WASHINGTON 2002
Guess Who's Not Coming to Dinner?
It’s been a year since Katharine Graham died, and like so many of us in Washington, I miss her.
I miss her because she was smart, brave, and funny in unexpected ways. She was kind and generous to so many people, especially women. And I miss her because she gave great dinner parties.
Her last grand party was for President Bush in February of 2001, just a month after the inauguration. The guest list included Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Steve Case, Alan Greenspan, Colin Powell, Commerce Secretary Don Evans, Henry Kissinger, Vernon Jordan, and Ethel Kennedy. There were a few media types: Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell, Al Hunt and Judy Woodruff, Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, Jim and Kate Lehrer, George Will, Howell Raines, Margaret Carlson, and the top brass from The Washington Post — all invited to welcome Dubya to the nation’s capital.
“He’s been awfully nice in every way to reach out to Washington,” said Graham. “It makes a lot of difference in the feelings of people in this town.” She was being kind; the president’s dislike for Washington was an open secret, and this dinner marked his first real effort to break bread with the “permanent establishment.”
As the Post’s social reporter, I was assigned to write about the event. I sat in her office and asked for help. She was wildly apologetic but no, she couldn’t give me the guest list. No, she wouldn’t let me stand on her front step and interview those guests. And no, she wouldn’t call me after the party to give me details. Her dinners, she explained, were always strictly off-the-record. But coverage of the parties is not the point; it’s what transpired there.
Graham’s death didn’t kill off the Washington dinner party — an endangered institution for many years — but it marked the end of an era. For decades, politicians and journalists of every stripe gathered at tables and, for a few hours, pretended to like each other. Sometimes they actually became friends. The operating assumption was that everyone in Washington had a common purpose: a stronger, better United States. They might differ on the means to achieve that, but the end was never in doubt. At the very least, everyone had a better sense of whom they were dealing with.
It laid the basis for smarter journalism, too. Listen, anything that allows us more insight and clarity is all to the good. In Washington, a dinner party is an extension of the workday, but the mask is slightly different, the guard lowered just a bit. Sit next to a cabinet secretary or a senator for an hour and you can’t help but get a better sense of what makes this person tick. (Sit next to a spouse and you learn even more.) The more we understand, the more thoughtful and measured we can be in our reporting and writing.
Not everyone shares this view. In fact, there are plenty who see Washington as a modern Sodom and Gomorrah, where souls are lost somewhere between the herbed rack of lamb and demitasse. Newt Gingrich swept into power in 1995 and coolly informed his conservative flock that the seductions of the soiree were dangerous and corrupt. Won’t dance, don’t ask them.
“Those of us who are part of the revolution didn’t come into politics and Washington to join the present establishment or influence that establishment,” Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, told me at the height of Gingrich’s Grass Roots Chic. “We didn’t come to get invitations to their dinner parties or their receptions.”
P.J. O’Rourke was even more withering. “Why dine with scum?” he shrugged. “It’s important to understand that not everybody on the other side are scum. But there are enough of them.”
Liberals, or what passed for them, were equally wary. Bill Clinton, despite his extravagant political gifts, seldom dipped into Washington’s social sea, which offended and annoyed the natives. You might think, then, that the Monica Lewinsky scandal had social Washington rubbing its hands in glee. Mostly, though, folks here were miserable. It deeply pained them that the office of the president had been sullied.
News flash: people are complicated, maddening creatures. Life is seldom divided neatly into black and white, which is bad news for the hungry young Turks out to pen that oh-so-clever exegesis on the state of the nation. The other news flash: journalists are human (gasp!), too. We have marriages, hobbies, passions, kids, feelings. A simple, civil conversation about “nothing” can lead to mutual respect, which occasionally develops into trust.
A few years ago, Vernon Jordan came roaring up during a dinner dance at the British embassy. Our previous conversations had been cordial. Looming over me, he yelled about my coverage of a state dinner. I yelled back. It was a brief and fair fight, then we shook hands. He thought he won, I thought I won, so we were both happy. I remember the incident because it was, in a weird way, respectful.
And that’s the real point. You don’t have to like someone. You don’t have to agree. But respect is essential.
I covered the dinner celebrating the 200th anniversary of the White House just two nights after the 2000 presidential election. Guests included all the living presidents except Ronald Reagan. The election outcome was uncertain and tensions, understandably, sky-high. But George and Barbara Bush showed up anyway. We all waited to see if the Clintons and Bushes would start throwing food at each other, but all were on their best behavior. George Bush gave a gracious and kind speech about the history and staff of the executive mansion. It was a classy performance, and I found myself once again admiring his grace and manners.
Close friends of his son tell me, “If you got to know him, you’d really like him.” To be honest, I’ve been impressed by the president’s old friends, who clearly admire and enjoy him. But this administration walked into Washington with a big chip on its shoulder and kept behind closed doors. The horrors of September 11 and the anthrax deaths reinforced the bunker mentality — in the light of that, who cared about what got said at parties?
But just three weeks after the terrorists attacks, I sat next to a wealthy Democratic fundraiser, who was full of praise for the president’s leadership and then confided, “I’ve been thinking, and I’m not going to do any more partisan stuff.” And I thought, what if everyone feels this way? How will it change Washington?
It was, of course, too good to be true. Washington is back to the nasty business of treating each other like enemies.
For my part, I’m whining about state dinners. This quaint little ritual is about as feel-good as it gets — warm, fuzzy global partnerships. It’s almost impossible to write a negative story. So what does this White House do? At the first dinner, for the Mexican President, Vicente Fox, they declared most of it “closed” and made it damned near impossible even to talk to the guests. For the second dinner, in July, I promised myself I would not lose my temper — then, of course, I lost my temper when we were treated like dirt, locked in the East Room to prevent us from even watching the president mingle with guests, and generally regarded as mosquitoes at a nudist convention.
Respect? You must be joking.
Perhaps there’s an upside to all this. No more cozy inside deals over brandy. Fresh DNA in the Washington party pool. Good riddance to the Inside the Beltways and clueless, co-opted Establishment hacks! Except we’re not. Our job is to ferret out the truth, to be there: at press conferences, on Air Force One, and yes, even at parties.
The day after Mrs. Graham’s party for Dubya, the phone at my desk rang. She was calling to apologize, once again, for not letting me cover the dinner — and thanked me for getting the story right anyway. She had no juicy gossip to pass on; no telling moment that suddenly illuminated the heart and mind of the new president.
She had just one tiny correction: I’d reported that the meal began with caviar. “There really wasn’t much caviar,” she explained. “It was just a little bit of caviar on those little potatoes.”
She wasn’t nitpicking; she just didn’t want people to think she was the kind of person who, well, served big mounds of caviar at her parties.
“Mrs. Graham,” I laughed, “I don’t think
anybody was paying attention to the menu.”
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