an excerpt from a letter to George Stephanopolous, from HST's (excellent) book "Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie"
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In a campaign, you need help from your friends; in Washington you need it from your enemies.
The whisperings of treachery are like
serpents in my bed
-- S. F. Bacon, Women's Voices
Ah, but you learned these things a long time ago, so why brood about them now? They are boring, like the wisdom of Washington is boring. It is not a town that teems with original thinkers (except maybe for ex-mayors and a handful of anarchist/hillbilly musicians)--and nobody you meet in D.C. was actually born there. Even the cab drivers are foreigners.
I was one of them for a while, George. I lived there. I had a 10-room, three-bath, two-fireplace, red-brick Colonial house with a two-car garage and a wood-paneled full studio-apartment above, on Juniper Street--which was a dead end street at the time, and the only thing between my front porch and the Kennedy Center was a three- or four-mile stretch of dense woods and horse trails and the lonely midnight roads of Rock Creek Park, which will always be one of my favorite places in the world....
Ah yes, the park. I knew it well, George. The park police came to love me. I was like the team physician to the night shift. I knew their wives and girlfriends, and they knew mine. They hated Nixon, and so did I. And we all smoked marijuana. Hell, we even inhaled it....
