WASHINGTON DIARY: FRIENDS, 12-STEPPERS, FRESHMEN

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It took 16 years for them to be friends. But last Thursday, when Senator John McCain eulogized a former enemy, David Ifshin, who died at age 47 after a five-month battle with cancer, the two had long made their "peace together." McCain may be our most famous prisoner of the Vietnam War; Ifshin, the most famous protester to go to Hanoi (save Jane Fonda). Ifshin's antiwar sentiments were piped into McCain's cell repeatedly via Radio Hanoi. McCain, who was left hanging by his broken arms for hours a day, shriveled to less than 100 lbs. during his five-year imprisonment. Both men would end up in Washington in 1984: McCain, by then a Congressman sharply critical of Ifshin's antiwar politics; Ifshin, a lawyer working on the Mondale presidential campaign. Two years after that, Ifshin saw McCain at a Washington event and the two men made up. Over the next months, the two set up the Institute for Democracy in Vietnam.

Two weeks ago, McCain visited Ifshin, his wife and three young children. "I thought, thank goodness we didn't waste any more time in anger. You can't put off setting your life right." In his eulogy, the Senator from Arizona remembered defending Ifshin, the former general counsel of the Clinton campaign, in the Senate after demonstrators assailed the lawyer's patriotism at a Memorial Day speech by the President. "I wanted the protesters to know that they were bearing false witness against a good man. That this small gesture that meant so much to David meant even more to me. David Ifshin was my friend. His friendship honored me and honors me still."

Washington is in love with the language of recovery, so much so that Mayor Marion Barry was able to garner bouquets of sympathy as he trotted off for physical and spiritual renewal necessitated, he said, by working so hard for the city. Whatever happened to taking a vacation, quietly, without invoking a 12-step program? For the moment, everyone is taken up by the melodrama of whether the mayor may be slipping back into drugs and alcohol--all because of the pressure. Many have forgotten that the pressure has been brought on by the mayor himself. It was Barry who did much to get the city into the fix it's in. His departure announcement was full of self-pity, and as he disembarked from the plane at his second retreat in St. Louis, Missouri, he was reading an open Bible. Unfortunately, there's no place for citizens to seek "physical and spiritual renewal." We're stuck here with the mayor's memorable words to those who didn't vote for him in 1994: "Get over it." We're trying. If only there were a 12-step program.