The Washington bureau into which I settled was a monument to the Mirror’s ambitions. The Times and the Journal had large Washington bureaus, and they were great newspapers, so we would have one, too. It took up a whole floor of one of those elaborately ugly office buildings on lower Connecticut Avenue. The bureau chief’s office might have belonged to the undersecretary of commerce, or the chairman of the Export-Import Bank. It was a vast room, with an enormous cherrywood desk, heavy green drapes and a thick carpet in a luminous shade of blue. There were so many chairs and couches placed about the room that reporters summoned for conferences with Marcus never knew where to sit.

From his office, Marcus could survey the long row of desks along the Connecticut Avenue windows. The Corridor of the Gods, we called it. At these desks sat the grandees of the bureau: Amory Small, who had covered Congress since Carl Albert was Speaker, and still sported the same crew cut he had worn when he joined the bureau in the early 1960s; Noel Rosengarten, the Pentagon correspondent who was always about to land a job with one of the TV networks but never did; Susan Geekas, the White House correspondent, who had covered three presidents and prided herself on never, ever, having attended a White House social event.

The only reporter who had his own office was Arthur Bowman, the chief diplomatic correspondent. It was at the other end of the corridor from the bureau chief’s office, and almost as grand.

The rest of the reporters were arrayed in the interior of the room, back from the windows. One of those banished to the hinterland was my best friend at the paper, George Dirk. Like me, he had started on the Metro desk in New York in 1981, and like me, he had dreamed of going overseas. But it had never happened for him. He had gotten married and had kids, and the arc of his career had turned down. He now worked as an investigative reporter for the Business Today section, producing a steady stream of good stories. But his fortunes had continued to sink at the paper, for reasons that were never clear to me. As a result, George Dirk was consumed with envy for other, more successful reporters—attributing their progress to deceit and double-dealing. He particularly disliked Rosengarten, whom he regarded as a shill for the military-industrial complex. Dirk still liked me, despite my success, but he was visibly upset when I was given a desk along the windows, midway between Marcus’s office and Bowman’s. To Dirk, the fact that I now occupied this prime real estate was evidence of a moral shortcoming on my part.