A HISTORIC EXCUSE FOR A CLUB

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000402650043-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 8, 2012
• Sequence Number: 43
• Publication Date: January 9, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/08: CIA-RDP9O-00965ROO0402650043-1
1 ~'~fi {lF t~ -'~ 1VJ '1'l."J' 1 l: 7 .d-67q 9 Januan, 1985
A Historic Excuse for aClub'
By MARJORIE HUNTER
Spedal to The New York Time.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 8- For more
than a century the Alibi Club has of-
fered some of this city's most promi-
nent men just what its name implies,
an excuse to escape into a fraternal
world of their own.
The club is little known outside its
own membership. Its headquarters
has no imposing facade like those of
the Metropolitan and Cosmos clubs.
Instead, it occupies a small pre-Civil
War house that is dwarfed by a seven-
story hotel on one side and a nonde-
script building housing medical of-
fices on the other.
Yet it could be called the club of
clubs, the city's most elite, for its
membership is limited at all times to
50 men, each one voted in unanimous.
ly, most from the top ranks of Gov_
ernment and the military and from
the city's oldest families.
Name Dropping
Vice President Bush is a member.
So are Chief Justice Warren E. Burg-
er, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. and a
retired Justice, Potter Stewart; Jer-
auld Wright, the retired admiral who
was once commander of the Atlantic
Fleet, and Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor,
also retired, who was once chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
George C. Marshall, now deceased,
liked to spend quiet moments in the
midst of the club's incredible clutter
wherkhe was Secretary of State in the
1940's. Llewelyn Thompson, Ambas
sador to the Soviet Union, was a
member, along with John Foster
Dulles, another former Secretary of
State; Allen W. Dulles, the former Di.
rector or e enceand Al-
fr, ruen er, once supreme
mili-
tary commander of NATO.
"We really don't pretend to be any-
thing special," said W. John Kenney,
the current proctor (the club's name '
for president), a longtime member
who once served as under secretary
of the Navy in the Truman Adminis-
tration. "We're just a group of people
quired a permanent name when one
member showed up at the door one
night and said he was in dire need of
an alibi, obviously one that his wife
might believe. The name stuck.
No Women as Members
The club has never permitted
women as members: according to
old-timers in the ranks, the idea has
never even come up and women have
never applied for membership. But
members may invite their wives and
other women to private functions, al-
though not to the regular Friday
luncheons.
It was at the Alibi Club that Nicho-
las Longworth, later Speaker of the
House, entertained his future wife,
Alice Roosevelt, and several of her
friends at a private dinner he had pre-'
pared.
The fact that women only occasion-
ally are seen entering the club proved
to be somewhat embarrassing one
time some years ago. A new police
officer stationed along the street saw
a parade of well-dressed men enter-
The New York T1mse/George Tames
narrow red brick building, with its
green shutters and brown window
trim, looks like a 19th-century relic,
along a busy modern street.
At first it was known as "That Lit-
tle Club." Members still fondly refer
to it as "The Joint." But it fin Illy as
who like each other."
A Secluded Spot
It all began in 1884 when seven
members of the Metropolitan Club
decided they wanted a more secluded
spot in which to play poker, tell jokes
and try their hand at a little cuisine of
their own making.
They acquired a two-room house,
former slave quarters, on I Street be-
tween 18th and 19th Streets. Over the
years it has been enlarged to include
a modem kitchen, a dining room,
game rooms and various other quar-
ters. But even with the additions the
The entrance to the Alibi Club and the
discreet sign announcing Its name. Its
membership is limited at all times to 50
men, who fondly call it "The Joint.'.
lag the small house and became sus-
?picious enough to report it to head-
quarters.
"So we got raided," Mr. Kenney
said with good humor. "They thought
we had girls in there. We didn't, of
course, and we got it all straightened
out."
While most of the city's exclusive
clubs are elegantly furnished, the
Alibi.Club is cluttered with a century
of memorabilia, a veritable flea mar-
ket of objects brought back from all
over the world by well-traveled mem-
bers.
There are displays of boomerangs,'
a British rum cask mounted on an ele-
phant's foot, a statue of a monkey
devil making a pass at a mermaid, an
old-fashioned cigar lighter, a some-
what battered piano, wall lockers in
whic i members kept liquor in Prohi-
bition. Virtually every inch of wall
space displays cartoons and portraits
of past and present members.
"These are the things," Mr. Ken-
ney said,' "that our wives won't let us
keep at home."
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/08: CIA-RDP9O-00965ROO0402650043-1