1976
I have been in Washington a few hours, and phone an old friend. He is one of the relics. We both remember Washington when men of the future, which turned out to be Vietnam, jumped into Bobby Kennedy’s swimming pool.
“Why Washington in January?” my friend asks.
“To take the pulse of the city.”
He is mildly convulsed. It reminds him of a Marx Brothers scene: Groucho holding Harpo’s wrist at the pulse, staring at his watch, then looking straight at the camera, saying, “Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.”
A very Washington reaction this winter, I find, as my stay lengthens. Nothing that is happening seems to be meant seriously.
There are these people, very important people, going through motions. It is ritualistic. I, of course, know all those motions. Once I lived here, had even been a low-grade “insider,” the kind of piffle obsessionist who knows who will be appointed Ambassador to Malagasy before it is published, who discourses at dinner on “the President’s thinking.”
It being January, the President makes a turgid speech written by a committee. “The State of the Union.” Congress interrupts with regular tedium-charged bursts of applause. Democrats “react” with mimeographed denunciation, Republicans with praise. The notorious Budget is revealed. Media giants analyze, commentate, disclose significance.
This year, however, the motions seem emptier than usual. This time everyone seems to realize that it is just … motions. The performers seem like mechanical figures in a grotesque clockwork machine. The machine whirs, cogs engage, doors flap open, men adorned in quaint politicians’ suits pop out to perform the immemorial movements and the villagers go through the ancient dispute about whether their beloved contraption needs major repair or merely fresh grease.
One wonders whether President, Congress, President’s men and would-be Presidents would have troubled going through with it had there been no press or, more urgently, no television willing to connive in the pretense that something is happening. After the State of the Union speech, a mouse at whose delivery the White House had labored for weeks, I ask one of President Ford’s men if it was not mostly a media event, a nonhappening staged because reporters would pretend it was a happening. “It’s all a media event,” he replies. “If the media weren’t so ready to be used, it would be a very small splash.”
With so much credulity to be exploited for political gold, the performers may safely commit absurdities to distract attention from the shortage of substance. Thus we have the spectacle of the Tory Ford exhorting the populace to march in the spirit of Tom Paine, a revolutionary so offensive to established order that he had to flee Europe for America to avoid being hanged by men of Mr. Ford’s political philosophy.
In Washington, almost everybody of importance, man and woman, has run out of imagination. Wit’s end seems not far off. All that remains to talk about is how the money is dwindling away and whether the next bank-loan payment can be met. The business of the Republic has become a glum quibble among bookkeepers. We are in the hands of men who make no music and have no dream.
At a certain time in the sixties, I had begun to feel a chill between me and my old pal, the Government.
This is not so easy to explain without sounding naive, but I grew up in the Roosevelt age when most people—though certainly not many rich men—looked on the Government as a friend. It had always seemed to be on my side in life, and during World War II we pitched in and worked together, and afterward, through Truman and Eisenhower, we developed a relationship of mutual respect. At this particular time in the sixties, it occurred to me that the Government was no longer my friend and, indeed, that it regarded me as little more than a nuisance, someone to be tolerated with barely veiled contempt and, when I annoyed it, to be thrown out of the office by receptionists.
I do not mean to personalize this. It wasn’t only I who had been left behind by this immensely successful new Supergovernment. It was all of us. And I don’t mean “the people.” I mean the persons of America, the ornery, difficult, fascinating 200 million individuals who were the United States of America.
It seemed to me that the Government had no use any longer for us persons. It was deferential enough to “the people,” to be sure, and was constantly pushing us around for the good of “the people.” The Government had become something like the fellow you knew in high school who grew up to be the most important man in television; you might get a Christmas card from him now and then, but you wouldn’t dream of burdening him with twenty minutes of your anguish, pain and dreams. The Government’s energy was too valuable to be spent on persons; it had to be husbanded for “the people.”
Some blood connection between Washington and the country had been snapped. It was suddenly easy for Washington to talk about pain and death because they had been reduced to statistics. War was glossed over in terms of “body count” and “mega-deaths.” Old age was a percentage point, unemployment a manageable figure in the economic forecast. The Government not only was in the death-dispensing business on the grand scale, it was also dealing with humans as though they had no humanity.
Eventually I left Washington and almost immediately felt in touch with life again. I think of this as I return now in deep winter, the Potomac sliding under the wing of the airplane, ice floes visible at the big curve by Watergate and, on the ground, a merciless wind out of the Arctic.
There is an old horror story entitled Donovan’s Brain, in which this poor devil has his brain removed from his body and kept alive in a cupboard to do nothing but think about its predicament. Gradually, the brain acquires nasty powers to control events outside, events with which it has lost all physical connection. The brain exerts pure mental power undiluted by connection with human reality.
Washington, it seems to me, has become like Donovan’s brain and the rest of us like Donovan’s disconnected body. On instinct and reflex, we may twitch and convulse, but Washington sits in its brainpan solution in the cupboard, severed from any feel of the struggle and the pain.
The politicians of Washington complain that the people have become cynical about Government and lost their faith in Washington. This is a typically disconnected Washington view of reality, with the common flaw that it assumes “the people” is human. The real case seems somewhat different. The persons of America, it seems more likely, don’t much believe the Government is capable of realizing there are persons out there. When Washington looks at you in this epoch, it seems to see only a statistic.
There are signs of decay in Washington that could be mustered for yet another essay on a city demoralized, disheartened and dispirited in the ruin of Watergate. The old hands sit around, romantically hoisting the brandy to the good old days, which turned out to be such rotten old days, and moping that it’s all over and nothing remains but lunkheads and midgets. Thus the special joy with which they joke about President Ford as a punchy heavyweight stumbling over dogs and bumping his head on the icebox.
Tales of human inferiority are conversational staples. President Kennedy’s sex life is exhumed over the dinner table. What a fall is there from Camelot! Someone has heard that Jackie has dropped the Kennedy from her name in business usage, now calling herself Jacqueline Bouvier Onassis. Someone else says Mrs. Kennedy smiles too much. The Democratic leadership of the House is described in Laurel-and-Hardy terms. At dinner, a local lady famed for knowing all and telling it acerbically recites tales of the Democratic eminence whose gizzard has been so long marinated in alcohol that he regularly finishes public banquets snoring face-down in his plate. When an evening with someone from the White House reaches the convivial stage at which confidences can be exchanged, the invariable question is, “Is Ford as dumb as everybody says he is?” (Invariable answer: No.)
Ruin and despair in Washington can be overdone, however, and Watergate, after all, is some two years past, which is an eternity in the Washington measure of time. In fact, I saw very little ruin in Washington. The machinery which makes the place so fierce seems remarkably intact and all ready to roar again once we return to normal Government. Normal Government is what is in ruin at present. Given an unelected President of conservative Republican mind and a Democratic Congress distinguished only by poor leadership, lack of organization and total absence of any political philosophy, it would be unreasonable to expect anything more than caretaker Government, and caretaker Government is what we have.
Are the media the Frankenstein monster of our time? Occasionally, someone among them seems to sense the worst. During an insensate descent of Washington reporters on Iowa in late January, Jack Germond of The Washington Star seemed to be writing dangerously close to the edge of reality. The reporters had decided that the outcome of an arcane caucus process among Democrats would have fateful results on the distant presidential elections, and Iowans, seeing the reporters descend, decided to take it as seriously as the media. Is the press here because of these caucuses, asked Germond, or are the caucuses being held because the press is here?
Well, of course, Ford has been on television; the Democrats get equal time. The Democrats have no program either. Actually, the Democrats may not even be a party anymore. I tend to the theory that they are just a memory. But never mind. They want a crack at afflicting prime-time America, too. So we have Senator Edmund Muskie for forty minutes right after dinner.
Muskie makes a basic mistake. He thinks people listen to television. People do not listen to television. They look at television. I had to cover the first Nixon-Kennedy TV debate in 1960 and, so, didn’t have time to look at it. I had to listen to it. If you listened to it, Nixon won. Not by much, but he had the edge. Most Americans watched it on television. They didn’t listen. They looked. And Nixon lost by a knockout.
Muskie had a great television moment in 1970. He came on television and spoke calmly. He came on immediately after everybody had looked at Nixon out West carrying on like a speed freak. And then they saw Muskie talking calmly. Ask anybody who thought it was a great speech what Muskie said. Nobody can tell you. But everybody remembers what he looked like. Calm. Rational.
So here is Muskie six years later doing a Nixon 1960. He is reading a speech as though folks out there are going to be listening. I am sitting in an elegant Georgetown house in company with two senior Democratic Senators, and I am looking at the two Senators. They are not smiling with that sappy faraway look Democrats get when they look at old films of Franklin Roosevelt. They are frowning ever so slightly.
There are other Democratic biggies present. Eight of them have drifted to a back room and the food before Muskie even begins. Afterward I go to visit a Republican. He loves Muskie’s speech. “The Republicans should have paid for his television time,” he says.
I go to the White House and watch the reporters bait Ron Nessen as though he were Ron Ziegler declaring yesterday’s White House statements “inoperative.” Again there is the sense of people going through motions. Having been sandbagged once at the White House press office by the lamentable Ziegler, the reporters seem fated to go on and on performing their role as testy watchdogs of presidential cover-up.
There is some empty fencing over a forthcoming presidential medical examination. Will the doctor disclose everything, Ron? Nessen’s reply that the doctor has “professional reservations” about going totally public, what with the doctor-patient relationship, draws crisp reminders that this doctor is now on the public payroll. Public obligations! Is he aware of that, Ron?
Nessen says everything will be told. (It always is after these physicals, and the President is invariably pronounced in tip-top condition; it is apparently the world’s healthiest job.)
I go to the Capitol in search of Congress and find only policemen. The place is swarming with them. They are on steps, in doorways, outside elevators, patrolling corridors, behind the bust of Aysh-Ke-Bah-Ke-Ko-Zhay (“A Chippewa Chief”) and the statue of Will Rogers. I roam through acres of cops, and at the House of Representatives, I am forced to pass through a metal detector before they let me enter the press gallery.
At the public galleries, some 200 tourists are emptying pocket and purse of keys, coins, souvenirs. This is only a mite of the total-security orgy which is placing a blockade of guns between Government and the governed. And is it not necessary? In the past few years, the Capitol has been bombed, maniacs have attacked over the White House lawn and sundry deranged persons have been aiming guns at President Ford. Eventually, I am told, bulletproof glass walls may be installed between the congressional galleries and the Senate and House, and Congress will become known as the men in the glass booths.
The effect of it, finally, is to heighten the sense of disconnection between the Government and us. So many police hips bulging with firepower, so many cool appraising police eyes, give one the impression of being looked upon as a menace, of being not quite safe. One hesitates about striding right through doors and gates. There is a sense of lost freedom.
Under the surface of police which Congress presents to the public, the one grim issue tormenting Congress is the rise of police power and what to do about it. Restraints on the FBI? Shall the CIA’s secret international police operations be curtailed? Does national security mean that the President must have no constraints placed on his extensive powers to police international affairs?
The Senate’s Church Committee and the House’s Pike Committee are grappling unhappily with these weighty questions, and the Congress is watching them with increasing unhappiness. Press leaks of garish deadly goings-on in the CIA and lawbreaking in the FBI have apparently surfeited the public with illustrations of what these agencies should not be doing—namely, breaking the law. But there is little discussion of what they should be doing.
This has given defenders of secret centralized executive power an opening to charge that Church and Pike threaten to destroy vital parts of the national security machinery. No Congressman can live long with the imputation that he is damaging the national security and, not surprisingly, Congress’s interest in any kind of tighter controls on the executive seems to be waning.
At the end of the month, in fact, the House voted to forbid publication of the Pike Committee’s CIA report until the President (meaning, of course, the CIA) had removed material he considered damaging to national security. This was an extraordinary retreat for a Congress which had come to Washington a year ago declaring, in Congressman Brademas’s words, that it was going to run the Government. Now it was making the President its own censor.
Most of the report’s juicier tidbits, of course, had already been published in press leaks, which made the House vote doubly interesting. What alarmed the House was not the publication of the secrets, but the possibility that Congress could be blamed for spilling them. It did not want to assume public accountability for intervening in CIA affairs. The best guessers I could find believe that after the investigations and the uproar subside, Congress will leave all the old machinery intact.
Which brings us to the ultimate question of the imperial Presidency. Is it really dead, as the conventional wisdom proclaimed when Nixon was routed back to California? Morris Udall, the House Democrat, who understands power in Washington, says that it is. Henry Kissinger constantly laments that it is, and considering how brusquely Congress has undone so many of his international ventures this past year, he would seem to know what he is talking about.
I was not persuaded during my call on Washington. I saw a Congress that no longer trusted Kissinger making it clear they didn’t trust him. I saw a President with no mandate to govern being treated no mandate to govern.
But the imperial Presidency seems intact. Congress has passed no significant law to dismantle any of the powers built into the Presidency under Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Press and television still focus most of their light on the White House and ignore Congress. And, most important, all thought and discussion center on the monumental question of who the next President, the genuine, elected President, will be.
After so much devastation, one thinks, something basic should have changed, and yet very little has. Although Watergate has ruined men, the apparatus of the Superpresidency (along with the machinery of normal Government) is still there, and public expectations of the office seem to make Americans hunger for an ideal man to fill it, which, finally, is what makes our Caesars fatten.
Most Americans still seem to be dreaming of the perfect President, that amalgam of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt who will one day appear out of the tube to save us. One might have thought that after so much catastrophe from greatness, we would be delighted finally to settle for a competent second-rater who would tell us that while Government may be a grimy business, somebody has to do it, and there is no reason why it cannot at least be done with honor.
It is hard to foresee such a man prevailing in Washington anymore. There is still too much hunger for charisma and grandeur to match that marble whiteness.