George & Dana's excellent adventure

Nukes & Spooks is mostly meant as a forum for serious discussion of national security issues. But hey, we're not above passing along scurrilous gossip and fun vignettes from the halls of government from time to time.

To wit:  An "anonymous source who is in a position to know" tells us that after President Bush's trip to Europe last month, the White House arranged to flack the trip to Washington's diplomatic corps ... with a slide show at the State Department.  Two problems:  while State's protocol office was in on the plan, the rest of Foggy Bottom, it seems, wasn't. And the briefer was to be White House press secretary Dana Perino. While Perino's no slouch, some thought the assembled ambassadors and minister-counselors from Embassy Row might want a little more heavyweight policy. (Bush had traveled to Romania for a high-stakes NATO summit; stopped in Ukraine and Croatia; and held important talks with outgoing Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi, Russia).

After much to-ing and fro-ing, it was agreed that Dan Fried, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs, would join in on the briefing, which took place in State's Loy Henderson auditorium. Some missions sent their ambassadors to the briefing, although a few seem puzzled as to why they had been gathered together. Other embassies sent lower-ranking diplomats.

The briefing went well. "You could call it outreach," our source says.

And you thought that after 7 years and 4 months, the Bush administration had figured out how to coordinate foreign policy.   

Comments

[Tom Traubert]

Did they have cookies on the table? I think they might have had cookies.

[Susan]

No, I didn't think that. Why would I think that? They couldn't coordinate a war either.