Dinner-Party Diplomacy

By Cokie Roberts

With barely more than a year and a half left in his term, George W. Bush has finally pulled out a centuries-old weapon in the political arsenal of Washington power players: the dinner party. As politicians of both parties emerge from evenings at the White House impressed with their host (and themselves), they ask the same question: What took the President so long? Here's an affable man with an engaging wife; you'd think he would have used the power of the invitation years ago. Intimate gatherings in the family quarters dazzle even the most hardened pols. It's probably no accident that Democratic Senator Ken Salazar signed on to the immigration-reform bill soon after his dinner there.

Dinner-party diplomacy didn't suit George Washington's palate. While the food was good--"roast beef, veal, turkey, ducks, fowls, jams, etc.; puddings, jellies, oranges, apples, nuts, almonds, figs, raisins, and a variety of wines and punch," recorded one guest--the host often sat in complete silence. It fell to others to set the table for key compromises in Washington's first term. When the first Congress reached an impasse over two issues--where to locate the permanent capital city and how to pay off the Revolutionary War debt--Thomas Jefferson asked Alexander Hamilton and James Madison to share a meal at which the three men struck a bargain: the Northern states would agree to locate the capital in the South, and the Southern states would assent to the Federal Government's assumption of the debt, even though most of the South had already paid up. The nascent nation survived to fight another day. Later, because of the power granted the central government, Jefferson distanced himself from the deal. Maybe his dislike of it persuaded him to avoid social settings that could yield bipartisan agreements; at his informal White House dinners, he invited guests from only one party at a time. Or maybe, in typical Jeffersonian fashion, he preferred to say one thing to his partisans, another to the opposition.

But one of the President's official entertainments set off an international incident. In 1803, when the new British ambassador, Anthony Merry, and his wife Elizabeth arrived for their first official dinner, Jefferson, no friend of the Crown, determined to insult them. He not only invited their French counterparts, though the two countries were at war, but also escorted Dolley Madison, rather than Mrs. Merry, to the dinner table. The ambassador's personal secretary claimed that the affront caused the War of 1812. Though that's a stretch, "the Merry Affair" certainly contributed to the continued bad blood between the young U.S. and the former mother country.

With the widower Jefferson setting such an unpropitious social tone, the wife of his Secretary of State established an alternate "court" that she presided over for close to a half-century. Dolley Madison was the first to assume the role of what came to be dubbed "the Washington hostess," and she provided the model for the rest to follow. Dolley's dinners--used at first to promote her husband's career and then to solidify her own--delighted the politicians, and she made every guest feel like the most important person there. Living well into the middle of the 19th century, the former First Lady trained successive generations of hostesses in the art of putting on the party where the politics could play out.

One of Dolley's acolytes, Rose Greenhow, turned her dining room (and perhaps her bedroom) into a venue for sources for a Confederate spy ring. A well-liked widow known for entertaining both sides in the tense years before the Civil War, Greenhow understood the ways of Washington. She advised a friend seeking a favor that Congressmen were "honorable men who could not be bribed, but they discern much more clearly the justice of a case, when they have dined and supped well in pleasant company." When the war started, the Union politicians who continued to sup with Greenhow let slip intelligence that she passed along in complicated code to rebel generals.

Twentieth century Washington hostesses wielded such political power that they achieved wider public acclaim. Perle Mesta, known as "the hostess with the mostest," became Harry Truman's ambassador to Luxembourg, the inspiration for the Irving Berlin musical Call Me Madam and the subject of a 1949 cover story in this magazine. Bill Clinton posted Pamela Harriman as his ambassador to France. It was the least the President could do for a woman who used her talent for entertaining, and her husband's money, to bring fractious Democrats together in the 1980s, eventually uniting them behind the young Governor of Arkansas.

In recent years, the role of hostess has fallen out of favor. Members of Congress dash from fund raisers in D.C. to town meetings in their districts, leaving little time for "pleasant company." But one invitation remains a draw: dinner at the White House. Now, let's see if George Bush can use the seductive setting to persuade politicians to come together on policy.