Damn You, Connie. You've Ruined Our Foreign Policy
McDonald, Marci
Damn you, Connie. You've ruined our foreign policy! by Marci McDonald The story behind the slap at the Canadian embassy Thwack, thump. It was the sound of one hand slapping. The...
...But Jimmy Carter's four-year effort to deimperialize the presidency with a tide of downhome beer and peanuts had temporarily dimmed the chandeliers...
...les a way for your-husband to -get his views across...
...When Trudeau launched his controversial Peace Initiative three years ago, many of those who tried to sabotage it in Washington were the same ones who had been supping on fiddleheads and maple mousse at the ambassador's residence...
...And many in Canada objected to the articles on the grounds that they perpetuated the hayseed image Canadians had always suspected Americans had of them...
...Connor says that the vice-president showed up from Philadelphia just when he said he would, and that she supposes he ate two dinners that night...
...If Adolf Hitler came to town and the Smiths took him under their wing, he'd have it made...
...John Dingell, who led the attack on Deaver, and Senate Finance Committee chairman Robert Packwood eschew the social circuit...
...Guests invited to their March 19 dinner for the prime minister by phone were told it was in honor of Vice President George Bush...
...Despite the pervasive symptoms of what former presidential adviser Lee Atwater calls "Peacockia—the need to flutter around and be seen," many of the city's key players such as Rep...
...Theirs was no case of mere personal social climbing...
...To call somebody up and say you'd like to give a dinner in her honor when you're not even sure if she'll remember you—that takes chutzpah ." She pauses before adding what, in -retrospect, became obvious: "Except in Washington...
...a hockey game with Edmonton...
...When their dinners and reputations were still flourishing, the ambassador credited his warm relations in high places with winning Canada exemptions from the Reagan administration's potentially disastrous tariffs on steel and copper...
...At the White House, he cultivated Meese as his chief contact, and when Ottawa officials came to town, they were impressed at being able to present their point of view at such lofty levels over a private lunch...
...Flesh met flesh in a forehand, then a backhand...
...Friends began speculating that with her higher public profile had come mounting strain...
...But a congressional aide argues that the senators' discontent was obvious...
...Once he had gained entree, he was skillful- and dogged at marshalling his arguments...
...Gossage launched a concerted charm offensive aimed at the "Style" section's assignment editor, Robin Groom, and relentlessly fed Chuck Conconi guest lists...
...While a higher social profile can produce introductions and access, there is a danger in mistaking attention for effectiveness...
...But when harm came the country's way, in a cruelly coincidental series of events following The Slap, all of his socializing was unable to ward off the blows...
...The stunning scenes form part of Allan Gotlieb's private store of works by the nineteenth century artist James Tissot—the world's largest collection of his prints...
...Sondra would try one mode on and when it didn't work on me, she would slip into another," she recalls...
...As seen from Washington, Canada had lost its innocence or virginity," Rashish said, "and now was like the rest of the girls...
...When promised anonymity, the doyennes of capital society confide that they will be relieved when the Gotliebs leave their post in November so Washingtonians can stop circling the wagons in strained displays of manners, loyalty, and noblesse oblige...
...And then there was the story about the time she met California Governor Jerry Brown in her bathrobe...
...A journalist recalls that, talking about Washington's hostesses, Allan Gotlieb rhymed off their names "as if he was talking about the pope...
...In her columns, Sondra Gotlieb gave it another name: Partying to Win...
...The court of Ronald Reagan Sondra Gotlieb's second comic novel was published three years ago in the United States under the title A Woman of Substance...
...Still, the biggest attraction remained Sondra Gotlieb herself...
...Over wine and Manitoba golden caviar, Gotlieb discreetly pleaded his government's case on the issues of the day—no strong-arming, just some gentle nudges...
...Indeed, some students of CanadianAmerican relations are now asking just how much political profit the Gotliebs reaped from playing the social card...
...Spotlighted in the Deaver investigation, Ottawa suddenly found its historic clean-cut reputation sullied by implication in a scandal that had become synonymous with Washington's careless ethics...
...won't tell you at the office...
...As soon as you understood how much depended on her," he said, "you knew you had a highly unstable, volatile instrument of policy...
...years...
...Hadn't Talleyrand told Louis XVIII, as he was- dispatched to the Congress of Vienna, "I have more need for casseroles than written instructions...
...Nobody would have noticed this if it had been the Somalian ambassador's wife...
...But much of the value of attracting the cream of the capital's journalists lay in their sheer celebrity...
...Then, in the wake of The Slap, it backfired just as swiftly...
...Those_who watched Deaver and the ambassador - work together found a natural symbiosis—theone an expert on style,• the other on substance, but both' with a canny appreciation of the value of public relations and access...
...But increasingly, the gossip mill carried news of a change in her that she wasn't recording...
...Even though it ranks as America's leading trading partner, Canada was winning little attention for its trade problems or the acid rain that was killing its forests and lakes...
...Partying to Win was a tactic tailor-made for the court of Ronald Reagan...
...Tension was growing as an anxious Sondra Gotlieb stepped out onto the front porch to ask Connor, who was scanning the horizon for the vice president's limousine, the whereabouts of Richard Darman...
...Gotlieb asked an American official he had met to introduce him to William Safire...
...But they didn't understand that his passion for an artist who once was scorned as a superficial society painter would mean that he took to the cocktail-and-canape circuit with gusto, frequently quoting Jane Austen: "Everything happens at parties ." In Polly Kraft, whose social panache had burnished her own husband's journalistic career, the Gotliebs found what the city's social experts consider essential: a well-connected guide...
...Her hands, she says, were trembling...
...The next morning, as the wire service machines of Canadian Press clattered out the story that a fearful deskman had spiked the night before, there were those across the stunned capital who detected another sound: nails being driven into the coffin of the social reputation of Sondra and Allan Gotlieb, the diplomatic superstars who had been anointed by Vanity Fair and The Wall Street Journal as the hottest couple on Washington's embassy row...
...In the book, her heroine, Nini Pike, had berated her husband for accepting a diplomatic post...
...Everything you say about their power is an understatement...
...That's what ambassadors do...
...People here were left with the sense that Canada felt it had the exec in its pocket so why worry...
...No ambassador in the country's history has ever won such laudatory press...
...She made no attempt to hide her befuddlement about Washington protocol and her ineptitude with servants...
...In Canada, it had appeared two years earlier as First Lady, Last Lady...
...A member of the Canadian Parliament rose in the Commons to protest the propriety of a diplomat's wife poking fun at the social circuit of her host country...
...Some charged that, by lobbying with such a high profile, Canadians had become an interest group like any other...
...In Washington, while many followers hooted with empathy over Sondra's depictions of a victim in the same social web that had entangled them, some members of the traditional ladieslunch circuit privately seethed at finding themselves skewered by Sondra's typewriter...
...The other was that many of the rising media stars turned out to be Canadianborn...
...The name Gotlieb proposed showed his canny reading of access in the Reagan era: Jean French Smith, wife of William French Smith, then the attorney general...
...The slap, said one longtime observer of the social scene, "showed that not only was she not above all this, but that she was participating zealously on precisely the level she sneered at ." Much of the city felt that it had somehow been conned...
...The sharp crack that reporters heard signaled the disintegration of a foreign policy built on the shaky foundations of social networking...
...He had only agreed to drop by the ambassador's residence later for coffee...
...He advocated a new public diplomacy through which Canada would work the...
...Within weeks, The New York Times also had recorded the new stand-up comedy act that had moved onto embassy row: Allan the earnest bespectacled straight man, Sondra butting in to observe, "For some reason, people's eyes glaze over when you say Canada...
...When the architect proposed himself to carry it out, the prime minister waved _ Allan Gotlieb off to Washington as ambassador confident that public diplomacy was in the best possible hands...
...There had been indications early on in Gotlieb's tenure that his parties weren't bringing the concrete results he sought...
...The Gotliebs could win friends, but when Canadian concerns ran counter to U.S...
...When Meese became attorney general Gotlieb focused his attention on Deaver, another of his frequent guests...
...At the Post itself, there were rumblings heard that too much of the paper's prime editorial space was being taken up with the social antics of a tiny elite...
...But, as events soon showed, Gotlieb couldn't count on the administration's favor either...
...Washington's history is tittered with foreign envoys who have made -a splash in the small town on the Potomac with their-grace, their pomp, or their tables: Lord Harlech's Kennedy family connections and elegant galas that bathed the British embassy- in- the reflected glow of Camelot...
...More importantly, the Post editorial board invited Allan Gotlieb to drop by for a talk...
...Sondra Gotlieb lived up to Bradlee's advance billing...
...But as soon as Ronald and Nancy Reagan swept into Washington in a flurry of limousines, designer furs and millionaire friends, the tuxedo was taken out of mothballs as a political tool...
...Stephen and Moira can play bridge with the congressmen and run after the senators...
...She said she didn't want to stay on in Washington after forfeiting their Rock Creek Drive mansion, servants, and status...
...They have constancy," the ambassador told a Canadian journalist...
...he said...
...He is candid about how the column paid off for him...
...The prime minister, caught off guard, was infuriated by the ploy, which left the agreement hanging by a thread for more than a week—and with it, the centerpiece of his foreign policy...
...Indeed, some analysts on both sides of the border suggest that Gotlieb may have misread Washington entirely...
...Ambassador, played the bemused outsiders stumbling through the local folkways...
...When the Gotliebs threw their first big dinner party for then-Canadian External Affairs Minister Mark MacGuigan early in the new year, it had a certain quality of Geneva redux...
...Oilers' superstar Wayne Gretsky, _to...
...Said one social scribe: "There was a feeling all this entertaining had turned into something that was not so much for their country's benefit as their own ." Guest lists for their hundreds of functions a year were reported to have become an obsession at the embassy—personally supervised by the ambassador from a computerized bank of 400 profiles of Washington's power elite...
...The unpredictability factor had finally entered into play...
...Not only had the Gotliebs succeeded in reaching such dizzying heights on Washington's treacherous social slopes that one-third of the cabinet could be seen at their parties, but in the process, they had provided the public a rare glimpse of Powertown's inner workings...
...Graham was reportedly furious when the "Style" section ran a front-page spread on the social freeze that had begun to descend over the Gotliebs in the wake of the slap under the title "A Big Chill for Canada...
...In Washington," Popsie said, "if you want people to come to your party, you have to make it in honor of somebody very well known...
...In that splitsecond brutal gesture, she had revealed that the character who had become the toast of the capital's glitterati was to some extent a fraud...
...The embassy staff understood that what mattered was not only that the influential came to the Gotliebs' parties but that they were assured their presence would be noted in the Post's social columns...
...It contributed to the image of a couple who had very broad access in Washington...
...But former embassy staffers remember much debate within the chancery over whether the letters would have merits as a policy tool to raise the country's profile...
...That Washington Post story catapulted them right into the middle of the social scene and positioned them in a way that would have taken months to achieve by normal diplomatic channels...
...When she sighted a man who cut an appealing figure admiring her husband's collection of art nouveau boxes and frames, she sidled up to him and confessed that she didn't know any of her guests...
...Certainly the ambassador had repeatedly made his case directly to those on Capitol Hill...
...It was no accident that Bradlee had been at the MacGuigan dinner...
...As she wrote to Beverly, "This is a town where status shifts so swiftly that a euphoric Powerful Job who never had time to return his phone calls can easily turn into a decompressing Used-to-be-Close-To whose telephone never rings...
...She kept trying on roles to see what I would react to...
...It seemed that the likeable Canadians, who had charmed their way onto its guest lists by seeming not to understand the local customs, had in fact understood them so well that they had taken everybody in...
...Said one Canadian diplomat...
...Everybody can go ahead and be nice to them now that we know they're leaving," said Sonia Adler, departing editor of Washington Dossier magazine...
...Some of those who frequented her salons suggested that the Gotliebs were taking their press clippings too seriously...
...Gotlieb wasn't interested in beat reporters or managing editors...
...Let Moira give the tea parties and burst into tears when the cabinet wives don't show up...
...Despite rumors he was on a hit list that the newly elected Conservative government in Ottawa had reportedly brought with it to power in September 1984, a week later, when the new prime minister visited Washington, he announced that the ambassador would be continuing at his post...
...Canadian-American relations'had sunk to their worst level since World War II...
...Not long afterward, two of them became regulars in the Gotliebs' salon: Evangeline Bruce, the widow of former super-ambassador David K. Bruce, and Susan Mary Alsop, who noted of their parties, "You know when you go there, you will meet people who are crucial" As Diana McLellan summed up their status in Powertown: "They're as in as you can be when you're out of power...
...The witnesses watched in disbelief as it struck out in the direction of the pale, powdered cheek of Connie Gibson Connor, the embassy social secretary...
...the Gotliebs' parties had taken on a dynamic of their own...
...But she has...
...Like some anthropologist turning a scholarly eye on distant and exotic tribal rituals, Gotlieb had examined Washington's unwieldy and scattered power centers and observed a universe where—as she wrote in fictional lettters to a friend named Beverly back home—dinner guests have to keep in mind that they're "sitting next to a job, not a person," and hostesses are obliged to put their invitees at round tables "so that no one feels below the salt ." In her sly vision, Powerful Jobs, Serious Media, World Famous Socialites, and Most Expensive Lobbyists, not to mention the ubiquitous Close-Tos, schemed their way through Georgetown's salons while she and her husband, Mr...
...by Marci McDonald The story behind the slap at the Canadian embassy Thwack, thump...
...Gee, that's pushy.' I had a really Canadian attitude...
...She had never been in the city before and their only previous posting had been years earlier in- Geneva...
...For the previous five years he had exercised more power than any ambassador could dream of by running the country's foreign policy as undersecretary of state for external affairs...
...which the ambassador—who had to be briefed on Gretsky's identity—invited hockey fans-Paul :Volcker and George Shultz...
...the Powerful Jobs won't know either...
...No matter what party was in power, the opinion-makers remained...
...According to her husband, the column was also one of the factors in Mulroney's decision to keep him on as ambassador...
...By developing a reputation for attracting them to their soirees, the Gotliebs were practicing a technique known to veteran Washington hostesses as baiting their guest lists...
...There were only two flaws in the plan...
...One party, in honor of the marriage of then-Assistant Secretary of State Richard Burt to then-White House Social Secretary Gahl Hodges, struck some observers as odd...
...Sondra didn't recognize a single face except MacGuigan's...
...Gotlieb argued that Canada's interests were so intimately entwined with U.S...
...As soon as the Gotliebs arrived in Washington, the embassy's then-press counselor, Patrick Gossage, was charged with getting them not only ink, but also the cream of the city's media for their guest lists...
...Smith's cachet came from the fact that not only was her husband one of the president's closest friends, he was head of his Kitchen Cabinet...
...Even for those who have only disdain for the vagaries of guest lists and other such social ephemera, The Slap might well offer a lesson that is both unsettling and instructive about how business gets done in that arena of geopolitical gamesmanship that the ambassador's wife had christened Powertown...
...Those who had accepted his hospitality weren't inclined to refuse his calls...
...Who are you...
...It became clear to me that where Washington comes together is in the evenings, socially...
...To keep the Powerful Jobs coming, his staff mobilized to think-up-constant inducements: fashion shows with lunch...
...Says Sondra: "It all took off from there...
...Some veterans of Ottawa's social scene weren't surprised to hear about The Slap...
...groups whose interests coincided with Canada's...
...They had deliberately chosen to use the city's social scene as the key instrument of a high-risk new Canadian foreign policy...
...Months before it happened, when a Canadian journalist asked Sondra Gotlieb about her plans after her husband's term in Washington was up, she mused that she had no illusions about the friendships they had made there...
...While he was dining regularly with the administration's stars, he failed to pick up signals last April that members of the Senate Finance Committee felt such resentment over their exclusion from the administration's trade policy that they were preparing to hold hostage an agreement to begin fast-track free trade negotiations with Canada...
...You mean the president...
...Soon afterward, she met Meg Greenfield, the Post editorial page editor for lunch at the Jockey Club and happened to tell her . about the notion...
...A newcomer who wanted entree to the corridors of power during the Carter era would not have found it wise to play the social card...
...Quipped one: "I'm not grand enough to be invited to the Gotliebs ." Gotlieb's prized—and flaunted White House catch, Michael Deaver, may also have inflicted long-term harm on the Canadian government, merely by association...
...The American government and business community were enraged...
...Sondra's epistolary career was born...
...Her gaffe had been provoked by news that an invited guest, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Richard Darman, had rescinded his acceptance to dinner...
...Notebooks and cameras had temporarily fallen slack during a let-up in the parade of black limousines disgorging tuxedos and sequins that had come to pay tribute to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney on his triumphant official visit to Washington...
...His conclusion was that the country's traditional quiet diplomacy wasn't working with the United States...
...In Gotlieb's defense, Charles Doran, director of Canadian Studies at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, points out that even the administration didn't sense the confrontation with the committee coming...
...Sondra says she .initially balked at such a gesture...
...Their efforts resulted in more stories on Canada, including growing attention to acid rain, and Gotlieb was instrumental in convincing the Post to establish a full-fledged Canadian bureau...
...It may sound like a pretty cynical.approach, but we discovered parties were-a way to get yourself known .and accepted...
...All prestige and no power...
...Soon after the Quebec- meeting, the Gotliebs threw one of the first farewell parties in honor of the departing White House deputy chief of staff...
...She took Sondra in hand, enlightening her about the distinction between A and B guest lists, and more importantly introducing her to another power center that the ambassador had targeted: the grandes dames who, with the press and lobbyists, make up the "permanent village...
...Everybody does it," she says, "but never to the same degree or quite so blatantly...
...In her twice-monthly satires of life in the nation's capital for The Washington Post's op-ed page, Sondra Gotlieb had set herself up as the chronicler of the comedy of manners that was being played out in the rarified inner circles that govern the country...
...In retrospect, some scholars of the city's society speculate that the Gotliebs had taken to heart one of the key instructions published in gossip columnist Diana McLellan's witty 1982 book on the city, Ear On Washington...
...But in the future, no Canadian ambassador to the United States is likely to take as prominent a role in the Washington social scene...
...Washington likes originals," notes a former embassy staffer...
...he had concluded it was, as he told a Canadian journalist, "the key to all their centers of power...
...After all, hadn't entertaining always been the modus operandi of diplomats...
...She told the Post's Stephanie Mansfield how, at 18, when she was flunking out of the university back home in Winnipeg, her parents had virtually arranged her marriage to Allan, then an Oxford don she had known only nine days...
...She had come up with the idea for a book based on a series of letters home to a friend about the arcane rites of the Washington society she had found herself thrown into...
...After having charmed the press, he began phoning American officials and journalists he suspected had been questioning his activities and charged them with harrassment...
...But as criticism and gossip mounted after The Slap, even the ambassador's friends were surprised to see how badly he reacted...
...By that time...
...One was that virtually the only couple they knew when they arrived— introduced through mutual journalist friends in Ottawa—was a major catch: Joseph Kraft and his artist wife Polly...
...In his memoirs of the Trudeau era, Close to the Charisma, to be published in Canada this fall, he writes that even as early as 1983, some embassy officials worried about whether the socializing was paying off, although their concerns weren't heeded by a government reveling in its new-found social dazzle...
...There was some added tympany: the skittering of an amethyst and pearl earring down the Marci McDonald is the Washington Bureau Chief for Macleans, Canada's newsweekly...
...It's a great irony," said former Undersecretary of State Meyer Rashish, "that after five years of being the toast of the town, all that anybody is going to remember is the slap...
...That guest list provided the wings on which the Gotliebs soared in the inner circles of the Reagan administration for the next four...
...Sondra Gotlieb argued that in her columns she was trying to get at "the way temporary power and status react on human beings—including myself...
...Years later when I asked Gotlieb how, as a welltraveled cookbook writer who had penned awardwinning fiction, she could have left the American media with the impression of such an unsophisticated scatterbrain, she explained that just before leaving Canada she had made a crosscountry promotional tour for her second novel...
...After the official was ousted from power, he soon found himself dropped from the Gotliebs' guest lists while Safire went on to become a frequent diner...
...In the critical week that free trade negotiations began in Ottawa, Reagan signed an order for a devastating tariff on the import of Canadian cedar shakes and shingles to the United States— a gesture of stunning political insensitivity...
...the petrodollar extravaganzas of Beluga caviar, champagne, and glitz thrown by the shah of Iran's envoy Ardeshir Zahedi...
...Over wine and Manitoba golden caviar, Allan Gotlieb discreetly pleaded his government's case on the issues of the day—no strong-arming, just some gentle nudges...
...had quite realized that the ambassador didn't see the social scene as just another capital power center to lobby...
...Everybody knew she was unpredictable...
...Hi, I'm the hostess...
...always done whatever was necessary to nurture.her husband's career...
...try the vice president...
...Her advice: cultivate an image...
...In Ottawa, the government is reported to have decided to leave in place part of the foundations of Public Diplomacy—the direct lobbying of different branches of government...
...At the embassy, there were protracted debates about how long to stall dinner in a city where, as Sondra had noted to Beverly, everybody liked to leave by 10:30 for bed...
...Don't be stupid...
...Sondra Gotlieb, Wife Of As Sondra Gotlieb tells.it, her social celebrity just happened—like one of her inevitable mishaps...
...Give Washington to the Belnaps...
...Nor were the same observers startled when=long before the Deaver inquiry put their relationship into question—, Gotliebs close friends' were predicting with a knowing air that as soon as his term in Washington was up he would join Deaver's public relations firm...
...Maybe we should invade South Dakota or something" The Gotliebs were off and running on the blacktie dinner circuit, propelled by her daffy media persona...
...The day after the parties, back at the chancery, Gotlieb would follow up with a vengeance...
...From the first, the columns were controversial...
...Allan Gotlieb had christened it Public Diplomacy...
...In fact, Bush had a previous engagement that night in Philadelphia...
...Winking at the capital's tendency to dismiss spouses of the powerful as mere appendages, Gotlieb had dubbed herself Wife Of...
...But unlike lobbyists—most of whom traditionally have kept their names out-of the paper—Canada -couldn't rally any constituentsto pressure policyrnakers...
...A former Commerce Department official remembers that at one point in' Reagan's first term, Gotlieb, paid six calls on Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige—one of his frequent dinner guests—while the Japanese ambassador, with an even greater trade deficit, made one...
...I can't abandon her now," one sighed to a friend...
...The next day, Bradlee sent a Post "Style" section reporter around to Rock Creek Drive to do a profile on the offbeat new ambassador's wife, whose undiplomatic candor verged on the outlandish...
...A few months later, when Allan Gotlieb's appointment to Washington was announced, Nini Pike's query echoed through Ottawa: why on earth would he want to be ambassador...
...Why on earth would you want to become the ambassador...
...Said an Ottawa official: "He didn't seem to have assessed just how great the cost could be of such a high-profile policy?' In fact, some analysts point out the Canadian government may have had unrealistic expectations of how much could be accomplished with social networking...
...Said Hope...
...Then when word leaked out that Deaver was leaving to set up his private public relations practice, a former Canadian diplomat recalls that gloom settled over the embassy...
...A conscious decision was made to go ahead with them, as long as they didn't touch directly on politics, and the ambassador still vets every one...
...Gossage and his team courted key names in the press with the same determination that other embassy staffers blitzed congressmen...
...There were reports of her rudeness and volatile behavior, of her abrupt departure in the middle of a lunch at the British embassy, of disconnected conversations and remarks that trailed off into silence...
...One dinner...
...Sondra has insisted that the column was born accidentally...
...On the porch just outside the front door, the silk-sheathed arm of the ambassador's wife, Sondra Gotlieb, had suddenly been raised...
...But the guest list for that September 1984 dinner-dance, which included Weinberger and Shultz, is credited with prolonging Gotlieb's career...
...The next afternoon, she gathered up her courage and dialed Jean French Smith's number at the Jefferson . Hotel...
...Many Americans had also used entertaining as a tool to gain access and information...
...But Trudeau, who had never taken a low-profile stance in his own political life, bought it...
...No one was surprised when, within six days of Deaver's official exit, he started negotiations to become Canada's $105,000-a-year lobbyist...
...and a- review board to screen all foreign investment...
...But one Canadian journalist who showed up to interview the ambassador's wife at the time found a slightly different persona—or personae...
...would he introduce her...
...The day after the profile appeared on the front page of the "Style" section, the "Today Show" asked her to appear as a guest...
...The press corps—a wire service reporter and a handful of photographers straggling along the fringes of the Canadian ambassador's front lawn on Washington's Rock Creek Drive— snapped to attention...
...He found, as Sondra Gotlieb put it, "Over drinks people will tell you things that they won't tell you at the office . " In seducing the media, the Gotliebs enjoyed two strokes of luck...
...When civil rights lawyer, Joseph L. Rauh Jr., first came to Washington in the 1930s to clerk at the Supreme Court, Justice Felix Frankfurter advised him that if he wanted to understand what was going on in Washington he would have to read the social pages...
...In the first negative press the Gotliebs had received in four years, a devastating profile in Regardie's recounted how she heckled her husband during toasts and butted her cigarettes in the salt cellar at dinner...
...In retaliation, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had responded with some protectionist measures of his own: a contentious National Energy Policy that underpriced Canadian oil and limited American energy ownership in Canada...
...How's your acid rain...
...to thrash out a compromise on acid rain, The chief thorn in their relations...
...In fact, Gotlieb had emphasized that the Serious Media was even more critical to Public Diplomacy than Capitol Hill...
...Even the Serious Press proved predictably ungrateful...
...Pitfalls of Peacockia Parties, Sondra Gotlieb wrote in a description of her life in Vanity Fair," are "the single most useful activity an embassy can engage in to promote its country's interests !' But not everyone agrees...
...I thought, 'You've got to give them an angle: " Indeed, former embassy officials don't remember her social celebrity as an accident at all...
...William Safire led the attack against Deaver, and Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee's regular presence at the Gotliebs' table didn't prevent the Post from recording the slap or the couple's subsequent fall from favor in colorful detail...
...High-class lobbyists...
...But, in fact, she had written herself a more complex starring part: the role of Bumbling Innocent Abroad who, in her guilelessness, sees everything clearly...
...The other was summed up by-a veteran Ottawa technocrat in one world: Sondra...
...he targeted a nucleus of the opinion-making stars and top honchos: Joseph Kraft, William Safire, James Reston, Ben Bradlee and Post publisher Katharine Graham, whom Sondra later characterized in her letters to Beverly as "the famous press rather than the working press...
...Sondra Gotlieb, Wife Of On the paneled walls of the downstairs library in the ambassador's residence, elegant Victorian beauties pose in their finery at glittering cosmopolitan gatherings...
...All the people who had been at the trough turned out to be the ones who took the biggest swipes," said Gossage...
...Ridings Miller, a former social editor of The Washington Post, "It's a city where, if you have enough nerve to invite people, they think you're in a position to ask them ." Jean French Smith was delighted by the offer and produced a list of her friends to invite, -including other cabinet members and the troika then running the White House—James Baker, Michael Deaver, and Edwin Meese...
...The sound rent the stillness of the mild March night air...
...After that, they had it made...
...Guests awaiting him found the cocktail hour unusually long...
...As one of the city's lobbyists notes, some members of the "permanent village" took umbrage at the open cynicism of the Gotliebs' social assault...
...Said one social scribe: "They were the key couple in the first Reagan term...
...It would be a mistake," she said...
...And people were curious about Sondra, so they invited the Gotliebs out...
...But no one, including Canadian government officials...
...I was really , scared...
...When Allan Gotlieb left for Washington in 1981...
...But Gotlieb came back from a meeting to announce with relief that Deaver had agreed to stay on until he had orchestrated the Shamrock summit in Quebec City, where Reagan and Mulroney were...
...Suddenly he interrupted Lougheed to blurt out, "Are you really Husband Of...
...domestic interests, their parties alone couldn't influence policy...
...she'd asked...
...But in that position, Gotlieb—a graduate of Berkeley and Harvard Law School, and a Rhodes scholar who had read international law at Oxford—had analyzed Canadian foreign policy with the same rigor he brought to parsing clauses in "cod war" treaties...
...One was that it constituted a high-risk foreign policy: increasing the country's visibility meant that every misstep would be noted...
...There,- she had distinguished herself by failing to pick up the dinner-party signal that the ladies were to leave the table when the port was served, and then by blundering into the men's washroom where Allan and his confreres caught- her washing her hands in the urinal...
...When she came home from yet another afternoon with cabinet wives, he finally suggested that they throw a dinner in honor of one of them...
...I thought...
...Her reaction wasn't that of a daffy Alice in sociopolitical Wonderland who remained above the city's crude and cynical code...
...I'm Caspar Weinberger," the secretary of defense replied, a response that later became immortalized in her column...
...tariff on imports had wounded his country's industries...
...the impression Gotlieb left on his calls to them that his administration contacts made Canada impervious to their concerns only added to their resentment...
...they had to offer some advantage to his guests...
...She was determined to show that Washington was not the heartless, grasping Powertown of Sondra's letters to Beverly...
...Diana McLellan agrees that the Gotliebs' social lobbying backfired in part because of their penchant for publicity...
...Ben Bradlee, executive editor of The Washington Post, found it such a novel approach that he delightedly obliged...
...Her "Dear Beverly" letters, which the Post began publishing on its op-ed page in November 1983, boosted her celebrity to new wattage...
...Instead, Gotlieb urged a strong media and social presence in Washington as a lever of influence For Canadians, with their national inferiority complex, it was an audacious foreign policy move...
...domestic policy that his country could no longer rely on making its case discreetly through the State Department...
...He-found, as Sondra put it, "Over drinks people will tell you things that they...
...Everywhere he went, especially on Capitol Hill, he found himself hailed by Sondra's fans...
...Intimations of social mortality now hang over the Canadian embassy, where the heady traffic in place cards and engraved invitations has slowed to a stately minimum...
...When Mulroney came to town last March on his first official visit, the Gotliebs felt pressure to top their previous triumphs with a stellar roster...
...To observers, the image that Sondra Gotlieb presented was one with a noble tradition in the capital, most recently personified by the late, irrepressible Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who kept a cushion beside her with the needlepoint invitation: "If you don't have anything nice to say, sit by me...
...He and his wife, Sally Quinn, watched in amusement as she greeted one of her invitees...
...porch steps, the swift tattoo of Connor's evening slippers as they too fled down the stairs and toward the back servants' entrance...
...As it turned out, so did others...
...A decade earlier, a single acrosstheboard U.S...
...I'm Caspar Weinberger There are more than 150 embassies in Powertown, -and if the Media don't know you exist...
...he said, provided a breakthrough in U.S.-Canadian relations when a presidential aide took him aside and explained what irked the administration about Trudeau: they didn't like their allies criticizing them in public...
...The wedding wasn't for another four months, and Burt had a reputation among Canadian officials for appearing scornful of their country's concerns, often greeting them with a sardonic, "So how's your acid rain...
...They made the ghastly mistake of saying what they were doing while they were doing it ." The chronicler of Powertown, in fact, may be the least surprised of all about her post-slap fate...
...I was still thinking in terms of a book tour," she said...
...Despite those heady social successes in early 1982, the ambassador found that the key players in the administration still weren't returning his phone calls...
...In a city where information is the commodity most revered after power, he set out to create a venue for its exchange where he was oneof the key brokers...
...It was a satirist's role in the tradition of Mark Twain—the hayseed who shrewdly lampoons the mores of sophisticated society—and it had catapulted Sondra Gotlieb to stardom in Washington...
...His frustration mounted as he watched Sondra—drawn into a network of ladies' lunches by Polly Kraft—routinely breaking bread with the wives of Powerful Jobs he couldn't get on the line...
...According to sources in the embassy, Gotlieb had calculated all along that to stay a player on the social circuit, his dinners had to serve as more -than a ticket for himself...
...But they didn't invite the rest 'of the diplomatic corps,-and embassy officials were often only included when there was a last-minute cancellation...
...In fact, the Gotliebs' own social progress provides a textbook example of how an outsider—American or foreign—could go about gaining entry to the corridors of influence in Washington...
...But the most vicious rumors charged that Sondra had "assiduously" courted Meg Greenfield's favor socially in much the same way that the young Lyndon Johnson had once won the patronage of House Speaker Sam Rayburn—by filling the formidable bachelor's lonely Sundays with invitations to dinner...
...American system just like any lobbyist for Exxon: roaming the halls of Congress, making its case to the Cabinet, and cultivating U.S...
...One of Canada's senior mandarins, he had held the most important deputy ministries...
...When one of them, Peter Jennings, was named ABC News anchorman, the Gotliebs threw a party in his honor that attracted most of the major media luminaries on the eastern seaboard...
...A few months later, Helms—who is notorious for shunning the social circuit— showed up at an embassy dinner...
...A blinding snowstorm blew guests onto their doorstep early, when Allan was still upstairs on the phone...
...she extended her hand...
...Despite his close contacts, he wasn't forewarned when American forces invaded Grenada—a slight that still rankles the Canadian government...
...Apparently, in part to make amends, last June she co-hosted a dinner party in their honor at her house with Democratic lawyer-lobbyist Robert Strauss, who previously had been under contract to the Canadian embassy...
...Least startled of all had been one of Sondra Gotlieb's friends, Elizabeth Gray, the respected CBC Radio journalist who formerly hosted "As It Happens...
...At the time his posting was announced, some Ottawa officials had dismissed him as a dry technocrat, unable to cut the social mustard in Washington...
...Gotlieb's administration contacts hadn't given him fair warning of the decision and the lowerlevel White House officials who might have alerted the administration to the uproar such a measure might cause in Canada had never been cultivated by him...
...film stars Donald -Sutherland and-Margot Kidder-for dinner...
...Recalls an embassy employee: "The Gotliebs measured their success in direct proportion to how many influential Americans they could get to come to dinner...
...Years earlier, at a party in Ottawa, Sondra Gotlieb had also suddenly, inexplicably, whacked Gray across the face...
...All the goodwill and visibility we had so painstakingly constructed," he concludes, "really only yielded results in the margins when real issues were at stake...
...Once, when he led former Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed to an appointment with Senator Jesse Helms, Gotlieb noticed Lougheed growing more and more agitated as Helms's attention wandered from the premier's careful exposition on the merits of free trade...
...My success is the absence of harm," he said...
...But Ottawa officials- now acknowledge that at the time none of them realized exactly what Gotlieb meant when he talked about Washington's social universe as one of-the city's power centers...
...Deaver's role in that summit has since become pivotal in the Justice Department's investigation of possible conflictofinterest charges against him...
...It was sheer coincidence," she says...
Vol. 18 • September 1986 • No. 8
