“You guys don’t get it,” broke in Annie. “This isn’t a baseball game. The First Lady doesn’t think that way. She doesn’t worry about her husband’s reelection, any more than she cares whether her husband thinks she looks cute. This is a woman with larger ambitions. She wants to be great. That’s why she’s causing everyone problems.” Annie smiled in that way I remembered—like the most outspoken girl in junior high—at once mischievous and sweet. The panel fell silent. The host said, “I think Annie Baron has the last word on that topic,” and broke for a commercial.

I watched Annie with a mixture of admiration and astonishment. When I left America, shows like this one had been a joke—ponderous old farts sitting around gassing about the news. Annie used to call them “the fatheads.” Now she was one of them, but with a powerful difference. She was smart, young, pretty. She wasn’t like the politicians she covered; she was on a different plane altogether.

Annie’s specialty, in print and on the air, was penetrating the public version of events to offer an inside account. Her magazine column, called Under the Volcano, had become something of a Washington obsession. People would read about a new outbreak of political infighting in the administration and remark, “That’s just like an Annie Baron column.” She had always been a facile writer, ever since her first movie review in the Stanford Daily, but she had gotten by for years on rhetorical tricks. Now, at last, she seemed to have found a worthy subject. She chronicled the life of official Washington as if it were a comedy of manners. She noticed the bags under the president’s eyes and wondered in print what might be keeping him up at night. She observed the fastidious dress of the secretary of state and went off to interview his tailor. She went to the beauty parlor with the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and got her to talk about the trade deficit while she was having her nails done. The pleasure of Annie’s column was that it was always surprising; you never knew what secrets she might pull out of people.

I should explain why I still felt so connected to Annie, after all those years apart. She was a reference point. It was as if she held the other key to the safe deposit box in which the valuables of my life were kept. “Only connect” had always been her line, and she meant it. That was her one requirement or expectation in a relationship. She made me read Howards End when we first started dating in 1978, to make sure I got it.