The late Kermit Gordon, a wonderful man who was budget director in the Kennedy-Johnson years, used to tell a favorite story on himself He was having lunch in the White House mess with his wife, Molly, who had called to say there was something she must talk to him about. But the mystery subject couldn’t come up because cabinet officers and other hotshots kept stopping by their table to complain to Kermit that some proposed cut of fifty million dollars or so from their budget would absolutely devastate their operations. To all this Kermit repeatedly found himself saying not to worry, something could probably be worked out, the funds be restored. And then Molly got her turn. The construction people had called this morning with the estimate for the garage renovation. It was going to be twelve hundred dollars. “Twelve hundred dollars!” Kermit heard himself shriek. “Twelve hundred dollars! Are they crazy? Tell them no!”
The point is bipartisan, timeless and universal so far as Washington is concerned. No matter how much we talk, argue, negotiate and pontificate about public money, it doesn’t seem real-only the other kind does, the kind that individuals pony up at the end of the month or on the second, slightly less warmhearted notice from the credit-card company. This is one of the several immutable aspects of the “inside the Washington Beltway” sensibility that got John Sununu in trouble. They all reflect an unbridgeable gulf between the way people think here and the way they think practically everyplace else. It is testimony to their seductiveness that even so hard-eyed a customer as Sununu, who, in his New Hampshire political incarnation no doubt had much mean to say about Beltway profligacy, in his turn succumbed.
Start with the fact that not just for someone like Sununu, but for members of Congress, lobbyists and media too, Washington is an environment in which lavish kinds of transportation and meals and booze and entertainment are regularly paid for by someone else. We get in the habit of taking, no questions asked. This luxurious evening is being sponsored by the Acme Widget Company … or something-who cares? We all convince ourselves that we are either there for working purposes or that the cause is a good one or that this is but a tiny reward for the wonderful work we do. People in political Washington are surrounded from the minute they get here by other people dying to pick up the tab.
For Sununu or any White House chief of staff-and it is no accident that so many of them have come to grief on the shoals of arrogance and a delusion of grandeur-there is much more to turn the head, starting with the perks of office. Service in the upper reaches of the White House can justify or, more precisely, seem to, almost any indulgence or comfort in the name of quick communication, respite for the high-powered, pressured people who must make split-second decisions and so forth. This is the awesome-burden mystique. There is also the terrific fawning engaged in by others in the administration and people around town. What gets created, alas, on the part of the White House biggie is a sense of personal wonderfulness and invincibility: “I can do anything and everyone else just keeps acquiescing and smiling and/or taking the humiliations that I see fit to dish out. Now please call my helicopter and be sure it’s stocked with my favorite soda and peanuts. God, I’m great.”
Distinct from these transient politicians is permanent, establishment Beltway Washing-ton; these are people who live so deep inside the Beltway both physically and spiritually that they actually don’t know where the Beltway is. They are generally among the first to show the newly installed administration bigwig from elsewhere (like Sununu and many of his predecessors) ostentatious respect, and without fail among the first to titter at the trouble he gets in, which they have learned to expect as inevitable. The relationship here-an anthropological curiosity-is as follows: The Washington establishment encourages the poor fellow in his vanity until he’s got a head so big it looks like a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. The political big shot comes to believe that he does not need to pay for anything or to reciprocate or even to thank because his presence or attention or mere existence is gift enough in itself, both to the government and to those lucky enough to get a few minutes of his time. The setting for overreaching and scandal is thus ripe, and those in the permanent establishment who contributed to it (and who have seen it all before) know this.
It is also true that to persons with the Beltway frame of mind, which we all seem to get within about five minutes of unpacking our belongings, the public expenditure required to sustain these comforts seems small (as it is) in relation to the gigantic sums spent on public purposes. Cutting them out seems foolish since they contribute to the ease of life in government and hardly affect the spending curve. In fact, we always hoot at officials who try to cut these costs-Lyndon Johnson going around turning out White House lights, Jimmy Carter whacking back White House privileges. We point out that this is chicken feed, symbolism, showboating.
But it is important. For while the American public may, as was the case with Carter, show a certain ambivalence about how much glamour and cushiness it wants to surround its leaders, there is no doubt in my mind that this issue of the lifestyle of official, subsidized, God-I’m-great Washington is one of the most deeply felt and volatile in the country. It is always what gets people outside the Beltway wild, whether Washington is telling them smugly that it needs four times the average American salary to live a suitable life here and to be able to attract people of high caliber to government and to compensate for the sacrifice it is making, or whether, in the congressional manner, it is flying itself (and its husbands and wives and assistants) all over the place at prices and for reasons that simply can’t be justified. It really doesn’t matter that next to the defense budget or the Medicaid outlay the cost of all this may in fact be infinitesimal. And it doesn’t really help to point out that others or the opposition or in fact everybody here does it: that only confirms the general public suspicion and suggests that things may be even worse than people feared.
In other words, I don’t think this is, as some of the current Washington sophistication has it, a sidelight political issue. I think it is a potential killer.
