This Town (37 page)

Another Jarrett loyalist pointed out that during the reelection campaign, many Obama advisers seemed to be auditioning for post-election broadcast jobs. It created a dynamic in which aides would be competing with one another to get on TV—ostensibly vying for better positions in the same pundit class they made such a show of running against four years earlier. Jarrett never partook of this, said the aide, who also noted that Axelrod and Gibbs both signed substantial deals as contributors with MSNBC within a few months of the election; Plouffe, who railed against the “jackals” in the media in 2008, joined Bloomberg Television as a contributor and strategic adviser; and Politico’s Dylan Byers reported that Stephanie Cutter was talking to CNN about cohosting a relaunched version of
Crossfire
, the high-decibel debate show. Her conservative counterpart would be Newt Gingrich.

In early 2013 I visited Jarrett in her White House office to discuss some of the palace intrigue of the first term. She seemed completely bored by the proposition. She betrayed no defensiveness and a hint of smugness at having outlasted her detractors. The president was ensconced in the White House for another four years and many people expected Jarrett would stay at his side right through to January 2017. She kept steering the conversation about internal dynamics into the present tense, which of course carried a slap at some former colleagues. “If you talk to people who are here now, I think you’d hear people say that we have a great team, that it’s collaborative,” Jarrett said. Her overriding message seemed to be that she
was
still here, had learned to rise above “the parlor games,” and had outlasted her riff-raff. She spoke in an even, high-pitched voice and kept shrugging her shoulders. “This town will break your heart,” Jarrett said. “But you can’t let it.” And she shrugged her shoulders again for emphasis, or non-emphasis.

14

The Last Party

December 2012

E
arly on the Thursday night before Christmas, traffic was stacked up in a honking mess at the valet station on N Street, in front of Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn’s. There, in the rain, was another reminder, if one was again needed, that the movie-set streets of Georgetown were designed for bygone vehicles.

Across town on Capitol Hill, dignitaries had just finished paying respects to another bygone vehicle, Senator Daniel Inouye, the eighty-eight-year-old Democrat of Hawaii, who died a few days earlier. Colleagues praised their war-hero friend in the usual “quiet dignity,” “respect for the institution,” “disagreed without being disagreeable” ways. As mourners filed past the casket perched atop the Lincoln catafalque, everyone marked another somber recollection of the proverbial “bipartisan era that once was.”

A week earlier, a gunman had slaughtered twenty-six people—twenty of them kids—at a Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school. Even by our uncomfortably numb routine of mass slaying aftermaths, this one stole your breath. Obama delivered what might have been the best speech of his presidency in Connecticut. He read the first names of the kids and made me cry.

Yet everyone knew this would all default soon enough into the familiar Kabuki. And a few days later, Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association, gave a rambling press conference that was ridiculed by solemn commentators, gun-control Democrats, and a growing class of hand-wringing/self-hating Republicans. It made everyone feel better to ridicule, to feel superior to, the gun nut at the podium, never mind that his NRA still had at least half of Washington by the gonads, and that Obama was conceding privately that there was probably nothing he could do to change gun laws in any major way—as was eventually borne out.

But the outrage Obama channeled was powerful, or felt powerful. As often happens here, much of the outrage turned inward. This Town was having one of its periodic “We’re not worthy of this historical moment” moments. It happens every few months, usually when some predictable circus greets a legitimate crisis. Another was unfolding simultaneously on Capitol Hill as Republicans were blowing up a proposal that Speaker Boehner had floated to stop the “looming fiscal cliff” fiasco. By eight p.m. on the rainy Thursday night before Christmas, news came down that Boehner had adjourned the House for the holidays, and the city’s center of gridlock shifted to the clogged streets of Georgetown, in front of Ben and Sally’s Federal-style Laird-Dunlop House.

This was not just any party. It was “The Last Party,” as Sally Quinn had billed the much-anticipated get-together. The evite landed a few weeks earlier. Nearly everyone who’d received one thought initially that The Last Party referred to some special parting hurrah for the great Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee, Sally’s husband, the
Washington Post
’s balls-out editor during the Watergate era and beyond. At ninety-one, Ben finally seemed to be reaching his last legs. He had been forgetting names and faces, appeared confused much of the time, and was less than his spit-brass self. “Not doing well” was the phrase. “Dementia” was the word, whispered. Sad. Could Ben’s be This Town’s next mega-funeral? Could this tribal assembly be a kind of “pre-game,” as Politico
might call it?

Like so many in This Town, I revered Ben, whom it was of course always fashionable to revere, but I really did. I fell in love with the Jason Robards version, the dashing fire-breather he presented in his memoir,
A Good Life
, in which he told of his unbridled newspaper adventures with no hint of the preening insecurity that defines so much of the business today. A lot of Ben was bravado, maybe exaggerated and sprinkled in the potent mythmaking powder of Hollywood and history. But he embodied a spirit and a newspaper that wanted, more than anything, to have impact—and that actually did have impact: a White House brought down, history diverted. Who had impact now, really? Who even remembered who won last year’s Pulitzers, or last month’s ratings, or last week’s top Sunday morning “gets”? It all can feel so fleeting and entangled, and often at the same time.

I hesitate to suggest excessive nostalgia here, or certainly to imply some “Well, wasn’t it all better here in Nixon’s day” lament. Nor would it be right to say Bradlee was a paragon of journalistic mission, independence, and subversion. His career was suffused with ample coziness with the powerful that many would condemn today. There’s virtually no way that any journalist could carry on the close friendship that Bradlee did with John F. Kennedy while he was covering the president as
Newsweek
’s Washington bureau chief (a time when, by many accounts, Kennedy was sleeping with Bradlee’s then wife’s sister). In other words, to impose some false modern standard of purity on Ben would illicit from him a trademark “Fuck it.”

Still, one of the glories of Watergate was that it ended in a clean kill. The
Post
prevailed, Nixon was exposed. There were spoils and consequences. “
For the first time, really, I felt in my guts that we were going to win,” Bradlee wrote of a period in 1973 in which a vindicating groundswell of revelations laid bare the scope of the White House’s wrongdoing. “I had no idea still how it would all come out. But I no longer believed that Watergate would end in a tie.”

Journalists often debate whether the Watergate story could have been broken today, or would at least have the legs that it did four decades ago. Forget the question of whether Woodward and Bernstein would have been given the time, space, and editorial backing to pursue such an endeavor. Even if they did, the Nixon White House would now have a massive Fox/Rush/Drudge apparatus at its back. A complicated story would devolve into the familiar left-right rock ’em, sock ’em. “Okay, the liberal media is at it again,” the first defense would be, and then everyone would assume their places in the noise machine.

Soon enough, Watergate would be over, eclipsed by the next shiny object, and no one would remember who won or lost, and even what “winning” and “losing” meant beyond the ESPN-style scoring: To wit, a modern analog to that unfolded a few days later. After the fiscal cliff battle was finally resolved on Capitol Hill, Mike Allen included in Playbook an “e-mail du jour” from a Democratic aide. In it, the aide distilled—with perfectly of-the-moment, of-the-medium simplicity—the current state of play in the complicated economic debate that has dominated This Town through the Obama years:

So we have a split decision as of now: GOP won 2010 elections, then got the Budget Control Act deal with all cuts, no tax hikes. Obama won 2012 elections, and scores this deal with all tax hikes, hardly any spending cuts. So each side has one victory each.

You can’t decide who wins overall until the rubber match happens in March. That side will be the winner—best two out of three.

•   •   •

B
en Bradlee used to throw around a favorite phrase, “The caravan moves on.” This was his way of always moving forward, not dwelling. It was a quality familiar in powerful WASP types—and, even more, to combat vets of a certain era, like him, who fought a good war in the Pacific and lived to “move on.”

At a time when journalism was becoming a hot profession—in large part thanks to Watergate and
All the President’s Men
—Ben became the object of the biggest personality cult in This Town. I spent much of the first half of my career imagining what it would be like to work at the
Washington Post
under Bradlee.

By the time I reached the paper in 1997, Ben had been retired for six years and was working out of the
Post
’s emeritus wing on the seventh floor. He was well removed from the newsroom, though he strolled through it frequently and ate lunch most days in the cafeteria. “I’m a stop on the tour,” he said then, and still does. He would sometimes send me fan mail after a worthy piece. “Your story today makes our newspaper so good,” he wrote once after I’d been at the
Post
a year or so. To this day, if someone forced me to relinquish everything I owned except what could fit into a single box, I would make room for that note.

We had lunch a few times, Ben and I, usually some nice place in the neighborhood where he would speak French to the maître d’. Once, when I was weighing another job offer, he said to me, “You’re working for the best fucking newspaper in the world. Don’t be an asshole.” He was a
Post
exceptionalist, even when he knew better (and he did). “You’re a fucking traitor,” he scolded me in 2006, when I finally did leave—for the
Times
. “And now you’re working for a bunch of assholes.” He knew that the
Post
had “lost a lot of its horsepower” and that I was probably making the right move. On the way out, he reminded me to “keep your pecker up,” a common Ben-ism.

•   •   •

A
s it turned out, The Last Party was not meant as any special tribute to Ben, at least officially. Rather, it was meant as a play on the end of the world—which, according to the Mayan calendar, was scheduled for the next day or so. A lot of people had been making end-of-the-world jokes, and this was Sally’s offering—although she later told me that she was fully aware of the double meaning here. Whatever the occasion, it’s always a thrill to score the invite to Ben and Sally’s: a landmark house, once owned by Robert Todd Lincoln (Abe’s son), whose grounds occupy nearly an entire block. Portraits of Bradlee’s ancestors, Josiah and Lucy Bradlee, hang in the foyer, while a mingling local royalty mosey through, sipping drinks. (Is “ColinPowellJimLehrerAndreaMitchell” one word?)

My first entrée into a Ben and Sally soiree had come exactly four years earlier, at the end of 2008, a few weeks after Obama was elected. Bill Burton, the former campaign press secretary, was there, along with a host of hot new Obama arrivals. Burton was a big “destination” that night, as was David Gregory, who had just prevailed in the competition to replace Russert as host of
Meet the Press
.

The 2008 gala was ostensibly to welcome the new editor of the
Washington Post
, Marcus Brauchli, to town after a long career at the
Wall Street Journal
. My major recollection was being confronted at the buffet table by Chris Matthews, who was mad about a profile I had written about him earlier that year. Matthews blamed that story, he said, for “costing me a job that I really wanted.” It was not clear what he meant exactly, although I wondered if it was the Senate seat in his native Pennsylvania that he had been making noises about running for—just noises, as it turned out. Anyway, he stormed away before I could ascertain more. Ben, who was standing nearby and apparently heard the exchange, met my eyes and shrugged. “Fuck ’im,” he said, patting my back. And then, as he walked away, he said, “Keep your pecker up.”

Four years later, there was Ben again, now parked in the front hall, greeting guests as they arrived. He looked typically stellar—silvery white hair, barrel chest out, grinning handshakes and ever the impresario in full command of his charisma, if not his memory.

A few feet from Ben, Brauchli was taking condolences on his removal from Ben’s old job as executive editor. He had been canned a few weeks earlier (“invited to resign,” if you prefer) after an extended spiral of the diminished print subscriptions, ad revenues, and headcounts that have hit the entire business, but the
Post
especially. Brauchli had in fact just been “caked” in the
Post
newsroom that afternoon—“caking” being a term coined for the sugary farewell rituals that had been breaking out repeatedly at the paper in recent years. It is not clear if anyone could have weathered those declines better than Brauchli had. But regardless, he was now fully deposed to the emeritus wing and not happy about it (and neither was his wife, who was uncomfortably open about her feelings via Facebook). On the upside, Brauchli had plenty of time now for lunch, as he told people who were consoling him at The Last Party.

In the back of the foyer schmoozed Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who made for a timely destination herself tonight because she was “in the news.” Earlier that week, Rice’s prospective nomination to be the next secretary of state had been harpooned, mostly by Republicans. John McCain, who had picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate four and a half years earlier, said Rice was “
not very bright” and “not qualified” for the job. In truth, Rice rubbed a select bipartisan contingent the wrong way. She was often called a “brusque” and “doesn’t suffer fools gladly” type, which can be big trouble in This Town, especially for a woman. Richard Holbrooke, too, was the epitome of brusque and doesn’t-suffer-fools-gladly, yet he was a particular darling among the same set of Thought Leaders he spent much of his life cultivating. Rice did not, and one member of the White House national security team noted that her ultimate kiss of death was inflicted by the supreme Thought Leader himself,
Times
columnist Thomas Friedman: “
I don’t know Rice at all,” he wrote, “so I have no opinion on her fitness for the job.”

In the vein of too-little-too-late, it was ironic that Rice would show up at The Last Party. It was also precisely the kind of shindig Richard Holbrooke would never have missed. He had so many great friends here, starting with Ben and Sally, and his name had also been invoked a fair amount of late—two years after his death—for an incident that took place during the Clinton years in which
Rice gave him the finger during a senior staff meeting at the State Department. Not classy! Less remarked upon was the condescending diatribe from Richard that allegedly incited Rice.

Walter Isaacson had Rice corralled while Colin Powell walked a few feet away. This was notable because Walter Isaacson is someone who absolutely
lives
to be in the same room as people like Colin Powell. Not so much the likes of me, whom Walter always blows right past en route to the Colin Powells—and if he greets me at all, he calls me “Matthew,” which I’ve never bothered to correct because Walter is so smart, for all I know my name IS Matthew and I’ve been going by the wrong name all these years. Anyway, the fact that Walter was staying fixed on Susan Rice and letting the gravy train pass was testimony to her timeliness in This Town, at least for another day or so. Isaacson eventually proceeded into the living room, which was adorned with plush couches, fresh flowers, and Vernon Jordan. Whenever I see Jordan, the perennial This Town insider, I think of a story told by Jeff Connaughton, a former top aide to Joe Biden and superlobbying partner of Ed Gillespie and Jack Quinn. Connaughton, who made plenty of money as a lobbyist, then became disgusted with This Town and moved to Savannah, Georgia, recalled an encounter he and Quinn had with Jordan back in the 1990s.