Quote of the Day (Barbara Howar, on Competing in DCs ‘Race Toward the Ridiculous’)

"Laughing at myself is what I do best. Lord knows I have had practice, there being no city like Washington for laughable situations, but it appears to me that I have outdistanced even politicians in my race toward the ridiculous. I wanted to make my mistakes at the top and I have. You may think it simple to play the fool in a town that pursues the activity with unrestrained zeal, but my success was no lucky accident. I have had to work making my blunders count against strong contenders through four administrations." —Barbara Howar, Laughing All the Way (1973)

Barbara Howar, born 85 years ago today in Nashville, Tenn., represents a type—heck, make that “types”—increasingly rare in America: DC cocktail party queen, semi-permanent talk show guest, gossip queen. 

Modeling herself as a Scarlett O’Hara-style Southern belle, she came to Washington as wife of a real-estate leader. Here she found, however briefly, her mecca—in her words, “If ever there was a place for a polished courtesan, it was Washington.” 

That was certainly the case in the early-to-mid Sixties, when the lissome blonde drew notice for her parties and for managing (for a short while) the near-impossible feat of remaining in the good graces of the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson. 

Then an indiscreet remark led to her banishment from LBJ’s circle, and an indiscreet affair with a Presidential aide led to the end of her marriage.

In a 1986 Spy Magazine takedown of the “Most Embarrassing New Yorkers,” Howar was derided as a “ludicrous woman, really—each night she primps and postures before millions, delivering mindless accounts of trivial movements in the lives of inconsequential stars.”  

It is true that, like the fictional mistress of Tara, she did display a talent for floating to the surface when her latest venture or association with a man didn’t work out.

In the 1970s, that meant an affair with editor-novelist Willie Morris (who evidently used her as the basis for at least part of the title character in his The Last of the Southern Belles), or her own memoir (the bestselling Laughing All the Way) or novel (the far less successful Making Ends Meet).

In the attached 1978 Tonight Show interview with Johnny Carson, Howar inveighs against how the press had turned Washington into as celebrity-obsessed a town as Hollywood. Ironically, she was already well on her way toward becoming part of that celebrity industry as an interviewer. 

She went on to stints of several years at Entertainment Tonight and the more ill-starred Who’s Who, as an “entertainment reporter”/gossip columnist. Later, she worked for All in the Family producer Norman Lear, in one capacity or another. By the late 1990s, by design or not, she had fallen off the map.

It is very possible to take umbrage against Howar as a silly, insubstantial woman who made her way with a modicum of humor, charm and looks. But there were, even in her heyday, far worse ways of getting ahead. Right next to her on Spy’s list of Embarrassing New Yorkers was a certain “short-fingered vulgarian.” (Yes, Mr. Orange Hair.) 

And a sense of proportion about where one really ranks, as she had, is hardly to be sneered at.

Quote of the Day (Alexander Bickel, on Government and ‘The Arts of Compromise’)

“No society, certainly not a large and heterogeneous one, can fail in time to explode if it is deprived of the arts of compromise, if it knows no ways of muddling through.”— Constitutional law expert Alexander M. Bickel (1924-1974), The Least Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court at the Bar of Politics (1962)

I took the photo accompanying this post two years ago, on a vacation down to DC. No matter how dysfunctional I thought Capitol Hill then, it’s nothing like now.

Photo of the Day: DC Infrastructure, Way Before You-Know-Who

Did you know that the White House had christened the last several days “Infrastructure Week”? No?

Don’t feel bad. It wasn’t only that adverse media coverage about a former FBI Director’s riveting Capitol Hill testimony left the White House press office too Comey-tose to press their agenda, but that the President had done nothing, really, to advance what purports to be his plan: a $200 billion boost in federal spending that is supposed to trigger $800 billion in private financing through public-private partnerships. Nothing, that is, except toss to the ground thick binders of what he said were unnecessary and burdensome environmental reviews holding up a highway project.

Once, American leaders did more than offer cheap theatrics over infrastructure. They proposed detailed, carefully reasoned plans that not only created jobs, but that helped knit together the youthful but unruly and disparate regions of a sprawling nation.

Including in our nation’s capital, as I discovered in the fleeting but fascinating glimpse of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal that I photographed from a bus while on vacation three and a half years ago. I was on my way down to Foggy Bottom when, looking out the right side of the bus window, I saw this towpath—a sight far different from what you’re likely to encounter in the glass and marble structures that line today’s Washington.

As I write this, the Georgetown Chesapeake and Ohio Canal is closed for renovation. As soon as it’s completed, though, I advise you to take it in, and marvel at what people once did once they set their minds to it.

The seeds of the Chesapeake and Ohio were planted by George Washington, who with other entrepreneur formed the Potomac Company to improve navigation on the Potomac. Logistics stymied construction of that, but the building of the Erie Canal starting July 4, 1817 altered the views of lawmakers across the nation. (Let the record show that the effort to spearhead it was led by a New Yorker, DeWitt Clinton—who, as a lawyer and longtime legislator, knew how to educate and persuade people to his point of view—all without insulting tweets. Imagine!)

For the next decade or so, federal assistance to “internal improvements”—not just canals, but also roads and bridges—seemed the wave of the future. That came to an end when the President that Donald Trump likened himself incessantly to, Andrew Jackson, vetoed a major roads bill.

But in the meantime, the Chesapeake and Ohio Company was chartered in 1825 to build a shipping canal connecting two rivers: the Potomac’s tidewater in DC with the headwaters of the Ohio in western Pennsylvania. President John Quincy Adams broke ground for the canal in ceremonies at Little Falls, Maryland, on July 4, 1828. The construction effort survived even more dangers than the red tape that President Trump complained about, including recession, labor shortages, landowner fights concerning right-of-way, and a five-year construction shutdown. At last, it opened in 1850.

The canal’s heyday was relatively brief—only a generation or so after its midcentury opening—but it enabled engineers to surmount future challenges because of the solutions supplied here: dams, hundreds of culverts, and a 3,117-foot tunnel through a large shale rock formation. 

Today’s challenges may be different, but are hardly insurmountable if approached with a spirit not just of ingenuity, but of intelligence and persuasiveness—qualities in desperately short supply at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days.

Photo of the Day: DC’s Great War Memorial

Three years ago, I came upon this local memorial to World War I by accident while walking around DC. I was in the midst that day of visiting similar tributes to our nation’s war dead in the capital—for the Vietnam, Korean and World War II conflicts.

Even though I had never heard about a similar national memorial for the Great War, I still half-expected to come across it. I never saw one—and it’s unlikely that you have, either. Although there is one in Kansas City, there is none in Washington.

Over a century ago, wars were commemorated at the local level, “rooted in place, practiced on the town square and generally modest in scale,” according to this January 2016 article by Washington Post art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott. All over the country, such a relatively modest sculpture might include a list of local boys fallen in the conflict.

Just like the wrenching conflict it recalled, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial upended all those assumptions. With that first national war memorial in place, pressure grew inexorably to commemorate “The Forgotten War,” in Korea. And, as the “Greatest Generation” began passing away in earnest, the movement to pay tribute to the heroes of World War II took on enough urgency that it was almost inevitable that a memorial for that conflict would be constructed, too.

No such demographic urgency exists for a World War I memorial; its last known veteran passed away in 2011. Nevertheless, a different kind of logic is now proving operative in this case: an educational one. With the completion of a tribute to the heroes of the Great War, the nation’s capital will have a national memorial for each 20^th-century war in which a military draft required the services of a large part of America’s young.

As a result of Congressional legislation passed a few years ago, the prospective site of the memorial is Pershing Park on Pennsylvania Avenue. Though without the visibility of the National Mall, it also promises to bring the square (named, of course, for the general of all American armies in the war) a level of attention it had never achieved when it was designed in 1981 by architect M. Paul Friedberg.

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In the meantime, curious Washington tourists will want to check out the DC War Memorial on the bandstand at West Potomac Park. Designed by noted architect Frederick H. Brooke with his associates Nathan C. Wyeth and Horace W. Peaslee—all veterans of the Great War—it was dedicated on Armistice Day 1931. 

The Doric structure is 47 feet high with a diameter of 44 feet—large enough to accommodate the entire U.S. Marine Band. Following 2010 restoration funding, the memorial now gleams in something close to its original, brilliant white color, with new pathways and lighting systems to make it more visitor-friendly.

If you look along the memorial’s four-feet high circular marble platform, you’ll notice the names of the 499 DC residents who died in the war. They are inscribed in alphabetical order with no distinction made to rank, race, or gender. Although that has an obvious utilitarian function in terms of locating names, it also underscores the traditional American insistence on equality—an aspiration that even governs unto death.

Photo of the Day: Benito Juarez Statue, Washington, DC

A year and a half ago, on vacation in Washington, DC, I came across this statue of the great Mexican leader Benito Juarez, when I was trying to get to someplace else. It took me a while to find an appropriate time to post about it. But really, if not on Cinco de Mayo—the Mexican national holiday that Juarez, the country’s President, declared—when exactly can you write about it?

This 12-ft. bronze statue, located in the Foggy Bottom section of the U.S. capital, at Virginia Avenue, NW and New Hampshire Avenue, NW, is a copy of one located on a mountain in Oaxaca, Mexico, created by French-Italian sculptor Enrique Alciati in 1891. It was received by the U.S. from Mexico in 1969.

What little I knew of Juarez came from American textbooks that discussed how his Presidency was interrupted in the 1860s by Archduke Maximilian, the puppet of France's Napoleon III, and how the United States was annoyed by this violation of the Monroe Doctrine but unable to help because it was dealing with the Civil War.  (A well-intentioned but dull Warner Brothers bio of the 1930s, Juarez, starring Paul Muni, did little to add to my knowledge.) In 1867, Maximilian was overthrown and Juarez restored to office.

But, in reading further about him, I’ve discovered that Juarez was one of the giants of his country. He certainly seems like the type of leader who would not enthrall the current administration in DC. Consider:

*Unlike the dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, he was not the kind of strongman so admired by Donald Trump; 

*He was a Zapotec Indian of peasant birth—making him a minority among a larger group that Trump already sees as decidedly secondary in his scheme of things;

*He was a liberal who believed in the rule of law;

*One of his most famous quotes, inscribed in both Spanish and English on the base of this memorial, is diametrically opposed to Trump’s domestic and foreign policy: “Respect for the rights of others is peace.”