Axis of Egos

Posted on July 4, 2008

When Walter answered his phone, he was genial. “Whatever you need,” he told me casually. Walter was a congressman from North Carolina; he later coined the term freedom fries, then became the first Republican to change his mind about Iraq. This tells you a thing or two about Walter. My job was to ask semi-probing questions. I was a wire reporter for the Fayetteville Observer-Times, stationed in Washington—I’d never even been to North Carolina. My editor told me what to write, I was little more than his apple-cheeked mercenary. Military, tobacco, and the occasional soft piece were the usual items on my agenda.

I tried to pick my subjects wisely—or as shrewdly as a twenty-three year old could. I’d been pushing to write a story about the fifteen-or so folks in the state named after senator Jesse Helms. Helms was a modern political giant, loved by legions, hated by other legions, but nonetheless an historical figure. I sat in Foreign Relations hearings where Helms, the Tar Heel state’s senior senator, unfurled meaty adjectives at times when he could not abide. “Aw, that’s just plum baloney,” he’d say in his smoky mountain drawl. He tooled the marble halls of power in a sturdy, black, motorized Lark, though the Washington press corp kept this hush-hush, like Roosevelt in his wheelchair. Yes, there were better stories to chase, but I was enamored with Senator No. I wanted to ask him probing questions about what he’d learned in his time in Washington, and what he hoped to do in his final years in office.

I filed numerous press requests while my editor laughed at me for trying. But I was determined to have supper with Jesse. It became my aim, my vision quest, my lonely crusade for historical journalism before moving onto baser assignments, of which there were always many. One morning, Ed said I was to interview the state’s congressional delegation about cum found on a blue dress. “See what Jesse has to say about that.”

Okay, so my boss was a prick. Lesson learned. Not that it salvaged my tilted fate. I was poised to spend long hours talking with congressmen about splooge. It was seminal fluid that brought me to Walter. Not mine, or his, but we had to have a serious talk about another man’s juice. I sat at my desk for almost an hour, wondering how I should tackle the subject. Instead of cum, I could call it semen. “Congressman, I’d like to ask you about semen. No sir, somebody else’s semen, but nonetheless very important semen. VIP sperm.”

“Whatever you need,” Walter said, and I knew exactly what Ed wanted: Quotes about man milk and make it snappy. I felt my tender youth swiftly passing, moments stripped out of my destiny: a summer afternoon riding motorcycles up the Khardong La, or making love to a French girl off the Rue de la Huchette. Instead, here I was, a Washington D.C. correspondent, gossiping about the President’s gizz with a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

I was disgusted, but mostly I was embarrassed. I was a reporter in the world’s deliberative capital, beacon of history’s first democracy. I was an American living in my national home. Yet, I often felt a strange sensation, a feeling that I was surveying Rome just before it burned. Washington had become a place where great ones came to be mediocre. It was defective to the point of being dangerous to us all.

But what could we do? What could we do other than pray we wouldn’t be crushed by its Axis of Egos?

Walter was waiting. It turned out no one had briefed him about the interview subject. I started and stopped, then tried again. I couldn’t keep a straight face. I finally said, “So what are your thoughts about the grand jury testimony?”

There was a long pause on Walter’s end, and I learned to always be very specific when talking juries with elected officials.

“Peckergate,” I muttered, hoping he would shoot me then. “The testimony… confirming the affair… the physical evidence… the dress…the um…semen?”

“Ah yes,” Walter said. “Lets see, how should I say this?” I waited while he thought it through. This wasn’t TV. There was no hurry. He then said thoughtfully, like he’d had his staff on the issue all morning, “I wouldn’t want to comment on an active grand jury investigation, but the allegations are serious when it comes to questions of honesty and character… How’s that?”

“Dynomite, Walter,” I said drowsily, adding it into my notes. All of this was plum baloney, as Helms liked to say. I wondered what Caesar had told the philosophers; I guessed he hadn’t told them much. Walter wished me a good evening. No lectures about media responsibility, or lamenting mankind’s perverse diversions, or fears for where this all would lead. Quite the opposite, really. When it came to talking about semen, many of the Republicans were giddy, although they’d tried to conceal their bliss with statements of deep disappointment. The Democrats either answered tersely or cowered to their constituents, repeating their faith in traditional values and strongly repudiating adultery. But none, not one, questioned the exercise. Good governance and journalism, it seemed, meant stories about splooge. This was their legacy as they were living it. I was only writing it down.

Except for Jesse Helms, who died today at 86. Helms had tired of slime, apparently. The Senate’s bad boy had become an elder statesman, working across the aisle, focusing more on policy than probity. To his dying day, he remained enigmatic. He significantly fueled the two party maelstrom which threatens today to consume our country, but he was voted the nicest man in the Senate by his peers. He was a vestige of the old south, a race baiter and an isolationist, who in latter years hung out with Bono and attended U2 concerts. (Hearing aid turned off.) I’m not sure what deeper truths this offers, maybe only that Helms was human; kind in some ways, cruel in others. I never got that interview with him—not about policy or Peckergate.

For the latter at least, I’m grateful.

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