Interview

Globetrotting political advisor Dr Phillip Karber is one of the most interesting polo players around. Herbert Spencer meets the man they call ‘Robo-Karb’

ILLUSTRATION PHIL DISLEY

Sitting in on one of Dr Phillip A Karber’s classes at Georgetown University, I was reminded of Robin Williams’s character as the professor in the film Dead Poets Society. Karber doesn’t leap onto the table or invite his students to call him ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ but he does have them on the edges of their seats. With aviators pushed up onto his forehead, a short-cropped beard and leaning on his bone-handled cane that doubles as a pointer, Karber is lecturing on the dangers of nuclear weapons: ‘If you think the Cold War between two rival blocs was scary, just wait ’til your generation faces more than a dozen nuclear powers around the world!’

This professor is not just drawing from academic research, but from hands-on experience. Many polo players are at the top of the heap in the business or entertainment worlds, but Karber is the only player I know living today who has been so prominent in affairs of state – albeit often as an éminence grisebehind the scenes in the corridors of power.

At the height of the East-West tension during the Cold War, he was Director of Strategy Development in the Pentagon, reporting directly to Secretary of Defence Caspar Weinberger and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But this is no caricatured, simple-minded Washington hawk. When President Reagan went to the summit at Reykjavik, he and his Secretary of State carried a ‘Top Secret’ report authored by Karber advocating ‘A World without Nuclear Weapons’. When Gorbachev announced in 1988 that he wanted to quit the competition, much to the scepticism of Western defence experts, it was Karber, quoted on the front page of the New York Times, who took him seriously. The next month it was Karber’s report on a joint meeting of NATO political and military leaders that set a new course for the alliance; one which elicited the personal appreciation of the Soviet leader.

Karber has appeared at numerous Congressional hearings and international parliamentary committees as well as serving as an influential international advisor. He is famous for his directness and reporters love his sound bites, as when a Congressional inquisitor incurred his wrath: ‘That’s a stupid question and I’m not going to dignify it with an answer.’

After his class at Georgetown, we stop for a hamburger and I ask him about being an adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at a critical time in world affairs. ‘At Chequers [her official country residence],’ Karber recalls, ‘sitting directly across the table from me during that 1989 “think tank” session, the Iron Lady asked me straight out if I thought the Soviets seriously wanted an end to confrontation. I laid out the case for why I thought they did. The Chancellor of the Exchequer sided with me, but she was unbelieving; the next week he resigned.’ Ironically, within two months of that meeting the Berlin Wall came down.

The unlikely subject of polo also came up at Chequers. ‘Over morning coffee I mentioned having gone to Harrods to buy a polo helmet and boots and Mrs Thatcher asked how I could play with my new artificial hip, then interjected before I could respond: “Sometimes we have to do what’s in our hearts.” Later she gave me an elegant blazer pocket badge with a polo motif, tufted and embroidered as only the Brits can do.’

In addition to a PhD in International Law from Georgetown, Karber holds three postdoctorate certificates including two from Harvard. Despite his reputation as an intellectual and strategist extraordinaire, however, he has another, tougher side. A former Defence Department deputy recalls him ‘arriving to brief us in the Secretary’s office at 7am with his arm in a sling, a broken collarbone and a face that looked like a pizza – all from attempting to save a maiden’s honour in a bar fight from the night before.’

And after Iraq’s invasion, the Pentagon asked Karber’s company to recruit and train a ‘Free Kuwait Army’ to provide coalition forces with language and intelligence support for Operation Desert Storm. The White House was so impressed that they sent the Vice President to take the handover of the last unit personally from Karber.

Whence tough? Adopted from an orphanage in Hollywood at the age of one by an elderly couple, Karber grew up riding in the High Sierras. There he played ‘pine cone polo’, a game taught him by his movie stuntman neighbour who had played polo with Will Rogers in the 1930s. The game entailed riding bareback and flicking a footlong pine with a three-pointed bamboo rake . ‘We landed in the dirt a lot,’ Karber recalls. ‘But, boy, did we think we were cool.’ As a teenager he played proper polo for a couple of teams around Bakersfield, California.

Then a budding career as a CBS affiliate television cameraman and news reporter took over his time and earned him a full scholarship to Pepperdine University in Malibu. After a stint in the Marine Corps, cut short by a broken neck and back from skydiving, he shifted careers from the media to politics and was recruited to the staff of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in Washington –at the same time taking advantage of a PhD fellowship at Georgetown University. Over the years he also became a player in international corporate boardrooms.

‘In retirement I had only two ambitions: teach in the university and play polo, because they both keep you feeling young,’ he says. Unfortunately another sports injury left him with a shattered pelvis and an artificial hip. Unwilling to give up the sporting life, he taught himself to ski on one leg and worked for years to regain his equestrian seat.

Later Karber’s team was competing in the US Arena Open when he was pulled off his horse as another pony stepped on his mallet. Carried out of the stadium, he remounted and finished the last chukka. (‘It was not heroic, I was so pumped full of adrenaline I didn’t feel a thing. It was easier to ride than walk.’) One of the early pioneers to play with an artificial hip, he made the record book as the first to break one. High goal teammate, Tommy Biddle, christened him ‘Robo-Karb’ and the nickname has stuck, with match commentators announcing: ‘Here comes Robo-Karb, he’s got more spare parts than a ’57 Chevy!’ So

just how beat-up is his body? Twenty-six broken bones, six concussions, and fourteen surgeries. ‘The majority are not from polo’, he says emphatically. ‘Just an active life.’

Over the last decade Karber has increasingly given his attention to promoting polo. As chairman of New York’s new International Air Terminal at Kennedy Airport, he hosted Randy Russell’s polo statue exhibit, displaying polo art and photography throughout the passenger areas, and arranging distribution of polo magazines in first class compartments of more than forty airlines. As head of the Marketing Committee of the US Polo Association (USPA), he was responsible for the first significant survey of American polo players’ attitudes and images of the sport –with results that drove the association’s entire strategic plan of recent years.

Elected as a USPA Governor-at-Large last year, he now heads two key committees –marketing and arena polo –and is beginning to exercise the kind of influence he’s known for in the world of international politics. ‘The USPA is fortunate to have greater financial resources than any other polo association in the world,’ he says. ‘And we should invest some of the association’s riches in marketing the sport, raising the profile and image of polo in the eyes of the American public. This would in one way or another benefit every club in the country, from the smallest to the largest, and every player from young beginners to high goal pros – a rising tide lifts all ships.’

Karber is in his fourth year as president of Great Meadow Polo Club in The Plains, Virginia, with its arena stadium and grass ground overlooking the steeplechase course for the Virginia Gold Cup. Last year, 20,000 customers paid to watch arena polo there during 15 consecutive Saturday nights. This year, 2008, is the official Centennial of the founding of the first polo club in Virginia, and Karber is hoping to make this 100th anniversary a banner year for public appreciation of the sport.

The Karbers’ Normandy Farm in Great Falls, Virginia is just 13 miles west of the White House. This unspoilt equestrian retreat, shielded from the surrounding suburbia, is the closest polo facility to the nation’s capital. As I prepare to depart after a week there, Robo-Karb is off to yet another meeting at the Pentagon; he won’t say about what. But I look down at the report he is carrying, entitled, ‘Nuclear War in the Next Administration’ and wonder: what does he know that we don’t?