Look who's hitched! The secret lives of Washington's power couples!(Cover story)

• Author: Frank, T.A.

SOME COUPLES YOU DON'T WANT TO MESS WITH. Maybe they trap you in a corner at parties, or maybe they call each other "Bushie," or maybe the wife is a covert operative at the CIA specializing in weapons of mass destruction. In such cases, particularly the last of these, it's best to keep a prudent distance. Still, in the summer of 2003, anger caused Vice President Dick Cheney to abandon such discretion. The trigger was an op-ed in the New York Times by one Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who described taking a CIA-sponsored trip to Niger in 2002 and debunking claims of Iraqi uranium purchases, only to see the White House ignore the findings and mislead the public about evidence for WMD in Iraq

Cheney did not enjoy the article. Poring over each sentence, the vice president underlined passages and scribbled vexed notes in the margins. "Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us?" he wrote. "Or did his wife send him on a junket?" The "wife" referred to one Valerie Plame, who, Cheney had learned, worked as a WMD specialist at Langley. After discussion with his chief of staff, I. Lewis ("Scooter") Libby, Cheney decided that Libby should go forth and whisper to colleagues and journalists about Valerie possibly having pulled strings for Joe at the CIA to get him a trip to Niger. The old-fashioned nepotism-conflict-of-interest angle looked like a promising sell.

But a curious thing happened on the way from Leakville to the newsroom: not much. Very few journalists bit. A host of plausible reasons for this come to mind. One is that Niger, while unmatched in nomadic camps and Neolithic rock engravings, doesn't exactly suggest a junketeer's paradise. Another is that most reporters, while happy to receive inside information, still have the decency not to out one of our spies. A third is that accusations of spousal favoritism coming from the husband of Lynne Cheney are, to put it gently, a bit rich. (Former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke notes that, on the evening of 9/11, Dick invited Lynne to join staff in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a restricted bunker below the East Wing of the White House, and that she felt comfortable enough to drown out the teleconference of the Counterterrorism Security Group by turning up the volume on CNN.)

The main reason, though, was simply this: Washington has no real quarrel with power couples. Nor does it have a quarrel with power couples whose professional lives occasionally overlap. This also applies to the journalists that the White House wanted to entice with the Plame leak. There was New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who'd once shared a home with the late Les Aspin, at various times a congressman, defense secretary, and Miller source. There was Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus, spouse of Ann Terry Pincus, a onetime director of the Office of Research at the United States Information Agency, a position to which she was appointed by Bill Clinton. There was John Dickerson of Time, married to Anne Dickerson, a onetime news producer who now specializes in media coaching for advocacy groups. And NBC's David Gregory: he's the husband of Beth Wilkinson, general counsel for Fannie Mae; they met when she was prosecuting Timothy McVeigh and Gregory was reporting on the case. And there was Time's Matthew Cooper, married to Mandy Grunwald, onetime media specialist for Bill Clinton and current ad guru for Hillary Clinton. As for Bob Woodward, who'd learned about Plame several weeks earlier, he is married to New Yorker writer Elsa Walsh. If Dick and Scooter hoped to indict Joe and Valerie for the proximity of their professional lives, they might have picked a more promising jury. Only old Robert Novak took the bait, and Novak, like Mikey in the bygone commercial for Life cereal, eats anything.

What Cheney and company seem to have missed is that Washington has changed. Career overlap occurs here because career parity between husbands and wives has become normal rather than exceptional. Not only do accomplished men and women now seek each other out; it's rare that they don't. The power couple, in short, is integral to Washington life.

And two cheers for that. Thousands of Washingtonian power couples--defined here as couples in which both husband and wife attain positions of consequence--now pursue influential, independent careers. Some, like NBC's Andrea Mitchell and former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan, get lots of attention. Some, like Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame (at least until they become famous), get none. Many, like Scooter Libby and Harriet Grant, onetime Democratic staff lawyer for the Senate Judiciary Committee, get something in between. All are evidence of a city that has tossed aside its old sexist dubbiness and replaced it with a new non-sexist dubbiness.

But couples are also a funny thing. When they put their mind to misbehaving, they can, by the nature of their closeness, be especially naughty. Those Macbeths, for instance, did seem so nice at first. Or, to take a more Washingtonian example, when former Congressman Tom DeLay started to get in legal and ethical trouble, one of the problems was that his wife, Christine, had received $115,000 from the Alexander Strategy Group, a lobbying firm, for doing close to nothing. (Christine and DeLay's daughter, Dani, also received a total of $350,304 in political consulting fees and expenses as consultants for her husband's Americans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee.) Then there was DeLay aide...