Among the Intellectualoids/Washington Behind Bars: A Journalist's Story
Stillman, Whit
AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS Whit Stillman Washington Behind Bars: A Journalist's Story following'the war in Vietnam, a number of America's finest young journalists found themselves unwilling to...
...Looking at one of her pictures of inside the Tiger House, Dirk said, "This describes it far better than I could," and pulled three pages from his manuscript...
...They left and in a subdued mood walked back through the zoo compound toward the terrace...
...While writing Drumbo drank one cup of coffee after another, although it was bad for his stomach and had the effect of keeping him up late each night...
...The word "zoo" has an ugly connotation in our language, perhaps related to our negative assumptions about animal behavior...
...Another piece,'' he said, "might focus on the mistreatment of household pets by the Park regime in South Korea" The subject I'd like to do myself is the 'Washington cocktail party.' The conventional theory in Washington these days is that all the 'real' political decisions are being made there...
...At a stoplight he looked across into one which carried five passengers jammed in . the back seat...
...He mentioned that the outbreak of a land war would be highly advantageous to official Washington's hangers-on...
...The folding of New Times in December 1978 coincided with Fortnightly' s fourth anniversary...
...defense spending be cut 90 percent as a defensive signal to the Russians...
...It seemed authentic...
...There was perhaps a veneer of glibness to Effing's theories, but in them Drumbo heard something else-the unmistakable cadences of the Rockefeller/Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) line...
...government use of vivisection-based research reports imported from Canada...
...Laura started snapping photos of the tigers in their cages, hurriedly, lest a zoo official see them and try to intervene...
...Fortnightly is not afraid of printing stories which might make powerful people angry...
...We realized before the others that the line between the mistreatment of animals and of people was thin- and could easily be crossed...
...Our readers have come to rely on Fortnightly for giving them the story behind the headlines-and in copy that is crisply written, tightly edited, tautly designed, and clearly printed...
...That figures-we wouldn't think of using nuclear weapons on whites...
...For an explanation one did not have far to look...
...he did not imply that they desired such a war...
...He explained that his initial objective had been to find out whether it was true that the real political decisions in Washington were being made at its cocktail parties...
...was related to their exclusion from the decision-making process...
...AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS Whit Stillman Washington Behind Bars: A Journalist's Story following'the war in Vietnam, a number of America's finest young journalists found themselves unwilling to accept the "strait-jacket" of objectivity demanded by traditional publications such as the Washington Post...
...And there's no other magazine quite like it...
...Effing, a high-ranking Foreign Service officer who had served in Iran, Taiwan, Afghanistan Ethiopia, Angola, Vietnam, Laos, Kampuchea, Libya, Algeria, and Cuba, and who said he would be taking a post in Ottawa shortly...
...For example, it was the first magazine to raise the issue of animal rights...
...The crowd on the zoo's, terrace had grown quickly in size...
...Everything seems highly institutionalized here," Dirk said...
...Fortnightly is in short, original and unique...
...Essentially, there are just two classes of people at Washington cocktail parties: those with power and those no longer with it...
...Why don't you see what you can find out...
...Fortnightly, founded in reaction to the "objective" bias of the conventional news media's coverage of the war, sought to keep everyone, and especially Congress, mindful of Vietnam's lessons...
...I'm not really a Foreign Service officer,'' he said...
...An hour later, as Dirk and Laura were driving back from Federal Zoo, a popular song from the early sixties, "Eve of Destruction," came on the car radio, with its powerful lyric: "We are on the eve of destruction...
...As the plane lifted off from LaGuardia, he watched the cars on the ground recede until they were the size of dinky toys, matchbox toys and, finally, "0" gauge toys, before the plane left Long Island behind...
...In Canada our reporters found that many of the rats which contracted cancer during laboratory tests later died...
...But this doesn't take into consideration the machinery of policy-making...
...He examined the small napkin he had been handed with his drink and saw that it was covered with writing, almost all now indecipherably blurred...
...The capital city was lushly green and seemefd swollen with opulence, as if vast sums had been collected from distant provinces and distributed lavishly here...
...most of the editorial fireworks were his...
...Washington chews people up," an old capital saying goes, "but it doesn't spit them out...
...He also wondered aloud whether the time hadn't come to start thinking of animals in an entirely new light...
...They could easily have been rice paddies, he thought, had the climate been warmer, and the fields flooded and planted with rice...
...To do the paperwork necessary for a procurement contract, or to hold a productive committee meeting, would be nearly impossible...
...This put her at aa advantage when she and Dirk arrived at Federal Zoo...
...She was pretty in the sense of being highly attractive physically...
...On Safari" was the party's theme...
...The emotions Dirk had felt during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis came back to him now...
...How come...
...Steel bars were everywhere...
...The first nine years of the new decade were over, and nothing much had happened...
...Then the light changed and the two cabs sped on...
...Before leaving Effing confided, ' 'Please keep my role in this off-the-record...
...B.ut, like many photographers, she lacked intelligence of the verbal kind, tending to see the world more in terms of visual images...
...From its window a forlorn man-child of nine years returned his stare, a look of nightmarish discomfort on his face...
...He would never forget the harrowing news broadcasts of the Vietnam era...
...He was used to the casual, working-class style parties Fortnightly staff members would give...
...In the opening paragraphs the question editor Rice had raised at Fortnightly's editorial meeting was clearly answered...
...With considerable concern about what they might find, Dirk and Laura stepped behind the terrace backdrop to enter the confines of the zoo itself...
...War would be inevitable...
...By being omitted from the guest list, the less privileged had been excluded from the decision-making pro cess...
...Todd Rice, the editor of Fortnightly magazine, believed this more passionately than anyone...
...This is incredible," he said...
...The title of the first feature news magazine, New Times, itself pithily expressed the credo which inspired them all: simply, the belief that the times we live in have never occurred before...
...Our alliance with South Korea was linked to the eating of household pets there...
...Drumbo was glad to see him...
...In all my years in the Foreign Service, I've never seen a true parallel emerge...
...The prestigious Northwest section of town was bordered...
...When he was through, he lifted up a cocktail napkin covered with handwriting and pulled two small squares of carbon paper from the napkins beneath it...
...Editor Rice asked him to look into a second lead: "The United States has a vast arsenal of intercontinental--and so implicitly offensive-nuclear weapons...
...Population bias is something we should definitely cover," he said at one point...
...The central lesson was, simply, never again Never again should the United States involve itself in a land war...
...If it were known that I had given a journalist America's nuclear plans I could lose my job...
...Some of the guests had formed into oddly large conversational groups...
...The lacquered townhouscs of Georgetown were mocked by the unkempt lawns of the city's poorer areas...
...For the staff, each was an ordeal of peer judgment: "Brilliant" and "terrific" story ideas were applauded...
...Her photography-begun with an expensive Christmas gift-had turned from pastime into hobby, then into artistic obsession, and, finally, career...
...People outside the foreign policy community are always saying this: that because something happened in nation A, and something superficially the same in nation B, that therefore something similar could happen in nation C. But this is norisense, of course, as it completely fails to take into consideration tribal factors...
...Often some everyday event-the sight of a former Vietnamese officer working as a short-order cook, a news report about a freighter rescuing "boat people"- would remind him of America's catastrophic involvement in the Indo-chinese conflict...
...As any of you who have been to a cocktail party know, it's hard enough to find a cocktail napkin to write someone's phone number on, or to conduct a really good conversation...
...Drumbo's reporting was cut short when Sean Effing reappeared and took him a-side...
...After the editorial meeting, Dirk returned to Washington on the Eastern Shuttle...
...Khe Sahn, Da Nang, Saigon, Annam, Constantinople, Hamburger Hill, South Vietnam's tiger cages, Peace with Honor: The names and phrases of Vietnam- which are etched forever on the memories, and in some case the skin, of those who grew up in the sixties-are largely unknown to the college students of 1979...
...After a minute or two the smell inside of disinfectant and tiger B.O., and the tension of the situation, combined to make her feel nauseated...
...o 'And nuclear war would almost certainly lead to a ground conflict...
...he watched as five of them raised their cocktail glasses in unison...
...Instead they invented feature news journalism...
...The first thing we learn in the Foreign Service is that it's impossible to compare the experience in one country with that in another...
...Dirk Drumbo had years earlier discarded any simple view of Washington...
...Others had not been willing to make the hard "easy decisions" sometimes necessary for survival in administrative and electoral politics, or else had chosen the hard way by mistake...
...Nearly everyone there, he noted, held a cocktail glass or some other beverage container in his hand...
...In conclusion, Drumbo admitted that he could not fully explore the implications of all the points his article raised...
...The illdressed, the ill-spoken, the ill-clothed had not been invited to the zoo benefit, so no representatives of the poor and working classes were there...
...The occasion was Federal Zoo's Spring Benefit, and all of official Washington was sure to be there, if only in a show of support...
...Margot practiced a style of photojournalism as iconoclastic and surprising as Fortnightly's style of reporting...
...I see that it's the Russians and mainland Chinese we have our missiles pointed at," Dirk said bitterly...
...next, evoking the tranquil, complacent America of early 1979...
...But what about locking tigers in tiger cages...
...He described the odd conversational groups, the use of carbon paper between cocktail napkins and matchbook flaps, the juxtaposition of Secretary Califano's signature and a multibillion dollar figure-but without pointing to any conclusions of his own...
...He chose this low-key opening because it accomplished several things: first, setting the date...
...Minority groups are seriously under-represented in the population as a whole...
...Essentially it was a city of glaring contrasts...
...At the end of the article Drumbo dropped his documentary approach to make some explicit connections...
...Dirk doubted whether those present had thought about the zoo situation at all...
...For a minute Dirk examined the document...
...Inside the building, roof and walls effectively blocked out most light...
...When the prints were finished they spread them out over his floor, selected the best, arid arranged them into rough chronological order...
...Laura...
...The "idea" of wilderness was placed next, to the very real possibility of all-out nuclear war...
...This meant breaking the rules of conventional journalism...
...His own hand had become smudged with black ink...
...Rather than returning home, they would linger on in Washington as attorneys, or lobbyists, or agents for foreign powers, or congressmen...
...From National Airport Drumbo took one of the inexpensive local cabs into town...
...Later, over Maryland, he watched the patchwork pattern of fields below...
...and, finally, setting what struck him as the right tone for what would follow...
...And "Eve of Destruction's" despairing lines brought back some darker associations from those days, too...
...Laura Margot brought over contact sheets of the pictures she had taken at the party, and with an orange grease pencil he marked the shots he wanted prints of...
...Effing slipped from his attache case a thick report bound between red "top security" covers and labelled: Plans for Emphatic Use of Military Force Following Massive Nuclear Attack on the United States by the USSR and the PRC [Red.China...
...But obviously it's in some people's interest to have this 'cocktail party' theory believed...
...Laura went to take photographs around the party's periphery, while he ordered a cocktail...
...April 1979...
...In New York we found dogs and cats which were being mistreated...
...After Effing left to "get another drink" -cocktail party shorthand for wanting to move on-Dirk mentioned to Laura something else he had noticed: All countries in which Effing said he had served had at some point been involved in a land war...
...then the other four raised theirs- after which the original five smiled and waved their left hands in "V" symbols...
...For days Dirk thought, pieced together, and wrote...
...After detailing the steps which had led to his being invited to the 200 benefit, he told of driving there and walking up to the terrace, decorated in its "on safari" theme...
...But what if two countries did share the same language, customs, dialect, tradition, location, and name-couldn't parallels then be drawn...
...17 or the next half hour Dirk collected information for his article simply by watching what was happening around him...
...I'd like to find out whose interest...
...In Global Network the economist Peter Swayzc has written: "Through this quadrumvirate- the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Club of Rome, and the Cousteau Society-international corporations have been able to manipulate virtually every western nation's foreign policy to their advantage, and to that of their stockholders,...Both Thor Heyerdahl and Senator William Proxmire have married female members of the Rockefeller, family...
...He urged the adoption of a Boston Soinerville (Massachusetts) study group's recommendation that U.S...
...These were expressly conceived as brainstorming sessions...
...But how can I be sure you really are a Central Intelligence Agency agent...
...It had been a week of intense foreign policy discussions on the bus to school and extensive canned food purchases at home...
...It's just as incarcerating, and far more cynical...
...The dark prospect was relieved only by rudimentary openings for ventilation and a series of portals opening from each cage to a runway outside-and also providing ventilation...
...He reminded Laura how shocked everyone had been when the Thieu regime had made a practice of jailing its political opponents in tiger cages...
...Dirk Drumbo was a member of the earlier generation...
...How can I be sure that this isn't another 'set-up...
...I couldn't say...
...Near him, nine men stood in a closed circle...
...Drumbo then noticed a second curious thing...
...Drumbo silently read the label...
...Toward the bottom of the napkin, however, he could pick out a seven-digit dollar figure and the signature "Joseph Califano"-the napkin was evidently some kind of multibillion dollar contract the HEW Secretary had awarded in the course of the party...
...Fortnightly was the imaginary feature news magazine and, as such, probably the best...
...Foreign visitors to Washington often commented upon its disparities...
...In Washington this potentially Oriental cast to the landscape was obscured by the city's sprawling semi-urban development...
...The narrative voice he chose was quiet and personal, as if Fortnightly1 $ 330,000 readers were seated about him in his room and he were talking to them...
...by the less prestigious Southwest section...
...asked him, "Have any of the countries in . which you've previously served had political systems like ours, with the real decisions being made at social gatherings...
...An enormous job of synthesis was involved, and the facts and observations which could not be fit into an overall framework he decided just to add as they occurred to him...
...Editor Rice used the occasion to pay tribute to the original feature news magazine and to try to catch his own journal's essence: "Fortnightly is 'radical' in the sense of 'going to the roots of things,' 'liberal' in the best sense, and 'conservative' in its preservation of what's finest in the tradi- . tion of progressive journalism...
...Fut everything in, even the little things, no matter how insignificant they might seem now," editor Rice told Dirk over the phone...
...The treatment of working-class people as if they had social "B.O...
...He drew a line from the prevailing formality of attire to the treatment of 200 animals, and from there to the official U.S...
...Go ahead, do some digging...
...That was just my 'cover.' The place I really work is probably known to you as fthe company,' 'the agency,' 'Langley,' or just 'mother,' but those of us there refer to it as 'the Central Intelligence Agency.' I should mention that I'm violating security in telling you this...
...As he stood with his drink near the bar, he saw a conservatively dressed man writing in laboriously small print oil the inside cover of a book of paper matches...
...Then the man put his pen away, and pulled two tiny slips of carbon paper from between the covers of two match-books open below...
...Yes-but that would be hypothetical...
...At Fort: nightly'k March 1979 editorial meeting "Drumbo" put a dozen leads up for grabs...
...Dirk Drumbo, Fortnightly' s Washington editor, was the star of these proceedings...
...What struck Drumbo as newsworthy was the paltriness of the sum involved-tiny in comparison to the Pentagon's huge outlays for military hardware...
...Effing had proved to be a valuable source-so far, in fact, his only one...
...poorly thought out" ones could be mercilessly ridiculed...
...The military jargon, the acronyms, the colorless writing were there...
...There was little Fort-nightly's editors did believe: "Brashly skeptical, iconoclastic, irreverent, irresponsible, iconbusting, unconventional, totem-toppling, irrepressible, always surprising, and never predictable"-this was how the magazine described itself in its own promotional literature...
...Laura Margot, a well-connected local photojournalism had managed to wangle invitations for both Dirk and herself...
...For some, it was a matter of having backed an unsuccessful candidacy -perhaps their own...
...A backdrop of large, brightly colored cardj-board zebras, giraffes, and elephants separated the zoo's terrace from its animal compounds, Thfee long tables covered with white iineh, copious piles of "on safari" cocktails napkins, and ranks of liquor three dieep set the tone...
...The situation in every country is far too complex to allow for generalizations of any kind-please forgive me if that sounds glib...
...All Effing's glibness had dropped away...
...Although the offices of news organizations are pervaded by an informal, democratic habit of mind-everyone is free to call anyone else by his first name-there's a custom of just using the last...
...What we don't really know is what they're pointed at...
...Fortnightly'is also 'radical' in the old sense of 'being to the left politically,' and 'liberal' in the same way...
...The hum of conversation on the terrace was occasionally pierced by raucous animal sounds from the zoo area behind the colorful "on safari" backdrop...
...These must be tigers," Dirk said as they walked past the first half-dozen cages...
...A small crowd of influential Washingtonians had already arrived...
...We know that these are cylindrical missiles with cone-shaped tips and that they are therefore capable of being pointed...
...On the first Thursday in April, Washington Society threw itself a party...
...The general formality of attire at the zoo gathering surprised Dirk and made him feel somewhat uncomfortable...
...The bad smells, worse hygiene, and brutal habits of individual animals have been ascribed to entire species...
...Maybe this will convince you...
...On the terrace the party continued unabated...
...Drum bo's idea was enthusiastically received...
...Perhaps they hoped that one day some unforeseen event would return them to power-an event such as America's involvement in a land war...
...But on the way in from the airport what struck him most was the incongruous crowding in the taxicabs...
...Each country is separated from every other by language, custom, dialect, tradition, location, and name...
...Thematic arrows were drawn from the Chase Manhattan Bank to the Arben2 coup d'etat in Guatemala in 1954 and the Kon-Tiki expedition seven years earlier...
...The first influential Washingtonian they met was Sean...
...A few yards away a man bent over one of the linen-draped liquor tables, writing intently...
...the effect was comparable to that of a prison's interior...
...Frank odors and jungle noises accompanied them as they walked along a marked path that led to an old stone building labelled simply, "Tiger House...
...Much of what was surprising in Fortnightly-and its readers could look forward to several startling articles in each issue- originated at the magazine's monthly editorial meetings...
Vol. 12 • April 1979 • No. 4
