Letter from Washington: Party Unfaithful

The West Wing of the White House tends to have a funereal stillness, even in the best of times, which these are not. The President's aides walk the narrow corridors with pensive expressions and vigilantly modulated voices. By contrast, Karl Rove's office has an almost party atmosphere. Rove, the President's chief political adviser-the "architect," Bush has called him, of his 2004 victory over John Kerry-has been a man of constant troubles: Valerie Plame troubles, U.S. Attorney-firing troubles, and, most of all, collapse-of-the-Republican Party troubles. Yet his voice is suffused with bonhomie, his jokes are bad and frequent, his enthusiasm is communicable; he resembles an oversized leprechaun, although one with unconcealed resentments and a receding hairline.
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Letter from Washington: Woodward vs. Tenet

The former director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, who for the past two weeks has been the most comprehensively excoriated man in America, keeps an office at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. It is cramped and badly ventilated. He has had two offices at the school, where his title is distinguished professor in the practice of diplomacy. Tenet asked to be moved from the first after discovering that Douglas J. Feith, the former Under-Secretary of Defense for policy, who was one of the principal architects of the Iraq war, kept an office nearby. Feith, a neoconservative whose title at Georgetown is visiting professor and distinguished practitioner in national-security policy, has been a nemesis of Tenet's, and though Feith told me that he has tried to be friendly to Tenet-"I'm civil with everybody"-Tenet has shown no interest in reciprocating.
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The Talk of the Town: Pot Vs. Kettle Dept.

The new movie "The Hoax" concerns the activities of the literary grifter Clifford Irving, who perpetrated the most intrepid publishing fraud of the modern era when, in the early nineteen-seventies, he sold McGraw-Hill the "autobiography" of Howard Hughes, which he wrote without the assistance or the knowledge of Hughes. In the film, which was directed by Lasse Hallström, Richard Gere perpetrates a New York Jewish accent while portraying Irving as a comprehensively dislikable man whose motives were base, venal, and, worst of all-for Irving, at least-quotidian.
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The Talk of the Town: Wind on Capitol Hill

Hunan Dynasty, a few blocks from the Capitol, is not generally considered to be one of Washington's better Chinese restaurants, which is saying something, because, Chinese-food-wise, Washington is not New York, or, for that matter, Philadelphia. Even its devotees-for example, New York's senior senator, Charles Schumer-admit that the restaurant "always has the faint smell of disinfectant." Nor does Hunan Dynasty draw a notably powerful crowd. One night last week, as Schumer sat down for dinner, the only other diners were a group of out-of-town electric-company executives and Representative Dennis Kucinich, of Ohio, who is running for the Democratic Presidential nomination. "I believe I'm going to win New Hampshire," he said, adding, "The tofu here is very good."
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Letter from Washington: The Starting Gate

Evan Bayh was uncharacteristically dispirited when I met him in the Russell Senate Office Building on a quiet Wednesday before Christmas. For Bayh, who is fifty-one and was first elected to the Senate from Indiana in 1998, December will be recalled as a low moment in an otherwise high-achieving life. Less than two weeks earlier, he had the bad luck to visit New Hampshire on the same weekend that his junior colleague in the Senate Barack Obama, from Illinois, was also visiting. Bayh spoke to a hundred and fifty supporters in a Manchester restaurant; Obama swept through the state trailed by a hundred and fifty reporters. "We originally scheduled the Rolling Stones for this party," the governor, John Lynch, told fifteen hundred people who paid twenty-five dollars apiece to see Obama in a Manchester ballroom. "But we cancelled them when we realized Senator Obama would sell more tickets."
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Inner Office: The End of the Affair

Two months ago, Kenneth Adelman, the former director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, received a call from the Pentagon: Donald Rumsfeld would like to see him as soon as possible. Adelman said he knew then that this meeting might be their last.
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Letter from Gaza: The Forgotten War

Four skittish and dishevelled members of a Hamas rocket team threaded their way down a pitted alley in Beit Hanoun, a destitute town in northernmost Gaza. They stayed close to the walls, searching the sky for the pilotless, missile-firing drones of the Israeli Air Force. It was late July, the fourth week of Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza, a conflict eclipsed by Israel's other war, against Hezbollah. The men came near the doorway of the vacant building in which I was hiding. A friend, a Palestinian who had arranged this meeting, stepped into the alley and waved them over. It was 3 A.M.
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Letter From Washington: Central Casting

An enduring predicament of the Democratic Party was revealed one day in August, 2004, when John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for President, and John Edwards, the nominee for Vice-President, visited a soybean-and-cattle farm outside Smithville, Missouri. The announced purpose was to speak about alternative energy sources (soybeans are an important source of biodiesel), but the goal was to express solidarity with rural white voters, who have been abandoning the Democratic Party in disquieting numbers. About a hundred and twenty-five people, mostly farmers, sat on hay bales in an orchard near the farmhouse. Claire McCaskill, the Missouri state auditor, was there, too; she was running for governor and was eager to appraise the two Senators, whose names would be on the ballot with hers.
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The Talk of the Town: Sprucing Up Nixon

The nine-acre campus of the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace, in Yorba Linda, California, features the thirty-seventh President's boyhood home; his burial site; a gift shop that sells, for $9.95, the "Nixon surf logo beanie"; and a sleek museum that highlights the good and the bad, but mostly the good, of Nixon's sui-generis Presidency.

What is missing from the Nixon Library and Birthplace is an actual library.
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Letter From Washington: The Believer

The Judson Welliver Society is a bipartisan, sporadically serious, and generally impious club of ex-White House speechwriters. Its founder and president-for-life is the former Times columnist William Safire, who once wrote speeches for Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon. Welliver, a former newspaperman, was the first "literary clerk" ever to be placed on the White House payroll; he wrote speeches for the subcompetent Warren G. Harding and the ineloquent Calvin Coolidge. The members of the society that carries his nearly forgotten name get together every year or so to remind one another of the maddening yet elating experience of watching the most powerful men on earth rewrite their otherwise perfect sentences.
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