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Tom Wolfe's Washington Post

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"In such fashionable districts as Georgetown and Chevy Chase, the correct telephone exchange (FEderal or OLiver) has been one of the symbols of status."

On the lobbyists: "The [trade] associations' marble-slick buildings are a tip-off to their new roles. They still send out lobbyists who, in a crisis, can flash on a 150-watt smile or shake hands like a football captain at a reunion. But they consider that a faintly uncouth phase of their operations. Today they are industry's status seekers in the broadest sense."

* * *

Also there for anyone to see, but strangely unobserved until many years later, was Wolfe's political conservatism. In an otherwise straightforward report about a thrifty bureaucrat, he bemoaned "the tremendous expansion of the government."

And in a review of C. Wright Mills's book on the Cuban revolution, Wolfe dismissed the noted sociologist as one of a number of "aging leftwing American intellectuals" who welcomed Fidel Castro's revolution "like a massive dose of Geritol."

James.Rosen@foxnews.com

James Rosen is a Washington correspondent for Fox News. Lee Ross, a graduate student at George Washington University, contributed research for this article.

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