Is This the Party to Whom I Am Speaking?HotAir links to this New York Times article about the White House's difficulties reaching Shirley Sherrod by telephone last week between Monday and Thursday. It's an amusing article, in part because White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was claiming to the press corps that "the secretaries" were trying to reach her at the very moment she was on a split screen at CNN, watching the press conference. It's also an interesting story about the evolution of the President's relationship with the MSM, because the NYT made it pretty clear it was accusing the White House of lying, even to the point of relying on the old "critics say" and "one blogger commented" gambits to throw in some anonymous zingers.
But here's what I really enjoyed about the article: it describes the glory days, when the White House Operators could get anyone on the line, any time, just like in the movies. The nostalgia starts with some parlor tricks, such as President Kennedy asking the operators to locate someone for him who was in fact standing next to him in the Oval Office (it took them only minutes). They also found Truman Capote for him, not at his unlisted number in Brooklyn Heights but at the home of a friend in Palm Beach, also unlisted.
My favorite, though, was how White House staff ran down the House majority whip, who was fishing in the Gulf of Mexico during the Cuban Missile Crisis:
A Navy helicopter dropped a bottle down to his boat with the following note: “Call Operator 18, Washington. Urgent message from the president.”These days, with everybody carrying a cellphone, it's hard to imagine a dedicated executive staff taking three days to reach anyone. As the article noted, 20-year-old interns at CNN didn't seem to be having any trouble.
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