Customer Reviews

Washington

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Meg Greenfield was the consummate insider for 30 years in rough and tumble Washington D.C. She was the powerful editor of the editorial page on the Washington Post and had a weekly column in Newsweek. She counted among her friends Post publisher Kathryn Graham, many powerful politicians and fellow journalists. Her political inclinations are hard to pin down because of her diverse opinions, her friends from all sides of the political spectrum and her even-handed reporting.

This is not a `tell-all' book. If you are looking for scandal and in-the-know tidbits on the famous players, you will be disappointed. She writes what it is to be in the middle of the whirlwind of national politics. The first danger is losing yourself, not your ideals. The role politicians must play to survive (and get re-elected) is for public consumption, and all too often the human being behind the spin ceases to exist. She likens D.C. to high school with twice the stress and all of the infighting necessary to be one of the Golden Boys. In D.C., there is no relaxing and reaping of rewards when you reach the exalted Senior status. You must constantly build your warehouse of favors owed to you while not alienating the voters or your peers.

Miss Greenfield has not written a memoir. I think that would have been impossible for her, as she was a completely private person. She maintains she had to be or she would have "lost" herself. Her writing style is economical and clear. She comes across as humorous, amazingly approachable with a very clear and unblinking eye on what has gone on around her. She has an ease with writing that only the best journalists can carry off. The book raises questions and answers others.

Unfortunately, Miss Greenfield died before completing the last chapter. I believe it was her wish that it not be published in her lifetime. When I completed the book, I felt as if we were such good friends that she wouldn't mind at all having lunch somewhere and clearing up any questions I might have. Perhaps she knew there would be many just like me.

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.

Reading this book make you feel like you were partaking in a nice little gossipy talk over coffee with a close friend. The author had a wonderful writing style that kept me interested even during sections that I normally would have skipped. I really did not expect the type of book this turned out to be, the author covers her impressions of the type of people that make it to elected government office and what they have to do to stay there. She also covers her thoughts on the people that make their living covering or helping these elected officials. It makes for funny and insightful reading.

The only thing I would have liked were more names of the people she covered. She does a classy job of covering nasty little items, but leaving out names or even strong hints as to who she is talking about. Overall this is an interesting book that covers her impressions and time in Washington. It is not a dry year by year run down of major events, but her impressions of the people. For example she spends time talking about the similarities between Washington and a clicky high school with the popular kids living on perception over substance. If you are interested in Washington and the people that make it run then you will enjoy this funny, witty book.

An interesting book, not least because Meg Greenfield's WASHINGTON teasingly promises more than it delivers, only hinting at the devastating expose that might have been. One wonders what information may have been in the many secretly coded files that Michael Beschloss edited into the finished manuscript. Did Greenfield name some names that Beschloss deleted? Did she tell some tales that he thought were better left untold? Unfortunately, Beschloss's essay doesn't give a clue. And neither does Katherine Graham's tribute.

What does come across clearly from the published work is that Greenfield knew many more secrets than she ever told, that she kept these secrets while working for Max Ascoli at The Reporter and Katherine Graham at the Washington Post, and that she may have taken some of her best stories with her to her grave.

One conclusion that occurs after reading WASHINGTON is that reporters and editors have a lot more information than they ever share with their readers -- and that the game of "I know something you don't know" is one of the favorite pastimes in our nation's capital.

To see that confession in print, Greenfield's book is well worth reading.

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.

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.

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 the other hand, and the stultifying social rounds expected of them, makes the reader wonder how any Washington marriages survive.

When Greenfield started out in 1961 the position of women was such that she was not permitted to set foot in the National Press Club, not even to check the wire service ticker. She was routinely excluded from "old boy" meetings and patronized in interviews, a penchant she learned to exploit. Greenfield candidly explores her own complex feelings and acquiescence in this system, even to comporting herself so as not to "threaten" her male subordinates' egos.

Much of the old-boy network is changing, but not entirely for the better, says Greenfield. "This new culture is also redolent of high school, but high school at its most dangerously deranged." The appearance of taking a stand has become more important than getting things done - for a politician it's a sound bite, for a journalist it's the headline. A freshman who would have voted as he was told in the old days in exchange for a good assignment or a morsel of pork now runs to any number of TV outlets to denounce the intimidation, possibly even propose hearings. Smear campaigns and self-righteous posturing have replaced much of the back-room dealing. Though Greenfield is far from waxing nostalgic about the old days, she does explain how private give-and-take worked to get landmark civil rights legislation passed, among others.

Greenfield concludes the book with a discussion of journalism - the delicate line between cooperation and collusion, the hypocrisy of virtue, the formulation of an ethics code at the Post. Ironically, this is the least compelling section of the book, not because of any reticence on Greenfield's part, but because journalistic soul searching has become so fashionable there is little new here.

A thoroughly enjoyable portrait of a peculiar and important place, written in secret before her death from cancer at age 69, Greenfield's account is enhanced by a warm personal foreword from Post publisher Katherine Graham and an equally affectionate afterword by historian Michael Beschloss, who aptly sums up Greenfield's central theme: "how to live at the center of political and journalistic influence in Washington without losing your principles, detachment or individual human qualities." Engaging, witty, and humanizing, Greenfield's "Washington" can be appreciated even by those who feel alienated by and cynical about our nation's politicians.

Washington is a fairly interesting look at the interrrelated world of politics and the media within the small but self-important world of Washington, DC. The focus is not on politics specifically or the media specifically, but rather on the peculiar and perhaps shady world where the two intertwine. A good book, but a bit on the cynical side, I suggest using it as a campanion to CQ Press's "Congress and its Members". Also, if you enjoy this book, also read "Parliament of Whores" by P.J. O'Rourke.

This is really two books in one. First, it's a reality check; it spares no details describing what's come to be nearly unavoidable in modern political life -- basically, all-encompassing pettiness, insincerity, and generally undignified behavior. Second, it's a heart-warming philosophical journey with the author. You get to know her and see how she's formed her opinions of the forces that shaped her life. In the end, she reassures us by arguing that journalistic integrity can survive the "politics" of politics.

"Washington", by Meg Greenfield is a wonderful book. Prior to the book's beginning there is a Foreword written by Katharine Graham that is very interesting to read and better written than many books. Almost as important as what this book is, is what it is not. Meg Greenfield was clearly well educated, brilliant, and a writer that could be tough without sinking into the mud. This book is devoid of gossip, and never even strays near the type of tabloid garbage that litters newsstands. She does talk about scandal, but she focuses on the damage it can do to the family and children of the person caught in some impropriety, not on the salacious details that are valueless.

For over 3 decades this lady covered Washington, and for most of that time it was for The Washington Post. When she arrived it was to a business that would not allow a women to step into press clubs to do her job, when she finally left she had become one of the more influential Editors, had been the first woman to occupy the many levels of the profession she pursued, and was a winner of The Pulitzer Prize as well. She was not outspoken on women's issues, she made her mark by her performance. Her comment, "that if liberated I will not serve", would anger some, but this lady's career was a success by any measure by either gender.

She characterizes Washington life as being akin to high school, with people playing the same roles that teenagers do. There are the groups to be part of, people that are shunned, and others that are the flavor of the moment. She provides a wonderful illustration of just how little substance many in Washington posses. The book is balanced as she also offers brief biographies of people who have come to this nation's capitol and actually retained their personalities, their integrity, and made a difference.