Williams's profiles, most of them written for Vanity Fair and the Washington Post, cover the period from 1987 through 2001. In that span, we fought a Middle East war measured in weeks. We celebrated the dot-com boom (and endured its bust) and the first blush of the real estate bubble now popping spectacularly before our eyes. We thought we had no concern more pressing than the president's sex life. From a president (George H. W. Bush) to Cabinet secretaries current and future (James Baker and Colin Powell), to political operatives like the squabbling principals of "Tristan & Isolde, LLC," Mary Matalin and James Carville, as Williams slyly dubs them, she offers up a striking set of Washington insiders who proudly strutted their hour on the stage during that decade and a half.
Although some may be tempted to pass over this collection for more contemporary fare, there's an uncanny prescience reflected in Williams's treatment of subjects who appear in these pages. She writes unsparingly, for example, about the late Lee Atwater, architect of Bush 41's victory in 1988 and the man whose Willie Horton ads injected a virus into our body politic that infects it to this day. Her searing indictment of the economic policy failures that ushered out the first Bush presidency in the midst of a recession ("And now that the lie is crumbling, there is something dishonest about our insistence on blaming the liar.") is chillingly relevant today.
Reputation's reach goes beyond these political types; the book has its share of lighter pieces. There's an amusing portrait of Larry King, the "Mayor of Celebrityville," whose avuncular image takes a few dents at Williams's hands. Most readers won't immediately recognize the name Patricia Duff, but the story of this unabashed social climber's epic child custody battle with billionaire Ronald Perelman is sketched with an arch wit.
Marjorie Williams has given us an album of elegant snapshots of Washington power players from an era that seems somehow both distant and close at hand. When historians chronicle that time, they'll be grateful a writer whose perception was so discerning and whose prose was so exquisite was there to observe it.--Harvey Freedenberg
Shelf Talker: A skilled political journalist offers an indelible collection of portraits of Washington insiders whose careers were at the center of public life in the last decade of the 20th century.