A new year, new chapter and a few reminiscences
This is my 1,768th opinion column. It is also my last.
Permit me a few reminiscences.
Elizabeth Taylor, the movie star, was married to John Warner, the Republican senator from Virginia. She was not at all happy in Washington. She had expected to be a political salon hostess as mistress of Warner’s vast Virginia estate, like in the movies. But she was often alone while Warner politicked on Capitol Hill.
Ben Bradlee, then editor of The Washington Post, and I, then president of the Washington Press Club, were hosting a cocktail party for the American Society of Newspaper Editors at the Kennedy Center. I was to escort Taylor around for the evening. She looked at my lavender polyester blouse with a bow at the throat and glowered. “You’re wearing my color. But I’ll forgive you if you keep me in three fingers of Jack Daniels all night.”
When Warner showed up, late, he whispered to her, “Elizabeth, I think you’ve had enough.” She turned with the studied purpose of an immense ocean liner and hissed, “I’ll tell you when I’ve had enough. Ann, three more fingers.”
Diana, princess of Wales, and Prince Charles came to Washington and were lionized at many parties. At a reception at the home of the British ambassador, I found myself looking up at her and realized nobody else was around. I had a moment of panic, wondering what we would talk about since it was made clear it was a social occasion, not a journalistic one. She asked if I had children, and we chatted happily about our offspring for what seemed to be an inordinately long time. I forgot how gorgeous and royal she was and remember thinking, “What a wonderful mother!” As I left, she came over and said, “I so enjoyed our conversation.”
I covered the White House full time as a reporter for more than 20 years and had the amazing privilege of often traveling abroad with the presidential entourage. Yes, Ronald and Nancy Reagan flew their bed to Europe. But in a move that could never be repeated, I once went from my house, boarded Air Force One and stood a few feet away from Mikhail Gorbachev and Reagan in Helsinki without ever going through security. Different times.
Once I complained to President George H.W. Bush that my elementary-school-age daughter did not believe I went to the White House every day because he had not called on me at his last two press conferences. He sat down at his desk, pulled out an ivory card embossed at the top with “The White House” and wrote, “Dear Kirstie. I do know your mother. Love, George.”
Once, when he and then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher met for the Good Friday summit in Bermuda in 1990 on Saddam Hussein, the Soviet collapse and NATO, a gale was blowing so hard that it was difficult to stand. Kites, hats, music stands and reporters’ notebooks were swirling everywhere. But nobody who was there will ever forget that not a hair on Thatcher’s lacquered head stirred.
When Bill Clinton was running for president, I was on the press pool when he barnstormed my hometown of Springfield, Ohio, which Karl Rove would later turn red for George W. Bush. My entire family came to the Clinton event — to see me, as they had earlier when Rosalynn Carter was stumping for her husband Jimmy. Later, Clinton would say at a white-tie dinner in Washington, “If I had as many brothers and sisters as Ann McFeatters does, Hillary would have won Ohio.”
On the day Barack Obama gave his we-are-one nation speech at the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston, he appeared at a breakfast for reporters hosted by The Christian Science Monitor. We all openly speculated that we were eating eggs with the man who would become the first U.S. Black president even though he wasn’t a senator yet.
I covered every inauguration from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump. I covered them in blizzards, with pneumonia, with boots that left my feet bloody, with new technology that refused to work, with M&Ms the only food I ate for 20 hours, with a ball gown over leggings and galoshes.
And then, often messy but always fascinating, came watching the arduous complicated work of governing.
Being a witness to history has given me enormous satisfaction and immense gratitude to the vital, fun and increasingly difficult profession of journalism. There is always a feeling of awe that a peaceful transition of power happens. And the joy of being at the right place at the right time. It has been at times frustrating, always enlightening and humbling, whether it meant meeting the infamous, Bashar al-Assad, or the noble, Nelson Mandela.
But most of all, I am grateful to the amazing journalists I have known. They have kept the flame of liberty burning, and, we must all hope, they will be able to continue to do so.