I was raised in the District of Columbia. My father, Willam S. White, was an internationally syndicated journalist, famous and close to several presidents and senators. He authored Citadel: The Story of U.S. Senate which still—only ideally now—defines the U.S. Senate and is, at last check, featured on the chamber’s website. A Texas native, Daddy was never accepted by the East Coast Ivy League honchos ruling D.C. then (and many still now!), and his obvious simple integrity was an additional aggravation to many of those same elites.
My father was the only person who stayed with the disgraced Walter Jenkins, policy advisor and confidant to LBJ, as an otherwise loyal Walter lay, suicidal and wrecked, in a hospital bed throughout the night, after Jenkins’s so-called sexual scandal and arrest in a bathroom “sting.” (Jenkins was charged with “disorderly conduct” after being caught in a public bathroom with a man.) Jenkins’ family did not show that night, nor did his boss, LBJ, nor any friends or colleagues. The message? Henceforth, Walter was on his own. That is friendship in this city.
Even with the passage of many years, my point remains fair to this day: Walter Jenkins, a father of six, and his family, were destroyed both personally and politically that night, probably due to his emotional exhaustion from dealing with LBJ at the heights of the Vietnam blow-out and right before the next election. Jenkins’s arrest may have been orchestrated as an attack on his boss, who was always a big fat problem for the NYT and Washington Post. Anyway, it didn’t matter, then and now, what you did as much as who were and where you were from: in Jenkins’s case, Texas.
The Washington Post and NYT can still kill you or elevate you, practically, for your home state postcode. Generally, the rough “justice” of D.C. is also ongoing and very much operational then and now. Yet now, an accusation of any sort of deviancy in D.C. may not shock anyone, as many actually celebrate, and are now rewarded for deviancy. One could say deviancy has become a lucrative MSM cult. Corruption grows as it wills.
And oh my, yes, there was plenty of escalating dark money in D.C. back then. Migrating, very rich Arabs had started their steady population ascent into D.C.’s urban and suburban culture: the rural two-lane road—that took my secondary school bus from the city into McLean—was steadily gaining huge mega-mansions (one to house LBJ’s elder daughter and her new family). These self-important immigrants were to utterly change the entire rural, charming, and even indigenous, character by a series of monstrously vain architectural statements. Where, I marveled as a teenager, did all the filthy richness come from?
It wasn’t from old D.C. money, I knew that for sure. Because, in the ‘60s, and up until JFK’s assassination, all the city kids—white and black—knew what D.C. neighborhoods had the money, and those were few. Foxhall Road was probably the most famous. That was for doctors and professionals and just the plain very rich, as well, who started up the inexplicable growth, federally subsidized by tax breaks, in the “private family foundation” cohort now run amok. D.C.’s first foundation family lived on Foxhall Road.
As the “foundation” beast, now a more thoroughly corrupt alliance between politicians and the corporate elite (the Clinton Foundation—renamed now—is a relative newcomer yet has done horrifically well by and mostly for itself), is awash in D.C., with special interests galore that have come along fine in the Swamp, starting in the 1960s.
The lobbyists were also in D.C. back then, many wielding significant political heft and personal (mostly unexplained, if not undocumented) wealth. “Famous” attorneys were seen lobbying and rubbing shoulders on the Hill, eager to become presidential acolytes. Embassies were a good venue, then and now.
The ambiguous role(s) of lobbyists now on Capitol Hill is a scandal in itself, and entirely out of control. There was an arrogance to them I noticed even as a child, but it’s only worsened—then, most did not boast large luxury offices and fulltime staff to push paper to and from enabling officials on Capitol Hill.
I am both happy and anxious watching D.C.’s comprehensive breakdown as challenged by a real president. I fear for President Trump, simply because one man, even a U.S. president, even a great man—as he transparently is—can only effect so much change in so short a time. Swamps have exceedingly tough roots.
At six years old, I used to sit on our side steps on D.C.’s Reno Road and watch the loud and messy garbage trucks come by to pick up the trash—then overflowing the battered metal cans. I marveled each time. Where on earth would they hide all this ever-accumulating garbage? (No recycling then—although one guesses about efficacy there.) My childish solution to my mental dilemma always was:
Well, the garbage will just keep piling up until it covers the whole city. Or the whole earth.
How prescient children can be.
Image from Grok.