When Jill Abramson first moved to Washington, in the late 1980s, as a young reporter for the Wall Street Journal, she believed that the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner — the black-tie gala filled with journalists and the Washington intelligentsia they cover — was a meaningful event. It had felt like such a big deal that when her boss at the Journal asked her to find a good guest for their table, she “sweated over it.”
Abramson didn’t need to find a real celebrity, just a Washington celebrity — someone whose presence could signal that her newspaper mattered enough to lure elite company. She managed to snag Bob Strauss, a Washington super-lawyer. And she was relieved when he said yes.
“I had this feeling of, ‘Phew, I’m in the mix here,’” says Abramson, who would go on to be executive editor of the New York Times. “I’m really ashamed to say it now, but I thought of it as something that was really important.”
Landing a Good Guest is a time-honored art form in Washington. A Good Guest can help validate the importance of a news organization, become a source for news, or — if their presence helps lure donors — a future source of revenue. A Good Guest can help you lure other guests (Good or otherwise) to parties and fundraisers. The Gridiron Club, a semi-secret organization of journalists, takes guest work so seriously that each year before their annual white-tie dinner they hold their version of a fantasy football draft: Members draw a number and then pick their tablemates from a list of boldface names (they call it an “auction”).
There are no events in Washington, however, that take guest lists quite as seriously as the correspondents’ dinner — or ‘nerd prom’ to the nerds who love it.
The jockeying for dinner guests starts as early as January.
“You sit down and think about who represents your reporting — it’s not just throwing 10 people together,” said a staffer at one media company who is involved in the planning and spoke on the anonymity to discuss the ultrasensitive topic of dinner guests. “It’s a conversation from high levels of the organization.”
Companies then dispatch top reporters to ask their sources and brag about the proximity of their tables to the stage. The posturing even comes down to the gift bags host organizations hand to guests at the dinner, and the custom number signs each company places on their table (the Hilton hands out generic ones, but those usually get ditched).
Snagging a guest can also be simple. For example: How did USA Today manage to get Ukrainian Ambassador Oksana Markarova — one of the most sought-after party guests in Washington — to say yes to their invite?
“They asked first,” Markarova says.
This year, CBS will host FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas; The Wall Street Journal will dine with White House senior adviser Neera Tanden and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will sit with ABC.
Companies often want to get a bipartisan mix. NBC landed Republican National Committee member David Bossie and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). Meanwhile CBS has the first Gen Z member of Congress, Rep. Max Frost (D-Fla.), and Republican Rep. Nancy Mace (S.C.).
With covid concerns on the decline and with President Biden showing up to give a speech, there seems to be particular interest in this year’s event. And some journalists and politicos have learned the hard way that, when it comes down to it, they are not essential guests. “I know of news organizations that are having to claw back invites,” said NPR’s Tamara Keith, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association.
The correspondents’ dinner bills itself as a chance to raise money for charity, celebrate the importance of the White House Press Corps, and enjoy an evening of comedy (and comity) in a city that can often run hot between the people who run the place and the people who cover them. Some journalists see great value in the dinner, noting that behind the practice of truth-seeking is the practicality of relationship-building. Others might just be eager for an excuse to wear fancy clothes and bump into people they know.
“I haven’t regarded my going as a big statement, one way or the other,” says John Harris, a co-founder of Politico. “My view is that it’s become a lot. Two days I could live with, but four days of parties seems like a lot. But people seem to enjoy it and I don’t want to get in the way of their fun.”
And despite the Times’s prohibition against paying for a table — the paper stopped sending reporters in 2008 — a number of its journalists still get spotted around town at the before- and after-parties over the weekend.
Other journalists see partaking in this so-called “enjoyment” as … untoward.
“Now it’s just a gangbang full of advertisers and glitterati,” said Al Hunt, the longtime Washington journalist.
Long-timers point to 1987 as the year when the guest culture changed for the correspondents’ dinner. That was the year the columnist Michael Kelly made a splash by inviting Fawn Hall, a woman who played a prominent role in the ongoing Iran-contra affair. Inviting the “mysterious and beautiful secretary,” the Los Angeles Times wrote, was the “social coup of the year.”
After that, it seemed like every year someone was plotting their own social coup at the nation’s capital, with outside-the-Beltway celebrities becoming a big thing, especially during Barack Obama presidency; in 2012, Fox News had both Kim Kardashian and Lindsey Lohan at their table.
“It’s the strangest weekend in Official Washington,” said Luke Russert, the former MSNBC reporter who once invited the actress Anna Kendrick as his date to the dinner.
The quotient of actually famous people is no sure thing from year to year, and some organizations eschew the true celebs for people who are merely notable. NPR will dine with the White House covid czar Ashish Jha (yes, there is still technically a pandemic) and U.S. Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn. (And in true NPR fashion, its other guests include “NPR donors and other supporters of public radio.”)
Eventually, with enough time and dinners under her belt, Abramson began to have a thought: are Good Guests actually bad?
In 2003, Abramson, then the Washington bureau chief at the Times, attended a correspondents’ dinner after-party, and spent the night “getting plastered” at the bar with a group of journalists and another guest: Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Irve Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
Afterward, something about the evening didn’t sit right with Abramson. And it wasn’t just the booze.
“We should have been figuring out that Scooter Libby was manufacturing completely false intelligence to support the Iraq War,” she says now. “We should not have been knocking back shots with him.”
Abramson, now a Harvard professor, no longer believes the dinner is important. She thinks it’s “corrupt” and a “walking, partying conflict of interest.” Now, when she sees journalists socializing with the subjects they are supposed to cover, she sees what she calls, an “unseemly display of the pal-sey-wal-sey-ness.”
Abramson says she has not been to the dinner in years. And yet, for much of Official Washington, the pal-sey-wal-sey-ness continues apace.
