Posted on 09/08/2001 9:36:05 PM PDT by Utah Girl
The room was packed, the dessert divine—and the social politics fierce. Backstage at the Bushes’ first state bash
Roland Mesnier, the artistic pastry chef at the White House, understands the geopolitics of cuisine. He has learned from painful experience. A few years ago he made dessert for a visiting Mexican head of state: he created a charming—to him—scene of a Mexican boy in a sombrero, dozing off against his mud hut. Not quite the image that President Carlos Salinas had in mind when he came to Washington to promote his nation’s drive for business and industry. Horrified, a White House aide yanked off the boy with the sombrero just as Mesnier’s magnificent ice-cream-and-cake confection was being carried into the State Dining Room. First Lady Barbara Bush finished off the destruction, hastily bulldozing the adobe hut with a serving spoon.
AT ONCE EMBARRASSED and angry, Chef Mesnier threatened to quit. But he stayed on through the Clinton administration, and last week he was busily making dessert—a dome of mango ice cream, decorated with sugar hibiscus flowers and hummingbirds blown like glass—for Mexican President Vicente Fox at President George W. Bush’s first state dinner. “When the dessert comes, it has to yell ‘Mexico!’,” says the flamboyant Mesnier. But not too loudly.
State dinners are about elegance and refinement and haute cuisine, but mostly they are about politics. They are elaborately and painstakingly designed to stroke the large egos invited in without offending the large egos left out. No mean feat: Letitia Baldrige, social secretary for JFK, recalls being offered a $5,000 bribe for an invitation, while LBJ’s Bess Abell once got a call from a man claiming that his terminally ill wife’s dying wish was to attend a state dinner. (Abell got the couple in, and notes with a laugh, “I still see them around from time to time.”) For the state dinner honoring President Fox, White House political strategist Karl Rove says he got about 40 calls and e-mails fishing for an invite.
He had to politely say no to almost all of them. In their relentless quest to be the un-Clintons, the Bushes decided to restore White House state dinners to an earlier intimacy by holding them in the State Dining Room, which can handle at most about 130 people, and then only if the waiters walk sideways. Growing ever larger to reward campaign contributors, Clinton’s state bashes got so big—up to 700 guests—that he had to stage one in a giant tent. For the Fox dinner, Bush was not able to accommodate a single “Pioneer” (donor who raised more than $100,000) from the 2000 campaign. The guest list was heavy on pols like Senate Republican leader Trent Lott, administration officials like Secretary of State Colin Powell and various Mexican business tycoons, with a light sprinkling of celebrities (actor Clint Eastwood) and only a few journalists, most notably Fox News anchor Brit Hume, who sat across from Bush. Those who missed the cut for the state dinner were invited to the entertainment afterward, and the also-also-rans were asked to a “state lunch earlier in the day. The pressure on the guest list was so intense that Bush’s two closest advisers, Rove and Karen Hughes, voluntered to come only for the entertainment in order to make room for border-state governors. On the day of the dinner, the White House social office got four or five calls from incredulous Washingtonians demanding, “Are you sure we’re not on the guest list?”
The White House allowed a NEWSWEEK reporter in to view the intricate upstairs-downstairs machinations of the dinner, but generally the press corps—instructed to wear tuxedos and formal dresses—was kept at a distance. Allowing press at the receiving line would be “diminishing,” decreed First Lady Laura Bush. Predictably, there were squawks. A military aide tried to move Washington Post reporter Roxanne Roberts back from the arrival zone. “I have been covering state dinners for 13 years. This is ridiculous!” shouted Roberts, stomping her stiletto heel on the polished stone. A White House aide standing nearby worried that the scene would be captured by C-Span cameras. “Oh, no,” the aide thought, “what a way to start.”
In the kitchen, Chef Walter Scheib fretted when President Fox abandoned his prepared text for his toast and began winging it. As Fox rambled on about how he and his buddy “Jorge” shared a love of Western boots and ranches and “like to see things happen,” Scheib worried whether his first course would remain warm enough. Fortunately, Fox went on just about five minutes too long, and there were only murmurs of praise for the Maryland crab and chorizo pozole and the pumpkin-seed-crusted bison (“buffalo meat,” as Bush called it) that followed. The domestic staff does not fear the new First Lady quite the way it did the old. One of the three White House calligraphers delicately observed that Laura Bush granted him more artistic license than Hillary Clinton did. Mrs. Bush did, however, color-coordinate her hot-pink-and-red Scaasi gown with the sage tablecloth. At the always on-time Bush White House, “the reception line won’t go on forever,” Mrs. Bush coolly predicted to reporters, who made note of the implicit comparison to the Clintons’ talkathon style.
The president, former rush chairman at the Deke House at Yale, has not lost his glad-handing touch, though these days he toasts his guests with 7-Up. He seemed to be enjoying himself, shouting “Callate!” (“Shut up!”) at some pushy Mexican reporters and welcoming the Foxes, in his fractured Spanish, to “the Casa Blanca.” There were a few glitches. Bike-race hero Lance Armstrong canceled because of a 24-hour bug at about 3 in the afternoon (causing a feverish reworking of the seating chart and resetting of the tables). Barney, the White House terrier, briefly got loose when the color guard marched out, and someone’s mobile phone rang during a romantic solo by soprano Dawn Upshaw. An elaborate fireworks display on the South Lawn at about 11 p.m. lit up the White House switchboard: angry neighbors were taken aback by the unexpected late-night noise, and several callers asked if Washington was being bombed. But Bush and his guests seemed happy at the end of the evening, even if the host looked a little sleepy. “For those of you who like to stay up late, you are welcome to dance,” he told the guests. “For those of us who like to go to bed early...” He paused and took in a glance from the First Lady. “I guess I’ll be here for one dance.”
In his pantry, pastry chef Mesnier smiled with relief. It has long been his custom to listen at the State Dining Room door when his desserts are served. He always hopes to hear silence: it means the guests have paused from chitchatting to admire his creation. On this night there was a blissful hush. The delicately crafted dessert came back nearly demolished—some guests had taken the blown-sugar birds as souvenirs. But this time Mesnier was glad to have his dessert destroyed. “That means they like it,” the chef said.
Sounds like the dinner was a success, even in Newsweek's biased eyes. I just shudder to think of the Clinton's dinners. Imagine letting Chelsea host one of them because Slickette was too busy working on her Senate campaign.
I enjoyed Barney getting loose. He is such a rascal. And who was the idiot that brought his cell phone. You would think anyone esteemed enough to get invited would know of W's disdain of cell phones. I'll bet it was one of the token dims invited, Puff Daschle or Dicky Gephardt or maybe even McCain.
LOL!!!! Barney is so cute...it must have made a few people chuckle to see him!
There are always glitches at any state dinner.....but I think this one ran beautifully. It wasn't a Clinton-like circus act and payoff dinner. It was gracious and elegant.
And Chelsea hosted a state dinner? I hadn't heard that. Oh boy.
That should be grounds for summary execution.
I picked it up from Edward Clinton Ezell's "Small Arms of the World" because it sounded pretty cool, looked neat, and had some history behind it.
Most people think my name is of an airsoft gun, because that's usually the first thing to pop up when they do a web search for it.
I didn't realize that a few of the posters here had actually used this particular weapon (or the XM177 or the XM177E1) over thirty years ago, long before I was even born.
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