This Town Read online

  Russert, who described Moynihan as his “intellectual father,” died just before Father’s Day, at the dawn of a general election campaign that featured two presumptive nominees, Obama and McCain, whose sagas were steeped in fraught paternal legacies. Obama’s memoir was titled Dreams from My Father, while McCain’s was Faith of My Fathers. “A man’s either trying to make up for his father’s mistakes or live up to his expectations,” Obama told Newsweek’s Jon Meacham that summer.

  “My dad was my best friend,” eulogizes Luke, twenty-two. “To explain my bond with my father is utterly impossible to put into words.”

  And then the white screen rolls down and Springsteen enters via satellite. Like Bruce, Tim deftly made himself a spokesman for America. He was “the Boss” of the nostalgic male playgrounds he presided over in the nation’s capital. “Luke, this is for your pop,” Springsteen says, leading into an acoustic version of “Thunder Road.”

  As I walk out, I get a big hug from Tammy Haddad, a veteran cable producer who repurposed herself in recent years as a professional party host, event organizer, and full-service convener of the Washington A-list. Haddad, a towering in-your-face presence with black hair bisected by a white streak, is a human ladle in the local self-celebration buffet. She tells you how great you are, how you really need to meet the author, or cohost, or honoree, or whoever, and that by the way, she just talked to Justice Breyer! “Over the Rainbow” plays as Tammy and I and the rest of The Club schmooze our way up to the Kennedy Center roof for an actual cocktail party.

  And there, glowing over the Potomac and the monuments: a double rainbow, surely a message from heaven’s green room to the power mourners, now sipping Heinekens and white wine. Everyone says so. “Is anyone still an atheist now?” Luke asks, according to Tammy, who will write a blog post later about the “Russert Miracles.”

  Or: an opposing viewpoint on the rainbow from the since-departed atheist Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate: “No benign deity plucks television news show hosts from their desks in the prime of life and then hastily compensates their friends and family by displays of irradiated droplets in the sky.”

  God could not be reached for comment. But let us at least agree that He is quite obviously attuned to the doings of politics and media. That is why so many would-be leaders say they are being “called upon” to run for president, and why eulogists lean so heavily on the trope that God runs an HR department that recruits people like Sunday hosts and yachtsmen into heaven. When Andy Rooney died a few years later, the CBS anchor Scott Pelley compared Rooney to Cicero and Dickens and certified that “apparently, God needed a writer.” (Apparently CBS did not, because Rooney had been pushed out a month earlier.)

  And God just loves Washington; of that we are certain. His presence is indeed potent at the Kennedy Center, although everyone keeps looking around for someone more important to talk to.

  Tammy can’t stop talking about the Russert rainbow. It makes for an enthralling, powerful, and stagnant spectacle—that same wonderland feel that can make Washington’s monuments seem like a stage set. Is it real or papier-mâché? Or maybe God meant the rainbow to resemble an NBC peacock—a celestial branding play. Whatever, it all fits the “narrative” of a momentous time. It is no longer enough just to follow the unsexy business of governance in the seat of power. No more boring and stodgy in This Town. Vintage square rooms have given way to light-headed news cycles and public servants have graduated into killer personal franchises. The Washington story has become something more momentous, befitting a “narrative”: a pumped-up word in a pumped-up place where everything is changing, maybe more than in any city in the country, in line with the hopeful imperative of the next president.

  Or maybe nothing is changing at all, and the only certainty is that the city fathers of This Town will endure like perennials in a well-tended cemetery.

  2

  Suck-up City

  The founding fathers, whose infinite wisdom gave us a Constitution and form of government well nigh perfect, located the seat of that government in a stinking, steaming swamp.

  JACK LAIT AND LEE MORTIMER,

  Washington Confidential

  September 2008–January 2009

  It was a time of hope and rebirth, except that the economy was cratering. That was a problem, and for the media too. I ran into Andrea Mitchell at the October 2008 debate in St. Louis between opposing running mates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin. Andrea was in the midst of a rough moment because a lot of people were blaming her husband, Alan Greenspan, for the financial collapse. His free-market, Ayn Rand‒influenced policies while running the Federal Reserve were not looking good now. His image had been “tarnished,” said the Wall Street Journal. Not only that, but some of those uptight media-ethics types, at places like the Columbia Journalism Review, were “raising fundamental questions” about how Mitchell could possibly cover the major story of the day for NBC without running up against questions of Greenspan’s culpability and legacy.

  Mitchell says she has always been a stickler for avoiding conflicts of interest. But in Alan and Andrea’s rarefied and interconnected realm, that was like an owl trying to avoid trees. She was a model citizen of This Town. A Club officer. The administrations and campaigns that Mitchell covered overlapped considerably with her social and personal habitat. In her 2005 memoir, Andrea described her 1997 wedding to Alan, officiated by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Inn at Little Washington. “Our friend Oscar de la Renta designed my dress,” Andrea said. There was no honeymoon because she and Alan both had to work, and besides, they had a state dinner to attend two nights later, “our first as a married couple,” Andrea pointed out. “Although the dinner was in honor of the prime minister of Canada, it felt as though we were still celebrating our marriage.”

  Once, as part of the White House press pool, Mitchell encountered Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, Lloyd Bentsen, outside the Oval Office—and was embarrassed when Bentsen thanked her and Alan for hosting him and his wife for dinner the night before (“Oh, Andrea, I was gonna write you a note, we had such a good time last night,” Bentsen said). There were weekend getaways to the home of George Shultz, others with Gerald and Betty Ford, and another to visit Liz and Pat Moynihan. There was the memorable dinner in Virginia with Al and Tipper Gore, back when they were still married, and that great surprise fiftieth-birthday bash for Condi Rice at the home of the British ambassador.

  Mitchell’s main coverage area has been national security and foreign affairs. This generally kept her clear from the monetary and economic policies over which her husband held enormous sway for decades. But not always, and of course, the politics and politicians of Washington are never so neatly compartmentalized. Mitchell also hosted a midday show on MSNBC, which focused broadly on the politics and, obviously, the captivating campaign in progress. Citizens of This Town—including many inside NBC—had wondered for years how Mitchell could possibly navigate the big Washington gray areas between the demands of friendship and journalism, and what constituted a social and professional setting. “She knows where to draw the line,” NBC News head Steve Capus told the New York Times in response to “questions being raised.”

  Still, the financial crisis was a special case. It would be like Laura Bush covering the federal government’s reaction to Katrina, the Columbia Journalism Review wrote. “There is an excessively large elephant in the [NBC] control room,” the magazine added. “Its name is Alan Greenspan.”

  Speaking of elephants, the Andrea–Alan union called to mind a dictum coined by former New York Times editor A. M. Rosenthal: “I don’t care if you fuck an elephant,” he said, “just so long as you don’t cover the circus.”

  No one covered the circus like Andrea, a fierce, smart, and tenacious journalist and pioneer among women broadcasters in a male-dominated realm. She was also a real-deal reporter in a sector—TV news—that had been increasingly given over to bimbos and blowhards. Girls tell her
they want to grow up to be “news anchors,” not “journalists.” Andrea is a journalist, and no one works harder.

  But given the calamity at hand, and the campaign, special accommodations were in order. Mitchell would not be allowed to talk on-air about the causes of the crisis. Only the politics of it. “We see a distinction between pure analysis of the bailout—such as the conditions that led to the crisis, which we’ve decided to keep her away from—and coverage of the politics related to it,” NBC Washington bureau chief Mark Whitaker said at the time. Andrea was not pleased about the arrangement, she told colleagues, and did not think it was fair. She had always been confident about her ability to draw lines. When there were doubts, she could always hash it out with Tim Russert, and he had always protected her from such nonsense.

  Washingtonians love the “So-and-so is spinning in his grave” cliché. Someone is always speculating about how some great dead American would be scandalized over some crime against How It Used to Be. The Founding Fathers are always spinning in their graves over something, as is Ronald Reagan, or FDR. Edward R. Murrow is a perennial grave spinner in the news business (though in fact, Murrow was cremated).

  It would be a mark of his impact and legacy that Tim Russert was declared to be spinning in his grave from almost the moment of his interment. Such were the prevalent offenses being visited upon the changing world of the media and politics and in the pecking order he presided over.

  When David Gregory was named as Russert’s full-time replacement as the host of Meet the Press, many people at NBC guessed that Tim would have been displeased given the internal belief that Gregory was overly ambitious, excessively full of himself, and unworthy of “the chair.” While the TV news business is rife with jealousy and backbiting, Gregory was a target of particular distrust. After a Democratic debate in Ohio a few months earlier, a lot of national media types were boarding a D.C.-bound flight that included several NBC talking heads—Chris Matthews, Russert, and Mitchell. When someone noted that if the plane crashed, it would devastate the network’s talent pool, Matthews quipped that Gregory was at that moment sabotaging the engine. Gregory’s true ambition was to host the Today show, it was assumed inside the network—assumed widely enough for Matt Lauer, the current host, to joke to an NBC colleague, “If I end up floating dead in the Hudson River, there will be two suspects: my wife and David Gregory.”

  • • •

  Notwithstanding the economy being in the sewer and Tim being in the ground, Barack Obama provided a shot of adrenaline and ignited the hottest local media swoon since Camelot. His critique of Washington—the silliness and smallness of its politics—was powerful for both its eloquence and timeliness. It also incorporated the broader ethic of his campaign, a promise that the Chicago-based enterprise operated on a plane above the cynical sensibilities and petty vanities of the capital. Obama’s top lieutenants were extravagant in detailing their contempt for the city, even though many of them had lived in D.C. for decades and were living out of suitcases in Chicago. They boasted that their opponents in the race, first Hillary Clinton and then John McCain, were susceptible to making tactical decisions based on some encounter with a Washington insider they had seen at the market, at a dinner, or on cable. “In part because we were in Chicago and in part because of our approach, we did not do ‘cocktail party’ interviews,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the campaign’s communications director, who would hold the same job at the White House. “These are interviews that you agree to because you were always bumping into the reporter at cocktail parties, and they keep asking for the candidate’s time. We would laugh every time our opponents would do them.”

  Staff members were encouraged to ignore new websites like the Page, written by Time’s Mark Halperin, and Politico, both of which were widely read by the Washington insider set. “If Politico and Halperin say we’re winning, we’re losing,” Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, would repeat around headquarters. His least favorite words in the English language, he said, were “I saw someone on cable say this. . . .”

  Obama himself vowed that his administration would steer clear of other corroding Beltway forces, summarized as “the people who’ve been in Washington too long.” This worked, more or less, as a proxy for the kind of usual suspects who would support his opponents. It also carried the implication that Obama’s administration would not be susceptible to the capital’s Fat City seductions. They would resist the cults of celebrity and personality that affix themselves to the incoming kings of the pecking order. They would operate at a distance from the money culture that could entice them to “monetize their government service,” as the clinical term went. Ed Rogers, a former aide to Reagan and the first President Bush who went on to be a top lobbyist, said he tells many prospective hires to go “back to school and get a postgraduate degree.” By this he means they should spend a few years working on Capitol Hill or in an executive branch agency to bolster their résumés and earning potential. Left unsaid is that people in high-level positions, including elected officials, will be maintaining their K Street contacts throughout their time in “graduate school.”

  In a sense, the leaders of the Obama campaign—which included Gibbs, Pfeiffer, and Plouffe—railed against the useful rhetorical meme of Washington rather than the pleasant home and workplace of it. Their campaign was a force for “a politics of unity, hope, and common purpose,” said Plouffe, who in particular reserved special disdain for Beltway doomsayers as “bed-wetters,” press hordes as “jackals,” and the political noise machine as “the cluster-fuck.” You could detect in all of the Obamaphiles a smirking grievance of underdogs who had been doubted and who had proved the haters wrong.

  But there was a deeper resonance to the critique: a notion that the D.C. models they were running against were governed chiefly by the capital commandments of self-interest, self-importance, self-enrichment, and self-perpetuation. It was, implicitly, a character attack on the kinds of people who engage in the behavior necessary to get ahead in This Town. Obama himself said that politicians came in two types: those who are in the game to make money, and those who are the true public servants. People who worked on the Obama transition staff received a “no ego, no glory” document reminding them that they were volunteers working for the good of the country and should not expect anything (i.e., a job) in return.

  “We believe this isn’t about us,” Gibbs said a few weeks before Obama’s inauguration. “It’s about something bigger.”

  From the moment Obama secured the Democratic nomination, he and his staff were subjected to a frantic frenzy of flattery. Serial sucking up is common to any hot political enterprise, but it reached comic levels of desperation in this case. Bill Richardson, who was then the governor of New Mexico and had run unsuccessfully for president earlier in 2008, pulled aside Joe Biden before a campaign event in Mesilla, New Mexico, in October. “Joe, you got to make me secretary of state,” Richardson pleaded in an exchange that surprised nearby campaign staffers for how naked—and public—it was.

  Obama himself possessed a post-ironic detachment from politics that was true to his personality. Whenever he lapsed into shtick, a behavioral category that incorporated much of what politicians do in public, it was with an implicit nod to the game transpiring. He was playacting, in other words, and he wanted you to know that he knew it.

  In early 2005, shortly after his election to the U.S. Senate, I interviewed Obama in his temporary office in the basement of a Senate office building. He and Gibbs were sprawled in identical postures like frat brothers watching football. They were pushing the message that Obama was no prima donna. Obama, they kept reminding me, had already sat through countless town meetings in Illinois and committee hearings on Capitol Hill. What a trouper he was! The article I wrote poked gentle fun at Obama for his and Gibbs’s zealous efforts to show how unzealous Obama was about climbing the ladder. “Jeez, was it really that obvious?” Obama said to me when I ran into him and Gibbs on Capito
l Hill a few weeks later. “Nice going there, Gibbs,” Obama said, pretending to smirk.

  As I just demonstrated, a favorite flaunt among political insider types is to advertise how far they go back with Obama—maybe to Springfield, Illinois, or (if you’re supercool) some Indonesian sandbox. It’s a form of currency, or status marker, in the same way that people in Silicon Valley love to talk about how they used to hang out with Sergey Brin back in his Stanford days, before he cofounded Google.

  Here is my less-than-awesome offering about when I first met my old pal Barry:

  It was when he was a U.S. Senate candidate at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston, on the eve of the keynote address that would propel his stardom. Obama’s flight had arrived from Springfield at four a.m. and he was awake at six to do Meet the Press, then Face the Nation, then CNN’s Late Edition. And now he was being forced to endure a reception hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus on a cruise ship docked in Boston Harbor. People kept coming up to the young state senator, saying how excited they were to hear his speech, how they had donated to his campaign, and whatnot; and Obama, as a mantra, kept telling everyone that he just needed a nap. It was the opposite of those politicians—Bill Clinton—who drew energy from crowds.

  Like any deft officeholder/seeker, Obama can nod his head and knit his eyebrows and look interested in almost anything. He can glide from conversation to conversation, room to room, but he will sometimes sigh too audibly and tighten his face in a manner that betrays the look of a man too eagerly en route to forty winks. “I can stagger through receptions with the best of them,” he boasted to me before mentioning again that he needed a nap.