Diary

24 March 2007

The next night Harry Evans and Tina Brown gave a dinner for 50 at their apartment on the Upper East Side. After the main course I was interviewed for half an hour or so by Harry, then came polite but tough questioning from Jon Meacham (editor of Newsweek), 9/11 Commission member John Lehman, the columnists Fareed Zakaria, Adam Gopnik, and others. When Joe Klein (author of Primary Colours) said: ‘There are so many things I want to take issue with in your thesis that I don’t know where to begin,’ I suggested he go for either alphabetical or chronological.

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The following night Henry and Nancy Kissinger gave a dinner party at their apartment only five blocks from Tina and Harold geographically, but hundreds of miles away politically. Mayor Bloomberg said the Kissingers had tracked down the last 20 Republicans in New York (who included George F. Will, Peggy Noonan and the New York Sun proprietor Roger Hertog). Rupert Murdoch turned out to have precisely the opposite of the personality caricatured in the left-liberal media; he was charming, witty, good-natured and even slightly retiring. If that wins me Private Eye’s OBN, it’s still true. I asked Bloomberg whether any of the rumours that he might be standing for president were true. ‘You’re the historian, Andrew,’ he replied. ‘Remind me the last time that a 5ft 7in Jewish billionaire from New York got to the White House?’

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Flew to Washington and stayed at the elegant Willard Hotel, which resonates with history in every brick. Saw ex-UN ambassador John Bolton in the lobby, who said he was enjoying the book. That night the economist Irwin Stelzer gave a big party at the Metropolitan Club for me, and his friends Irving and Bea Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Perle and Charles Murray stayed for dinner afterwards. Then there were more speeches at the Heritage Foundation, Hudson Institute and Anglosphere Institute, and an American Spectator party given in the Kalorama Circle palace of Bill Walton, chairman and CEO of Allied Capital. It was there that Lucky Roosevelt, Reagan’s chief of protocol, told me to address the President the next day only as either ‘Mr President’ or ‘Sir’.

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