Profiles in Solipsism. - Review - book review

National Review, August 6, 2001 by Jacob Heilbrunn

Washington, by Meg Greenfield (Public Affairs, 272 pp., $26)

The Columnist, by Jeffrey Frank (Simon & Schuster, 240 pp., $22)

Washington, d.c., may not be a bookish city, but it has inspired an unusual number of books. This literary output comes in several genres. One is the memoir of the journalist who recounts the capital city's golden age, which happens to coincide with his own years there. The tone is one of high seriousness about the nation's affairs, coupled with lamentation about the decline of manners, mores, and statesmanship. It could be David Brinkley describing the rise of Washington after the Second World War in Washington Goes to War, or Joseph Alsop, in I've Seen the Best of It, complaining that the world he knew had "gone by the boards." Such books often provide a window into the psyche of the Washington writer, a conflicted creature who is attracted to power but seeks to maintain the appearance of moral and intellectual distance from it.

A rather more colorful genre is that of the Washington novel, which began in 1880 with Henry Adams's Democracy, a send-up of the Grant administration. The main character is a rich widow named Madeleine Lee. Despairing of New York and Boston, made up respectively of hatchet- faced stockbrokers and dilettantish academics, Lee moves to Washington, hoping to find there pillars of intellect and courage. She quickly discovers that the capital is a beehive of gossip and intrigue, while the president himself is the pawn of a powerful senator. Since Adams's day, writers from Allen Drury to Gore Vidal, Ward Just, and Michael Lind have depicted the corruption and hypocrisy of Washington. For Washington's worthies, these novels afford the pleasure of having their importance affirmed and create a pleasant parlor game of guessing who is who. For the rest of us, they offer a more accurate portrait of the city than is usually to be found in memoirs.

Meg Greenfield and Jeffrey Frank are the latest entrants in this crowded field. Greenfield's memoir recounts her tenure as editor of the Washington Post's editorial page. A Pulitzer Prize winner, Greenfield, who died in 1999, relished her reputation as a tough cookie who had made it to the top in a man's world. Frank, who has worked at both the Post and the Washington Star and is now a senior editor at The New Yorker, has written a comic novel drawing extensively on his experiences in Washington.

For anyone seeking to understand the values of our nation's capital, Greenfield's book is required reading. Greenfield chronicles her unlikely rise from studious child in Seattle, where her parents, by her account, inculcated her with austere values, to Washington powerbroker. Some of her most interesting passages are about her first job at an influential Cold War fortnightly called The Reporter, published by a brilliantly eccentric Italian emigre named Max Ascoli, who terminated the magazine out of disgust at Lyndon Johnson's hesitation over Vietnam. But the bulk of Greenfield's book is about the culture of Washington, by which she means its habits of deceit, pomposity, and knavery. Seldom has a more acidulous portrait of the city been drawn by one of its preeminent members.

According to Greenfield, Washington resembles a high school where the students never grow up. Its inhabitants display all the worst traits of teenagers-self-absorption and pettiness, together with a pecking order that rests on political power. "This population of long-term squatters is attuned to its own purposes, answers to its own code, administers its own rewards and punishments, and has its own distinctive conception of what constitutes winning and losing." The fundamental problem with Washington, we are told, is that it produces phonies: Journalists and politicians "eagerly dehumanize themselves," constructing a public self that does violence to the "genuine person" beneath.

Unfortunately, Greenfield names no names and provides no specific examples. Whom does she have in mind? Who were Washington's biggest phonies? We are never told. Nor does she consider that the behavior she condemns may simply be careerism, which is scarcely unique to Washington. The backstabbing and preening she criticizes can be found in any sphere, whether the corporate world, Hollywood, or academia. There is something a little parochial about Greenfield's complaints; an uncharitable critic might even say that they're rather Inside the Beltway.

While her apparent assumption is that she herself has somehow managed to remain detached from the Washington scene, her book offers an unwitting portrait of the true Washingtonian, who repudiates the city's shallowness and hypocrisy while ascending the escalator of success. Disappointment with the city is itself a form of egotism: a dexterous attempt to separate oneself from the indecorous town that has made one's career. Given that Greenfield's posthumous memoir features a foreword by Katharine Graham and an afterword by historian and television personality Michael Beschloss, doubts can hardly be suppressed about her virginal status.