On my first trip back to Washington, D.C., after September 11, I had lunch with friends at Billy Martin's Tavern, a venerable, narrow-boothed pub where I sometimes ate when I taught at Georgetown University during the 1980s. It's not the kind of place you'd pick to woo a lover or to be wooed by a lobbyist (the check would be too small), but few places were better for hearing stories about the attack and its aftermath. I learned things I hadn't registered before. How, after American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, thousands of people simply abandoned their cars on the street and walked home, afraid the Metro might be targeted next. How nightlife beehives like Dupont Circle remained spookily depopulated for months. And how, once anthrax hit the mail rooms, the city's level of tension ratcheted up to the breaking point.
"Everyone was afraid to say this at the time," said Tom, who was raised a Foreign Service brat, "but if just one more thing had happened, it would have been pure panic—a steady line of cars flooring it from here to West Virginia." He looked around at the sizable lunchtime crowd eating crab cakes and calmly chatting. "Now things are back to normal. If Washington was ever normal."
Washington has indeed bounced back. The Pentagon is being repaired with Indiana limestone, Reagan National Airport is once again open for business, scene makers are popping in for drinks at the new Ritz-Carlton—just like President Bartlet's staffers on The West Wing. For the first time since Marion Barry's election in 1978, which kicked off two decades of breathtaking incompetence on the part of the municipal government, the city has a mayor, bow-tied Anthony Williams, who understands that its citizens actually like having their garbage collected and 911 calls answered. Washington has long been plagued with a niggling undercurrent of self-pity ("We kill ourselves making this country work and you hate us"), but the War on Terror has given the capital a steely new sense of self-worth ("We aren't just bureaucrats anymore").
Like New York, Washington is a national treasure that you see differently once it has been wounded. You cherish it that little bit more. I didn't fully grasp this until one balmy afternoon I found myself walking down 17th Street. Passing Farragut Square, I sliced east to Pennsylvania Avenue. There before me, surrounded by a profusion of armed security guards but gleaming bright in the midday sun, stood the White House. Like millions of others, I'd laughed when its famous columns were blown sky-high in Independence Day. But those were simpler times. Today, I didn't feel corny in thinking how nice it was to see it still standing.
John F. Kennedy joked, a bit unfairly, that Washington was "a city of southern efficiency and northern charm." Living there in the 1980s, I often thought of it as an American version of Bonn, an unlikely capital graced with some old-fashioned delights—the cherry blossoms of spring, streets radiating like spokes from its traffic circles, lovely Victorian summerhouses in Cleveland Park, the Italianate glory of The Hay-Adams Hotel. It has always been an artificial construction, a backwater elevated to the summit of world power, an architectural extravaganza that was something of a precursor to Brasilia. Of course, the paradox of Washington is that the seat of the most dominant nation since imperial Rome should feel so much like an ordinary company town (albeit one that produces global power rather than cars or insurance policies). Once famed for duels, brilliant oratory, and iconic personalities—Andrew Jackson, "Honest Abe" Lincoln, FDR with his jaunty cigarette holder—the city increasingly prizes those who are willing to abide by the local rules of decorum, political and otherwise.
In fact, Washington is the conservative alter ego of Hollywood. Ever since Marilyn Monroe serenaded JFK in a dress so tight she had to be sewn into it, people have tirelessly traced the ties between the political capital and the movie capital. These links are sometimes literal—Ronald Reagan was an actor turned president—but the metaphorical connections are even more telling. Both D.C. and Hollywood are run by powerful elites who feel a strange mixture of fear and contempt toward the American heartland, that vast constituency whose whims determine their success at the box office or at the polls. But there is one striking difference: Movie stars are nearly always much shorter than you think, while Washington bigwigs are nearly always much taller (as if God had decided that the large shall rule the world and the small must perform to get his attention). Still, both places share the unhappy awareness that the media are always watching. Long gone is the era when a powerful congressman like Wilbur Mills would splash around in the Tidal Basin with stripper Fanne Foxe, the Argentine Firecracker. These days, Washington big shots conduct their affairs in private (unless they prove as unlucky as Gary Condit).
Each new administration sets a tone for the city. After the florid disarray of the Clinton White House, which everyone agrees was entertaining but exhausting, the city is slowly adjusting to the buttoned-down professionalism of George W. Bush. At first, locals feared the president would fill the city with rootin'-tootin' Texans ("There were a lot of cowboy boots at the inauguration," said a friend who attended), but the Bush house style has proved to be not cowboy but corporate. It prizes discretion, rectitude, self-discipline. And because so many top officials aren't what you'd call spring chickens, this may be the most sedate administration ever to take power.
Although the world associates Washington with pomp and spectacle—state dinners at the White House, award ceremonies at the Kennedy Center, rockets red-glaring over the Capitol on July Fourth—the city's real social life has traditionally taken place out of view, in private homes. It has always been famous for a culture of hostesses, from Dolley Madison to Perle Mesta to Katharine Graham, whose soirées brought the governing elite together with the chattering classes to gossip, float ideas "off the record," and sculpt the conventional wisdom. Such evenings offered northern efficiency and southern charm.
Graham's name came up one night over dinner with a friend, who said, "It used to be that everyone would go out to hear things you couldn't hear on the news. That no longer happens. Now, everyone in Washington reads the inside stuff on the Internet, just like everybody else."
These days, a visitor's best glimpse at insider Washington often comes from having lunch at the Palm, the 19th Street institution prized for its Eisenhower-era cuisine—steaks, lobsters, terrific Martinis—not to mention its aura of manly wheeling and dealing. Friends and I once showed up with reservations and stood waiting for nearly an hour as each new free table was given to people who'd just floated in the door, often with faces you recognized from the pundit shows.
My next time there, I was interviewing the host of Hardball, Chris Matthews, who really isn't a lout, he just plays one on TV. Although there were a dozen people waiting, we were instantly squired through the dining room crowded with mahogany-tanned lobbyists, journalists, and countless PAC-funded apparatchiks. As we sat down, Matthews sighed happily, "I love it here." And who could blame him? What has always drawn people to this city is power—be it the power to build highways, launch missiles, or land the catbird seat at the Palm.
Dylan Thomas once said that Washington isn't a city but an abstraction, and in a sense he was right. The District of Columbia—once a muggy, mosquito-riddled river settlement—only became the U.S. capital because the northern states and the southern states cut a deal after the Revolutionary War. Gore Vidal dated the birth of what he calls the American "empire" to the invention of air-conditioning in the 1930s. Before then, politicians fled the city, which annually turns into a tropical inferno, for three months a year instead of staying all summer "making mischief."
If air-conditioning made Washington less unbearably hot, Camelot made it cool. The Kennedys were the first genuinely television-savvy First Family, and they bathed the city in stylishness—working for the government was suddenly youthful, chic. No neighborhood benefited more from the New Frontier than Georgetown, which went from being a neglected patch of 18th-century brick houses to a watchword for glamour. Each time I visit, I find myself strolling along N Street past the lovely Federal houses, walking along the C&O Canal, and admiring the high Gothic spire of the university's Healy Hall. Still, Georgetown's with-it reputation has long since moved on—not only to Adams-Morgan but to nearby U Street.
Because it's obsessed with the red meat of politics—and its sporting simulacrum, Redskins football—Washington has long been renowned for its mundane attitude regarding the more civilized things in life. Arts coverage in The Washington Post is worthy of Omaha, all those bureaucrats with M.A.'s prefer the multiplex to the Kennedy Center, and the city itself has inspired no great novels. Until rather recently, this same prosaic, almost puritanical attitude afflicted the local outlook on food. When the late Jean-Louis Palladin opened his eponymous restaurant in the Watergate back in 1979, it was as if a Martian had fallen to earth bearing foie gras and truffles—alien food.
Now, Washington is filled with restaurants that, if not so dazzling as some locals claim, offer a level of finesse that you wouldn't have dreamed of when Palladin's Air France spaceship first touched down. Not only does the city boast first-rate places such as Kinkead's, Michel Richard Citronelle, and Palena, but even the outlying areas have a couple of good spots—Café Bethesda and Tavira, both in Maryland, and Evening Star, a small Alexandria restaurant with terrific American cooking. Though I was there on a Monday, the place was packed with young professionals. Washington has become a city of commuters, and once these folks leave work, they don't fancy going back into town to eat. This hasn't been lost on the likes of Bob Kinkead, who opened his acclaimed Colvin Run Tavern near Tyson's Corner, the traffic-snarled center of suburban hell.
Nothing in the suburbs, however, compares to the Mall. One bright morning, I made my way to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, with its haunting, inscribed black walls and gifts of remembrance beneath loved ones' names. No matter the hour, I've never been there when I didn't find someone weeping. The Mall itself is not beautiful—its sparse planting makes it look a bit too much like a runway—yet its vacancy is redeemed by the distant view of the Capitol. It is, in fact, so encyclopedic in its possibilities—from the shattering Holocaust Museum to the Air and Space Museum's exhilarating IMAX movies about flight—that it's hard to decide where to go first.
I ended up in the National Museum of American History. Its giddy blend of the esoteric and the pop, the radical and the commercial, never fails to remind me what it is I treasure about this country. Inside the gift shop were books on our current president, including Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose's Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush. The very presence of a book that mocks a sitting president, just blocks from where he lives, is stunning testimony to our democratic ideals. A couple days later, I had lunch with Charles Paul Freund, an editor at the libertarian magazine Reason. I mentioned that nobody seems to realize how great the Mall is. "The trouble isn't that nobody knows it's great," he said, "it's that elite taste has always looked down on Washington for not being as classy as New York or Europe." Then he flashed a sardonic grin: "The only people who understand how good it is are the millions of ordinary Americans who pour into this city every single year."
WHERE THE ELITE MEET TO EAT
Billy Martin's Tavern, 1264 Wisconsin Avenue, N.W. (202-333-7370). The Grill from Ipanema, 1858 Columbia Road, N.W.(202-986-0757). Palm, 1225 19th Street, N.W. (202-293-9091). Kinkead's, Red Lion Row, 2000 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. (202-296-7700). Michel Richard Citronelle, Latham Hotel, 3000M Street, N.W. (202-625-2150). Palena, 3529 Connecticut Avenue, N.W. (202-537-9250). Café Bethesda, 5027 Wilson Lane, Bethesda, Maryland (301-657-3383). Tavira, 8401 Connecticut Avenue, Chevy Chase, Maryland (301-652-8684). Evening Star Cafe, 2000 Mount Vernon Avenue, Alexandria, Virginia (703-549-5051). Colvin Run Tavern, 8045 Leesburg Pike, Vienna, Virginia (703-356-9500).