Monday, Mar. 28, 1988

Historic Roles WASHINGTON GOES TO WAR

By Stefan Kanfer

As the New Republic saw it in 1942, Washington was a "combination of Moscow . . . Paris . . . Wichita . . . and Hell." In this rich anecdotal history, David Brinkley spends much of his time in the precincts of purgatory. The veteran commentator was a young reporter when the capital began to mobilize. "Was it conceivable," he wondered, "that the leadership of the Western world in wartime could fall to a city only a few generations out of the mud? A city that still boasted 15,000 privies?"

Indeed it was. As the guns sounded overseas, gallus-snapping Congressmen and dollar-a-year New Dealers, bullnecked racists and high-toned society hostesses, secretaries and alphabet-soup bureaucrats from the OPA, BEW, CAS and OEM all began to audition for their roles in history. The little Southern town abruptly became an arena of contradictions, and Brinkley surveys them all.

When the Navy needed acreage for a local military-intelligence station, it seized the grounds of a girls' school and summarily ejected the students. Meantime, a Senator could find no place to house his wife and child; so they stayed home in Missouri, while Harry Truman spent his first years in Washington living in a hotel. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, observes Brinkley, "invented the modern press conference by accepting direct questions," whereas his predecessors had demanded they be written and submitted in advance. Yet F.D.R. regarded his journalistic critics with "what seemed to be the consuming, corrosive hatred of his public life." The black opera star Marian Anderson broke the color line by singing in the D.A.R.'s Constitution Hall. But for Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, there was no such thing as race relations: "He repeatedly introduced a bill to deport all Negroes to Africa and once suggested that Eleanor Roosevelt be sent with them and made their 'queen.' "

Brinkley's lively account fades out with Roosevelt's death. Postwar Washington, he observes, was the only major capital "on the winning side, or any side, to survive without a scratch." Psychologically, however, it was altered almost beyond recognition. Within a generation, the unthinkable would be commonplace in D.C.: desegregation, Medicare, a 50-state union, peace marches, feminism. Brinkley is uniquely qualified to narrate the causes of that change. After all, in the early 1940s, what title could have been more incomprehensible than that of TV network anchorman?