Only in America

There is a strange sensation that overcomes the new arrival in America. So much of what you see is instantly recognizable from television and films. A glimpse of Capitol Hill with its splendid white dome in the distance triggers a hundred ill-defined memories from flickering screens. You almost expect someone to jump out from behind a bush and scream ‘CUUT!’ The White House seems so small at first sight that you almost believe it is made of plywood and will fold up like any other film set. The size of the building exists in inverse proportion to the amount of power that emanates from it. Is this really what all the fuss is about? So much of what you see sets off reassuring recognition. So much of what you hear sounds alien, even alarming.

It is the sound of a superpower at work. Helicopters shuttling to and from the White House or the Pentagon. Motorcades. I counted five on my first day. Who are these people? Police cars with whining sirens demanding attention. Ambulances. Fire trucks. It sounds as if the whole of Washington is under siege, on its way to hospital, jail, the morgue or an important funeral. Then you look at the faces. They seem happy. It is summer after all. The pavements shimmer in the heat. They are full of chairs and tables where people in shirtsleeves are spooning lunch out of the kind of polystyrene containers you get on aeroplanes. They don’t seem to mind. The queues outside the Greek deli on 19th Street stretch the width of the pavement. Everyone is patient. No one seems to mind waiting. This place is chilled, I think. But whoever runs the ambulances, the police cars and the fire brigade is behaving as if World War III has broken out. So is the guy on the radio. We are only a few weeks away from the first anniversary of 9/11 and the local radio station we’re tuned into is humming with breathless reports about terror alerts, the conflict in Afghanistan and the failing diplomacy over Iraq. The drumbeat of a new war has begun. For now, however, it is a distant but regular thud on the horizon.

On the taxi radio the news is interspersed with advertisements. ‘Special discounts for all military personnel,’ the gravelly voice promises. The word ‘America’ seems to be mentioned an awful lot by just about everyone from advertising baritones to high-pitched politicians to the President. ‘America is better than this’, ‘America won’t stand for it’, ‘America’s favourite chocolate’, ‘America drinks Florida Orange Juice … no-pulp guaranteed’, ‘America is on the lookout for new enemies’, ‘America’s way of life will never be destroyed’, ‘Only in America …’

My head was spinning. America wasn’t just a country. America was a being and America was, it seemed, deeply pissed off. The Nigerian cab driver seemed unaware of the chorus of self-regard seeping from the speakers. The overall impression throbbing in the pastry-clad egg of my brain was that this city and country were much weirder than I imagined and far more difficult to decipher: half holiday destination, half barracks gearing up for conflict. The taxi dropped me outside my new office close to Dupont Circle, an area that used be an encampment for the homeless. On my first visit to Washington in 1988 I was chased through Dupont Circle – in those days an open space dotted with trees and surrounded by traffic – by a man in rags wielding a nail file. He was probably harmless but in those days Washington was still known as ‘the murder capital of the USA’ and my mind immediately pictures me being slashed to death in a vicious nail-file attack. Today, Dupont Circle is the heart of the capital’s gay district, where boutique hotels and coffee bars compete for attention with interior design shops and art galleries. In the fourteen years since my last visit some parts of Washington – by no means all – had changed almost beyond recognition. With its pavement cafés and bathroom-tile shops, the capital seemed more European. In so many other ways, however, America had moved further away from Europe than ever before.

I had witnessed the groping, open or clenched hand of America’s largely benign colossus from far-flung provinces but now I had been summoned to the capital itself. The BBC had allowed me to roam the world for almost two decades. I had been based in Jerusalem, Berlin, Bonn, Rome, Hong Kong and Singapore. Whether it was the fall of the Berlin Wall, the civil war in Bosnia, the isolation of Libya, the collapse of Christian Democracy in Italy, the expansion of China, the invasion of Afghanistan or the liberation of East Timor to a greater or lesser extent the hand of Washington, heavy, subtle or conspicuous by its absence, could always be felt in all of these places. America was everywhere and I had been reporting from – and on – the receiving end of its policies for seventeen years. Inevitably, the motivations of America seemed much clearer from five thousand miles away than they did up close and personal in the place where the decisions were made. There was the political hothouse of Washington. And then there was the vast multilayered country sprawling around it.

Fred Scott, a BBC cameraman born in San Diego, exudes the nasal nonchalance of someone who was brought up within earshot of Pacific surf. He spent a lot of time in Asia and once put it like this: ‘When you try and decipher America, Matt, think of India. Both are huge, complicated countries, where the difference between rich and poor is vast, where religion plays an important part in politics and everyday life. Both have nukes and both speak the kind of English that no one else does.’ It turned out to be sound advice although I am still looking for the equivalent of the caste system in the US.

For now the politics of Washington were incidental to the domestic issues that were occupying my full attention and providing my first personal glimpses of the States. I had failed spectacularly on just about every front. The first two Kathies had shown me so many houses whose addresses were never numbered in anything less than 1000s that I had lost track and my head was reeling. Did I like 3317 P Street or 3317 O Street? Was the nice garden – I’m sorry, I mean ‘yard’ – in 4567 Warren Street or 4512 Windom Place? I did, however, manage to get a car. I bought the giant, hulking people carrier in which my predecessor had ferried his family around. It was as long as a boat, as wide as a tank and had an insatiable thirst for petrol. I mean gas. The inside was so enormous that I suffered bouts of agoraphobia. And wherever I went I got hopelessly lost. On the face of it the road grid of Washington is dead simple if you know the alphabet and can count to fifty-five. Numbered streets go east to west. Lettered streets go north to south. Unfortunately outside the centre of the city, parks, hills and creeks interrupt this logical pattern. Streets are abruptly cut off and dismembered as if an angry child had thrown the puzzle map in the air and the pieces had landed at random.

For a country that prides itself on the efficiency of the free market, I soon discovered that America can also be surprisingly bureaucratic. In order to exist as a foreigner here you need a social security number, which involves descending into the bowels of the local Social Security Office. Nothing, however, rivals the fifth circle of hell represented by the Department of Motor Vehicles, the dreaded DMV. How can America’s famed love affair with the car flourish when the courtship involves an unavoidable trip to the DMV? It makes you regret the rest of the relationship and contemplate the bicycle as a preferred method of transportation. Or public transport. Or perhaps it is merely the test of true love for the automobile? The DMV is a frightening place that has achieved something unique: it mixes Hitchcock with Orwell and Monty Python.

What I hadn’t realized is that the DMV headquarters on C Street, in the shadow of the glorious Capitol, functions as a refuge for citizens of no fixed abode. In the winter it provides free heating, in the summer free air conditioning. I turned up at 7.45 a.m. to find a queue of two hundred or so, many of whom looked not only as if they had no fixed abode, but no access either to a moving vehicle they could call their own. In order not to get kicked out they all pretended that they were there on official business. They drew a number that designated their order in the queue – I’m sorry, line. I waited for three hours just to be told that I had brought the wrong papers. The man who informed me of this had clearly failed to read and learn the DMV’s customer service commandments about courtesy and efficiency pinned up on the board. I didn’t have the guts to point them out. To add injury to insult he informed me that the car I had bought from my predecessor was worth $2000 less than I had paid for it. ‘Sure hope he ain’t your friend!’ he added, laughing. The sad truth is that he was.

It also didn’t help that, unlike 92 per cent of America’s driving population, I belonged to that tiny, benighted minority that failed their multiple-choice driving test. Some questions were easy. Like: ‘If you come across a funeral procession, do you A slow down B speed up and drive through it or C come to a complete stop?’ The two questions that made the difference between success and failure were: ‘What is the minimum distance you have to maintain from a fire truck with sirens on?’ I hadn’t a clue. And one about car insurance. I cheated and called up the insurance broker to get the right answer. She gave me the wrong one and that was it. I flunked the test. A kind woman at reception whose enormous girth swivelled cheerfully on a small chair helped out: ‘Oh, honey, I am sorry. You can always use a study aid,’ she said at the top of her voice. The people around me started to take an interest. I was the only one wearing a suit. I was the guy they had all put their faith in. And I had failed. Then I saw the large notice on the wall aimed at the clientele. No eating! No fighting! No pro-fanities! I felt like doing all three. Unfortunately there is no escape from the DMV if you want to drive a car legally or have a driving licence. In a country where only 25 per cent of citizens have passports, the driving licence is the photo ID of choice, without which you can board no plane, send no parcels and retrieve no shirts from the laundry. The DL is de rigueur. Especially during the ‘global war on terror’. In America you want to be able to prove who you are at all times.

By the end of my first week I had hit rock bottom. I had acquired a car I was not yet allowed to drive. I had not found a house for us to live in. And I barely had time to visit the schools that would mould the future of my precious children. I was camping out in my predecessor’s home for a few weeks, before the American owners returned. I had dragged Penny and the children away from their friends, from our idyllic house in Singapore with its frangipani and avocado trees, its pool and the sultry tropical languor that provided a welcome anaesthetic from the more mundane tasks of family life. Asia was intoxicating in the best possible sense. Washington was proving to be a major detox. And in late August it was just as hot as Singapore, if not hotter. But the formal dress code of jacket and tie meant that one was walking around in a permanent mobile sauna. The mosquitoes were the size of birds, trained for combat and confident in their belief that no city authorities would ever have the temerity to kill them with insecticide. I began to dream of the grey clouds of DDT that enveloped our house in Singapore every two weeks and killed everything with tiny wings.

Penny flew in on the day that the heavens opened with late summer vengeance over Washington. I was stuck thirty miles away at IKEA buying bedding and cutlery and I couldn’t make it to Dulles Airport to pick up my own family. This was not good. I rang Gerald, a taxi driver frequently used by the office. He bailed me out and met a confused, bedraggled troupe of surly children and their mother in a country they had never visited before and were not entirely sure why they had to move to. The passport queue was two hours long. The customs officer behaved as if he was closely related to the prick at the DMV. The family had been hit on the head by the hammer of transcontinental jet lag. The British Airways stewardess had been excessively rude even by the standards of the mile-high gulag at the back of the plane. And because of the torrential rain, the drive from the airport to our house took an hour and a half.

I looked out of the kitchen window as they finally arrived. It struck me that none of them wanted to get out of the car. They all sat there, rooted to their seats like wax figures. Not smiling. Lottie, the youngest – not even a year old – could always be relied upon to be irrepressibly good-humoured. She was in tears. ‘Welcome to Washington,’ I muttered without conviction. Gerald shook his head. Penny glowered. Things could only get better. And they did.

Some foreign postings are love affairs: passionate, all-consuming. They are prone to deep disappointment but always cherished and remembered as an intimate and special bond. Other are arranged marriages. The beginnings are more prosaic and businesslike but they can blossom into something precious. Washington was the latter. It had started on a dog-tired note with an exhausted groom – me – and an indifferent bride – America. It wasn’t made easy by the fact that the rest of the world had very entrenched, preconceived notions about the bride, which became more and more virulent as the relationship took shape. For those judging America from abroad the middle ground had been eroded. President Bush’s famous statement about loyalty after 9/11 – ‘you are either with us or with the terrorists’ – had become a self-fulfilling prophecy for the rest of the world. You were now either with Bush or against him, with America or against it. In response the world became less willing to differentiate between an administration and an entire country. Criticizing an aspect of government policy immediately threw you open to charges of being anti-American, just as lauding a piece of policy made you into a snivelling sycophant, Bush’s poodle, Uncle Sam’s lackey and someone who was hell-bent on force-feeding their children Big Macs.

Washington is the window into America’s political soul. It is the Rome and the Athens of the twenty-first century, a city of raw power and a citadel of refined ideas. I was lucky enough to be dispatched there during a crucial juncture in the constant cluttering evolution of this huge country. I was a political tourist with family in tow, trying to find my way around the corridors of power, discover what made the colossus tick and set up a home. Invariably the broad tapestry of politics is interwoven with very personal experiences, many mundane, a few dramatic. They conspire to build a subjective impression of America which aims to be neither complete, comprehensive nor even very fair. It is, however, personal.

ONE Beltway Blues

For many years my morning commute was regularly enlivened by an encounter with the American Vice President, Dick Cheney. He lives in a secure compound next to the British Embassy that also houses the United States Naval Observatory. Does Cheney wander over to the giant telescope in the dead of night to try and catch a glimpse of distant stars and imagine alien civilizations? I doubt it. His gaze is firmly fixed on the terrestrial.

At 7.30 a.m. precisely the traffic is stopped in a surprisingly elaborate ceremony that is Washington’s equivalent of the Changing of the Guard. At first nimble policemen on mountain bikes wearing aerodynamic pod-shaped bicycle helmets pop out of the undergrowth and flag down the traffic. Then their less trim cousins emerge from police cars humming with more lights than a funfair attraction. They block the flow. Finally the super-sized outriders on their Harley-Davidsons park right across the street. The man-meets-machine road block is in place.

The wait begins. The curtain is about to be raised on a vintage Washington spectacle. We all sit in traffic, fiddling with our steering wheels, making unnecessary calls on our phones and waiting for the main event. Then the gates of the Naval Observatory swing open, the bomb barriers are swallowed up by the road and more policemen on Harleys appear with screeching sirens. They gesticulate furiously, guns in hand, reinforcing a point that has already been made eloquently and unambiguously by the grunts preceding them. Next, two black secret service vans appear, followed by an armoured stretch limo – the decoy – followed by the real one, in which the Vice President can briefly be spotted, sitting in the back, squinting at the ungrateful world outside. We always make eye contact.

Then there’s another secret service van. This one is open at the back and displays two agents looking at potential assassins through the sights of M16 rifles. At this stage I always take my hands off the wheel, just in case I make an involuntary move that could get me shot. I resist the urge to scratch the back of my head. Then there’s the obligatory ambulance. It follows dutifully in case the Vice President, who had the first of his four heart attacks when he was only thirty-six, doesn’t survive the six-minute commute to the White House. Finally there is the tail escort, another three howling Harleys. So, just to recap: two armoured stretch limos, three vans, one ambulance, six motorbikes, three mountain bikes and, oh yes, a helicopter keeping an eye on everything from above. All this just to get one old man to the office.

This is all part of the theatre of power that is Washington’s only real industry. It is what defines life inside the so-called Beltway, the ring road that circles the capital and which has become a metaphor for the insularity of the world’s most powerful capital.

No one I know has anything good to say about the Beltway. And I’m not just talking about the people stuck in one of its twelve almost permanently congested lanes. At night the Capitol Beltway, also known more formally as Interstate 495, looks like an oozing river of red and yellow dots. Whether you’re travelling clockwise or anti-clockwise you’re almost always moving at a snail’s pace. But the Beltway conjures up much more than the M25 around London or Paris’s Périphérique. The humble 495 is seen as the membrane around a political cocoon, the frosted glass encasing the hothouse, the cordon sanitaire which separates those who dwell within from the world outside.

‘Inside the Beltway’ has become shorthand for the insularity of the American capital. It was first coined in 1983 by Mike Causey, a columnist for the Washington Post. Today the phrase is received by the rest of America with a mixture of awe and disgust. Mainly the latter. It evokes a shadowy world of Byzantine machinations and deceit. It lends itself to unflattering alliteration. The Beltway Boys is a TV talk show on the FOX News Channel whose content sounds distinctly kinky but which offers nothing more titillating than pundits chewing the political cud. In Washington politics is sex. Here power has its own brand of pornography. ‘Beltway Bile’ was the name of a column in a local Maryland newspaper. ‘Beltway Bosoms’ was the name of an unsuccessful lap-dancing bar on the seedy Florida Avenue and perhaps the only time that the notions of intercourse and interstate have merged in one name. The one word you never, ever, hear in conjunction with the Beltway is ‘wholesome’. And that is unfortunate because most of America cherishes ‘wholesome’. No other capital city of a great nation has allowed itself to be defined by its ring road. But, then, no other capital city worth reckoning with has ever been created solely for the pursuit of politics.

Washington was founded in a malarial swamp by a general-turned-president in 1790. He liked the spot on the Potomac River mainly because it was only seven miles from his plantation at Mount Vernon. It was convenient enough to reach after a two-hour ride but far enough to keep the riff-raff at a distance. He then named the tiny settlement of shacks after himself, appointed a French architect called Pierre Charles L’Enfant to design the capital of the New World on the drawing board and designated its shape as a 110-square-mile diamond. Early Washington was really no more than the eighteenth-century equivalent of modern Dubai, without the sand, the bling, the excellent duty-free shopping and the Russian hookers. When L’Enfant suggested that the city should be named ‘Washingtonople’, which he considered a little less crass than just ‘Washington’, he was promptly sacked.

All in all, it was an inauspicious beginning for a city that has never been much loved. Not even the residents who enjoyed their flirtation with destiny here have had nice things to say about it. When Lyndon Johnson left the White House crippled by the Vietnam war and unwilling to run for re-election, he told his audience: ‘I’m going home to Texas where people notice if you’re sick and care if you die!’ A former mayor of New York once quipped: ‘It’s half the size of the Queens cemetery and twice as dead!’ Fred Thompson, the lawyer-turned-actor-turned-senator-turned-actor-turned-presidential candidate, once compared the capital of power to the capital of movies: ‘Washington has all the veneer of Hollywood,’ he said with a drawl that rolled like one of his favourite Cuban cigars, ‘but none of its sincerity!’

And then there is the ultimate litmus test of the computer age. How many Google entries does Washington, DC, get? New York has 4500. Washington, DC, the capital of the free world, as it likes on occasion to be called, only a pathetic 111. Des Moines, Iowa, America’s capital of flat, rural tedium, isn’t far behind with 84. Middle Americans are disgusted by Washington, whose politics they see as the corruption of everything noble America stands for. When things go wrong it is easy to blame Beltway bile and equally easy to forget that it was the voters who originally made it happen. For its part Hollywood despises Washington like a movie gone wrong. The script had such potential, they mutter over their soy lattes. But they keep changing director. The actors aren’t up to much either. The set is stodgy. If only Steven, George or Marty could get their hands on Project Washington. The doyens of Silicon Valley look at it with the same anthropological marvel reserved for ancient, outdated hardware. Bill Gates and his philanthropic entourage descend on the city at regular intervals to appear before some congressional committee and to remind the politicians that he alone spends more money on solving AIDS and battling TB than they ever will. And yet there are those who have the opposite problem, those who fall hopelessly but discreetly in love with Washington, realizing that theirs is a love that dare not speak its name. It is the grubby and infectious love of power and it is felt most keenly by those who never exercise it. It is the love of eunuchs, a species that includes academics, lobbyists, policy wonks, economists, diplomats and think-tank types, many of whom have dipped their toes into the waters of influence by serving in an administration. It also includes the ultimate low lifes: journalists. I don’t think I have ever heard any of the above say they dislike Washington. I look around my daughter’s school playground and it is full of parents gossiping feverishly about who is in and out while vigorously pushing swings or egging on children dangling from monkey bars. Once you have examined the entrails of Washington any other form of vivisection seems dull.

The newspaper and broadcasting editors of the world recognize the fatal attraction of Washington. ‘Frei, you must not get stuck in the Beltway’ was an exhortation I heard repeatedly from my bosses when they dispatched me to the United States. ‘Of course not!’ I replied earnestly and I meant it. But a year later the magnetic pull of the capital worked its magic, the ring road became like a force field I didn’t dare crash into and I found more and more excuses not to leave. George Bush, his wars, his scandals and his determination to reshape the world are a great help, admittedly. This is, after all, vintage ‘Inside the Beltway’ material. Even my bosses wouldn’t want me to miss it. And yet whenever I manage to escape they celebrate the fact as if I was a child learning to walk. ‘Great to see that you’ve managed – finally – to get out of the Beltway!’ is one of the highest compliments paid to any correspondent resident in the city.