He who travels the high road of humility in Washington will not be troubled by heavy traffic.
—former Wyoming Republican senator Alan Simpson
THERE WAS SOMETHING ELSE AT WORK DURING TIMES OF BIPARTISAN consensus that had nothing to do with where members of Congress came from or what ideology they held. It had to do with attitude, gratitude, and latitude.
With occasional and notable exceptions, the political culture in Washington prior to the current period of polarization was more civil than today. Friendships between members of opposing parties were encouraged and often necessary. Members of Congress spent weeks, at times months, together in Washington, unlike today’s forty-eight-hour “work” week. At the center of old Washington’s social life were the hostesses who opened their homes for social events that were not just pleasant gatherings, but also often served as places where “hothouses” flourished. Many important issues were dealt with under the watchful eye of these quietly influential women. And they were influential, not because of any office they held (none did), but because they had the ability to actually make Washington work.
Is this nostalgia in overdrive? The political past—even the recent political past—was no golden age. But there were political and social rules one was expected to follow and these rules worked for everyone, regardless of party or persuasion.
A Suitcase Town
When Tony Hall arrived in Washington in 1979 as a first-term Democratic congressman from Ohio, House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill told him to bring his family with him. “No one heeds that advice anymore,” Hall told us. “Washington has become a suitcase town.” He meant that members of Congress spend so little time in Washington they don’t have to unpack their suitcases.
House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer echoed the same feelings when we spoke with him prior to the 2006 elections that would propel him to majority leader: “The Tuesday–Thursday sessions are bad news. We’re going to have to lengthen them just to get the work done. And frankly, most of the Tuesday–Thursday sessions are spent on fund-raising.”
Hoyer told us that if he became majority leader after the 2006 election, the short workweek would change: “They’ll need to come in Monday night and leave Friday.”
True to his word, after he became majority leader in December 2006, Hoyer announced that starting in January 2007 the House would be in session Monday through Friday. Shortly after the announcement, he started hearing complaints from many Republicans and quite a few Democrats who liked the old way.
Hoyer made one other comment worth mentioning. It concerns the much-maligned issue of congressional travel and why it helps blunt polarization: “When you travel overseas in a bipartisan group, an interesting thing happens. The plane takes off from Andrews [Air Force Base] and you get into the air and you’re not a Republican or a Democrat, you’re an American.” Some might wonder why Republicans and Democrats can find common ground in the sky, but not on earth.
Congressional wives had their own way of building bridges across party lines. That so many were in D.C. also had the benefit of holding down the number of “bimbo eruptions” one sees with more frequency today.
Veteran party giver Esther Coopersmith, a staunch Democrat, is famous for putting together people who might have remained strangers had it not been for her hand-addressed invitations and her social graces. She agrees with Tony Hall, but goes a step further: “Not only do they come to town Tuesday and leave Thursday, they come mostly to have fund-raisers, not to legislate.” She recalls that when she used to host fund-raisers, the person for whom the money was being raised attended, staying the evening, dining with the guests. “Now they use professionals and it’s ‘Give me your check, or even better, just send it,’” she says. “The legislation they get around to is flag burning and gays.”
Coopersmith remembers being told by one of the Republican Senate wives, “Esther, if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t know any Democrats.”
“I couldn’t believe it,” Coopersmith said. “In order to get anything done, you need both parties to work together. Right now, I look at Congress and say, ‘That’s my tax money doing nothing.’”
Coopersmith is an endangered species, and Washington and the country are worse off because of it. While a lifelong Democrat, she has the grace (and wisdom) to have Republican friends. Coopersmith, who arrived in Washington from her native Wisconsin in 1954, is part of a bygone era in which one did not see members of the other party as enemies to be wiped out like termites by an exterminator, but as valued fellow citizens, who might occasionally have ideas worth considering.
She is from an era in which people wrote thank-you notes for gifts and kindnesses provided. She still prefers hand-addressed party invitations, and notes in longhand, eschewing the impersonal convenience of e-mail.
Letitia Baldrige was Jacqueline Kennedy’s chief of staff. She often writes on social deportment. Presiding over many of those grand social occasions that made Washington come alive in the early 1960s, she provided an atmosphere that people from both parties wanted to be a part of. Born and reared a Republican, Baldrige said she was somewhat surprised when the Kennedys asked her to come to the White House.
Reflecting on today’s tone in politics, she said similar behavior in her day would have gotten a politician blackballed from the social circuit. “If you showed venom,” she said, “it showed you were a total loser.”
Baldrige recalls members of Congress greeting one another in the hall or on the street. “There was tremendous affection because they were part of a group: the Congress of the United States. There was tremendous civility. They would call each other up for favors.”
Tony Hall agrees: “I established a pattern, as many other members did, of going home only twice a month. So I got to know other congressmen. You might play cards together, have dinner with each other. Your children knew each other. If you start to build a relationship, you begin to trust the other person. Then it’s a little difficult to beat each other up on the floor of Congress.”
Baldrige believes the loss of these relationship patterns of effectively working with strangers is a major reason “we’re going through a period of nastiness.” She also charges, with much justification, that the unpleasantness “is aided and abetted by the press.” She thinks the media focus too much on “celebrities,” instead of accomplished people. When she was growing up, her heroes were people like Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican senator from Michigan, and Robert Taft, a Republican senator from Ohio. These were people, she says, who voted according to their principles. “We talked about principles and people like this at the family dinner table,” she recalls. “Today, there is no family dinner table and people don’t seem to vote according to their principles anymore.”
Clare Crawford-Mason is a journalist, television producer, and author. She was a founding editor and Washington bureau chief for People magazine and reported on the White House from the Kennedy through the Reagan administrations. She remembers those years as “vastly, vastly different” from today. She also recalls the importance of Washington parties. “The most important thing in Washington was to be ‘club-able,’ which means the ability to get along with other people,” she said. ‘You’ve got to go along to get along’ was a popular slogan of those times. It wasn’t that you passed up what you believed in, but everybody mostly had the same aim: to enhance life in America. People didn’t have separate agendas, like getting rich. You came to Washington to help the country become ‘the greatest and best country.’”
Crawford-Mason becomes even more passionate when she adds, “You could do good without doing well. There were people who had money; there were moneyed families, but it wasn’t like a story I read in the Washington Post which told of someone in Alexandria, Virginia, paying $140,000 to put a spa in their bathroom. Back in the 1940s, there were people who were glad to have two bathrooms in their homes and those who still remembered having outhouses.”
Crawford-Mason recalls interviewing Pearl Mesta, who was known in Washington as “the hostess with the mostest” and subsequently became an ambassador to Luxembourg. “I said, ‘Mrs. Mesta, tell me about these parties.’ And she said, ‘These parties are very good. We provide a place where people can get together and talk about what’s going on in our country.’”
Crawford-Mason continued: “That place is missing. We try to get the Israelis and Palestinians to talk. Why can’t we get the people who run our country together to talk?”
Today, what social glue there is—and there isn’t much—is produced not by hosts or hostesses, but by lobbyists who throw parties for influence and for money.
THE JULY 12, 2006 WASHINGTON POST CARRIED A STORY BY JEFFREY H. Birnbaum about forty-year-old Jeffrey S. Shockey, the deputy chief of staff of the powerful House Appropriations Committee. Birnbaum reported that Shockey collected nearly $2 million in severance payments from his former employer, “a lobbying firm that specializes in winning benefits from the committee he now serves.” Previously, Shockey worked for Representative Jerry Lewis (R-CA), who was at the time a member of the committee and subsequently became its chairman. In that role, Lewis gets to assist members with “earmarks,” which are special projects for the member’s home district. Getting reelected back home, not serving the public, is the main objective in today’s Washington.
No wonder this sort of behavior is called the “revolving door” in Washington. The lobbyist is all-powerful, and Shockey was merely being compensated for his value to the firm and the anticipated business he will bring in for its clients.
But it shows that when objectives change, the means for reaching them also change. The “pursuit of happiness” has replaced the pursuit of honor, civility, virtue, and integrity. If Jonas Salk were around today his cure for polio would have to compete for magazine cover space with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, and most likely Salk would find himself on an inside page.
The media feed our lower natures by focusing on the superficial and the unimportant, but the media wouldn’t if they weren’t responding to what so many of us seem to want.
Another contributing factor to the general contentiousness is the failure of anyone in modern politics to take responsibility for anything and the obsessive need to blame someone else. And citizens, focused on their own pursuit of happiness and wealth, don’t take the time to explore complex issues, and so instead rely on the spoon-feeding given to them by the media. It is easier to blame, than to understand; easier to watch a sound bite on television, than to read a book.
To paraphrase Peter, Paul, and Mary, “Where have all the leaders gone? Long time passing.”
President George H. W. Bush famously dismissed what he called “the vision thing.” But as the proverb says, “Without a vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18).