Washington Goes to War

...to let the sun dry them out and bleach In a sense, Brinkley's Washington out the yellowness and then sewed them Goes to War is his black notebook on back together and pressed the the city of Washington during World reassembled suit...

...The term lake-homepay' now entered the language...

...But it could spend money, and did, then as now...

...Second only to the Nazis in Brinkley's scornful eye seems to be Congress, whose foibles, both institutional and individual, are detailed in depth and brutally summarized...

...The city, writes But it is anecdotal detail that makes Brinkley, "had well-stocked stores, inBrinkley's description of drowsy, rigid- teresting women, Cuban cigars, docile ly segregated prewar Washington vivid...

...The book's basic structure is cal broadcasts, is even more evident drawn from Brinkley's memory of war- here...

...Viner at the looseleaf notebook now frayed from Sunshine Cleaners on Mount Pleasant years of use...

...It was the course of American history...

...The book is full of Brinkley's sometimes caustic opinions, but there is no sign they spring from any political philosophy...

...Yet even in dealing with Congress, Brinkley seeks to be evenhanded...

...ernment as a whining, conniving pip-There is, for example, this passage de- squeak who used his embassy for all scribing the New Dealers whose manner of pro-Nazi activities...

...There is one inexplicable oversight: no index...

...black servants willing to work at low Then, and for many years to come, it pay—in all a far more pleasant life than was a place to which poor blacks mi- they could hope for in their own coungrated by the thousands, hoping for a tries...

...Sound familiar...

...Then, if you want to keep it, send us $99...

...And there was money to be better life and usually not finding it...

...It was simply the way the government worked, in both war and peace, although in wartime it was worse...

...flowed outward to all the extremities of There were more reasons than espioAmerican life, returning it to health nage for these diplomats to remain in and prosperity...

...PAPER CLU'l i ER makes you inefficient, frustrated, and may hurt your career...

...By the time he goes on the Street, he took each suit completely air, he has most of these notes memo- apart at the seams, stitch by stitch, rized, and from them he draws the ma- hand-washed each flannel piece terial he recounts on the air, often with separately, laid them all out on the roof a sardonic chuckle...

...It was energetic presence had already done bizarre," writes Brinkley...

...Or return it and you owe us nothing...

...It was, says Brinkley, "a revolution in American public finance...

...She wore "the Hope diamond dangling down the front of a Hattie Carnegie dress...

...He depicts the ten with elegance and flair, and a ambassador from France's Vichy govreviewer finds it irresistibly quotable...

...Brinkley describes at length the time Washington, where he was a remarkable tolerance the government young reporter newly arrived from displayed for the diplomats of GerNorth Carolina...

...He makes a few appearances, anonymously, as a "young reporter," or a "reporter from NBC...

...At the height of the popularity of "The Huntley-Brinkley Report" twenty-five years ago, Brinkley was besieged by publishers wanting a book from the famous anchorman...

...They stood in striking contrast to prepared for a live broadcast on the genteel formality observed by some election night or at a political conven- better-off whites...

...It was not the system," he says, "that made the wartime Congresses unruly, politicized, argumentative, unresponsive and occasionally vulgar...

...Throughout all this, the war, the shortages of housing and, during rationing, of nearly everything else, there was one surprising constant: an endless round of Washington parties that were extravagant even by the gaudy standards of today...

...The United States eventually was prepared for war, but at far greater cost than if presidential leadership had been more exacting and if administrative power had been detailed quickly and firmly...

...There were 15,000 privies in the they remained, a gaggle of fascists city limits of Washington before the representing rulers who deserved the gallows, enjoying life in a city where Brit Hume, a Washington native born that was still possible, spying and prop-during World War II, covers Congress agandizing while swindling their own and works with David Brinkley at ABC governments on the side...

...When people became accustomed to paying taxes as they had always paid for automobiles—on the installment plan—Congress and the president learned, to their pleasure, what automobile salesmen had learned long before: that installment buyers could be induced to pay more because they looked not at the total debt but only at the monthly payments...

...entered the war...

...Thomas Saltz drove out from his men's store downtown to do for the McLeans what they were unable or unwilling to do for themselves, tie the men's neckties...

...Brinkley describes Washington Goes to War as "less a work of history than of personal reminiscence and reflection...

...many and its allies in the days before It is a richly readable account, writ- the U.S...

...There are two things missing from THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988 41 this book, happily...

...And the publisher, the esteemed Alfred A. Knopf & Co., should be ashamed...

...He reads through heat of Washington summers, Brinkley mounds of research looking for nug- reports, some men still wore light-gets of color and anecdote...

...Congress simply handed it over every year and almost always more than the year before, so it was there to be spent and it was unthinkable not to spend it...

...So it's surprising that this book came close to never being written...

...Part of the problem was that Congress couldn't run the war or the nation's foreign policy (though that has not kept it from trying repeatedly to run both war and diplomacy since), so it didn't have enough to do...

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...Among the thousands of people loaded onto the government payroll were the hacks and misfits ordered hired by members of Congress who never saw the war as any reason to change their old habit of loading the federal payroll with their friends, hangers-on, unsatisfactory sons-in-law, unemployable cousins, courthouse idlers, maiden aunts fallen into straitened circumstances and relatives addicted to the bottle...

...made by padding expense accounts and They lived in desperate circumstances, passing on newspaper information as often in alley hovels converted from the fruits of diligent spying...

...When they them down in longhand in a black sent their flannels to Mr...

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...drawers filled with research, much of it gathered for Brinkley by Harvard students under the direction of 71 he author's eye for human vice Brinkley's son, Alan, a Harvard history 1 and excess, apparent in his politi professor...

...He writes weight white wool suits...

...Mrs...

...As the war raged on in 1944, the Senate was hard at work on a successful filibuster to block repeal of the poll tax, a fight whose outcome, unlike that of the war, was never in doubt...

...That's all...

...Try it for 30 days...

...I told them I didn't need the money, didn't need the notoriety, and didn't want to do the work...

...After starting it in 1972, though, Brinkley says he nearly abandoned the project many times, finally finishing it with the help of an IBM personal computer, which, he says, took much of the pain out of revision...

...For example, he has been quoted as saying Franklin Roosevelt was a great President, but Roosevelt's shortcomings as the administrator of a burgeoning government are amply detailed...

...Brinkley relates such details with evident relish and seeming ease...

...An ambassamuch to change the atmosphere of dor for America's oldest ally, claiming Washington before the war: "They were to represent France, but in fact represocial workers, farm economists, liberal senting the Fascist government of lawyers, union organizers, all of them Pierre Laval, who looked in news picpolitical chiropractors eager to get their tures like a likely candidate for a rat thumbs on the national spine, to snap trap...

...prewar Washington...

...And despite the author's protestations, it is an informative and unique history of what the book's subtitle calls "the transformation of a city and a nation...

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...Nobody in government ever benefitted in any way from saving money...

...News...

...That gives Brinkley too much credit, and too little...

...But with it came a new factor that has helped make government a growth industry ever since: income tax withholding...

...The single fact most clearly differentiating government employers from private employers was, always, that government agencies did not have to earn their money...

...This weakness," he writes, "would in time be costly to Roosevelt and to the country, and the cost would be counted in the coin of delay, confusion and waste...

...While four thousand American bombers attacked Germany," writes Brinkley, "while the Russians recaptured Sevastopol from the Germans, while allied troops in Italy opened a spring offensive, and while Americansin New Guinea fought their way onto two Japanese-held islands, the Senate played through its scripted and choreographed performance...

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...It was passed after much wrangling and took effect in July 1943...

...An Ambassador who had turned it and crack it until the blood again his embassy into a base for Nazi spies...

...Box 228, Somerville, MA 02143 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988...

...I had almost a stock answer," Brinkley says...

...Despite the jungle tion in the same way...

...But as many of those who lived and worked in Washington during the war began to die off, Brinkley felt he was among the last who might be able to write such an account...

...You can't find things when you need them...

...Also absent is any hint of political bias...

...All this took one War II...

...T he war, of course, was largely 1 responsible for the phenomenal growth of Washington in the 1940s...

...Its framework and some of the detail may spring from the author's memory, but this book is plainly the product of extensive research—some of it done by Brinkley, but, as he acknowledges in the book, much of it done for him...

...This 282-page volume is dis- week—longer in cloudy weather—and tilled from sixteen legal-size file cost ten dollars...

...When Cissy Patterson, empress of the Roosevelt-hating Washington Times-Herald, went out to dinner one night at Evalyn Walsh McLean's Georgetown house, Brinkley reports that she arrived just after a little custom had been observed in the McLean household...

...McLean, of course, had no need of neckwear...

...Whatever was not spent had to be handed back to the Treasury and if an agency had money left over at the end of one year, how could it ask Congress for more money the next year...

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...One is a lot of talk about Brinkley himself...

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...Brinkley says he has no idea why, that he expected the publisher to provide one and was unpleasantly surprised to find otherwise...