Orientation

Posting this aboard my Lufthansa flight en route to Frankfurt for my 2005 Arthur F. Burns fellowship:

Days 1 and 2: I went sightseeing in Washington D.C. before the formal orientation. Shout-outs to my friend Liz from Duke and her hubby Andy, and to ex-Observerite Lauren and her hubby Josh, for hosting me my first two days. Highlights included a lovely Italian dinner in Shirlington, an up-and-coming area that Birkdale and Phillips Place strive to be, and visits to the Titanic exhibit in Baltimore (where I lunched with ex-Observerite Andrea Walker) and the Spy Museum in D.C. (interesting but a bit depressing).

The orientation began Tuesday evening with a dinner reception in a historic home a bus ride away from our fancy hotel near Dupont Circle. The group consisted of 10 Americans and 11 Germans (one is on some sort of special fellowship), and a couple of facilitators who showed us around. We evolved into a congenial group during the week. (Sample media outlets: ABC News/World News Tonight Weekend chief writer; South Dakota Public Radio; U.S. News & World Report contributing editor; freelancers for NY Times and Village Voice; Moscow correspondent for Cox Newspapers).

Wednesday was the first of two and a half days filled with meetings to acquaint us with various transatlantic issues (and some purely domestic ones). Our home base was the German Marshall Fund building. We heard presentations from the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies; a rep for the EU delegation; Washington Post Supreme Court reporter Charles Lane (the same guy who was the New Republic editor who caught Stephen Glass fabricating some years back); a panel of other journalists including Elizabeth Becker of the New York Times and the Washington Post’s foreign editor; another panel of German journalists; and a couple of global trade experts from Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. We traveled by bus to meet at the State Department with Condoleeza Rice’s spokesman, Sean McCormack, and to the White House executive building to meet with deputy homeland security director Jack Crouch, and we briefly toured the West Wing press room, which is amazingly small and dingy compared to its appearance on TV.

The highlight of the week was a reception Thursday at the German Ambassador’s residence, perched strikingly on a hill in the Georgetown area. I met Henry Kissinger and briefly conversed: He told one of the Germans who’s assigned to work at “Good Morning America” to say hello to Diane Sawyer for him – she worked in the White House during the Nixon administration. While he was chatting about working with her, I brought up that I’d seen theories from a while back that she was one of those suspected of being Deep Throat. This caused him to say he doesn’t believe Bob Woodward’s account that Mark Felt was the only Deep Throat – he thinks there was more than one source and someone who was highly placed in the administration was involved. So I piped up with: “Well, did you ever talk to Mr. Woodward?” He shook his head no, and then said “It is an insulting question, really.” He smiled as he said it. I said ‘Well, I had to ask,” and everyone laughed, and I soon exited the conversation.

The ambassador’s residence had an amazing bar in the basement where we retired for a while to socialize.

Friday we bused to the Airlie conference center in Northern Virginia, a beautiful sprawling wildlife preserve filled with ponds and swans. Visitors can use the many bicycles propped up outside buildings to explore, and there was a pool where I spent much of my daylight time with my iPod and “Harry Potter” book. Both nights consisted of heavy buffet dinners and then drinking either near the pool or in a bar alongside it (there was some horrifying karaoke the first night, which nearly all the Germans partook of enthusiastically and atonally). Airlie was a lovely vacation oasis before embarking on our adventure.