Photograph by Matthew Worden

Russert accepts the "Washingtonian of the Year" award.

In 2004, The Washingtonian honored NBC's Tim Russert as a "Washingtonian of the Year." Russert died Friday after suffering a heart attack at the NBC bureau. The award citation follows below:

TIM RUSSERT

The kids of the Boys & Girls Clubs knew they'd be winners no matter who won the presidential election. That's because Tim Russert, moderator of NBC's Meet the Press, got Washington's most partisan spouses, Republican Mary Matalin and Democrat James Carville, to bet $1,000 on the outcome. The loser had to write a check to the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Washington.

Last year Russert encouraged Senators George Allen and Jon Corzine to make a similar bet on the air. Before that, Russert challenged the chairs of the national parties. Each bet was another win for the kids of the DC area.

Russert got involved with the clubs nine years ago, when they asked him to emcee their annual congressional dinner. But he had known about their work for years.

"My father was in a boys' club in the 1930s in south Buffalo," he says. "It's an organization where you can see firsthand results. You know you've changed someone's life."

Russert has emceed nine annual dinners and announced that he'll give $100,000 from the sales of his book Big Russ & Me to the clubs. When he won $20,000 on Jeopardy!, that check also went to the clubs.

"Last year we reached our $1-million fundraising goal and we absorbed the Metropolitan Police Boys & Girls Clubs," Russert says. "The best part is when the kids come back from college and talk about what they did. They want to come home and sponsor a kid."

"Tim brings tears to our eyes when he speaks so lovingly about his father or so painfully of the plight of our children," says Pat Shannon, president of the clubs. "He makes us laugh at his Yogi Berra stories, and he lifts us up with his donations. It doesn't get any better than Tim Russert."

By Leslie Milk

Sharon Does DC: Here's What Happens When a Sexy Hollywood Star Comes to Washington To Talk About Breast Cancer

"What happened? Did you get sucked into it?"
--Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct

Sharon stone's instinct was to help a good cause. The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation's instinct was to use the sexy blonde actress to increase public awareness of breast cancer. But when Stone came here to be the celebrity chair for the foundation's Washington Race for the Cure, things didn't go as either the actress or the organizers had planned.

The Race for the Cure is the biggest fundraiser nationwide for breast-cancer research. The race is actually many 5K races run in cities all over the country. But it is the Washington race that has had the high profile since it started six years ago. During the Bush administration, Marilyn Quayle adopted the race as her personal cause. Former White House social secretary Gretchen Posten handled the organization of the race while she was dying of breast cancer. Quayle and Posten recruited heavy hitters from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue and the media who cover them.
For the past three years, Vice President Al Gore and wife Tipper have co-chaired the event. But while Al Gore has great legs, race organizers knew a Veep in shorts doesn't attract enough attention. The Marine Corps Marathon had Oprah. The Race for the Cure needed a headliner.

Women Can't Fight

By James Webb

"Your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable—it is to win wars," Douglas MacArthur told the 1962 West Point class. In this story, a Naval Academy graduate, a combat veteran of Vietnam, says the country's fighting mission is being corrupted, with grave consequences to the national defense. One of the main problems, he says, is women.

 From the November 1979 Washingtonian

We would go months without bathing, except when we could stand naked among each other next to a village well or in a stream or in the muddy water of a bomb crater. It was nothing to begin walking at midnight, laden with packs and weapons and ammunition and supplies, seventy pounds or more of gear, and still be walking when the sun broke over mud-slick paddies that had sucked our boots all night. We carried our own gear and when we took casualties we carried the weapons of those who had been hit.

When we stopped moving we started digging, furiously throwing out the heavy soil until we had made chest-deep fighting holes. When we needed to make a call of nature we squatted off a trail or straddled a slit trench that had been dug between fighting holes, always by necessity in public view. We slept in makeshift hooches made out of ponchos, or simply wrapped up in a poncho, sometimes so exhausted that we did not feel the rain fall on our own faces. Most of us caught hookworm, dysentery, malaria, or yaws, and some of us had all of them.

The fortress-like building at 6885 Elm Street in McLean has no sign indicating it's the headquarters of a multinational corporation. As you approach the building, the only clue suggesting the presence of Mars Inc. is the warning: "Private Property."

One of the best-kept business secrets in Washington is the presence of this family-owned corporation in the Virginia suburbs. Few Washingtonians realize that the country's fifth-largest private business is headquartered here. The Mars company and the family that owns the candy giant have turned secrecy into a way of life.

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X RATED: DC's Underground Sex Industry 

By Chris Vogel.

DC's red-light district is gone, and the strip-club scene is pretty tame. But the sex industry is going strong. Using the internet, it has gone underground, and police warn of coming turf wars.

It's Tuesday evening, and the tourists have said goodnight to the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials. At the end of the Mall, the dome of the Capitol shines like a moon. Almost in its shadow, seven blocks away, is a neighborhood few tourists have reason to visit. Lining the streets beneath the noise of I-295 is a mixture of auto-repair shops, chainlink fences, and taxi-cab companies. A bouncer sits on a stool outside a building at 900 First Street, Southeast. The awning reads NEXUS GOLD CLUB. Parked cars line the street. Inside, the VIP balcony is filling up, and the downstairs lounge is teeming with businessmen trying to show clients a good time. Scantily clad women hobnob with customers, exchanging pleasantries and cruising for tips.

Arianna Huffington in 1994.

This article is from the May 1994 issue of The Washingtonian.

By Diana McLellan

Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington has it all: looks, brains, money, family, love.

She's a gorgeous redhead married to a stud-muffin oil-zillionaire congressman, Michael Huffington, who's currently running for Dianne Feinstein's California Senate seat.

"The most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus," Arianna has been called. She was the first foreign student to head Britain's Cambridge Union debate team. At 23 she was a best-selling author -- The Female Woman. Since then, she's written five books, including lollapalooza biographies of Maria Callas and Pablo Picasso. It's said that she conquered social London in the '70s, New York in the '80s, and the West Coast in the '90s.

Welcome to our new feature where we highlight thought-provoking and interesting pieces from Washingtonian's decades of archives. In light of the upcoming baseball season, we feature a 2005 article on how DC got baseball back. Click below to read the full article.