Power Game (18 page)

More to the point, Washington is surprisingly open to newcomers, even to those it initially intimidates. Practically everyone in political Washington has come from somewhere else. Each new political tide brings in waves of newcomers. In presidential election years, especially when the White House changes hands, the influx is wholesale. The new crowd from Georgia or California take over literally thousands of the choicest jobs in town. Even in midterm elections, one or two dozen new congressmen and senators arrive with fresh messages from the country for the old hands. The Washington political community is “almost absurdly permeable” to outside influence, suggested Nelson Polsby, a keen academic observer of American politics.

“What other community in America,” Polsby asked, “regularly accords automatic, immediate, unshakable top status to someone from out of town, even if that someone’s public conversation consists mainly of unpleasant statements about the community and attacks on its oldest inhabitants?”
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Indeed, Washington regularly takes in newcomers, absorbs them and makes them its own. Those who arrive to serve in Congress learn to live in two worlds—in their hometowns and states, and in the special world of the capital. The longer they stay in Washington, the more they become Washingtonians, buying homes, raising children, worrying about parking places and street crime, some even rooting for the Washington Redskins football team against their home-state teams.

Newcomers arrive full of idealism and energy only to discover what a tiny fragment of power they grasp. To expand that fragment, they
make alliances, join groups, get appointed to committees, make contacts with the press, find friends in the administration. Before they know it, they become caught up in Washington’s internal politics, involved in the rivalries of Congress and administration, consumed by their committee work, their personal specialties, their Washington careers—the clout they develop in Washington and the amount of attention they can command in the Washington power game.

In short, people who come here to serve in the executive branch or Congress catch “Potomac fever”—the incurable addiction of wielding political power or feeling at the political center. When their president leaves office or they lose their congressional seats, very few politicians go home to retire or make money. Most stay in Washington and become lawyers, lobbyists, or consultants, because they’ve grown accustomed to Washington’s ways and to thinking of themselves as movers and shakers, and no other place has quite the same excitement and allure.

Power, of course, is the aphrodisiac—the special brand of federal power that is Washington’s monopoly. New York and Los Angeles have enormous financial muscle. Houston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Detroit have industrial and commercial might. Silicon Valley outside San Francisco is at the leading edge of high-tech science and electronics. Hollywood and Broadway create stardom. But Washington is where the nation’s destiny is set. The incomparable titillation for politicians and government officials is doing the public’s business and feeling that the nation is paying close attention.

Political Washington is a special community with a culture all its own, its own established rituals and folkways, its tokens of status and influence, its rules and conventions, its tribal rivalries and personal animosities. Its stage is large, but its habits are small-town. Members of Congress have Pickwickian enthusiasm for clubs, groups, and personal and regional networks to insure their survival and to advance their causes. They love the clubbiness of the member’s dining rooms and such Capitol Hill watering holes as the Monocle or the Democratic Club. And downtown, politicians, lobbyists and journalists like to rub shoulders and swap stories at Duke Zeibert’s, Mel Krupin’s, or Joe and Mo’s, where the movers and shakers have regular tables.

Political parties have a social impact; most politicians fraternize mainly with colleagues from within their own party. But when I first came to the city, I did not realize how personal relationships often cut across party and ideological lines, so that conservative lions and liberal leopards who roar at each other in congressional debates play tennis on the weekends or joke together in the Capitol cloakrooms. And yet, for
all their backslapping gregariousness, politicians strike me as a lonely crowd, making very few deep friendships because almost every relationship is tainted by the calculus of power: How will this help me?

Above all, Washington is a state of mind. I’m not talking about the 3.5 million people who live in the Washington metropolitan area: the hospital administrators, shopkeepers, schoolteachers, and the people who inhabit the middle-class city of Washington and its Virginia and Maryland suburbs; rather, I’m referring to the hundred thousand or so whose life revolves around government, especially the few thousand at the peak who live and breathe politics. To the people of that world, this is the hub, the center, the focus of what Henry Adams once called “the action of primary forces.”
²
The conceit of this Washington is not all that different from the conceit of Paris or Moscow.

Example: The city and its suburbs are encircled by a sixty-four-mile freeway loop known as the beltway (U.S. 495). The political community of Washington talks as if that beltway formed a moat separating the capital from the country. “Inside the beltway,” political Washington’s favorite nickname for itself, is a metaphor for the core of government. Hardly a dinner or a meeting goes by without someone observing that the mood inside the beltway on Iran or a new Soviet-American summit or on protectionist measures is running ahead of the country, or that the president, any president, is in trouble inside the beltway but not “out there,” with a wave of the hand toward the boondocks.

The distance between Washington and the rest of the country is partly a matter of language. Jargon is a vital element of the Washington game. Washington jargon is impenetrable and often deliberately so, to exclude all but the initiated.

For starters: Unless you’re President Reagan, you can’t be a major player in budget politics unless you know the difference between constant dollars and current dollars, between outlays and obligations, between the baseline and the out-years; you can’t enter the arena of arms control without some grasp of launchers, throwweight, and RVs
^*
If you’re an insider, you will have mastered such trivia as knowing that the shorthand for the Department of Housing and Urban Development is pronounced “HUD,” but that the nickname for the Department
of Transportation is pronounced “D-O-T” and never “dot.” You will also know that bogeys are the spending targets the secretary of Defense gives the armed services and that beam-splitters are the nearly invisible TelePrompTers that flash the text of a speech to the president as he turns his head from side to side.

The split between capital and country also reflects a different awareness of how Washington really works. The veterans know that the important, knock-down, drag-out battles in Congress usually come on amendments to a piece of legislation, not on final passage of the bill. They understand that when some member rises on the floor of the House or Senate and says that a piece of legislation is a “good bill” and that he wants “to offer a perfecting amendment,” he is really getting ready to gut the legislation. Sometimes an amendment is a complete substitute bill with quite different impact and meaning, known in the trade as a “killer amendment.” That’s the way the legislative game is played.

In many other ways, political perceptions differ sharply inside the beltway and out in the country. For example, Thomas Foley of Washington State, the House majority leader, is hardly a household word. But in the Washington political community, Republicans as well as Democrats respect him as an effective leader with sound judgment who can hold northern liberals and southern conservatives in a Democratic coalition and also work well across party lines. A large comfortable Saint Bernard of a man, Foley has on occasion shrewdly blunted the force of Republican attacks and at other times steered Democrats toward compromises with Reagan.

Conversely, New York State Congressman Jack Kemp has made a national splash with his tax issue, but political insiders regard him as generally less influential with other House Republicans than Trent Lott of Mississippi, the House Republican whip. “Lott swings plenty of votes,” one Reagan White House strategist confided to me. “You can’t count on Kemp to bring that many members with him.” Over in the Senate, Jesse Helms is the booming public voice of the New Right but when it comes to working major issues with other Republicans, James McClure of Idaho, a quieter legislator, is given more credit as the leader of Senate conservatives. In 1984, McClure, not Helms, was the conservatives’ candidate for majority leader. In short, Kemp and Helms are the national figures with mass appeal; Lott and McClure are rated by their peers as more solid performers. The most striking modern case of a politician who was no great shakes as a congressman or senator but who won a mass following—and the presidency—was Jack Kennedy.

A City of Cocker Spaniels

What really sets Washington apart, of course, is the heady brew of power and prominence. Washington combines the clout of the corporate boardroom and military command with the glamour of Hollywood celebrities and Super Bowl stars. That magnetism and the stakes of the battle are what draw armies of politicians, lobbyists, lawyers, experts, consultants, and journalists to Washington. It is a self-selected group, ambitious and aggressive, marked by collective immodesty. Politicians love to be noticed, and they take their notices very seriously, assuming their own importance and grasping for daily confirmation in the attention of the press and television.

Many people treat the word
politician
as a synonym for hypocrisy, but I believe most politicians come to Washington largely motivated by a sense of public service, and usually with a deeper interest in policy issues than is felt by people back home. Most politicians really want to contribute to the public weal, as protectors of their home districts or exponents of some cause; their early motiviation is the ideal of better government. Most people who make a career of government could earn a good deal more money in other walks of life. And they toss into the bargain the loss of personal privacy for themselves and for their families. Not all politicians are that self-sacrificing, but I believe a majority are; only a small minority seem charlatans. Their agendas differ greatly, but if one urge unites them all—and really makes Washington tick—it is the urge for that warm feeling of importance.

That ache for applause and recognition shows in the weighty tread of senators moving onto the floor and glancing upward for some sign of recognition from the galleries. It shows in the awkward jostling for position as a group of congressmen approach the television cameras and microphones outside a hearing room, or after a White House session with the president. I have marveled at it in the purgatorial patience of politicians with endless handshakes, speeches, receptions. I have sensed it, too, in the flattered eagerness of corporate executives arriving at a White House dinner in their limousines. And I have felt it in the smug satisfaction of a select group of columnists and commentators called to a special briefing from the president in the family theater of the White House. None of us is completely immune to that siren song of being made to feel important.

“Washington is really, when you come right down to it, a city of cocker spaniels,” Elliott Richardson once remarked. Richardson, a
Republican Brahmin from Boston, held four cabinet positions in the Nixon and Ford administrations and after a few years out of the limelight felt the ache for attention badly enough to make an unsuccessful try for the Senate.

“It’s a city of people who are more interested in being petted and admired than in rendering the exercise of power,” Richardson contended. “The very tendency of the cocker spaniel to want to be petted and loved can in turn mean that to be shunned and ignored is painful, and there is a tendency in Washington to turn to the people who are in the spotlight and holding positions of visibility at a given time.”
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In their collective vanity, the power players are willing to endure long hours of boredom to bathe in the roar of the crowd. Talking with me in his Senate study one rainy afternoon about the vanity of the political breed, Senator Charles McC. Mathias, the Maryland Republican, recalled an incident at an American Legion dinner in Washington years ago. As Mathias arrived, he saw two fellow Republican warhorses—Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts with his arm in a sling and Everett Dirksen hobbling on crutches.

“It was one of those many functions which you attend but where your absence might not even be noted,” Mathias observed. “Saltonstall and Dirksen had valid excuses [to stay away], but they came anyway. And I thought: Is there never surcease from this demand and this compulsion to get out to these things? But of course, they would be put at the head table and introduced, and the spotlight would fall upon them, and the people from Massachusetts and Illinois would wave their napkins in the air when their names were mentioned, and the band would play their state anthems. It is all utterly meaningless, and yet those two wanted to be part of the act, and the applauders wanted the act, too.”
⁴

Narcissism
is not too strong a label for the Washington syndrome. Political Washington is consumed with its own doings: Who’s up, who’s down, did you hear what the president said over an open mike, how’s the tax bill doing, should we have bombed Libya, what’s next? Surely ranchers in Texas, car makers in Detroit, textile executives in South Carolina, or doctors and lawyers anywhere are equally self-absorbed. But Washington, rivaled perhaps by Hollywood, allows itself the collective vanity of assuming that people elsewhere are fascinated with its doings.

“The capital, with its curious mixture of high ideals and hard work and base ambition and blind vanity, becomes the universe: If I am so famous that
The
[
Washington
]
Post
is writing about me, then, of
course, the whole world is reading it,” observed former Secretary of State Alexander Haig,
⁵
with the wry detachment of hindsight, once he was out of office.