Town Topics

Jeff Malet • July 26, 2011

DC shadow Senator Michael Brown was one of three arrested in an act of civil disobedience, blocking traffic during a protest outside the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington DC on April 15. Brown joined a youth day Tax Protest targeting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) who has an office in the Hart Building. Reid and other top Democrats approved a spending deal with Republicans that put restrictions on the District’s ability to fund abortions providers with its own money to low-income women, and would institute a private school voucher program that several local leaders oppose. These were among the latest indignities foisted on DC residents already disgruntled about not having a vote in Congress. Many protestors were wearing t-shirts displaying the words “taxation without representation.” Participating in the protest were DC Vote, the educational and advocacy organization dedicated to securing full voting representation in Congress and full democracy for the residents of the District of Columbia. DC Mayor Vincent Gray, who had been arrested at a similar protest earlier in the week, spoke to the group.

Gary Tischler •

Legacy, like passion and professional, is an overused word today. Lives lived in full to the end let us see the real meaning of legacies—passion in action and professionalism as a matter of course and duty. Herewith, we celebrate the lives of three men who embodied those qualities.

Sidney Harman

Only last year, Sidney Harman, past ninety, bought the national news magazine Newsweek for a dollar, picking up its considerable debt. Harman, who loved news and newspapers and magazines, was thinking about how he could turn around the venerable and respected magazine in an age where publications of any sort are in decline and at risk.

This is a little like the story about the 100-year-old man who married a young girl and drew up plans for a nursery. Harman, as you may know from his history, was an optimist, a forward-looking-guy with a boundless curiosity about his fellow man.

In the course of a lifetime that was rich in achievement and experience, Harman, who passed away from complications from acute myeloid leukemia at the age of 92, April 12, managed to create a legacy of family and community, as an enterprising and empathic businessman and employer, and a philanthropic citizen with a keen love of culture which benefited and enriched everyone.

Hearing of the death of a 92-year-old man shouldn’t be a shock, but Harman’s death seemed like a surprise. The man exuded energy; he had a look-you-in-the-eye way about him and a pretty strong handshake. There wasn’t much he hadn’t done and there wasn’t much he didn’t know about, and if by chance he was in the dark, it’s certain that he would correct that situation.

Today’s billionaire tycoons might take note of the model Harman presented as a businessman and employer. His company, which specialized in sound systems, was famous for initiating quality of life programs for its employees.

Among many things, he was trustee on many boards, including policy institutes and symphony orchestras. He served as Undersecretary of Commerce under President Jimmy Carter, wrote books, golfed into his 90s, was a higher education leader and left a good chunk of his own money in a way that will outlive him far into the future.

The most visible legacy is Sidney Harman Hall, the downtown state-of-the-art theater, which houses Shakespeare Theatre Company productions, visiting performance arts institutions and the Washington Ballet at times.

“Sidney Harman enjoyed an extraordinary life, characterized by great passion for his wife, for the performing arts, for ideas and for life itself, said Michael Kahn, Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company. “All of us, privileged to know him, enjoyed our own lives more because of him.”

He loved music. He was the co-inventor of the high-fidelity stereo back in the 1950s. He loved the arts and he always looked for new challenges. He was married to Jane Harman, a Democratic Congresswoman from California. He is survived by his wife, six children and ten grandchildren.

Also surviving is his reputation as a modern Renaissance man, a historical description that moves far into the future. He was a man who lived a life in full.

David Broder

The Washington Post, the newspaper for which he worked most of life and won a Pulitzer Prize for, described him in its headline for his obituary and appreciation as the “Dean of Washington Press Corps.”

He was 81. He was a man passionate about politics, the subject he wrote about all of his life. He was a professional in the entirely true sense of the word. He made you proud to be a part of the profession he practiced just by reading his work, because he brought honor to it all of the time, with his judicious care for the truth, with a keen passion to get it right, with a curiosity that died only when he did.

Covering politics, being a part of it that way or any way, isn’t always considered a noble profession. Hackery lives here, as does the indelicate art of brown-nosing, affliction from the kind of pollen that fills the air in the spaces occupied by proximity to power, or worse, the desire for power. Broder more often than not ennobled the profession; he took it seriously enough not to let his biases get in the way of accuracy and completeness.

They say he loved politicians as types perhaps a bit too much, an experience that can be a little like being in love with the girl that you know will always have other boyfriends. He didn’t wear his heart too much on his sleeve, and he took little that politicians or elected officials said for granted. What got into his columns was the process, and he was astute in its observance, and what he got from it came from regular people, who talked to him about the issues they cared about, what mattered in their towns and workplaces. He got that right almost all of the time. The love was in going on the road to see campaigns in action. What got into his columns were such qualities as accurate information, hard-nosed intelligence and insights fed by years and every minute of his experience.

He got it right and gave his readers and his peers respect and the right stuff.

Few like Broder remain.

Sidney Lumet

No one every accused Sidney Lumet of being a fancy-pants artist. This prolific film director, who died at the age of 86, came to the movies by way of the theater and live television from “You Are There” to the estimable Playhouse 90. Faces and words, words and faces were the cornerstone of his work, not fancy, haunting camera work.

Maybe that’s why a good chunk of his movies are classics, along with the words and faces: Picture Peter Finch yelling out the window “I’m Not Going to Take It Anymore” in the classic and prophetic “Network.”

Picture Henry Fonda browbeating bigots Lee J Cobb and Ed Begley in the claustrophobic jury movie “Twelve Angry Men.”

Picture Al Pacino as “Serpico” and Treat Williams as “The Prince of the City,” two classic New York cop movies, and Paul Newman in his best-ever performance as the lawyer-as-drunk in ‘The Verdict.” (For the record, my favorite line is when Newman asked about his adversary James Mason. “Is he any good?” “Good?” says gruff Jack Warden. “He’s the f—–g prince of darkness.”)

He was a pro. He left a huge film legacy underwritten by a social conscience, an eye for urban landscapes and a love of the human species. “Every picture I did was an active, believable, passionate wish,” he said. “Every picture I wanted to do…I’m having a good time.” Plus he spent married time with remarkable women, like the actress Rita Gam, the socialite Gloria Vanderbilt, Lena Horne’s daughter Gail Jones and Mary Gimble, who was with him at the time of his death on April 9 from lymphoma.

Gary Tischler •

Every St. Patrick’s Day, I get nostalgic. Some part of me wants to hear an Irish rebel song, down a stiff Irish whiskey, get begorrah drunk in a place where there’s already two feet of beer on the floor and admire an Irish lass with green eyes and flaming hair.

It passes. There are, if my fading old eyes don’t deceive me, more Irish bars than ever ‘round about here, so I imagine that at least today there is a market for the wee bit of Gaelic sound. Many of the newer bars I’ve never heard of, but the old standby pubs still standing, like Sinatra and Elvis, make you breathe with the slowed down breath of memory.

Some of the newer ones certainly sound like old sod pubs—Castlebay Irish Pub in Annapolis, Flanagan’s Harp and Fiddle in Bethesda, O’Faolain’s Irish Pub in Sterling, Virginia, Ned Devine’s and Ned Kelly’s in Herndon, Virginia, O’Sullivan’s Irish Pub in Arlington, Old Brogue Irish Pub in Great Falls, Sine Irish Pub in Arlington, Slainte Irish Pub in Bethesda, the Auld Shabeen in Fairfax—even the Fado downtown with its myriad beers and Irish bric a brac, not to mention the legendary Murphy’s in Alexandria, and the rising Ri Ras where the hold music sessions.

But for my money—and it’s not a lot, I’m a writer after all—its places like Kelly’s Irish Times, the Four Provinces, (now Ireland’s Four Fields) the Dubliner, Nanny O’Brien’s, and the long-defunct Matt Kane’s and Ellen’s which are and were the real thing. And you can throw in Billy Martin’s Tavern in Georgetown, which has been around longer than anybody and anyone, serving up square and basic-good Irish food and spirits and conviviality as a matter of family tradition.

Of course, the heydays were probably during the 1970s and 1980s, when St. Patrick’s Day was celebrated a little bit like a hooligan’s holiday, with daylong, sometimes weekend-long celebrations. In those days, there was a steady and large supply of Irish bartenders to go with the Irish restaurants, not to mention Irish musicians who were splendid, played and sang reels and rebel songs and ballads that broke your heart, and got everybody in the spirit of things along with the spirits.

I suspect some of that atmosphere is missing now—I don’t see hundreds of hill staffers running around with “Kiss Me I’m Irish” pins for a whole day, although the funny looking big green hats remain ever popular.

St. Patrick’s Day was a day of wretched excess in those days, and, luckily and with good reason, I don’t remember much about them.

What I do remember is that this German writer loved most things Irish beyond reason. With my metabolism now rebellious of anything beyond a single glass of beer, I can look at this with measured focus, as opposed to through a glass darkly. I think it’s because friends I knew in Washington from the beginning were named Kelly and O’Brien and Murphy and McHugh and so on, and they were the types you could tell your worst secrets to, make the phone call in the middle of the middle of the night. They would take you in if you got kicked out of some other place for the night. They were the boon companions at the race track, the guy who’d spot you a bar bill and laughed at all of your jokes, except the Irish ones. I knew a few, let’s say, and here’s to Michael Kelly, and his brother Hugh, the publican and founder of Kelly’s Irish Times, the most democratic of Irish pubs in existence, if not the most elegant.

Kelly’s was a footstep or so away from The Dubliner, and was once a Hawaiian Luau Hut before Hugh Kelly bought it and once held a celebration in which patrons were encouraged to smash a plastic volcano rock to piece. The Dubliner—run by the estimable Danny Coleman—was also the best venue for some of the greatest Irish musicians around, notably Celtic Thunder and the Irish Tradition. That trio, which sometimes wandered into the Irish Times, filled the house like a rock band. They were Andy O’Brien, the lad the lassies dug, Billy McComiskey, a button accordionist of great gifts, and the vibrant Brendan Mulvihill, a fiddle player of Irish national championship quality, big of girth and afro-red hair, who could make a fiddle do anything—produce tears, sound like jazz, be bluesy and rangy, and tell musical stories as thick as novels. In the past he has been known to play at Nanny O’Brien’s on Connecticut Avenue, right across the street from the Uptown Theater and, lo and behold, another Irish pub, the Irish Four Fields.

But enough about pubs: that’s where all your friends are today if they have signs of life in them. The Irish connection runs deeper than a state of bold and wordy inebriation. I once had a discussion with another fine Irish person of note about the religious and philosophical symbolism of a certain scene from “Saturday Night Fever,” and it says a lot for Guinness and the Irish that this stuck in my mind.

The Irish love to talk, and when they’re not talking, they’re writing, composing, singing, putting on plays, making theater and persevering, in spite of anything, come famine or feuding. If you want to know the origin of St. Patrick’s Day and its consequences, check out Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” (or four hours in a bar with some very eloquent and poetic drunks), in which a cop or two make an appearance and one of the denizen’s says “Why didn’t St. Patrick drive all the snakes out of Ireland, and didn’t they swim across the Atlantic and become New York policemen?” or words to that effect.

I love the Irish words, probably more than the Irish do: both the great playwright of the void, Samuel Beckett, and novelist James Joyce, moved to Paris and wrote in French.

A whole new generation of Irish playwright’s have emerged, but Wilde, Synge, Behan, Shaw and all the rest still rise up onto our stage with words, wit and wonder (“An Ideal Husband” at the Shakespeare Theatre right now and “Penelope” at the Studio right now). And Solas Nua, the Irish theater group, is handing out free books today.

And it’s St. Patrick Day. If things should go amiss, remember a few things along the way: there may have been Bette Davis eyes, but there is Maureen O’Hara hair as well. And remember that famous Irish saying: “May you be in heaven a half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead.” And may you recall with some caution that famous scene in “Fort Apache” when the Irish 7th Cavalry First Sergeant, played by Victor McLaglen, is ordered to destroy a roomful of rotgut whiskey by Henry Fonda. “Lads,” he said, “let us pull together. We have a fearful task ahead of us.”

Indeed all of you do. It’s St. Patrick’s Day. Celebrate as the Irish might and god help you on the way.
[gallery ids="99197,103364" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

It will all be the same. Thousands upon thousands of visitors will jam Washington’s Tidal Basin to see a miraculously beautiful work of nature when the National Cherry Blossom Festival commences Saturday, March 26 and runs for three weekends, sixteen days.

They will show up for the opening ceremonies at the National Building Museum, and they will jam the hillsides near the Sylvan Theater on the National Mall for traditional and contemporary Japanese and American performance artists throughout the festival. They will go to the spectacular Cherry Blossom Parade, to the Japanese street festival, to the lantern walks at the Tidal Basin.

The thousands will watch as the blossoms from these trees, lining the Tidal Basin near the Mall and Memorials, linger among the symbols and icons of our own brief heritage and history, with the bliss of their blossom beauty elevating them to a keener iconic status.

It will be the same as always—white and pink blossoms, astonishing beauty and sights, thousands walking or gawking from inside their cars. Hundreds of events, restaurant specials, street music and performances, talks and dancing, the click of thousands of digital cameras.

It will be like that, and then again it won’t. It will be the same, but hardly so. If petals can weep, they will be moist this year without the help of dew or rain.

In the wake of the gigantic 9.0 earthquake and immensely destructive tsunami that hit northern Japan, and the subsequent – and still ongoing -nuclear reactor crisis in the devastated area, it might be necessary to take the word “festival” out of the Cherry Blossom Festival.

“Commemoration” might be better, for what has happened to Japan lies like haze over everything in the festival. There is a blanket of sorrow accompanying us all even as we move among the trees that are perhaps the most precisely apt symbol we have on hand.

Traditionally the festival, which commemorates a long-standing relationship between the United States and Japan, is a celebration of the basic friendship between the two nations, both commercially and economically powerful movers in the modern world. The festival commemorates two gifts to the United States of cherry tree transplants from Japan. The first grove arrived in 1912: a gift of 3,000 cherry trees from Tokyo Mayor Yukio Ozaiki to the city of Washington DC, formalized with a ceremony in which First Lady Helen Heron Taft and Viscountess Chinda, wife of the Japanese Ambassador, together planted the first two trees on the North Bank of the Tidal Basin in West Potomac Park. A second gift of trees came in the 1960s.

The Cherry Blossom Festival evolved over the years into a major tourist attraction that celebrated the early spring budding of the tree’s blossoms, and it is now a national event. And today and for some time to come, it is a sad one.

The Cherry Blossom tree, depending on what history and opinions you find, is much revered in Japan because of the short duration of the life of its blossoms. They create the kind of beauty that breaks your heart: the way a mother’s heart breaks on seeing her grown son in uniform, or a young boy’s heart breaks when he sees for the first time a truly beautiful girl who never looks at him.

Japanese culture, which includes the practice of Hanami or social gatherings like picnics for flower viewing, teaches that the cherry blossoms are even more beautiful because of their ephemeral lifespan , a lesson about the nature of life itself. If ever there was a need for the cherry blossom, it is now, because it teaches the same lessons of earthquakes and tsunamis—the uncertainty and brief duration of life. But the blossoms also symbolize renewal and rebirth and hope. If they are fleeting, they are so nonetheless a promise of peaceful and warm months to come.

Festival organizers have added a “Stand with Japan” event for March 24, at 6:30 p.m. at the Sylvan Theater. From there, attendees will walk to the Tidal Basin and reflect on the ongoing tragedy borne by the Japanese people. (Donations can also be made at that time.)

For over a week now, a book of condolences has stood open outside the Embassy of Japan. The latest reports place the number of deceased at 8,000, though the number of people that remain missing may raise that figure to roughly 18,000. Most buildings themselves actually withstood the earthquake itself —which broke all records for magnitude in Japan— fairly well, following the structural improvements made in the wake of the Kobe quake of the mid-nineties. Yet tsunami was devastating to coastal communities and the industrial centers of the Northeast. The Japanese economy has taken a huge hit. Nothing will be the same after this.

The Japanese people have suffered terribly, yet the survivors have shown an example of behavior and reaction to the world that others could only hope to emulate. Walking through the wreckage wrought by a tsunami that caused entire villages to simply disappear, scattering pieces of former homes for miles, the Japanese in the Sendai area, have proven to be proved to be incredibly stoic – not brittle and numb, as they have visibly grieved, but doing so without self-pity or hysteria. There were no reports of looting anywhere as there were in almost any other areas of the world where riots, political upheaval and natural disasters have struck in the past, including the United States.

In a matter of minutes, thousands died, disappeared, were swept away, lost everything they owned, saw their lives forever disappear in muck and mud and crumbling rock. Yet in this moment of devastation, the Japanese appeared to draw on their cultural traditions for remembered guidance. This is not necessarily a religious matter, but a question of codes of behavior, of honor and helping each other, of community and acceptance that life for humans, as for the cherry blossom, is brief.

The prime minister offered words of hope, and the Emperor himself went on national television: a public appearance that had not happened since the end of World War II. But it seemed to observers from thousands of miles away that the people themselves, full of an overwhelming sense of loss, were the ones who stood tall.

What changed all that was not so much Nature as the destruction of human artifacts: the instability set off at a collection of nuclear reactors in the Fukuskima prefecture. The burdens of the nuclear age resonate in Japan, the only country in the world ever to have suffered nuclear attacks. People began to evacuate, and then move far and further away, unable to trust the experts, the air, their food, their water, the sky itself. Uncertainty shook the Japanese people more than the earth did.

In the end, nature comes upon you wrathful and sudden, a wave of destruction that leaves the survivors lost, not knowing what happens next or when. So too is the Cherry Blossom dependent on the vagaries of wind, rain, the natural ways of the universe to last long enough to create a dazzling beauty that assuages us like clean, cold water in the desert. We are, in the midst of loss, astonished yet again.

This year as we walk among the blossoms, people will marvel. But the magnitude of what has happened will linger in the air like blossoms refusing to fall. As blogger/haiku poet John Tiong Chunghoo put it: “In the flurry of tsunami/death radio news/Cherry Blossoms Fall.”

Ari Post •

After a swift remodeling beginning in April of this year, innovative kitchen and bathroom designer Boffi has reopened their doors on M Street with brand new designs that seamlessly integrate their innovative blend of modern aesthetics with artisan tradition.

Upon walking into the newly designed store you are guided through the showrooms by the sleek, clean lines of the model, which direct you in and out of the spaces so naturally you might not realize you’re being persuaded. Along the way, your eyes stray from the smoothly beaten path, finding long expanses of custom countertops, shelving, wide-mouthed sinks (the daydreams of serious cooks), and luxurious modern bathtubs in haute blacks, whites, silvers, and browns.

Roberto Gavazzi, CEO of Boffi, delights in the idea of bringing Boffi’s signature style to Georgetown. Unlike other big cities, Washington – and specifically Georgetown – is filled with wonderfully antiquated, colonial homes; the perfect palette on which to bring out the dynamic designs Boffi creates. “It is what you see in the current trends,” says Gavazzi, “to mix things with very strong combinations of products coming from very different cultures, and from very different styles. Here, you see a raw wall of bricks close to a very clean and aggressive kitchen. In an old mansion here, it would really be a very nice contrast.”

However, the Boffi designs aren’t only for those with an eye for pushing the envelope of interior decoration. While the store offers kitchens that can be very aggressive and modern, there are also many ways to adjust their furniture to be warm and conservative.

“You can moderate the presentation in a way that is more acceptable to someone who wants something more reassuring,” says Gavazzi. “While when you are with somebody else who wants a more aggressive, ‘New York’ type of kitchen, you can go with a stainless steel solution, totally clean and simple. We have this possibility of really adapting our lines to the type of customer we are in front of.”

But at the end of the day, the store preserves the fact that their customers are buying an overall Boffi style. “We will never completely change the basic way of being that Boffi transmits,” says Gavazzi. Started in 1934 in Milan, Italy, the company has a long history being a high-end, trendsetting designer of comprehensive furniture packages, or modular system products, as they call them.

Buying a kitchen or bathroom from Boffi is not like purchasing other furniture. Buying a sofa, for instance, is quite simple. You keep it for a few years, and when you tire of it you get rid of it, get a new one. Buying an entire kitchen can be more complicated. You will most likely be stuck with the one you choose for the duration of your time in that house. So it’s important to get one that suits you.

That’s why Boffi works with the architects and designers to incorporate the kitchen into each individual space. The showrooms are there to expose the product in the best way, from warmer and more intimate, to modern, clean and aggressive.

“What we like to offer is a very international style for people who are from different places,” says Gavazzi. “We are quite an international company in general,” which nonetheless offers a universally Boffian way of looking at furniture and lifestyle.

At Boffi Georgetown’s grand opening on the evening of September 16th (though they had officially reopened back in August), Boffi’s premier art director Pierro Lissoni, who designed a huge percentage of the overall line, mingled with Georgetowners and delighted in the opportunity to bring his signature style to one of DC’s most cultured neighborhoods.
[gallery ids="99203,103440,103436,103434" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

Vincent Gray strode toward the microphone in front of the Washington Court Hotel Wednesday with a confident spring in his step, looking fresh and energetic.

“My God, he looks rested,” said one of the dozens of reporters, photographers, and television crewmembers who had gathered here around noon.

Amazingly, Gray looked, talked and acted sharp, like a man with eight hours of sleep under his belt. Which probably wasn’t so. He was giving his first press conference as the winner of the District of Columbia’s Democratic Primary over incumbent Adrian Fenty, getting a surprisingly solid six-point victory with 53% of the vote to Fenty’s 47%. The last count had Gray with 59,285 votes and Fenty with 50,850 votes.

Given that only four years ago Fenty swept every precinct and every ward en route to a stunning win over City Council Chairperson Linda Cropp, becoming the city’s youngest mayor in the short history of home rule, Gray’s victory, which wasn’t really nailed down until the wee hours of the morning, was an astounding and probably historic turn-around.

It was also a clear sign that Gray had been correct early in his campaign when he said that the city was never more divided. “I am humbled by the victory we won,” Gray said. “And I am thankful for all the people across the city that made this possible with their votes. But I realize that there were also many people who did not vote for me, and I want to reach out to them. I want to unite this city once again.

The victory was achieved – it’s safe to say – along racial and economic lines, with many black voters favoring Gray over Fenny. Fenty lost because many voters felt excluded from the changes that were occurring under Fenty, especially in school reform. It was a battle over style and voters apparently preferred Gray’s evident style of consensus-making, thoughtfulness and inclusion. Fenty had plenty of warning that this personality, style, and character issue was important to many people. First revealed in a Washington Pots poll in January, it was cited as the main cause for Gray’s double-digit lead in a Post poll several weeks ago.

“Now is the time to move forward,” Gray said at the press conference. “[Let] now be the time for the city to unite.”

Now was a time many reporters were prodding Gray to say what was coming next, which is to say that they found ways to ask the questions about the fate of the often-controversial school chancellor Michelle Rhee. During the campaign Gray was asked at every turn whether he would fire Rhee. He never did say. He wasn’t saying now either. “I put in a call to her,” he said. “We will be sitting down and talking. I haven’t heard back yet. I imagine she’s busy. She’s running our schools, after all.”

Other than announcing that there would be a transition team, Gray in fact would not deal with names and faces. “I’m not talking about personnel decisions right now,” he said. “There will be time enough for that. We are still facing serious problems right now, especially on budget matters. I’m still the Chairman of the City Council.”

He was asked who would head the transition team or who would be part of it. “It’s a process,” he said.

“Yes,” Tom Sherwood of NBC 4 said, “but will it move quickly?”

“I talked with Mayor Fenty today,” Gray said. “We had a great conversation. I know that he loves this city, and wants nothing but the best for the city. He assured he would do everything he could to help with the transition.”

Gray said he got no indication that Fenty might be considering a run in the general election as an independent. “I didn’t get any sense of that,” Gray said.

“I meant everything I said about transparency in my administration,” he said. “This is going to be an open government. I want people to feel empowered, not disenfranchised. My door will be open. And for the press, I’ll be having regular press conferences.”

“The onus is obviously on me now,” Gray said. “I expect to be held accountable.”
Winning the democratic primary meant that Gray is all but assured of winning the general election in November and will become Washington’s oldest elected mayor. Although, as was noted, he sure didn’t look it or act it.

Election night, in fact, was full of confusion and uncertainty until well past midnight. At the hotel where Gray held a gathering for his followers, a strange atmosphere prevailed early in the night, and lasted well until midnight. Nobody knew anything. For an event full of politicos and campaign workers, the silence was nerve-wracking. Nary a rumor or piece of gossip managed to surface. All people knew was that there were no results forthcoming from the Board of Elections, where a major case of the slows and computer glitches were occurring.

Fenty did not concede until, “…we have official results from the Board of Elections.” The delays from the Board of Elections were heavily criticized by followers of both candidates and frustrated news reporters from all media. Even the bloggers and internet world couldn’t come up with a single voting result.

Gray, it’s now clear, will also be joined by Kwame Brown, who fended off challenger Vincent Orange to win the Democratic Primary for the City Council Chairman position, Gray’s old job. “I look forward to working with Kwame, who ran a fine campaign, and with whom I’ve already had a great working relationship…” said Gray.

In the other city-wide election, Phil Mendelson at last overcame the great Michael D. Brown confusion, handily winning over the shadow senator, a late entry in the race whom polls showed was leading , mostly because voters confused him with Michael A. Brown, a current member of the city council who was not running.

Gary Tischler •

That small room in the National Portrait Gallery housing “One Life”, the series of exhibitions begun since the completed renovation of the Reynolds Center, may be one of the biggest rooms in the whole building. “One Life”, after all, attempts to squeeze into a small, square room a summation of an entire American life with a minimum of artifacts, paintings and photographs. Not an easy task when you’re dealing with the previous tenants.

There was Walt Whitman, the outsized poet of the outsized American experience; Thomas Paine, the inspiring, iconoclastic political pamphleteer of inspiration for the American revolution; there was most recently Elvis Presley, king of rock and roll, an entire American cultural invention unto himself.
There was Abraham Lincoln. No one sentence would suffice.

There was the first Katharine, the grand dame and Dame of American movies, Katharine Hepburn, or Katharine the Great.

And there is today the other Katharine, Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, who made the Post one of the truly great newspapers of the world in what may arguably have been the last golden age, the Indian summer of the newspaper business.

Probably no previous subject of the “One Life” series means quite so much to the current residents of this city as this one – even Lincoln or Elvis. Katharine Graham, as a prominent figure, as a publisher of a national newspaper, as a deeply powerful and influential national and international figure, rose to real prominence in 1963 when she became the publisher of the Washington Post after the shocking and tragic suicide of her husband Phil Graham. At sea in a role she never anticipated, even though she grew up in the world of the Post her father had bought in the 1930s, she learned quickly and adapted, overcame painful shyness, and in a unique partnership with Managing Editor Ben Bradlee, guided the paper in short order through the risky and courageous business of printing the Pentagon Papers (though the New York Times fell into the same category), exploding Watergate onto the front pages of a major newspaper, and afterwards, surviving an almost ruinous printers’ strike in the 1970s.

She was, as it turned out, tough.

That’s certainly the impression you get from the first photograph you see upon entering the exhibition – the famous, iconic, dramatic, almost forbidding black and white portrait taken by Richard Avedon in March of 1976.

She stares at the camera sternly, challengingly, even quizzically. Her arms are folded. Her mind appears made up about something. She has, for want of a better word, a certain gravitas there, earned honestly and with great difficulty in a world completely dominated by men, even in the ‘70s.

It’s not an entirely inviting image to an exhibition, but it takes care of summing up Graham as, by that time and certainly for the rest of her life, one of the most powerful women—people—in the world.

“It’s not something you could leave out,” says Curator Amy Henderson, who normally organizes exhibitions on popular culture icons like…say, the other Katharine, Katharine Hepburn. “The image
is iconic, and it shows that toughness, that courage which let her accomplish what she did. It’s a way in. But we wanted to do a lot more. We wanted to show a little bit of what made Katharine Graham the woman and person she became.”

The “We” Henderson refers to was a notable duo of consultants who knew Graham intimately. Pie Friendly, a researcher at the National Portrait Gallery, knew Graham socially through her husband
and father-in-law, journalist and writer Alfred Friendly Jr., and former Post Managing Editor Al Friendly, respectively. Liz Hylton, Graham’s personal assistant, provided access to photos and memorabilia and anecdotal material. “It was just us three ladies,” Henderson said. “The Washington Post and the Graham family were tremendously helpful.”

“We all knew each other,” Friendly said. “You would always cross paths through the paper, schools, parties and social occasions. I respected and admired her tremendously. She was a woman in a man’s world, truly. She was straight forward, honest. You cannot imagine what it must have been like for her, but she did more than persevere. She made the Post a great newspaper. It was just tremendous fun working on this, it really was. And mind you, she fired my father-in-law and replaced him with Ben Bradlee.”

Henderson was obviously limited in terms of space, so there’s a lot more that could have found its way into a larger exhibition. But what resides tells her story, fleshes her out, and portrays Graham
in full.

“It’s interesting going through these photographs—of which there were a lot,” Henderson said. “You get a sense of a woman, a girl, who was raised in a privileged world, was raised in her father’s newspaper business [working as a reporter]…who met and married a man she absolutely adored, and wanted nothing more than to be a wife, a mother, raise her children and do good deeds, and perhaps be a social leader. She never expected to be what she became. It required reinvention of the most difficult sort.”

When Henderson talks about Graham—whom she never met, she will tell you—certain words recur with regularity, as they do when you talk with Pie Friendly: “forthrightness, honesty, integrity, courage, resilience.” These are, of course, all qualities that elicit great admiration, without necessarily revealin a human being so much as a statue.

The pictures and artifacts, carefully selected by the trio of women, accomplish that job, even if the two videos (for the NPG’s Living History series by former director Mark Pachter) in which Graham talks about Watergate and the Pentagon Papers don’t entirely do so. There are many pictures, for instance, in which some form of the Graham sternness of the Avedon image are repeated: Graham with her editors, Graham at a meeting of the Associated Press National Board, Graham unsmiling in lots of photos.

But there are also a lot of portraits of Graham smiling, laughing with her head thrown back, and the smile and laugh show a woman transformed: a fun loving person in the moment. It’s a pretty dazzling smile she’s got there. And not one easy to acquire given the charismatic but self-absorbed nature of the dazzling Agnes Ernst Meyer, her mother, shown in a haunting photograph taken by no less a photographer than Edward Steichen. Her father, Eugene Meyer, while he encouraged and obviously loved his daughter, was rarely accessible and often distant. And there was the kinetic, hypnotic Phil Graham, who became publisher of the Post and absolutely swept Katharine away, until his instability began to overtake him.

What did she achieve? Take a look at the AP meeting portrait: a semi-circular made up entirely
of men who look somewhat like the cast of “Mad Men” in late middle age, minus cocktail
and cigarettes. And there is Graham, alone as a woman, but uncommonly self-assured. In her memoir, she wrote that she accepted life in a man’s world but then ended up leading a change in that world.

Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, and the Post’s growing reputation as a writer and reporter’s paper under Graham’s leadership, steered the paper into a stratosphere occupied by few publications.

Both the Pentagon Paper publication and, even more so Watergate, were dangerous times for the Post, but also thrilling and memorable times. In a way, the Post helped bring down a president, and the movie version of the Woodward-Bernstein saga “All The President’s Men” did not change that perception. Graham herself began to become an influential social lioness, and you can see her light up like a Christmas tree with Jacqueline Kennedy in New York, and at the black and white ball thrown by Truman Capote in her honor.

The infamous—therefore treasured—showdown with then-Attorney General John Mitchell, in which he blustered that Kate had gotten her tit in a wringer, resulted in a gift of a miniature wringer and small jeweled replicas of a wringer and a breast, which she wore proudly and with grand humor. They are among the artifacts on view, which also include the first hand-written page of her Pulitzer Prize-winning
memoir and the mask she wore to Truman Capote’s black and white ball.

The strike was difficult for Graham and in squashing the union she acquired, unfairly said a Post reporter, a reputation for ruthlessness. “Not so, not so,” said Robert Kaiser, who wrote the official story on the strike for the Post, “without any interference from her.”

“That was undeserved. She was the ideal publisher if you were a reporter.”

For most of us who were not Posties, the paper nevertheless was a daily presence in its headiest period, and Graham, for Georgetowners, living in her mansion, was an uncrowned queen. When she passed away, the funeral at the National Cathedral and subsequent wake at her home seemed like one last gathering for which she had called upon the world to come. And the world came.

The exhibition, which gets all the right things in that small room, seems particularly poignant in a time when the idea of great newspapers seems more memory, and a memory without a future at that. You feel almost glad that she’s not here to see the confusion and decline and predicted disappearance of newspapers in the 21st Century.

On the other hand, she might have found a way to prevent all that, to persevere. That Avedon picture, that look, those crossed arms seem to indicate that she just might have done it. [gallery ids="99247,104180,104159,104176,104172,104168,104164" nav="thumbs"]