Plumbing the Nation's Capital
HERRICK, WILLIAM
Plumbing the Nation's Capital Echo House By Ward Just Houghton Mifflin. 328 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by William Herrick Author "¡Hermanos!" Ward Just is an old Washington hand, having worked...
...Axel chooses a road other than the elected one...
...Echo House is a fine book, beautifully written...
...Echo House, the abode of the Behl family, is an old mansion in Washington, overlooking Rock Creek Park...
...She is a poet, sybaritic, the artistic type, and she leaves him...
...As it turns out, this cast is nearly all connected with the intelligence community, not just as spooks, but as their manipulators—in the Watergate sense, plumbers...
...There is one quote I must give you...
...Back in Washington after the war, Sylvia finds him remote—what does one expect of a shadow...
...Echo House, his very intelligent 12th novel, is about three generations of dealers in power and intrigue—the aristocrats of our capital, the ruling class...
...I must say I tried very hard, but could discern no clef at all to this roman...
...They want him to put his pots and pans in his peddler's cart and move along to the next village...
...You just flush the toilet and the shit goes down...
...Senators fear him...
...He has lost his good looks...
...Next thing you know, they'll want to pin a yellow star to his blue serge suit...
...If only they can get rid of Nixon, Washington will be sound once again...
...Perhaps all of us honorable anti-Communists, including this illustrious magazine, had nothing to do with this victory...
...The Behls are obviously the main characters of Echo House, but the true protagonist is the city of Washington itself: its politics, its intrigues, its cynicism...
...At a Washington dinner party, Borowy says of Nixon: "Nixon is Washington's Jew, despised and feared...
...Constance, Adolph Behl's wife, a flinty, tough woman, has created lovely gardens there, and the Senator has bred wild roses...
...What is depicted is the rough plumbing behind the shiny white appliances and fixtures of our democracy...
...it is just marvelous...
...It is spoken by Willy Borowy, Sylvia's second husband, a wealthy Jew who hadn't heard an antiSemitic word until he was 21, yet comes to see himself as an outsider...
...The book spans eight decades from the early '20s almost up to the present...
...Alec is involved in Richard Nixon's forced departure and then mediates his pardon...
...It gives us the lives of three men, Senator Adolph Behl, who was promised a vicepresidential nomination...
...When the promised vice-presidential nomination is denied, he gives up the hope of power, much to the contempt of his wife...
...They don't like his friends...
...the oldboys of his spook world esteem him...
...It projects a strong light on the shadows...
...There he is terribly wounded when his jeep hits a landmine on his way to join General Patton...
...At the end of his life it is said that he won the Cold War...
...In fact, Axel becomes a spook, first for the OSS in wartime France and then, though he is ostensibly without affiliation with the CIA, a diligent anonymous agent for that intelligence-gathering arm of the government...
...He becomes a man of great influence...
...Alec Behl, son of Axel and Sylvia, the third generation of the powerful Behls, is like his father, without portfolio, yet becomes an influential mover of events, in a milieu where all's done behind closed doors: a word in the ear of a White House aide, a trade-off of favors—you do one for me, next time I'll do one for you...
...It is a historic place where an impatient President Lincoln once met with a procrastinating General McClellan...
...While his wife Sylvia and their child are in wartime London, Axel is in France for the OSS...
...Ward Just is an old Washington hand, having worked for many years as a reporter for the Washington Post...
...Ward Just knows the score and he gives it to us with great insight and muscularity...
...The cynicism just drips—one almost wishes not to know...
...He has, however, passed on his belief in public service to his son...
...The CIA, in need of shadowy money, has him organize a bank so they can siphon off funds...
...His friends and peers are "related by blood or by marriage or by school or university," and in times of crisis "these connections [are] an advantage...
...And this, in the end, is exactly what Just's novel is all about...
...Like his grandfather and father before him, he is in public service...
...As we know, sometimes the pipes leak, and a stink pervades the place...
...He's never had full citizenship in the federal city...
...and Adolph's grandson Alec, a lawyer who practices no law —another type of fixer...
...I think what you do," says a magazine writer doing a piece about Alec and his father, "is take people off the hook...
...Somehow the plumbing always works...
...Axel his son, an ardent Democrat who works for Roosevelt's election and becomes a "fixer without portfolio...
...These characters are but shadows...
Vol. 80 • June 1997 • No. 11
