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Only in America
Matt Frei
Matt Frei, the BBC's former Washington correspondent, goes under the skin of the nation's capital to unravel the paradoxes of the world's last remaining superpower.The paperback has been fully updated to provide a unique view into the weird, wonderful and totally bizarre workings of America’s political world and the 2008 Presidential election.Imagine a city so powerful that the weapons commanded from its ministries could obliterate the globe many times over and yet so vulnerable that it cannot prevent a seventeen-year-old boy from killing half a dozen of its inhabitants in a shooting spree that lasts for a whole month. A city so rich that it spends 150 million dollars a year on corporate lunches, dinners and fundraisers and yet so poor that its streets are frequently as potholed as those of any forgotten backwater in the developing world. A city that deploys more armed officers per square mile than any other in the world but has earned the title of being its country's murder capital. A city where 565 elected Congressmen and Senators are chased, charmed, cajoled and sometimes bribed by 35,000 registered lobbyists; where the most illustrious resident travels with a fleet of planes and a small army of body guards but where the mayor for twelve years was a convicted crack addict who believed that every law in his own country was racist, 'including the law of gravity'. A city that plays host to seventeen different spying agencies, employing 23,000 agents, none of whom were able to discover a plot that involved flying civilian airliners into buildings, even though the plotters had littered their path with clues. Hard to imagine? Welcome to Washington DC: the Rome of the 21st century.Matt Frei was the BBC’s Washington correspondent from 2002, and now presents BBC World News America. Now fully updated to cover the longest, most expensive and most fascintating election campaign in US history, including the astonishing ascent of Barack Obama, the first election of the internet age, the rise and fall of John McCain and Sarah Palin and the new First Family. ‘Only in America’ is a surprising and brilliant dissection of the most powerful nation on earth from its capital out.
MATT FREI
Only in America
DEDICATION (#ulink_1ad7da37-da1f-55a2-94b4-5ac9c2fd2b61)
For my familyGeorge, Amelia, Lottie, Alice and Penny
CONTENTS
Cover (#ufa2eff0f-9e7c-542b-a726-f8787e334ebc)
Title Page (#u291feb82-93d1-5607-935f-f5262a849942)
Dedication (#u0c01739f-7461-5c49-aed3-d9859f552b8e)
Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job (#u483b7d18-e8e5-52d7-abfe-26a7a1126e83)
Arriving (#u6fc16a9e-5280-577b-885f-7835b160f544)
1 Beltway Blues (#u3581336d-44e6-5e06-9351-fdb5b1074445)
2 Tilden Street (#ubcf864bf-5d71-5845-acd0-fd2de0bcb484)
3 The Colour of Fear (#ubdcab885-2809-5114-8aef-bd3744c322f8)
4 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (#litres_trial_promo)
5 Grovelling for Votes (#litres_trial_promo)
6 Weather You Can Call Names (#litres_trial_promo)
7 God is Everywhere (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Defenders of the Constitution or Scum of the Earth? (#litres_trial_promo)
9 Think-Tank Alley (#litres_trial_promo)
10 The Tyranny of Comfort (#litres_trial_promo)
11 The Colour of Money (#litres_trial_promo)
12 Class Without War (#litres_trial_promo)
13 School Citizens (#litres_trial_promo)
14 Whose American Dream is it Anyway? (#litres_trial_promo)
Afterthoughts (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
BLACK MAN GIVEN NATION’S WORST JOB (#ulink_fd7fa05e-9b62-58d5-9997-5d656a4546c0)
The National Mall is the Circus Maximus of Washington, DC. Instead of chariot races and gladiatorial battles, it plays benign host to rallies, concerts, charitable walks against breast cancer or armies of tourists shuffling dutifully past the war monuments, the shrines to the Founding Fathers and the museums that form the granite and marble core of a city that refers to itself, somewhat self-consciously, as ‘the Nation’s Capital’. The steps to the grandiose Lincoln Memorial, illuminated at night like a pop-up Parthenon, were glistening with early November drizzle. It was one in the morning and a small crowd had gathered at the foot of the lugubrious Abraham Lincoln, a giant sitting back in his huge throne, in brooding disapproval of the world around him.
It was a motley gathering of students, tourists and some interns from Capitol Hill, clutching a bottle of champagne. They were all huddled around a radio as if listening intently to football scores. But the mood was too intimate and reverential for sport. In any case this was the middle of the night. One of the women, an African American, was crying silently as she listened. The make-up on a young white woman’s face was smudged with tears or rain. I couldn’t tell. What seeped out of the small wireless wasn’t the excitable voice of a sports commentator. It was the brown-sugar baritone of a politician. The voice rose and fell as if delivering a sermon. And when the speaker said that ‘the true strength of our nation is not the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth but the enduring power of our ideas’ the small radio crackled and hissed to the sound of mass applause. The gathering at the Lincoln Memorial nodded silently in collective approval. In the distance someone was hollering with apparent joy. A car passed by blaring out the popular country song ‘Only in America’.
Half a mile away at the White House a much bigger crowd had assembled. Washington, DC doesn’t usually go in for spontaneous human gatherings, especially in the middle of the night. But something had brought the streets to life. The sound of car horns echoed off the inscrutable glass and steel towers on K Street, home to the city’s most powerful lobbying firms. Even the anti-nuclear protester who has been living in his tent outside the White House for as long as I can remember, forever threatening but thankfully never achieving self-immolation, had crept out of his lair and was now staring through the black wrought-iron gates of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. There was nothing to see. George and Laura Bush, famous for retiring to bed early, were probably fast asleep by now. A lone sharpshooter was patrolling the roof.
But the crowd had not come to gawp. They had come to imagine. In a few months a family would reside here that descended from the slaves who had helped to build this replica of a Virginia tobacco planter’s mansion two centuries earlier. As an African American, Barack Obama could have been legally owned by America’s first sixteen Presidents. Now he and his wife Michelle and their daughters Sasha and Malia would move into the White House, not as cooks, cleaners or advisers, but as the First Family. Millions of Americans doubtlessly felt that such an event was horribly overdue. Millions more around the world had doubted it would ever come to pass. The airwaves, the internet, the newspapers had been filled for months with meticulous polling data, touch-screen electoral maps and convoluted conjecture about why an African American would be acceptable to a largely white electorate. Or why not. Entire days of broadcasting time had been spent discussing the so-called Bradley Effect, named after a former African American candidate for the governorship of California who was soaring in the opinion polls but lost in the privacy of the polling booth because too many voters were simply too racist. But that was 1982 and this was now 2008. And wherever you were on that night and whoever you wanted to win, you had to pinch yourself that on 4 November sixty-two million Americans had elected a forty-seven-year-old black Senator called Barack Hussein Obama to be the forty-fourth President of the most powerful nation on earth.
Call it the stomach-knot-forming sensation of history. And what formed that knot weren’t the returns from those crucial swing states of Ohio or Pennsylvania, or the moment that California and Washington state tipped him over the 270 electoral votes that a candidate needs to win. No, it was the simple image of seeing America’s first black First Family walk onto the stage at Grant Park in Chicago in front of half a million people. Jesse Jackson, the veteran civil rights campaigner who had stood next to Martin Luther King when he was shot forty years earlier in Memphis, was buried in the crowd, his face streaming with tears. He too had tried to make a run for the White House two decades earlier but failed. Jackson had been at times lukewarm, critical and downright obscene about Obama’s candidacy. Like many other leaders from the civil rights generation, Jackson at first thought that Obama, with his white mother and Kenyan father, wasn’t black enough. Obama was not the descendant of slaves. He had not been branded by history. His skin colour, like his candidacy, represented a compromise to purists in the civil rights movement. That compromise only became acceptable as they realized that the candidate had a real chance of becoming President.
The other famous face in the crowd belonged to Oprah Winfrey, the fabulously wealthy entertainer and talk-show hostess who had supported Obama from the start and had organized mass rallies on his behalf. ‘He is the one …’, she once declared, sounding more as if she was touting a Messiah than a candidate for public office. Oprah’s endorsement from the sofa pulpit of her television show dusted Obama with mainstream appeal and introduced him to legions of white housewives who were only dimly aware of the lanky politician with the exotic name. The rest of the vast crowd in Chicago was anonymous: a mixture of white, black, Hispanic, young and old. They were cheering, crying, laughing or just open-mouthed with astonishment. In our studio in Washington, DC I watched Trent Duffy, the young spokesman of the outgoing Bush White House, watch the pictures from Chicago. He too gulped. A McCain supporter, he couldn’t help but feel a moment of pride. Whatever you thought of Obama as a candidate or of his potential as a future President, this was a night to remember. America had reintroduced itself to the rest of the world.
Even the New York Times, which prides itself on its long-winded headlines, was lost for verbosity. One word bleated out from its front page: OBAMA. The New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch, who had been lukewarm about the candidacy of Senator Obama, splashed a reverential ‘Mr President’ on its front page. In Kenya, where relations of the President-elect still lived in a village of the Luo tribe, the government declared 4 November a national holiday. Elsewhere Obama’s election was greeted overwhelmingly as a symbol of America’s renewal, as proof that America could still inspire, as evidence that the tired cliché of the American dream was not yet dead. After almost a decade of mounting anti-Americanism, newspapers and politicians in Paris, Rome and London suddenly began to ask themselves: could we ever elect our own Obama? One dreads to think what they would have said if Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska had prevailed. It would surely have been: look at how racist America still is. The charge would have been levelled even though no European nation is close to electing a native-born Pakistani, Turk or Algerian as its head of government or state.
The morning after the election the weather was still grey and wet. Yellowed leaves were falling limply to the ground and yet the dogged regiment of Washington commuters seemed to have a spring in its step. Something had changed. I asked the African American woman at the hotel reception how she felt. She smiled, winked and said nothing. She didn’t need to. The capital, which had never failed to vote for a Democratic presidential candidate, had opted for Barack Obama by an unprecedented 92 per cent. Not even Saddam Hussein could rely on such results. African Americans, who make up almost two-thirds of the city’s population and who used to be famously absent at the polling booth on election day, turned out in record numbers. A similar picture was repeated elsewhere. Hispanic voters, who now represent the biggest minority in the United States, voted overwhelmingly for Obama. So did students. The Democrats had managed to mobilize millions of first-time voters in an aggressive and meticulous campaign that used the internet as a tool of fundraising and recruitment. Obama took his campaign to enemy territory and won states like Virginia which had not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since the Lyndon Johnson landslide of 1964. It was an astonishing achievement, one that came about because of an uncanny combination of factors: a ground-breaking campaign, a great candidate, a weak opposition, revulsion with the incumbent Republican President, opposition to his war in Iraq, an economic crisis that had flawed America and undermined its self-confidence, and all of the above leavened with the deep desire for change. A majority of Americans had come to the conclusion that in the twenty-first century it was time to try something different. And so they went out to make some history.
The last time I felt the benign knot in my stomach was the day the Berlin Wall came down. This too was a symbolic moment. It was bloodless and it shifted the world’s political furniture. Of course the laughter and the tears of joy didn’t last for long. German unification was a bruising business. Running America will be, too. With two wars and a failing economy, Obama has his work cut out. As the satirical magazine The Onion put it in a banner headline: ‘Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job’. How he got the job and how it became so bad is the unlikely story of America in the last eight years, a story which we joined after our arrival in the summer of 2002.
November 2008
ARRIVING (#ulink_56ff1112-0b87-5e7c-8179-1b58609fabaa)
There are many reasons to feel queasy about starting a new job in a strange country. But fear of dying isn’t usually on the list. I was on my way to Washington DC. We had lived in Asia for almost six years and were preparing to take up a new posting in the United States. Penny, my wife had dispatched me early to find schools for our children George, Amelia and Lottie, a car and a house to live in. After a nomadic decade of moving from one post to the next I had learned that the secret to a happy foreign correspondent is a foreign correspondent’s happy spouse. My track record in scouting out good accommodation had been proven in Rome (a penthouse flat in a crumbling palazzo), Hong Kong (a crumbling flat with a fabulous view) and Singapore (an old British officer’s house with lazy fans and a large garden). Now it was Washington’s turn. The pressure was on. As I settled into my seat on the plane I could imagine us all lounging on one of those traditional American porches.
I hadn’t been back to DC since my first and only visit in 1988 as a young radio reporter. Then I had come to cover the election of President George (HW) Bush. If someone had told me I would be returning a decade and a half later to live in America and report on the presidency of another man called George (W) Bush I would have laughed. To have father and son elected to the same coveted job was odd enough. To have them share exactly the same name – but for one humble H – would have struck me as bizarrely unimaginative. At least they’d save money on the monogrammed napkins at the White House. The thought occurred to me as I surveyed the movie menu and looked forward to a long transpacific flight without young children and the torture that pits their restlessness against your nerves. The journey was going to be blissful.
It was for about six hours. Until we reached a point somewhere over the Pacific. I thought I could see the sunrise over San Francisco, having just witnessed the sunset over Japan. I had already drunk half a bottle of white wine, my sense of timing was clearly impaired and I was stuck into a soppy film that would have seen me walk out of the cinema on terra firma but almost had me in floods of tears at 30,000 feet. Tear ducts are suckers for high altitude and low pressure, apparently. Suddenly the narrative was interrupted and a completely different voice entered my head, mixed with static crackle. It was the captain, an American with a reassuring baritone and a slight Southern drawl. ‘I’m afraid to tell you, ladies and gentlemen’ – pilots, it occurred to me immediately, should never use emotive words like ‘afraid’ – ‘that we have to report an engine failure in engines two and four.’ There was a pause, which I didn’t much care for. I had suddenly lost interest in the film. The tear ducts got a grip on the unfolding situation. They shut down. I was hungry for more information about our plane. I wanted to know a lot about engines two and four, but also, come to think of it, about one and three. The captain cleared his throat. ‘We will be heading, ah, I mean, returning, to the nearest airport, which I am afraid to tell you is … Tokyo. It’s five hours from where we are now, but it’s a little closer than going on to San Francisco and … we may have to make an emergency landing. I will keep you posted, folks.’ You could feel and hear the collective sobering up of three-hundred-plus passengers. Seats that had been almost horizontal were suddenly ramrod-straight. A man and a woman in the row next to me held hands and starting praying. This was, I thought, a bit premature. But it changed the mood in my section of the plane as if the Grim Reaper himself had arrived with the drinks trolley. As it happened some wanted to order more drinks. Others regretted the ones they had already consumed. I seem to remember straddling both camps. The static resumed: it was the captain again. ‘I understand that some of you may be alarmed. But I jus’ wanna reassure you. This is a very, very big bird but she can fly on two engines real good.’ I remember reading something along those lines. But was the breakdown in grammar from the cockpit an indication of engine issues the captain wasn’t letting us in on? Or was it just vernacular? Turning the 747 into a ‘bird’ was both reassuringly colloquial, betraying the confidence of a veteran pilot, but also, perhaps, alarmingly flippant. It certainly struck me as very American. All around me guttural Cantonese and high-pitched Mandarin tones were flying around like swallows before a storm. My fellow passengers were desperate for a translation that I could not nor would have wanted to give and that took five minutes to come from a Chinese-speaking stewardess. After that a few more people started muttering silent prayers. I ditched the film and went to the sky map, a handy device in moments of impending emergency; handy, that is, for working out the geography of disaster. Where would we crash-land? Who lived nearby to save us? To recover our bodies? Would there be South Sea garlands for the survivors? It was the white wine that was thinking. The little dot that represented our plane had done an outrageous U-turn over a large area of blue that displayed not a single speck of land. I zoomed out. Why not land in Hawaii? I couldn’t think of any other islands in this part of the world. Hawaii, though, was a few thousand miles to the south. We were flying over the middle of the Pacific and now we were indeed heading back to the place I had come from. What a waste of flying hours. After all this time in Asia I had become mildly superstitious. Was this a signal? Should we be going to America after all? We had been so happy in Singapore. Washington, DC, had been attacked by terrorists. My brother Chris had had a narrowish escape in New York. His apartment was next to Ground Zero but he had been on business in Paris at the time. In Singapore the only danger came in the form of stray branches from tree pruning on the airport motorway, the occasional snake in our house or being struck by lightning on the golf course (if you were stupid enough to carry one of those large umbrellas). Had I made a terrible mistake?
In the end we were spared the emergency landing, although it was alarming to see scores of fire engines and ambulances racing down the runway next to our plane. Apparently we made the evening news in Tokyo and the morning news in San Francisco. A new plane was rustled up and after a five-hour delay we recommenced our crossing of the Pacific Ocean. I arrived in Washington thirty-five hours after I had left home. I should have missed two days of my life, but because of the thirteen-hour time difference I was only a day behind. The mental maths was doing my head in. My body clock had been fast-forwarded, then rewound and then binned. Even as a seasoned traveller I had never, ever experienced jet lag like this. I should have been asleep when everyone else was awake. My brain felt like a poached egg encased in pastry. My senses were numbed, my limbs ached and I was not in the least prepared to deal with three Washington estate agents from three rival agencies. All called Kathy.
In a moment of fitful enterprise before leaving Singapore I had contacted these agencies, hoping to see as many houses as possible in the short time I had available. Little did I realize that I had broken an unwritten but widely respected etiquette in the world of Washington property. You choose an agent and then you stick with him or her to the bitter end. It is easier to get a divorce in the United States than to change agents. So to start your hunt for the dream home as a polygamist was hardly a good idea. There was also a matter of verbal misunderstanding. I was happily using the term ‘estate agent’ until the concierge in my hotel informed me that this conjured up images of managing the properties of the dead more than the accommodation of the living. I should try ‘realtor’. But that was difficult to pronounce and, in any case, sounded like something out of Viking lore. We were indeed divided by the same language, I thought, and in my mental state such subtle points of translation actually caused physical pain.
I spent much of the first day of my new life in America wondering if, when and how I should tell one Kathy about the other two. Acute jet lag makes the mind obsess acutely about little things. Eventually the Kathies would find out, wouldn’t they? And how many other BBC correspondents could there be in Washington at that time looking for a place to live? At least two as it turned out. I rang the Kathy I designated as Kathy 1, cross-referencing her name with her phone number. She had seemed to be the most forthcoming when I had called her up earlier from Singapore. ‘I’m dying to meet you in the flesh!’ I now lied, perhaps crossing a red line of familiarity.
Kathy 1 shot back: ‘Well, Matt, there’s a lot of it!’
‘Properties?’
‘No, flesh.’
I liked Kathy 1. After Singapore I was taken aback by humour that didn’t come from friends, books, TV or films. We arranged to meet later that afternoon.
I put the phone down and rang Kathy 2.
‘I am so, so glad that you called, Matt. I have just been chatting to the most delightful gentleman, who happens to be a friend of mine, who has the most gorgeous house in Georgetown. It is superb for entertaining. You and your family will adore it. Meet me in one hour, if you can.’
I was sitting on the side of the hotel bed, looking like a forlorn character in an Edward Hopper painting. My shoulders were rounder than the dome of the Capitol. My eyes had gone AWOL. My skin felt like old cornflakes and looked so pale it was translucent. I was meeting a woman who had got it into her head that I was going to entertain like an ambassador and resemble a well-scrubbed anchorman.
I turned up at the allotted location. I was early. The house was wonderful, huge and looked at least four times my budget. I was clearly wasting my time. Then I noticed an elegant woman sitting in a Jaguar on the other side of the road. She was waiting and fiddling with her phone. She had clearly seen me, but made no attempt to communicate. So she can’t have been my date. I looked at her. She looked away. It was summer. The air was ablaze and I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, what everyone in Singapore would have worn. But not, it turns out, in ‘the Nation’s Capital’. Then my phone rang. It was Kathy 2.
‘Where are you, Matt?’
‘Oh. I’m outside the house. Where are you?’
‘I’m outside the house, too …’ and with that the elegant woman in the car looked out of the window of her Jaguar and caught my eye. Despite numerous nips and tucks, her upwardly mobile cheeks fell like wet cement. She got out, straightening a pink Chanel suit. Her trussed-up hair seemed to obey a higher master. In her fifties, Kathy 2 was what I imagined the quintessential Georgetown hostess would look like: elegant, urbane, and horribly disappointed by her new client. One reluctant handshake later she was ringing the doorbell of the house, probably mentally preparing her excuses for the dear friend who would find a man resembling a bedraggled mature student darkening his illustrious doorstep.
‘Hello, Jim,’ she said. ‘This is …’
But before she could end her sentence and uncurl her disapproving upper lip, Jim blurted out: ‘Matt Frei. But of course. I recognize you from the news. I lurved your stuff from Asia. Come in. Please come in.’
First a non-crash and now this. I might have jet lag but there was a God.
Kathy 2 changed her tone as if day had banished night. After this she offered to drive me round town and show me Washington. Having almost never been recognized by anyone, I was immensely grateful for this windfall of minor celebrity and wondered whether it could translate into a 350 per cent discount on the exorbitant rent charged by Jim for his glorious mansion. Alas, it was not to be. I politely declined Kathy 2’s offer of a tour of her city. She promised to get back to me with other properties ‘better tailored for the needs of your family’. In other words, cheap. I went back to the hotel to ring Kathy 3.
‘You’re already talking to two other agents. It’s a small world, you know, and there really isn’t that much around to show you at your budget. Anyway, I am already dealing with a guy called Justin Webb. He also says he’s from the BBC. How many of you are there?’ I had been busted and the in-house competition was hot on my heels.
Later that day I decided to rent a taxi and take a tour of Washington. The driver was a noisy Nigerian, so huge he seemed barely to fit into his enormous Lincoln town car. I wanted him to drive me round town on the clock for at least an hour, a dream commission for any taxi driver anywhere in the world, I thought. But not in Washington, where taxis charge you by zones and where they make the most money by shuttling you on short trips across zone barriers. So I offered him $50 and the deal was done. He spent the rest of the trip virtually screaming into one of those tiny mobile phones that look like large earrings and are almost invisible. As he swerved from one lane to the next he also swerved from English into his native language. He appeared to be having a furious row with his wife about who should collect the laundry. He was also oblivious to the fact that he had a passenger. I tried to block out the bickering and concentrated on looking out of the window, watching the familiar images of the capital float by.
There is a strange sensation that overcomes the new arrival in America. So much of what you see is instantly recognizable from television and films. A glimpse of Capitol Hill with its splendid white dome in the distance triggers a hundred ill-defined memories from flickering screens. You almost expect someone to jump out from behind a bush and scream ‘CUUT!’ The White House seems so small at first sight that you almost believe it is made of plywood and will fold up like any other film set. The size of the building exists in inverse proportion to the amount of power that emanates from it. Is this really what all the fuss is about? So much of what you see sets off reassuring recognition. So much of what you hear sounds alien, even alarming.
It is the sound of a superpower at work. Helicopters shuttling to and from the White House or the Pentagon. Motorcades. I counted five on my first day. Who are these people? Police cars with whining sirens demanding attention. Ambulances. Fire trucks. It sounds as if the whole of Washington is under siege, on its way to hospital, jail, the morgue or an important funeral. Then you look at the faces. They seem happy. It is summer after all. The pavements shimmer in the heat. They are full of chairs and tables where people in shirtsleeves are spooning lunch out of the kind of polystyrene containers you get on aeroplanes. They don’t seem to mind. The queues outside the Greek deli on 19th Street stretch the width of the pavement. Everyone is patient. No one seems to mind waiting. This place is chilled, I think. But whoever runs the ambulances, the police cars and the fire brigade is behaving as if World War III has broken out. So is the guy on the radio. We are only a few weeks away from the first anniversary of 9/11 and the local radio station we’re tuned into is humming with breathless reports about terror alerts, the conflict in Afghanistan and the failing diplomacy over Iraq. The drumbeat of a new war has begun. For now, however, it is a distant but regular thud on the horizon.
On the taxi radio the news is interspersed with advertisements. ‘Special discounts for all military personnel,’ the gravelly voice promises. The word ‘America’ seems to be mentioned an awful lot by just about everyone from advertising baritones to high-pitched politicians to the President. ‘America is better than this’, ‘America won’t stand for it’, ‘America’s favourite chocolate’, ‘America drinks Florida Orange Juice … no-pulp guaranteed’, ‘America is on the lookout for new enemies’, ‘America’s way of life will never be destroyed’, ‘Only in America …’
My head was spinning. America wasn’t just a country. America was a being and America was, it seemed, deeply pissed off. The Nigerian cab driver seemed unaware of the chorus of self-regard seeping from the speakers. The overall impression throbbing in the pastry-clad egg of my brain was that this city and country were much weirder than I imagined and far more difficult to decipher: half holiday destination, half barracks gearing up for conflict. The taxi dropped me outside my new office close to Dupont Circle, an area that used be an encampment for the homeless. On my first visit to Washington in 1988 I was chased through Dupont Circle – in those days an open space dotted with trees and surrounded by traffic – by a man in rags wielding a nail file. He was probably harmless but in those days Washington was still known as ‘the murder capital of the USA’ and my mind immediately pictures me being slashed to death in a vicious nail-file attack. Today, Dupont Circle is the heart of the capital’s gay district, where boutique hotels and coffee bars compete for attention with interior design shops and art galleries. In the fourteen years since my last visit some parts of Washington – by no means all – had changed almost beyond recognition. With its pavement cafés and bathroom-tile shops, the capital seemed more European. In so many other ways, however, America had moved further away from Europe than ever before.
I had witnessed the groping, open or clenched hand of America’s largely benign colossus from far-flung provinces but now I had been summoned to the capital itself. The BBC had allowed me to roam the world for almost two decades. I had been based in Jerusalem, Berlin, Bonn, Rome, Hong Kong and Singapore. Whether it was the fall of the Berlin Wall, the civil war in Bosnia, the isolation of Libya, the collapse of Christian Democracy in Italy, the expansion of China, the invasion of Afghanistan or the liberation of East Timor to a greater or lesser extent the hand of Washington, heavy, subtle or conspicuous by its absence, could always be felt in all of these places. America was everywhere and I had been reporting from – and on – the receiving end of its policies for seventeen years. Inevitably, the motivations of America seemed much clearer from five thousand miles away than they did up close and personal in the place where the decisions were made. There was the political hothouse of Washington. And then there was the vast multilayered country sprawling around it.
Fred Scott, a BBC cameraman born in San Diego, exudes the nasal nonchalance of someone who was brought up within earshot of Pacific surf. He spent a lot of time in Asia and once put it like this: ‘When you try and decipher America, Matt, think of India. Both are huge, complicated countries, where the difference between rich and poor is vast, where religion plays an important part in politics and everyday life. Both have nukes and both speak the kind of English that no one else does.’ It turned out to be sound advice although I am still looking for the equivalent of the caste system in the US.
For now the politics of Washington were incidental to the domestic issues that were occupying my full attention and providing my first personal glimpses of the States. I had failed spectacularly on just about every front. The first two Kathies had shown me so many houses whose addresses were never numbered in anything less than 1000s that I had lost track and my head was reeling. Did I like 3317 P Street or 3317 O Street? Was the nice garden – I’m sorry, I mean ‘yard’ – in 4567 Warren Street or 4512 Windom Place? I did, however, manage to get a car. I bought the giant, hulking people carrier in which my predecessor had ferried his family around. It was as long as a boat, as wide as a tank and had an insatiable thirst for petrol. I mean gas. The inside was so enormous that I suffered bouts of agoraphobia. And wherever I went I got hopelessly lost. On the face of it the road grid of Washington is dead simple if you know the alphabet and can count to fifty-five. Numbered streets go east to west. Lettered streets go north to south. Unfortunately outside the centre of the city, parks, hills and creeks interrupt this logical pattern. Streets are abruptly cut off and dismembered as if an angry child had thrown the puzzle map in the air and the pieces had landed at random.
For a country that prides itself on the efficiency of the free market, I soon discovered that America can also be surprisingly bureaucratic. In order to exist as a foreigner here you need a social security number, which involves descending into the bowels of the local Social Security Office. Nothing, however, rivals the fifth circle of hell represented by the Department of Motor Vehicles, the dreaded DMV. How can America’s famed love affair with the car flourish when the courtship involves an unavoidable trip to the DMV? It makes you regret the rest of the relationship and contemplate the bicycle as a preferred method of transportation. Or public transport. Or perhaps it is merely the test of true love for the automobile? The DMV is a frightening place that has achieved something unique: it mixes Hitchcock with Orwell and Monty Python.
What I hadn’t realized is that the DMV headquarters on C Street, in the shadow of the glorious Capitol, functions as a refuge for citizens of no fixed abode. In the winter it provides free heating, in the summer free air conditioning. I turned up at 7.45 a.m. to find a queue of two hundred or so, many of whom looked not only as if they had no fixed abode, but no access either to a moving vehicle they could call their own. In order not to get kicked out they all pretended that they were there on official business. They drew a number that designated their order in the queue – I’m sorry, line. I waited for three hours just to be told that I had brought the wrong papers. The man who informed me of this had clearly failed to read and learn the DMV’s customer service commandments about courtesy and efficiency pinned up on the board. I didn’t have the guts to point them out. To add injury to insult he informed me that the car I had bought from my predecessor was worth $2000 less than I had paid for it. ‘Sure hope he ain’t your friend!’ he added, laughing. The sad truth is that he was.
It also didn’t help that, unlike 92 per cent of America’s driving population, I belonged to that tiny, benighted minority that failed their multiple-choice driving test. Some questions were easy. Like: ‘If you come across a funeral procession, do you A slow down B speed up and drive through it or C come to a complete stop?’ The two questions that made the difference between success and failure were: ‘What is the minimum distance you have to maintain from a fire truck with sirens on?’ I hadn’t a clue. And one about car insurance. I cheated and called up the insurance broker to get the right answer. She gave me the wrong one and that was it. I flunked the test. A kind woman at reception whose enormous girth swivelled cheerfully on a small chair helped out: ‘Oh, honey, I am sorry. You can always use a study aid,’ she said at the top of her voice. The people around me started to take an interest. I was the only one wearing a suit. I was the guy they had all put their faith in. And I had failed. Then I saw the large notice on the wall aimed at the clientele. No eating! No fighting! No pro-fanities! I felt like doing all three. Unfortunately there is no escape from the DMV if you want to drive a car legally or have a driving licence. In a country where only 25 per cent of citizens have passports, the driving licence is the photo ID of choice, without which you can board no plane, send no parcels and retrieve no shirts from the laundry. The DL is de rigueur. Especially during the ‘global war on terror’. In America you want to be able to prove who you are at all times.
By the end of my first week I had hit rock bottom. I had acquired a car I was not yet allowed to drive. I had not found a house for us to live in. And I barely had time to visit the schools that would mould the future of my precious children. I was camping out in my predecessor’s home for a few weeks, before the American owners returned. I had dragged Penny and the children away from their friends, from our idyllic house in Singapore with its frangipani and avocado trees, its pool and the sultry tropical languor that provided a welcome anaesthetic from the more mundane tasks of family life. Asia was intoxicating in the best possible sense. Washington was proving to be a major detox. And in late August it was just as hot as Singapore, if not hotter. But the formal dress code of jacket and tie meant that one was walking around in a permanent mobile sauna. The mosquitoes were the size of birds, trained for combat and confident in their belief that no city authorities would ever have the temerity to kill them with insecticide. I began to dream of the grey clouds of DDT that enveloped our house in Singapore every two weeks and killed everything with tiny wings.
Penny flew in on the day that the heavens opened with late summer vengeance over Washington. I was stuck thirty miles away at IKEA buying bedding and cutlery and I couldn’t make it to Dulles Airport to pick up my own family. This was not good. I rang Gerald, a taxi driver frequently used by the office. He bailed me out and met a confused, bedraggled troupe of surly children and their mother in a country they had never visited before and were not entirely sure why they had to move to. The passport queue was two hours long. The customs officer behaved as if he was closely related to the prick at the DMV. The family had been hit on the head by the hammer of transcontinental jet lag. The British Airways stewardess had been excessively rude even by the standards of the mile-high gulag at the back of the plane. And because of the torrential rain, the drive from the airport to our house took an hour and a half.
I looked out of the kitchen window as they finally arrived. It struck me that none of them wanted to get out of the car. They all sat there, rooted to their seats like wax figures. Not smiling. Lottie, the youngest – not even a year old – could always be relied upon to be irrepressibly good-humoured. She was in tears. ‘Welcome to Washington,’ I muttered without conviction. Gerald shook his head. Penny glowered. Things could only get better. And they did.
Some foreign postings are love affairs: passionate, all-consuming. They are prone to deep disappointment but always cherished and remembered as an intimate and special bond. Other are arranged marriages. The beginnings are more prosaic and businesslike but they can blossom into something precious. Washington was the latter. It had started on a dog-tired note with an exhausted groom – me – and an indifferent bride – America. It wasn’t made easy by the fact that the rest of the world had very entrenched, preconceived notions about the bride, which became more and more virulent as the relationship took shape. For those judging America from abroad the middle ground had been eroded. President Bush’s famous statement about loyalty after 9/11 – ‘you are either with us or with the terrorists’ – had become a self-fulfilling prophecy for the rest of the world. You were now either with Bush or against him, with America or against it. In response the world became less willing to differentiate between an administration and an entire country. Criticizing an aspect of government policy immediately threw you open to charges of being anti-American, just as lauding a piece of policy made you into a snivelling sycophant, Bush’s poodle, Uncle Sam’s lackey and someone who was hell-bent on force-feeding their children Big Macs.
Washington is the window into America’s political soul. It is the Rome and the Athens of the twenty-first century, a city of raw power and a citadel of refined ideas. I was lucky enough to be dispatched there during a crucial juncture in the constant cluttering evolution of this huge country. I was a political tourist with family in tow, trying to find my way around the corridors of power, discover what made the colossus tick and set up a home. Invariably the broad tapestry of politics is interwoven with very personal experiences, many mundane, a few dramatic. They conspire to build a subjective impression of America which aims to be neither complete, comprehensive nor even very fair. It is, however, personal.
ONE Beltway Blues (#ulink_7708e5e3-c1d5-53f5-b192-9780b0656eef)
For many years my morning commute was regularly enlivened by an encounter with the American Vice President, Dick Cheney. He lives in a secure compound next to the British Embassy that also houses the United States Naval Observatory. Does Cheney wander over to the giant telescope in the dead of night to try and catch a glimpse of distant stars and imagine alien civilizations? I doubt it. His gaze is firmly fixed on the terrestrial.
At 7.30 a.m. precisely the traffic is stopped in a surprisingly elaborate ceremony that is Washington’s equivalent of the Changing of the Guard. At first nimble policemen on mountain bikes wearing aerodynamic pod-shaped bicycle helmets pop out of the undergrowth and flag down the traffic. Then their less trim cousins emerge from police cars humming with more lights than a funfair attraction. They block the flow. Finally the super-sized outriders on their Harley-Davidsons park right across the street. The man-meets-machine road block is in place.
The wait begins. The curtain is about to be raised on a vintage Washington spectacle. We all sit in traffic, fiddling with our steering wheels, making unnecessary calls on our phones and waiting for the main event. Then the gates of the Naval Observatory swing open, the bomb barriers are swallowed up by the road and more policemen on Harleys appear with screeching sirens. They gesticulate furiously, guns in hand, reinforcing a point that has already been made eloquently and unambiguously by the grunts preceding them. Next, two black secret service vans appear, followed by an armoured stretch limo – the decoy – followed by the real one, in which the Vice President can briefly be spotted, sitting in the back, squinting at the ungrateful world outside. We always make eye contact.
Then there’s another secret service van. This one is open at the back and displays two agents looking at potential assassins through the sights of M16 rifles. At this stage I always take my hands off the wheel, just in case I make an involuntary move that could get me shot. I resist the urge to scratch the back of my head. Then there’s the obligatory ambulance. It follows dutifully in case the Vice President, who had the first of his four heart attacks when he was only thirty-six, doesn’t survive the six-minute commute to the White House. Finally there is the tail escort, another three howling Harleys. So, just to recap: two armoured stretch limos, three vans, one ambulance, six motorbikes, three mountain bikes and, oh yes, a helicopter keeping an eye on everything from above. All this just to get one old man to the office.
This is all part of the theatre of power that is Washington’s only real industry. It is what defines life inside the so-called Beltway, the ring road that circles the capital and which has become a metaphor for the insularity of the world’s most powerful capital.
No one I know has anything good to say about the Beltway. And I’m not just talking about the people stuck in one of its twelve almost permanently congested lanes. At night the Capitol Beltway, also known more formally as Interstate 495, looks like an oozing river of red and yellow dots. Whether you’re travelling clockwise or anti-clockwise you’re almost always moving at a snail’s pace. But the Beltway conjures up much more than the M25 around London or Paris’s Périphérique. The humble 495 is seen as the membrane around a political cocoon, the frosted glass encasing the hothouse, the cordon sanitaire which separates those who dwell within from the world outside.
‘Inside the Beltway’ has become shorthand for the insularity of the American capital. It was first coined in 1983 by Mike Causey, a columnist for the Washington Post. Today the phrase is received by the rest of America with a mixture of awe and disgust. Mainly the latter. It evokes a shadowy world of Byzantine machinations and deceit. It lends itself to unflattering alliteration. The Beltway Boys is a TV talk show on the FOX News Channel whose content sounds distinctly kinky but which offers nothing more titillating than pundits chewing the political cud. In Washington politics is sex. Here power has its own brand of pornography. ‘Beltway Bile’ was the name of a column in a local Maryland newspaper. ‘Beltway Bosoms’ was the name of an unsuccessful lap-dancing bar on the seedy Florida Avenue and perhaps the only time that the notions of intercourse and interstate have merged in one name. The one word you never, ever, hear in conjunction with the Beltway is ‘wholesome’. And that is unfortunate because most of America cherishes ‘wholesome’. No other capital city of a great nation has allowed itself to be defined by its ring road. But, then, no other capital city worth reckoning with has ever been created solely for the pursuit of politics.
Washington was founded in a malarial swamp by a general-turned-president in 1790. He liked the spot on the Potomac River mainly because it was only seven miles from his plantation at Mount Vernon. It was convenient enough to reach after a two-hour ride but far enough to keep the riff-raff at a distance. He then named the tiny settlement of shacks after himself, appointed a French architect called Pierre Charles L’Enfant to design the capital of the New World on the drawing board and designated its shape as a 110-square-mile diamond. Early Washington was really no more than the eighteenth-century equivalent of modern Dubai, without the sand, the bling, the excellent duty-free shopping and the Russian hookers. When L’Enfant suggested that the city should be named ‘Washingtonople’, which he considered a little less crass than just ‘Washington’, he was promptly sacked.
All in all, it was an inauspicious beginning for a city that has never been much loved. Not even the residents who enjoyed their flirtation with destiny here have had nice things to say about it. When Lyndon Johnson left the White House crippled by the Vietnam war and unwilling to run for re-election, he told his audience: ‘I’m going home to Texas where people notice if you’re sick and care if you die!’ A former mayor of New York once quipped: ‘It’s half the size of the Queens cemetery and twice as dead!’ Fred Thompson, the lawyer-turned-actor-turned-senator-turned-actor-turned-presidential candidate, once compared the capital of power to the capital of movies: ‘Washington has all the veneer of Hollywood,’ he said with a drawl that rolled like one of his favourite Cuban cigars, ‘but none of its sincerity!’
And then there is the ultimate litmus test of the computer age. How many Google entries does Washington, DC, get? New York has 4500. Washington, DC, the capital of the free world, as it likes on occasion to be called, only a pathetic 111. Des Moines, Iowa, America’s capital of flat, rural tedium, isn’t far behind with 84. Middle Americans are disgusted by Washington, whose politics they see as the corruption of everything noble America stands for. When things go wrong it is easy to blame Beltway bile and equally easy to forget that it was the voters who originally made it happen. For its part Hollywood despises Washington like a movie gone wrong. The script had such potential, they mutter over their soy lattes. But they keep changing director. The actors aren’t up to much either. The set is stodgy. If only Steven, George or Marty could get their hands on Project Washington. The doyens of Silicon Valley look at it with the same anthropological marvel reserved for ancient, outdated hardware. Bill Gates and his philanthropic entourage descend on the city at regular intervals to appear before some congressional committee and to remind the politicians that he alone spends more money on solving AIDS and battling TB than they ever will. And yet there are those who have the opposite problem, those who fall hopelessly but discreetly in love with Washington, realizing that theirs is a love that dare not speak its name. It is the grubby and infectious love of power and it is felt most keenly by those who never exercise it. It is the love of eunuchs, a species that includes academics, lobbyists, policy wonks, economists, diplomats and think-tank types, many of whom have dipped their toes into the waters of influence by serving in an administration. It also includes the ultimate low lifes: journalists. I don’t think I have ever heard any of the above say they dislike Washington. I look around my daughter’s school playground and it is full of parents gossiping feverishly about who is in and out while vigorously pushing swings or egging on children dangling from monkey bars. Once you have examined the entrails of Washington any other form of vivisection seems dull.
The newspaper and broadcasting editors of the world recognize the fatal attraction of Washington. ‘Frei, you must not get stuck in the Beltway’ was an exhortation I heard repeatedly from my bosses when they dispatched me to the United States. ‘Of course not!’ I replied earnestly and I meant it. But a year later the magnetic pull of the capital worked its magic, the ring road became like a force field I didn’t dare crash into and I found more and more excuses not to leave. George Bush, his wars, his scandals and his determination to reshape the world are a great help, admittedly. This is, after all, vintage ‘Inside the Beltway’ material. Even my bosses wouldn’t want me to miss it. And yet whenever I manage to escape they celebrate the fact as if I was a child learning to walk. ‘Great to see that you’ve managed – finally – to get out of the Beltway!’ is one of the highest compliments paid to any correspondent resident in the city.
Consider the wise words of Betty Jean Crocker, the sixty-year-old owner-manager of the Chateau Surprise Bed and Breakfast in Cambridge, Ohio. When I confessed to her that I lived in the Beltway she looked at me with a mixture of pity and puzzlement, as if I had been recently bereaved: ‘I’m so, so sorry, dear,’ she said. ‘You can’t be seeing much of America then!’ I replied feebly that I had already visited thirty-seven states. Had I been an American her response might have been less pitying and more judgemental. Had I been a lawyer or a lobbyist she would probably have shown me the door. Saying that you live in Washington has the same effect on people outside the city as announcing that you work in life insurance. A grimace spreads across their face like an oil slick.
What Las Vegas is to sin, Seattle to coffee, Hollywood to movies and Detroit to cars, Washington is to power. The city is – somewhat unfairly – associated with one industry alone. And that industry is the most despicable, corrupting, wasteful, unproductive and yet coveted of them all. The fact that it is vacuum-wrapped inside the Beltway makes it all the more unpleasant. Power in Washington is like a prize pickle, obscene, awe-inspiring, grotesquely nurtured beyond recognition and totally unpalatable. There is so much of it you can taste it in the air. Power is the faintly sour odour of well-scrubbed men in suits rushing to meetings. It is the shrill sound of a motorcade racing through unmenacing streets ferrying the Jordanian minister of finance to a meeting about debt relief, as if he was being rushed to hospital after an attempted assassination. It is the whirr of the President’s three helicopters: the one he actually travels on and the two decoys that accompany him just in case someone ill disposed to the leader of the free world wants to take a potshot. In Washington power rules the air and the roads. It can also dictate the way people live and eat. No one drinks at lunch time because no one wants to be caught off guard. Power even inspires the chat-up lines. ‘Would you like to see my yacht/Porsche/six pack’ is not nearly as impact-charged as ‘Do you want to come to a working breakfast with this senator or that White House deputy chief of staff?’ You can hear the pitch of power in the strained voices of parents urging on their charges at Little League soccer games: ‘Go, Tyler, GOO!’ One year the Little League supervisors even had to issue a directive asking parents to tone down their cheering from the sidelines.
Power dominates the conversation at dinner parties. At one stage a celebrated Georgetown hostess had to limit each guest to two George Bush anecdotes. Anyone who flouted the rule would forfeit dessert. And as a journalist you naturally while away your time discussing it, weighing it, dissecting it, bemoaning it, begrudging it, undermining it and yearning to have much, much more of it. This would all be purely self-indulgent were it not for the fact that the exercise of power inside the Beltway also has the tendency to ripple round the globe like a pebble in a millpond. It is, after all, not just any old power. It is hyperpower.
When I joined my Washington gym, a colleague gave me the following advice. ‘If you want to make the right contacts in this city, forget going after work or at lunch time. The people who matter go to the “six a.m. boot camp”. [Boot camps tend to be places where US Marines learn to become super-fit killing machines.] Then you go off and have breakfast at the Four Seasons. Everyone will be there!’ I tried to imagine what it would be like sidling up to the right contact while panting for my life, glistening like a pickled herring and smelling, well, like a pickled herring. Would you interrupt them on the running machine? What if they lost their balance? Would it be better to make contact in the changing rooms? Surely if I accosted them in the showers I would simply be arrested. Russians, I was told, like to conduct their business in the sauna or the hot tub after marathon vodka-drinking sessions. Americans, on the other hand, are notoriously sober, especially when they are engaged in the gruelling business of toning their abs. Saunas are meant for quietly sweating out toxins, not for conversation, let alone business. So, the 6 a.m. boot camp, I concluded, wasn’t for me.
