I was considering Prozac after participating in an hourlong cable-television show, mostly about a supposedly semen-stained dress, which included viewer responses to this query: “Is Linda Tripp Like You?”
Like much of Washington these days, it seemed like fiction but wasn’t.
Unsure what any of it meant, if anything, I turned to this option: real fiction.
In “Echo House,” the 12th and most recent novel by Ward Just, there’s reference to the Venerables, a group of older and loyal public servants who entered and exited government poor and “were not shy about reminding everyone what Washington had been and what it had become, a self-infatuated, money-grubbing iron triangle of stupefying vulgarity, vainglory, egoism and greed, worse than Rome because at least in Rome there was lively sexual license, orgies and the like.”
“The present-day crowd along with their unspeakable arrogance were intolerant,” it continues. “They were sanctimonious. They were puritans. They were budget-cutters, cheap Charlies.”
Just, 62, comes from a great Waukegan newspaper family and was a young Washington reporter for Newsweek in the early 1960s, then a celebrated Vietnam correspondent for The Washington Post, before trading in journalism for much-acclaimed novels.
He has been tagged as an adroit practitioner of the “Washington novel,” but his topics have been far more varied.
So, Mr. Novelist, tell us from your Vineyard Haven, Mass., home, what’s going on here?
He laughed heartily, then commenced.
“In Washington back in the ’60s, there was a government, and it was important. It governed. Bills were passed. You listened to Sen. (Everett) Dirksen on the floor. You may not have had the foggiest idea what he was saying due to some of the lingo, but at the end of the day, and a long debate, something happened. And it was reported on the evening news.”
But Washington as a “city of government has been swept off the board,” he believes, and has become a city of press, personality and gossip.
Part of it has to do with money. Once, it was not the common coin of so many lives. People were intensely ambitious, yes, but there was also a lust to figure out what was going on behind the scenes,” not necessarily to figure out how to get in front of a camera.
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The author sent one ego to new heights by mentioning this column’s occasional “Cokie Watch” feature, about the large sums reporters can earn for side endeavors. “$35,000 for a speech is preposterous, and it moves everybody’s perceptions around. You are in a different place when that becomes an all-consuming thing.”
The business of Washington, he said, is now politics and campaigning. Bill Clinton seems to care more about those than governing. For all Richard Nixon’s faults, he hated campaigning “and cared much more about the government.” He would be out of place these days.
“If you have a city where government is no longer at the center of things, it follows that it becomes no longer a city of ideas but of personality. The air is now so thick, so swampy, that no real idea can breathe. When was the last time you heard an interesting idea about government? Maybe from a few people, like Sen. (Daniel Patrick) Moynihan (D-N.Y.), but not many others.”
And the government is here, not in Philadelphia or Chicago, where other things happen.
Because politics is the town’s only business, “it follows that in a period where people are more personally ambitious than in the past, you get this tremendous rush to cover this one story since there is not anything else.”
The ruling class operates differently. Once, the elite from each party would convene at salons run by the likes of Washington Post grand dame Katharine Graham. There would be lots of booze and attempts to hammer out disputes.
But now that “it’s every man for himself in a permanent campaign,” symbolized by the ultimate practitioner of the endless campaign (Clinton), such confabs seem quaint.
Meanwhile, if tragedy always repeats itself as farce, we may be consumed by one now. The Lewinsky matter “is farce, soap opera, but not soap opera of the 1940s. It’s soap opera of the 1990s, with their salacious, coarsening quality.”
“What one fears is that it plays into the hands of the religious right,” Just said. “In the future, every candidate will certify himself as morally chaste, which is the last thing we need.”
“You want people who have been in the world. And if you have been in the world, you will have been jammed up,” meaning that there will have been complications in your life. “What we don’t need is even more sanctimoniousness.”
Agreed.
And as far as his final take on the town’s current fixation, “Nobody will come out better than when they came in: the press, the presidency, (Kenneth) Starr, Congress, nobody.”
Just the facts–true or not
Victoria Toensing and husband Joseph DiGenova are Washington’s most aggressively high-profile legal team due to a penchant for television and having chums in the media establishment.
She stumbled a tad last week as the duo assists a Republican assault on the Teamsters. .
Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of a committee looking into the union, hired the two for $150,000 to help part time for six months.
During a Thursday hearing, Toensing asked a government-chosen review board, which oversees the union, if it knew that the union’s “just resigned” spokesman beckoned two Teamsters to deliver “an industrial-size shredder” into his office recently.
For starters, the spokesman later noted, he’s still the spokesman.
Secondly, no such shredder has been purchased. Hoekstra said he would get “to the bottom” of the matter.
Meanwhile, those looking for really dandy part-time gigs might note this fact, hereby published for apparently the first time. The review board has cost the union $13.6 million since October 1992.
Thus, board member William Webster, the former CIA and FBI chief, has taken home in excess of $750,000 for part-time labor.
Members Frederick Lacey, a former judge, and Charles Carberry, a former prosecutor, have earned far more.
They’ve been there since 1989 when the government took over to cleanse the institution.
Lacey, who’s part of a judicial old geezers network (chum of the judge overseeing the board), and Carberry have both billed out at roughly $350 an hour. Lacey and aides at his law firm alone took in $3.4 million between 1989 and October 1992.
Clearly, alleged corruption pays.
More than just the fax
This week’s award for shameless self-promotion goes again to a self-styled Democratic political consultant named Jennifer Laszlo. There are consultants who help shape strategies and declarations of clients. Not her.
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” `LINDA TRIPP DOES NOT DESERVE PITY–THE ONLY WOUND SHE SUFFERS IS SELF-INFLICTED,’ says Democratic strategist Jennifer Laszlo.”
That was the headline of a press release from Laszlo & Associates, which went on to say, “Linda Tripp’s pathetic attempt to cast herself as a victim–and her false allegations saying that she saw illegal activities is disgusting.”
Forget the bumbling punctuation. Laszlo’s prime client appears to be herself.
Washington being Washington, it may work.
Several hours after the above missive surfaced in fax machines, Laszlo could be spied on a CNN show blabbing about, among other matters, Linda Tripp.