The Deep State (2 page)

Rome lived on its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought out nothing but loads of dung. That was their return cargo.

—
Winwood Reade,
The Martyrdom of Man
(1871)

If I wanted to go crazy I would do it in Washington because it would not be noticed.

—Attributed to Irvin S. Cobb, in
Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations Requested from the Congressional Research Service
(1989)

Imperial City on the Potomac Swamp

Like ancient Rome, Washington, D.C., is an imperial city. The capital of the United States produces laws, Supreme Court decisions, regulations in the
Federal Register,
circulars from the Office of Management and Budget, a trillion dollars of contracts a year, gossip, scandal, and punditry. All of these products are not dung—well, not exactly—but their value has in recent years become increasingly questionable.

First, a point of clarification: the city is usually not called “Washington” except by out-of-towners. It is “D.C.” or “the District” to the locals. Despite this convention, some congressmen who have held office for decades still affect a folksy, fake-populist cant in their jeremiads against the city they have operated in most of their adult lives and perpetually run for
reelection while deploring “those pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington.”
*
A few years ago, there was a fad among Republican politicians to denounce any spending their constituents or K Street contributors didn't like as “Washington spending.”

Sometime during the 1980s, the Beltway, the sixty-four-mile-long Interstate highway encircling the capital, came to be used as shorthand for the political culture of Washington. “Inside the Beltway” gradually became the description of an out-of-touch, undoubtedly liberal, elitist snob and the political philosophy he adhered to. Although the actual Beltway had been completed by the mid-1960s, the Reagan administration represented the first mass influx of political operatives who self-consciously viewed themselves as political outsiders and made their aversion to a supposed Beltway mind-set a proud talking point, despite the large number of them, like Michael Deaver and Kenneth Duberstein, who remained in Washington for decades to cash in. It was during the Reagan years that a largely phony inside-the-Beltway/outside-the-Beltway distinction took hold in the minds of Washington's political operatives. “Beltwayland” as a state of mind was born. It is significant that it was born in the hypocrisy of visceral opponents of Washington's culture who made the nation's capital their permanent headquarters.

John F. Kennedy famously quipped that Washington was a town of “Northern charm and Southern efficiency.” When he said that, more than fifty years ago, he may have been right. Ever since the cornerstone of the Capitol was laid in 1800, similar comments have abounded. Before the Second World War, prior to the widespread use of air conditioning, members of the British diplomatic service stationed in Washington received an extra salary allowance for the presumed rigors of serving in a tropical duty station. The soon-to-be Capital of the Free World might as well have been a colonial outpost in Burma or the Gambia in the eyes of Foreign Office mandarins. During the first year of World War II (just before American entry into the war, a critical time when the British could have
been expected to be doing their utmost to woo American support), the British ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, found the whole tenor of the town so off-putting that he did his utmost to avoid the wretched place altogether: “He had little interest in anyone in Washington: a boring and provincial town, he thought. He associated with almost no one but the socialites of New York, Newport, and Palm Beach.”
1

Fortunately, his death in December 1940 released Lord Lothian from having to serve the crown in the fetid miasma of the Potomac's tidal swamps.

Despite the vast expansion of government during and after the Second World War, the nation's capital remained at the time of Kennedy's presidency surprisingly small and parochial. London, Paris, or Berlin it was not. It may not even have been Stockholm, since it didn't have so much as a subway system and had only begun building an international airport at the end of Eisenhower's second term.

No one could ignore the fact that Washington lay below the Mason-Dixon Line during the era when racial segregation sputtered to its inglorious end. The city's manners, mores, and “peculiar institutions,” like racial segregation, all had a southern flavor. This was unsurprising, as the powerful committee chairmen of the House and the Senate were mostly geriatric southern Dixiecrats. House and Senate committees directly ruled the city with scant regard for the wishes of its citizens. Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, chairman of the Committee on the District of Columbia, once told a delegation of black civic leaders from the District that the only realistic prospect for their race was to repatriate to Africa (note that this incident occurred not in the 1850s but after World War II!). Modern memory has tended to blur the fact that Sam Ervin, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman whose role in the Watergate hearings made him a liberal hero, was also a staunch segregationist. In response to the 1954
Brown v. Board of Education
ruling by the Supreme Court, Ervin drafted
The Southern Manifesto,
a document urging defiance of federal desegregation efforts; the vast majority of southern senators and representatives signed it.

Watergate and the Rise of 24/7 Politics

Times were changing in America, and soon Washington would be changing with it. While the city began to shed much that was old, rustic, and retrograde, this was not unalloyed progress in view of what it was to become. The Capital of the Free World was gradually exchanging the southern, small-city provincialism of contemporary Richmond for the more indefinable provincialism of a burgeoning metropolis producing little else than politics as blood sport and a governing elite intent on conducting perpetual and lucrative wars on one thing or another, whether drugs or terrorism. The 1970s were a key transition period in this metamorphosis.

In 1971, the city acquired the Kennedy Center, the upstart town's claim to being a national beacon of arts and culture almost (but not quite) on a par with New York. Adjacent to the Kennedy Center was the Watergate complex, significant not only for its size (which threatened to breach local height restrictions) and contemporary architectural brutalism, but also for its political symbolism. President Nixon's bugging of the Democratic National Headquarters in that building instituted the politics of 24/7 scandal, accelerated the concentration of national media in Washington, and inaugurated the coming decades of heavily polarized, ideological political parties in America. A crucial adjunct to this politicization was the rise of the tax-exempt foundation, which would soon become the farm team and temporary holding pen for the burgeoning class of operatives who would come to garrison the Deep State.

Foundations have of course existed ever since enactment of the federal income tax law of 1913 gave America's tycoons an incentive both to dodge taxes and bypass state laws forbidding wills that seek to establish a perpetual inheritance. For the most part, these early foundations engaged in medical research, education, charitable work, and other do-gooding. There were naturally exceptions, such as the right-wing American Enterprise Institute (founded in 1938) and the left-wing Institute for Policy
Studies (established in 1963), but by and large the foundation world was a staid and genteel one, and not overtly partisan.

That changed in the 1970s with the rise of the politically focused foundation. The Greater Washington area is now home to over sixteen hundred foundations of various kinds; the hordes of gunslinging grantsmen who try to maintain a façade of scholarly disinterest are functionally as much a part of the ecosystem of the town as the lobbyists on K Street. A new threshold of sorts was crossed in 2013 when Jim DeMint (R-SC), with four years still remaining in his Senate term, resigned from office to become president of the Heritage Foundation, not only because he could exert more influence there than as a sitting senator (or so he claimed—which, if true, is a sad commentary on the status of most elected officials), but also because he would no longer be limited to a senator's $174,000 statutory annual salary.

By the 1980s, the present Washington model of “Beltwayland” was largely established. Contrary to widespread belief, Ronald Reagan did not revolutionize Washington; he merely consolidated and extended pre-existing trends. By the first term of his presidency, the place even had its first openly partisan daily newspaper, the
Washington Times,
whose every news item, feature, and op-ed was single-mindedly devoted to harping on some conservative bugaboo or other. The
Times
was the first shot in a later barrage of openly partisan media. Some old practices lingered on, to be sure: Congress retained at least an intermittent bipartisanship until Newt Gingrich's speakership ended it for all time. But the foundation had been laid by 1979, when the C-SPAN cameras were allowed into the House Chamber, and the cement was drying fast.

Washington had long since shed the aura of being a sleepy southern town. In 1960, even the rural areas in Maryland north of the capital were culturally southern. By 1983, when I arrived in Washington, many observers reckoned the border of Dixie to lie roughly along the Occoquan River, about twenty miles south of Washington. Now the cultural border is at least as far south as the line of the Rappahannock River near Fredericksburg, more than fifty miles south of the city.

The town was physically changing, too. It was less the growth of the government itself than the metastasizing spread of contractors, lobbyists, media organizations, and think tanks feeding off the government that created contemporary Beltwayland. The District of Columbia proper has a population of 659,000, and is only the twenty-second-largest city in the country, having recently enjoyed modest growth after a steady drop in population since 1950. But the Washington Metropolitan Area, the region around the Beltway, has added two and a half-million people since 1970, making it the seventh-largest metropolitan area in the United States. Tysons Corner, a sprawl of shopping malls and office parks along the Virginia portion of the Beltway, has more office space than anywhere else between New York and Atlanta.

Like other office parks around the D.C. suburbs, but unlike most of the rest of the nation, it also has its own covert CIA facilities camouflaged in plain sight, housed in the usual drab and depressing office barracks that everywhere deface the American landscape. The National Security Agency and many of the other covert arms of the state whose existence many Americans consider quasi-mythical and exotic also have their quota of cheerless satellite offices around the Beltway, where the reality of the daily commuting routine reduces Hollywood's fantasies of glamorous espionage to a dismal watercooler joke. This is the Deep State at its most numbingly banal.

As Washington expanded, its center of gravity shifted as well. It has long been a part of Republican lore that the town is dominated by the so-called Georgetown elite: a coterie of wealthy liberals who dwell in the west end of town in a historic neighborhood of nineteenth-century houses holding posh dinner parties, salons, and klatches where they socialize, network, and generally conspire to undermine the real America beyond the Beltway.

At one time there may have been some truth to this notion of a dominant liberal elite, particularly after then-senator John F. Kennedy purchased a Georgetown town house in the 1950s. One has only to think of the influential columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop; Katherine Graham,
the wealthy publisher and owner of the
Washington Post;
*
Ben Bradlee, the
Post
's editor during the Watergate scandal; and many others to know that once upon a time there really was a liberal establishment. But Georgetown as a political state of mind was already in decline by the 1980s, and by the time of the death of its most illustrious soiree hostess, Pamela Churchill Harriman, in 1997, it was as defunct as the Romanov dynasty, despite the occasional outburst of right-wing indignation at the Georgetown liberal elite.

Besides, Georgetown had too many elegant but cramped town houses with inadequate wiring, tasteful but worn Persian carpets, and an aura of ever-so-slightly shabby gentility characteristic of the traditional Eastern Establishment. Who needed that when you could buy a brand-new 12,000-square-foot McMansion with cast-stone lions guarding the front gate, a two-and-a-half-story-tall great room, and a home cinema with built-in FSB ports? If that sounds more like the jumped-up suburb of a Sunbelt city like Houston or Atlanta than the traditional, old-money atmosphere of Georgetown or Beacon Hill or the Philadelphia Main Line, it is because that is precisely what the new neighborhoods of the reigning establishment have become.

Up the George Washington Parkway in Virginia, across the Potomac from Georgetown and its shabby-chic semidetached Federal houses lies McLean, where by the late 1970s the growing new elite was already settling in on former pasturage near the CIA's headquarters. It became the mecca of the moneyed new class: some Democrats (mega-fund-raiser and Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe is one such resident, as is Zbigniew
Brzezinski), but overwhelmingly they are Republican officeholders of the better-heeled sort (a former employer of mine, Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, was one), consultants, lobbyists, lawyers, fund-raisers, pollsters, and the occasional venture capitalist. The roster includes such luminaries as Colin Powell, Newt Gingrich, and GOP megalobbyist Ed Rogers.