President Barack Obama was waiting for him, playing host to his election rival in a one-on-one luncheon in the presidential dining room.
For a $59 Elderhostel fee, participants received printed material, including hardcover copies of "What's Right With Islam," which explores the Islamic world's relationship with the West, and takeout lunches from a nearby Turkish restaurant that afforded guests and hosts the opportunity to go one-on-one at the luncheon table.
There was a time not long ago when City boys, journos, admen and lawyers would think nothing of a three-hour, two-bottle, one-stogie luncheon.
When one of his luncheon companions remarked, "It's too bad you can't be vice president and secretary of defense," he barely demurred.
Richard Holbrooke, the former Assistant Secretary of State, met Booker at a luncheon one afternoon, and walked away feeling as if he had just encountered a VISTA volunteer from the Kennedy-Johnson era.
They seemed to grasp the magnitude of their role when one of the luncheon guests clasped her hands and, in a loud voice, said, "Are these our girls?" I grew up in central Florida in the nineteen-sixties, barefoot half the time and running around the orange groves where my father worked.
An invitation to one of her luncheons or dinners — especially if it was for a first lady, like her friend Nancy Reagan — was a sign of having arrived at the highest level of society.
THERE were hundreds of high-hatted ladies at a luncheon on Staten Island on Thursday, but it was the tiniest one who seemed to be making the biggest hit.
The second room is majestic: three boxing scenes, three ravishingly piquant portraits of working-class youths, and a startling nude of an ill-at-ease woman, posed after the one in Manet's "Luncheon on the Grass" (and cribbed by Manet from Giorgione's "The Tempest").
