Reporters: the new Washington elite.

• Author: Hays, Charlotte

Thumbing through his engagement book, Los Angeles Times Bureau Chief Jack Nelson surveys an impressive array of entries--a gala affair for King Fahd, dinner at the Canadian Embassy, U.S. News and World Report's party for retiring Editor Marvin Stone, cocktails for the Chinese ambassador, and several movie screenings. "Spring is the worst time of year," complains Nelson. "You could just look at your schedule and see that you had too much to do. There were about eight black-tie things."

Nelson is not unique. He represents a pervasive phenomenon on the Washington scene: the Socialite Journalist. Washington editors, and even reporters, enjoy a status that would shock their counterparts in Cleveland or Chicago; no party today is complete without its representatives from the media. "When we're putting together a guest list," says Betsey Weltner, a publicist with Gray and Company, the public relations firm, "including a journalist is just as important as including a diplomat or a Cabinet member."

"We invite jobs, not people as individuals," admits Sandra Gottlieb, the socially savvy wife of that Canadian ambassador. Asked for a list of status positions, Mrs. Gottlieb ticks off the editor of The Washington Post, a Supreme Court Justice, the bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, and a vague category called "opinion makers."

Ambassador and Mrs. Gottlieb frequently entertain Meg Greenfield, the Joseph Krafts, the Tom Bradens, the James Restons, and Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn. A writer and Post columnist herself, Mrs. Gottlieb also gives less official "smart lady lunches." Women's Wear Daily's Susan Watters, Abigail McCarthy, Barbara Matusow (Mrs. Jack Nelson) and Washington Weekly Publisher Joan Bingham have been to smart lady lunches.

Journalists in Washington have become what bankers are in Pittsburgh or Tulsa: the straws that stir the drink. "Washington is fundamentally like Hollywood," says Richard Cohen, a Post columnist who is himself something of a "catch." "It doesn't make steel, and it doesn't make computers, and it doesn't deal in high finance." Washington makes news, and the life goal of the powerful here is that others think well of them. For this to occur, the press must think well of them first.

Ali Bengelloun, Ambassador of Morocco, recalled for the Washington Journalism Review how he stopped by The Washington Post to visit Executive Editor Ben Bradlee immediately after presenting his credentials to President Carter. "I consider Bradlee a personality who plays a big role in Washington," Bengelloun explained. And he added, "I consider it very important to have journalists to my home, just as I would want to meet a member of the Cabinet face to face." Tell that to a journalist often enough, and he'll start to believe it's true.

In a city where the elected powers come and go, the press has become a part of the permanent social establishment, valued for its store of lore and wisdom. More than one new senator or Cabinet secretary has huddled with a veteran pundit to find out how to deal with the Appropriations Committee chairman or where the bodies are buried at State. Journalists, for their part, scrutinize a new administration a little the way the denizens of Palm Beach size up the family that bought the mansion down the drive. In contrast to the permanent pillars of Washington journalism, says Mrs. Gottlieb, "A Mr. Secretary today is a Mr. Has-Been tomorrow."

Socializing with the Washington media becomes a priority even for the very highest. President Jimmy Carter, for example, showed up for the 1980 opening of the L.A. Times's new bureau on I Street. Nelson, who knew Carter when he was a reporter with the Atlanta Constitution, sees nothing extraordinary about the president of the United States stopping by a newspaper party. "I don't see any reason why we shouldn't consider ourselves on equal footing with those we cover," he says.

All of this sounds a bit strange if you still think of journalists as the hard-boiled types who do most of their socializing in bars. It's equally curious to a journalist from another country. Christopher Hitchens, the British-born correspondent for Nation magazine, says, "If you said in London, 'You must come to dinner. i've got the features editor of the Observer,' everybody would laugh."

New Deal seduction

Asked to check her guest list, Polly Fritchey, wife of columnist Clayton Fritchey and one of Georgetown's leading hostesses, finds that about half of the people at her last party were journalists. Would the press have figured so prominently on such a guest list 20 years ago? "Oh, God, no!" exclaims Hugh Sidey, the columnist and Washington bureau chief emiritus of Time. "It amazes me even today."

When sidey came to Washington during the Eisenhower years, the social life of reporters here--even the relatively privileged ones at Time--was far more modest than today. "We didn't make much money, and I lived in a small apartment on Pook's Hill with my wife and child," recalls Sidey, who wrote books on the weekend to help make ends meet. He donned white tie for the first time on his life for the second Eisenhower inaugural, but he was totally unfamiliar with the capital's social elite. "I whispered to somebody, 'Who's that very handsome woman,'" he recalls. "It was Mrs...