Free Power Game by Hedrick Smith Page B

level, the national Republican party and its campaign committees raised $254.6 million in the presidential election year of 1984, more than triple the $74.3 million that the rival Democratic committees raised. 18 Political spending was spiraling everywhere, but PACs were the main vehicle of growth. Their number, including all kinds of PACs—business, labor, and other interest groups—jumped from 608 in 1974 to 4,157 in mid-1987, and PAC donations to candidates leapt nearly a multiple of fifteen—from $8.5 million in 1974 to $132.2 million in 1986.
    Big money has changed the face of Washington and its life-style. In a decade or less, several billion dollars of investment funds have poured into Washington to finance scores of new luxury office buildings, top-of-the-line hotels, stylish restaurants, and ten significant new art museums that have put glitter into downtown Washington. Texas money. British money. Dutch money. Plus multimillionaire local developerssuch as Oliver T. Carr and Charles E. Smith are expanding commercial corridors along K Street, the West End, the Potomac Riverfront in Georgetown, and in Virginia.
    With its think tanks, consulting firms, lawyers, and lobbyists, Washington is a natural boomtown in an economy driven by the information revolution. By the mid-1980s, it was bolting ahead so rapidly that more new office space was being opened and leased in the capital each year than in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or Houston. 19 Between 1976 and 1983, thirty-seven new hotels opened. Two glass-box mini-cities of consulting firms sprouted in Crystal City and Rosslyn across the Potomac River, mainly to serve the Pentagon. Spreading political power has been a catalyst for the real estate surge, but a lot of new money flowed to Washington with modern light industry. A dozen high-rise, high-tech mini-cities have sprung up in the capital’s backyard, and in early 1987, Mobil became the first major industrial corporation to choose Washington’s Virginia suburbs for its world headquarters.
    The city of Washington has become zip-code chic for firms eager to display a capital address but anxious to avoid rising rents downtown.
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built twin modernistic towers in Arlington, Virginia, but listed its address as “Box 500, Washington, DC 20044.” The Mariott Hotel Corporation put its world headquarters in suburban Rockville, Maryland, but listed its address at a mythical “Marriott Drive, Washington, DC 20058.”
    Pennsylvania Avenue, the political spine of the city, was once the butt of tart complaints from President Kennedy, who bemoaned the seedy combination of liquor stores, souvenir shops, and vacant lots that he saw on his inaugural ride from Congress to the White House in 1961. Since then, Pennsylvania Avenue has been transformed not only with new parks and promenades but a huge burst of investment. Between $1 billion and $1.5 billion in private capital has gone into its renovation: for rescuing the National Theatre and the old Post Office Building from demolition and reviving them; for giving the National Press Building a $47 million face-lift; for a new $35 million Canadian Embassy; much larger sums for several swanky office-hotel complexes between Sixth and Thirteenth streets, with price tags from $125 million to $200 million apiece: and also for Oliver Can’s elaborately authentic $150 million Beaux Arts restoration of the historic Willard Hotel, where Abraham Lincoln and other presidents awaited their inaugurations.
    “What’s happened to Washington is wealth,” suggested Mabel “Muffy” Brandon, former social secretary to Mrs. Reagan and now animpresario of cultural events and parties for corporations. “We were always known as a city of power. But in the last several years wealth has come. It’s always been here but very discreetly. This has never been a city of conspicuous consumption. But now the wealth is flagrant in the cars people drive, the clothes they wear, what they spend on real