Washington

and then Tells It like it is - not just about washington dc or politics - about human nature any time/ any place --- i recommend this to young adults out of college... both Meg Greenfield and Meryl Streep figured out that "life isn't like college - life is like... High School!" when i was growing up, my mother would say "when you're older, you'll find out What Life Is All About"... and i'd wonder What's The Big Mystery? Why Don't You Just Tell Me Now... so i can know NOW? this book is brilliant, fun, laying it out truthfully, plainly, like almost no one does --- no WONDER that wonderful people (like Kay Graham) loved this woman and her amazing insights - i loved the time i spent reading her book, and recognizing so much of what i had learned firsthand in the 40 years since i wondered What Life Was All About.

Looking back on nearly four decades as a journalist in the nation's capital, Meg Greenfield's (Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post editorial page editor and Newsweek columnist) "Washington" eschews personal memoir or tell-all sensationalism for a witty, ascerbic take on how the place functions and how it's changed. The analogy that best fits its structure and function, Greenfield says, is high school. "High school is a preeminently nervous place." Isolated from the larger community, it operates on "a make-or-break, peer-enforced social code that calculates worth as popularity and popularity as a capacity to please and be associated with the right people (no matter how undeserving they may be...." Congress has "terms", its work grinds to a halt during long vacations, and its "freshmen" are expected to tow the line and show deference to their elders, while seniors wield the power and set the rules. It's a rarified high school, comprised of "successful children." These are not only the hall monitors and teachers' pets, the civic award winners and "the ones who mowed the neighbor's lawn and were pronounced `fine young people, but also "a small but steady stream of amazing prevailers...the determined, express-train kids who knocked down all the obstacles and were the first in their families to do practically everything." Few troublemakers or rebels aspire to a Washington career, and in this clear-eyed assessment Greenfield includes herself, "nothing if not reliable, and, in fact, sometimes seeming to have been fifty years old at birth." Like herself, many Washington denizens have a "rogue" sibling (like the long line of first brothers - Sam Johnson, Donald Nixon, Billy Carter, Roger Clinton - and that's just during Greenfield's tenure). "You may take it as a rule of thumb that the children who came to Washington are not the ones who put the cat in the dryer but the ones who tattled." The psychology is more complex than that, involving guilt, love, even a certain admiration for the brash willfulness or impulsiveness so foreign to the "good" child and Greenfield does a clever, often humorous job of explaining how "good child" psychology makes government work on many levels, including staff and press. Greenfield's study of Washington psychology goes on to encompass family. Wives (Washington is still primarily a man's town, "a recovering man's town, but still a man's town"), children and particularly parents who knew him "when" have the ability to cut the big man down to human size. "When even he, in the gathering derangement that marks his ascent to public notice, has come to think of himself as synonymous with the title and image, they will not." Many pols, she points out, had powerful parents, particularly mothers, and their good child personas keep them striving for approval. With a few hilarious and humanizing anecdotes she shows a general reduced to earnest pleading, a senator pushed into a public apology. Greenfield's depiction of wives, on

This is great book that gives dead-on insight into the various Washington personalities. Those "inside the beltway" will recognize the characters and the games they play, while those in the real world will come away with a better understanding of why Washington is the way it is. Required reading not only for political junkies but for anyone who wants a better understanding of how Wahington really works.

I have admired Meg Greenfield's professional work for several decades. On a few (rare) occasions, I observed her when she appeared on television. Obviously very intelligent and articulate. A good person. But somehow guarded. Cautious. Almost shy. I was saddened to learn of her death and then eager to read this, her final book. It reads very much like a journal expanded into separate but related essays in which Greenfield struggles to answer questions such as these: How to understand the culture of the federal government? How to understand the inter-relationships between and among public officials and the media? And finally, in effect, "Where do I fit in?" Greenfield's answer to the first question is that the culture most resembles that of a high school. The inter-relationships can be (depending on a given issue) adversarial, adversarial-cordial, cordial/adversarial, or (occasionally) cordial. Where did Greenfield fit in? To offer an answer to that question could perhaps compromise Greenfield's relationship with her reader. Curiously, much more of what Greenfield thinks is revealed than of what she feels. (Perhaps she would have examined more of her feelings in a diary which, presumably, no one else would ever read.) Her approach to various subjects (e.g. power brokers, "good guys", villains, national and international crises) seems to be that of an anthropologist. But she also has a journalist's eye for significant details and an ear for the memorable phrase...as well as what could be called a "sniffer" for sensing what may not be immediately evident, lurking behind political posture or rhetoric. Those who knew her well are better-qualified than I am to comment on "who she really was" and "what she was really like." My remarks are limited almost entirely to this brilliantly written retrospective assessment of a unique culture and an equally unique career. Only after having the read the book could I fully appreciate what Katherine Graham shares in the eloquent Foreword, concluding "I miss Meg and am grateful that she has lengthened her time with us by leaving this book." Meg Greenfield's own life reveals what her career attempted to understand: "the endlessly engaging complexities and contradictions" of human nature, within and beyond our nation's capital.

Washington is a better book than even Meg Greenfield probably realized. Her understanding of human beings is profound. One can imagine this book being read 200 or 400 years from now.