Get Bill

The base meets the surreal in a capital city that, briefly, matters again

by Jason Vest

LAST WEDNESDAY EVENING, a young woman stood at a tavern pay phone, venting. She had been en route to the bar, she said, hoping to catch the latest episode of the capital's real-life Aaron Spelling drama -- only to find 24th Street blocked by a cadre of soldiers and Secret Service agents who had secured the street for Yasir Arafat's entourage. "Like anyone gives a shit about him," she fumed.

Her priorities are hardly unique. "We're back! We're the Center of the Universe again!" was the first thought of Washington Post society reporter Roxanne Roberts, who -- along with virtually every other denizen of the Fourth Estate here, from the lowliest hack to the loftiest pundit -- could hardly contain her glee at the latest presidential predicament. During the Cold War, Washington was, journalistically speaking, one of the two most important cities in the world; now, in the era of globalism, it's easily upstaged by places like Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Sarajevo. Indeed, in some respects, it's become rather like some remote, orphan Third World bureau, where reporters pray for war or assassination -- something, in other words, devoid of complexity, something that will capture not just the attention but the imagination of the reader.

By this reasoning, last week began as just another bad one for Washington. As of Tuesday morning, most editors had resigned themselves to the reality that the News of the Week would emanate from those ol' debbils Havana and Baghdad, and that Washington would get attention only as the site of Arafat's conclave with Benjamin Netanyahu. By Wednesday morning, however, Fidel and the pope, Saddam and the Middle East, were not just secondary on news budgets -- they had taken a back seat in the consciousness of the nation's capital.

When scandal hits, Beltwayites revel in knowing that, rightly or wrongly, the eyes of the world are trained upon the federal city. People walk around with a spring in their steps and smiles on their faces -- neither one a usual feature of the D.C. urban landscape. Motorists linger in their parked cars, listening to the latest updates. A ride in a cab becomes not just a means of transportation but an informative, entertaining, or frightening experience, depending on which radio show is the driver's favorite. (Anecdotal evidence suggests that cabbies are inclined to believe the worst about the president; I heard three reference the Ron-Brown-was-shot-by-Clinton theory, with one saying, "This serves him right for killing that good black man.")

A sense of community is difficult to come by in this city, so Washingtonians take it when they can get it. Bars, even some sports bars, are uncharacteristically quiet as patrons watch TV intently. People who otherwise wouldn't talk to each other get engrossed in conversation. And subway riders carrying copies of the morning's Post don't seem to mind if others crowd around to read over their shoulders.

BUT AS pleasant and familiar as the glow of shared experience may be, there is a base, surreal quality to this scandal that makes it unique. It is a sight to behold when colleagues who normally concern themselves with Congress, welfare, or urban renewal are suddenly fixated on blowjobs. (Never in a million years did I expect to be in James Fallows's office having a meeting on this topic.) Indeed, almost every news organization has its own internal moniker for the Lewinsky business, and the terms they have come up with have little to do with the legal ramifications of the matter. Staffers at the august-but-cheeky National Law Journal refer to it as "Pussygate," while some at the Washington Post prefer the more genteel "Fornigate" or its cousin, "Pornigate." Eschewing the overused "-gate" construction, hacks at Inside Edition have been referring simply to "the First Cocksucker."

We've been down this road before, of course, or at least ones like it -- from Clarence Thomas's Coke cans to Gennifer Flowers's "He eats pussy like a champ" to Dick Morris's unique variation on "This little piggy went to market." Even so, there is something truly disconcerting about walking through the staid halls of a national news magazine and overhearing the phrases "oral sex" and "eatin' ain't cheatin' " repeatedly, both in formal interviews and in casual conversation.

At least we print hacks do our work out of the public eye. "You have no idea how humiliating it is," says one TV reporter, "to knock on doors and ask [former interns] if their colleague Monica ever talked about blowing the president." And it was hard not to feel for CNN anchor Judy Woodruff, who, last Thursday, turned bright red and giggled when Bernard Shaw earnestly told viewers he had "just one eight-word question for the president: Did you have oral sex with Monica Lewinsky?"

TAWDRY AS it is, the Washington media's oral fixation shows how much more egalitarian scandal here has become. It used to be that sexual shenanigans like these were kept out of the papers -- but very much in the elite gossip loop. Tales of whoring by Warren Harding and his cronies were hardly unknown in the 1920s, after all. Back then, even upper-class women who indulged were threatened only with genteel titters, not journalistic scrutiny. Washington Herald publisher Cissie Patterson delighted in telling peers how, at a 1920 dinner party given by Alice Roosevelt Longworth (herself no slouch in the man-eating department), she had trysted with a male dinner guest in Alice's upstairs library. The exchange of notes the next day between the grand dames of D.C. society captures Washington sensibility at the time:

"Dear Cissie: Upon sweeping up the library this morning, the maid found several hair-pins which I thought you might need and which I am returning. Alice."

"Dear Alice: Many thanks for the hair-pins. If you had looked on the chandelier you might also have sent back my shoes. Love, Cissie."

More recently, reporters declined to write anything about Congressman Wilbur Mills's relationship with a stripper -- until his career-ending drive to the Tidal Basin -- because, as the New York Times' Eileen Shanahan has said, "as long as it appeared that this was just a purely private sexual escapade that didn't affect his work, it was not considered news."

ONE OF the most bizarre sidelights of the Lewinsky coverage is the degree to which some reporters (in private) and pundits (in public) have gone in assuming that the media scrum is pushing Monica to the verge of doing herself in. I know of one journalist who has actually penned a note of apology to Lewinsky; she feels the poor woman simply "followed her heart" and had "love and desire cloud her judgment," and is now being terrorized by a media throng.

That other journalists have echoed the sentiment is bizarre. They actually seem to believe that Lewinsky -- she who lived in a posh Watergate apartment as an unpaid intern, who spent nearly $100 a week on her hair, who (unlike most 24-year-olds with psychology degrees from obscure colleges) had job offers from the UN ambassador and a Fortune 500 company via an elite Washington fixer -- is a victim.

Well. The word ruined was bandied about in reference to everyone from Donna Rice to Whitewater diarist Josh Steiner (who, last I checked, was doing quite well on Wall Street). But given the close relationship between Monica and her mother, who promoted her Three Tenors book less on the basis of her reportage than on the possibility that she had an affair with a corpulent opera singer, the former intern is hardly facing her doom. "I would not be surprised," says a veteran tabloid reporter, "if book and movie rights negotiations were already under way. I really don't think this is a case of some babe in the woods being taken advantage of."

Indeed, the story has been full of undeserving heroes. To some in the pundit class, this is an occasion to rally around their "old friend" Vernon Jordan; the notion that he could have done anything improper apparently defies imagination. And Linda Tripp, perhaps the leading contender for über-snitch of the century, seems to have been handled rather gently -- as have Ken Starr, who seems light-years away from his originally authorized investigation, and Lucianne Goldberg, the political spy-cum-right wing literary diva whose comments to the press have simmered with anti-Clinton vitriol.

But that is how the scandal has looked from Washington: one week and counting of blind spots and strange enthusiasms. On Friday, White House spokesman Mike McCurry, whose assignment to date has been to say virtually nothing at long press conferences, went before the Senate Press Secretaries Association. Booked for the appearance long in advance, McCurry -- the Cool Hand Luke of PR -- entered the bar at the Hay-Adams Hotel to a round of thunderous bipartisan applause. Properly shocked, he surveyed the scene and said, "This is, undoubtedly, the only place in the universe I would get at standing ovation at this moment."

Jason Vest is a reporter at U.S. News and World Report.

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