The Capitol I knew

January 7, 2021 One afternoon in the summer of 1998 I was sitting in my cramped broadcast booth in the Senate Radio & TV Correspondents Gallery in the Capitol, where I spent my days reporting on Congress for listeners all over the world on the Voice of America. I had just filed a routine story…

A pandemic diary: Of times and lives

November 13, 2020 Genealogy is fascinating for a lot of reasons, and I don't mean finding out that your ancestor stood with the embattled farmers at Lexington. (If all the people who claim their relatives were there on that day are telling the truth, the farmers would've outnumbered the redcoats by about a million to…

A pandemic diary: Letter to younger self

October 16, 2020 You've probably heard of and maybe indulged in the exercise of writing a letter to your younger self. The idea is to take stock, reflect, set down the big lessons of the past, and promise to live by them in the future. That's all well and good, but I've already made a…

One man, one vote

October 14, 2020 My voting is done. It felt almost anticlimactic, filling out my ballot at the dining room table, signing it, and slipping it into the dropbox, which I'm sure is secure. Many years ago I was young and dumb enough to sit out an election. But if I had to, I'd stand in…

A statesman speaks

When you're a reporter covering Congress, you listen to an awful lot of speeches. Many of these breathless bulletins concern vital issues like National Cub Scout Month and the renaming of post offices. Speeches can be pompous, sanctimonious, badly reasoned, highly partisan, dull, hypocritical, long-winded, or all of the above. They're sometimes thoughtful or heartfelt.…