Washington as Seen From Georgetown Salons

Sally Quinn was on NPR’s “Here and Now” earlier this month discussing her New York Times op-ed about springtime in Washington. The op-ed appeared in May which is, the former Washington Post columnist tells us, the “most beautiful time of the year” thereabouts: 

Dogwood, forsythia, cherry trees, tulips and daffodils decorate every sidewalk, wisterias weep from porch overhangs, and redbuds pop up at every corner. The air is redolent of blossoms, a soft breeze sharing their scent through the streets. It’s the perfect backdrop for the columned monuments and buildings that remind us of the miracle of our democracy.

Cherry trees “on every corner”? That’s not even true in bosky Georgetown, where Quinn and the late Ben Bradlee, the Post’s long-time editor, held their famous salons.

And “our democracy”? It seems not to occur to Quinn that early summer is also the time that her crowd flies off to their properties in the Hamptons, precisely to escape the oppressive heat and other icky inconveniences of the city about which she has just waxed rhapsodic. Some Washingtonians don’t even have air conditioning. 

But this year, alas, springtime in Washington was not as it used to be—or at least as this former society columnist likes to remember it. Washington this year “is a city in crisis. Physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually.” (The tulips and daffodils, presumably out of spite, still decorate every sidewalk.)

It’s as if the fragrant air were permeated with an invisible poison, as if we were silently choking on carbon monoxide. The emotion all around—palpable in the streets, the shops, the restaurants, in business offices, at dinner tables—is fear… Nobody feels safe. Nobody feels protected.

Who outside of the higher reaches of Washington society ever felt “safe” or “protected”? Most born-and-bred denizens of the city did not come to town for careers as lobbyists, journalists, or lawyers. They didn’t arrive fresh out of graduate school to work for the federal government or a think tank to influence said government. 

They lived in places like Anacostia, Shaw, Le Droit Park, or the far reaches of Capitol Hill—places that are rapidly being gentrified, driving out the less desirable residents to make way for the come-here careerists. This, to someone of the status of Quinn and her chums, must be a welcome development, assuming they are even aware of it.

For less privileged Washingtonians, life has never been easy. Lawlessness, depending on where you live, has always been a problem. “If you take out the killings,” the former mayor Marion Barry claimed, “Washington actually has a very, very low crime rate.” He said that, while still in office, at a National Press Club luncheon in March 1989. Less than a year later, he was arrested for smoking crack and spent six months in the slammer. Five years after that, he was re-elected.

In Quinn’s Washington, people no longer have dinner parties the way they used to. Those were the good ol’ days, when Republicans and Democrats would break bread together at Georgetown dinner parties and establish convivial social connections. When that was not just possible, but encouraged, it was less disagreeable when they disagreed (supposing they remembered to do so) on the Hill the next day. 

Washington, in those long-gone days, was just so much better. Those were the glory days when Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, esteemed for his high-minded pontification, was—it was later revealed—practically on Joe Kennedy’s payroll. 

Then, a little later, came Stewart and Joseph Alsop—descendants of T.R. Stewart—alongside Phil Graham, then the Washington Post’s publisher. The trio went to the 1960 Democratic convention where they met privately with Jack Kennedy, persuading him to pick LBJ as his running mate. Stewart—this came out later—also used his cover as a foreign correspondent to write columns requested by the CIA.

Yes, once upon a time, political Washington was indeed cozier. People got their political news from the Post or the Times, or Walter Cronkite—not feisty Fox or MSNBC. And, if you were a regular at the right dinner parties, it no doubt was a lot more pleasant. It certainly must seem so, looking back. (Jack Anderson? Who is he?)

“I lived through the paranoia and vengefulness of Watergate. This time in Washington,” Quinn tells us, “it’s different.” 

Well, yes, and what isn’t? (And we all know whose fault that is, don’t we?)

When Rand Paul announced his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015, he said Washington was “horribly broken.” Americans have “to take our country back from the special interests that use Washington as their personal piggy bank, the special interests that are more concerned with their personal welfare than the general welfare. The Washington machine that gobbles up our freedoms and invades every nook and cranny of our lives must be stopped.”

He didn’t win, obviously. Donald Trump won, appealing to the same frustrations Paul did—and, of course, some others as well. Are Trump and his appointees “more concerned with their personal welfare than the general welfare?” Even if not, do they have the knowledge, the skills and the savvy to deliver?

That (as the sign outside the funeral home reads) remains to be seen. Trump has already alienated a potential ally in his professed desire to dismantle the “Deep State” so beloved by Sally Quinn, the daughter of a much-decorated army officer who also served as deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and chief of operations of the organization that became the Central Intelligence Agency.

The potential ally Trump has alienated is Rand Paul, who has dared criticize the president’s “big, beautiful bill.” Paul, Trump responded, has “very little understanding” of the bill and the “tremendous GROWTH” it will bring. Paul “loves voting ‘NO’ on everything.” His ideas “are actually crazy (losers!)” and “the people of Kentucky can’t stand him,” so there!

We can only imagine what Quinn and her friends are saying about all this over cocktails in the Hamptons. Quick! Fetch the smelling salts!