Can Trump Drain the ‘Swamp?’

I was born in Washington, D.C. in 1944 and we lived in the Northwest part of the city from 1950 until Dad took a job in New York, and we moved out of D.C. in 1956.

Every Summer we would rent a house in the mountains in Pennsylvania near Gettysburg or go out to Rehoboth and take a house at the beach. One summer we tried something different and rented a beach house on Chincoteague Island off the Virginia coast. My only regret is that every morning I would take a walk on the surf looking for a wild horse named Misty, but he never showed up.

The reason we never spent the Summer in Washington during those years was because it was just too goddamn hot. And this was before the Salk vaccine, and it was believed that sweating too much and then not lying down to cool off could provoke the appearance of that dread disease.

I made my first return trip from New York to D.C. in July of 1962 or 1963. And the first thing that happened when I got off the train in Union Station was that as I walked from the train into the terminal, I was hit with a blast of cold air.

Washington became an air-conditioned metropolis in the mid-1950’s, a time when we had a Republican President named Dwight David Eisenhower, a.k.a., Ike. Before every Federal building was cooled, the government shut down on Memorial Day and re-opened around Labor Day.