pictures, I cannot believe how I lived,” Reid told me. He compares the Searchlight of his boyhood to “that place in West Virginia.” There’s a word he’s looking for. Hmm. “You know, where things are so bad? Poor?”
“Appalachia?” I said.
“Yes, Appalachia,” Reid said, and then broke into a curiously big laugh.
Harry Sr. was a hard-rock miner who suffered chronic pain from on-the-job injuries. He battled alcoholism and depression, and spent time in jail. He killed himself in 1972, at fifty-eight. The senator’s mother, Inez Reid, was a redhead with few and eventually no teeth. As a teenager, Harry took a job at a gas station and bought her a false set. “It changed her,” Reid says of his mother’s new teeth. “I mean, you can imagine how good she felt with teeth after all those years.”
When I asked him if it’s ever painful to recall his own youth, Reid shrugs. “The only thing I don’t like is to watch movies about suicide and stuff like that,” Reid says, as close as he comes to publicly contemplating his inner life. But he is capable of pointed moments of empathy. Once, a young communications adviser, Rebecca Kirszner, who had just started working in Reid’s Senate office, kept misreading a phone number that Reid had been trying to dial for a radio interview. In his straight-to-the-point manner, Reid asked her, “Do you have a learning disability?” Embarrassed, she quietly said yes. Reid looked Kirszner in the eye and said, “You must have worked twice as hard to have gotten where you are.” No one had ever said this before to Kirszner, who was taken aback, and moved. “I did,” she whispered.
Reid’s sense of Washington psychology is grounded heavily in seeing—and, in certain cases, exploiting—the past humiliations of others. As with many politicians who grew up in poverty and endured family turmoil and other adversities, Washington has also been a powerful reinvention canvas for Reid. The city is filled with proving grounds that double as sanctuaries, like the Senate floor.
• • •
S ometimes during intense legislative debate and machinations, I sit up in the gallery and watch the floor. No words from below can be deciphered, only the low rumble and occasional laugh echoing up, and a pageant of body language. Senators are constantly engaged in physical contact, particularly the men shaking hands, squeezing shoulders, and bro hugging. It is the ritual power dance of faux fellowship, Capitol version. Michael Maccoby, a Washington psychoanalyst and author of the management and business book
Narcissistic Leaders: Who Succeeds and Who Fails
, says he is struck by the “homoeroticism of politics.” Not homosexuality per se, but just an abiding sense of love on the Capitol floor, even among adversaries. “There is a sense of people cherishing being together, even at a time when camaraderie supposedly no longer exists,” Maccoby says.
Maccoby speaks of a “pseudo love” that people in politics can derive from the approval of their patrons, the loyalty of their staffs and supporters, and the reflective glory of their marquee friends. Multibillion-dollar industries have been born to foster pseudo love through image-buffing public relations, lobbying, advertising, or political campaigns.
“Washington is both a secretive and intensely scrutinized place and it can breed paranoia,” Maccoby says. It relies on a form of total loyalty that is at once widely available and fleeting in D.C. It self-selects a personality type that gravitates to the high-wire act of the public affirmation game. The floors of Congress provide case studies.
Harry Reid is always careening across the Senate floor. “I always feel like I’m missing something if I’m not there,” Reid says. In his memoir,
The Good Fight: Hard Lessons from Searchlight to Washington
,Reid writes about how his father was never as happy as when he was down in his workplace, the gold mines. It didn’t matter
“Appalachia?” I said.
“Yes, Appalachia,” Reid said, and then broke into a curiously big laugh.
Harry Sr. was a hard-rock miner who suffered chronic pain from on-the-job injuries. He battled alcoholism and depression, and spent time in jail. He killed himself in 1972, at fifty-eight. The senator’s mother, Inez Reid, was a redhead with few and eventually no teeth. As a teenager, Harry took a job at a gas station and bought her a false set. “It changed her,” Reid says of his mother’s new teeth. “I mean, you can imagine how good she felt with teeth after all those years.”
When I asked him if it’s ever painful to recall his own youth, Reid shrugs. “The only thing I don’t like is to watch movies about suicide and stuff like that,” Reid says, as close as he comes to publicly contemplating his inner life. But he is capable of pointed moments of empathy. Once, a young communications adviser, Rebecca Kirszner, who had just started working in Reid’s Senate office, kept misreading a phone number that Reid had been trying to dial for a radio interview. In his straight-to-the-point manner, Reid asked her, “Do you have a learning disability?” Embarrassed, she quietly said yes. Reid looked Kirszner in the eye and said, “You must have worked twice as hard to have gotten where you are.” No one had ever said this before to Kirszner, who was taken aback, and moved. “I did,” she whispered.
Reid’s sense of Washington psychology is grounded heavily in seeing—and, in certain cases, exploiting—the past humiliations of others. As with many politicians who grew up in poverty and endured family turmoil and other adversities, Washington has also been a powerful reinvention canvas for Reid. The city is filled with proving grounds that double as sanctuaries, like the Senate floor.
• • •
S ometimes during intense legislative debate and machinations, I sit up in the gallery and watch the floor. No words from below can be deciphered, only the low rumble and occasional laugh echoing up, and a pageant of body language. Senators are constantly engaged in physical contact, particularly the men shaking hands, squeezing shoulders, and bro hugging. It is the ritual power dance of faux fellowship, Capitol version. Michael Maccoby, a Washington psychoanalyst and author of the management and business book
Narcissistic Leaders: Who Succeeds and Who Fails
, says he is struck by the “homoeroticism of politics.” Not homosexuality per se, but just an abiding sense of love on the Capitol floor, even among adversaries. “There is a sense of people cherishing being together, even at a time when camaraderie supposedly no longer exists,” Maccoby says.
Maccoby speaks of a “pseudo love” that people in politics can derive from the approval of their patrons, the loyalty of their staffs and supporters, and the reflective glory of their marquee friends. Multibillion-dollar industries have been born to foster pseudo love through image-buffing public relations, lobbying, advertising, or political campaigns.
“Washington is both a secretive and intensely scrutinized place and it can breed paranoia,” Maccoby says. It relies on a form of total loyalty that is at once widely available and fleeting in D.C. It self-selects a personality type that gravitates to the high-wire act of the public affirmation game. The floors of Congress provide case studies.
Harry Reid is always careening across the Senate floor. “I always feel like I’m missing something if I’m not there,” Reid says. In his memoir,
The Good Fight: Hard Lessons from Searchlight to Washington
,Reid writes about how his father was never as happy as when he was down in his workplace, the gold mines. It didn’t matter
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