Free This Town by Mark Leibovich Page B

story about the first lady’s hair.” He was referring to a front-page article in the
Times
the previous week about howthe new president’s hair was going gray.
    •   •   •
    A rianna Huffington hosted the signature D.C. party on the eve of Obama’s inauguration. It was held at the Newseum, a place cherished by Tim Russert, whose idea it was to inscribe the first forty-five words of the First Amendment on the building’s façade overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue and the National Mall.
    The rise and reinvention of Huffington, impresario of the fast-growing website, the Huffington Post, had been a source of great annoyance to Russert. In 1994, when Huffington’s former husband, Michael Huffington, was a Republican senatorial candidate from California and Arianna was an outspoken conservative who was orchestrating his campaign, Russert’s wife, Maureen Orth, wrotea withering profile of Arianna that characterized the Greek-born spouse as a despotic boss, a New Age flake, and the “Sir Edmund Hillary of Social Climbers.” Resentment between the parties simmered for years and boiled anew when Huffington started her website and initiated something called Russert Watch. The feature ridiculed
Meet the Press
as a hothouse of conventional wisdom, reflexive partisanship, and Beltway gamesmanship. Huffington told me later that media criticism had always been a big part of the website’s mission, and she started Russert Watch to chronicle how the host’s “kid-gloves-handling of the D.C. establishment allowed the conventional wisdom to survive unchallenged.” It had nothing to do with any personal history with Russert or Orth, she said.
    Regardless, Russert, who despite his top-of-the-class station could be quite thin-skinned—and quite Irish in holding grudges—complained bitterly about Huffington’s Russert Watch. Arianna was conspicuously lukewarm (or silent) about Russert during the canonization that followed his death. She did not attend the funeral. Luke Russert says he will always refuse to shake Arianna’s hand.
    Huffington’s resurrection into a new-media queen was completed three years later when AOL paid $315 million for the right to merge with the Huffington Post. The arrangement put her in charge of the whole moussaka. When the then CEO of NBC Universal, Jeff Zucker, later revealed that the network had itself pursued an acquisition of Huff-Po, it also no doubt set Russert spinning in his you-know-what. On the morning the AOL news broke, Sally Quinn, who in recent years has become fascinated with religion and now runs the “On Faith” website on WashingtonPost.com, forwarded the announcement to her old pal Orth, a devout Catholic.
    “How could God let this happen?” Sally asked.
    “It must be part of God’s divine plan,” Tim’s widow said.
    Huffington’s red carpet on Inauguration eve was dense with Demi Moores, Ashton Kutchers, Stings, David Axelrods, and Valerie Jarretts. Arianna addressed the reveling mob from a fourth-floor balcony. She wore a black gown with a long tail and looked every bit a re-reinvented queen of a changing universe. (Disclosure: my sister Lori works for Arianna at the Huffington Post, so this could get slightly awkward.)
    In the mad dash to get in with the hot young White House, Arianna, at fifty-eight, appeared to be a frontrunner. The White House press shop paid close and solicitous attention. Obama himself was dropping Arianna’s name—only her first name necessary—into interviews with the
New York
Times
. He volunteered that Arianna disapproved of his redecoration of the Oval Office. Valerie Jarrett called Huffington an “icon” and a “phenomenon” at a party Tammy Haddad threw for Huffington to celebrate her new book on the American underclass,
Third World America
. (And who knew there would be valet parking in Third World America? Or specially embroidered
Third World America
pillows!)
    Outside the Newseum, the magnificent Tammy—Tim called her “the