FOR art lovers in Washington, the hero of the hour is the director of the National Gallery, Mr Earl "Rusty" Powell. When the Vermeer exhibition in the National Gallery was shut down before Christmas because of the US budget crisis, Mr Powell sought out private donors to keep it open.
As a result, the exhibition has now re-opened and is drawing huge crowds. People have once again been forming long queues outside the gallery to view the largest gathering of the works of the Dutch Master, Johannes Vermeer, since shortly after his death in 1675.
It was a triumphal strike against the partial government shutdown which for the last 18 days has left 280,000 federal officials suspended without pay and deprived government agencies of funds to pay their 760,000 workers.
Tlie shutdown has infuriated tourists who find parks and museums all over the United States closed, and frustrated both those Americans wishing to travel abroad who cannot get passports, and foreigners who cannot get visas to come to the US.
Mr Powell acted because time was running out for the popular Vermeer exhibition, which contains 21 of the 35 Vermeers known to exist. The display cannot be extended beyond the February 11th closing date as it is due to open in The Hague in the spring. There has been chaos at the National Gallery since the reopening on December 27th, as a skeleton crew of employees tries to cope with crowds of suspended federal workers, exhibition- starved tourists and frustrated art lovers, their numbers far exceeding the usual 4,000 a day.
The Vermeer exhibition is now the only show in town. An important exhibition of the American artist, Winslow Homer, remains closed in another section of the National Gallery. All the Smithsonian Institute's exhibitions and galleries, which draw millions of tourists each year, remain locked.
The anger of tourists and art lovers matches a growing irritation with legislators among the public over their conduct of the crisis. Senators and House of Representatives members had planned 25 foreign trips in the next three weeks, abandoning Washington in the middle of the longest government shutdown in history. Two trips have already gone ahead.
This has infuriated State Department officials who have to help arrange the trips in Washington and abroad, and who have not been paid since the shutdown began on December 18th. Only a quarter of State Department staff is at work in Washington.
A trip to the EU by a Congressional delegation headed by Mr Ben Gilman, chairman of the House International Relations Committee - which would have taken in Dublin on January 16th - has been put on hold because of the crisis, a spokesman said.
A message from US diplomats bin Latin America to their association voiced outrage about a planned Congressional trip to Brazil. "Frankly we are disturbed by the thought that while American schoolchildren are being turned away from Smithsonian museums, national parks, monuments and memorials, some members of the US Congress are looking forward to seeing exotic attractions like Copacabana. . largely at the expense of the parents of those children," they said.
For those citizens wishing to travel abroad and who need a passport, the American borders have been effectively closed. A spokesman for the Irish embassy said that they had received several calls from people unable to make planned tourist or business trips to Ireland. A British embassy spokesman said that they were aware of thousands of inconvenienced travellers.
President Clinton returned to Washington on Monday evening after a brief New Year's break and was scheduled to resume his meetings with Congress leaders yesterday to try to resolve the impasse over how to balance the budget in seven years.
However previous such meetings at the White House before the New Year yielded little result.
"Our dirty little secret", one Democrat told the Washington Post, "is not much was done." A Republican said: "A lot was said and nothing was done."
A former US Interior Secretary, Mr James Watt, pleaded guilty yesterday to a single charge of attempting to influence a grand jury probing his lobbying at the US housing agency after he left office.
Mr Watt, one of the most controversial members of former President Ronald Reagan's cabinet, admitted he attempted by written communication to improperly influence a federal grand jury investigating his lobbying activities.