For 50 years, it has been New York's most prestigious nonpolitical political event. And since John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon took off their campaign gloves to attend the glittering dinner three weeks before the 1960 presidential election, most candidates for the nation's highest office have made the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner a mandatory stop on the road to the White House.
But not this year.
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York has not invited President Clinton or his Republican challenger, Bob Dole, to its $600-a-plate annual charity dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel next month. It is the first Presidential election year since 1960 that the archdiocese has not invited the Democratic and Republican candidates. And there are conflicting explanations.
The dinner's organizers said that the candidates were unable to make firm commitments to attend, and so were not invited. But other archdiocesan officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the exclusion stemmed from John Cardinal O'Connor's annoyance at President Clinton's veto of a bill that would have outlawed certain late-term abortions. They added that Mr. Dole was not invited to keep the dinner from taking on a partisan tone.