There were no reporters in Lafayette Square, but there were signs of discontent scattered throughout the city. The first image I saw of our president – posted in the window of an apartment building on Wisconsin Avenue – showed him in the colors of the famous Obama campaign poster, the word “HOPE” replaced by the word “HATE.” A lamppost sign greeting Metro riders at Dupont Circle told them that if they worked for this White House they should resign. Perhaps the most eloquent and subtle rebuke of the current administration came at the graduation ceremony of the Washington International School when one of the student speakers, Eliza Pink, spoke of the three things her class of 2017 would be dedicated to: reason, empathy, and openness.
It's been a long week for obit writers: Denis Johnson, Greg Allman, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jim Bunning, Frank Deford. Hania and I went to hear Deford at the Miami Book Fair a number of years ago. After his panel she approached him - she would hear his radio commentaries on her drives to work in the morning - and said: "Mr. Deford, I know nothing about sports but I like listening to you on the radio." He looked down at her - he was a very tall man - and said: "That's the nicest thing anyone's said to me in a long time."
Tomorrow, Hania and I head off to Washington for the long weekend. It's a social visit - her godson is graduating from high school - but for me it will be tinged with nostalgia. I lived in DC in the summer of '74 and remember watching a young, handsome, impeccably groomed White House correspondent by the name of Dan Rather stand bathed in white light in Lafayette Square and report on the embattled presidency of Richard Nixon.
Yesterday at lunch a former colleague was telling me about how the push in the newsroom now is all toward video. While he was talking, waiters appeared at the table next to ours, with a lit candle stuck in a cannoli, and sang “Happy Birthday” to the woman who was eating by herself. I couldn’t decide which was sadder: a woman celebrating her birthday alone or journalists being made to shoot video.
You know you live in Florida when you pick up the newspaper and find that the story next to the one of the president sharing secrets with the Russians is about alligator relocation.