"She said it was not the kind of place that people would come here
whose childhoods were the kind where you put the cat in the dryer."
— Michael Beschloss, referring to Meg Greenfield's description of
Washington (from NewsHour with Jim Lehrer)
I hesitated before emailing John Nettles to request a copy of
Washington for review. This, after all, would be Meg Greenfield. I've spent my
life reading her extraordinary coverage of all things Washington. While
I was in college in 1974, my father would mail me Xeroxed copies of her
Newsweek column. I vividly recall when she won the Pulitzer Prize for
editorial writing in 1978. During the next twenty years she would
oversee the editorial and opinion pages of the Washington Post and create
a legacy of journalistic integrity and excellence. To review her work
might prove intimidating. But this was not the case as I slammed through
the book with such pleasure, I knew I could write about it,
recommending it to anyone.
Katherine Graham's powerful foreword sets up Greenfield's character. In
describing her friend and co-worker, she writes,
Meg may have been small in stature, but she was a giant in impact and
intellect. In fact, anyone who knew Meg or read her work was impressed
by the strength of her mind. Although honorary degrees formally
recognized the sharpness of her unique mind, Post executive editor Ben
Bradlee cut to the quick when he exclaimed over "her goddam brain power."
She was gifted, logical, reflective, fresh and independent I her
thinking. Sometimes you could almost see her thinking things through from
the ground up.
Graham then comments on the "rock solid moral and ethical standards"
she had and her "innate sense of what was right and what was wrong, and
she took her bearings on what was right."
Greenfield's Washington, published posthumously and edited by her
friend and colleague Michael Beschloss, does not disappoint. The book's
central theme, "how to live at the center of political and journalistic
influence in Washington without losing your principles, detachment, or
individual human qualities," is presented in exactly the style in which
one would expect from Greenfield. Pithy, concise, acerbic, and witty, a
book filled with insightful observations of the effects of creating a
life/career inside the Beltway.
Taking a rather tongue-in-cheek anthropological approach to Washington
subculture, she identifies the principal species. Labeling them as "the
good child, the head kid, the prodigy, the protégé, the maverick, and
the image maker." Her writing being already a standard in his political
dictionary, these terms will surely become part of William Safire's
lexicon of all things political.
Greenfield dismisses the unflattering analogies that liken Washington
to an "elitist men's club; a recklessly run business; and a den of every
know public and private vice, including lechery, larceny, pride, sloth,
dissembling, and, above all, the lust for acquiring power and wielding
it cruelly and carelessly" and chooses instead to compare Washington to
high school. Nobody, Greenfield claims, ever gets over high school, a
"preeminently nervous place." The basic social codes, those which define
the imperatives for acceptance and popularity, consists of strict
confines created to assure one's capacity to please and to "be associated
with the right people" as well as to "impress and be admired by the vast,
undifferentiated rest."
Greenfield justifies her comparison:
Now consider this settlement's profoundly high school nature. It is
psychologically fenced off from the larger community within which it
makes its home, free--like irresponsible youth--of all but the minimal
obligations of citizenship to that community, and absorbed to the
exclusion of all else in its own eccentric aims and competitions. And the
high-school-like feel political/governmental Washington takes on by virtue
of all of this is intensified by certain givens of its existence...
One is the only-passing-through nature of so much time spent here...
She goes on, describing the terms "underscoring the fixed period of
time for which people in both the legislative and executive branches have
been sent to do their jobs," comparing the vacation schedules of
Washington to a high-school academic year, and finishes her justification
with the ultimate comparison -- freshmen and senior status.
Washington dissects the media, the politician, "the policy dingdongs
on the seventh floor" and the social elite. No weasel words here.
Greenfield never dulls her scalpel while dissecting the town and its
inhabitants. In the aftermath of Lewinsky and this week's daily Levy updates,
I am particularly fond of her description of journalistic life in
Washington. Referring to the "high-pitched whistles that no one can hear but
other Washington dogs" she explains the "fairly flexible, vague rules
and professional understandings" of reporting:
If the politicians and officials of Washington have an infinite number
of chances to cheat every day (and an equal number of chances to
decide not to), they have nothing on us in the press, who are their
neighbors, just one precarious house down the slope. This inescapable
circumstance of journalistic life in Washington was what I began to be
educated into, in a no-frills crash course, more or less the day I arrived...
Consider the accepted practices: We don't say everything we know, even
when it is highly relevant and also pretty hot. We decide which part
to make public. We -- yes -- knowingly suppress information on a regular
basis and essentially lie or at least paint a picture that we know in
some important respects is misleading in its incompleteness.
Greenfield's Washington also gives us what she considers rare
individuals, those people who, despite all odds, maintain their integrity and
manage to "do some good." She contends that Washington creates in its
characters a fabricated identity which masks and transposes the true
person. The end result is a "walking, talking, person-shaped but otherwise
not very human amalgam of `positions'... These are people who don't
seem to live in the world so much as to inhabit some point on graph paper,
whose coordinates are (sideways) the political spectrum, and (up and
down) the latest overnight poll figures."
Beschloss, in his Afterword, speculates about Greenfield's motives for
keeping this manuscript a secret. He believes she may not have felt
entirely sure of herself and wanted "to keep the option of aborting the
project, if necessary." He knew her personally -- I didn't. But I know
that, had she been alive upon publication, this book would have created a
terrific public reception and caused quite a stir -- one that would
have impacted her daily life. And, from what I learned of her character by
her revelations in this book, I suspect she wouldn't have liked the
spotlight.
