Adventures in Correspondentland (10 page)

That said, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the 100-something former Dixiecrat who had run for the presidency in 1948 as a white supremacist and then fathered a black love child, was the spriteliest I had seen him in years. The record holder for the longest solo filibuster in senate history – 24 hours and 18 minutes – he seemed to regard the presidential sex show about to unfold in the well of the chamber as his reward. Most of his 99 colleagues, however, had no appetite for such sordidness and made sure the trial was as brief as possible, apparently to save themselves from embarrassment as much as the president.

For me, the postscript to the impeachment saga came in March 1999, just six weeks after the end of the senate trial, when Clinton appeared at the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association dinner at the Washington Hilton. Like the Japanese cherry blossoms that start blooming on the Washington mall, these black-tie dinners are a rite of spring, a ritual that requires the president to submit himself to a gentle roasting and then to hit back with a stand-up routine of his own.

That night, with everyone still recovering from the exertions of the past 15 months, the simple fact that the Clintons had accepted the invitation earned them a good deal of warmth and protection, and when the MC Jay Leno cracked a lone Lewinsky gag there were boos from the floor. ‘Just one?' pleaded Leno.

In his opening remarks, Clinton acknowledged the weirdness of turning up to a dinner attended by 2000 journalists. ‘If this isn't contrition,' he said, ‘I don't know what is.' Then he risked another post-impeachment quip: ‘I know you can't really laugh about this. I mean, the events of the last year have been quite
serious. If the senate vote had gone the other way, I wouldn't be here. I demand a recount.'

As the strained laughter evaporated, the president introduced onto the stage a surprise guest, the ‘prime minister of the United Republic of Karjakador' – a play on his habit during the impeachment crisis of only appearing before the press when accompanied at the podium by a visiting international leader. Together, they performed a slapstick routine that was not only funny but, as ever at these dinners, impressively produced and well rehearsed.

What was most extraordinary about the evening, however, was not the president's self-deprecation but how he handled himself in another ceremony he was expected to perform. Every year, a journalist was honoured for their excellence in reporting ‘Congressional and political affairs', a citation that took on an especially unfortunate connotation. And, sure enough, that year's recipient was the ABC's Jackie Judd, the correspondent who discovered the existence of the stained blue dress, ‘apparently as a kind of souvenir', in the words of her award-winning report.

As her name was read out and she started on her journey to the stage, all eyes naturally fixed upon Clinton to see how he would react. Yet far from showing any hint of embarrassment or discomfort, he greeted her with his trademark handshake, a rosy smile and a look almost of parental pride. The First Lady, sat a few seats away on a top table that faced out over the audience, was nowhere near as good at political play-acting. Indeed, if the looks she darted towards her errant husband could have killed, a Secret Service agent would have been rugby-tackling the president.

Just as he survived the scandal, Bill Clinton got through the awkwardness of this encounter with his unique blend of
theatricality, likeability, political smarts and sheer bravado. From years of covering him, it remains to this day my favourite Bill moment, and by far the most telling. In this glorious instance of maximum unauthenticity, we could see the real Clinton.

Devotees of
The West Wing
would be crushingly disappointed by the reality of Washington. White House counsels are rarely as beautiful as Rob Lowe, press secretaries are never as witty as C. J. Cregg, presidents rarely quote long passages from the scriptures to break the tension of policy meetings, and their aides stalk the corridors of power with noticeably less fleet of foot, speed of mind and swiftness of tongue.

Doubtless, there are high-powered, big-brain types who can neatly encapsulate the world's most complicated problems in five pithy bullet points, and all in the time that it takes to hightail it from the Oval Office to the Situation Room. But I have yet to meet them, and nor truly would I wish to. Rather, the real West Wing is unexpectedly stately, elegant and orderly. Its corridors are not clogged with harried young BlackBerry-wielding aides, nor are the offices strewn with flip charts, whiteboards, campaign paraphernalia, plastic basketball hoops or stacks of empty pizza boxes. The West Wing has the look more of an English country home – albeit one with a state-of-the-art security system and its own private army – than the boiler-room of American executive government.

All this is not to deny that
The West Wing
gets a lot right. It captures the workaholic culture of official Washington, the perpetual politicking, the bristling egos, the obsession with the news cycle, and the Beltway patois of pinched abbreviations that
turns the president of the United States into POTUS, the first lady into FLOTUS and the justices of the Supreme Court into SCOTUS. It accurately portrays how most global problems end up in the Oval Office – although much of the president's daily work is conducted in an adjacent private study – and how the personality of the incumbent stamps itself so completely on the administration that bears his name.

As originally envisaged,
The West Wing
intended to make the president an invisible presence, rather like Marlon Brando in
Godfather II
. That, however, would have made it totally implausible. For no city in the world, not even the Vatican or Pyongyang, is quite so preoccupied with the thoughts, beliefs, statements, musings, body language, blood pressure, eating habits, moods, whims, idiosyncrasies and indiscretions of a single being. The West Wing, real and imagined,
is
the president.

As a place to work and live, Washington definitely has its limitations. The food, aside from its Frisbee-sized power steaks, is poor. The climate is horrible, especially in the swampy summer. On the style front, residents look like they have taken their fashion cues from watching reruns of
Dynasty
. It can be stultifyingly unimaginative, which partly explains why the suffix ‘gate' is attached to every scandal, however big or small. It suffers from being overpopulated by lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, policy wonks, diplomats and, yes, even journalists. Nowhere in the world has a higher concentration of self-important narcissists – with the possible exception, I suppose, of Hollywood, that west-coast Washington for beautiful people. With the mainly white population congregated in the north-west quadrant and the mainly black population occupying the rest, it is one of America's most racially polarised cities. Ridiculously, it still suffers from
the democratic deficit of not having any representation in the US Senate and of relying on a fairly powerless ‘delegate' rather than a full-blown lawmaker in the House of Representatives, an example of how black disenfranchisement survives even today.

But it is
the
place to be. Washington ‘dies at sundown, it is too hot in the summer, too damp in the winter, too dry on Sunday and more interested in politics than it is in sex,' observed the veteran reporter Russell Baker of
The New York Times
, ‘but I like it.' Most correspondents are much more fulsome in their praise and admit to falling completely for its seductive charms.

On the reporting front, the set-piece staple of the day is the televised lunchtime White House briefing, where the president's press secretary stands behind the world's most closely watched podium, in front of the world's most familiar blue curtain, and tries to stonewall reporters. (Earlier in the morning, the press secretary takes questions in an off-camera briefing called ‘the gaggle'.)

The correspondents hurling the questions sit in pre-assigned seats, marked with small brass nameplates, etched with the kind of inscription work that you would expect to find on a Little League championship shield or a spelling-bee trophy. The 49 seats are allocated, as you would expect in a city obsessed with seniority, by rank. The front row is occupied by the major television networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) and the key wire services (the Associated Press and Reuters), while CNN has also muscled its way onto it. Next come the major newspapers, such as
The New York Times
,
The Washington Post
and
The Wall Street Journal
. Then come some of the lesser lights, such as the
Chicago Tribune
, Voice of America and
The Christian Science Monitor
. These days, there is even a place, on the seventh row, for the Christian Broadcasting
Network, sandwiched between two once-great newspapers,
The Boston Globe
and
The Baltimore Sun
.

Some of the more venerable institutions, such as
Time
, have now been relegated. If memory serves, the demotion came about after a former
Time
correspondent by the name of Jay Carney could not see much point in turning up every day to the briefings, which is richly ironic because he has recently been appointed as the White House press secretary.

Alas, international news organisations, such as the BBC, have always struggled in the stamped-seats stakes, and we tended to jostle for standing room at the sides and back of the briefing room. To be honest, none of us ever really minded, because the
Time
guy had pretty much got it right: if the White House had anything useful to impart, it would have done so already with a leak to
The Times
,
The Post
or, as is increasingly the case, Politico, the online news-sheet. Similarly, if an errant administration official had something the White House didn't want you to know, it would already have appeared in the papers, and the morning briefing was unlikely to offer much in the way of elucidation.

After the briefings, correspondents would rush out to their live television positions on the gravel-strewn patch of land next to the North Lawn known as Pebble Beach, which has since been renamed Stonehenge after the crushed bluestone was replaced with concrete. With the alabaster columns of the North Portico over our shoulders, the shot was intended to convey the notion that we all had an inside track on the internal workings of the building behind, even though none of us could boast genuine access to the president.

In my day, the grand marquess of the White House press corps, the legendary Helen Thomas, still occupied pole position in
the middle of the front row. Like some medieval gargoyle carved into the facade of a great cathedral, however, she was there largely for decorative purposes and did not perform a vital function. Her long-time employer, the wire service United Press International (UPI), had years ago fallen into a state of disrepair, and as UPI waned so too did its star correspondent. Now an octogenarian, Thomas rarely got to ask the first question at presidential press conferences but did maintain the tradition, which she herself had revived during the Kennedy administration, of ending them with a cheery ‘Thank you, Mr President'.

But I honestly cannot remember ever reading a single word that Helen Thomas had written, and I dare say the same was true of many Washington-based reporters. For sure, there was a pantomime-like fun to be had watching her bully and badger White House press secretaries, especially the nervy debutants (in her later years, she even resembled a character from a pantomime). And, to her credit, in the aftermath of 9/11 she not only refused to succumb to the mood of ultra-patriotism but also railed against it.

Increasingly, however, her questions took on the feel of mini-monologues – Bush's first press secretary, Ari Fleischer, started referring to her lengthy interjections as ‘advocacy hour' – and, like many of Washington's human landmarks, her reputation would have been better served by an earlier and more graceful exit.

As it was, she left under a cloud of her own making, when she barked that Israel should ‘get the hell out of Palestine', and its citizens should return to Germany and Poland. President Barack Obama, who only a few months before had presented her with cupcakes to mark her 89th birthday, condemned this blast of anti-Semitism. So, too, did the White House Correspondent Association, the organisation she not only once headed but also
came to personify. For those who maintained the view that Washington was Hollywood for ugly people, Thomas was like a faded silent-movie star: she had turned Pennsylvania Avenue into Sunset Boulevard and cast herself as Norma Desmond, the crazed idol who now lived in her own fantasy world.

By far the most fun to be had with the White House press corps was way beyond the Beltway – the multi-laned ring road that doubled as a great halo of power – on international trips with the president. Aside from a small complement of reporters who flew on Air Force One, we would travel on a press charter where the seating assignments copied those of the White House briefing room. En route, the White House media team handed out pocket-sized briefing books, embossed with the presidential seal, which contained useful – and US-friendly – factoids about the countries we were about to visit. There were potted biographies of everyone the president was likely to meet, the times of the baggage calls (always ludicrously early), and helpful cultural pointers, which had the unintended side effect when travelling with George W. Bush of highlighting his own cultural faux pas.