Washington Whispers
Biloxi Puppy Lift Via Air Force One
A clandestine smuggling operation is helping turn a tragic legacy of a natural disaster into a heartwarming Walt Disney tear-jerker. The stars of this thriller: puppies of abandoned dogs. The villain: Hurricane Katrina. The saviors: the president, his staff, and his jet.
On April 27, before President Bush toured the Hands On Network crisis volunteer center in Biloxi, Miss., the White House advance team E-mailed home that the prez would see a kennel with 17 abandoned puppies collected by the Humane Society and Triple R Pets. Staffers cooed and asked for pictures. Two secretly agreed to rescue one each when Bush traveled there.
On his visit, Bush told Hands On coordinator Erika Putinsky that he sympathized with families who lost dogs in Katrina. "He thought about his dog, Barney, and how upset he would have been if he lost his dog," she recalls. He snuggled a few pups. She said he was taking two home. He said no--unaware of the secret rescue mission. That was the cue for the two staffers to seize their dogs, Biloxi and Scrappy. First stop, Air Force One, where a now informed and supportive president ignored the howls. Then came the motorcade and, finally, the White House, where they were unveiled the next day. Aides swooned. Some pledged to rescue more when Bush visits the area again. "It made the White House a very happy place," says an insider.
A Mexican Mission to Little Rock
Immigrants aren't the only ones south of the border hoping for a piece of the good old U.S. of A. Mexico's outgoing President Vicente Fox has dispatched his wife north to collect ideas for his presidential library and museum, the country's first ever. First lady Marta de Fox went to the William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Park in Little Rock. Sources say the Foxes tried to keep the mission secret. So instead of advertising it as a fact-finding expedition, Fox arrived under the guise of speaking to students at the Clinton center, then slipped off to quiz center execs and archivists about how to raise money, design a new facility, and operate it. A source who accompanied her says she was very direct, just like a former Arkansas first lady. "She was," says our tipster, "very Hillaryesque."
It Could Have Been Worse for Rummy
If you thought last week was a bad one for the much-heckled Pentagon stallion Donald Rumsfeld, consider his namesake, the horse "Rumsfeld," who ran at Newbury Racecourse in England last month. In an E-mail to the defense secretary, a friend who bet on the Italian horse to win told this tale. "He threw his jockey before the race began," says the E-mail, "and after the jockey trailed him halfway around the track, Rumsfeld refused to enter the starting gate until he was blindfolded, after which anyone knew he couldn't have much left for the race itself, but he broke away and came in second." Better yet, he beat Criminal Act by almost two lengths.
The Lobbying Scandal Workout
There's nothing like a good gym routine to get your mind off pressing issues like, say, whether or not you are going to prison. We hear that lobbying scandal figure Michael Scanlon has continued his workouts at the posh Sports Club/LA inside Washington's Ritz-Carlton, the same place where George Clooney and first daughter Jenna Bush sweat. Scanlon, convicted but not yet sentenced in the Jack Abramoff affair, looks fit, say fellow gym rats, but gets a bit testy with questions like "How is everything?" His answer to one: "Uh, don't you read the papers?" To others he predicts that he will avoid jail time.
The Ex-Secretary and the X-Mins
No, it's not a girl group like Josie and the Pussycats, but the leader of Madeleine and the X-Mins says it's just as cool, in a foreign-policy kind of way. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright reveals that she and the other Clinton-era foreign ministers like Britain's late Robin Cook became so close that they've kept an informal group together since, which she calls "Madeleine and the Ex-Mins." The goals: Share foreign-policy tips, and sometimes push an agenda. The Ex-Mins started about five years ago when Cook suggested the talking group. Lately, it has tried to influence policy in Russia and Darfur. The best part for Albright is that the approach is global. "The brilliant part about it," she says, is "we are talking without our national positions."
McCain's Cool, but Allen's the Goal
Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain might be getting all the headlines for burying the hatchet with political foe Jerry Falwell and agreeing to speak at the reverend's Liberty University. But that doesn't mean the Arizona senator is Falwell's guy in 2008. In fact, he sounds more like a Sen. George Allen fan. Just consider whom he wants to speak at the 2008 commencement. "Everyone asks if I support John McCain. Well, we agree on some things and not on others," Falwell tells us. "I am glad he is coming to speak. I hope to have President Bush speak next year and George Allen speak the year after that." In other commencement news, former President Bush is in another first: He and former first lady Barbara will give the May 21 address to George Washington University grads. The weekend before, Bush and former President Clinton will be making history by teaming to give the speech at Tulane University.
Bingeing on Terrorism Analysts
The new National Counterterrorism Center is supposed to be the nation's premier agency for analysis on terrorism, but it's still too small. So John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, is adding 75 more analysts to its ranks from other agencies. But that's just a start. He eventually wants to hire several hundred more to double the analyst ranks of the secretive operation. Raiding the other agencies shouldn't be a problem: There are an amazing 5,000-plus government counterterrorism analysts to choose from.
With Suzi Parker, Alex Kingsbury and Kevin Whitelaw
This story appears in the May 15, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.