The Woman at the Washington Zoo - by: Marjorie Williams

Marjorie Williams knew Washington from top to bottom. Beloved for her sharp analysis, elegant prose and exceptional ability to intuit character, Williams wrote political profiles for the Washington Post and Vanity Fair that came to be considered the final word on the capital's most powerful figures. Her accounts of playing ping-pong with Richard Darman, of Barbara Bush's stepmother quaking with fear at the mere thought of angering the First Lady, and of Bill Clinton angrily telling Al Gore why he failed to win the presidency — to name just three treasures collected here — open a window on a seldom-glimpsed human reality behind Washington's determinedly blank fa�ade.

Williams also penned a weekly column for the Post's op-ed page and epistolary book reviews for the online magazine Slate. Her essays for these and other publications tackled subjects ranging from politics to parenthood. During the last years of her life, she wrote about her own mortality as she battled liver cancer, using this harrowing experience to illuminate larger points about the nature of power and the randomness of life.

Marjorie Williams was a woman in a man's town, an outsider reporting on the political elite. She was, like the narrator in Randall Jarrell's classic poem, "The Woman at the Washington Zoo," an observer of a strange and exotic culture. This splendid collection — at once insightful, funny and sad — digs into the psyche of the nation's capital, revealing not only the hidden selves of the people that run it, but the messy lives that the rest of us lead.

Washington, D.C., is a city ruled by insiders, and few writers have broken through the social and public politics that govern it as eloquently as Williams. This posthumous collection presents a series of remarkably well-observed and intelligent profiles of the great and minor figures who have made D.C. for the past two decades. Williams, a longtime writer for the Washington Post and Vanity Fair, has a fine eye for telling details the license plates on a bureaucrat's car, the folds of satin in a dying socialite's dress but it's more than just details that make Williams's profiles so engaging. Underlying each representation is Williams's ability to make her characters as complicated on the page as they are in real life. It's that same concern that governs the heartbreaking personal pieces in the last third of the book, which covers Williams's losing battle with cancer. Here she is on her impending death: "whatever happens to me now, I've earned the knowledge some people never gain, that my span is finite and I still have the chance to rise and rise to life's generosity." In these final pieces, Williams steps out from under the self-effacing veil that made her such a fine journalist and speaks of her own experiences. The result is a collection of writing that dissolves the boundaries between the personal and the political to arrive at an obvious but no less startling conclusion. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Probing profiles and essays from the late Washington Post journalist long recognized for her insights into government's inner workings. Williams's pungent portraits of a panoply of Washington characters reveal raw power robed in an ornate, quaint, social fabric-almost as if the Rome of Tacitus were splashed across Jane Austen's English countryside. Her favorite targets include hypocrisy, of which there is plenty to burn, and the varieties of low behavior that wind up being a sort of generic lack of grace under pressure. In a chapter entitled "The Hack," for example, she skewers a California Democrat known for resigning from Congress under investigation and his tendency to backstab rivals with: "Listen to [Tony] Coelho, who pauses only to shoot his army's wounded on his way off the field . . . it's not Tony Coelho who will pay for his party's mistakes." In another instance, her predilection for psychological insight blooms forth in a comparison of the irrepressibly libidinous (her characterization) black lawyer and "message man," Vernon Jordan, with his patron, Bill Clinton: "Like Jordan, Clinton is a product of a matriarchal home that propelled him up from the lower middle class. Like Jordan, he is a man skilled at, perhaps addicted to, the seduction of everyone he meets." And in Ronald Reagan's ultimately forced explanation of the Iran-Contra situation-"Mistakes were made"-Williams nails the situation as a Washington syndrome: "the self-rescinding apology, which may be the most useful of all." Other notable chapters include Jeb and Barbara Bush as, respectively, The Sibling and The Wife. The second section comprises essays on life and fate, the most poignant of which is "Hit ByLightning: A Cancer Memoir," an account of being diagnosed with the cancer that killed her in January 2005. Somewhat dated but a nonetheless rich collection framing the kinds of people, fair and foul, destined to make Washington tick.