May/June 2001

WASHINGTON

by Meg Greenfield
Public Affairs. 241 pages. $26.00

Meg Greenfield, the late, great Newsweek columnist and editorial-page editor of The Washington Post, started writing Washington in the early 1990s, unbeknown to even her closest friends. Among the very few she told of the project was Michael Beschloss, the historian. And in 1998, battling lung cancer, she asked Beschloss to be her literary executor -- to ensure, as he writes in an Afterword, "that the book would be published if she could not see it through to the end."

She could not. When she died, in the spring of 1999, the book was unfinished. But Beschloss pored over the multiple drafts of each section Greenfield had stored on computer disks labeled with "Greek-sounding code names" and hidden in various nooks and crannies of her home office, and, in consultation with a handful of other Greenfield intimates, saw the manuscript through to publication this year.

Why was Greenfield so secretive about the work? Beschloss speculates that she might have felt somewhat shy about her first book-writing venture, and that she may have wanted to be able simply to drop it if necessary, no questions asked. But he thinks there was a more important reason, as well: "From the moment she came to Washington to live, in 1961, she was determined to preserve an inner chamber of her life that could not be touched or altered by the carnival going on around her."

Precisely that, Beschloss writes -- the difficulty of living "at the center of political and journalistic influence . . . without losing your principles, detachment, or individual human qualities" -- is her book's central theme. And it probably helps explain a kind of low-grade grumbling about Greenfield's book that has been audible in the capital's journalistic circles since it appeared. Characteristically, with unsparing directness and incisive wit, Greenfield has cut close to the bone, exposing Washington's habitually dishonest, often silly, sometimes squalid -- and occasionally brave and good -- mores for all to see.

Washington is not about journalism per se. Instead, it is a kind of anthropological memoir, a study, through the lens of Greenfield's nearly four-decades-long career, of the folks and folkways that mark the center of government and make the environs inside the Beltway seem so very foreign to the rest of the nation. But since reporters, pundits, and editors are central factors in the equation -- and utterly critical to the image-mongering that, as Greenfield sees it, is Washington's great failing -- her observations and the lessons she draws from them may be most pertinent to her erstwhile colleagues. Following is a small example of those large observations.

-- Merrill McLoughlin

Merrill McLoughlin, a former co-editor of U.S. News & World Report, is a free-lance journalist in Milwaukee.

We in the news business developed our techniques and ethical standards largely as a reaction to discredited professional habits of the not-so-distant past. Partisan reporting on public figures was among them. But too many of us have moved on from establishing professional detachment to something different: a willful disconnectedness from the human reality that lies at the heart of the issues and stories we are covering.

Too often we don't report what we really see or share what we really know. We have taken instead to reading public figures as a hot-dog 1950s English major might read a great novel. Practically no elucidating or extenuating context is allowed. Public figures are described solely in terms of how well they live up to the impossible, ridiculous, and hypocritical postures they strike from the podium. "I am and will continue to be perfect," the public person says in the classic, age-old junkspeak that office-seekers everywhere have always indulged. "In a twelve-part series starting today," our newspapers will sooner or later gravely announce, "the Daily Blast evaluates the record of Congressman Jones and analyzes how well he has lived up to his campaign pledge to be perfect."

Guess who flunks? The congressman, of course, but also we in the media who forfeit just a little more of our credibility every time we become a willing and not quite straightforward partner in this silly game. "Of course he's not perfect," an increasingly exasperated readership says. "Who ever thought he was or could be? Why are you taking this guff seriously in the first place? Just so you can hang him with it? Why don't you tell us what is really going on? Why don't you judge him against a realistic standard? Who is he anyway? Why is he doing the things he does? It can't be out of an unrelieved desire to do wrong. Might he see it, not cynically but honestly, differently from what you have so sharply implied? And forgive the very thought of it, but might he, at least in part of the presentation, have a point?" As an account of reality, our product too often rings false or empty or seems rigged . . . .

The hardest part of a Washington journalist's job is to discover and comprehend what those real men and women are doing and why -- not pretend "why" or posturing "why," but why. Oddly enough, that is still considered a heretical idea in some places.

And here is another even less reputable idea to which I also subscribe: You can't understand the "why" without considering the thought that maybe these big-deal Washington personages you hound and nitpick and trap and query -- and describe and describe and describe -- are fallible, two-legged, air-breathing, potato-chip-eating human beings. It doesn't mean you have to like them (though sometimes you may).

We recognize the conflicts and susceptibilities in others largely by imagining them in ourselves. Journalists who persist in regarding themselves as thoroughly clean and the world around them as thoroughly dirty are guilty of more than misplaced moral vanity.