Capitol Ideas/High Priests

...One thinks particularly of Jim Fallows, always primus inter pares among Charlie's Angels, who went out to become Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter and the Washington editor of the Atlantic Monthly...

...It was billed: "Understanding the Soviet Union...

...The joke is that the notion of Communists-as-plotters is most strenuously opposed by those who would least object to such plots...

...He probably wouldn't like the "insider" label...

...if you do, and you are considered important enough, you will be called an ideologue and anonymous informants will start whispering unkind things about you to the bloodhounds who dwell inside the Washington Post kennels...

...I decid.ed to see one of the few explicitly right-wing movies made in recent years, The Final Option, which is about the British Special Air Service foiling a Commie plot in London...

...The message seemed to be that Commies don't engage in plots-they're all trumped up by the FBI, which is the truly conspiratorial organization...

...Someone called Doctor Geyer was talking, a Methodist of sorts...

...Foiled again...

...I've kept a wary eye on the man since he was elected to the Senate, and he strikes me as being a fairly hard-line leftist who is only too happy to be offered shelter under the same taxonomic umbrella as genuine moderates like Fallows and Peters...

...I think the general idea is that a neoliberal is to a liberal what a neoconservative is to a conservative: a more moderate variety of the same species...

...But enough of this carping...

...Oh, one final point...

...The canon explained that Senator Claiborne Pell had only the other day had dinner with Berezhkov Sr...

...My guess is that Charlie is not entirely comfortable with the leftward drift of the Democratic party, and of the Washington consensus generally...

...Nice-mannered Episcopalian ladies were shaking out their umbrellas, and one with a green alligator on her top asked in a loud voice, "Who's Richard Pipes...

...Somewhere up there I also saw the cross...

...When one day I expressed doubts about the Bail Reform Act, he encouraged me to write the "right-wing crime story" that no one else in the office would tackle at that point...

...in Moscow, "which is good news," he added, "because it means he's in Moscow and not Siberia...

...But of course there were intangible benefits, and whenever a vacancy arises, I gather, Charlie has to sort through hundreds of applications...

...I might have picked up some good-writing tips...

...By the same token those who are comfortable with the new "liberal" position are really leftists in disguise...

...I think I might have plucked up my courage and gone to the conference anyway had William Greider been there to speak, as originally scheduled...

...This strikes me as being unexceptionable, because so few people are calling for an inefficient defense...

...A leaflet explained that "we need to be able to see the world from the Soviet perspective, and to respect its problems and goals...

...Although it had only opened at area theaters a few days earlier, there was no sign of it anywhere in the Washington Post listings...

...I couldn't follow the details-a lot of talk about the freeze and something about build-down being a build-up...

...One of the nice things I remember about writing for the magazine (I was on the staff for a year) was that you always had the encouraging sense that it was being read in High Places...

...On a few issues the Monthly (i.e., Peters, for he ran a fairly tight ship, editorially: it was no easy matter to get things he didn't agree with into the magazine) was to the right of the Washington Consensus-but never by much...

...Wouldn't you know, I arrived just in time for one of those now-common church debates whose unstated premise is that it might be wise to surrender to the Soviets before it's too late...

...Moderate enough, but of course rather rightish from the D.C...

...He did a good job of seeing the world from the Soviet perspective, I'll say that for him...

...apparently a heavy hitter on the peace and justice circuit...

...One of his best qualities was that it never seemed to bother him that those who worked for the magazine sometimes went on to media posts more prominent than the dusty little office-warren he occupied on the 12th floor of Connecticut Avenue...

...I should imagine today's Monthly staffers qualify for Food Stamps...

...just as Alger Hiss's innocence is most loudly proclaimed by those who would have the least objection to his guilty actions...

...I'm not at all sure I know what this"neoliberal" business is all about, and I suspect it may not be a particularly suitable description of the philosophy espoused by the Washington Monthly...

...His amplified voice echoed around the nave and transept...

...The soundmen are rock graduates and half deaf...

...But he canceled...

...At my wits end, I decided to go to a movie which I thought might contain some reassuring Biblical message, Daniel...

...It turned out to be some terrible rubbish about New York Communists in the 1940s...

...This is quite common among those who have been in Washington for ten years or more, and Peters himself may be in very much the same situation today...

...I couldn't help wondering why we should respect that country's "goals" which lie so predictably in the direction of Siberia...

...David Riesman wrote fan letters, and in response to the very first piece I wrote-as I recall, it was something about the Space Program-I was surprised to receive a friendly note from none other than Arthur Schle-singer...

...Charlie Peters's influence in Washington today, in my opinion, stems more from his personal qualities than from the rigor of his political analysis, which certainly in my day tended toward quirkiness...

...point of view...

...tion that must have doubled the cost of living in Washington since the mid-1970s...

...I remember Charlie once telling me that the late Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Sun-Times, who was on his advisory board, was far more interesting at the dinner table than he ever was in print...

...Arthur's friend," Charlie teased, the next time he saw me...

...I'm beginning to suspect we could use a visit in Washington from the Special Air Service...

...He knew all these things, but he was too discreet to write them down...

...CAPITOL IDEAS HIGH PRIESTS by Tom Bethell The big event this month promised to be the Neoliberal Conference in Reston, Va., put on by Charles Peters, the founder and editor of the Washington Monthly...

...Not death-penalty stuff, you understand, but lock-'em-up-if-they're-dangerous stuff...

...He was impervious to flattery and indifferent to personal stardom...

...The trouble with the centrist position that Peters by nature finds congenial, it seems to me, is that it is ultimately at the mercy of the extremes...

...If this analysis is correct, then Charlie Peters is not really a neo-liberal at all...

...doing so might, as it were, jeopardize his "seat" at the Godfrey Sperling breakfast conclave...

...But of course it's not done to object explicitly to this leftward drift...

...Indeed he seemed overjoyed by such advancement-perhaps secure in the knowledge that he would exercise a widening influence on the public debate through his undoubted influence on his rising disciples...

...As a Methodist," he said, "I can say that build-down appears to be a fig-leaf for the MX...

...resident...

...A protractor is a convenient instrument for bisecting the angle between left and right, but you never quite know in what direction it is going to end up pointing you...

...He's an old, or paleo-liberal...

...On defense, for example, Michael Kinsley, a Monthly alumnus who went on to become editor of Harper's, tells me that the neoliberal position is: we need an efficient defense...

...When the portentous Ed Asner appeared in the courtroom scene I could stand it no longer and left...

...He may well have been more comfortable with the old liberal position, as indeed were many of those who now call themselves neo-conservatives...

...Someone at the church porch handed me a counter-leaflet about the Ukraine, and placards were dimly visible in the night air...

...Charlie Peters was good enough some years ago to pluck me from the obscurity of a French Quarter attic in New Orleans to give me employment as an editor of his magazine, so I think that an article that might very well have been headlined "Paleoconservative Meets Neoliberals" would have been displeasing to all concerned...

...Today I hear they are still paid the same, despite an inflaTom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...

...If your goal is to stand between two people, then you must move where they move...

...he is the type of clergyman you would have met a lot twenty years ago in England who is awfully keen on cricket...

...Edward Lutt-wak, maybe, but I can't think of anyone else...

...Senator Paul Tsongas, a speaker at the conference, perfectly exemplifies this position...

...So I was left with time to spare and space to fill...

...His employees had little enough to complain about, despite the low pay...

...Oh dear, how wrong I was...

...We took to the pews and a breezy, hearty canon appeared at the speaker's platform-didn't catch his name...

...I had been thinking about going, but then I began to suspect that I might not be entirely welcome at the solemn gathering...

...Charlie Peters is a patriot, which I fear is no longer universally the case in Washington, especially in the media...

...He wore suede shoes and sideburns...

...As a result of such influence, Charlie Peters is becoming something of a Washington insider, defined as one who knows a good deal more than he says publicly, and whose influence is to some extent dependent on his continued discretion...

...So I trudged up the steep hill beside the Soviet Embassy to the National Cathedral, anticipating perhaps a few quiet moments of ecumenical reflection in the gothic structure...

...It all came up after my time...

...Not that he was speaking...

...He apologized for the absence of Valentin Berezhkov, First Secretary of the Soviet Embassy, from the discussion a week earlier, explaining that there had been the problem of his son's trying to escape from the Embassy compound (which is just up the road from where I live, and means that I get rather more police protection than the average D.C...

...He tries to resist the Harvard men-not always successfully...

...I looked up at the ceiling, and noticed large dark patches of rain-soaked stone...

...Daniel turned out to be a muddled and boring movie, with the very poor sound track that is now standard in Hollywood movies...

...just as the very notion of unpatriotic behavior is decried by those who persistently denigrate patriotism...

...His recent thorough investigation of the alleged problem of immigration, published in the latest issue of the Atlantic, is well worth the price of the magazine...

...Charlie Peters, who started up the magazine in 1969 after serving as a West Virginia legislator, a volunteer in John F. Kennedy's 1960 campaign, and a Peace Corps official, maintained an undaunted good cheer in face of the daily difficulties of putting out a small magazine on a shoestring budget...

...Polite little titters from the green-alligator contingent...