Trading war arms for welcoming arms

When some colleagues and I were having breakfast in a Nashville hotel back around 1980, former vice president Spiro Agnew and an entourage of well-dressed American businessmen came rushing through. Agnew was shouting, “Where’s the sheik? Where’s the sheik?” A bellboy told us that an oil-rich Arab sheik was looking at some Tennessee properties for which Agnew was the agent. Unpleased with his rooms, during the night the sheik moved to another section of the hotel. Agnew found the empty rooms and panicked out of fear of losing the sale by losing his sheik. The search for a between-the-beds sheik was both funny and acrid-tasting.