Weekly News: Washington

No one writes songs about Washington. Every other city in the States has inspired a hatful of ballads — pah-pahh-pa-pa-pah! New York New York! My kinda town Chicago is! I left my heart in San Francisco!

But can you imagine Sinatra or Tony Bennett singing about Washington? It’s a city full of politicians, so buttoned up they even named it after the most boring man in American history. The US capital could have been named in honour of Ben Franklin, the maverick genius behind the Constitution, or Davey Crockett, hero of the Alamo, or Abraham Lincoln, the most honest man ever to be a national leader.

Instead, it’s called Washington, after a young mischief maker who couldn’t even lie convincingly about defacing the local woodland.

It’s 25 years since I was last there, the guest of President Jimmy Carter at the White House, and even as I thrilled to the reek of power in the corridors, I knew that Washington DC could drive me insane faster than anywhere else on earth. Not insane with power-lust... insane with boredom.

Offices, meetings, machinations, lobbying — for politicians its addictive. For the rest of us, it’s baffling.

During the late Seventies, of course, I wanted to change the world with a colossal bang, a blast of energy that would right all wrongs, spread peace around the planet and tie a knot in every spoon. Now that I’ve brought up two children with my wife, and watched them grow from babies to adults a day at a time, by changes too imperceptible to discern, I am wiser: I know that the only important revolutions are those that happen gradually.

That’s why I was happy to fly to the heart of the political universe last week with my friend, Dr Noam Yifrach, to indulge in meetings, machinations and lobbying in the offices of Washington.

The invitation came from Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, the chairman of the American Red Cross.

Our mission was to put pressure on Washington’s policy-makers to put pressure on the Israeli government to honour the pledges made in Geneva last year between... all right, all right! I told you, this political stuff is addictive. You get drawn into it.

But like all politics, there’s a price to pay in the real world. The pay-off of our lobbying means the difference between life and death, perhaps for dozens of people in Jerusalem. The Palestinian Red Crescent want to station five ambulances into the Israeli-governed east of the city, and it doesn’t want to wait hours at checkpoints. Even a minute’s delay could mean that in the back of the ambulance a woman dies in childbirth or a child injured by a grenade bleeds to death.

I feel passionately that such a simple act of humanitarian common sense must not be thwarted. Dr Yifrach, the head of the Israeli branch of the Red Cross, the MDA, feels the same. And we poured our hearts out to a series of influential politickers, including Congressman Stephen Kirk and the Under-Secretary of State for Global Affairs, Paula Dobriansky.

Did we succeed? Ask me in a few months. Failure is not an option. Like I said, anything worth having in politics happens so slowly that the changes are invisible to the naked eye.

The Red Cross headquarters are mind-blowing. Built from solid white marble, every room is hung with priceless art. A series of Norman Rockwells, donated by the painter, all have a Red Cross theme. I sent photographs of them to my friends at Sotheby’s — the thought of what those canvases would fetch at auction will make their eyes water.

Bonnie’s showpiece was a grand dinner at the Israeli Embassy, in the sumptuous Jerusalem Hall. Hanna and I simply gazed about in wonder, before chatting with Israeli officials and the US permanent representative to the UN in Switzerland, Ambassador Kevin Moley.

One of our most impressive meetings, though, happened completely by accident. Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, was strolling close to our hotel when we bumped into him. He told me he is thinking seriously of running for President — he’s a Republican, like George Bush, so that option wasn’t open to him at the last election. This time, though, it’s a free for all.

Another accidental meeting happened in the hotel lobby. My daughter Natalie, who had flown from her new home in Los Angeles to see us, spotted the comedian Richard Lewis, who recognised me immediately and fired off a stream of wisecracks so fast that I scarcely said ten words to him in five minutes.

His electric sense of humour might trick you into imagining his act is totally spontaneous — but I could see he was working on a script, in the comfort of a hotel armchair, and he’d covered dozens of pages with minute notations about his lines. It takes a lot of work to make it seem so easy.

But the most bizarre synchronicity was the one that floored me on the day we left DC, on 11 February. I picked up the Washington Post to do the crossword on page 11 (see that pair of elevens?) and clue 61 across was “Geller, mentalist, 3 letters”.
Those crosswords are set months in advance. No one could possibly have known I’d be in town. It felt like a cheery wave from the hand of fate.