Built in Maine, the USS
Williamsburg sits rusting in an Italian shipyard, and may be scrapped within
weeks unless $40 million is raised through Kickstarter.
Two history buffs are waging a “last-last-ditch,” $40 million campaign to
save a Maine-built yacht that was President Harry S. Truman’s “seagoing White
House” in hopes of restoring the ship as a symbol of American diplomacy.
After serving as a private yacht, a Navy gunboat, Truman’s refuge and a
research vessel, the former USS Williamsburg may take its final voyage to the
scrap heap in a matter of weeks. The only hope is a legitimate offer to save
the Bath Iron Works-built ship that once hosted world leaders, but now sits
rusting and partly submerged at a shipyard in Italy.
With no buyer on the horizon, two former White House staffers are turning
to the public for help via a $40 million fundraising plea through the
crowdsourcing website Kickstarter. If successful – and that’s an aircraft
carrier-sized “if,” given the tight deadline – the pair said their nonprofit
would contract to restore the ship for use once again as the presidential yacht
or donate it to a museum, potentially in Maine. If not, the Italian shipyard
where the Williamsburg has sat abandoned for two decades could begin scrapping
the 244-foot ship this month.
“This is a labor of love and probably an improbable quest of love, but it
was worth a try,” said Peter Lord, a Maine native who studied maritime history
at Bowdoin College and now lives in Washington, D.C. “If we can show that we
have a viable (fundraising) event, then that will buy us some time. But if it
is not possible, I fully expect them to continue moving on scrapping of the
ship.”
AND MILLIONS TO GO
As of Friday evening, the campaign had garnered just 11 pledges totaling
$20,545. That left $39,979,455 to raise by Oct. 27 if Lord and Rob Knake, the
other co-founder of the Save the Williamsburg nonprofit, are to meet their
30-day Kickstarter goal.
“The time is really driven by the fact that the boat is sitting in the
water rusting and will be scrapped by the Italian government if this campaign
is not successful in late fall or early winter,” Knake said. “Either it will
take off in the next 20 days or it won’t, and a longer period won’t help.”
Lord and Knake began talking about sparing the Williamsburg from the
scrapper last year after reading news reports about the ship’s plight while the
two were working together on national security and cybersecurity issues at the
White House. Lord was struck by the symbolism of the yacht, which Truman used
extensively throughout his administration for both personal and official
business, and was distressed to see a Maine-built ship with so much history
headed for demolition. He called the campaign “our last ‘Hail Mary.'”
“Wouldn’t it be great if the American people could get behind something
from American history and give us a new tool for American diplomacy?” Lord
said.
And so began either the latest or the last chapter in the Williamsburg’s
storied life.
The ship actually began as the Aras II, a 244-foot luxury yacht built for
the son of Hugh Chisholm Sr., an industry magnate and part-time Maine resident
who built one of the world’s largest paper and forest products companies. The
ship was launched at BIW on Jan. 15, 1931, and came in “the final twilight of
the gilded age of yachting,” author Ralph Snow wrote in his book “Bath Iron
Works: The First Hundred Years.”
The Aras proved more than seaworthy and served Hugh
Chisholm Jr. for a decade. The Navy purchased her as part of the mass
militarization of domestic ships during World War II. The renamed USS
Williamsburg gunboat spent the war escorting other ships, shuttling VIPs and
serving as the flagship for the Navy admiral in charge of training for the
Atlantic fleet.
GUNBOAT INTO DIPLOMATIC YACHT
Truman, seeing the gunboat’s potential, had the Williamsburg converted
into his presidential yacht after the war. It was a time of dramatic changes as
Truman grappled with domestic issues as well as the reconstruction of Europe,
the Korean War and the emerging U.S.-Soviet arms race. He regularly used the
ship as his second office to escape the physical heat and political pressure of
Washington, for vacations and for weekend getaways.
“I do not know of any easy way to be President,” Truman wrote in his
memoir, “Years of Trial and Hope,” published in 1956. “It is more than a
full-time job, and the relaxations are few. I used the Presidential yacht, as
well as the Little White House at Key West, less for holiday uses than as
hideaways, and they were very useful when I wanted to catch up on my work and
needed an opportunity to consult with my staff without interruptions.”
In an August 1949 article, The New York Times described the Williamsburg
as “a slim white boat, a beauty to look at but not always comfortable on a
choppy sea.”
“Apparently Mr. Truman thinks a great deal of his 244-foot craft,” the
article continued. “He has prepared some important messages aboard and has
spent New Year’s Day on it every year he has been in office except in 1948. The
craft is sometimes used for Presidential receptions such as those given for the
Governor’s of the Virgin Islands, Bermuda and Puerto Rico during Presidential
cruises. Winston Churchill was once a guest on the yacht.”
Churchill was apparently impressed with his visit.
“At the table at the end of the evening, (Churchill) said to the
president that of all the meetings which he had attended in his career as prime
minister with his American colleagues, he had never attended one in which he
thought the atmosphere was so conducive to close and cordial relations between
the two countries as the one upon the Williamsburg,” Truman’s secretary of
state, Dean Acheson, wrote in a memo about the meeting maintained by the
University of Wisconsin.
FROM YACHT TO RESEARCH VESSEL
The Williamsburg was converted into an oceanographic research vessel
after Truman’s successor, President Dwight Eisenhower, decommissioned the ship
in 1953, but it was badly damaged while in dry dock in the 1960s. Several
groups ran the ship as a floating restaurant in Washington, D.C., and New
Jersey, yet it gradually fell into disrepair.
Art Girard, a Portland resident and business investor, came close to
purchasing the Williamsburg roughly 20 years ago. The deal fell through,
however, because the ship was tied up in a complicated bankruptcy.
“We were thinking of bringing it back to Maine,” Girard said Thursday.
“When we looked at it, it was a restaurant. But it wasn’t in that bad
condition, otherwise we wouldn’t have thought of bringing it back here.”
In the early 1990s, the Williamsburg was transferred to a shipyard in
Italy by a group planning to convert the vessel into a luxury cruise liner.
That project went bankrupt as well, and ownership of the ship eventually
transferred to the Navalmare shipyard in La Spezia.
Time has pretty much run out for the “ghost ship” Williamsburg, its hull
severely eaten by rust and its interior largely gutted. Stefano Pitton,
commercial director at Navalmare, said in an email that the shipyard presented
its demolition plan to the local port authority last week and could receive
authorization next week.
“After two days of yard preparation we will commence with the cutting of
the superstructures and then we will continue with the hull,” Pitton wrote. “We
waited for more (than) twenty years, now that the ship sank, really we do not
have more time. If there are (individuals) interested in the restoration of the
USS Williamsburg, please tell to him to contact me very shortly.”
Knake and Lord are working with an international yacht broker who handled
a previous effort to sell the ship. They also have a restoration firm in mind
that has developed plans for the Williamsburg. And if this unlikely campaign
succeeded and the federal government wasn’t interested in the boat, Lord said
his initial preference would be to donate it to the Maine Maritime Museum in
Bath, located just downriver from the ship’s birthplace at BIW.
“So really this is a last-minute SOS to save the
vessel,” Knake said.
Source: press herald.
10 October 2015
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