The Correspondents Dinner
Dateline Washington DC, the night of 24 March.
End of day two Premeditated Media Tour.
This was pretty cool.
First there is wearing a nice-fitting tux. Frankly, a nice tux makes anyone look really good, and if you’re tall (6’2”) and relatively straight like me, you look marvelous!
Second, Putnam PR director Steve Oppenheim is a great date. Knows hoards of people in the business and was generous enough to introduce me to more than a few, all of which was pretty thrilling because these are all people I’ve been watching on TV for years. Heady stuff!
So we hit the parties before the big dinner. Security is very tight, because Bush is speaking. Bush also spoke this afternoon at our hotel, so I feel like the man is haunting my every step today.
In the first round beforehand we focus on CBS and ABC. Highlight of all that is a long conversation with Bob Schieffer of CBS, who hosts Face the Nation. He is halfway through the book and absolutely loves it, so he is immediately the coolest thing since Cronkite in my mind. What’s neat about him is that his Texas drawl is about twice as thick off camera, and he really speaks like a Texan with all the colorful phrases. He regales me with stories about covering the Pentagon back in the late 60s and early 70s. When he mentions he saw Melvin Laird today (Secretary of Defense and former U.S. Congressman), I say, “He’s from my home state!” and Schieffer goes “Yeah, Wisconsin!”
Then Sen. Jack Reed from RI walks up and it becomes a threesome. We talk Rumsfeld, DoD, transformation, and Iraq, and it’s all pretty heady to listen to these guys and chime in now and then. Schieffer goes on and on about how great my book is, and Reed stops me when I break off and says to make sure his office gets a copy ASAP.
Celebrity spottings are almost too many to mention. Paula Zahn is really tall. Judy Woodruff is small like she seems on TV. Al Franken does look like a college wrestler up close. Some people from my biz included Richard Perle, General Peter Pace and Paul Wolfowitz. My coolest paired spotting was Ron Silver and Jerry Bruckheimer walking together deep in animated conversation. It was hard not to stare.
After the dinner ends and Bush vacates along with about 60 Secret Service, we plunge back into the party-scene. In a ten-minute span I get to meet and chat with Charles Krauthammer (we’ll be together in Scottsdale AZ next week to give speeches to Lockheed Martin’s annual conference), Jim Lehrer (very charming), Oliver North (who winked at me three times in less than a minute), and Bill O’Reilly who towered over me by about three inches—a brief but memorable exchange. In all, a pretty thrilling sequence.
The rest of night is lost meeting the producers of more news shows than I can remember, and most of the names you know from CNN, which had the loudest party by about 60 decibels. We left around midnight and by that time I had my 45-second intro on the book down pat.
Beat now. Bed at 1 am and up by 7 am to send this off and head to Pentagon with Steve. We’ll do six Pentagon correspondents in 90 minutes, basically going 15 minutes per cubicle. Then the day will really start to get long, but I think I’ll do okay.
All this seems to be coming at a nice time for me. I no longer get ga-ga over this stuff; neat, but not essential. I enjoy the moments but don’t feel any neediness toward the whole damn thing. Ambivalence feels good. Frankly, being able to take it or leave feels powerful, like I know who I am and find none of this too thrilling or too threatening. I will try hard to hold onto that confident feeling in the weeks and months ahead.
Also spoke with Mark Warren tonight. As soon as I get back, we begin editing the article for the June issue of Esquire. It will feel really good to be back in the magazine again. Once is definitely not enough.
