All the Houses

by Karen Olsson

  * * *

  The approach of the new year made me newly conscious that I was still in D.C., now working, renting. This unremarkable fact came to me in the guise of a remarkable one. I’ve never really gone in for epiphanies, nevertheless I was struck by the obvious: I was living in Washington now. I’d been thinking of myself as someone taking a break from real life, which would resume sometime in 2005, but now it was almost 2005. This was my real life. It was. And I had to start treating it as such.

  The first thing I did was to retire my white jeans and my polka-dot shirts. One evening after work I ventured out to look for Washington clothes, at a Talbots store. In a curtained stall I tried on flare-leg trousers, I tried on silk blouses, then a double-breasted jacket, a sweater set, all of it black, red, cream, charcoal, and/or navy. One pair of pants combined all these colors in a plaid. In the corner of my stall there was a chair, and on it I heaped the clothes I’d already removed, a growing mound of boiled wool and microvelvet that gave off a pleasant, almost woodsy perfume. Like a forest inside of a government building. I tried on something called “bi-stretch pants,” which forgave me my back fat. I tried on pumps styled like loafers, called “loafer pumps.” I could sense the saleswoman’s excitement, or perhaps she sensed mine: a real transformation was taking place, an inside-the-Beltway makeover! I left there with two bags full of prissy-wonky lady apparel, and then at another store I bought a few black headbands.

  That I conceived of “real life” in this way, as an exercise that required me to dress up as somebody else, in clothes I didn’t like—clearly it was this idea that needed the makeover, much more so than my wardrobe. But where was the store for that?

  * * *

  It was a long while before I managed to follow Jodi’s advice. I was still drawn to what she’d called the swamp. I went to the American University library, where I found the transcripts of Dick Mitchell’s deposition, from March 1987, and his testimony before the congressional committees, from July of that year. The thick black tomes of the official record spanned three shelves, so that for all the disclosures they might’ve contained, the total effect was of a black wall. Iran-Contra, this barricade of books announced, was too much for any one person to consume. The depositions alone took up twenty-seven volumes, organized alphabetically, Richard Mitchell following two men named Miller who followed former attorney general Meese.

  I toted Mitchell’s deposition to a carrel, next to a window overlooking Nebraska Avenue. There was a familiar low hum coming from someplace, a smell of—old carpet? Book bindings? Possibly I’d sat in that same chair in high school, looking up facts about African nations or the Missouri Compromise for some assignment, even as Mitchell had been giving the very deposition I was about to read. Whether or not that was precisely true, I was motivated, in my haphazard research, by the knowledge that important things had gone down back then, practically right under my nose, while I let myself be distracted. (It did not escape me that now I was here looking up testimony from seventeen years earlier, and so no doubt missing out on important things of the present.)

  Jodi had mentioned a rivalry between Dick and my dad. That was the most recent addition to my mental list of facts about Dick Mitchell, which I kept returning to, because I had this nagging intuition that there was something I’d missed about him.

  MR. EGGLESTON. Your job was to coordinate humanitarian assistance to the Nicaraguan resistance fighters, is that correct?

  MR. MITCHELL. Through June of 1985 I worked under Assistant Secretary Abrams at the State Department. I started as director of the Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office on July 1.

  MR. EGGLESTON. And that was also part of the State Department.

  MR. MITCHELL. Correct. But we were in a separate building. We were relatively independent.

  MR. EGGLESTON. Can you tell us what were your responsibilities in that office?

  MR. MITCHELL. Congress had allocated approximately 27 million dollars for humanitarian assistance, and we were in charge of distributing that.

  MR. EGGLESTON. How did you determine what would qualify as “humanitarian assistance”?

  MR. MITCHELL. There was not a set rule. We used our best judgment. Food, clothing, mosquito nets, it was those sorts of items.

  MR. EGGLESTON. Was everything purchased before it was delivered to the Nicaraguans, or were there cash transfers as well?

  MR. MITCHELL. There were both.

  MR. EGGLESTON. And how did you determine that the money you sent was used for humanitarian purposes only?

  MR. MITCHELL. That was a challenge. The people we were working with down there, they weren’t exactly trained accountants.

  MR. EGGLESTON. Nonetheless, according to a Government Accounting Office report from July of last year, some of the recipients of this aid did manage some rather artful invoicing. In fact, fraudulent.

  MR. MITCHELL. With this type of aid, regrettably, a certain level of fraud is not that unusual. Maybe in the future we ought to send some GAO people down to work with our recipients directly.

  MR. EGGLESTON. That’s not a bad idea. I don’t know how they’d feel about it.

  MR. MITCHELL. Oh, they’d love it in the jungle.

  MR. EGGLESTON. Right, right. Getting back to my questions. Did you coordinate many of your disbursements with Oliver North at the NSC?

  MR. MITCHELL. We were in contact with Colonel North. I wouldn’t say we coordinated with him, necessarily.

  To judge by the transcript, he was confident of his answers. He joked with the lawyers, and they responded in kind—Dick Mitchell, humanitarian, and his genteel interlocutors, peers from the same slice of Washington society.

  How I imagine that world to have been in, say, the spring of ’85: a giant tangle of crossed wires. The more I read about that period in government, the more it seemed that the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was up to, though I assume most governments share that quality, to one degree or another. Even so, Dick Mitchell and my dad would have been, at that point, still (relatively) young, full of potential, full of good intentions—after all, who in Washington did not have good intentions during the first part of his career?

  Nobody sleeps. The men tasked with running the country, they are in bed a few hours a night, if that, which they occasionally supplement by snoozing on an office couch or nodding off in a meeting. Night after night they deprive themselves, until more than a few hours of sleep are no longer even an option, for they’ve replaced their steady circadian rhythms with staccato, erratic beats. Their heads buzz and ache and echo. Other countries, distant wars, twirl in the dreamless kaleidoscopes of their minds, as they write memos and more memos.

  Most days, Tim drives to work. At six, six-thirty you can usually still find a space not too far away. From behind, with its fountain not yet turned on and the East and West Wings half-hidden by trees, the famous building is just a house. Often the sunrise is the last thing he sees before he goes inside of it, joining a slew of nervy workers in coats and badges. And once he passes through the portal that is the west entrance, through security, he finds himself in the midst of an alternative civilization, a hive, with fluorescent lights buzzing and the presidential seal everywhere, on the walls and the coffee cups. Men in dark suits walk briskly to and fro as brisker couriers retrieve and deliver the great daily burden of paper documents, waves of memoranda and briefings parceled out in manila envelopes, bound dossiers, file folders, naked stacks still warm from the copy machine. Here are the graying viziers of the free world and their minions, their staffers, their secretaries—eager Southern girls changing out of their Reeboks into navy-blue pumps. Here a lingering odor of scrambled eggs from the breakfast trays.

  Tim works for McFarlane, the national security advisor, a.k.a. the assistant to the president for national security affairs. It bothers McFarlane to no end that the president has not yet established a clear set of policy goals, leaving his own office without an agenda. The advisor tries to seal away his grievances, his fear that h
e isn’t accomplishing anything, and yet he takes such pains to present a calm facade that the underlying turmoil is all too apparent, as if he were continually declaring that he was not upset, no, not in the slightest. Not at all! At times the force of his anguish and the force of his efforts to swallow the anguish combine to make him hover just above the ground, or so it seems to Tim. He returns from the president’s morning security briefing with his jaw locked and his Florsheims floating over the carpet: out of sheer frustration, the assistant to the president for national security affairs is levitating.

  He is mysterious to the people around him. He speaks in abstractions, makes general pronouncements in a flat voice that stops, backs up, starts again, and does everything it can to avoid any slithering, biting emotion. His jaw clenches. But every so often, a vent opens and he releases a quantum of steam. His voice grows more insistent, though no louder, and his ears redden. Tim doesn’t necessarily know what (or who) caused it. His boss, as he’s confided to Jodi Dentoff over lunch, is an honorable, thoughtful man, but his desire for the president’s approval runs so deep it can never really be satisfied.

  McFarlane would return from a meeting and lament, The president has been misinformed! It’s bad policy!

  All right, Tim says. Let’s put together some information for him. But his boss bristles at that, ever loath to contradict his commander. Instead he contradicts himself: It’s not a matter of information, he says. And then, just as quickly as this upset emerged, it is suppressed. Redacted. A thick black line is drawn over his covert turmoil. McFarlane places the studious mask back over his face and asks Tim to locate an unrelated document. Then he asks whether Poindexter is in, nodding at the closed door to his deputy’s office.

  I believe so, says Tim.

  The deputy is a taciturn man, a vice admiral more inclined toward technical questions than politics, his mouth frequently plugged by a pipe, the door to his office usually shut. Tim doesn’t know—almost never knows for sure—whether he’s there behind that door or not. At the end of the day, Tim is distantly, quietly fond of McFarlane: he’s rooting for the boss, hoping he’ll drone and frown his way out of the administrative straitjacket he’s been forced to wear, unlikely as that may be. But with the technocrat in the deputy’s office, who mostly communicates, if at all, through short sentences scrawled on memos, Tim rarely finds common ground.

  McFarlane heads toward his own office door, then reverses direction and asks Tim to lend him a quarter for the vending machine. He takes a series of deliberate breaths, as his eyes peer out from their cool caverns. Before he marches off he says—to Tim, to Poindexter’s closed door, to nobody—I believe it is necessary for us to follow a coherent course of action, in accordance with the president’s objectives.

  His voice becomes lower and slower as he continues. That’s of the utmost importance, he says. Clear, decisive action is needed.

  * * *

  In the courtyard at the Tabard Inn, Tim drapes his arms over the back of his small chair and clasps his hands behind him. He tilts the chair onto its hind legs. It’s a balmy day, and the light lusters the two friends he’s met for lunch. He listens to them trade tattle, between bites.

  Because what I hear is, Schultz has been offering to resign on a daily basis, Jodi says, referring to the secretary of state.

  I wouldn’t call it daily, says Dick.

  He’s spinning his wheels.

  It’s not like Schultz is the only guy who’s got problems.

  The clusters of iron furniture are like big spiders that screech every time they move. He and Dick and Jodi meet up once a month, sometimes more, for breeze-shooting purposes. The Washington breeze: the braid of information and misinformation and you-didn’t-hear-it-from-me, the airstream of open secrets. Flirting also plays a part in it, the weightless, daytime flirting that keeps things interesting.

  Look at this woman eat, Dick says.

  She is a tiny woman with an enormous appetite, now making short work of a cheeseburger. For Tim it’s like watching his daughters when they were younger and had hands as small as Jodi’s and ate real food—before all the diets. Do Jodi’s feet even reach the floor? He is a giant by comparison.

  She takes a sip of her iced tea. I’m still recovering from last week, she says. I was in Phoenix, which was like Satan’s armpit. So hot I couldn’t eat.

  What were you doing out there? Dick asks.

  Talking to loons, she says. These people had their own logic that I couldn’t follow. I understood what they were saying on the face of it, and going from A to B it made sense, but once they got out to F or G it was just gobbledygook. This group called the United States Council for World Freedom, they’re out there in the desert plotting how to eradicate communism globally.

  I hear they’ve got Scottsdale pretty well cleared, Tim says.

  When you’re out in that kind of heat there’s a different thinking process that happens, she says.

  Tim dreamed, once, that he and Jodi were standing together at a cocktail party, a fund-raiser in a great empty plain of a room, with a huge marble floor and no one else there but the waiters. When he awoke he retained that image, and it has stayed with him as though it’s a secret they share.

  And how goes it in the inner sanctum? she asks him.

  I wish I knew. You know how many people are on our staff, Tim says. It’s one hundred eighty-something. And McFarlane talks to maybe half a dozen of those. The rest don’t know what the hell they’re doing. I mean, some do, but we’ve got guys who are literally wandering the halls.

  She narrows her eyes, even as she eats and eats. It’s an impossible situation, she says.

  Exactly, he says. That’s off the record.

  Mitchell scoops up a bundle of Jodi’s fries and eats them one by one out of his hand.

  If you want any fries, just help yourself, she quips.

  On paper Tim and Dick Mitchell have the same credentials, same track records in Washington. Tim would never swipe fries off someone’s plate without asking, though. At work, he relies more on diligence, while Mitchell has his card shark’s memory, his agility, and a talent for endearing himself to older men.

  There’s been talk about your hardworking marine, Jodi says to Tim. They’re saying that the lieutenant colonel has gone operational, she says. That he’s been jetting off to Ilopango and Tegucigalpa. They say his ass is way out on a limb.

  How people relish the sheer insiderness of inside information, the specialized lingo of the agency and bureau, the acronyms within acronyms within acronyms—and inside the innermost one, a rumor about a petty feud or somebody’s drinking problem. Or North’s irregular (since nobody really knew what was illegal) activities. Every fact has its own, erratic momentum. It sticks to other facts, and they drag words along behind them. For instance: after the president was diagnosed with intestinal cancer he said that he did not suffer from cancer. He later clarified that while he did have cancer, he did not suffer from it. He didn’t feel that he had suffered.

  Jodi has stopped eating: Any chance you could confirm—

  I can’t, Tim says.

  It must make you uneasy, she says.

  I see the guy sometimes. I barely know him.

  You know what the complaint is, she says. You’ve got all these military officers, ex-military working over there—they don’t understand politics. They resent it. They see Congress as the enemy.

  Tim nods. It’s a familiar rap on his bosses, but to him it seems superficial, a description as opposed to a diagnosis. I don’t think anybody really knows, he says. Knows the whole situation.

  You’re talking about North, Jodi says.

  North isn’t so bad, he says. Everything’s happening interstitially now.

  Jodi notices the time. She lays cash on the table, stands up, and backs away, smiling. Gentlemen, she says. It’s been a pleasure.

  After she leaves another spark lights up Mitchell’s face. He taps the edge of the table twice, with both hands, and tells Tim: You managed t
hat well enough.

  He isn’t aware that he tried to manage anything. He doesn’t think of it that way. But he can see from Dick’s expression that his friend knows all about North’s game, maybe more than he himself does.

  There is too much to know, too little to do. Every morning the agency staff descend from Annandale and Arlington by the thousands, with their lunches in brown bags, and succeed by dint of their long memories and regulatory vim in maintaining what the outsider might take to be stasis but what, to these balding Virginians, is a delicate equilibrium. A hippopotamus perched, just so, on top of a pole. Required to maintain the balance are strategic delays, lunch at one’s desk, gallons of sour coffee, thousands of ballpoint pens, careful ignorance of what might be happening in other departments, and countless memoranda with titles like “Initial Proposals Re: Preliminary Steps to Prevent Negative Consequences.”

  Tim’s position is superior to those of the pencil pushers, yet he has limited authority; it is not for him to direct policy or to be captured on camera as he marches from a doorway into a waiting black car. He is a platinum conduit, a fancy connector, through which top-secret matters ooze their way along, and as they go past, small adjustments can be made, suggestions offered, deposits of information amassed. He is close enough to the peripheral bureaucracy that he nurses a fear of becoming engulfed by it, of turning into a numb-assed, forgotten desk rat, to whom none but the most inscrutable and irrelevant documents are routed, and routed last—the fear that his would be the desk where disregarded memos go to die.

  (From the testimony of Timothy Atherton, June 24, 1987)

  MR. RUDMAN. What is the PROFS network?

  MR. ATHERTON. PROFS stands for “Professional Office System.” This was a system of IBM computers we installed in, I think it was 1984.