THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 5, 1994 TAG: 9410050525
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY WARREN FISKE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 51 lines
After a day of charges, counter-charges and high-speed fax transmissions from Virginia's U.S. Senate campaigns, it can be safely reported that, yes, Chuck Robb did make an ill-advised choice in his neckwear on Labor Day.
But how was Robb supposed to know, aides say, that a tie he wore to receive the endorsement of the state's highest-ranking black elected official was a little-known symbol of the Confederacy?
``I was with him when somebody bought it for him in Fredericksburg,'' Bert Rohrer, a spokesman for Robb, told a reporter. ``Nobody in his wildest dreams would guess that the tie is what you said it was.''
It all started Tuesday morning when Republican Oliver L. North spoke to students at Falls Church High School. A black student asked North to explain his defense of publicly displaying the Confederate flag at a Sept. 21 campaign stop in Danville.
North replied that when Robb later criticized his remarks as being racially insensitive, Robb was ``wearing a Confederate tie.''
The Robb campaign jumped on North's accusation. ``I don't own a Confederate flag necktie,'' Robb said in a faxed statement that accused North of ``lying to school children.''
Then the advisers in the North camp went to work. First, they admitted that North got the date wrong. Robb didn't wear the tie Sept. 23 when he criticized North. He wore it on Sept. 5, when he traveled to Newport News to receive the endorsement of U.S. Rep. Robert C. Scott, a Democrat.
Next the North team sent out photos of Robb wearing the tie. Then they transmitted a page from a fashion catalog.
In the photos, Robb is wearing a bright red tie with thin Navy stripes bearing white stars. An identical tie is marketed by a South Carolina mailing house, The Ben Silver Collection, as an ``Anglo-Confederate Society tie,'' worn by British Parliament members in the 1860s to express sympathy with the Southern states.
So who wins the debate? North had the date wrong. Robb certainly made a fashion faux pas.
So, technically, call it a tie. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
An 1860s British expression of sympathy with the South
KEYWORDS: U.S. SENATE RACE VIRGINIA CANDIDATES
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