The nicest thing about this little city was that I could walk to work. It took about fifteen minutes, when there was no snow, and afforded a passage through the different compartments of Washington. I would leave my apartment on California Street and set off through the comfortable old-money neighborhood of Kalorama. Several dozen of the city’s leading diplomats resided here. The French ambassador lived in a mansion on Kalorama Road that backed onto the expanse of Rock Creek Park; it is said that when Charles de Gaulle visited once, he looked out from the terrace over the hundreds of acres of woodlands, which he assumed to be the property of France, and congratulated his host: “You have done well, my ambassador.” The Syrian ambassador’s residence on Wyoming Street was a different story entirely. It was small and dilapidated, with a big fence and a big flag and little else to recommend it. Somehow they had managed to bring the ambiance of official Damascus to Washington.

I would walk east from my building to Connecticut Avenue and the curved white façade of the Washington Hilton, famous, for those who cared, as the place where John Hinckley shot and almost killed Ronald Reagan. As Connecticut Avenue sloped south toward the White House, the urban landscape would quickly become more exotic: a strip joint on the corner of Florida Avenue; a boutique catering to leather fetishists another block down; a gay bookstore; the local headquarters of the Church of Scientology; and every few doors, a coffee bar to feed the city’s caffeine addiction. Nearing Dupont Circle, I would see the signs of the city’s urban pathology: homeless junkies and winos with their hands outstretched, even on the coldest days of winter; clusters of unemployed men sitting in the park, doing nothing, every day of the year; inhabitants of the city’s underground economy—black men dressed in bicycle shorts, Latino men in construction boots and overalls. That was the shock, coming home from abroad: the misery and disarray of urban America. In the decade I had been away something in the fabric of the country had dissolved. America wasn’t one country anymore—it was two, or a dozen, or a thousand. The extremes of wealth and color and caste felt more like Cairo or Johannesburg than any American city I remembered.