Tales of the city: Ward Just's new novel provides a window on Washington.

Returning to his office each day after lunch, Axel leafed through his messages. They were his link to the world and he always returned them in order of receipt, no exceptions, not even the President. He swiveled his chair so that he could see out the big window into Farragut Square, talking into the telephone while he watched people go about their ordinary business, hurrying to a doctor's appointment, waiting for a bus, buying a hat. His conversations on the telephone affected them mightily, usually in ways they would never understand. So Axel observed them carefully as they hurried or strolled, looking into store windows while they waited for the light to change. At these moments, seated behind his father's old desk, disposing of the messages, Axel thought of himself as a builder of bridges.

He saw his chores literally as bridges, elaborate spans of iron and cable soaring into the sky as gracefully as a hawk in flight. A bridge took you from one frontier to another. Axel identified with the agile and imperturbable New York Indians, the Mohawk who balanced on the footwide beams, a thousand feet to the treacherous river below. Such work called for more than brawn and an inactive imagination. It called for strength of character and the sort of nerves that were wired into the genes, not learned or acquired but present from birth. Such men were not afraid to look down, but seldom bothered, because their eyes were fixed on the work at hand, and when their attention wandered they looked skyward to the heavens. Ad astra per aspera.

Their work was done in the clouds, hidden from view. If you were successful, your labor and the elegance with which you went about it were noticed only by your fellow aerialists, those who shared the heights. The danger was a given. And the danger was not the point. The bridge was the point, and the applause, when it came, would never be heard by the spectators below. That was its value.

A Place Where Anyone Can Play

"They don't forgive in New York. New York's tribal, it never changes. As long as you belong to the tribe you're at the top of the tree. You're there today and there tomorrow unless you go broke or go to jail. And your parents are there and your cousins and someone new comes to town and it takes a generation before their foot fits the slipper. The New York squires don't like Southerners, Westerners, or Jews. They particularly don't like Washingtonians, because we're the competition and anyone can play. Win an election, get nominated to a cabinet post -- and there you are; you're in the game. We don't care who you are or where you come from because we're a city in motion' He paused. New York was a spoiled, conceited city run by gangsters and the plutocracy; and its offspring, Chicago and Los Angeles, were no better. Chicago was much worse. "An outsider makes a mistake in New York and they cut his nuts off. ...We don't practice nepotism, the bank vice presidency or the seat on the Stock Exchanges or the partnership in the law firm. You can't hand down political power. If you're a senator or a Secretary of the Treasury you can't leave that to your son in your will. He has to make it on his own. And he will, if he's careful in his choice of friends.

Order of Battle

Constance insisted on setting her table personally, the flatware, the crystal, the china, the candelabra, the flowers, all situated just so on creamy Irish linen. She attended to the chore with the energy and enthusiasm of a general preparing the battlefield, and indeed that was how she saw herself and saw the after-hours life of the capital. She believed that tables were the terrain of the common struggle. Life flourished on flat surfaces, desks, conference tables, lecterns, dinner tables, an indoor world, and as the general paid particular attention to his forward battalions, his artillery support and reserves and logistics, so Constance was concerned with the precedence of chairmen, which senator was across the table from which lobbyist, who was at her own elbow. ...

Of course the table glittered, but it had a businesslike quality as well, a commercial environment where practical conversation could flourish. She took special care with the placement of the candelabra, in that way encouraging cross-table conversation. Enfilade, the generals would have called it. Constance thought the number 12 was just about right. That was the largest number that could be conveniently assembled within the range of one man's voice.

Camelot...

By the autumn of 1962 Washington was no longer just another glum city of government, like Albany or Sacramento. Instead, it was fabulous -- though not yet fabulous on the scale of Venice at the end of the 15th century or brainy Vienna on the eve of World War I. Any nation's golden age was most vivid at the moment of irreversible political declines, and in late 1962 Washington was at its most muscular and confident. The Russians had been humiliated in Cuba, and the young President was now seen not as a novice out of his depth but as a statesman of charm, subtlety, integrity, and tact. In private moments he spoke alarmingly of a long twilight struggle with the Bolsheviks; but that was not seen as evidence of pessimism or exhaustion but of an attractive worldliness, a newly mature American statecraft on the model of Whitehall or the Quai d'Orsay. Certainly there was no evidence of decline; quite the reverse. In such fine weather no one would think to listen for the scrape of the keel on the shoals. ...

Suddenly every Democrat wanted to be in Washington, indisputably the epicenter of American life. Civic-minded industrialists, university professors, foundation executives, writers, provincial politicians, lawyers beyond count, settled in sociable Georgetown or Cleveland Park as the American emigres to Paris 40 years before gathered in the quarters of the Left Bank, charmed by the natives, avid to absorb the culture. They arrived in station wagons from Cambridge or Ann Arbor with their wives and children, settling in as if they never intended to leave -- a logical assumption, since there was every prospect of a 16 or 24-year dynasty, so long as they did their work with competence and elan, and learned the language of government, indeed married the language of government to the language of the boardroom, the courtroom, the faculty lounge, and the newsroom. They thought of themselves as the permanent civil service that would supervise the long twilight struggle. There came to be a kind of syncopation to the capital, jazz rhythms to the press conferences and glittering White House evenings, as the big cats prowled and did their business, and then went reluctantly home.

... and Watergate

By 1973 Sylvia was back in Washington. ...She wondered whether she could smell the corruption in Washington, actually smell it, like onions or sweat or brimstone. ...The city was much changed from the leisurely capital of the prewar and postwar years, busier, larger, and somehow more settled, certainly more aware of itself and much, much richer. ...

No one could keep the details straight, but it was obvious that something somewhere was fishy and that Nixon was responsible; and then the tapes came to light.

They've got him now, Willy said. They've got his actual language, the language of a race-baiting roughneck. And that will become the issue. He's finished. Washington cannot abide the common speech, the words that people actually use, the petty evasions and nuance and exaggeration and resentment and hatred of the other. They want all Presidents to talk like Lincol or John F. Kennedy. They want words you can chisel in marble.

He's let them down, you see. Just as they knew he always would.

Poor bastard; they'll ride him out of town on a rail. ...

Watergate seemed such a simple matter and suddenly it wasn't simple. One scandal followed another. Courageous, brilliant reporting and disinterested, creative editing would bring Nixon down at last. The presidency itself was in the balance -- yet the commotion was threatening the stability of the government, straining the fragile threads that bound the leaders to the led. This was an unintended consequence, Washington itself on trial. Someone had to put a stop to it; otherwise --

He is destroying himself, they said. Will he destroy us as well? Nixon himself was a cancer on the community.

Getting the Right Lawyer: Not always

the Visible

I thought it would be better to have someone more visible, someone who'd make the senators sit up a little straighter, pay attention to the proceedings, treat you with respect, because maybe, sometime in the future, they'd need help from Mr. Visible. A dubious campaign contribution, sexual mischief, a grand jury summons, malfeasance or misconduct, the usual petty blackmail or extortion. At that time it's mighty handy to have Mr. Clifford or Mr. Williams on your side, explaining things. I thought I could use some of that distinction and weight. But Axel argued that that was precisely the wrong approach, because the Washington Visibles come with a reputation and an entourage. Word goes around that they've been retained; it's a bullhorn to the goddamned press: Wait a minute, this is serious, there!s something nasty afoot, perhaps something embarrassing to the government, perhaps to the President.

Clifford or Williams guarantees publicity and sometimes that's what the client needs. Sometimes you want to try the case in the press because you sure as hell don't want to try it in front of a jury or judge, or the Select Committee on Intelligence. But that wasn't what we wanted. Axel didn't want it and I guess I didn't want it either. My superiors didn't want it. ...

And the truth is, you can always rent a Visible for an hour to make a telephone call and explain what the situation really is as opposed to what it appears to be. These proceedings are always political and therefore it's a question of point of view. It has nothing to do with law and nothing to do with ethics. It has to do with optics. The lawyer's job is to make certain that everyone understands that there!s more than one point of view, each with its own primary colors. The Visibles are experts at building up one and tearing down the other. My Botticelli is superior to your Picasso, that figure with two noses and three eyes and a hole in her stomach. They aren't lawyers, really. They're opticians, each with his own eye chart.

The Venerables

The old men seemed to exist as a rebuke, relics of the empire that had mastered the Depression and fought a two-front war, in which all able-bodied men participated, as opposed to departing for Sweden or declaring themselves homosexual or sheltering in law school or faking murmurs of the heart, and still had resources left over to rehabilitate the nations of Europe and Asia while defending them against the Stalinist scourge; and at that critical moment managed to assemble the most talented cohort of public servants since the Founding Fathers, men who were poor when they entered government and poor when they left it, often with damaged reputations, owing to the recklessness of Senator McCarthy.

And the Venerables were not shy about reminding everyone what Washington had been and what it had become, a self-infatuated money-grubbing iron triangle of stupefying vulgarity, vainglory, egotism, and greed, worse than Rome because at least in Rome there was lively sexual license, orgies and the like. These people wouldn't know an orgy if it patted them on the ass and said, Please. The present-day crowd along with their unspeakable arrogance were intolerant. They were sanctimonious. They were puritans. They were budget-cutters, cheap Charlies.

This estimate of the nation's capital at the turn of the millennium did not go unchallenged. To younger Washingtonians the opinions of the old men seemed anecdotal, dated, nostalgic, and partial, a loud fart from another time altogether, more unreliable cold war propaganda. They not only had their own stories about what Stalin had told Chip and what Chip had told George and what George had said to Tommy and what Tommy had told the President; they had their fathers' stories about what the President had told Cohen and what Cohen had told Corcoran and what Corcoran had said to Frankfurter and what Frankfurter did. All very well and good, but weren't these more ghosts from the past come to terrorize the present? There was another way to look at it, and that was that these most talented public servants since the Founding Fathers, with their admirable modesty and high intelligence, had bankrupted the nation fighting foolish unwinnable wars and encouraging dubious insurgencies, all because of what Stalin had told Chip and what Chip had said to George, et cetera. And they had declined to levy the taxes needed to pay for the installation of the New Enlightenment, their American Century. And when the Russian empire had reached its megalomaniacal limit, it collapsed. Even so feckless an operator as Mikhail Gorbachev had brought it to its knees; and now it existed as a collection of impoverished semi-feudal states, with grotesque arsenals of nuclear weapons, wholly dependent on the forbearance and generosity of the West, and all thanks to the paranoia of Chip, Tommy, and George, and to that list you could add Harry, Ike, Joe, Edgar, Foster, Jack, Bobby, Dean, Allen, Bob, Mac, Lyndon, and Hubert, not to mention the unindicted co-conspirator Richard Milhous Nixon, who had poisoned the well for a generation, nearly destroying the nation's fragile faith in its political processes. Hell, yes, the country was in a sorry way, and Washington sorrier still. The Treasury was empty. And as for Nam -- could it not be humanely said that the true victims were those obliged to dodge and weave to save their skins, nobly refusing to be led like lambs to the killing fields? Victims, yes -- and heroes, too, answering a higher call.