When Prince Charles arrived in Washington in July 1970 for his first official White House visit, planners made what would prove to be a strategic miscalculation: they booked him and his sister Princess Anne for an afternoon baseball game at Robert F Kennedy Memorial Stadium.
The experience was a disaster almost from the start. Charles, then 21, and Anne, 19, arrived at the stadium on Saturday, July 18, accompanied by Richard Nixon's daughters Julie and Tricia, along with Julie's husband David Eisenhower. The quartet settled into seats directly behind the dugout, exposed to the brutal Washington heat.
The conditions were unforgiving. Mid-July in Washington meant temperatures approaching 91 degrees with no relief. The crowd was sparse, drawing only about 8,500 fans to watch the last-place Senators face the California Angels. Worse, the game itself was a pitcher's duel that offered little action to hold a viewer's attention, let alone one unfamiliar with the sport's rules.
Eisenhower, who worked in the Senators' front office that summer, recalled the outing with candor years later. "The baseball game was not very well planned actually, and I would say this was not one of Prince Charles's highlights," he told the Guardian. "First of all, I had to explain the game to him; he didn't know anything about it."
Charles's confusion was evident throughout. When Senators slugger Mike Epstein hit a foul ball into the stands, Charles asked why it wasn't a home run. Eisenhower spent innings explaining the difference between hits and strikes, walks and runs. Yet the educational effort couldn't overcome the brutal setting.
"It was mid-July, and in the afternoon, so you can imagine how hot it was," Eisenhower continued. "Third, the crowd was sparse. They didn't promote the idea that Charles was going to be there, probably for security reasons." He added that the low-scoring pitching duel made explanation nearly impossible. "How can you explain the game if you're watching a shutout? And so the whole thing was stressful and I think probably he didn't enjoy it that much."
The Washington Post captured the moment when the royal party's patience wore thin. They endured just one inning in the open sun before moving to a shaded box in the mezzanine. By the time Aurelio Rodriguez hit the game's only home run in the eighth inning, the royal visitors had already departed. The Senators won 4-0, a shutout that left little excitement in its wake.
The Post reported that Charles "appeared very studious throughout the game" and "smiled only when the Senators scored and when a fan made a clean catch of a high foul into the upper deck." Both he and Anne stood stiffly during the playing of the British national anthem before the game but did not sing.
One bizarre wrinkle added to the confusion: the ballpark was holding camera day, a promotion that brought hordes of photographers alongside the usual Secret Service presence. Children clutching Brownie Hawkeye cameras sought shots with the prince and princess, only to be politely turned away by security.
Charles sat next to Tricia Nixon that day, just a day after dancing with her at a White House supper. In a 2021 CNN interview, Charles would recall with some amusement: "That was quite amusing, I must say. That was the time when they were trying to marry me off to Tricia Nixon." She married Edward Cox the following June instead.
The broader visit included more successful stops. That morning, Charles and Anne had visited the Patuxent Center for Wildlife Research and Propagation of Endangered Animal Species, where Charles asked detailed questions about America's environmental movement. They also toured Capitol Hill, museums, and Camp David.
After leaving the ballpark, Charles spent more than an hour with President Nixon at the White House, discussing the environment, young people's attitudes, and world population challenges. At their farewell dinner, Nixon, an avid baseball fan himself, tried to sell the prince on another game. "Come see another Senators' game; it's the first one they've won in four days," Nixon urged. Charles politely declined any encore.
The Washington Post's Henry Owen, writing before the visit in a piece titled "Baseball: A Guide for Royal Visitors," had predicted the royals would be mystified. "No doubt, their Royal Highnesses will be baffled by the whole thing," he wrote. "They will be too polite to say so, but later on, in the privacy of the embassy, they will probably ask their attendants: 'Why do people go to baseball games?'" Owen concluded his guide with a philosophical note: "The plain truth is that baseball, like the British monarchy, is a mixture of tradition and sentiment which is hard to explain."
Charles would later become king. When he visits Washington this week, the Nationals will be playing in New York, sparing him any obligation to revisit the national pastime in the capital.
Author James Rodriguez: "Sometimes you can't manufacture a good story, no matter how much planning goes into it. This was the royal visit equivalent of a rain delay, minus the rain."
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