People sometimes accuse me of being cynical.
It's a bum rap.
In fact, "cynical'' is my least favorite word. Except maybe for "scrofulous.'' I wouldn't want to be scrofulous or cynical—and certainly not both at the same time.
Reporters are idealists turned inside out into skeptics, sort of the way Madonna wears underwear.
When I talk about Washington, my hometown, I can get positively corny. I love living in a city baked in history, filled with all the poetic, passionate and seductive spirits that created America. The monuments are tonics of stillness, an antidote to the cacophony of politics.
My first memory is of the Capitol, at night, blazing with light. My mom and I were driving down to pick up my dad, a D.C. police inspector who was in charge of Senate security for 20 years. Like most other children—and adults—I thought the figure perched on top with the feather headdress was an Indian chief. Decades later, when I had to cover the helicopter airlift that removed the 15,000-pound statue for cleaning, I was startled to learn the he was a she: a warrior babe named the Goddess of Freedom, holding a sword and wearing a crest of feathers over long curls.
I'm always dragging off friends who come to town for moonlight and sunrise tours. One of my favorite stops is Grief, an androgynous Augustus Saint-Gaudens statue at the grave of the unhappy wife of Henry Adams, who committed suicide; the spot became a refuge for the unhappy wife of Franklin Roosevelt. Eleanor went to sit by the statue in Rock Creek Cemetery when she learned of her husband's affair with Lucy Mercer, her social secretary.
BookExpo visitors, cheer up: It is a truth universally acknowledged that Washington has the most beautiful springtime in the world. As the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once put it to me: "Azaleas, azaleas, azaleas. And dogwoods. There's so much fauna, or is it flora?'' (Let's cut the senator a break. After all, he was from Hell's Kitchen.)
There have been whole books written rhapsodizing about our spring, and many poems.
A Washington Post reporter named Henry Mitchell wrote this verse:
Spring is here.The sap is ris.I wonder how the pandas is?
I get quite jingoistic about our pandas, too, which is hard, really, since they don't even belong to us. The National Zoo rents Mei Xiang and Tian Tian from the Chinese for a cool mill a year; plus we pay $600,000 a year for their new cub, officially named Tai Shan (which means "peaceful mountain") but locally known as Butterstick.
My first stint in journalism was the giant panda beat for the Washington Star in 1981, which consisted of an obsessive baby watch. When the female panda back then, Ling-Ling, could not get pregnant with her mate, Hsing-Hsing, the National Zoo imported another, flashier male lover from the London zoo, Chia-Chia. Only one problem: Chia-Chia only had eyes for Hsing-Hsing. It was a Brokeback Bamboo moment.
But now, all these springs later, thanks to artificial insemination—are male pandas necessary?—we have a cuddly bear heir.
The Vietnam Memorial is the most moving spot in town, a must-see, now that the government has gotten mired in another divisive insurgent war halfway around the world. Visit at sunset or at night, when you can see the surrounding white marble monuments reflected in the black granite chosen by architect, Maya Lin, who said she designed the deep V wall "for people to cry." Nearby is the Lincoln, also best viewed by moonlight, a monument to the spiritual stability of an earlier president at war.
The FDR Memorial is depressingly politically correct, with Roosevelt sans his signature cigarette holder and cocktail shaker, and nothing of Eleanor with her favorite fur piece around her neck. But FDR's dog Fala is there, the setting on the Tidal Basin is romantic, and it stays open until midnight.
In a recent study on America's most literate cities, Washington got ranked number three, after Seattle and Minneapolis. Washingtonians like to read, go to the movies and go out to dinner. And now, of course, we have baseball again, even if the Nationals—home against the Orioles on BEA weekend—are not yet as beloved as the Senators were when they became musical comedy legend in Damn Yankees.
While politicians often write biographies and go on book tours when they're getting ready to run for office, you don't find many pols who are as literary as Bobby Kennedy, Daniel Moynihan and Eugene McCarthy were. Often, when I ask candidates what they're reading, I feel I'm getting a stock answer devised by a press secretary. The favorite author is nearly always Winston Churchill. Dan Quayle seemed to be reading the same book for several years—Paul Johnson's history of America, Modern Times. It's now outdated and Dan's probably still not finished.
The worst, of course, is when pols try to write sex. Like thinking about your parents and sex, reading pols' strained attempts at steamy scenes just gives you the heebie-jeebies.
A decade ago, I discovered Newt Gingrich's embarrassing thriller, 1945, featuring a pouting sex kitten spy who sits "athwart" her lover's chest and hisses that he must tell her a secret "or I will make you do terrible things." Lynne Cheney's 1981 novel, Sisters—which was fetching $195 on Alibris.com. the last time I checked—features lesbian romps and, strangely, a Republican vice president who dies of a heart attack during sex with his mistress. (Newsweekwas right: Freud is not dead!)
When I interviewed the first President Bush about his fiction influences, he named War and Peace, not because he liked it but because he felt it was good discipline to be forced to read something that long as a teenager. When I asked his son the same question, he replied: "I've always liked John La Care, Le Carrier, or however you pronounce his name."
My favorite restaurants, which also happen to be popular with the Clintons, are The Bombay Club and Rasika, both elegant Indian places owned by Ashok Bajaj. I also like Zaytinya, Café Deluxe and Taberna del Alberadaro, which has great garlicky tapas and white sangria. For cocktails, it's the Hotel Washington, which has the view of the city used in all the movies about D.C.
I asked the Times' renowned food writer, Marian Burros, who once worked with me on the Washington Star, for some other suggestions. She offers these for high end: Citronelle, Marcel's, Indeblue, Galileo. For medium end: Equinox, Black Salt, Dahlia, Buck's Camping and Fishing, Bistro Bis, Pesce and Palena. For pizza, 2 Amys on Connecticut Avenue.
The most popular independent bookstores are Kramerbooks, with its Afterwords Café, Politics and Prose, Chapters, and the recent entry, Busboys and Poets, a hip bookstore and café.
On my book tour for Are Men Necessary? an interviewer abroad asked me which president I could have fallen in love with. At first I was a bit huffy, trying to explain that I did not think of politicians in terms of like and love; I just tried to assess the sort of job they were doing, and call them on abuses of power.
But then I gave up and said, "Lincoln.'' How can you not love a man who could write the spare but dazzling words in his second inaugural address, engraved on his memorial: "With malice toward none, with charity for all."
Besides, I grew up with him.
