WASHINGTON.

By Meg Greenfield. PublicAffairs. 272 pp. $26

Meg Greenfield richly enjoyed stories about the peculiar characters whose talents and ambitions (or hungers) led them to assume roles on the national political scene. When she began her career as a Washington reporter, the vast majority of such persons were those elected to public office by their less driven fellows in the rest of the country. Another sizable number were staffers, bit players empowered and obligated by their politician bosses. Later on, masses of journalists joined the scene, either in print or on the tube. By the time she became editorial page editor of the dominant paper in the capital, the Washington stage was crammed with politically interested men and women, talking and writing up a storm, measuring and rating as they schmoozed, using others at least as often, and as effectively, as they themselves got used.

Greenfield’s memoir, published two years after her death, depicts this political tableau in rather muted colors. It is not a Daumier or a Nast, in which political actors fairly leap off the canvas or page. It is more like a carefully composed setting by the American painter William Merritt Chase. There are beautiful disclosures in Chase’s paintings; he knew the environment inhabited by late-19th-century gentlefolk, and rendered it well. Yet few of his works had the pulse and heat of common life. In the same way, Greenfield’s elaborate, witty observations have the feel of occurring to her not on the street, or even in the newsroom, but in the quiet of the editorial office.

There are, to be sure, amusing snapshots of the political animal. "I haven’t done anything scientific to corroborate this," she writes, "but it does seem to me that an awful lot of our national political leaders established their reputations for special moral worthiness and a sense of responsibility beyond their years precisely against the backdrop of that entirely different sibling who slept in the next bed—the defiant playeraround, breaker of rules, and flunker-out, who, though often the more charming of the two, was always either in trouble or just about to be. Let your mind range over the astonishing number of exhibitionists, rogues, and ne’er-do-wells who have turned up in the exalted role of First Brother, for instance—people like Sam Houston Johnson, Donald Nixon, Billy Carter, and Roger Clinton. Right along with their willingness to exploit their presidential brother’s status, many have betrayed a smirking disdain for Mr. Goody Two-Shoes and a self-centered indifference to whether or not they caused him embarrassment with their kited checks and turbulent nights spent drying out in the local jail."

Whether Bill Clinton was ever precisely a Mr. Goody Two-Shoes can be argued, but the passage has a wonderful plausibility, and it embodies many of the concerns Greenfield wrote about for nearly 40 years: the moral character and personality of politicians; the attractions of charming rascals, and the need to deal with, to manage, both their charm and their rascality; the sense that arguments over policy, and even over such things as conviction and ultimate purpose, were often less significant to those involved in them than were things like loyalty and rooted connections. She writes with affecting sympathy about Bob Haldeman, whom her Washington Post regularly skewered in its pages, and his son Peter, as they struggled to maintain the bonds between them in a time of awful stress. In the din of Watergate denunciations and high-minded preachments, many of them issuing from the Post, Greenfield heard the whisper of the vulnerable.

There should be more such stories in Washington. The painter’s strokes should have been bolder, more vivid. Or, to change the metaphor, her clever insights and musings should have found their way into a novel—in the manner, say, of a modern Trollope. Perhaps in that novel there might have been more room to say what these Washington characters, at least the elected ones among them, were trying to accomplish, and in what ways they remained involved with citizens outside the Beltway. Throughout her long career, Greenfield cared much about such things, and her last work would have been richer for her reflections on them.

—Harry McPherson