From the NY Times:
February 6, 2005
New to Capitol Hill? 10 Tips to Avoid Ruin
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
WASHINGTON
THE start of every presidential term brings to Washington eager new cabinet officers and members of Congress who take the wrong elevators, get lost in the hallways and pop off to reporters. But such faux pas - Senator Ken Salazar, a freshman Democrat from Colorado, says he has not yet found the Senate dining room and is eating ham sandwiches in the public cafeteria - are hardly the worst of it.
As everyone knows, Washington is shadowed by the specters of grand scandals past: Richard M. Nixon and Watergate, Oliver North and Iran-Contra, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. More recently Bernard B. Kerik, President Bush's short-lived nominee for homeland security secretary, jettisoned himself for his troubles with a nanny and then turned out to have a Manhattan love nest, a serious no-no in Washington. Unlike New York, the nation's capital has always had a Puritan streak and remains a curious mix of raging ambition and Midwestern values.
So now that the president's State of the Union address has signaled the official start of the year, here are 10 rules, culled from those who have learned the hard way, for avoiding social, political and legal disaster in Washington.
1. Don't get up in the middle of dinner and announce that you have to run off to do "Larry King Live."
Well-mannered Washingtonians tell hostesses that they will drop by before or after their appearances on nightly programs like Mr. King's. "You should tell your hostess ahead of time," said Sally Quinn, the Washington writer and hostess who is married to Benjamin C. Bradlee, former executive editor of The Washington Post, and the author of a book on entertaining. Otherwise, Ms. Quinn said, there will be a gaping hole at the dinner table. (Mr. King's interview show is on CNN at 9 p.m.) For dinner on big occasions like election night, guests can graze in the shows' green rooms, the lavishly catered holding areas that have evolved into the new Washington dinner parties.
2. Don't use the expression "Do you know who I am?"
The answer from the young woman looking for your lost ticket at the charity dinner check-in table may well be an embarrassing no. Also, the question is generally not effective, unless your goal is frightening her. "It doesn't make your ticket appear more quickly," said Carolyn Peachey, a longtime Washington event planner who has heard the expression for decades.
The only time Ms. Peachey has given a dispensation for the expression's use was last fall, when the music mogul Quincy Jones was prevented from entering a reception at the State Department. A plate in his head from brain surgery had set off the metal detector, Ms. Peachey said, and 20 minutes of talking to the guards made no difference. "Do you know who I am?" Mr. Jones finally asked. The guard replied yes, Ms. Peachey said, but insisted there was nothing to be done. Mr. Jones eventually got in through intervention from higher-ups.
3. Don't withhold information from your lawyer.
Former White House counsels, lawyers for white-collar criminals, and the city's highly paid damage controllers all agree: This is the premier mistake that otherwise intelligent people make in Washington. Cover-ups are often worse than the problems themselves.
"What inevitably happens is that the facts dribble out, compounding the story, because reporters are not going to give up until they beat the competition and dig up something new," said Lanny J. Davis, a Washington lawyer brought in for White House damage control during the Clinton scandals and the author of "Truth to Tell: Tell it Early, Tell it All, Tell it Yourself."
Fred F. Fielding, the White House counsel for Ronald Reagan, who vetted the current President Bush's cabinet nominees during the 2000 transition, heartily agrees. Nominees have to be prepared, he said, honestly to answer the awful questions posed by White House lawyers: Have you ever had an affair? Or used drugs? A yes to either of those questions, Mr. Fielding added, was not necessarily a problem.
"There's a difference between somebody having an affair years ago, before their first marriage broke up, and someone having an affair with someone he supervised," he said. As for drugs, "occasional drug use in college would not be a disqualifier."
4. Don't change your hairstyle too often.
"There is zero tolerance for coif inconsistency," said Mary Matalin, a longtime adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and a former television talk show host who is, at the moment, a brunette. Over the years she has been blonde, light brown or, as she put it, "hijacked by hyper-highlights ranging from dull orange to bright white." In short, Ms. Matalin said, "You have to pick a color and stick with a color."
5. Don't plan to announce your new nominee before a proper vetting.
This applies more to presidents than to ordinary folk, but it is an important corollary of Rule No. 3. C. Boyden Gray, the White House counsel for the first President Bush, said that he was under constant pressure from the president and his staff rapidly to investigate the background of cabinet nominees so that Mr. Bush could fill jobs.
"I was pounded, relentlessly, when I was counsel," Mr. Gray said. He recalled that in 1988, when President-elect Bush insisted on quickly announcing Carla A. Hills as the United States trade representative, Ms. Hills and Mr. Gray agreed that Ms. Hills's husband, Rod, would have to resign from a steel company board to avoid any conflict of interest with his wife's new job. The problem was that Mr. Hills was on a plane until 4 p.m., and the president wanted Ms. Hills announced at 2 p.m. But she refused to say publicly that her husband would resign from the steel board without asking him first.
So Mr. Gray called the Federal Aviation Administration and got in touch with the commercial plane's pilot, who summoned Mr. Hills to the cockpit, where Mr. Hills gave his O.K. "I think it violated all kinds of F.A.A. rules," Mr. Gray said. "The point of the story is that these are very difficult issues, and you can't back down."
6. Don't wear a beaded Armani to a Friday night dinner in Cleveland Park.
The clean lines of Armani are highly desirable in Washington, and the first lady's white cashmere Oscar de la Renta wowed the town on Inaugural day. But even in a city as formal as the capital, be careful not to overdress. Andrea Mitchell, the NBC correspondent who is married to Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, said she was reminded of that recently when she wore a black silk Armani pantsuit with a beaded top to dinner one Friday in Cleveland Park, an affluent, liberal enclave of faded Volvos in the city's northwest quadrant. Every other woman, she said, was in slacks and turtlenecks.
What to do? "Laugh it off and realize that in Washington what you say and what you know is more important than what you wear," Ms. Mitchell said.
7. Don't think it is your job to educate reporters.
"You just bite your tongue on certain topics," said Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican strategist and the manager of Christie Whitman's successful campaign for governor of New Jersey in 1993. Mr. Rollins did not follow his own advice later that year, when he infamously boasted to reporters at a breakfast in Washington that Ms. Whitman's campaign had paid African-American ministers and Democratic workers $500,000 in "walking-around money" to suppress the black vote.
This statement, immediately recanted, prompted a federal investigation, which found nothing illegal. But Mr. Rollins's words had brought the political establishment down on his head and tainted Ms. Whitman's victory.
8. Don't believe your own spin.
"I was guilty of that," said Mr. Davis, the Clinton defender. Mr. Davis said he first spun out the argument that there was nothing wrong with political donors attending coffees at the Clinton White House because no money was actually collected there. "I tried to believe it, because I was technically correct," Mr. Davis said. "But people were expected to give money before or after the event."
9. Don't forget who your friends are.
"The biggest mistake that people make is that they base their friendships on who is in power and who is not," Ms. Quinn said. "This is short-sighted, because very few people in Washington stay in power for a length of time. In the same vein, people will count people out once they lose power. This is always a huge mistake, because people are never out unless they're in the ground with a stake in the heart."
10. Don't forget where you came from, and that integrity matters.
"People think the values here will be different than the ones they left at home, and they're not," said Robert S. Strauss, a Washington sage who is the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and a longtime Bush family friend. "It's the same damn thing that you have in Dallas or Los Angeles or Houston. People value loyalty here as much or more as they do anywhere else."
If all else fails, Mr. Fielding has the surefire way to avoid social, political and legal ruin in Washington.
"Move to Kansas," he said.
