"Come See Me"

Tooling along a street in Karachi last May on his Asian whistle-stop tour, Vice President Lyndon Johnson spied one of Pakistan's prime tourist attractions: a camel cart. Lyndon stopped the car, got out to shake hands with startled Camel Driver Ahmad Bashir, 40. While the photographers snapped away, Johnson made small talk. "President Ayub Khan is coming to the U.S.," he offered. "Why don't you come too?" Bashir agreeably smiled "Sure, sure," went home to his mud-and-gunny-sack shack and forgot it.

Johnson, who shook hands from Bangkok to New Delhi, drawling "Now you all come see me." went home and forgot it, too--until he read in Washington a translated press clipping from Pakistan's biggest daily newspaper, Jang, that "the U.S. Vice President has invited Bashir, a camel-cart driver, to come to America. My, Bashir is certainly lucky. He will go by jet and stay in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York." Faced with a fete accompli, Lyndon did the sporting thing: at a televised People-to-People luncheon, he suggested that it would be nice if someone helped Bashir get to the U.S. People-to-People Program, an independent group of international-minded Americans, promptly volunteered. So did the Reader's Digest.

Kidnapped. Bashir, meanwhile, had melted back into obscurity among Karachi's 1,000 camel-cart drivers. When the news of Johnson's TV bid reached Pakistan, the Morning News posted a reward for Bashir, spurring a citywide search by Karachians from every walk of life. Bashir and camel were found by two reporters, collecting a load of firewood in a railway yard. The reporters hustled Bashir off to the editorial office of the morning Dawn, where he was feasted, quizzed, and kept virtual prisoner for 14 hours to assure the paper a scoop. Finally, at 2:30 a.m. he was permitted to return to his anxious wife and four children, little the wiser. Explained the confused Bashir: "I'm going soon by first-class airplane to England to meet King Johnson."

Since then, Bashir has become a victim of his own fame. Assaulted by the press and the curious, he has been unable to make his rounds, which usually netted him $4 a day. Now broke, he is living off friends. He was forced reluctantly into his first pair of shoes. His family and neighbors were worried: "Will they let him come back to Pakistan?" "Will he bring back a mem-sahib [white wife]?" What was worse, the bewildered Bashir heard nothing from anyone in the U.S. about his trip. The reasons: the Digest backed out of sponsoring him; People-to-People was having second thoughts; Johnson's formal invitation unaccountably bogged down in the U.S. embassy in Karachi.

Taken. Finally last week, ten days after receiving Johnson's message, the U.S. embassy passed on the invitation to Bashir. (The embassy's explanation: it had had "trouble finding" Karachi's man of the hour.) Bashir was invited to come to Washington for the July Fourth celebrations. Reluctantly, Bashir informed the embassy that he could not make it this time, but would be glad to come at a later date. He explained he had no money to buy clothes for the trip or to support his family in his absence, and he had been warned by "several people" that he would disgrace his country in the U.S. (President Ayub Khan's aides were also afraid Bashir might take the edge off Ayub's scheduled visit to the U.S. next week.)

Deeply in debt, jeered at by his neighbors, teased by his customers, Bashir felt taken. "All this hullabaloo has brought me nothing but misery," he said. "Why didn't Johnson meet somebody else?"

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