This Town (24 page)

He had also talked to Jonathan Strong, a reporter at the Daily Caller, a start-up conservative website that was cofounded by the libertarian talking head Tucker Carlson. Strong had covered Congress, which is how he came to know Kurt. Kurt had forwarded me some of Strong’s e-mails. One sequence in early February stuck out in my memory.

“Favor,” Strong wrote in his subject line. He explained in his e-mail that the Daily Caller was compiling some promotional materials for advertisers. “I have been tasked with getting some quotes from Members about how they read and enjoy the Daily Caller,” Strong wrote. “Is this something you could help me out with?” This struck me as cozy even by the standards of This Town: a congressional reporter asking a member of Congress to lend his name to his publication’s promotional copy. Kurt was happy to be helpful. He asked Strong what he wanted Issa to say. “Just like, I enjoy reading the Daily Caller with some kind of mild variation on that theme,” Strong wrote. “I read it daily, my staff stays updated by reading etc.” Strong added that “my bosses are on my case about it.” He had his response from Bardella in three minutes:

“Not only has the Daily Caller become one of Washington’s must-reads of the day, but it has found its place in leading a daily news cycle that changes throughout the day. I can’t tell you how many times my staff has sent me breaking news that originates with reporting from the Daily Caller—Rep. Darrell Issa.”

“Epic,” Strong wrote back to Bardella a minute later. “Thank you.”

Now the Daily Caller was looking for a new promotions director, someone to circulate its stories and drum up excitement for the fledgling site. Strong asked Bardella if he could pass along Bardella’s name to Tucker Carlson. Sure, he said. Carlson, who hoped to turn the Caller into a conservative version of the Huffington Post, had been intrigued by Bardella’s energy and ambition. He had obviously won copious exposure for Issa, most of it good (until it turned bad).

Carlson has a special zest for goosing the self-righteous and condemning posture of The Club. “This is such a judgmental city when it comes to people like Kurt,” said Carlson, who had appeared as a contestant on
Dancing with the Stars
several years ago. Tucker had called me in April for my opinion on whether he should hire Kurt. I was hesitant to get involved further in Kurt’s fate, one way or another. But I figured it was the least I could do after getting the guy fired. I put in a good word.

I told Tucker what he already knew: that Bardella was high-risk and high-reward, driven and talented and immature. He had a desperate edge and would have to be watched closely. But it could be a smart, counterintuitive hire. Tucker invited Bardella in to talk about the job and hired him a week later.

Within a few weeks, Kurt was writing commentaries for the Daily Caller. His first involved Republican congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s entry into the presidential race. “
As long as her candidacy doesn’t completely implode,” Bardella opined, “her very presence in the Republican field creates dangers for the more established candidates regardless of whether she wins or loses.” Bardella’s op-ed was excerpted in the morning e-mail roundups, including ABC’s “Note” and NBC’s “First Read.” People were reading what he had to say, sending him notes.

Bardella’s time in the barrel lasted two months. Now he was back, just like Jack Abramoff was back, out of federal prison after three and a half years. His book (Abramoff’s) would get plenty of buzz later that year and his book party, at Carlson’s house, would include plenty of Washington journalists, waiting together in the valet parking line. Abramoff made a speech, did a lot of interviews, and stayed contrite. Every day was Yom Kippur. He pounded a tight message of atonement. Abramoff was also the subject of a video profile on Politico
pegged to his book release. The host, Patrick Gavin, asked the friendly felon questions like “So, what’s the takeaway from jail?” and “Are you excited for this rollout?”

Kurt said his own “rollout” from the barrel was happening much faster than he ever expected. But he said he was having fun and trying to concentrate on being a better person, learn from his mistakes, and do right by God.

Meanwhile, the promotions director that Kurt replaced at the Daily Caller, Becca Glover Watkins, had taken a new job on Capitol Hill as deputy press secretary for a publicity-hungry Republican from California, Darrell Issa.

•   •   •

L
ess than four months after he was fired, Bardella was the subject of a 7,400-word profile by Luke Mullins in
Washingtonian
magazine, the glossy monthly that Club members pick up in the checkout line at Whole Foods. The story’s headline, as surely it was: “Kurt Bardella: The Comeback.”

Kurt felt the story painted him in a decent light and helped round out his profile. From reading the story, it was inevitable that Bardella would come full circle soon enough. Issa was quoted saying that Kurt “always has a home with us.” Bardella and some of his coworkers had mentioned this to me as a possibility. On top of that, after Bardella disappeared in early March, so did Issa—from the media: the congressman was trying to keep a low profile after the e-mail unpleasantness. But it was also clear—and discussed on the Hill—that he missed Kurt. Without Mini-Me, he seemed to have reverted to being Congressman Nobody.

Bardella’s return to Issa’s office was announced August 24, 2011, a little less than six months after he was fired. It stood as the logical completion of the life-cycle: the snake eats itself.

In his new job, Bardella would not have any dealings with the press. He would work as a staff member, reporting to Issa’s general counsel. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released a statement saying that Issa believed Bardella deserved a second chance, even though he acted improperly.

9

Performing Arts

R
ichard Holbrooke stood at a White House urinal.

“Eric, I am very disappointed in you,” he said to the startled White House aide peeing next to him. Holbrooke might have followed the young man in there. It’s the kind of thing he would do.

The aide was Eric Lesser, a luggage handler on the 2008 Obama campaign plane who finessed that into a gig as David Axelrod’s assistant at the White House. Like most assistants in D.C., Lesser was essentially a glorified secretary. But in a White House whose early months were devoured by the media like free food, even the former suitcase schlepper was hot property. He was the subject of two prominent stories in the
New York Times
: one on the subject of his
Odd Couple
yin-yang with Axelrod, and the other featuring Lesser as the de facto officiator of the White House Passover seder. Tammy Haddad honored Lesser at a party before he headed off to Harvard Law School. In his well-positioned Washington Way, Eric Lesser was “worth knowing.”

Sweet-mannered and conscientious, Lesser sat two gates from the Oval Office. Eric could get you to Axe, and Axe could get you to Obama. No one knew this better than Holbrooke, the inexorable diplomat who brokered a peace between warring factions in Bosnia during the 1990s. Other than possibly George F. Kennan, Holbrooke might have been the most accomplished American diplomat who never achieved cabinet rank. One reason for this was that he was irrepressible—the kind of guy who followed you into the men’s room.

“The quintessential Washington know-it-all” was how Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, fondly described Holbrooke. But Holbrooke’s credentials were relentless. He apprenticed under some of the last century’s foreign policy royals such as Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Dean Rusk, and Averell Harriman. He was the youngest Foreign Service officer tapped for the Paris peace talks, helped write the Pentagon Papers, served in the Peace Corps, ran
Foreign Polic
y magazine, and was assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs and an ambassador to Germany and the United Nations. Obama appointed Holbrooke to be a special adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan at the urging of Holbrooke’s longtime friend, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

A connoisseur of power, Holbrooke studied the master moves of Clark Clifford, the city’s signature power broker of the last century (Holbrooke cowrote Clifford’s memoir). Holbrooke marveled over how Clifford worked it in Edward Bennett Williams’s owner’s box at Redskins games, positioning himself at the precise spot where important figures would see him upon entering the elite salon.

The men’s room gamut was a favorite trick in Holbrooke’s busybody arsenal. But he did not restrict his bathroom politicking to urinals. “Richard once followed me into a ladies’ room to make a point,” Hillary Clinton said. “In Pakistan!”

Now here was Dick Holbrooke standing next to Lesser, gatekeeper to one of the president’s gatekeepers, announcing that he was disappointed in him. Why?

Because, Holbrooke said, “You haven’t gotten me in to see David.” Holbrooke had been trying to get in to see Axelrod for some time. Holbrooke figured Axelrod was his best hope for scoring his elusive one-on-one with Obama.

When I asked Lesser about the urinal episode, which I heard about secondhand, he declined to comment except to say, “I prefer to keep my urinal discussions private.”

•   •   •

W
ashington is filled with self-appointed larger-than-lifers. Holbrooke represented its platonic ideal, both in its larger-than-life and self-appointed regards. “
The Ego Has Landed,” White House aides would tap out to each other on their BlackBerrys when Holbrooke entered meetings.

Convinced he was engaged in historic work at all times, Holbrooke’s pestering, hectoring, and sucking up made him a bit of a Washington cartoon. “
He would overdo all this flattery when you knew, basically, he didn’t mean a word of it,” Bill Clinton would say of Holbrooke.

But Holbrooke also attracted a deep following among his many protégés. He was both tolerated and revered within certain quadrants of the Democratic foreign policy establishment. He was an honorary pallbearer for Pamela Harriman, Averell’s widow, when the Washington hostess was laid to rest in 1997 at the National Cathedral. He eulogized Les Aspin after the former defense secretary died in 1995, hailing Aspin’s “triumphant but unfinished life.” He dated Diane Sawyer—his third wife, the former ABC news correspondent Kati Marton, had been married to Peter Jennings—and was tight with a pantheon of big-name journalists (Tom Brokaw and Charlie Rose, among others). They hailed his intellect and big heart. They celebrated his quirky trips of ego. He employed a personal archivist. They spoke of “Richard being Richard,” a favorite phrase of Hillary Clinton’s to excuse Holbrooke’s strenuous personality as worth the trouble, sometimes.

“What an asshole,” one friend of Bill Clinton’s once quipped to the former president about Holbrooke upon hearing him bloviate through an event at the Asia Society, a global nonprofit he had chaired.

“Yeah,” Clinton said. “But he’s
our
asshole.”

Holbrooke was never Obama’s asshole. The president tired of him quickly. In one oft-told story during the 2009 debate over troop levels in Afghanistan, a group of foreign policy advisers was meeting with the president in the Situation Room when Holbrooke melodramatically reminded the commander in chief that he faced a “momentous decision,” comparable to what Lyndon Johnson confronted over Vietnam. To which the president coolly responded, “
Do people really talk like that?”

Obama’s national security team—namely National Security Adviser James Jones and his deputy, Denis McDonough—had little use for Holbrooke either. To many people in the White House, Holbrooke embodied the old guard of the Democratic foreign policy establishment. He was also just the ilk of drama queen the No Drama Obama culture could not brook. Vice President Biden described Holbrooke as “
the most egotistical bastard I’ve ever met,” according to Bob Woodward’s
Obama’s Wars
. Biden then conceded that Holbrooke’s fanatical energy level and well of relationships in Afghanistan and Pakistan (known as “AfPak,” as Holbrooke insisted on calling it) could make him just the man for the job. But things went south quickly, to a point where Jones suggested to Holbrooke twice in 2009 and early 2010 that he start looking for other jobs.
One major sore point involved Holbrooke’s participation in a September 2009
New Yorker
profile by George Packer that struck many as needlessly All About Dick. Titled “The Last Mission,” the profile portrayed Holbrooke as heroically obsessed with avoiding the mistakes of Vietnam in Afghanistan. The president was not happy, and after the piece appeared, McDonough chewed out Holbrooke and insisted that he stay out of the media.

Another source of suspicion from the start was Holbrooke’s deep allegiance to Hillary Clinton. Her 2008 presidential campaign, which he supported aggressively, represented Holbrooke’s best hope of being named secretary of state, his dream job. When it was clear that Clinton was not going to win, Holbrooke moved to win favor with Clinton’s former rival, writing memos for Obama and cultivating his foreign policy advisers. One of Holbrooke’s top boosters inside the Obama camp was Samantha Power, who had gotten to know Holbrooke when she was working as a freelance journalist in Bosnia in the 1990s.

Power resigned from the Obama campaign during the 2008 primaries after referring to Hillary in an interview as a “monster,” but she was brought back after the primaries and emerged as a key foreign policy adviser at the White House.

Hillary Clinton’s surprise appointment as secretary of state was Holbrooke’s ticket back into the game. Her first choice was to hire Holbrooke as her deputy, but the White House vetoed it. Then at Clinton’s urging, Obama named Holbrooke to be AfPak czar. (Early on, Holbrooke decided to broker a détente between Power and Hillary—the aforementioned monster—as a wedding present to mark her marriage to fellow Obama campaign aide Cass Sunstein. When Power later told the president about this “wedding present,” Obama quipped that “some people just get toasters.”)

By November 2010, plugged-in observers of the situation assumed that Hillary was the only reason Holbrooke was still in his job. Sure enough, after one of the meetings—in March 2010—in which Jones urged Holbrooke to find other employment, Holbrooke called Clinton in Saudi Arabia to tell her. When she returned, according to an account in
Little America: The War Within the War in Afghanistan
by Rajiv Chandrasekeran, Clinton told Obama that he was
free to fire Holbrooke “over the objection of your secretary of state.”

Holbrooke’s marginalization at the White House was sanctified in classic Washington form: the humiliating Woodward portrayal. Every few years, the Most Famous Reporter in Washington publishes a new tome on the doings of a particular White House that sets off a familiar sport over who came out best, who came out worst, and who Woodward’s sources were. And in every book, it seems, one actor fares miserably above all others.

That distinction went indisputably to Holbrooke in Woodward’s book
Obama’s Wars
, published in September 2010, about the administration’s debates over Iraq and Afghanistan. The book portrayed Holbrooke as a floundering figure in a shark tank. Among the indignities catalogued was an episode from January 22, 2009, the day Obama introduced Holbrooke at a ceremony at the State Department.

“Mr. President, I want to ask you a favor,” Holbrooke said to Obama beforehand. He asked if the president could please refer to him as “Richard” during the announcement, not “Dick,” which Obama had used previously but that Holbrooke’s wife, Kati Marton, did not care for. Obama obliged, calling him “Richard.” But the request struck Obama as odd. And we know this because Obama told many people about the episode. And Holbrooke was mortified upon learning that Obama had circulated it with such mocking glee.

To some at least, one of Holbrooke’s more endearing qualities was that he wore his insecurities plainly. He was blatant in assessing his up-to-the-moment status. He unburdened himself constantly on the question of why the president disliked him, why the White House was not listening to him, and why his talents were not appreciated. While nearly everyone in Washington is preoccupied with their place in the pecking order, few were as open about how they were “doing” at a given moment. On Saturday, December 4, 2010, my friends Peter Baker and Susan Glasser spotted Holbrooke at a nearby table of a Georgetown restaurant. Holbrooke’s wife, Kati, had her arm draped around Holbrooke, who kept looking at his BlackBerry and showing it to his wife. Glasser wondered to Baker whether the rumor had finally proven true and Holbrooke had been fired. While he had not been, he had just been kicked again in the stomach: the day before, the president had made a secret trip to Afghanistan with a small delegation of staff and diplomats that did not include Holbrooke. It was the latest in what had become regular slights. Holbrooke’s White House adversaries held AfPak briefings with Obama without telling Holbrooke. They nixed his requests for military aircraft to travel to the region.
They tried to exclude him from an Oval Office confab during a visit by Afghan president Hamid Karzai (Secretary of State Clinton intervened and demanded that Holbrooke attend). Glasser, the editor in chief of
Foreign Policy
magazine, had just honored Holbrooke at a fortieth birthday party for the venerable publication that Holbrooke ran in the 1970s. He gave a long speech and stayed late, regaling guests—many of them young Foreign Service types—with stories. Anyone who knew Holbrooke’s predicament would have perceived a man enjoying a salve of recognition.

Nearly everyone assumed Holbrooke would be gone from the administration sometime in 2010. But Obama did not initiate anything, largely out of deference to Hillary Clinton. One of Holbrooke’s chief nemeses in the White House, National Security Adviser James Jones, resigned in October in part because he was suspected of being a prime source behind the trashing of Holbrooke via Woodward. Holbrooke, meanwhile, was still on the job in early December and determined to survive long enough to negotiate a workable peace in Afghanistan that would be the capstone of his fixated-upon “legacy.” If only he could get through to the president before his time was up.

Holbrooke could not get his presidential meeting through the regular White House national security channels (McDonough and Jones’s successor, Tom Donilon). The better bet was Axelrod, the president’s mustachioed message maven, who was largely responsible for devising Obama’s political rise.

The beleaguered diplomat felt he had rapport with Axe. Most people who came in contact with him did. Axelrod aptly described himself as a “kibitzer,” not a “policy guy.” He was difficult to dislike, although he had also amassed a share of enemies befitting his long and successful career as a Chicago political operative. Even as Hillary Clinton became an indispensable piece of the Obama team, the Clintons and their many loyalists still reserved a special place for Axe on their dead-to-us list for past sins. For starters, the Clintons were always supportive of CURE, David and Susan Axelrod’s foundation to benefit epilepsy research and awareness. They appeared at CURE functions and Hillary was wonderful and generous upon meeting the Axelrods’ daughter, Lauren. In turn, the Clintons felt betrayed that Axelrod would then campaign so aggressively against Hillary in 2008—his biggest sin coming shortly before the Iowa caucuses, when he seemed to indirectly blame the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto on Clinton’s support for the Iraq War.

While he complained often about what he called “the palace intrigue pathology of Washington,” Axelrod clearly enjoyed his renown in This Town. He was seen a lot at restaurants and parties, and he was a good friend to political journalists—and had been one himself years ago at the
Chicago Tribune
. He was always gracious to the tourists who wanted to take his picture. Holbrooke himself was in many ways a creature of Washington—quintessential, actually, in his fascination with power, status, and day-to-day reminders of historic work under way. But it was a point of great pride for him that Manhattan is where he made his permanent home. He was never shy in running down “the parasitic culture” of the capital. “Washington is the only town where people feel big by wearing pictures of themselves around their necks,” Holbrooke once told Samantha Power, referring to the familiar accoutrement around government buildings. People need these, Holbrooke joked, “to remember who they are.” Removing his tags was the first thing he did every Friday when he got back to his Central Park West apartment. “Richard was an outlier in Washington,” Marton told me. “He was too engaged in the world, and too big of a personality to be contained by Washington.”