extent, it was founded, since the Council on Foreign Affairs had a huge influence on the creation of global relations, especially after the Second World War. Everyone who has mattered in American politics since 1921, when the Council was founded, has been a member.

At that moment, it was clear that it was that decrepit chair from the "king's throne" write-off list, that specter that wandered around the building in Zamalek. But, even more exciting was the knowledge that by chance I know almost everything about that chair - its genesis and family tree. When I discovered it, I think I was as happy as if I were Nikola Tesla who had just discovered alternating current. I didn't walk for seven days, I just floated.

The comedian's case, as Crnjanski would say, happened to place a subject in front of me that I had heard about several times while working on my book on the history of Serbian-American relations, and speaking to students about that miniature episode about which it was not even known whether true at all. But it sounded enticing to any tale, and now it was definitely real. 
How did that chair get from New York to Cairo? It is a multi-decade journey with thousands of kilometers covered. 

How did that chair travel from New York to Cairo? It is a decades-long journey covering thousands of kilometers. 

The chair was presented to King Aleksandar Karađorđević by one of his closest foreign friends, the editor of the most important foreign policy magazine Foreign Affairs since its foundation in 1922 and for the next half-century, and one of the founders of the American Council on Foreign Relations - Hamilton Fish Armstrong. I heard his name for the first time in a conversation I had more than two decades ago with the famous American diplomat Henry Kissinger.

"Yugoslavia and I have something in common: the man who discovered it for America, discovered me too," Kissinger said in a conversation we had in 2001 in Berlin. "If it hadn't been for Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Yugoslavia would not have had the same meaning for America as she had, without him publishing my article in Foreign Affairs, the question is whether I would have ever become active in politics and diplomacy. He was at the center of American political decision-making for decades. The post-war world without his direct influence would not look the way it does today it seems," Kissinger concluded.

That was enough to ask: who is this very important man that no one knows about? So important, yet so unknown?

Knowing about our usual carelessness, it was not so strange that he is not in the books and doctoral dissertations that were written in Serbia, the former Yugoslavia, but also in the Balkans about the relations between Yugoslavia and America. Not even the Americans who wrote about Yugoslavia and the Balkans mention him, especially since the decade from 1990 to 2000 in American foreign policy was marked by the "Serbian question" and Serbia. Hundreds of books and tens of thousands of articles and texts were written about Serbia, Yugoslavia, and the Balkans, but again without mentioning his name.

The only source could be the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and Foreign Affairs. The magazine's editor-in-chief at the time was James Hogg, Jr., and he gladly agreed to host a search for the meaning of his illustrious predecessor that ran from September 1-13, 2004.

I met James Hogg a few years earlier, during the Yugoslav crisis, the reflections of which appeared almost regularly in Foreign Affairs. In some of his habits, Hogg seemed anachronistic for America at the time. He is an avid smoker, a habit he has maintained since his days as a journalist. Before becoming the editor of Foreign Affairs, he was a journalist for thirty years, including the position of editor-in-chief of the Chicago Sun-Times, which during that time became one of the most important American newspapers whose journalists received six Pulitzer Prizes.

Editing the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, Hogg opened a debate on numerous international aspects of the Yugoslav crisis, publishing texts that sharply criticized American policy, including critics of the bombing of Kosovo. The program he prepared included attending numerous events at the Council on Foreign Relations, from the first day which began with a breakfast during which the report of the working group on the Middle East headed by General Brent Scowcroft was presented, through the report on the new role of the UN which were reported by old acquaintance Richard Holbrooke and Thomas Pickering, until the dinner where the long-time first man of Time magazine and later of CNN, Walter Isaacson, spoke about his book about President Theodore Roosevelt.

General Scowcroft was Nixon's and then Bush's national security adviser, and in the 60s he was the American air attache in Belgrade, at the time George Kennan was ambassador. He earned his doctorate at Columbia University on the topic of Yugoslav social life and the position of workers and never lost his great sympathy for Belgrade, even in the decisive moments from 1988-1992, when he was Bush's first associate. When we shook hands, he said in excellent Serbian: "Good day!" I'm Brent Scowcroft. How are you?" He was proud that he had not forgotten Serbian even after almost half a century.

He also helped me to discover that he is indeed an extremely important and unjustifiably neglected man who for decades shaped the American attitude towards Serbia and Yugoslavia in the American official and unofficial bodies that shaped the fate of the world in two world wars. Above all, Hamilton Fish Armstrong was a loyal friend of Serbia and Yugoslavia throughout his life, since as a student at Princeton, together with his best friend Allen Dulles, later head of the CIA, he collected aid for Serbia in the Balkan Wars. Then, he hosted a Serbian military delegation that stayed in America for several weeks in 1917-1918, led by Milenko Vesnić, and that attended the Congress session when President Woodrow Wilson presented the American war program, known as "14 points". Armstrong after therefore became the first American military attaché in liberated Belgrade in 1919, when he played an important role in Pupin's first visit to Belgrade and Pancevo.

He was dedicated to Serbia and Yugoslavia. He deeply respected and appreciated your 'peasant sons', as he called them - Nikolaj Velimirović, Živojin Mišić, and especially King Aleksandar Karađorđević," Armstrong's wife Christa von Tipelskirk told me when we spoke in New York 15 years ago. He was especially close to bishop Nikolaj Velimirović, whose portrait he kept in his office.

Then she also mentioned the chair that is now in Cairo. It's the chair Hamilton Fish Armstrong sat in in his office as executive director of the American Council on Foreign Relations. He transported it by ship to Italy, and then by car to Belgrade as a gift to King Aleksandar Karađorđević.

"You can't be a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, but at least you can feel like one in this chair," Armstrong said as he presented the chair to the king.

"Not. You brought that with you so that you would feel as if you were in New York with me," the Yugoslav king answered him jokingly.