Time was, Washington D.C. was a grand and plummy place, in which prominent editors and columnists held court in the peach-colored parlors or forest-green dining rooms of their Georgetown manors, which often as not sat cheek by jowl with other manors occupied by Cabinet officers or senior senators.
It was a lovely and cozy arrangement for those anointed, and one could, over the course of a festive week, effortlessly move from, say, Joseph Alsop’s salon to Katherine Graham’s mansion to Pamela Harriman’s townhouse, nibbling on hors d’oeuvres, rubbing elbows with newsmakers of the moment, and topping off one evening after another with a good cigar and a fine bourbon — though not so much bourbon, one hoped, that one forgot the mental notes one had taken all evening, grist perhaps for an eventual column saluting the wisdom of one’s host.
Then, one day, a funny thing happened. The Republicans came to town, and settled in (the Clinton aberration aside) for more or less 24-years-and-counting of rule. And, dammit, said Republicans by and large didn’t cozy up to or bend elbows with the chattering classes of old, so a tradition slowly died — and before you knew it, pundits and pontificators had no one to entertain but each other.
We mention this only because last week a throwback to that earlier time took place, the annual holiday party of Ben Bradlee, the former editor of the Washington Post, and his wife, Sally Quinn — and this week a few journalists in attendance were awash in nostalgia for a better and more gentle time, when all seemed right with the world, and what they thought and what they wrote actually seemed, for a brief and shining moment, to … matter!
First came Newsweek‘s Evan Thomas, who on Monday gave us his own hushed and wistful account of the soiree, describing Bradlee’s house as “a kind of headquarters of the Washington permanent-media establishment” where “[t]he reputations of once powerful government servants” are buried, “between the dessert course and the toasts.” Bob Woodward was there and Tim Russert and Al Hunt and Maureen Dowd and Richard Cohen. And Donald Rumsfeld, whose head has been called for by all variety of columnists, pundits and even Republican senators, and George Tenet, whose brand new Medal of Freedom from President Bush had inspired a column by Cohen that morning deriding Tenet as “incompetent” and a “failure.” Indeed, Thomas recounted a moment in which Tenet “collided with Cohen over hors d’oeuvres,” asked, “Hey, what did I ever do to you?” and then mockingly asked Cohen if he wanted to step outside.
Today in the Post, Cohen himself, clearly still suffused with nostalgia for that clubby evening, picks up the story to tell us “what happened next: Tenet and I talked about our mothers.” Yes, Cohen announces, he and Tenet have mothers — wise ethnic mothers, one Greek and 86 years old, another Jewish and 92 years old, and they compared notes on these fine women on that fine evening, proof positive that two hail-fellows-well met, with enough lubrication, can trump even partisan invective.
Cohen uses this anecdote to launch into a jeremiad against, well, 2004 — where public figures like Tenet are reduced to “cardboard cutouts” without wise old ethnic mothers; where hate-filled e-mails clog the inboxes of beleaguered columnists like Cohen; where talk radio dehumanizes us all; and where “[e]ven the after-hours camaraderie of Washington is gone,” replaced by “Republicans who hang with Republicans, Democrats with Democrats — and they all get out of town as fast as possible.”
“A little bourbon,” Cohen dolefully concludes, “would do wonders for our dysfunctional government.”
Perchance a little bourbon would do wonders for our dysfunctional Washington press corps as well — afflicted as its leading lights seem to be by wistful memories of a smug, fraternal “we’re-all-in-this-together” Washington where you rubbed my back, I rubbed yours, and everyone was well-served.
With, of course, the possible exception of the reading and viewing public, noses pressed against the other side of that frost-covered window pane.
–Steve Lovelady
Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.