At a dinner in Kalorama on Wednesday night — the kind where the host apologizes for the roast chicken because she’s already apologized for everything else — my friend Eliza turned to the table and asked, with the innocence she deploys when she wants a fight, whether anyone actually cared that the President had made himself chairman of the Kennedy Center. A bipartisan lobbyist I will not name, because he pays for his own wine and that is rare enough to protect, took a long sip and said what they always say. He said it was mostly symbolic. He said the Kennedy Center is a building with a gift shop. He said there are bigger fights.
There are always bigger fights. That is the thing they say in this town when they want you to stop paying attention to the fight in front of you.
So let us be clear about what happened, because clarity is apparently a partisan posture now. The President removed the existing chair of the Kennedy Center — a board that has, by statute and by decades of quiet practice, included Democrats, Republicans, donors, diplomats, and at least one person who could actually tell you what a mezzo-soprano is — and installed himself in the chair. Not a loyalist. Not a donor. Himself. The federally chartered national cultural center of the United States is now, in a formal sense, a personal fiefdom of the man who once called the Kennedy Center Honors “very, very boring” from Mar-a-Lago.
Symbolic, the lobbyist said. As if symbols have ever been the small thing in American life. As if the reason we put a marble building on the Potomac and named it after a dead president was that we had run out of parking lots.
My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives for longer than some of the appointees at the Archives have been alive, has a phrase she uses when a thing happens that nobody wants to describe plainly. She calls it “a Tuesday item.” A Tuesday item is something that, if it had happened in any other administration, would have consumed a week of hearings and a Sunday show. Now it happens between the morning briefing and lunch, and by Tuesday evening the only people who remember it are the ones who worked in the building it just hollowed out.
The Kennedy Center is a Tuesday item now. So is the Pentagon deciding which news organizations get a desk. So is the revocation of a former president’s intelligence briefing, which used to be the sort of thing a country did to defectors. You can have one of these in a week and call it a skirmish. You cannot have all of them in a week and call it anything other than a pattern, unless your professional incentive is to not see patterns, in which case Washington has a corner office for you and a speaking fee to match.
I asked the lobbyist, because Eliza had gone quiet in the way she goes quiet when she wants me to take the swing, what he thought the board of the Kennedy Center was going to do. He laughed. Of course he laughed. The board of the Kennedy Center is going to do what boards of prestigious American institutions have been doing with impressive consistency since November: they are going to find something urgent to attend to in the Hamptons, or Jackson, or whatever compound currently substitutes for a spine. They will issue no statement. They will place no call. One of them, eventually, will give an interview to a magazine nobody reads and describe the whole episode as “complicated,” which is the word the well-dressed use when they mean they would like to keep their seat.
I have been writing this column for thirty years, and I have watched a great many people in this city discover, right on schedule, that the principle they were willing to resign over last administration is a nuance this administration. It is not hypocrisy, exactly. Hypocrisy requires that you remember what you used to say. This is something cleaner. This is a kind of civic forgetting, practiced at the level of the dinner party, where we agree, plate by plate, that the thing happening in front of us is not the thing it obviously is.
And here is what bothers me, and what should bother you, and what the lobbyist could not answer when I asked him directly over the pear tart: if the national cultural institution can be annexed by signature on a Wednesday, and the board will not say a word, and the donors will not say a word, and the press corps will cover it as a style-section curiosity because the real news is a tariff in Tokyo, then what exactly is the firewall? Name it. Point to it. Tell me which institution, which board, which nonprofit with a Rockefeller on its letterhead, is going to be the one that says no.
Because I have been to a lot of dinner parties this month, and I have not heard anybody rehearsing the word.
The Kennedy Center will reopen next week. The marquee will light up. Somebody expensive will sing something moving, and the cameras will find a senator’s wife dabbing at her eyes, and the program will thank the chairman. Read that sentence again and tell me it is symbolic. Symbols are how a country tells itself who it is. We just let ours be signed over, and we passed the salad, and we agreed there were bigger fights. There are always bigger fights. That is how you lose the small ones, which turn out, in the morning, to have been the only ones that mattered.