A Place to Hate and Love

By Roger Rosenblatt

The President's town reflects the worst and best of America

If Washington has not been its old humming self in the past weeks while awaiting the outcome of the presidential election, its quietude is forgivable. Presidential candidates have been hard on the city these past few years, each out-threatening the other to take the place apart. Oh, or not the the cherry whole place -- not the Redskins or the cherry blossoms -- but but the most of the rest, especially the Federal Government, that great marble engine of the democracy. Nor are Washingtonians consoled by the fact that the candidates have been merely speaking for the country at large. Lord, how the nation hates Washington. Ask any Texan or Vermonter or whomever, and he will chew your ear off about that godless pile on the Potomac, that lobby-choked mausoleum, that fat, besotted . . . and you can throw in tasteless while you're at it. And dull.

When Presidents themselves talk that way, it is not merely campaign bombast aimed at the hinterlands. Jimmy Carter entered Washington as a stranger, and has never been accepted by it.

Ronald Reagan openly campaigned against the place. The President may find temporary shelter in the roomy house on Pennsylvania Avenue, but when he looks toward green Lafayette Square and creamy St. John's Church, he will not see his home town. One cannot imagine Leonid Brezhnev or Margaret Thatcher mentioning Moscow or London and meaning anything but a place. But when the President says "Washington," he means a force, perhaps his nemesis. What is this city that even Presidents cannot handle?

Regarded with scorn and trepidation, the capital city remains uncomfortable but composed. By now, after all, it is used to being attacked, having in a sense been baptized in the War of 1812, when Rear Admiral Cockburn and his redcoats practically cooked the city alive. A violent storm followed the British, whipping roofs and chimneys off houses. Things looked up after that. The charred walls of the President's house were painted white, thus suggesting a new name. Eventually the mud streets were paved. A social life came waltzing in, followed briskly by a professional life and a business life, until now there is almost nothing the city lacks, except an encouraging word.

Not that Washington has ever needed any patting on the dome to nourish. Growing is what the place does best. There are 298,000 federal civilian workers in the Washington area today, compared with 2,200 in Lincoln's time. These hordes are attended in various ways by lobbyists, lawyers, accountants, special interest groups, consultants and journalists, all in vast numbers. The number of lawyers alone would drive Plato to despondency. Ever since Government started going after business, business started hiring lawyers. In July 1973 there were 10,925 attorneys listed as members of the District of Columbia bar. Two months ago, the count was up to 33,457. Naturally, the number of offices has also shot up -- by 57% in the past five years. And restaurants (mainly French) and stores (mainly chic). In 1976 Bloomingdale's set out to surround the District by opening one branch in Virginia and then, six months later, by placing another in Maryland. Neiman-Marcus and I. Magnin soon followed. For those who admire such things, there could be no surer sign that Washington had arrived.

All that sudden growth has not marred the temperate beauty of the city. To be sure, the office buildings housing lawyers and lobbyists on K Street look like toasters with windows, but on the residential streets of the city there are probably more attractive homes (Federal, Victorian, stark modern) than anywhere else in the country. This makes for some astonishingly boring discussions of real estate deals but also for some very pleasant living. So do the parks, like Montrose and Rock Creek. So do the ball fields and tennis courts (available). The city's most famous structures have always held a special power: Lincoln, white as a sheet, looking out from his inappropriate throne across the Reflecting Pool (drained now for repairs) toward the Washington Monument; the monument itself, an elongated ghost, ringed by schoolchildren, peering over the city as if to check on its prosperity.

Along 16th Street all the world's churches seem to have convened for a permanent caucus -- Mormon, Universalist, Episcopal, Lutheran, Swedenborgian. There are many distinctive areas like this. Glen Echo is an amusement park that went out of business in 1968. Now arts groups meet there near abandoned carrousel horses and a cracked, empty pool. Downtown, the old Woodward & Lothrop department store looks as handsome as ever, with its polished wood everywhere. Streets are lined with wig emporiums and phrenologists. The National Portrait Gallery is located in the old U.S. Patent Office that doubled as a makeshift hospital during the Civil War. Walt Whitman wrote of soldiers dying there between the rows of inventions. The Phillips Collection at 21st and Q is still a great place to be alone with a painting. Yet a lot of the best in Washington is new, including a clean, safe subway and a hockey team that is quite bad enough to bring happy tears to the eyes of old Senators fans.

As for the growth of the arts, Washington has reached a point in the past few years where only a transplanted New Yorker would remain unimpressed. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts opened in 1971, bringing yet more unnecessary acres of red carpeting to the city but also presenting thousands of nights of first-class opera, theater and ballet. The National Symphony is now led by Mstislav Rostropovich and is magnificent. There are other great institutions: the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian museums, the National Theater, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden -- all intelligently run, all national showpieces. Nor is the feeling of these places monumental and distant. One of the white blades of the National Gallery's East Building is tinged brown about three feet up from the grass, where kids could not resist grasping the stone.

This is the Washington tourists see -- 13 million visitors a year, 3.5 million in April alone, when the Tidal Basin wears a garland of cherry blossoms. Tourists do not generally see the black ghetto areas like Anacostia, where trimmed lawns and trees as stately as dowagers mix strangely with dour housing projects and graffiti-ridden seesaws. Nor are there many tours that stop at the corner of 14th and Belmont, where stained couches lie cut open on the sidewalk. Washington is 70% black. Not all is poor black; the "Gold Coast'1 out along 16th Street is largely black and upper middle class and stucco. But the city has more than its share of the ravages of poverty, a situation not improved after the riots of 1968, when "white flight" to tranquil McLean, Va., and such places left the city poorer.

Now middle-class whites are settling in the District, though not yet in great numbers. Middle-class blacks, in turn, are moving out to the suburbs, and as Peter McGrath and Howard Means pointed out in the October Washingtonian magazine. Prince George's County, Md., may soon provide "the purest test in the area of the ability of blacks and whites to live together." Such facets of Washington life are not the concern of Washington haters, who concentrate their fury on candlelit Georgetown and rich but modest Cleveland Park. Yet their grievances about Washington run far deeper than this. And not all have to do with the meddlesome Fed:

The Solid Civil Servant. In a city where everyone and his brother are cast in bronze, the federal employee requires no such memorial. He is more immovable than any statue, and he needs no horse or cannon for protection. He is also substantially protected from inflation and old age. And he is close to being recession-proof, living blissfully in what former Attorney General Griffin Bell calls "the land of the lotus eaters." Including the 9.1% pay raise that took effect in October, the average annual salary for federal white-collar employees is $23,000 in the capital area. Federal pensions are boosted to keep up with the cost of living not once but twice a year, costing taxpayers an extra annual $500 million. When President Carter tried to reduce that raise, the federal employees' unions mounted a zealous lobbying campaign and beat him in the House, 309 to 72. Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus, who is planning to return soon to Idaho, will take home mixed memories: "I'm not anti-Washington. I enjoy it. But you have games going on all the time with these people. There are bureaucrats and there are 'powercrats.' I call the two or three percent who poison the well 'powercrats.' "

The Beltway Bandits. The Carter White House likes to boast that there are 40,000 fewer federal employees today than in 1976. True enough. But there also happen to be 30,000 more part-time federal employees. Moreover, the Government pays between $4.5 billion and $5 billion a year to private contractors, those burgeoning consulting firms known as the "Beltway Bandits" for their location on Route 495, which encircles the District. President Carter has tried to cut back the use of consultants, but like the other beneficiaries of Big Government, they are getting stronger all the time.

Here Comes Everybody.Those lawyers, lobbyists, accountants and others who hover around the federal honey pot are remarkably well rewarded for their attentiveness. In 1979 Washington was once again the nation's most affluent marketplace, according to Sales and Marketing Management magazine. The average income of households in metropolitan Washington after taxes was $27,200, which is a tidy 31 1/2% above the national average. The average household income for suburban Montgomery County, Md., was $30,333. In Fairfax County in northern Virginia, it was $33,578. One of the reasons that the rest of the country begrudges these people their incomes is that the rest of the country is indirectly paying for them through increased taxes to an increasing Government. And of course the hangers-on have a keen interest in seeing the Government grow.

Here Comes Nothing. If all the hundreds of thousands of federal employees and hangers-on actually helped to make Government efficient, Washington's glaring wealth might not be so resented. But the general perception is that nothing connected with the Government works at all. That is especially true of Congress these days, where all the reforms of the past few years were supposed to oil the machine. It was not long ago when the great wail about Congress was aimed at the obstructive, old (and usually Southern) committee chairmen. Nowadays you do not see a chairman of the Rules Committee putting controversial bills in his pocket and going off to a Virginia farm, the way Congressman Howard Smith used to do in the '40s and '50s -- "I have an old sow that just loves to have her ear scratched. I've got to tend her now and then."

What you do see, however, is the "iron triangle," the term applied to the relationship among the people in a given Government department, a special interest group outside the Government and the members and/or staff of a congressional committee or subcommittee, all working on the same problem. Triangle describes the positioning of the participants, iron their mobility. Such arrangements are further immobilized by the sheer number of subcommittees dealing with any one issue. With the power of the leadership in both the House and the Senate reduced to almost nothing these days, bills go to several committees simultaneously, which then report conflicting versions to the floor. Want to know when to expect a coherent energy policy out of Congress? Ask any or all of the 83 committees and subcommittees now handling the crisis.

Power to the Lobbyists. The Government is supposed to represent the will of the people. The complaint today is that it only represents the will of people with special interests. There are more than 2,500 trade associations and professional groups with offices in metropolitan Washington (900 have come to the city in just the past decade). Of these some 1,800 have their national headquarters in Washington. They even have their own association -- the American Society of Association Executives -- and their own flag (ASAE in gold on a bold blue square). The 2,500 associations employ some 87,000 people and spend about $4 billion a year to try to get the Government to see things their own separate ways. There are also more than 500 national corporations with representatives in Washington. What all this amounts to, in the words of a former lobbyist, is "a new branch of Government."

Driven and Detached. All of the above adds up to what many people in and out of Washington perceive as a smug, cold, self-absorbed city, wholly out of touch with real-life America. Too many Washingtonians speak of "access" to centers of influence; too many talk in initials and numbers (OSHA, DOD, HR -- 152). Too many want to "meet for lunch" in order to pump others for favors or information. Too many are transients. Too many only want to know you when you are up.

Then there are all those journalists -- too many, period. There are 2,661 news-gathering organizations in the city, and they are part of the action. Washington may be the only city in the U.S. -- in the world -- where journalists enjoy so high a social standing. They gain their prestige like lobbyists and lawyers, by serving those in power, by providing their means of publicity and communication. Those who serve especially well often gain power for themselves; too many do that. On the other hand, those who do not serve at all are kept in solitary confinement, without sources. Journalists in Washington are courted, partied, pampered and told that they are wonderful. Too many believe it.

Then again, the city often appears detached not only from the rest of the country, but also within itself. Unlike Gaul, Washington is divided into four parts, four unequal sections that center on the Capitol and then spread out in their separate directions. But the separations go deeper. Blacks and whites may be coming together in the suburbs, but in the District the blacks and whites generally have their own areas. The monuments are also separate from where people live. So are the museums. The big snazzy stores have their own sections as well. And if you want to watch the Bullets or the Caps, you have to drive to a separate city (Landover, Md.). In short, there is no easy flow to life in Washington, no meandering from gallery to dinner to theater without a trek. Every person seems his own department.

And Dull. Sure, there are plenty of new restaurants in Washington, but with a couple of exceptions, all the food tastes as if it were prepared in a central kitchen located at K Street and Connecticut Avenue. Sure, there is the Kennedy Center. But where are the renegade artists and the experimental playwrights? Where are the writers? Every couple of years, someone will produce an article on the literary life in Washington, in which Herman Wouk's name is trotted out like the tsar's jewels. To be fair, there is no literary society in any American city now. But except for the work of a few first-rate poets and novelists, most Washington prose goes into memos.

Where, for that matter, is intellectual life generally? There ire scholars aplenty in Washington -- all packed away in think tanks like Brookings and the American Enterprise Institute, hard at work on social science projects that will undoubtedly have practical applications. But where are Washington's university professors? There are 25 colleges and universities in the immediate area, employing more than 10,000 faculty members. In Boston, it would be impossible to throw a party without a dozen professors showing up. In Washington, professors are invisible, out of it, lower than lobbyists, far lower than journalists. Of course, parties are places for the conduct of business, not discourse. That is just as well. Henry James romantically regarded Washington as the "city of conversation." It would be interesting to see what he would make of the arcane political chitchat that fills lunch hours at Sans Souci and the Madison.

Obviously, some of these grievances are more urgent than others. But in a strange way they have all been blended into one shrill complaint. There is something quite special going on here. The city is not solely an object of scorn for being clumsy and cold. The very idea of Washington is hated too. And both the idea and the fact of the city have now become so confused in the public mind that expressions of contempt for the place sound as if the city had done the complainer some personal injury: "It is impossible for me to express the depth of feelings I've seen around this country about Washington," says Columnist Richard Reeves, who worked as a national political reporter in Washington from 1972 through 1978. "It is a patriotic hatred. It crosses all socioeconomic classes, educated or uneducated, rural or urban."

Americans who feel a "patriotic hatred" toward Washington view the place as enemy territory. Mighty strong words, when one considers that the city was originally wished into existence by a country that had just wished itself into existence. That steamy, swampy capital was designed to be the repository of the new country's best hopes. If Washington has now fallen in the public eye, does it mean that those hopes have also fallen? Or is it rather, and more ominously, that Washington has indeed become all the country has hoped for, and that it now represents the penalty for hoping for too much?

In a sense Washington has shown itself to be the answer to the American nightmare -- overstuffed, overpaid, over-employed. Perhaps the national animus against the city has something to do with the country's disappointment and/or frustration with itself. Maybe Washington is not out of touch with the rest of the country. Maybe the rest of the country is out of touch with itself.

And maybe, too, Washington is not quite as bad as it is made out.

Everyone would agree that incompetent federal employees should be fired, for example, but you do not hear much talk about the invaluable civil servants who do hold agencies together. There are tens of thousands of skilled, devoted, diligent workers on whom the entire machinery of Government depends, and who in total anonymity have saved the neck of many a Cabinet officer and President.

As for the high pay, a veteran Treasury Department manager admits that "the less competent people in Government make too much money, far more than they would be making anywhere else." But he adds, "The really good people in Government are not making as much as they should. And Government is like any other place; a relatively few people carry all the rest."

There is another side to the complaint against lobbyists too. Many lobbyists do regard their breed as a "separate branch of Government," but rather than being ashamed of that fact, they see their branch as the only one that works. Peter Jay, Great Britain's former ambassador, admires Washington for the very reason that it is an open "marketplace of ideas, of powers, of influence." And many of the most obstructive forces in Washington sincerely believe that they are acting in the name of the people who condemn them. That certainly goes for Congress. All those Gordian-knotted committees were set up in direct reaction to a time when things like the civil rights bills could be shelved for eternity. That time is often romanticized now. Much is made of the good old smoke-filled rooms. But the smoke-filled rooms did not produce an array of heroes either.

"Don't tie the President's hands!" That was the plea when the President's hands belonged to Franklin Roosevelt. By the time the country ended the Nixon years, the plea had been changed to "Tie the President's hands! Hurry!" So Congress began to assert itself. Young Congressmen have done likewise. "If you want to get along, go along," Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn used to counsel new members. That would be unthinkable now; freshman Congressmen are too obstreperous. Yet if they are refusing to follow the leader these days, perhaps it is because no leader is worth following.

As for the more subjective grievances -- that Washingtonians are power mad, detached and dull -- it is first of all an impertinent accusation to level at those (and there are more all the time) who live in Washington wholly removed from the power circles. There are plenty of D.C, dentists whose closest contact with the Government is the left incisor of a Senator's niece. But even for those at the heart of the heart of the Government, that element of detachment from one's fellows is neither surprising nor condemnable. Since they are tied to one center, it would be difficult to also be tied to each other. And the conversation that emanates from that center can hardly be any more limited than the conversation of other company towns, say Detroit.

Nor does the fact that Washington is a company town mean that the company itself is lifeless. When a big political event breaks in Washington, there is nothing like it. Those same reporters who sometimes make too much of too little also know a real story when they see one. They whoop it up like prospectors, and the city shines with news. The point is that Washington is very much whatever the rest of the country wants it to be, and if it has turned out to be not quite perfect, it is largely because some old ideas soured, or outlived their time, and some new ideas have not yet been brought under control.

Whether the ideas were good or bad, it has always been Washington's lot to respond to them. When cars change shape, Detroit looks pretty much as it always looked. But when the Republic changes shape, the capital city is a brand-new town.

The essential fact about Washington is that it was invented to represent a representative Government. Every time a new President moves in, the city changes dramatically. All those immeasurably powerful Cabinet chiefs, Senators, admirals, ambassadors -- they come and go. Thousands of Washingtonians have been wondering if they would continue to be Washingtonians after this week, or revert to Iowans or Oregonians. The city was invented by the people, and it takes its nature from whatever the people wish for it

If the rest of the country does not like what it sees in its capital city these days, it will eventually change things. As the core of the democracy, Washington will always display the most extreme consequences of popular sovereignty. The citizens who longed for an end to the spoils system now look at some deadheaded, immovable GS-12 and shriek, "But we didn't mean to end up with you!" Of course not. But they did mean someone as different as possible from some political boss's dopey nephew, and up showed the GS-12. It will take more reforming to produce the perfect civil servant or the perfect Congress or the perfect lobby system. But if the urgings are strong enough, Washington will change again.

In a way Washington was doomed to be a hated city from the start. A country with historical inclinations to thumb its nose at Big Government and to mock politicians is not about to embrace the center of Big Government, the politicians' Disney World. Yet sometimes there is the suggestion of an embrace. It occurs in oblique ways, as when aggrieved masses of people march on the city for a cause because Washington is the only place in the country they can yell at. It also occurs every June when some of the brightest and most talented university graduates head for the city that will wholly challenge them.

And the people's affection for the city shows in more indirect circumstances still -- in those quiet, unguarded moments when visitors and residents as well set aside words like access and power and amble among the monuments as subconscious patriots. Children are more demonstrative. They shout up at Lincoln's capacious ears, or take the Capitol three steps at a clip, acting as if they owned the place.

They cannot take the Capitol these days. Piles of wood lie on the steps, where workmen are hammering together the viewing stands for the Inauguration. The ceremony will be held on the west side of the building this time. When the President takes his oath of office he will be lined up with the monuments to Washington and Lincoln. After he is sworn in, he will make his way up Constitution Avenue, then veer to the right up Pennsylvania toward the house that Rear Admiral Cockburn could not obliterate.

The city will be bare then -- not like now, when autumn continues to languish on the trees, and Lafayette Square is still bright yellow with chrysanthemums Come January the city will be humming again, and this present quiescence for gotten. Miserable normality will be restored, and the country will glower at it creation.

-- by roger Rosenblatt

Reported by Simmons Fentress/Washington

With reporting by Simmons Fentress

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