Katharine Graham's Washington - Rilegato

Katharine Graham served as the publisher of the Washington Post from 1969 to 1979, piloting the paper through the crises of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, and as the president and chairman of the Washington Post Company for much longer. In 1998 she won a Pulitzer Prize for her best-selling autobiography, Personal History. She died at the age of eighty-four in July 2001.

Washington Overview

The Washington experience with its bigness and its novelty ends in a deep, grateful happiness.
-my mother, Agnes Ernst Meyer, from her diary

Mother was right: Washington is indeed a big experience. This is a place where novelty is nothing new. As Isabel Anderson, a social light here from 1897 to 1919, wrote in her book, Presidents and Pies, "In Washington there is always something new under the sun."

So how does one begin to tackle a topic as big as Washington? My friend Stewart Alsop once wrote that, after years of observing Washington, he "understood why John Gunther had never written Inside Washington, although he at one time firmly intended to do so. There are just too many Washingtons to get inside of."

Clearly, this city cannot be reduced to any single dimension. During the New Deal, FDR, as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration, set Americans to work writing guides to great American cities. In the guide to the nation's capital, WPA writers made so bold as to speak of "the fundamental fact about Washington." Their "fact" was that Washington "was created for a definite purpose and has been developed, with many modifications, according to a definite plan. Therein lies its unique distinction among American cities, and among all existing capitals in the western world."

All of my experience relating to this place, however, leads me to the conclusion that there is no one "fundamental fact" about Washington. It's not just one thing-it's one thing and its opposite at the same time. The contradictions inherent in this place are evident everywhere: it's formal and informal; it's public and private; it's social and political; it's a small town and the capital of the world. It's a city that's a symbol of democracy and yet thoroughly undemocratic, since it remains the only place in America where the people are taxed without representation in the very bodies that make the policies that govern them.

In Washington, the public and the private intertwine in such a way that they can't be easily separated. This is the city where the personal and the political are most closely linked. Part of the "bigness" that Mother must have had in mind is that this is a town where principles and passions are writ large. The climate here-by which I mean the feel of the place, its heat in a non-meteorological sense-is just right for people who like drama with all its figurative thunder and lightning.

Washington is certainly the best city in the world for someone like me, who thinks that there just is nothing more exciting than news. To me, involvement with news is absolutely inebriating. It's what makes my life exciting. And even if the news doesn't originate here, it's often commented on here, or enlarged here, or explodes here. Something said in Washington comes boomeranging back in an even bigger way.

Washington is more than a place. It's the best example I can point to of the old English-class concept of personification. People say, "Washington knows this . . . thinks this . . . says that," and everyone seems to know what or who is meant.

Frank Carpenter, a syndicated writer and correspondent for the Cleveland Leader in Washington in the late 1800s, called this city a "living curiosity, made up of the strangest and most incongruous elements." Henry James called it the "City of Conversation, pure and simple, and positively of the only specimen, of any such intensity, in the world." Others have variously referred to Washington as "Democracy's home town," the "city of magnificent distances," and "at once the most and the least American city in America."

For the most part, the people whose writings are represented here offer personal impressions and opinions. They are not historians or authorities, any more than I am, but they all touch on some of what endures.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of Teddy Roosevelt and the wife of House Speaker Nicholas Longworth, once wrote about Washington: "Anyway, it is always an entertaining spectacle . . . the show is there for us, and we might as well get what entertainment we may out of it." I certainly have, and most Washington watchers, including the following writers, have, too.

Edward G. Lowry

The Washington Scene

Washington Close-Ups (1921)

I don't know much about Edward Lowry except that he was a friend of my parents. Mother first met Mrs. Lowry at the home of Mrs. Mark Sullivan in November 1921, shortly after his book was published-a book that, at the time of its appearance, created a lot of buzz in Washington. Mother considered Mr. Lowry "very clever" and described him in her diary as "one of the oldest of the Washington newspaper crowd."

Over the next decade or so, Lowry and his wife, Elizabeth, were often guests at our house-both in Washington and in Mount Kisco. In a guest book that my parents kept for a few years, Lowry wrote a little ditty on July 14, 1923: "Rest little booklet rest, bearing this honored name, And may we hear when I come back, 'I'm glad that he has came.' "

What he did in the chapters of Washington Close-Ups, several of which appeared in magazines and journals of the time, including The New Republic, Collier's Weekly, and the Weekly Review, was-in Walter Lippmann's words-to "shine the light" on twenty-six of Washington's best and brightest men of that era, and some of the less than best. While his writing is old-fashioned, the portraits he paints of these long-gone (and, in some cases, long-forgotten) public figures are vivid and incisive. No doubt, many were controversial at the time of publication. The chapter on then vice president Coolidge, for example, is titled "Coolidge: Foster-Child of Silence," and within the first two paragraphs, Lowry describes the VP as "a politician who does not, who will not, who seemingly cannot talk," and says of him, "It appears from the meager record that he thinks of himself as Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up to be a man."

This selection from Washington Close-Ups introduces the Washington scene within which all these public figures made their mark.

Aeons upon aeons agone, when the bat-winged pterodactyl swooped down relentlessly upon its prey,-I mean to say a long time ago,-this humid cup in the hills that is now the Washington scene may have been different; it must have been. With that we have no present concern.

But Washington itself; the Washington of the organic act, of the Adamses, John and Quincy, of Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, William H. Taft, and Woodrow Wilson, is the Washington of Warren G. Harding. Regard the eternal changelessness of the two stone legs of King Ozymandias in the desert of Egypt and attune your mind to the tale I have to tell.

Come with me into Mr. Harding's front yard and let us sit under a flowering magnolia and leisurely, as becomes the pure in heart and detached in mind, talk about the familiar apparitions who inhabit these pleasant walks and tinker with our destiny.

It passes belief how little is known about Washington by the country at large, and yet no city is more written about. Still, it is hardly ever justly appraised by the people at home. They seem to see it through a refracting and magnifying haze. New York and Chicago and San Francisco and St. Louis and New Orleans they know and can justly estimate. They are visualized clearly, but it is curiously true that almost every newcomer to Washington and every visitor suffers a sort of stage fright.

O. Henry in one of his stories tells about a cowboy going to New York and being diffident before New Yorkers, until he discovered they were people "just like Grover Cleveland and Geronimo and the Watson boys." No citizen of Danville, Illinois, or Pike County, Missouri, or Springfield, Massachusetts, would make any average American tongue-tied or step on his feet with embarrassment. Yet those three places have furnished the last three Speakers of the House of Representatives, and the Speaker of the House is a great personage in Washington. Tourists to the Capitol peer into his room with awe, and nudge one another furtively and say, "That's him," when they pass him by happy chance in a corridor. Then they go home and talk about it for days and days.

I do not know why it is that individually the Senators and Representatives and Cabinet members are always so awe-inspiring to their fellow countrymen, while collectively it has always been the fashion to disparage them. The late Henry Adams was the very greatest of Washington correspondents, though I should have been afraid so to describe him in his presence. He spent a lifetime, from Lincoln's administration through Roosevelt's, looking at the Washington scene with clear eyes and interpreting the marionettes with the coolest, most detached mind that has ever been brought to that occupation. When I used to talk with him in the latter years of his life I found to my dismay that all of my slowly acquired discoveries he had known since the sixties, and some of them were known to his grandfather before him. Some of his impressions gathered between 1840 and 1869 might have been written to-day looking at the present assemblage here.

It is as true now as it was in President Taylor's administration that Senators are a distinct species, and that continuous service in Congress produces-a Congressman. They have their own easily discernible vocational stigmata. They are a distinct sort of human being and as easily distinguishable, once you know them, as a raw oyster from a cup of tea. The type reproduces with astonishing fidelity, despite the greatest moral, social, and political convulsions.

Our system is so arranged that Congressmen must nece...