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...
...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...
...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...
...On Safari" was the party's theme...
...Foreign visitors to Washington often commented upon its disparities...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...In the opening paragraphs the question editor Rice had raised at Fortnightly's editorial meeting was clearly answered...
...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...
...then the other four raised theirs- after which the original five smiled and waved their left hands in "V" symbols...
...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...
...Before leaving Effing confided, ' 'Please keep my role in this off-the-record...
...She was pretty in the sense of being highly attractive physically...
...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...
...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...
...Her photography-begun with an expensive Christmas gift-had turned from pastime into hobby, then into artistic obsession, and, finally, career...
...defense spending be cut 90 percent as a defensive signal to the Russians...
...We know that these are cylindrical missiles with cone-shaped tips and that they are therefore capable of being pointed...
...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...
...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...
...He also wondered aloud whether the time hadn't come to start thinking of animals in an entirely new light...
...Drumbo was glad to see him...
...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...
...The first nine years of the new decade were over, and nothing much had happened...
...Fortnightly is not afraid of printing stories which might make powerful people angry...
...All Effing's glibness had dropped away...
...Laura started snapping photos of the tigers in their cages, hurriedly, lest a zoo official see them and try to intervene...
...Laura...
...How come...
...They left and in a subdued mood walked back through the zoo compound toward the terrace...
...The emotions Dirk had felt during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis came back to him now...
...Washington chews people up," an old capital saying goes, "but it doesn't spit them out...
...I'd like to find out whose interest...
...and, finally, setting what struck him as the right tone for what would follow...
...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...
...By being omitted from the guest list, the less privileged had been excluded from the decision-making pro cess...
...Drum bo's idea was enthusiastically received...
...For days Dirk thought, pieced together, and wrote...
...These must be tigers," Dirk said as they walked past the first half-dozen cages...
...I'm not really a Foreign Service officer,'' he said...
...Each country is separated from every other by language, custom, dialect, tradition, location, and name...
...Minority groups are seriously under-represented in the population as a whole...
...Dirk doubted whether those present had thought about the zoo situation at all...
...But how can I be sure you really are a Central Intelligence Agency agent...
...Go ahead, do some digging...
...The first influential Washingtonian they met was Sean...
...Essentially it was a city of glaring contrasts...
...The crowd on the zoo's, terrace had grown quickly in size...
...He would never forget the harrowing news broadcasts of the Vietnam era...
...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...
...We realized before the others that the line between the mistreatment of animals and of people was thin- and could easily be crossed...
...o 'And nuclear war would almost certainly lead to a ground conflict...
...In Canada our reporters found that many of the rats which contracted cancer during laboratory tests later died...
...On the first Thursday in April, Washington Society threw itself a party...
...For example, it was the first magazine to raise the issue of animal rights...
...Dirk Drumbo had years earlier discarded any simple view of Washington...
...17 or the next half hour Dirk collected information for his article simply by watching what was happening around him...
...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...
...Drumbo then noticed a second curious thing...
...For a minute Dirk examined the document...
...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...
...Laura went to take photographs around the party's periphery, while he ordered a cocktail...
...War would be inevitable...
...Rather than returning home, they would linger on in Washington as attorneys, or lobbyists, or agents for foreign powers, or congressmen...
...What struck Drumbo as newsworthy was the paltriness of the sum involved-tiny in comparison to the Pentagon's huge outlays for military hardware...
...A small crowd of influential Washingtonians had already arrived...
...by the less prestigious Southwest section...
...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...
...Yes-but that would be hypothetical...
...This is incredible," he said...
...The general formality of attire at the zoo gathering surprised Dirk and made him feel somewhat uncomfortable...
...The word "zoo" has an ugly connotation in our language, perhaps related to our negative assumptions about animal behavior...
...Effing had proved to be a valuable source-so far, in fact, his only one...
...A few yards away a man bent over one of the linen-draped liquor tables, writing intently...
...Later, over Maryland, he watched the patchwork pattern of fields below...
...At a stoplight he looked across into one which carried five passengers jammed in . the back seat...
...Dirk Drumbo was a member of the earlier generation...
...the effect was comparable to that of a prison's interior...
...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...
...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...
...Dirk Drumbo, Fortnightly' s Washington editor, was the star of these proceedings...
...This meant breaking the rules of conventional journalism...
...It had been a week of intense foreign policy discussions on the bus to school and extensive canned food purchases at home...
...Our alliance with South Korea was linked to the eating of household pets there...
...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...
...How can I be sure that this isn't another 'set-up...
...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...
...They could easily have been rice paddies, he thought, had the climate been warmer, and the fields flooded and planted with rice...
...The central lesson was, simply, never again Never again should the United States involve itself in a land war...
...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...
...he watched as five of them raised their cocktail glasses in unison...
...Instead they invented feature news journalism...
...But what about locking tigers in tiger cages...
...Steel bars were everywhere...
...Fortnightly was the imaginary feature news magazine and, as such, probably the best...
...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...
...I couldn't say...
...After the editorial meeting, Dirk returned to Washington on the Eastern Shuttle...
...government use of vivisection-based research reports imported from Canada...
...But obviously it's in some people's interest to have this 'cocktail party' theory believed...
...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...
...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...
...In all my years in the Foreign Service, I've never seen a true parallel emerge...
...With considerable concern about what they might find, Dirk and Laura stepped behind the terrace backdrop to enter the confines of the zoo itself...
...The bad smells, worse hygiene, and brutal habits of individual animals have been ascribed to entire species...
...He drew a line from the prevailing formality of attire to the treatment of 200 animals, and from there to the official U.S...
...On the terrace the party continued unabated...
...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...
...The "idea" of wilderness was placed next, to the very real possibility of all-out nuclear war...
...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...
...From National Airport Drumbo took one of the inexpensive local cabs into town...
...Some of the guests had formed into oddly large conversational groups...
...The folding of New Times in December 1978 coincided with Fortnightly' s fourth anniversary...
...Laura Margot, a well-connected local photojournalism had managed to wangle invitations for both Dirk and herself...
...Why don't you see what you can find out...
...Then the light changed and the two cabs sped on...
...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...
...At Fort: nightly'k March 1979 editorial meeting "Drumbo" put a dozen leads up for grabs...
...For some, it was a matter of having backed an unsuccessful candidacy -perhaps their own...
...Fut everything in, even the little things, no matter how insignificant they might seem now," editor Rice told Dirk over the phone...
...In conclusion, Drumbo admitted that he could not fully explore the implications of all the points his article raised...
...Maybe this will convince you...
...Fortnightly is in short, original and unique...
...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...
...next, evoking the tranquil, complacent America of early 1979...
...poorly thought out" ones could be mercilessly ridiculed...
...He reminded Laura how shocked everyone had been when the Thieu regime had made a practice of jailing its political opponents in tiger cages...
...Everything seems highly institutionalized here," Dirk said...
...he did not imply that they desired such a war...
...These were expressly conceived as brainstorming sessions...
...The military jargon, the acronyms, the colorless writing were there...
...But what if two countries did share the same language, customs, dialect, tradition, location, and name-couldn't parallels then be drawn...
...His own hand had become smudged with black ink...
...He urged the adoption of a Boston Soinerville (Massachusetts) study group's recommendation that U.S...
...That figures-we wouldn't think of using nuclear weapons on whites...
...The hum of conversation on the terrace was occasionally pierced by raucous animal sounds from the zoo area behind the colorful "on safari" backdrop...
...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...
...The lacquered townhouscs of Georgetown were mocked by the unkempt lawns of the city's poorer areas...
...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...
...Essentially, there are just two classes of people at Washington cocktail parties: those with power and those no longer with it...
...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...
...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...
...And "Eve of Destruction's" despairing lines brought back some darker associations from those days, too...
...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...
...Nearly everyone there, he noted, held a cocktail glass or some other beverage container in his hand...
...The prestigious Northwest section of town was bordered...
...He chose this low-key opening because it accomplished several things: first, setting the date...
...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...
...But on the way in from the airport what struck him most was the incongruous crowding in the taxicabs...
...Margot practiced a style of photojournalism as iconoclastic and surprising as Fortnightly's style of reporting...
...For the staff, each was an ordeal of peer judgment: "Brilliant" and "terrific" story ideas were applauded...
...Population bias is something we should definitely cover," he said at one point...
...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...
...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...
...It's just as incarcerating, and far more cynical...
...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...
...When the prints were finished they spread them out over his floor, selected the best, arid arranged them into rough chronological order...
...In New York we found dogs and cats which were being mistreated...
...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 treatment of working-class people as if they had social "B.O...
...It seemed authentic...
...If it were known that I had given a journalist America's nuclear plans I could lose my job...
...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...
...I see that it's the Russians and mainland Chinese we have our missiles pointed at," Dirk said bitterly...
...From its window a forlorn man-child of nine years returned his stare, a look of nightmarish discomfort on his face...
...Near him, nine men stood in a closed circle...
...April 1979...
...B.ut, like many photographers, she lacked intelligence of the verbal kind, tending to see the world more in terms of visual images...
...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...
...was related to their exclusion from the decision-making process...
...Inside the building, roof and walls effectively blocked out most light...
...He was used to the casual, working-class style parties Fortnightly staff members would give...
...most of the editorial fireworks were his...
...In Washington this potentially Oriental cast to the landscape was obscured by the city's sprawling semi-urban development...
...What we don't really know is what they're pointed at...
...And there's no other magazine quite like 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...
...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...
...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...
...Todd Rice, the editor of Fortnightly magazine, believed this more passionately than anyone...
...Drumbo silently read the label...
...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...
...At the end of the article Drumbo dropped his documentary approach to make some explicit connections...
...Fortnightly'is also 'radical' in the old sense of 'being to the left politically,' and 'liberal' in the same way...
...He mentioned that the outbreak of a land war would be highly advantageous to official Washington's hangers-on...
...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...
...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...
...But this doesn't take into consideration the machinery of policy-making...
...For an explanation one did not have far to look...
...Drumbo's reporting was cut short when Sean Effing reappeared and took him a-side...
...The situation in every country is far too complex to allow for generalizations of any kind-please forgive me if that sounds glib...
Vol. 12 • April 1979 • No. 4
