To Pay or Not to Pay Taxes
• October 24, 2013

I’m a deadbeat.

Eight years ago, I purchased a two-year old condo in a beautifully manicured gated community with tennis and volleyball courts, swimming pools, clubhouse and gym, and covered parking in Florida across the street from a major league baseball training camp.

A bank offered me one of those ridiculous nothing-down, interest-only loans. I declined, put 20 percent down, and made regular payments. Three years later, Florida real estate crashed, and dragged my condo with it. Two-thirds of its value vanished. It was so far underwater that it could take decades to recover. My bank went broke, the next bank went broke, and the third bank sold my loan to a fourth bank working for Fannie Mae. The banks wouldn’t talk to me, so I couldn’t sell the condo without paying more money in a market gone sour that was not my fault.

Realtors, lawyers, and bankers all gave me the same advice: Default and do a short sale. That took 18 months. During that time I collected $20,000 rent. At closing, I offered it to Fannie Mae, but Fannie Mae told me to keep the money since any payment would cancel the sale.

At the end of the year, it sent IRS Form 1099 on which I had to pay tax. It was the wrong amount – a lot higher and a nice round number. Fannie Mae said if I could prove how much I really owed, it would replace the form.

I knew that defaulting would destroy my personal credit. (Before doing this, I talked with my bank to make sure it wouldn’t hurt my business.) Now, over two years later, I still can’t get a new credit card even though my income is good, my house has no mortgage, my credit cards are paid in full, and I have some savings. Lenders simply don’t trust me.

Last week, most Republicans voted for the U.S. to default on its debt ceiling to prove, somehow, that we are serious about out budget deficits. When countries such as Spain, Russia, and Greece and cities like Detroit defaulted, interest rates and unemployment rates skyrocketed to 25 percent. They still face years of severe financial problems.

The debt ceiling a quirk of history. Before 1917, Congress had to approve all specific types of borrowings. In 1917, the first debt ceiling law was designed to allow the Treasury to issue the types of debt necessary to finance World War I. After Congress passed Budget Control Act in 1974, the debt ceiling was raised simultaneously as Congress passed appropriation bills.

In 1995, after the federal government shutdown, Congress separated the spending authorization process from the debt ceiling. Since then, Congress passed trillions of dollars on spending bills without providing the money to pay those bills.

No other nation has a U.S.-style debt ceiling. No other nation approves spending without making the money available. No other nation is that insane.

My strategic and intentional default did not prove to my creditors that I was a tough negotiator or that I was serious about dealing with my debt. It proved that they don’t trust me, won’t lend me money, and charge extra. It proved that a deadbeat is a deadbeat.

Shutdown Losers? The American People
• October 23, 2013

The great and partial government shutdown of 2013 is still over.

It seems that a rather large majority of the American people blame the GOP, in general—and the Tea Party, in particular—for what happened. This is the same American people whom Republican Senator Ted Cruz, the gadfly and patron saint of the get-rid-of-Obamacare movement at all costs who convinced Tea Party diehards in the house that this was a smart move, professed to be looking out for.

As an unsuccessful for a city council seat once said in response to finishing last in a multiple-candidate race: “The people have spoken—the bastards.”

Actually, the people are the smart ones in this shutdown that should never have happened. They are also the victims, a fact that still seems not to have gotten through the heads of people like Cruz, and Misters Boehner, Lee, Issa and their ilk. After 24 billion in lost moneys to the United States Government and U.S. taxpayers, after thousands of government job and man hours and paychecks lost for almost a month and a near-default avoided only at the last moment, it was the rest of the country that lost. And isn’t it strange that the guy who couldn’t muster a quorum or wouldn’t call a vote actually had 88 Republicans vote for the deal—a punt to January—faster than you could say let’s get out of town.

“We fought the good fight and we lost,” said a resigned—just a mood, not a fact—House Speaker John Boehner. Wrong, Mr. Speaker. You lost, but so did the American people and it was not a good fight. It was stupid, wrongheaded, irresponsible and reckless fight, and in terms of Mr. Cruz, cynical. This was the guy who kept telling everybody that the polls weren’t harming the GOP, that the fight was winnable, and, standing in front of World War II veterans being used as a photo op at the WWII Memorial, wondered out loud who could do such a thing as keep the vets from seeing the memorial. Why you could, Mr. Cruz. Cruz was unrepentant in the end and insisted that he would “do anything necessary to get rid of Obamacare.”

Everybody else, including many angry veteran Republicans in the House and the Senate, were angry at the backlash, at the fruitless stratagem which may have, if not fatally, certainly seriously hurt the GOP’s politically. But then this was never more about anything else but politics. I heard a cabdriver hesitantly tell me in response to the shutdown, which hurt cab drivers in their pockets, like everyone else in this city, that it seems strange to foreigners that America still insists on telling other countries how to run their affairs when they can’t seem to be able to run their own. The politics of dysfunction and paralysis seems pretty obvious to everyone.

With Obamacare seemingly about to implode under the burden of—get this, too many people unable to get on the website—it seems likely the GOP will now settle for calling for hearings with the intent of permanently downsizing Kathleen Sibelius, head of the Department of Health and Human Services, at least for now. Most people think the GOP could not possibly push for another shutdown scenario.
Don’t count on it. January next is coming fast. Do your Christmas shopping now.

Jack Evans Report: Enjoy D.C. in the Fall
•

The fall has arrived, along with the change of seasons that really defines the Washington region. The beauty of this area is that we really do have four distinct seasons to enjoy.

Lots of fun fall events are underway in our community. On Oct. 29, I will have the opportunity to serve as the Grand Marshall of the 25th Annual High Heel Race near Dupont Circle. The neighborhood holds a special place in my heart, as it was my first home in the District. For those unfamiliar with the event, it involves thousands of spectators gathering on 17th Street, north of P Street, the Tuesday before Halloween to watch hundreds of costumed revelers race down the street in their high heels.

The next day, Oct. 30, the Rose Park farmers’ market is open for its last day of the season. Luckily for the residents of Ward 2, several of our other neighborhood farmers’ markets continue through the fall, such as Foggy Bottom, Dupont Circle and Penn Quarter.

This leads us to our next big holiday, Halloween, which also happens to be my birthday. The Metropolitan Police Department again did extensive planning for the crowds associated with Halloween to ensure a safe celebration throughout the District. I will once again be a “wrangler,” helping at the “Little Goblins Parade” on Oct. 26. This family-friendly parade involves a number of “little goblins” marching from Stead Park in Dupont Circle, past Whole Foods, TD Bank and Logan Hardware to Logan Circle. Spectators are welcome.

I hope you are enjoying this fall as much as I am, and I encourage you to join one of the many great community events still ahead. Hope to see you there!

50 Years On: Jack & Jackie In Our Lives
• October 10, 2013

Those of us who were alive on that day all remember where we were and how we felt when we got the news that day. Oh, G od. We may not remember exactly all of the details, who was with us, and exactly what we were doing or what we said, or even remember entirely the person who we were.

It was, after all, 50 years ago on November 22, 1963, in Dallas that President John F. Kennedy was shot by a lone assassin named Lee Harvey Oswald, while riding in a motorcade with his wife and John Connolly, the Governor of Texas, and his wife. That was half a century ago, the better part of a life ago, if you remember then and when. Time stopped for Americans that day, and, headed one way into history, diverged on another road. We lost a 46-year-old president who was admired probably beyond reason by millions, because, like another leader whose soaring rhetoric on the National Mall that summer roared all the way to the White House, he had the ability to inspire us to dream. He too, died at an assassin’s hand.

Beyond all that and anything else, the great loss that this country—beyond the whole Kennedy saga, the historical facts of the matter—the greatest loss we suffered as Americans was the source of inspiration, that voice and source of energy, action and vision. What we were left with was an ongoing drama, a legend, the remnants of a family that would continue to engage us and fascinate us even now and especially now.

A 50th anniversary of an event, even one as shocking and tragic as the assassination of a president, amounts to a resurrection, the old story told anew, and remembered by those who can remember it and we tell these stories, these days, through personal memory, through photographs, through musty old newspaper headlines, books and words, videos and flickering images from that day and the mournful afterward days, as well as through mediums and methods that did not exist when John F. Kennedy lived and died.

We prepare to remember that day—which resonates in especially poignant fashion in Georgetown—here, as we always do with speeches, talks, symposiums, the marketing of the cottage industry that is Kennedy books, Kennedy stories, Kennedy histories, Kennedy memorabilia. Fifty years is a long time, but our fascination with the life and death of JFK at this time is not a matter grief or of not getting over it. I suspect the need to remember is spurred not by grief and sorrow, but by history—our own, and that of the day it happened.

We mourn the passing of the president, to be sure, and the flickering of that flame in Arlington Cemetery, which we cannot today visit because of this miasma of the government shutdown, but we also with resignation recognized all that has happened since, the change train that’s rushed through and altered us all as persons and citizens.

John F. Kennedy is, of course, remembered vividly here in Georgeotown by surviving Georgetowners,, he lived and breathed, rented and courted and fathered and familied among us, sometimes looking impossibly young and dashing, like a vision of a long (and then lost) future. He lived in an apartment at 1528 31st Street as a bachelor congressman from Massachusetts, then lived for a time with his sister Eunice a few blocks down the street. After winning his senate seat in 1952, he moved into an apartment at 3260 N St., NW, for two years. He was living at 3271 P St., NW, when he proposed to Jackie, whom he had met at a friend’s house in Georgetown. The couple’s first house was at 3321 Dent Place, NW, where they lived in 1954. They moved to 2808 P St., NW, in 1957 and then to 3307 N St., NW, the couple’s last residence in Georgetown. He was still a Georgetowner when he ran for president, and his son John Jr. was born at Georgetown University Hospital.

Looked at through the prism of his residential moves in Georgetown, it’s fair to say that Kennedy lived his manly youth here, in the kind of perpetual tree-shaded sunlight so characteristic of Georgetown. He lived among his peers, his family, within sight and sound of the spires—buildings and academic intellect—of Georgetown University, of Holy Trinty Church, as part of a high-powered community full of men and women of achievement, wealth and style. The Georgetowner was here too, chronicling much of the comings and goings under founder and owner Ami Stewart.

Georgetown was different then, we are generations removed from the Kennedys in Georgetown, and most of those high-profile leaders are long gone, along with many members—the brothers, daughters and sons, grandparent, Robert and Ted, John John and Rose and Joe—of the Kennedy family.

We wrote often about the Kennedys, and in the aftermath of the assassination we tried to capture the changing, and elusive legend, watched it change over time. It became something of a tradition and part of our November journalistic life.

But now, because half a century is 50 years and a large part of a life, it is time to reflect in more detail. We have a wealth of tools to look back with—books and histories too numerous to count from those rushed and labored over in the immediate aftermath— Arthur Schlesinger’s “A Thousand Days,” and William Manchester’s still readable account of “The Death of a President” spring immediately to mind—and books of photographs and exhibitions, and films—“Parkland” a new film that recounts the assassination day is out now, but there’s always the rabbit hole of Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” a conspiracy movie to end all conspiracy movies—and memories and life and times. We had our friend Pierre Salinger, JFK’s much put-upon press secretary writing for us in the late 1990s until 2002.

For now, though here in Washington, D.C., where JFK’s funeral and memorialization and institutionalization of Camelot are vivid memories, we can remember at the Newseum, which will be holding a JFK Remembrance Day Nov. 22. The Newseum is showing numerous films, and holding numerous activities, including two ongoing exhibitions. There’s “Three Shots Were Fired,” a rich and detailed exhibition full of artifacts—including among many the Bell & Howell 8 mm movie camera, used by Abraham Zapruder which captured the killing.

“Creating Camelot” is an exhibition of “The Kennedy Photography of Jacques Lowe,” with photographs of images of the Kennedys and their children, Caroline and John. Lowe was the family’s personal photographer.

You can find a more wide-ranging view in “Capturing Camelot,” a book of photographs by the late Look Magazine photographer Stanley Tretick, with moving text by Georgetowner and best-selling author Kitty Kelley and photographs by Tetrick of the Kennedys that appear as startling and fresh as the sounds you might have heard at a Kennedy family breakfast or touch football game.

No doubt there will be an onslaught of memories, of pictures and musings about that day. I remember myself then, sort of, a young private first class in the United States Army in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, sitting in a group of chairs around a black-and-white television set that day, and later on a Sunday, watching Lee Harvey Oswald murdered by Jack Ruby. We had never seen or felt or experienced anything remotely like that and we wept, and then were stunned into silence and later, the salute, the widow, the old Frenchman, President Charles de Gaulle, the thunder and drums and the coffin and the horse.

He still inspires us today, I think, and seems in pictures, still very alive. But it was 50 years ago. The history—the kind that tortures us madly today in our daily lives amid a government shutdown and the kind that happened then—lives on and perhaps it will echo stronger in times notable for the absence of reasonable, pragmatic and inspiring men. [gallery ids="101486,152003" nav="thumbs"]

ObamaCare vs. Affordable Care Act
•

Informal polls by newspapers and comedians and formal polls by Fox and CNN indicate that more people prefer the Affordable Care Act than Obamacare.

The Affordable Care Act contains a number of provisions that most people agree with:
(1) Children can stay on their parents’ healthcare plan until age 26.
(2) Insurance should be available to everyone without regard to preexisting conditions.
(3) Health insurance should follow people and not be cancelled if they leave their job.
(4) Insurance companies should be required to pay out most (85 percent) of the premiums they receive in benefits. (By comparison, the federal government pays out 97 percent even though most people believe private insurance companies are more efficient.)
(5) Most people believe it’s unfair that seniorsmust pay 100 percent of their drug costs above $2,700 up to over $6,000.
(6) Most people believe that access to preventative care will lower future healthcare costs.
(7) Most people believe that small businesses should get tax breaks for providing healthcare to their employees.

The Affordable Care Act does all that. So does Obamacare. They are the same law. Because a slice of voters hate President Obama, the Affordable Care Act, a Republican idea, has become the symbol of all that is wrong with government.

The day before Obamacare opened last week, various opponents on Fox News said:

“Pray we don’t get sick.”

“My mother can’t get her meds anymore.”

“My doctor had to close his practice.”

“Obamacare is the largest government program since World War II.” (Not close. Medicare Part D in 2006 – meds for those over 65 – cost more.”)

And that’s before Obamacare even started.

Almost 18 percent of every dollar spent in the United States is for healthcare. Someone – businesses, people, or the government– must pay for it. If businesses are saddled with healthcare costs, their products cost more and become less competitive in global markets. Few people can afford 18 percent of their income for healthcare; under Obamacare, the maximum is 9.5 percent. If government pays for healthcare, tax increases bring the wrath of the voter.

By covering the military and veterans, the poor, and the elderly, government pays close to half the national healthcare bill, but tens of millions of Americans aren’t in those categories and don’t have employer healthcare. Obamacare is for them.

Fifty years ago, Republicans objected to Medicare, health insurance for those over 65. Not so today despite the 2.9 percent wage tax that pays part – though not enough – of the cost. They don’t want to risk the wrath of 55 million voters who receive Medicare.
Here’s the real problem. If Obamacare works, that’s a lot of votes, so Republicans decided to shut down the government rather than provide healthcare to 30 million lower income Americans under age 65. Sen. Cruz (R-TX) was wrong to compare Obamacare to “Green Eggs and Ham.” Every parent knows that Dr. Seuss was saying, “Try it; you’ll like it.”

The political process is teaching people to hate government and to hate government assisted healthcare unless, of course, it’s their healthcare. Medicare is good government healthcare. Obamacare is bad government healthcare.

It’s all in the name.

Letter to the EditorOctober 9, 2013
•

I received a letter from Jack Evans earlier this week asking for contributions to his quixotic campaign for mayor. In his letter, Mr. Evans states that it is his ?intention to redevelop the Whitehurst Freeway so that the Waterfront and K Street can be as vibrant as M Street.? His choice of the words ?redevelop? and ?vibrant? caught my attention. It is obvious that his real interest is in tearing down the Whitehurst Freeway. Like Captain Ahab, Evans has made the demolition of the Whitehurst Freeway his own Moby Dick.
Much like the feigned shock expressed by Captain Renaud in Casablanca when he discovered that gambling was occurring in Rick?s Caf?, I was as equally shocked when a $500,000 study commissioned by Evans recommended the demolition of the Whitehurst Freeway despite strong opposition from local community groups. Evans himself admitted that ?no one knows what will happen to the traffic? were the Whitehurst to be removed.

It took more than 30 years to build the Georgetown Waterfront Park, which is one of this city?s jewels. Now Mr. Evans would like to ?redevelop? K Street so that the approximately 45,000 cars a day that use the Whitehurst Freeway will make K Street as congested, noisy, polluted, and ?vibrant? as M Street.

Great idea.

-Charles Pinck

A Terror-filled Week, Saved by Life’s Little Things
• September 25, 2013

Were it not for last Monday, the week that just passed from Sunday to yesterday, would have been newsy enough, and even in its cultural and we-are-New-York and world-class way, a pleasant and rich harbinger of a fall to be enjoyed.

On Monday last week, the thorn of Syria was still in the news, and there was turmoil in that region as always. During that week, the House of Representatives passed its own version of a budget bill which, among other things, would cause huge cuts in the Food Stamp program and was hitched to a measure that would either defund Obamacare or lay the ground work defunding it, a prospect that could cause a government shutdown. Locally, the D.C. Council could not muster enough votes to override Mayor Vincent Gray’s veto of its Living Wage bill, a bill some thought was aimed squarely at the powers that be at Walmart, which had initiated plans for several of its low-wage, low-prices super stores in the District of Columbia. On the same day of that vote, Ward 8 Councilman Marion Barry—once the Mayor of Washington, D.C., who was once called mayor-for-life routinely—was censured (for the second time in three years) by the council for taking money from contractors, which he had already admitted. They also stripped him of his only committee chairmanship.

These things alone were big news—an ongoing foreign policy crisis in the Middle East, actions by Congress that threatened a government shutdown amid the usual partisan blame game and paralysis, major political and policy issues in Council actions. But this was Monday’s week and none of it, not even in the midst of gala season, the floundering Redskins and triumphant-sad plight of our baseball team or the thriving panda much mattered.

On Monday, a lone gunman made his way into the Washington Navy Yard and Building 197, which housed the Naval Sea Systems Command, and shot and killed 12 employees and workers there in a spree that ended with his own death at the hands of police. His name was Aaron Alexis, an apparently mentally disturbed man who only recently called police in Rhode Island to tell them that he was hearing voices, a former member of the Navy Reserve, with a checkered, but apparently not alarming enough, past of gun incidents and reported incidents with the law that stopped just short of being criminal.

Alexis and his killing spree blotted out the media sun Monday and for a good part of the rest of the week here. He brought “This Town,” back to the status of “Our Town”, in the sense that everybody was consumed, shocked, floored, and eaten up by the news, as the District of Columbia joined other cities and places like Aurora, Newtown, Virginia Tech and the list-goes-on-places in being overwhelmed by the senseless and the random, humanity’s version of nature’s disasters.

“Rampage at the Navy Yard” was the big Washington Post headline across the top beneath the familiar mast-head with a bone sharp photograph of a police officer with short-cropped to the skin hair with a fierce expression on his face, holding a gun that looked like it could kill dozens in seconds. The rest of the page was filled with categories: the victims, the suspect, the scene , a picture of the suspect staring into a camera, a map of the Navy Yard, a time line, and various columns and stories on the inside, including one that asked “How Much is Enough?” It suggested that maybe these shootings were the ones that would lead to better gun laws.

As to that, fat chance. Only Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and a few other officials raised the question, and even President Barack Obama, in his eulogy for the victims on Sunday, worried that these shootings, like others had become “the new normal.”
“Checks failed to flag gunman’s past,” was the second day across the front page, underneath a list of the names of the victims, which we can repeat here, lest we forget so soon or sooner:

Michael Arnold, 59; Martin Bodrog, 54; Arthur Daniels, 51; Sylvia Frasier, 53; Kathleen Gaarde, 62; John Roger Johnson, 73; Mary Frances DeLorenzo Knight, 51; Frank Kohler, 50; Vishnu Pandit, 61; Kenneth Bernard Proctor, 46; Gerald Read, 58; Richard Michael Ridgell, 52.

The week was dotted with videos from funerals, people in line at churches, memorials, memories told like stories. And yet, as noted elsewhere, including by the president in his eulogy, more, and, arguably worse horrors awaited during the week: shootings at a basketball court in Chicago— the kind of gang violence that is a major plague in Chicago and which continued through the weekend —a murderous assault on the Westgate Premier Shopping Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, by members of al-Shabab, a terrorist group associated with al Qaida, in which nearly 70 shoppers were killed and in Peshawar, Pakistan, the All Saints Church was hit by suicide bombers, killing more than 80, the single worst-ever attack on Christians in Pakistan.

In his eulogy at the navy yard, President Obama said he felt a “creeping resignation” in the country about gun violence, that it had become the new normal. “There is nothing normal about innocent men and women being gunned down where they work.”
But by Monday, while the world absorbed the news of the Navy Yard, Kenya or Chicago, other talk floated through the year, including the dread of going over the cliff, urged on by congressional Tea Party members, and the prospect of a government shutdown, a prospect that sent a rush of anxiety through this city as well as our town.

In times like these, you take a deeper interest in the visit of the President of Iran to the United Nations where he is scheduled to speak as is President Obama. You take hope from the ongoing ability of Pope Francis to surprise with his gentle, expansive vision, which includes chiding the church for its obsessive attention to gay marriage and abortion.

In these times, you take solace where you may—the way the sun lit up and made almost holy the colors of apples and peaches in brown boxes at the Dupont Sunday market, the sight of six or fawns and does on a visit to Olney, the modulated, almost musical voice of National Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey as she read from her poetry in a crowded tent, men, women and children, old and young, black and white, and all the rainbows, listened raptly at the National Book Festival. Even with a heavy rain storm, it was attended, according to reports, by some 200,000 people over two days — more than those who attended the Redskins’ or Nationals’ games this weekend.

Now, it is a new week, and the headlines are thankfully small, making room even for the status of that sorry race for Governor of Virginia.

BID Releases ‘State of Georgetown’ 2013
• September 12, 2013

Last week, Georgetown Business Improvement District released its first “State of Georgetown Report 2013.”

According to the BID, it is “a compilation of statistics and analysis about key features of the Georgetown economy: people and employment; office and retail activity; hospitality and tourism, and; transportation. The report will help inform decisions by the BID’s members, as well as brokers, potential investors and tenants and the District government. This inaugural edition shows that Georgetown remains D.C.’s premier retail and accommodation destination and continued to attract new and dynamic businesses that serve residents, tourists and visitors in 2012 and the first half of 2013.”

The following are key highlights about Georgetown from the BID’s 2013 report:
= Businesses in the 0.25 square mile Georgetown BID area support over 11,000 jobs; immediately adjacent to the BID, Georgetown University supports around 10,000 additional jobs on 0.16 square miles. This density of jobs is similar to areas near Dupont Circle, Shaw, and the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor.

= Within a three-mile radius of Wisconsin and M, a rapidly growing cohort of 25- to 34-year-olds now comprises 54,000 households with $3.6 billion of disposable income. Determining how to remain relevant to this powerful group of consumers will require thinking about a variety of topics: transportation preferences, retail trends, employment patterns and marketing strategies.

= Georgetown has 440 retailers, comprising more than two miles of store frontage; in 2012, 26 new retail businesses opened in the BID area, a net gain of nine from the previous year.

= Average office rents remain among the lowest of the regional submarkets at $40.93 per square foot; at the end of 2012, the average rent in Georgetown was 22.1 percent less than Downtown-East End.

= Georgetown hotels generate a disproportionate amount of revenues relative to other hotels in D.C., as they represent only 2.8 percent of D.C.’s total hotel rooms but generate 3.9 percent of D.C.’s total hotel revenues. In 2012, hotel revenues generated $8.8 million in hotel sales taxes.

“We are very excited to launch the very first ‘State of Georgetown.’ “ said Joe Sternlieb, CEO of the Georgetown BID. “With each subsequent, annual edition our knowledge of the commercial district will deepen, and our decisions can be increasingly well informed. This sort of data is extremely important for efforts like Georgetown 2028, our 15-year visioning process.”

Is It Forever . . . September 11th?
•

The photograph that the Georgetowner caught that afternoon from Halcyon House, looking south, doesn’t seem like much if you don’t know the context.

Something way off on fire, plumes of smoke, a distant shot. It was our cover in our Sept. 14, 2001, issue after it happened. (Sept. 14, by the way, is the birthday of our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” written by Georgetowner Francis Scott Key in 1814. That flag seen waving in the foreground is a Star-Spangled Banner flag, a version of which still flaps today from Francis Scott Key Park on M Street.)

Knowing, of course, what it was and what happened, makes and made that photograph a powerful reminder of that day, you can hear it happening in your head looking at it, the noise, the utter confusion, and we know exactly where each and every one of us where that day and we can roll it back on command as if we lived in a story.

We still have a stack of publications from that day and right thereafter: the Georgetowner cover(s), the Time cover with President Bush waving a flag on top of the pile of rubble at the tip of Manhattan where the Twin Towers used to stand, a Vanity Fair special edition cover, “One Week in September,” “Faces of Tragedy, Faces of Heroism,” “Fanfare for the American Spirit,” a Newsweek cover with the faces of three sturdy firemen on the cover, “America a Year Later,” a Dec. 31 Newsweek cover with the Twin Towers on fire as the number 11, a commemorative issue based in Shanksville, Pa., where the last hijacked plane crashed in another ball of fire.

We remember all of those things vividly and only glancingly remember that Newsweek is gone. Yet 12 years after September 11, 2001, we are changed.

We live in the world in large part created and formed by that day and its aftermath. The terrorist attack on the United States led to two costly wars that had major impacts on our economy—wars that President Barak Obama is retreating from even as he and we and the rest of the world muddle through a response to chemical warfare in Syria, a muddle that has a lot to do with the wars of the 9/11 aftermath.

We live in a changed world because of 9/11—there is such a thing as the Homeland Security Department, there is the discomfiture of traveling anywhere, including the United States. There is a ratcheting of spying hiding under the flag of national security, the extent of which is now secret no longer, with a odd result: while people are afraid, aware and even angry, there is precious little passion or outrage that raises to the surface. We have gotten used to the world we live in, which is full of high-tech toys of the kind that bright 12-year olds can penetrate. So, why not the nation’s super-intelligence agencies?

In this world, everybody spies on everybody, for economic gain, for political advantage, for guessing the next terrorist attack, the latest scheming in some basement in America, Yemen or France. Our names are out there, and so are our bank accounts, any friend named Ali, or a contribution to a mosque, or knowing that a Sufi and a Sunni and a Shiite are different branches of the same Islamic tree.

In the Middle East, the Arab spring is misunderstood by most Westerners, except that perhaps free elections are overrated as a springboard to democracy. We know that what is going on has its dangers and that the grandchildren and children of Osama bin Laden are among the participants and soldiers of the civil wars and revolutions and demonstrations all over the region.

What happened on Sept. 11, 2001, raised a wall many of us would like to lower again. We are either at war or awaiting the next war, wondering who is friend or foe. The president may have been—in his agonizingly slow approach—acting on principle and seemed surprised that when he said, “Follow me,” there was no one behind him on Syria. The GOP stalwarts seem to have trouble imagining any sort of future except one that is absent Obama and his health care plan. They to would like to go back to before 9/11, somewhere when morals and movies were black and white.

We cannot go back. The smoke is still in our nostrils, as it was for everyone who experienced World War II. One of us remembers, as a five-year-old living in Munich, watching American tanks come into the fallen city. One of us also remembers standing next to the White House on 9/11 and being told by a policeman that two planes had struck the World Trade Center, and one had hit the Pentagon and another was coming right here, perhaps.

It didn’t. But that smoke from that picture, that was the Pentagon.

It was 9/11.

‘Let Freedom Ring’: the Measure of the March on Washington
• August 22, 2013

Our whole city will be celebrating Aug. 28, when thousands are expected to converge on the National Mall to celebrate, remember and commemorate the 1963 March on Washington, the march that saw the leaders and participants in a rising civil rights movement come together nearly 300,000 strong to demand justice and jobs.

The march will also always be remembered for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, oratory that reached the mountaintop of measured, stirring rhetoric, a visionary epic dream of that our better angels would finally come to achieve equality for all in America.

The people who came to Washington were famed and courageous pioneers in the movement. They were labor leaders, they were workers and those without jobs. They were African-Americans–or Negroes as in “The Negro is still not free,” as declared by King. They were politicians, organizers, movie stars and singers. It might be remembered and even recreated in its spirit. As an event, it was one-of-a-kind, never to be seen or heard again.

If you weren’t there or if you won’t be here for the 50th anniversary celebrations, you could do worse than pick up “Let Freedom Ring: Stanley Tretick’s Iconic Images of the March on Washington,” written by Kitty Kelley, the Georgetown author known for her large-scale, controversial biographies of the likes of Nancy Reagan, Frank Sinatra, the Bushes, the Royal Family, Jackie Kennedy and Oprah Winfrey.

“Let Freedom Ring” is the second book Kelley has produced after she discovered a treasure drove cache of photographs in a trunk left by her friend Stanley Tretick, a noted photographer and photojournalist who covered the White House, politics, wars and the civil rights movement. She had already provided the prose and background for a book on Tretick’s iconic photographs of John F. Kennedy, many of which were done for Look Magazine and amounted to a chronicle of the Camelot years.

“Let Freedom Ring” is an entirely different book, although the structure and process is the same. It’s a kinetic look at the march, but also a chronicle of the civil rights movement and its leaders, more journalistic in nature, a kind of documentary that appears to be without style or guile. If you have that wish of having been at the march, this is as close as you can get, perhaps accompanied by YouTube clips of the speech, the gathering or the singing of Joan Baez.

“The government, the Kennedys were very much afraid that there would be real violence and demonstrations,” Kelley told us. “They had set a curfew. They were going to make sure that nothing like that happened. And when it didn’t happen, I think they got some very different notions about the march, about King and about the fight for civil right.”

“Stanley was right in there, chronicling the whole thing,” she said. “He had a front row seat, and he had a lot of empathy for the march. From that day, and I think the pictures show this, the movement picked up visibility all across the nation, and these pictures and others helped do that. This was about the power of people coming together, about non-violence.”

Images of violence–not of the civil rights participants and leaders–but their opponents throughout the south, including the infamous Bull Connors in Alabama and the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi had already had their effects in forcing the whole country to look at what was happening. The march, with its images of thousands singing, marching, swaying and listening to King’s gospel-like speech, added to the impetus.

These are not great pictures. They’re something better than that. There are thousands of images that exist of the march. Tretick’s photos have the look of news, of in the moment. They are faces caught up close. They show the multitudes carrying a message or rather hundreds of messages. Then, as now, it wasn’t just about justice, but: “We march for Jobs for all now!” and “We march for first class citizenship now!”

This is what you see in the images of “Let Freedom Ring”: men in suits, holding hands locked in unanimity, Roy Wilkins, Walter Reuters, religious leaders, priests and rabbis, members of the so-called Big Ten, including Whitney Young of the Urban League, authors like James Baldwin (“Go Tell It On The Mountain” and “Another Country”). The headline from the local Afro American is here: “We Shall Overcome! 200,000 Voices Will Be Heard.”

Some of the best shots are those of the thousands sitting by the Reflecting Pool, barefoot in the water, or mingling thickly on the steps leading up to the Lincoln Memorial.

The photos–and the text by Kelley, and the many verbatim speeches, including the King speech–appear both direct and art-free and all the more powerful for their modest qualities. They seem true, like the perfect music that accompanies a wedding, a solemn moment.

Reading, leafing through the book cause a kind of flashback to where one might never have been. Still, something stirs, you hear the raspy voice of Dylan, the crystal clear voice of Baez, the thousands singing ‘We Shall Overcome.”

The major civil rights legislative actions were yet to come, and King would live to see that, even if Kennedy did not.
The struggle in a way had begun for real at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Kitty Kelley, for ensuring that Tretick’s photographs would be seen in this powerful way, is to be commended. And we are all the better for that and plan to be at the anniversary events here next week.

So should you.