Are We Rome?

by Cullen Murphy

  Inside the Bubble

  WASHINGTON, TOO, sees leadership as its special gift, though it did not always. For more than a century it was very much a provincial southern town. The Washington of Henry Adams’s Democracy (1880) is a city of pinched horizons, not the center of anything. There’s plenty of religion and corruption and politicking and small-mindedness in the novel, but no sense at all of America on a world stage. Like Rome, Washington changed character suddenly: its Augustan phase began only in the twentieth century and accelerated after the Depression and World War II, spurred by new social ambitions at home and new security obligations abroad. In the eyes of nostalgic proponents of small government, the Rubicon was crossed with the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, in 1913, giving Washington the unimpeded power to levy an income tax and therefore to spend ever larger amounts of money. In the eyes of those nostalgic for a time when America could hide behind two oceans, the symbolic point of no return is the construction of the Pentagon, rushed to completion in 1943 and still the world’s largest office building.

  All life in Washington today derives ultimately from the capital’s own version of Rome’s annona—the continuous infusion not of grain and olive oil but of tax revenue and borrowed money. Instead of ships and barges there are banks, 10,000 of them designated for this purpose, which funnel the nation’s tax payments to the city. The keystroking civil servants at the federal Financial Management Service, who gather it all in electronically are Washington’s equivalent of the longshoremen at Ostia. The never-ending flow of revenue creates a broad level of affluence that has no real counterpart anywhere else in America. Federal employment may no longer be growing—the federal payroll in the Washington region is about 360,000—but this is in essence a convenient deceit, to make the size of government seem contained. An even larger number of people in the Washington area—about 400,000—work for private companies that are doing actual government work; like the baker Eurysaces, they’re living directly off the annona. H. Ross Perot, the anti-government maverick, made his fortune this way, supplying data systems to an expanding federal government. (He deserves a marble tomb in the shape of an old-fashioned computer punch card.) An additional quarter of a million people in the region feed off government directly or indirectly: the lawyers and lobbyists, the wonks and accountants, the reporters and caterers and limousine drivers and panegyrists, and all the aides and associates whose job it is to function as someone else’s brain. Every week a dozen or so pages of the Washington magazine National Journal detail the comings and goings of executives in categories like “image makers,” “think tanks,” “lobby shops,” “interest groups”—denizens of the smoked-glass office blocks on K Street, Washington’s own Street of the Dark Shops. Washington simply doesn’t look like the rest of America. It’s richer, better educated, more professional—number 1 in the country in median income, and in the percentage of college graduates, of women in the work force, and of two-earner families. Its professional classes are largely insulated from economic conditions in the rest of the country. As the analyst Joel Garreau has observed, “Only the residents of Washington, reaping the benefits of being at the center of the Imperium, fail to view this as bizarre.”

  Washingtonians see themselves as the masters of the oikumene. When Washington appears in novels these days, it’s the Washington that plays the Great Game of foreign affairs and espionage, not the Washington that deals with grubby domestic issues. It’s the Washington of Jack Ryan, not Mr. Smith. One analysis of Washington phone books found that listings beginning with the word “international” had increased two and a half times as fast in the second half of the twentieth century as those beginning with “national.” Although Washington does not have a marble omphalos, the president has his finger on something else that gets everyone’s attention: “the button,” the one that controls our nuclear arsenal. The president of the United States goes by the acronym POTUS, subliminally evoking potency (from potens, the Latin word for “powerful”). For years he was also “the leader of the free world.” Now that there is no longer an unfree world, at least officially, the president is simply “the most important man in the most important city in the world.” That turn of phrase attaches itself like a limpet to anything in sight. Ads for one Washington bank have described it as “the most important bank in the most important city in the world.” The general manager of Washington’s power-lunch restaurant The Palm has been called “the most powerful man at the most powerful restaurant in the most powerful city in the world.” And hold on: maybe it’s not just “the world.” As President Bill Clinton prepared for his inauguration in 1993, the Washington Post published a four-part series called “A Newcomer’s Guide to the Most Important City in the Universe.”

  The sacred boundary of the city of Rome was known as the pomerium. Washington’s pomerium is of course the Beltway, and “inside the Beltway” has long been conventional argot for the city’s special sense of self; “outside the Beltway” means, in effect, “the provinces,” “the hinterland.” Even time is held captive within Washington’s pomerium: the atomic master clock at the Naval Observatory, in the heart of the city, defines the meaning of “now” for cell phones and satellites, computers and cruise missiles. When Washington’s atomic clock makes an adjustment, even a billionth of a second, time obeys. “Once within the confines of the Capitol complex,” the late Meg Greenfield explained, “most people come to accept its standards, live by its rules, honor its imperatives.” They also “start referring to the rest of the country (without quite realizing what the term conveys) as ‘out there.’” Washington itself, though, is the outlier—an anomaly among American cities. It is not a great cultural capital, just as Rome wasn’t; it must import its artists and actors, its rhetoricians, its scholars, its thinkers. Architecturally it is without great distinction, using its past as a kind of spolia—erecting new buildings behind old façades (the practice is known as “façodomy”). It’s hard to avoid the atmosphere of conspicuous striving—in the slightly overdone formal invitations for every social event, in the leather-and-globe furnishings of offices and studies, in the advertisements for cosmetic surgery in high-end local magazines—and of muted cultural defensiveness. There always seems to be a moment at Washington gatherings when some mildly fortified Oxbridge expatriate begins muttering about how it falls to Britain “to play Athens to your Rome.” Washington’s wounded riposte would echo that of Julius Caesar in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra: “What! Rome produces no art! Is peace not an art? Is war not an art? Is government not an art? Is civilization not an art?”

  Washington’s life-support system is maintained not by one annona but by two. The second comes in the form of information—information about everything, public or proprietary, open-source or top-secret, a vast ingathering from all over America and the world to this one place, where it is stored, minced, parceled out, analyzed, palpated, twisted, packaged, shared, and deployed. (Or, in some cases, withheld or destroyed.) William Petty’s seventeenth-century Political Arithmetick, which used statistics to compare the economic and military resources of England with those of Holland and France, marked a revolution in government. Information has become the brick of the modern state, and the demand for it in Washington is impossible to satisfy. In 2002 the government launched a program known as Total Information Awareness, whose name sums up its aims, to be pursued through electronic and other means. Justified on national-security grounds, and run out of the Defense Department, the program encountered opposition because of privacy concerns, and was said to have been shut down. But many of its components continue under other names. As all roads once led to Rome, all computer trunk lines lead to Washington. In locations throughout the city—on Capitol Hill, in the White House, in the offices of defense contractors and political lawyers, there are secure redoubts known as “SCIF rooms”; the acronym, pronounced “skiff,” stands for “sensitive compartmentalized information facility.” These are special sites, protected against eavesdropping, where informatio
n of utmost gravity can be imparted to those select few with clearance to receive it. One participant in SCIF discussions says, “Those of us who’ve been in those rooms long to be in them again.”

  In the Ellipse just south of the White House stands a granite Zero Milestone, intended to be Washington’s version of Rome’s Golden Milestone, the symbolic central reference point from which all things are measured. Well, it isn’t our central reference point at all—no one has ever heard of it, though you could argue that modern America began on this very spot. This was the place from which Lieutenant Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1919, set out to lead the army’s “transcontinental motor convoy” across America. By the time Eisenhower reached San Francisco, sixty-two days later, he understood that America needed what Rome had possessed, a network of good public roads. When he became president, he created the interstate highway system. Tourists pay no attention to the Zero Milestone at all, and yet our own descent into hell started right there.

  Washington’s real focal point is provided by the Washington press corps, which provides the magnifying lens through which the capital is seen. Increasingly, the national and international news cycles are set by journalists and media executives inside the Beltway. If you count by the minute, as much as 30 percent of the nightly network news is datelined Washington, and most of that coverage is built around official sources. Of the 414 stories on Iraq broadcast on the three major networks from September of 2002 through February of 2003 (that is, during the run-up to the war), 380 were reported from the White House, the Pentagon, or the State Department—as opposed to, for instance, any European capitals, or Middle Eastern capitals, or the United Nations, or Iraq itself. The weekly Friday-evening and Sunday-morning political talk shows begin with a musical flourish that evokes imperial trumpets, and the words “From Washington . . .” The analysts offer what James Wolcott has called a “luxury-skybox view” of national affairs:

  Assurance fluffs up their every pronouncement, because they have permanent thrones . . . Not having to answer to angry constituents, they make everything sound easy. They dispatch imaginary troops overseas as if snapping their fingers for a taxi. Welfare cuts? No problem. Slash government payrolls? Make it so.

  “The week”—meaning the political week in Washington, and in essence meaning the president’s week—has long been the basic formal unit of journalistic time (has POTUS had a good week? a bad week?), although with the Internet and round-the-clock cable news, the half-life of particular stories keeps getting shorter and shorter. The ephemeral nature of “importance” in the capital is symbolized by the “Zeitgeist Checklist,” in the Washington Post, which rates the urgency of various issues—immigration, same-sex marriage, Iraq—as if they were items on a bestseller list (current rank, last week’s rank, weeks on list). It’s done skillfully, with practiced irony. But it works only because in this instance the ironic and the real overlap completely.

  In Rome at its height all social and political life was derived ultimately from the imperial court; and only through access to the court could those men of influence known as suffragatores control jobs and resources. In their day the names of suffragatores like Libanius and Themistus and Fronto were as expeditious as those of Vernon Jordan and Robert Barnett in our own. Money fuels the system, of course—no surprise there. In the days of the republic, when Rome still had functioning electoral elements, the inexorable creep of lobbying and vote-buying induced pathetic fits of “campaign-finance reform,” such as placing limits on the numbers of people a candidate could invite to banquets, on how much a candidate could spend on food and drink, and on where the banquets could be held. As Washington would discover to its own great relief, the only effect of such measures was to prompt the discovery of new loopholes.

  The degree to which the world inside the pomerium has become a hermetically sealed system is taken for granted. Jimmy Carter thought of Washington as an island (and was thrown off it). Eisenhower complained that everyone in Washington “has been too long away from home.” The occasional acknowledgment of how isolating Washington is changes nothing. Newsweek ran a cover story in 2005 called “Bush in the Bubble,” because the president and his advisers seemed to be living inside a membrane that kept certain viewpoints in and certain realities out. The description fits any recent administration, though this one more than most. Documents pertaining to Vice President Dick Cheney’s travel requirements became public in 2006, revealing that when he entered a new hotel room he wanted all the television sets already turned on and tuned in to the ideologically congenial Fox News. (With the hiring last year of the Fox News anchor Tony Snow as the White House spokesman, the circuit has been closed.) To keep the membrane in good repair, the vice president has required crowds behind rope lines, waiting to shake his hand, to cleanse themselves with antibacterial gel.

  Pliny the Elder describes the marvels of Rome’s drainage system, the sewers leading down from the seven hills into the central Cloaca Maxima, which another Roman observer once called “the receptacle of all the off-scourings of the city.” Washington now drains into the blogosphere, another engineering marvel. In the larger scheme of things, how important were the personnel changes at the White House last year, which removed Scott McClellan as press secretary and took away one of Karl Rove’s jobs? They came at a moment when the price of oil had reached $75 a barrel, Iran was pursuing plans to build a nuclear bomb, and the war in Iraq offered a prospect of perpetual carnage, but for a week the swirl of opinion in Washington blogs—scores of sites, hundreds of links, tens of thousands of words every day—centered mainly on those White House personnel changes, and who won and who lost, and how prescient (or asleep) the bloggers themselves had been. Archaeologists excavating the drains of the Colosseum have found the bones of exotic animals and the remains of stadium food. Archaeologists dredging the Washington blogosphere will discover dense strata of self-reference: “as I said this morning . . . ,” “as I predicted last week . . . ,” “I’ll say it again . . . ,” “to repeat . . .”

  Within any closed, insular system, the competitive pressure for status becomes intense. Edward Gibbon, in a typically tart moment, took note of Roman officialdom’s taste for fancy forms of address: “They contend with each other in the empty vanity of titles and surnames, and curiously select the most lofty and sonorous appellations . . . which may impress the ears of the vulgar with astonishment and respect.” Washington titles do not approach the grandeur sought by North Korea’s Kim Jong Il (“Saint of All Saints,” “Lodestar of the Twenty-first Century”). But consider this: during the Kennedy administration only twenty-nine people held the coveted title of “assistant,” “deputy assistant,” or “special assistant” to the president; by the time Bill Clinton left office, there were 141 such people. Unabashedly ambitious (Cicero maintained that the quest for gloria explained everything), the Romans spelled out their achievements with painstaking care in autobiographical commentarii when alive, and in detailed elogia by allies when dead; the self-serving, score-settling “Washington memoir” has a long pedigree. In his letters you can watch Cicero hire buyers and decorators to make his villa outside Rome into a statement of good taste and great influence. He would have been an avid consumer of the American capital’s glossy shelter and real-estate magazines. (“Its spectacular glass and columned façade speaks of power and professionalism,” says one ad for Washington office space.) The Washington world of public-relations “handlers” and of “strategic communications” had a counterpart in Rome, where applause in the law courts could be bought and sold at standard rates. When a Roman was awarded an official triumph through the streets of the capital—the pinnacle of public achievement—painted renderings of his deeds were carried along in procession: a mobile version of that Washington fixture, the “I love me” wall, with its photographs of the triumphator gripping hands with the mighty. The quintessential Washington text may in fact be a Roman one, Cato the Elder’s self-promotional speech titled “On His Own Virtues.”

 
; The omphalos syndrome is not just a curiosity—it leads to isolation and a view of yourself and the world that can be sharply at odds with the true state of affairs. Rome actually had more insulation against the consequences than Washington does. Roman emperors traveled continually, whether to wage wars or just to see the empire for themselves; they could be absent from Rome for years at a time. Moreover, for all his power, a Roman emperor could be an oddly passive figure. In his magisterial study of how Roman emperors did their jobs, the historian Fergus Millar describes what might be called an “in-box imperium.” The majority of an emperor’s time was spent simply considering petitions and then rendering decisions—often in person, with supplicants from all over the empire standing before him to state their business. His time was not spent dreaming up social programs, defending civil rights, or reinventing government; any talk of pressing toward a New Frontier would have been meant literally—adding territory. Finally, the empire’s far-flung parts were run by capable proconsuls of high stature, their autonomy enhanced by great distance and poor communications. The Roman mindset—center of the world!—might be a palpable reality, but in practice the nature of government put limits on its scope.

  In Washington it’s exactly the opposite: the nature of American government amplifies the mindset of the capital. A president is deemed a failure if he is not pushing an activist agenda. He is therefore wary of being seen as “detached,” wants to be seen as “hands-on.” The president spends most of his time in the capital, and even on his many short trips he remains largely isolated from ordinary people. The machinery of government centered on Washington—hundreds of agencies, millions of workers—had no counterpart in Rome. The machinery is there to be used, and a president has access to all of it. Modern communications ensure that no job is beyond potential presidential supervision, even when decentralization and autonomy might be all to the good. Lyndon Johnson personally selected bombing targets in Vietnam. The commanders of the failed military rescue mission in Iran, in 1980, had to check with Jimmy Carter’s White House by radio every step of the way. With its vast political databases a modern White House can tailor specific messages to individual households everywhere, as easily as VISA or Comcast can, reflecting a Washington presumption that “out there” is subject to manipulation from the center.