I, embarking on my attempt to make government comprehensible, and the Bush administration, embarking on its attempt to make government, arrived in Washington at about the same time in early 1989.
Many reporters, when they go to work in the nation’s capital, begin thinking of themselves as participants in the political process instead of as glorified stenographers. Washington journalists are seduced by their proximity to power, and that was me. Power had my lipstick smeared and was toying with my corset hooks before I even got off the Trump Shuttle.
Newsmen believe that news is a tacitly acknowledged fourth branch of the federal system. This is why most news about government sounds as if it were federally mandated—serious, bulky, and blandly worthwhile like a high-fiber diet set in type.
All of Washington conspires to make reporters feel important—a savvy thing to do to people who majored in journalism because the TV repair schools advertised on matchbook covers were too hard to get into. The U.S. government, more than any other organization on earth, takes pains to provide journalists with “access” to make the laptop Saint-Simons feel that they are “present at the making of history.” Of course, the same high honor can be had by going around to the back of any animal and “being present at the making of earth.”
If you can get accreditation to the Congressional Press Galleries—which, when you’re employed by a “major news outlet,” is about as difficult as falling asleep in a congressional hearing—you receive a photo ID tag to wear on a chain around your neck. Everybody who’s anybody in Washington wears some kind of ID tag on a chain around his neck, so that the place looks like the City of Lost Dogs. I wore mine everywhere until one day in the shower, when I had shampoo in my eyes, the chain caught on the soap dish and I was nearly strangled by my own identity. This happens a lot to members of the Washington press corps.
Within days of getting to Washington I began to write pieces featuring all the access I had and frequently mentioning that real political figures, some of them so important you’d actually heard their names, spoke directly to me in person. Thus, readers were left with an indelible sense of “A politician talked to him? What the hell else does a politician ever do to you except take your money?” I even got a part-time slot on one of those public affairs TV shows that air at 6:00 a.m. on Sunday mornings. It was a sort of farm-team McLaughlin Group, but it gave me a chance to say things like “Washington journalists are seduced by their proximity to power.”
Washington is a fine place for journalists to live as well as to brownnose. It has plenty of the only kind of people who can stand journalists—other journalists—and plenty of the only kind of people journalists get any real information from—other journalists. It is, like most journalists themselves, not very big (Washington is smaller than Memphis, Tennessee) and not as sophisticated as it thinks. And it’s pretty. Washington has lots of those Greek- and Roman-style buildings that practically make you feel like a senator just walking up the steps of them. Senators, in particular, are fond of this feeling, and this is one reason official Washington escaped the worst effects of modern architecture. That plus the fact that steel and glass skyscrapers are relatively cheap to build, and cost effectiveness is not a concept here. As Article One, Section 9, paragraph 7, of the U.S. Constitution says, “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.” So it’s obvious what the whole point of lawmaking is.
But Washington, though it costs taxpayers a fortune, is itself inexpensive—at least compared to New York or Los Angeles. In Washington journalists can afford to live almost as well as people who work for a living. Those stories about crack wars and the “murder capital of America” are nonsense, of course—as long as you stay in the part of Washington that concerns itself with real wars and being the regular capital. This is the part that extends northwest along Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin avenues from the tourist attractions on the Mall to the Maryland suburbs—the “white pipeline.” People do occasionally venture outside this zone, people who come in to do your cleaning or mow the lawn.
Numerous demonstrations, marches, PR stunts, and other staged events are held in Washington to give journalists an excuse for not covering real events, which are much harder to explain. Barely a weekend passes without some group of people parading in the capital to protest the piteous condition of those inevitable victims of injustice, themselves.
One Saturday it’s opponents of abortion dragging little children along to show they hadn’t been killed. The next Saturday it’s advocates of abortion dragging little children along to show they’d been born on purpose. The homeless come and make themselves at home around the Washington Monument. The Vietnam veterans are veteran gatherers at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Earth Day organizers litter the streets with posters and pamphlets calling for trash to be recycled. The AIDS Memorial Quilt is unfolded, and the Cancer Sampler and Car-Wreck Duvet are probably coming soon.
For the people in government—rather than the journalists who pester it—Washington is an early-rising, hardworking city. It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money. At 10:30 on weekday nights Washington bars and restaurants are as empty as synagogues in Iraq. I have never gotten up so early in Washington—or stayed up so late—that somebody wasn’t already awake and jogging by beneath my apartment window. On my first full day in Washington I saw an astonishingly beautiful young woman, slim, doe-eyed, and still dewy from a hinterland childhood, the kind of girl who would be streaking like a Tomahawk cruise missile through the New York fashion-model and dance-club world. She was reading Defense News on the Metro at 7:45 a.m.
People in government jobs, especially political appointees and high-level bureaucrats, are customarily at their desks by eight in the morning and are still there at six at night. They return calls, are courteous over the phone, prompt in their appointments, and helpful to the point of obsequiousness.
Government people work so hard for the curious reason that their output can’t be measured. There are plenty of ways to determine bad government, but good government is hard to quantify. How can streets be too clean or crime rates too low? A poverty threshold is easy to establish, but nobody’s ever too rich. The casualties of war are simpler to count than the augmentations of peace. And that’s why government employees work so hard—since output can’t be measured, input has to be.
People in government are also a cheerful and indefatigably optimistic bunch. At first I was mystified. Government work would seem to be a run in a hamster wheel. Government can do nothing, at least nothing right. For instance, the deficit is terrible, but lower spending will hurt the poor, and higher taxes will lead to a recession causing more people to become poor and get hurt by the lower spending needed to bring taxes down to end the recession, and so on. But since government rarely succeeds, it hardly ever fails. And government programs aren’t necessarily designed to go anywhere. Like the joggers beneath my window, who are the people who run those programs, they just go. The results—sweat, ruined knees, America as a second-rate world power—don’t matter. It’s the effort that makes the action worthy. Frank Lavin, who was the director of the Office of Political Affairs in the Reagan White House (notice my access), told me, “People who believe in government regulation and intervention in life—for them government is a church.” And people who are truly committed to government exhibit the same dull self-satisfaction and slightly vapid peace of mind as do devout churchgoers. They also know their business is never going to be bought by Sony.
Washington’s optimistic enthusiasm, dreadfully wholesome energy, and overabundance of media types are never more evident than when a fresh batch of optimistic enthusiasts and wholesomely energetic dreadfuls is sucked into town by a new presidential administration and all the media types rush there to meet them.
This was particularly true in the case of George Bush. Usually journalists suffer a brief, syrupy infatuation with an incoming chief executive. But everybody had such a crush on George that you began to wonder if the New York Times editorial board wasn’t maybe driving by George’s house in the middle of the night and pining out the car window or sneaking into the Kennebunkport Yacht Club to leave anonymous poems in his locker.
First the jerk disappeared—the tall schmo with the nasal lockjaw, the one who was running for president but nobody could figure out why because he kept getting his tongue in a clove hitch and calling every what-chamajigger a “thing.” He vanished without a trace. You’ll remember that until the beginning of January 1989 George Bush was a skinny, inconsequential doofus, an intellectual smurf and moral no-show who’d wound up in the White House by default. Then one day I saw in the newspapers that the president-elect was a seasoned Washington professional, a man who knew where all the levers and pedals and remote-control channel changers of government were located, plus he was a symbol of unity and strength reaching out to Americans of every hue, stripe, and polka-dot pattern and gathering us together in an immense bipartisan hug, cuddle, and smooch.
Next George was applauded like an Academy Award–winning actor with cancer for his proposed cabinet appointments. (This being before the U.S. Senate decided that former senator John Tower was too drunk and silly to be secretary of defense but not quite drunk and silly enough to be a senator again.) In fact, only two of Bush’s nominees were other than mundane. There was William Bennett, who had been so much fun as Reagan’s secretary of education. You had to love a man who’d made that many schoolteachers mad. Bennett always seemed about to say, “Anybody who doesn’t know what’s wrong with America’s schools never screwed an el-ed major.” However, now Bennett was to be “drug czar.” Would his scholastic background help? Would he make dead crack addicts stay after life and write, “I will not be killed by rival gangs of drug dealers” one hundred times on the blackboard? Then there was Jack Kemp, the proposed secretary of Housing and Urban Development. But was it a bold stroke or a mean prank to make the only real conservative in the crowd go down to the ghetto and explain the Laffer curve?
Anyway, for the moment, the media were treating Bush’s cabinet picks as if they were the nine worthies, the three wise men, and two surefire ways to lose weight without dieting. And this was nothing compared with what had happened to Barbara Bush: apotheosis. Now, Barbara Bush was reputed, on good authority, to be a nice woman, warmhearted, funny, sensible, and all the things we usually say about our mothers when they’re listening. But it wasn’t as though she’d actually done anything or even said much. Barbara Bush, it seemed, was elevated to secular sainthood strictly on the basis of gray hair and a plump figure. And such is the remarkable speed of fashion in Washington that, within hours of the swearing in, snowy bouffants and comfortable tummies appeared everywhere among the politically chic. A few extra pounds were spilling over the waistband of my own boxer shorts.
Even the Dan Quayle market was—very temporarily—up. This is the fellow who was supposed to answer the question once and for all “Can a person be too dumb for government?” But in February 1989 columnists and commentators were mumbling about what a hardworking senator Dan had always been. The Wall Street Journal went so far as to call him “an avid reader … not just of newspaper clips or an occasional magazine piece, but of real live books.” Quick to note a vogue in toadying, the New Republic offered a Quayle Revisionism Award, only to have readers write in suggesting the prize be given to the New Republic’s own senior editor, Morton Kondracke, for saying Dan Quayle was “well-informed, intelligent, candid and engaging.”
There was a giddiness in the District of Columbia during inauguration week, and not just among Republicans dizzy from victory and cheap, warm domestic Inaugural Ball champagne. Liberals were sidling up to each other and confessing profound relief that Puckermug Micky Dukakis was back in Boston with a huge, poorly balanced Massachusetts state budget about to fall on his head. Garry Trudeau had run out of punch lines for his Doonesbury comic strip and was stuck with an “invisible George” joke, about a president so hopelessly visible that he seemed to show up everyplace except The Oprah Winfrey Show. Jesse Jackson and George Bush looked to be on the verge of starting their own two-man Operation PUSH chapter. Jackson said Bush’s inaugural speech “set exactly the right tone.” And the Tehran Times—this is true—welcomed George Bush to the White House and opined that he’d “acted wisely” at the onset of his administration.
On inauguration day anti-Bush demonstrators were thin on the ground. A smattering of ERA signs were held aloft along the parade route. A few devoted peace buffs were camped across from the White House in an antinuke vigil that they’d vowed to continue until the world didn’t blow up. The homeless were nowhere to be seen. I suppose the police had told them to go home. The Washington Post devoted only fifteen column inches to “alternative” celebrations in its special Saturday inauguration section. And I saw just one protester outside an Inaugural Ball, a lonely flake in pigtail and knapsack with a message about the Super Bowl hand-lettered on notebook paper: “If Joe Montana Passes Like Dan Quayle Speaks, the Bengals Will Win.” (They didn’t.) The liberal liberals, the serious hemorrhaging valentines, the real giveaway-and-guilt bunch, had disappeared into the same black hole as the jokes about Barbara looking like George’s mother. Alas, the pinkos—they’d lost to the guy who lost to George. They weren’t even ranked anymore.
Of course, in those bastions of GOPery, where you’d expect the welkin to ring, there were rung welkins all over the place. At a Republican National Committee staff party at the Grand Hyatt, the crowd was young, integrated, drunk, loud, and seemed to have lost its copy of “The How to Act Like a Republican Manual.” A large can of men’s hair-styling gel had been discovered in the hotel suite’s bathroom, and people were being tackled at random. “Mousse him! Mousse him!” went the cry. Someone would go down in a pile-on and emerge with improbable hair spikes projecting above pin-striped suit jacket.
A clean-cut person in his middle fifties with very good posture walked in. “It’s the general!” yelled the RNC staff. “Hey, General! Hi ya doin’, General?! MOUSSE HIM!!!” He came out looking pretty good, too. Later I remember somebody, possibly me, weaving down the hotel hall with a large cigar in one hand and a larger drink in the other, shouting, “We had all the money! Then we won all the votes! Now we’ve got all the fun!” while his wife kicked him and threatened to call security.
It had been a long while since there was this much good cheer and auld lang syne at a presidential inauguration. You’d have to go back to 1961, when Jackie was a tomato and Jack was giving the world a nudge and a wink, and the New Frontier stretched before us full of challenge, potential, and shoving people into swimming pools. (Although it’s instructive to remember what happened in the late sixties and early seventies when we reached the unexplored regions of that New Frontier—war, drugs, STDs, disco music, and about a billion ruined marriages.)
George Bush looked like he’d be a cozy president, old shoe, gemütlichkeit. This wasn’t the same as having a smug little wiseacre or a big Hollywood movie star in the White House. The first word of George Bush’s inaugural address was hey. (That is, of course, after he’d said “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen,” because this is a president who minds his manners.) “Hey, Jack, Danny,” said George, looking around at Congressmen Jack Brooks and Dan Rostenkowski as though he’d just stepped up to the podium at a Monday Rotary lunch. “Mr. Chief Justice, Mr. President, Vice President Quayle, Senator Mitchell,” George continued, “Speaker Wright, Senator Dole, Congressman Michel, fellow citizens, neighbors, friends …” For a moment it seemed as though the president might just keep on greeting people for hours, like a little kid trying to include everybody in the God-bless section of his bedtime prayers: “… colleagues, compatriots, associates, acquaintances, distant cousins, people who graduated from high school about the same time I did …” But he stopped himself, gave the world a goofy smile, and delivered a speech we’d all heard a hundred times before but never from a president of the United States. It was a speech we’d all heard a hundred times from our dads.
This country has a meaning beyond what we can see … our strength is a force for good … We are not the sum of our possessions. They are not the measure of our lives … We have more will than wallet; but will is what we need … The final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory … A president is neither prince nor pope, and I do not seek “a window on men’s souls.” In fact I yearn for a greater tolerance, an easygoingness about each other’s attitudes and way of life.
Most dads don’t have Peggy Noonan speech writing for them, so their phrases aren’t so orotund and rhetorically balanced, but it’s the same lecture in the den.
You should thank your lucky stars you were born in the United States of America. Money isn’t everything. Hard work never killed anybody. Family is family so quit picking on your little brother. And I can’t follow you around for the rest of your life keeping you out of trouble, so use your common sense and don’t do anything stupid—it would break your mother’s heart.
Then the Reagans blew out of town. The herds of anchorfolk covering this on TV did their best to make the departure damp-eyed, but you could practically hear the nationwide sigh of relief. They are really lovely, lovely people, the Reagans, and we enjoyed their stay, we really did, but, well, you know … They have been here quite a while, and they’re frankly not getting any younger. And they’re a bit—let’s be truthful—la-di-da, especially her. When you come right down to it, it’s great to have them out of the way so we can spend Sundays padding around in our bathrobes with the funny papers all over the place and can leave the TV on during dinner if we want.
Which is apparently what the Bushes were doing. Twenty-eight members of the Bush family spent the first night of the Bush presidency at the White House. “You kids cut that out! Go to sleep this minute! No pillow fighting in the Green Room, you’ll break the gosh-darned antiques!”
During the inaugural parade Bush kept darting in and out of his limousine, and the crowd reacted as if he were the early Beatles. These pop-outs were much better received than the Jimmy Carter business of walking the whole parade route. We Americans like our populism in small doses and preferably from an elitist. A Democrat populist might mean what he says and take our new Toro away because a family down the street can’t afford the self-starting kind with the de-thatching attachment. A Republican populist is only going to indulge in the popular types of populism and will then get back in his Cadillac and behave.
Dan Quayle stayed in his Cadillac entirely and broadcast cheery greetings to the parade viewers over the car’s built-in PA system: “Section A … stand 21, how are you? Hello, Section B.” (These are actual quotes.)
It was worth going to the Inaugural Balls on Friday night just to see hundreds of newspaper reporters in bad tuxedos and mortal pain from rented dress shoes. I went to two of the things, which is about all a non-elected human being can bear. Ball procedure consists of standing around chatting amicably in itchy clothes if you’re a man or, if you’re a woman, standing around chatting amicably in clothes that parts of you are about to squeeze out of. You can’t drink because the bar is two hundred fifty thousand Republicans away from where you are. And you can’t dance because the music is being played by marines on sousaphones. This must be what entertainment was like in the nineteenth century, before fun was invented.
The Young Americans Ball at the J. W. Marriott Hotel was particularly crowded, and the Young Americans were horribly well behaved. I’d bet most of them weren’t even on drugs. This may be just as well. What kind of hallucinations would these clean-cut juveniles have? “Oh, man, I was staring at these clouds, and they looked just like falling bond yields.” Though I’m a conservative myself, I worry about the larval Republicans. They should act up now and get it over with, otherwise misbehavior may come upon them suddenly in middle age, the way it came upon the protagonist of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and, also, Gary Hart.
The Maine and Indiana Ball at Union Station was better, full of the most reassuring kind of grown-ups, who looked like grown-ups used to look thirty years ago—happy, prosperous, solid, sensible, a little boring, and not about to turn up in a Bret Easton Ellis novel. It was worth hundreds of hours of psychoanalysis and a prescription for Valium just to walk around among their merry, placid faces and ample cummerbunds.
Dan Quayle arrived at Union Station about 10:30 wearing a smile that said—as only an open, honest, corn-fed Midwestern smile can say—“Fuck you.” Who can blame him? There was terrific press bias against Quayle during the election because most journalists worked harder at college than Dan did and all it got them was jobs as journalists. Marilyn Quayle was there, too, looking—it was indeed a strange week in Washington—great. She had her hair done up in something my wife said was a chignon, and whatever it was, it made Marilyn look considerably less like a Cape buffalo than usual. Though actually I admired the Cape buffalo look. I have an idea that—like the Cape buffalo—if Marilyn Quayle gets furious and charges, you’ve got only one shot at the skull. You wouldn’t want to just wound her.
The next night the president’s campaign manager, the supposedly cold-blooded Lee Atwater, staged an immense rhythm-and-blues concert at the Washington Convention Center auditorium. This was more or less Atwater’s first official act as the new Republican National Committee chairman—inviting Sam Moore, Percy Sledge, Bo Diddley, Albert Collins, Joe Cocker, Ron Wood, Willie Dixon, Etta James, Dr. John, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Delbert McClinton, Billy Preston, and about a dozen other blues musicians to entertain, of all things, the GOP faithful.
I’d like to travel back in time to January 1969, when Richard Nixon was being inaugurated, and Pigasus, the four-footed Yippie candidate, was being inaugurated, too, and the country was a mess, and so was my off-campus apartment. And I’d like to tell the self that I was then: “Twenty years from today you will watch the chairman of the Republican National Committee boogie down on electric guitar. And he’s going to duck walk and do the splits and flip over backward and sing “High Heel Sneakers” at the top of his lungs. And when he gets finished, the president of the United States—a Republican president—is going to be pulled up on stage by Sam Moore of Sam and Dave and presented with an electric guitar with THE PREZ painted on the front. And the president of the United States and the chairman of the RNC are going to trade blues licks in front of a crowd of eighty-five hundred big squares in a deep groove.”
I’d like to know what I would have thought, that is, after I got over the shock of seeing myself come back from the future so jowly and with an ROTC haircut.
Anyway, the concert sounded like Jesse Jackson had been elected, except the music was better. Jackson would have felt compelled to have boring Sting there and some Suzanne Vega and Tracy Chapman depressive types and dreary Rainbow Coalition stuff, too, probably featuring “Hava Nagilah” played by a marimba band. The Republicans were under no such constraints.
When President Bush entered the auditorium, no one played “Hail to the Chief.” Instead, the 1967 Bar-Keys instrumental “Soul Finger” had been chosen as the presidential theme. Bush walked, as he’d have to for at least the next four years, inside a hollow square of stiff-necked fellows with long-distance looks and pistols in their armpits. But within the Secret Service phalanx you could see one bright, white head swaying and nodding to the beat. Barbara Bush didn’t sit down all night.
Atwater, whose health problems were still a year away, proved to be an excellent guitar player and a, well, very enthusiastic vocalist. The evening’s master of ceremonies, the president’s son Marvin, bellowed into a microphone: “They call Frank Sinatra the chairman of the board, but they call Lee Atwater THE CHAIRMAN OF THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE!!!”
“I taught Lee everything he knows about that kind of dancing,” said George Bush. “I know when to shut up and when to say something,” continued Bush, “And this is a time to shut up.” Though he didn’t quite. He wanted to talk about how he’d thrown the White House—the “People’s House” he insisted on calling it—open to the public that morning and how, even after these people had been waiting outside in the cold for what must have seemed like forever, they didn’t complain. They looked around in awe “just like me and Barbara.”
“We’ve got a little present for you,” said Sam Moore.
“Dancing lessons, I hope,” said the president half under his breath. And there was a smile of real pleasure when he saw the guitar. It almost looked as though “THE PREZ” knew how to play it.
And then the music began again. All across the auditorium thousands of Republicans were coming out of their tuxedo jackets. The convention center was wall-to-wall in a pattern of jiggling suspenders over soaking-wet dress shirts, like a huge attack of extra Y chromosomes. Did they have rhythm? No. But this is America. You can achieve anything in America. Republicans might even achieve a little soul.
We’d had eight years of talk about patriotism and family values from a man who saw less combat in the service than I saw as a hippie and whose children spent his whole administration exiled to the Good Morning, America gulag. Now there was an actual household in the White House, one where Dad really was a war hero.
Our country was all smiles and handshakes with the USSR. The first faint blush of political freedom was visible in Eastern Europe. Wars were petering out in Afghanistan and Angola. Central America was idling in neutral. The economy was OK. It seemed to be a genuinely promising moment in the history of the nation, a moment for—as Dr. Johnson said about second marriages—“the triumph of hope over experience.”