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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Political Pulse: Elián González Defeated Al Gore (May 2, 2001) Cuban-Americans are the only bright spot in GOP's prospects among Hispanics. By William Schneider Legal Affairs: Psst! Pass It On. The Successor To Rehnquist Will Be ... (May 2, 2001) One scenario has O'Connor becoming Chief Justice. Another scenario has Bush picking Breyer for the post. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Media: Thanking Our Stars (May 2, 2001) If we really want to be sophisticated about our ever-evolving media, we should revise how we think about famous people and their increasingly visible role in our lives. By William Powers Social Studies: Now Is the Time to Tell the Truth About Rwanda (April 26, 2001) With Clinton out of office, an honest inquiry into America's role during the genocide is at last possible. By Jonathan Rauch Political Pulse: Bush Wins 'Let's Make a Deal' (April 26, 2001) The American public put saving lives over saving face in Chinese standoff. By William Schneider Legal Affairs: Enact a Civilized Crime Bill, for a Change (April 26, 2001) Letting defendants and convicts use DNA tests to prove their innocence isn't being soft on crime. By Stuart Taylor Jr. More from National Journal. |
On Books 
Meg Greenfield's Song of RegretIn our new book review section, William Powers takes a tour of Meg Greenfield's Washington. by William Powers ..... Meg Greenfield lives. This is quite a feat, and not just because the longtime editorial page editor of The Washington Post died two years ago. It's a feat because what she left behind is a memoir of political Washington, the sort of book in which it's generally hard to find any trace of activity that might be mistaken for life. You know the books I'm talking about. Gassy recollections of people and events that "mattered" in a superficial, front-page sort of way, and almost nothing of what mattered in a human way, i.e., what it was really like, emotionally and intellectually, to spend a life inside the political-media terrarium. Sadly, the omission is often completely unconscious. Washington doesn't reward reflective personalities, and those who rise the highest here often seem to have no interior life at all. They live in and through the game, and produce books that are just post-game recaps, accounts of how they acquired influence and what they did with it. Ghostwriters are hired for the job, and no wonder: Who better to write a dead book than a ghost? Washington is not a dead book. Reading it, I really thought at times that Meg Greenfield was still cruising around inner Washington, surveying everything and everyone with her Cat-in-the-Hat smile. Like its author, whom I knew slightly in my days as a Post reporter, the book has a foxy, confiding, come-into-my-parlor quality. I had my first personal contact with Greenfield after I wrote a column in The Post about my "secret addiction" to The New York Observer, the dirt-dishing weekly paper that was just starting to catch on outside Manhattan. She phoned me at my newsroom desk to say she was interested in this wicked-sounding rag I'd discovered, and did I think she should subscribe? Something in her voice told me she was itching to get her hands on this fresh bit of trash, and just wanted a nudge. Oh, absolutely, I told her. She did, and from then on, whenever we saw each other, she'd lower her voice and give me her latest read on that other newspaper. It was our little secret. She liked to conspire. Here she asks us to join in a conspiracy against the elites who have run Washington in the past 50 years and who, in her view, have turned it into an inhumane place. Because one of the most enduring members of that class was Greenfield herself, this is a pretty interesting project. When the typical Washington memoirist remarks on Washington's more corrupt ways, a blanket self-exemption is implied. There was one saint in Sodom, you see, and he's here to tell the tale. The most fascinating aspect of this book is Greenfield's refusal to do this. It's actually part memoir, part zoology of Washington elites, with the former serving the scathing purposes of the latter. She implicates herself fully in the horrors she describes. On the surface, she has written a lament on the decline of public life in the capital and its transformation into a "colony of political independent contractors, loners, and freelancers" who care less about getting things done than about marketing themselves. But an inch beneath, it's about what Greenfield herself became in living that life, a poignant self-rebuke of a kind that comes along rarely these days, and almost never in Washington. Sometimes the self-incrimination is fairly serious. Arriving in Washington in 1961 as a young reporter fired up with liberal idealism, Greenfield was at first appalled by the smooth cynicism of the insiders, the pols and journalists who cared mainly about the state of political play, and not so much about doing the right thing on major questions of the day. Congress still hadn't passed a civil rights bill that would outlaw discrimination against black Americans, for example. The greenhorn Meg believed passionately that it was time to fix that. But after immersing herself in the intricate congressional politics of the issue, she slowly grew sophisticated and lost the fire. She became a Washingtonian. "I noticed that I had become progressively more interested than indignant, a sign that, for better or for worse, I was adapting in some Darwinian way—a feather here, a claw there—to my new habitat and job." Elsewhere, she records smaller ways in which she succumbed to some of the phoniest aspects of capital existence. Some people in Washington, she writes, "are content to be seen as powerful and don't know that that is not the same thing as acquiring and using power. The emblem of this is the power picture. What are these blank-faced official photos, autographed in the most noncommittally possible 'friendly' way and hanging on the office or living-room wall for all to see?" Mocking those inane photos is a clichéd way of demonstrating you are above the game, and I thought it would end there. I certainly didn't expect what came next: "I used to have them up all over my study at home." It must have been a little painful for her to type that sentence. Greenfield isn't the first old hand to notice a degeneration in the way Washington does its business. But I don't think anyone has made the case with such nuance. Far from longing for the old postwar capital that she knew in its waning days, she concedes there was a lot wrong with that world. It was clubby, hierarchical, and lumbering, and the best it offered smart, ambitious women was the patronizing status of isn't-she-something curiosity. But, Greenfield writes, "the new atomized life emerging is, if anything, even more unmoored from reality and more remote from the way business is ordinarily conducted among human beings." Similarly, in journalism she was glad to see the passing of the old coziness between reporters and public officials. Yet she regrets that journalists are now so removed from human contact with their subjects that we have stopped thinking about them as people at all, and have reduced them to "opportune props and raw material" for our work. In the book's most memorable coinage, she calls this "effigy journalism." For me, three stunning moments bring the book together—and I should note that it requires some bringing together on the reader's part. Greenfield died before she could write what would have been the final chapter, and there's a feeling of a lot of good ideas hanging loose. The first stunner comes not from Greenfield herself, but from a long, touching forward written by her friend and publisher, Katharine Graham. According to Graham, Greenfield, who never married and seemed to steer clear of romantic involvements, once spoke of her mixed feelings about the feminist movement: "Housewives in Silver Spring talk about liberation as escaping from the washing machine into the newsroom, while I have some vague sense that for me it would be going in the other direction. I think, 'Gee, wouldn't it be great: three small children and a washing machine ... and a fella.' " It wasn't the content that stopped me here—she was no Gloria Steinem—but the choice of details. It's one thing to wonder aloud about what-ifs, and another to go to such lengths to distance yourself from the high-flying Georgetown life you chose to live. Silver Spring? A washing machine? The second stunner comes when Greenfield first states what will become the central theme of the book—that there's a deep personality flaw endemic to Washington players. "It is one I recognize and continually have to contend with in my own life," she writes, "and have seen played out a thousand times over in the lives of people I have tracked and written about as a journalist in Washington for more than three decades. What I mean is how public people almost eagerly dehumanize themselves. They allow the markings of region, family, class, individual character, and, generally, personhood that they once possessed to be leached away. At the same time, they construct a new public self that often does terrible damage to what remains of the genuine person." There are endless ways of damning Washington, but it doesn't get much darker than that. Finally, there is a telling moment in the book's afterward, by historian Michael Beschloss. Greenfield wrote this book in secret during the last years of her life, and toward the end, she entrusted Beschloss with getting it published. His moving account of their last few interactions gives this highly unsentimental book a needed coda of tenderness. Beschloss reports that in Greenfield's notes for the final chapter, she proposed various reasons for why she had never married, including the possibility that she had expected to find someone handsome and couldn't "love the ugly or imperfect." Toward the end, when she was suffering from cancer and spending a lot of time alone, he goes on, she gained a new respect for the "inner animal," which she also called the "Stanley Kowalski," a reference to the earthy ruffian of A Streetcar Named Desire. If you could choose one character from American literature who is the perfect opposite of brainy, successful Mary Ellen Greenfield from Seattle, I'm pretty sure it would be Stanley Kowalski. How do these moments fit together? The book argues that certain personalities are drawn to Washington, among them what she calls "the Good Child": "Political/governmental Washington is an adult community made up largely of people who were extremely successful children," she writes. In her merciless taxonomy, the type includes the teachers' pets, the grinds, the suck-ups. "You may take it as a rule of thumb that the children who came to Washington are not the ones who put the cat in the dryer, but the ones who tattled." Greenfield places herself squarely in this awful crowd, recalling that she sometimes seemed "to have been 50 years old at birth." In her telling, all the Good Children who flocked to Washington in the late-20th century wound up building a culture without a soul, a place where, in order to succeed, people had to shed their real selves and adopt an "image," a set of marketable policy positions, and a utilitarian "board-game view" of other people. They put everything, even their families, in service of their careers. Borrowing from Blake, she calls this existence "Something Else Besides Human Life." The condemnation is not universal. Greenfield concedes that admirable exceptions to her rule abound. But in treating various Washington species, she comes back again and again to her theme: There's something terribly false here. What she doesn't observe, but the reader can, is that a lot of those Good Children wind up in Washington precisely because they are running away from human life. It's a place where driven, praise-starved people are not just allowed but encouraged to put a safe distance between themselves and everything that's messy and real, from Silver Spring drudgery to the Kowalskian urges. Here you can build a whole life around the exquisite abstractions of policy and government, and the most delicious abstraction of all: your career. Greenfield seemed to have felt she did that to some degree, and looking back, one senses, she was full of regret. This is not a perfect book. Beyond its unfortunate truncation, there is the author's somewhat clotted writing style. She had an unusually subtle mind, and an eye for good writing in others. But in her own prose, she wasn't much for pruning back the tendrils. Her ideas gather too densely, crowd each other out. But they're worth the trouble, and so is she. A lot of people who come to Washington are changed forever by the game, and not for the better. Among those who win, few have the guts to look back and ask if it was even the right game to be playing. At the close of what was, by most measures, a fabulous life, Meg Greenfield evidently worried that she hadn't done it quite right, that perhaps she'd been one of those Washington people who betray their own humanity, kill off their best selves. Then she turned around and gave us this book, proving, in the end, that she had nothing to worry about.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2001 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. |
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