Benjamin Grove describes the joys and sorrows of covering D.C. and the challenge of moving on

Sunday, March 26, 2006 | 7:01 a.m.

WASHINGTON - I was changing my infant son at 3 a.m. recently, and as I pitched a diaper in the pail I wondered what happens to all those nasty things. I thought: This country needs a high-level waste repository for all my kid's dirty diapers.

I chuckled at my little joke - a reference to the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. Only the Las Vegas Sun's sleep-deprived Washington reporter would think that's funny.

After nearly seven years in this job covering Yucca Mountain, as well as Nevada's five congressional lawmakers and other Nevada news from the nation's capital, this is my last story. My wife and I are moving to Minnesota to be closer to family. My last day was Thursday. It was a strange gig.

One thing Washington reporters learn first is that the "news" and the truth are not the same.

The news here has layers. The first layer gets reported it is what Washington's armies of press handlers distribute to us; it is what the policy makers tell us at press conferences. When reporters have time and inclination, they dig deeper. On occasion we uncover layers that are closer to the truth the full narrative, its context, the motivations of the players, what it means to people outside Washington.

The relationship between reporters and government press officers is a strange dance. There are a few exceptions, but many press officers believe their first job is to make their bosses look good. It is not to tell the public the unvarnished truth. They do not view reporters as a conduit for getting information to the public. Often we are treated as a foil to be engaged and misdirected.

There is so much spinning in Washington that reporters are sometimes stunned by honesty. We write about it as if it is an endangered species ("In shockingly candid remarks today, Sen. So-and-So said ").

One day a few years ago, several reporters chased down former Yucca chief Margaret Chu in an Energy Department hallway after a budget briefing. After a few questions, she told us Yucca wouldn't open until 2012 at the earliest. Of course, we all knew that it likely will be 2015 or later but that was the first time anyone at the department had acknowledged that the department's 2010 target date had slipped.

Reporters looked at each other in disbelief, and wondered aloud: Why would she tell the truth like that? It wasn't that Chu was dishonest, but she was a government bureaucrat and they rarely answer tough questions directly.

Chu announced her resignation three days later.

I was always interested in the tales of back room maneuvering. Back before Congress voted once and for all on Yucca Mountain, I heard a story I could never get anyone to talk about on the record. The story was about a senator who was struggling to get enough votes for a bill he introduced. An aide asked if he had Sen. Harry Reid's support. The senator said he did he had played his "Yucca card," promising Reid he'd vote against Yucca if Reid would support his bill.

I often thought of that grammar school lesson about how a bill becomes a law. Two decades later, I saw that lawmakers do not vote based solely on an issue's merits. They also act based on the horse-trading deals they made, party pressure, how their vote might "play" in the media, and special interest influence.

If that sounds cynical, I would add this: Despite the partisan politicking and the scandals, most lawmakers are good people.

Most get into public service for the right reasons.

But as the years go by, some get distracted by fundraising, partisan battles, committee seniority. They get distracted by attention and power. They start talking like politicians. They overuse words like vetted, impact, panacea, circumspect, and phrases like "in the field," "on the ground," "moving forward," "forward-leaning."

Some lawmakers stay truer to themselves than others.

In my humble opinion, the least phony of the Nevada lawmakers is Rep. Shelley Berkley. She speaks her mind more than most.

Rep. Jim Gibbons was the stiffest politician. But he could be genuine. He once told me about how he had tried to comfort his son Jimmy during the anthrax scare in Washington. He dropped that TV-anchorman voice and spoke with tenderness.

Of Nevada's five lawmakers in Congress, I knew Rep. Jon Porter least well. Porter always struck me as a good guy who was trying to do good work in Congress, but who was always a little preoccupied with impressing party leaders.

Sen. John Ensign was straightforward whenever I talked to him, and clearly he's a charismatic rising GOP star in the Senate. But his aides didn't seem to like him talking to the media. He had the most secretive office.

It's hard to sum up Harry Reid. He sent me several hand-written notes over the years, including a sympathy card after my grandma died. It struck me as both the move of a savvy politician and a sincere gesture.

What's most interesting about Reid, of course, is not who he is and where he is from (few in Washington have been spared his Searchlight spiel). The most interesting question is: Where is the Minority Leader taking the Democratic Party?

Certain memories of working in Washington will stick with me.

Just a month after Sept. 11, I wrote about running a marathon that snaked past the burned out side of the Pentagon. Runners wept.

After the Senate anthrax scare, I had my nasal passages swabbed.

I tailed protesters in the blazing August heat through the streets of Philadelphia during the 2000 Republican convention, then stood in the bitter cold outside the U.S. Supreme Court where justices were deciding the fate of the presidential election.

And I took a ride with Berkley in a black sedan that was racing to the Capitol for a vote. I interviewed her as we lurched around in the backseat. Police stopped us for going the wrong way on a one-way and the driver and cop exchanged tense words. Berkley never stopped talking. Never even paused.

I remember meeting President Clinton, looking bone-weary in the final days of his second term.

But the people who really stand out to me did not have fancy titles.

When the International Spy Museum opened here in 2002, I toured it with a retired real-life spy. He was soft-spoken, unassuming - nothing like the James Bond imaginings of Hollywood. He talked about the personality traits of a spy the willingness to take huge risks for no credit, not even an occasional pat on the back. He talked about some narrow scrapes during his years in North Africa, South America and Europe.

When we parted I shook his hand. He was missing a finger.

I am always amazed by people who talk to the media about the loss of a loved one. I talked to the gracious parents of 21-year-old Army Ranger and Boulder City High graduate Matthew Commons just a few hours after they buried their son at Arlington National Cemetery. He was killed in Afghanistan.

"I really respected my son and to hear him say, 'I want to be a teacher like you,' that's a prideful experience," Greg Commons told me. His mother, Patricia Marek, managed to share a few laughs and warm memories after the funeral. "At some point the reality will hit and I will realize that I don't have him to talk to, that I won't have my best friend anymore," Marek said.

The biggest news event of my time here, of course, came on Sept. 11, 2001.

Minutes after Flight 77 plunged into the Pentagon, I rushed to the Capitol to track down Nevada's lawmakers, and I ran into a friend who said it was rumored more planes could crash perhaps on Capitol Hill. In a city that often feels detached from reality, that moment was truly unreal.

Lawmakers and their staffs had evacuated their office buildings. Congressional aides and a few lawmakers shuffled aimlessly in the park north of the Capitol, fruitlessly trying to make cell phone calls that jammed networks couldn't process. Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said, "America is going to be changed forever."

I tried to take the Metro train back to my office, but the station was closed. Traffic gridlocked. Sirens wailed. I walked 14 blocks to my office and wrote a story on deadline that reported that Nevada's lawmakers had evacuated their offices and were safe. But nobody in Washington felt that way.

Since 1999, I have watched Nevada issues ebb and flow in Washington federal money issues, land issues, gaming issues.

But one issue Yucca Mountain never goes away.

I spent countless hours every year in Yucca meetings, covering panels with names like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste, where slow-tongued, gray-haired scientists and policy eggheads pored over Yucca's most obscure details.

To spice things up I hit the road. I spent a few days driving through New Jersey with Yucca critic Kevin Kamps, who was hauling a mock nuclear waste container with an SUV and preaching the dangers of waste shipping. On other assignments I visited nuclear power plants to better tell the industry's side of the story.

I see the nuclear industry's side: Congress promised to haul waste away to Yucca beginning in 1998, then reneged on the contract - the federal government broke its promise. Industry officials with impressive scientific backgrounds believe research proves Yucca is a good site for a national nuclear waste dump.

But I see Nevada's point: Humankind has never tried to store so much of something so dangerous for so long how can it be safe? I am highly skeptical of big-ticket Energy Department projects. Many fail. A Yucca failure would be a spectacular one.

As I get older, what I may remember most about my years at the Sun will be that it was the job I had when I was a young man. It was the job I had when I lost a beloved grandmother, a good dog, and, in a very strange day, my appendix during emergency surgery.

I was working for the Sun when my mom successfully battled cancer, and when my sister joined the Peace Corps in Bolivia.

It was the job I had when I met my wife. I started at the Sun in 1998 in Las Vegas, as the education reporter. Not long after, city hall reporter Denise Cardinal and I skipped out early one Friday afternoon and went pool hopping at the Flamingo. The rest is history.

Now we have a son named for the late Sun Executive Editor Mike O'Callaghan. We're calling him Cal for now. It's a big name to grow into.

If I could sound one final note in this little swan song it would be to thank readers who sent me feedback over the years. I appreciated that even the e-mails that told me to stick it. Other readers corrected my syntax and grammar.

Because of them I will never again use the logic-defying phrases "endless columns of data" or "docked off the coast."

I often ended e-mail responses to those folks with the same phrase:

Thanks for reading.

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