“tends to provoke confrontation and all the things you have in an impersonal institution.” He was reminded of frictions he had seen elsewhere. “I practiced law in Tucson, and I knew every lawyer in town, knew their families. You knew whose word was good. You knew a few guys you couldn’t trust. And the courtroom demeanor was always very friendly. I went to Chicago once to extradite somebody when I was the prosecuting attorney, and the opposing lawyers were treated like thieves and crooks. Unpleasant. And you find that tendency here. You find that people are suspicious of each other.”
In another arena, Scotty Reston recalled for me the wartime days when he used to visit every morning with Secretary of State Cordell Hull in the old State Department building next to the White House. Sometimes, he said, Byrnes, an old Tennessee politician, would throw a few overnight cables from American ambassadors across his desk and ask Reston, “What d’you think?” The relationship between press and government was relaxed enough in those days that Reston understood it was all off-the-record, not for direct use, and he would hand back the cables after reading them, without stealing secrets.
Henry Brandon, for decades the London
Times
’s correspondent in Washington, recalled traveling with a small White House press corps to Key West, where President Truman relaxed. Truman, who normally wore a corset to tuck in his tummy, would hold bare-chested press conferences in swimming trunks. Even though this exposed a pear-shaped profile, Truman did not flinch at informal snapshot taking. On such trips, the U.S. Navy not only provided billets for reporters but arranged deep-sea fishing excursions for their amusement. Brandon, thinking of the angry confrontation between press and government since Vietnam and Watergate and everyone’s sensitivity to buying influence with favors, chuckled quietly, and asked, “Can you imagine either side putting up with that kind of arrangement these days?” 10
In the early 1960s, when I first came to Washington, it had the easy feel of a southern city. There was still a clubbiness, a close-webbed intimacy within the power establishment. “Washington used to be cozy,” observed Barbara Gamarekian, who worked in the Kennedy White House and later became a
New York Times
reporter. “You could go to a party, a reception of a hundred people, and look around and say, ‘Well, everybody’s here—everybody who counts.’ You can’t dothat anymore. The city has grown big and amorphous. There are so many social circles: the administration people, the corporate crowd, members of Congress, patrons of the arts, the old Kennedy-Johnson crowd, the Reagan Republicans, the Nixon-Ford Republicans. These circles bump up against each other now but it’s not one cozy network anymore.” 11
Then more than now, I believe, small power circles dined intimately and debated policy over candlelight and sterling silver or over brandy in the sitting rooms of tastefully rich homes in Georgetown. From those dinners, secretaries of Defense and State or their assistant secretaries would be discreetly summoned, and quietly depart to deal with some distant crisis. In Dean Acheson’s vivid phrase, the other diners felt they were “present at the creation” of policy. In that vein, Stewart Alsop titled his vintage account of the power elite in the Johnson presidency simply
The Center
. That book’s inside-the-cabinet profiles and its judgment that Congress mattered “less and less” were a revealing record of the time. But from the vantage point of the late 1980s, Alsop’s focus on the power apex and his virtual silence about television, political money, the fluidity of modern power, the lobbying and brawling now common to Congress, seems rather quaint.
“The jet airplane wrecked everything,” Mo Udall groused. “It used to be when a constituent came in, it was a big deal. You stopped whatever you were doing and hailed
In another arena, Scotty Reston recalled for me the wartime days when he used to visit every morning with Secretary of State Cordell Hull in the old State Department building next to the White House. Sometimes, he said, Byrnes, an old Tennessee politician, would throw a few overnight cables from American ambassadors across his desk and ask Reston, “What d’you think?” The relationship between press and government was relaxed enough in those days that Reston understood it was all off-the-record, not for direct use, and he would hand back the cables after reading them, without stealing secrets.
Henry Brandon, for decades the London
Times
’s correspondent in Washington, recalled traveling with a small White House press corps to Key West, where President Truman relaxed. Truman, who normally wore a corset to tuck in his tummy, would hold bare-chested press conferences in swimming trunks. Even though this exposed a pear-shaped profile, Truman did not flinch at informal snapshot taking. On such trips, the U.S. Navy not only provided billets for reporters but arranged deep-sea fishing excursions for their amusement. Brandon, thinking of the angry confrontation between press and government since Vietnam and Watergate and everyone’s sensitivity to buying influence with favors, chuckled quietly, and asked, “Can you imagine either side putting up with that kind of arrangement these days?” 10
In the early 1960s, when I first came to Washington, it had the easy feel of a southern city. There was still a clubbiness, a close-webbed intimacy within the power establishment. “Washington used to be cozy,” observed Barbara Gamarekian, who worked in the Kennedy White House and later became a
New York Times
reporter. “You could go to a party, a reception of a hundred people, and look around and say, ‘Well, everybody’s here—everybody who counts.’ You can’t dothat anymore. The city has grown big and amorphous. There are so many social circles: the administration people, the corporate crowd, members of Congress, patrons of the arts, the old Kennedy-Johnson crowd, the Reagan Republicans, the Nixon-Ford Republicans. These circles bump up against each other now but it’s not one cozy network anymore.” 11
Then more than now, I believe, small power circles dined intimately and debated policy over candlelight and sterling silver or over brandy in the sitting rooms of tastefully rich homes in Georgetown. From those dinners, secretaries of Defense and State or their assistant secretaries would be discreetly summoned, and quietly depart to deal with some distant crisis. In Dean Acheson’s vivid phrase, the other diners felt they were “present at the creation” of policy. In that vein, Stewart Alsop titled his vintage account of the power elite in the Johnson presidency simply
The Center
. That book’s inside-the-cabinet profiles and its judgment that Congress mattered “less and less” were a revealing record of the time. But from the vantage point of the late 1980s, Alsop’s focus on the power apex and his virtual silence about television, political money, the fluidity of modern power, the lobbying and brawling now common to Congress, seems rather quaint.
“The jet airplane wrecked everything,” Mo Udall groused. “It used to be when a constituent came in, it was a big deal. You stopped whatever you were doing and hailed
Similar Books
