“It’s fifty percent pure bullshit,” Jodi Dentoff said to me, speaking about James Singletary’s memoir. I’d asked her whether she’d read it. “You might say that makes it a hundred percent impure bullshit.”

When I’d run into her at Dad’s panel, I hadn’t expected that either of us would follow up on that wispy promise of a get-together, but then I’d found her card in my purse and sent her an e-mail, and she’d replied at once. We met for a drink at a downtown hotel, the same hotel I’d been taken to for birthday lunches when I was in middle school, and I was sorry to discover that the dining room had since been renovated, turned into something more generic, more mauve. My memories were of velvet drapes and long shrimp ringed around a pewter bowl, and when I was twelve it couldn’t have seemed more fancy. Now it was nothing special. But Jodi made it seem classier, or clubbier at least, leaning forward so that her chin grazed the yellow blooms that had been placed there, and talking in barely more than a whisper.

“To be expected, with any of these guys and their books. They have selective memories, obviously, like anybody, and big egos, and then there are the unfortunate conventions of the form. If I know one thing from too many years of journalism, it’s that any time you try to write the story of a life you distort it,” she said.

I mentioned I’d been reading her recent articles. Jodi was still working at The Washington Post, as she had been for years, and recently she’d been assigned to cover the hearings and legal proceedings that had followed the revelations of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. She’d seen so many tempests blow through Washington, she said, and so she had low expectations, predicting that none of the evidence or testimony or reports would lead to any genuine accounting, that the end result of all the agitation would be to bury the facts in heaps of paper, that the public response would amount to a kind of distracted fatalism, if not sheer indifference.

“At what point is it all just more entertainment? I’m beginning to think of myself in those terms. As a pornographer,” Jodi said.

She’d tried out this speech before, I sensed.

“Jodi Does D.C.”

“Basically.”

“But you’re still doing it.”

“The alternative would be what?”

Jodi was very much of the 1980s, even two decades later. She had made her name then, coaxing secrets out of retired two-star generals and discontented agency staff. Her sense of style, while of the type a magazine might have labeled “timeless”—black shifts, anorexic litheness—recalled another notepad slogan from my childhood: You can never be too rich or too thin. Her writing was as spare and chiseled as could be, avoiding the lyric and the folksy in equal measure. Again: timeless, according to the ideal of a particular time. Out of all the adults who had showed up at our house for parties when I was young, Jodi had been the one I’d been most curious about, maybe because she was so small, not much larger than I was at age nine or ten, but also so modish (I remember in particular a tasseled suede cape and snakeskin heels), with a husky voice that made everything she uttered sound like an extraordinary disclosure.

Now an older, huskier echo of that voice curled out of her throat, dipped in butter and ash. “The system always works the same way,” she said, back on the subject of scandal. “A few lower-level people get hung out to dry, while the higher-ups … let me just say I’m not worried for Rumsfeld.”

“He’ll land on his feet, I guess.”

“Those guys always manage to cover their asses. Almost always. They misrepresent things, and they end up believing their own misrepresentations. They publish them even, write memoirs and wind up in some law firm or a consulting firm, they do a little lobbying. In the end everybody’s fine except for the poor bastards who drew the short straws.

“But,” she added, “your dad knows a little something about that, doesn’t he?”

I felt as though I were exaggerating my expressions, my nods, making faces and bobbing my head up and down in lieu of responding. I didn’t want to seem as ignorant as I felt. Then I confessed to her I was trying to write something about what had happened to him, and she didn’t say anything for a long time, so that I imagined she was testing out words in her head, working out the best way to let me know it was a dumb idea.

Instead she started to tell me, disjointedly, something of her own past. She’d come to Washington in 1966, as a cub reporter, that’s how she put it, though the term sounded quaint to my ear, movie-musical romantic, like she’d arrived hanging by one arm from a Pullman car, wearing a fedora with a pencil in the brim. It was the first time I thought of Jodi as a transplant. She was much more tightly bound to the city than I was by the accident of having been born in it.

She paused and sipped her wine. “I met your dad when he was at State.” She paused again. “And then he went to the NSC and then, as you know, some shit went down. What questions did you have?”

I felt foolish for not having come with any questions. Struggling to produce one, I asked her what part of the Iran-Contra story she’d covered. She stared back at me.

“I was not assigned to it,” she said. “I filed a few related stories, nothing major.”

And then how could she have said what she said next? Stating so matter-of-factly, “Of course your dad was wrecked by it.”

“Wrecked?” Damaged, yes, but wrecked? As a father, he’d remained intact. Sometimes crazy, sometimes a pain in the ass—but intact. I didn’t know what to do with her remark, and maybe I didn’t even want to talk about Iran-Contra, maybe neither did she.

“His career I mean, it never recovered. I always wondered why he didn’t just move, get out of this town. That’s what I would’ve done. Then again he had his family to consider.” She looked at me, part of the family in question. “And now he’s so upset about that book, Singletary’s book. I mean, who even takes Singletary seriously anymore? He’s totally on the fringe. The fringe of the fringe. When he asked me to write some kind of takedown—”

“Singletary did?” I asked.

“Your father, he wanted me to write an article about the book, about the errors in the book. It’s not the kind of thing I write. He was very insistent, but…” It seemed she was trying to apologize to my dad through me, or else she was trying to convey to him, through me, why she couldn’t have done what he wanted her to do.

“Yeah, when my dad disapproves of something, he can get pretty agitated,” I said. “Sometimes I think it’s because he grew up in a small town, it was a lot of German immigrants, and there were all these unwritten rules for how to behave. So when he has these big reactions, it’s because someone did something you just wouldn’t do in his hometown.”

She looked at me from under scrunched brows, as though what I’d said didn’t parse, or maybe she found it distasteful, this daughter’s offhand analysis of a father. I’d been trotting out that theory about Dad’s small-town background for years, I realized, ever since high school or college when I’d developed it, believing I’d solved the puzzle of him.

“Or that could be part of it,” I added.

“Mmm,” she said into her glass, before taking another sip. “He would always talk a lot about you.”

I smiled at the mistake. “Not me. My older sister, Courtney. She was always—the impressive one. He saw himself in her.”

“No, not her. The middle one. You.”

“He talked about me?”

“He worried about you.”

I didn’t know what to do with that. “Were you friends with Dick Mitchell?” I asked.

She inhaled slowly and exhaled his name. “Dick Mitchell,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

“I remember him, but after he died it was like he’d never existed, my dad never talked about him.”

“I haven’t thought about him in a long time.”

“But you knew him.”

“We were friends. Back in—the early eighties, I guess it was. He wasn’t a close friend, but we would meet for lunch or for a drink from time to time. We would talk about whatever was going on, what we knew. He was a big flirt too, not that I minded that, or ever took it seriously. I also used to have lunch with your father, though there was not so much flirting with him, of course. He was always more proper. And since they were friends, Dick and your dad, sometimes we would get together, the three of us, which was always a lot of fun. It was also very interesting to see those two together. Sometimes they would vie over me, like boys trying to get their mother’s attention. They knew they were doing it, and they could be funny about it, but I saw the rivalry there long before…”

“Long before what?”

“Before their falling-out.”

“They had a falling-out?”

“That was my understanding, that they stopped speaking around the time of the congressional hearings, the Iran-Contra hearings. After that I didn’t see much of either of them.”

“I guess my dad had been kind of in Dick’s shadow, right?”

“No. I wouldn’t say that.”

“I was just a kid, but he had this larger-than-life thing…”

“Dick Mitchell lived under his own shadow,” she said, and then she said that Iran-Contra had poisoned more relationships than just theirs, and she warned me away from what she called “the swamp” of the scandal.

My dad had been sucked into it, and so had a lot of people, she said. Now none of them could even remember the truth of what had happened—they were retired or semiretired and had too much time to revisit the big drama, their trauma, they were victims of this or that, they were misunderstood. They might tell you something they consider to be factual, but beware. Not to mention, there was a whole demimonde of researchers, she said, Iran-Contra obsessives who’d fallen into the bottomless pit of the scandal, who’d been poring over documents at the National Security Archive for years and years, developing their own theories. Time had stopped for them.

“If you want my advice, and I’ll understand if you don’t, forget about all that. The craziness, the secret deals: no one could ever digest it, other than to say that covert action and democracy make uneasy bedfellows. My advice would be to write what you remember. Stick to that.”

I told Jodi I would try, i.e., try to anchor the story to my own memories—but what were those? Say goodbye a little longer, make it last a little longer, give your breath long-lasting fresh-nesssss … with Big Red! Jingles and sayings from an era when people kissed each other with chewing gum in their mouths (or so I was convinced), in other words so much residue, hardly sorted or prioritized. In the midst of which, the scandal that tripped up our dad seemed to be, at a very minimum, some kind of organizing principle, even if it was only a connection to another mess, a jumble of activity for which no one could agree on a meaning.

Afterward I took a circuitous route back to the Metro station, past a number of grand old edifices of our federal bureaucracy. It was cold and late enough that the nearby streets were sparsely traveled, but for the odd black Infiniti wheeling softly in or out of a garage, the driver clutching a travel mug. Here were both the grand mystery of government and its little human movers, with their travel mugs, so small compared to the massive buildings.

*   *   *

The approach of the new year made me newly conscious that I was still in D.C., now working, renting. This unremarkable fact came to me in the guise of a remarkable one. I’ve never really gone in for epiphanies, nevertheless I was struck by the obvious: I was living in Washington now. I’d been thinking of myself as someone taking a break from real life, which would resume sometime in 2005, but now it was almost 2005. This was my real life. It was. And I had to start treating it as such.

The first thing I did was to retire my white jeans and my polka-dot shirts. One evening after work I ventured out to look for Washington clothes, at a Talbots store. In a curtained stall I tried on flare-leg trousers, I tried on silk blouses, then a double-breasted jacket, a sweater set, all of it black, red, cream, charcoal, and/or navy. One pair of pants combined all these colors in a plaid. In the corner of my stall there was a chair, and on it I heaped the clothes I’d already removed, a growing mound of boiled wool and microvelvet that gave off a pleasant, almost woodsy perfume. Like a forest inside of a government building. I tried on something called “bi-stretch pants,” which forgave me my back fat. I tried on pumps styled like loafers, called “loafer pumps.” I could sense the saleswoman’s excitement, or perhaps she sensed mine: a real transformation was taking place, an inside-the-Beltway makeover! I left there with two bags full of prissy-wonky lady apparel, and then at another store I bought a few black headbands.

That I conceived of “real life” in this way, as an exercise that required me to dress up as somebody else, in clothes I didn’t like—clearly it was this idea that needed the makeover, much more so than my wardrobe. But where was the store for that?

*   *   *

It was a long while before I managed to follow Jodi’s advice. I was still drawn to what she’d called the swamp. I went to the American University library, where I found the transcripts of Dick Mitchell’s deposition, from March 1987, and his testimony before the congressional committees, from July of that year. The thick black tomes of the official record spanned three shelves, so that for all the disclosures they might’ve contained, the total effect was of a black wall. Iran-Contra, this barricade of books announced, was too much for any one person to consume. The depositions alone took up twenty-seven volumes, organized alphabetically, Richard Mitchell following two men named Miller who followed former attorney general Meese.

I toted Mitchell’s deposition to a carrel, next to a window overlooking Nebraska Avenue. There was a familiar low hum coming from someplace, a smell of—old carpet? Book bindings? Possibly I’d sat in that same chair in high school, looking up facts about African nations or the Missouri Compromise for some assignment, even as Mitchell had been giving the very deposition I was about to read. Whether or not that was precisely true, I was motivated, in my haphazard research, by the knowledge that important things had gone down back then, practically right under my nose, while I let myself be distracted. (It did not escape me that now I was here looking up testimony from seventeen years earlier, and so no doubt missing out on important things of the present.)

Jodi had mentioned a rivalry between Dick and my dad. That was the most recent addition to my mental list of facts about Dick Mitchell, which I kept returning to, because I had this nagging intuition that there was something I’d missed about him.

MR. EGGLESTON. Your job was to coordinate humanitarian assistance to the Nicaraguan resistance fighters, is that correct?

MR. MITCHELL. Through June of 1985 I worked under Assistant Secretary Abrams at the State Department. I started as director of the Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office on July 1.

MR. EGGLESTON. And that was also part of the State Department.

MR. MITCHELL. Correct. But we were in a separate building. We were relatively independent.

MR. EGGLESTON. Can you tell us what were your responsibilities in that office?

MR. MITCHELL. Congress had allocated approximately 27 million dollars for humanitarian assistance, and we were in charge of distributing that.

MR. EGGLESTON. How did you determine what would qualify as “humanitarian assistance”?

MR. MITCHELL. There was not a set rule. We used our best judgment. Food, clothing, mosquito nets, it was those sorts of items.

MR. EGGLESTON. Was everything purchased before it was delivered to the Nicaraguans, or were there cash transfers as well?

MR. MITCHELL. There were both.

MR. EGGLESTON. And how did you determine that the money you sent was used for humanitarian purposes only?

MR. MITCHELL. That was a challenge. The people we were working with down there, they weren’t exactly trained accountants.

MR. EGGLESTON. Nonetheless, according to a Government Accounting Office report from July of last year, some of the recipients of this aid did manage some rather artful invoicing. In fact, fraudulent.

MR. MITCHELL. With this type of aid, regrettably, a certain level of fraud is not that unusual. Maybe in the future we ought to send some GAO people down to work with our recipients directly.

MR. EGGLESTON. That’s not a bad idea. I don’t know how they’d feel about it.

MR. MITCHELL. Oh, they’d love it in the jungle.

MR. EGGLESTON. Right, right. Getting back to my questions. Did you coordinate many of your disbursements with Oliver North at the NSC?

MR. MITCHELL. We were in contact with Colonel North. I wouldn’t say we coordinated with him, necessarily.

To judge by the transcript, he was confident of his answers. He joked with the lawyers, and they responded in kind—Dick Mitchell, humanitarian, and his genteel interlocutors, peers from the same slice of Washington society.

How I imagine that world to have been in, say, the spring of ’85: a giant tangle of crossed wires. The more I read about that period in government, the more it seemed that the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was up to, though I assume most governments share that quality, to one degree or another. Even so, Dick Mitchell and my dad would have been, at that point, still (relatively) young, full of potential, full of good intentions—after all, who in Washington did not have good intentions during the first part of his career?