On Washingtonian, I wrote a quick post about “What You Should Know About Jim Comey” and then a much longer adaptation of part of my book “Threat Matrix” that focused on Comey’s background, his role in the March 2004 hospital incident, and his friendship with Bob Mueller: “That dramatic week had united the two men—both career public servants—deepening a friendship forged in the crucible of the highest levels of the national security apparatus after the 9/11 attacks.”

Washingtonian

I’m especially proud of the winning personality profile, “The Passion of John Wojnowski,” looking at a well-known Washington figure who holds a lonely vigil outside the Vatican embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. Our contributing editor Ariel Sabar brought a beautiful style to it and did some impressive reporting to boot.

I celebrated the awards with a late-night trip to Waffle House (right), with friends from 5280 and D Magazine, and we’ll have a big celebration at the magazine this week too.

The big wins at CRMA come right on the heels of our Beard Award nomination for food coverage, also the first time that the magazine has been nominated for a Beard Award. While I’ve been become convinced that not winning awards isn’t necessarily a sign that you’re not on the right track, winning awards like these is certainly a sign of improvement and that we’re on the right track as a publication.

UPDATE JUNE 6TH: Rounding out this exciting spring, Rachel Manteuffel just won the Livingston Award for National Reporting for her Washingtonian article, “The Things They Leave Behind.”  The Livingston, which honors the best writing and reporting by journalists under 35, is the largest all-media, general reporting prize in American journalism.

The FBI’s official stationary carries the exact address of its headquarters, 935 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, as if one could wander right by the angular, concrete, eleven-story monstrosity without noticing the J. Edgar Hoover Building. The aging block-sized headquarters, named by President Nixon after Hoover’s funeral on May 4, 1972, and officially opened in 1975, is one of the best examples of the blessedly brief Brutalist era of architecture—which if one stops to analyze that sentence means that the building is recognized by experts as uniquely and especially ugly.

Today, the building is nearing the end of its lifespan and not even historical preservation experts want to save it. The Bureau’s needs have shifted too—digital records have negated the need for floor-upon-floor of fingerprint files and the war on terrorism has increased headquarters staff is today scattered across 21 annexes in the DC area. The thousands of Hoover Building staff who do spend their days wandering its depressingly drab corridors certainly would love a fresh start somewhere else, a building filled with natural light and a whole lot less linoleum. Planners have estimated that selling or trading the land to a private developer, one of the largest parcels between Capitol Hill on one end and the White House at the other, could net close to $900 million—enough for the cash-strapped government to build a huge modern, 55-acre complex somewhere in the suburbs. In the years since the Oklahoma City bombing, the FBI has come to worry too that its current building is too close to neighboring streets and a new suburban location would offer greater “setbacks” and physical security; similar security concerns have kept its once-popular public tour closed since 9/11.

For jurisdictions near DC, landing the new FBI headquarters has become the largest economic development gem in years; Alexandria and Fairfax, Virginia, to the south and west and Maryland’s Montgomery and Prince Georges counties to the north and east are now all competing for the future billion-dollar building project and the workers, still years away. A January presentation by the General Services Administration, the government’s real estate agency, drew more than 350 people and spilled over into an overflow room. Each jurisdiction is touting their access to public transit and proximity to major highways, yet nearly all the locations under consideration are 45-minutes or even an hour away in Washington’s notorious traffic from the downtown.

The DC suburbs are already filled with hidden spy complexes; the CIA Headquarters at Langley, Virginia, and the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, are just glimpsed from neighboring roads. The unremarked headquarters of the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Counterterrorism Center, and other covert operations are barely known even to their own suburban neighbors.

The FBI, though, is different. We shouldn’t want to hide our chief law enforcement agency away in the suburbs. Since the 1970s, it has stood symbolically on DC’s most important street under the watchful eye of the White House, Congress, and the public. It’s not supposed to be a hidden spy agency; it’s meant to be a publically-accountable law enforcement agency, front and center as a guardian of our democracy.

Ensuring accountability and trust in its leadership means it must be answerable to the public; it should symbolically exist in the public eye, its building open to the visiting public, its officials close to the oversight of Congress, the Justice Department, and the White House. On its best days, the FBI stands as the primary protector of our nation’s security and liberties—but on its darkest days, it has also been one of the greatest threats to our civil liberties. Journalists and congressional staff know it’s hard enough as is to get information out of the Hoover Building today, let alone when its staff is someday isolated in some location outside the 495 Beltway.

There’s a more existential question for the federal government wrapped up in the FBI relocation debate too: How much government should actually be located in our capital? And how accessible should it be? The Department of Justice, directly across Pennsylvania Avenue from the Hoover Building, is even closer to neighboring streets than the FBI headquarters. Ditto for the IRS headquarters up the street. As their New Deal-era buildings age, will each of them relocate in the years ahead to suburban office parks to achieve the required war-on-terror “setbacks” too? What other agencies will soon claim “security needs” as part of an effort to gain nicer offices in leafy, university-like campuses?

In the wake of the September attack on our Benghazi consulate, diplomats have lamented the modern security requirements of our overseas embassies. Centrally-located embassies in foreign capitals—what once were inviting, urban temples of American democracy—have been replaced in recent years with fortress-like suburban compounds that discourage visitors and isolate our diplomats even in the capitals of some of our friendliest allies. We shouldn’t now make the same mistake in our own capital.

In the last decade, navigating around DC government buildings that can’t relocate—like the White House and the Capitol—has become a maze of closed streets, bollards, and jersey barriers. The Supreme Court in 2010 closed for the first time the bronze doors at the top of its iconic steps in the name of security. In a republican democracy, we shouldn’t fortify our government right out of the capital city—or the public out of the capital. Being located in the capital should be a sign of importance and respect, whereas in recent years the government seems to have switched to a default of moving offices out of the downtown to the suburbs.

Replacing the Hoover Building is undoubtedly necessary, but requiring the new FBI headquarters to remain in downtown DC should be a critical step towards ensuring that our government operates in public view. That’s an achievable goal. Indeed, two other top federal law enforcement agencies—ICE and the ATF—have both found and built in the last decade new headquarters locations within blocks of where the FBI is today. The FBI is only asking for the same space it has now—actually less, just better utilized: The Hoover Building today is 2.4 million square feet and developers have been told the new headquarters should be just 2.1 million. The answer should be to rebuild the FBI where it is on Pennsylvania Avenue, which would be disruptive in the short-term but an important sign for the overly security-conscious capital, or to move to one of several sites within the District that DC Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton has identified could work for the new headquarters.

If we can’t keep our nation’s primary domestic security agency safely in the capital, what can we keep safe in Washington?

As I gear up for my next book, I also did a lot of research reading, so this list represents for me actually a relatively high percentage of the non-required reading I did in 2012. And there were a handful of fiction books that I really enjoyed: Kurt Anderson’s True Believers really got under my skin and made me think; Richard Ford’s Canada was a great read over Christmas, and the lyrical The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell kept me company for a round-the-world journey back from India.

Without further ado:

1) An Economist Gets Lunch, by Tyler Cowen :: No book did more to improve my life in 2012 than this treatise on eating by a George Mason economist and food lover. Cowen’s approach is that we have a limited number of meals on earth and that each meal should bring the maximum possible enjoyment—a bad meal is an unnecessary negation of life’s pleasures. He provided a lot of tips in the book about how to think about eating, how to explore, range widely cuisine-wise, and generally broaden your eating horizons. I tried very hard to follow his advice—and it opened up untold wonders and happiness for me in 2012: Exploring new suburban ethnic restaurants on a random weekday, trying cuisines I’d never eaten before, and ordering dishes that I’d never consider eating before (one of his recommendations is, at a good restaurant, order the least appetizing-sounding item on the menu because it’s probably the one the chef has put the most work into making taste good).

2) Washington: A Life, by Ron Chernow :: This massive Pulitzer-winning cradle-to-grave biography of George Washington has been on my shelf for years; I finally took a long weekend at Peacham this summer to read it straight through. He makes a very convincing case that Washington is every bit as impressive and worthy of our nation’s hero worship as his legend holds him to be. Coupled with two trips I made to Mount Vernon last summer and fall, Chernow’s book really helped life Washington back into my life and got me interested in the early history of DC—and inspired more than one editor’s letter in the magazine.

3) The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro :: The latest installment of his now four-and-will-be-five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, Caro continues his sui generis examination of what made LBJ LBJ. This volume only covers a few years, the 1960 campaign and his time as vice president, ending just a few months after Kennedy’s assassination, but Caro traces Johnson’s careful and calculating use of power through a turbulent time. The vice presidential period is particularly fascinating, as Caro examines how LBJ—who craved power innately—dealt with the powerlessness that his post presented him after his years as Senate majority leader.

4) The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe :: As the US saw its last space shuttle grounded for good, I went back to read Wolfe’s original classic about the space age and the first crop of astronauts. It’s a book that I’ve wanted to read for probably twenty years—I remember growing up my parents’ copy of the book sat on the bookshelf over our computer and I was intrigued by it from a very early age, although obviously it took me a very long time to actually read it. It didn’t disappoint; Wolfe’s language just crackles, bringing to life the drama and the human stories behind the early test pilots and astronaut program.

5) Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power by David Sanger, and The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era by Michael Grunwald :: These two books, one by a New York Times reporter and one by a Time correspondent, were the best things written about the Obama administration—both arguing, Sanger on the foreign policy front and Grunwald on the domestic policy front, that the Obama administration actually accomplished a great deal in its first term. Sanger’s insights into China and particularly Iran underscored how important smart, in-depth reporting can be, and Grunwald on energy and health care was the latest in the seemingly-ever-growing pile of evidence of how shoddy day-to-day journalism is today. Grunwald argues that effectively we believe about the stimulus and TARP is wrong—that it was highly effective and has in certain ways fundamentally altered the path of the nation’s economic future in positive ways.

6) The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach :: Yes, I’ll stipulate this book is, like Jonathan Franzen, effectively “chick lit for smart people” but geez was it a fun read. The first hundred pages or so really made me as a professional writer deeply jealous of his writing ability, although I think the second half of the book was weaker and the ending a bit far-fetched. Still an entertaining weekend read.

7) The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers :: I really like novella-length books and try to read a couple every year, and I’ll often end up giving them as Christmas gifts, as in past years I’ve done with Mystery Guest and Sense of an Ending. This year, in a twist, I got Yellow Birds as a Christmas gift, and read it quickly over the holidays. The story of two soldiers and their friendship in training and then in Iraq, it was quite moving—and had a very unexpected ending, unfolding in a way much darker and much more emotionally than one expects from the early pages.

8. Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez :: The best thriller I read in 2012, this science-fiction-as-fact novel focuses on what happens when drones and robotic-killing machines begin to migrate—as they inevitably will—back to the United States. Our military monopoly on armed drones won’t last too much longer and you’re already beginning to see a push for private sector and law enforcement drones domestically. Suarez’s techno-thriller really brought the threat home.

9) The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy; Ike’s Bluff by Evan Thomas :: Looking back at this list, I evidently read a lot of presidential biographies this year. Much like Chernow and LBJ, these two books both argue for a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the presidency in the latter half of the 20th Century. Gibbs and Duffy’s book far exceeded my expectations—they trace the relationships between the modern living presidents and ex-presidents, intertwining their stories in a way that highlights just how exclusive their “club” truly is and how there are deep friendships and kindnesses hidden far from the political spotlight. Similarly, Thomas’s biography of Ike exposes him as a much more cunning and successful president as he tends to be portrayed—nothing like the gentile, disconnected golfer his reputation seems to be. Thomas argues that we were lucky to have Ike as president at the dawn of the nuclear Cold War because perhaps only he was strong enough to threaten nuclear war while restraining the military sufficiently from actually going to nuclear war.

10) The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough :: The history of the Panama Canal, as told as masterfully as McCullough tells every topic he tackles, this book traces both the abandoned French attempt to build the canal and then the successful American attempt. I had known nothing of the French expedition before diving into McCullough’s book; beyond that, though, we have an oddly large assortment of Panama Canal memorabilia in our apartment, and it was fun to look at the maps and pictures we have and match them up with the book’s tales.

[Check here for my past lists: 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2004.]

In Courts as Conversations: An Argument for Increased Engagement by Court Leaders, social media expert Garrett Graff explains the true significance of the arrival of social media as it alters the expectations and habits of American society. He advises state court leaders that they “must not only learn how to communicate with new tools; they must also envision new means of judicial engagement with the public through the new social media that can further advance the legitimacy of courts in a democratic society.”

If you’re interested in the judiciary, I hope you’ll give it a read and let me know what you think. I was invited last year to speak to the national conference of chief justices in Atlanta and had a fun exchange with them about how the courts are falling behind the other two branches of government in adopting and embracing new technologies.

It would be easy to dismiss all of this as political silliness were it not for one troubling fact: Sometimes the way a president connects with critters can affect the way voters relate to him.

“Presidents and their pets have a long and storied history,” says Garrett Graff, a goldfish owner and editor-in-chief at Washingtonian magazine. His theory about why voters take such an interest in such matters: “Most of us don’t ‘get’ Middle East oil politics, and the rise and fall of the G.D.P., but we can ‘get’ if you connect with a dog or you connect with a cat.”

This year I read widely as I normally do, but thanks to a lot of travel I did this year, I had the time and space to develop a theme in my reading: Big, enormous epic tomes that I could never read but for some dedicated long-haul flights. More than half of these books would be a month of normal reading on their own, 600- to 800-page doorstops, that I was able to tackle while I was out promoting my own 600-page doorstop of a book.

Here’s to the list:

1) The Secret Pilgrim by John Le Carre :: I read more than a dozen Le Carre novels this year, including the entire Karla trilogy, and so was unexpectedly rewarded by all of that reading when I got to Secret Pilgrim, which is in essence a spy’s memoir, telling tales, lessons, and rules of intelligence gathering to a new crop of agents, as he narrates many of Le Carre’s other tales and characters.

2) Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961 by Paul Hendrickson :: Early on in this masterful book, Hendrickson writes that his aim is “to lock together the words ‘Hemingway’ and ‘boat’ in the way that the locked-together and equally American words ‘DiMaggio’ and ‘bat’ or ‘Satchmo’ and ‘horn’ will quickly mean something in the minds of most people, at least of a certain age.” He succeeded impressively. He accomplished something truly masterful—what, I can say with all writerly envy, is the hope of any serious writer starting out: A project that will stand forever and can be read for years and years to come by generations yet unborn. It reminds me in richness, not just in related subject matter, of A. Scott Berg’s biography of Max Perkins, Editor of Genius, which nearly 40 years after its publication is still a masterful work of nonfiction, rich in personality, and densely packed. Rich, textured, and savory, a fulfilling meal not to be rushed or half-tackled, a project of such ambitious scope and expressing such a depth of knowledge as to overwhelm the reader with its sheer virtuosity. It’s reading works like his that I wish my reading comprehension (and retention) was better—reading it I know I won’t retain anything close to the amount that I wish I would. I read it nonstop on the cross-country Friday flight home, then read it much of following day, and finally finished it Sunday afternoon in an intellectual feast unsurpassed in the last year of my reading.

3) 1861 by Adam Goodheart :: My near life-long fascination with the Civil War shows no sign of slowing down, yet I’m running out of books that seem totally new. Most seem at this point to be highly specific niche books, but Goodheart’s history, published to mark the 150^th anniversary of the start of the war this year, was surprisingly fresh—he argues that 1861 was not just beginning of the war,  nor merely another year, but an idea, much like 1776 was in the United States. With remarkably gripping and detailed portraits and scenes, he told the story of that tumultuous year through a series of individuals and their decisions. Also this year I read Lincoln: A Novel by Gore Vidal, which I finally tackled during a swing to the Pacific Northwest this summer, and really enjoyed it. A great true tale told as fiction.

7) Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick :: For the second year in a row, there’s a book by Remnick on my list, amusing only because Remnick actually has written only four books. I spent much of this year reading books on Russian history, as part of some initial research for my next book project, and so turned to Remnick’s classic of the fall of the Soviet Union early on in my studies. I also read this year David Hoffman’s Dead Hand, another great book on Russia—specifically on the Cold War and the multi-decade nuclear showdown between the U.S. and the Soviet Union—by another Post alum.

8.) Defection of AJ Lewinter by Robert Littell :: This is a small book, a tight darkly comic tale of a specific episode in the Cold War by the author of the majestic, sweeping novel of the CIA, The Company, which was a great read. Speaking of variations on an author’s theme, I read David Ignatius’s Sun King, which is the one novel of his that’s not a thriller, and which turned out to be a great, cutting, comic tale of Washington life.

9) Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement by David Brooks :: I’ve gone hot and cold on Brooks’s books before—I thought Bobos in Paradise was fantastic while I couldn’t even finish On Paradise Drive—so I wasn’t sure what to expect as I got into this quite-hyped new book. It turned out to be great, a wonderfully and imaginatively told story of how much of our life’s destiny and thinking is beyond our conscious control. The runner-up in the “imaginative life biography” category would have to be Bill Bryon’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life, which I’ve listened to on audiobook over two long car rides—he’s always been my preferred audiobook accompaniment for car rides—which tells the history of modern life through stories about each room of his house in England: The kitchen, the bathroom, the front porch, the telephone, and so on. The short version: Life was much more Hobbesian much more recently than I would have thought.

10) The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World  by Daniel Yergin. A follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of oil, “The Prize,” expands his scope to include the general global energy picture and is in that respect every bit as interesting as one would expect. What surprised me, though, was that the first two parts of the book, taken together, are among the most provocative and lucid histories of the last decade that I’ve read anywhere. The other amazing book on recent history I read this year was Bethany McLean’s and Joe Nocerra’s All the Devils Are Here, about the financial crisis.

[Check here for my past lists: 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2004.]

To be on the top 10 list for current affairs with Peter Bergen and Francis Fukuyama is pretty cool, as is appearing on the broader list with some of my favorite books of the year—like David Brooks’s Social Animal and Adam Goodheart’s 1861.

“The Threat Matrix” will be out in paperback in a few weeks, with an updated epilogue, if you’d like to preorder from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Politics & Prose.

In large measure, this is, as author Garrett Graff puts it, the story of the “Muellerization” of the FBI after Robert Mueller took the Bureau’s reins one week before 9/11…. Graff has adopted an interesting approach: This is not a formal history of the Bureau, which might have detailed footnotes, though for perspective he includes considerable historical background with general references….

It was not all smooth going as the challenges implementing the Patriot Act illustrate, (503) but Graff shows that progress was continuous and positive, and the Bureau of today bears little resemblance to Hoover’s organization. Along the way, Graff does more than reprise challenging Bureau cases. He includes biographical details about special agents and illuminates the often frustrating bureaucratic culture in which they operate. The John O’Neill tragedy—he died in the South Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11—is one instance. Another is the case of Coleen Rowley, the whistle-blowing special agent from Minneapolis, who wrote a memo after 9/11 that attacked “Mueller and other Bureau leaders for pre-9/11 failures.” While its accuracy was not challenged, she had embarrassed the Bureau, an act that violated “the number one precept of the FBI.” Her retirement followed. (417) A chapter on operations in the Iraq war zone includes the engrossing story of George Piro, whose interrogation of Saddam Hussein illustrated the Bureau’s approach to dealing with high-value enemy targets….

The Threat Matrix is based on hundreds of interviews Graff conducted throughout the government and the New York Police Department, plus various books and articles. Graff admits he has recreated some conversations, an increasingly common practice in such histories. The result, nevertheless, is a well-told story and a reading pleasure. J. Edgar Hoover would be proud of the result.