There were two unpleasant surprises [about Washington]. One was the inertia of Congress, the length of time it takes to get a comp...licated piece of legislation through ... and the other was the irresponsibility of the press.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are always those who are willing to surrender local self-government and turn over their affairs to some national authority i...n exchange for a payment of money out of the Federal Treasury. Whenever they find some abuse needs correction in their neighborhood, instead of applying the remedy themselves they seek to have a tribunal sent on from Washington to discharge their duties for them, regardless of the fact that in accepting such supervision they are bartering away their freedom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... by and large, wife-changing and high office are not compatible. This inequity accounts for the many dull women in Washington a...nd is the cause of much smug complacency on the distaff side of political marriages.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Washington will ever be a city for extracurricular romance and undercover trysts, partly because of the high moral standards deman...ded of the politician by his constituency, and also because it is a town where women are more easily tolerated if they dabble with politicians rather than politics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
President Kennedy had a wholesome, widely discussed, and largely deserved reputation for his interest in women.... But no Presiden...t, however young and energetic, could possibly have gotten around to all the ladies in Washington, New York, and Hollywood who made claim to his affections after he died.... Such was the force of Jack Kennedy and the manner of his death that anyone associated with him, even the pretenders, assumed added glamour and interest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For the people in government, rather than the people who pester it, Washington is an early-rising, hard-working city. It is a popu...lar delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... anything so delightful as Washington I have never seen elsewhere. There were a mingled simplicity and grandeur, a mingled stat...e and quiet intimacy, a brilliancy of conversation--the proud prominence of intellect over material prosperity which does not exist in any other city of the Union.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... what a strange time it was! Who knew his neighbor? Who was a traitor and who a patriot? The hero of to-day was the suspected o...f to-morrow.... There were traitors in the most secret council-chambers. Generals, senators, and secretaries looked at each other with suspicious eyes.... It is a great wonder that the city of Washington was not betrayed, burned, destroyed a half-dozen times.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Look at the mother of Washington! She raised a boy that could not tell a lie--could not tell a lie! But he never had any chance. I...t might have been different if he had belonged to the Washington Newspaper Correspondents' ClubLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before... air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September.... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents--or at least their staffs--never stop making mischief.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »