This Town Page 2
Likewise, from the late 1990s, This Town was riveted by bigger–than–West Wing mega-news: Monica, the 2000 recount, 9/11, and the wars that followed. Politics and Washington became the game, perhaps the dominant story of the young century. George W. Bush’s Washington was held out as the polestar of the nation’s safety and the world’s democracy. That cost money, much of it spent here, and they were also fattening up social programs like Medicare while at it. Suddenly it had never been so easy to “monetize” taxpayer-subsidized government service. Then, in 2008, a for-the-ages presidential campaign culminated in a historic election and coincided with a fiscal calamity, at which point This Town was entrusted with saving the nation’s economy too. In both administrations, Washington appeared deeply divided by politics, but the fights were sufficiently huge and loud to affirm everyone’s hyper-relevance—the reason they pay you (the cable outfits, the corporations, the foreign governments) to explain “how Washington really works.” Because you are part of This Town, and that in itself is a value proposition, central to the brand.
With the rise of Obama, the more immediate question became, once again: Could Washington really change? Because, rest assured, This Town as we knew it would have no friend in the Democratic nominee. No more lobbyists in the White House, or “politics as usual,” or tending to the needy oracles of Beltway groupthink that foster consensus views like Hillary being “inevitable” or America not being ready to elect a black president. What would become of The Club in a Wild West of disjointed megaphones, charismatic insurgents, hope, and resignation?
No matter how disappointed people are in their capital, even the most tuned-in consumers have no idea what the modern cinematic version of This Town really looks like. They might know the boilerplate about “people who have been in Washington too long,” how the city is not bipartisan enough and filled with too many creatures of the Beltway. But that misses the running existential contradictions of D.C., a place where “authenticity and fantasy are close companions,” as the Washington Post’s Henry Allen once wrote. It misses that the city, far from being hopelessly divided, is in fact hopelessly interconnected. It misses the degree to which New Media has democratized the political conversation while accentuating Washington’s insular, myopic, and self-loving tendencies. It misses, most of all, a full examination of how Washington may not serve the country well but has in fact worked splendidly for Washington itself—a city of beautifully busy people constantly writing the story of their own lives.
• • •
What is my story?
People ask me a lot if I am a member of The Club. I started getting that question, in so many words, when I began writing this book. Yes, I’m guilty. I write about national politics at a big media outlet. I’ve been in This Town sixteen years, nine spent working for the Washington Post and the last seven for the New York Times. I have a title, an affiliation, and a business card that seem to impress. People appear to believe I am worth knowing (and I must be, because sometimes I get to go on Morning Joe!). I have lots of Washington friends and also some real ones.
People then ask, legitimately, would it be possible to write honestly about The Club from the inside? “Who discovered water?” goes the old Yiddish riddle. “I don’t know, but it wasn’t a fish.” I am a fish. I have chosen to live, work, and raise my family in the murk. This might well be an easier pursuit for a citizen on solid land. But I have no plans to leave. People ask me about that too. Why? It’s not like I’m making lobbyist or TV money. I plead reality: my wife and I have built a good life here.
I also plead optimism: If Washington, D.C., is a civic lab rat of the Nation Exaggerated—all good and petty tendencies concentrated into a few monument-bedecked square miles—then we want to believe that what goes on here can be a flattering microcosm, right? It might not be at a given moment or decade, and surveys show an overwhelming majority of Americans judge Washington to be a mortifying perversion of national ideals. But as Barack Obama proved in 2008, hope can be a powerful force, if not necessarily sustainable (as Obama also proved).
And while living in D.C. can encourage cynicism, it can also breed daily wonder. When I drop my daughter off at kindergarten, I watch her and her friends stare out the window at the vice president’s motorcade as it sirens past en route to the White House. In the day-to-day, we can all be those kids with noses pressed against the glass. That’s how Tom Brokaw described Tim Russert when he first came to Washington from Buffalo as a young aide to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. They are a local archetype, the starstruck operators, arriving new to revivify the city with fresh waves of scared energy and the desire to make it in This Town.
Washington is one of the two or three most popular destinations in the country (along with New York and possibly Los Angeles) for those seeking self-creation, reinvention, and public purpose on a grand and national scale. People work obscenely hard, and they do it despite/because of the baggage they bring. And they do it, in many cases, with a desperation that, to me, is the most compelling part of the Washington story, whether now or before: it is a spinning stew of human need.
I make no claims of immunity. Or—Lord knows!—superiority. I am part of this culture and under no illusion that it cannot reinforce my worst tendencies at times: vanity, opportunism, pettiness—it’s all there on the psychic résumé. I struggle with all of it and more. But this is my home and my experience and I write from it willingly.
It is also, of course, a position of privilege. My job allows not only for a prime spot against the glass but also forays behind it to see the momentous and ridiculous up close. I have profiled hundreds of political figures over the years and have spent considerable time in their presence (and who knows why they continue to allow this?). They will often play to caricature—their own and the city’s—but they are also human beings who are usually engaged in important work. The entertainment value here can be great but ultimately incidental. Washington is not Hollywood (or “Showbiz for Ugly People” as the dumb cliché goes). The stakes are real and higher.
In the words of Republican senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, today’s Washington has become a “permanent feudal class,” a massive, self-sustaining entity that sucks people in, nurtures addiction to its spoils, and imposes a peculiar psychology on big fish and minnows alike. It can turn complex, gifted, and often damaged individuals into hollowed-out Kabuki players acting in the maintenance of their fragile brands. I have seen this up close, too, often in the most fateful environments, like this, Tim’s send-off, the biggest tribal pageant This Town had seen in some time.
• • •
You know someone big has died when they play “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes and interrupt the president with news of the passing: George W. Bush was told of Russert’s death while dining in France with President Sarkozy. They have metal detectors at the funeral entrance, because so many high-value targets have come. And many men in the crowd are glowing with Queen Elizabeth levels of Pan-Cake makeup as they are coming straight from their TV stand-ups, or “hits.”
“I feel almost like we did when somebody—when Jack Kennedy or even Katharine Graham died,” blogged Sally Quinn, a former Washington Post reporter who is a Georgetown hostess and the wife of the Washington Post’s illustrious former editor, Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee.
Sally is shattered. But looks fantastic, at almost seventy. So does Ben, even better (nearing ninety). Will the silver-haired BFF to JFK get a send-off like this? Lord knows he will deserve one, but it will hopefully not happen for the longest of whiles. Ben was the Washington alpha journo of his day, with a presidential scalp to end any discussion. He also played the transactional local game as well as anyone. “Did he use me? Of course he used me,” Bradlee said of his late friend John F. Kennedy in a 1975 interview. “Did I use him? Of course I used him. Are these the ground rules down here in Washington? Hell, yes.” Ben Bradlee is the Man. He is The Club.
Tim Russert was the
mayor of it. He was a superb journalist—not so much in the sense that he wrote or produced stories or unearthed wrongdoings, but in the sense that he was a guy on TV whom everyone knew, who asked the “tough but fairs” of important newsmakers and did so in a way that was distinctive and combative and made for good TV. If you were a politician of serious ambition, an invitation to his set was your rite of passage and your proving ground. “It was like you were being knighted,” Bradlee said of getting on the show. “All of a sudden you went up a couple of ranks in their class.” And then, when the program was done, everyone would rate your performance.
Russert became more famous than most of the people he interviewed. After a while in Washington, the fame itself becomes the paramount commonality between the parties. You are a commodity, Someone on TV, with an agent and a chief of staff. (Even Chelsea Clinton has a chief of staff now!) You start using “impact” as a verb.
After a while, the distinctions between the clans all run together—the journalists, the Democrats, the Republicans, the superlawyers, the superlobbyists, the superstaffers, the supercommittees, the David Gergens, the Donna Braziles, and the loser on Facebook who says he’ll be on Headline News at 2:20 p.m. They run together like the black-tie dinners, or the caricature drawings of notable Washingtonians on the wall at the Palm on Nineteenth Street. If you’re lucky and you stay long enough, you can get your picture taken with some really notable Washingtonians and then show off the photos on your office “Me Wall.”
Yes, Russert was the mayor of This Town. To be sure, the “real” city of Washington has an actual elected mayor: black guy, deals with our city problems. But that’s just the D.C. where people live, some of them (18.7 percent) even below the poverty line, who drag down the per capita income to a mere $71,011—still higher than any American state but much less than what most anyone at the Russert funeral is pulling down. Yes, Washington is a “real city,” but This Town is a state of belonging, a status and a commodity.
Russert was such an intensely present figure, his face filling the whole screen like he was right there in front of you. People would approach him at Reagan National or after one of his paid speeches, where he would tell the same jokes and stories over and over, like a politician does. Non‒Meet the Press‒worthy lawmakers chased him into the men’s room, trying to make a charismatically folksy impression. Strangers told him all about their cousins from Buffalo and commended Tim for “holding our leaders accountable” and for being so real, because somebody in Washington had to be real. That was Tim’s job. Fans would ask him to deliver a message to the president, as if everyone in This Town lived together in the same high-rent group house and bickered over the rent and shared Bob Dole’s peanut butter.*
Tim possessed all of the city’s coveted big-dog virtues: He was not to be fucked with. He seemed happy and excited and completely confident at all times, and why not? His killer persona combined a Guy’s Guy exuberance with gravitas. Tim had a great table at the Palm and drank Rolling Rock from a bottle and ate good, manly food that wasn’t drizzled with anything. He testified at the Scooter Libby trial. He had great seats for the Washington Nationals and people asked him to sign their tickets between innings, and maybe Greenspan had signed the ticket before, and James Carville, too, and also Bob Schieffer, all of them together on the same ticket—like a D.C. version of a ’52 Mantle baseball card.
Russert, of course, had many friends, which he worked at with a politician’s attention to gesture. He would handwrite sympathy and thank-you cards and send baby pillows embroidered with the name of your newborn. He went to spring training every year and brought back a Jason Giambi autograph for E. J. Dionne’s son. Tim was classy that way. When the former Senate leader Tom Daschle’s father died, Tim sent his widow an ensemble of T-shirts, hats, and a jacket bearing the Meet the Press logo. Mrs. Daschle could be seen for years wearing the jacket around Aberdeen, South Dakota.
I probably had about a half-dozen conversations with Russert over the years, usually about sports or politics. Our last in-person encounter was in February of that year, 2008, at a Democratic presidential debate in Cleveland, which he was moderating. He had just finished a workout in the gym of the Ritz-Carlton and was walking through the lobby in a sweaty sweatshirt, long shorts, black loafers, and tube socks. A network spokesman tried to declare the mayor’s outfit “off the record,” which I of course made a point of mentioning (gratuitously) in a future story in the New York Times Magazine.
Before I did, I called Russert to give him a heads-up about this, because nothing is more important in Washington than giving or getting a “heads-up,” the better to avoid the intolerable humiliation of being surprised or blindsided by some piece of information. One could argue that an entire boom industry, lobbying, is predicated less on influencing the government than on giving heads-ups to big-paying clients about something that is going to happen whether or not they paid a lobbyist a $50,000-a-month retainer.
Anyway, so I called the mayor to give him a heads-up about how I would not be honoring the flack’s off-the-record outfit request. He laughed so hard I had to move the phone away from my ear. “Just do me one favor,” he said. “Say they were rubber-soled shoes, will you?”
He laughed again, and we talked briefly on the topic of how so many people in This Town are obsessed with where they rank in the great pecking order. Concern over one’s place is hardly original to these times in Washington. But the orgy of new media, news-about-news, and the rolling carnival of political moneymaking and celebrity has only exacerbated This Town’s default vanity.
“You can drive yourself crazy if you worry too much about that stuff,” the mayor said, with the self-assurance of a man solidly atop the pig pile and comfortable in his shoes.
Then, three months later: “Did you hear about Tim Russert?”
1
Heaven’s Green Room
Apparently cholesterol plaque ruptured one of Russert’s arteries. It caused a sudden coronary thrombosis. He was in an audio-tracking booth at NBC’s Washington bureau recording voice-overs for that Sunday’s show when he collapsed. The EMTs defibrillated but could not resuscitate. He was pronounced dead at Sibley Memorial Hospital.
Russert had just returned from Italy. He had been celebrating his son Luke’s college graduation and had recently placed his eighty-four-year-old father into an assisted-living home in Buffalo. Tim had struggled with his weight and was looking tired, and his many pals had been worrying about the stress he was under. He had suffered from asymptomatic coronary artery disease, which he treated with medication and exercise. He did well on a stress test seven weeks earlier, on April 29. Tom Brokaw promised him a Chuck Berry album if he lost ten pounds by that summer’s political conventions. “What’s happening?” were Russert’s last words, a greeting to the person on the other end of the audio feed. The autopsy showed an enlarged heart. Flags were ordered at half-staff by the mayor of Buffalo.
“He will be missed as he was loved, greatly,” said Brokaw, announcing the death live on NBC.
Russert—“Tim”—reached the top of the pecking order while shrouding a cutthroat ambition in his slovenly nonchalance. While a focused and surgical ambition is vital to success in D.C., the ability to be appropriately sheepish about it is more so. Russert had a nice, easy populism about him—just a guy out of Buffalo who cherished his country, loved his dad and his son and his Bills and his T-shirts and all that. “Rumpled” is always good for the brand here, and Tim had that nailed.
He was also acutely status-conscious. Known primarily as a TV star, he preferred to identify himself by his more hierarchical title, “Washington bureau chief.” (Russert told a Washington Post reporter in 1991 that he wanted to be president of NBC News.) Brokaw once asked if he ever considered entering the priesthood. Yes, he said.
“Cardinal?” Brokaw asked.
No, Russert said. “Pope.”
That was a joke but Tim had just see
n the pope a few days earlier, when in Rome. He sat up front for the weekly prayer service, and then His Holiness (the pope, that is) had to leave.
Tim liked his seat in the corporate boardroom and his large home in Nantucket, “The House That Jack Built,” as the sign outside identified the Nantucket house—Jack being Jack Welch, the longtime CEO of NBC’s corporate parent, General Electric. Russert and Brokaw attended Ronald Reagan’s funeral as guests, and then walked outside the Washington National Cathedral to anchor the news coverage for NBC.
Tim lived in the sweet spot of the big, lucrative revolving door between money, media, and politics. He also died there. Every wannabe, is, and has-been in Washington was issuing statements. “We will never see his likes again,” “He touched so many lives,” etc. Big distinctions were bestowed—“the preeminent political journalist of his generation,” John McCain said. “One of the finest men I knew,” Obama said. Small kindnesses were recalled. “When my mom died, he sent two dozen roses,” said Ann Klenk, a producer at MSNBC. “I adored him.”
He was indeed adored—in that unmistakable vintage of Washington “adored” that incorporated fear and need and sucking up. You needed to be on Meet the Press to be bestowed with a top-line standing in what Joan Didion called “that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.” You needed to be friends with Tim, the closer the better, as so many people advertised with deft turns of posthumous networking. People on TV jockeyed to outgrieve one another. Network and cable channels paid tribute with their favorite homage: overkill. This was particularly true on NBC, and doubly particularly true on its little cable sister, MSNBC, which Russert—in life—was always wary of spending too much time on, for fear of slumming away his mayoral status in the high-numbered channels.
“He called me ‘Mitch,’” NBC’s Andrea Mitchell said on MSNBC. Same thing her father called her. “Go get ’em, K.O.,” Tim used to say to MSNBC’s Kelly O’Donnell. Keith Olbermann said Tim had said the exact same thing to him (“Go get ’em, K.O.”).