By Rowan Philp
Reporter, Sunday Times
Johannesburg, South Africa

It was 9:52 p.m. when I walked into the clattering White House press room. Thirty-eight minutes to deadline and I felt fine. A little smug, even. I had yet to put pen to paper on the event I'd just witnessed that Sunday night, but I was covered. I had been in a panic two days before. Veteran Post reporter Phil McCombs and I had been asked to cover the White House state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee for the front page of the Style section. Neither of us had ever covered a major fashion-and-finery story and McCombs seemed to consider finding a suit the only preparation necessary. A dead ringer for Clint Eastwood, McCombs was a former war correspondent, and looked it—a chewer of cigars, a griller of steaks, a pronouncer of French words. We were clearly in trouble.

Worse, we were to have less than an hour after the end of the toasts in which to write the thing. So I spent hours that weekend researching the event, getting special permission to interview the catering staff Sunday morning and writing the entire story ahead of time. I'd done it many times before on "scheduled event" stories in South Africa—go for the obvious angle beforehand and just stick in a few quotes from the event afterwards. And there was only one obvious angle for this gig—having refused even to meet with the Pakistani leader two weeks previously, Bill Clinton takes clear sides in the subcontinent by reserving his biggest and last state dinner for India. So I wrote that.

Step two, of course, is: what does the regular state dinner reporter usually write? Detail, the state dinner printouts told me: tons of descriptive prose about the table settings, the flowers, the menu. And so my piece spoke richly of wild Copper River salmon and garlic-chanterelle emulsion served upon Indian-theme plates, placed on gold and pomegranate damask tablecloths, decked with rare Wartah proteas. The story ran overlength before I even left for the event it reported. Competent. DONE.

So, at 9:42 p.m. in the press room, having got the quotes we needed, I smiled at the mad hustle among the reporters in the pool and got ready to seed my prepared masterpiece with a few choice quotes. McCombs settled in front of the Post's terminal, cleared his throat—a thundering phlegmy gargle that jarred heads in our direction—and said: "Okay, lets ged rid o'ya B-matter here and write this damn thing from the top, whaddaya say?" B-MATTER? Before I had a chance to say anything like "No! Are you crazy?" McCombs deleted the top half of my story with a single keystroke.

I yelled: "Dammit, Phil, we've got half an hour on this—get that back!" "Relax, man, we can slug it out later," he drawled. "What happened here tonight is news—what you think it means is not news. C'mon what's the best quote ya'gut?" Um..."The...the chef, talking about the soup. He said 'It's all about sweetness and smoke,' which is a nice metaphor for this weird new Indian diplomacy and..." "No, no, c'maan, man! Metaphors? People aren't interested in the curry and the friggin day-cor, man, they wanna know what the stars think about the nukes!"

It was a bad moment. It appeared I'd been stuck with some war-addled conspiracy theorist on my first major deadline story. He added: "But the nukes are for later. What did the leaders do? What did you see?"

Exasperated, watching the clock strike 10:00, I said, "Nothing. It was just a set dinner; there's nothing to write. They just clinked their damn glasses..." "Right, right, then that's our lead," he said, turning to the keyboard: "India and America clinked glasses last night in their new whirlwind friendship as Prime Minister...Hey, wut's the best quote ya'gut for Vaj-pie?" Before I could stop myself, I mentioned the prime minister's flippant remark about Columbus finding America by mistake.

"Right, right!" said McCombs, and started narrating his typing: "'Columbus, who set sail for India but landed in America.' Great. Now—the nukes." A joke in the lead? I was gutted; couldn't think. My piece had been beautiful—my hard-earned comfort after the nightmare of the guest quote-getting earlier in the evening. (I'd have gotten them all over the phone if I'd had the numbers). I had been one of a dozen reporters working the ropes on a guest arrivals corridor inside the White House.

The actor, Chevy Chase, walked by. Ha! A funny quote; I'd just have to feed him a line. So I shouted: "Chevy, what does the prospect of nuclear annihilation do for the digestive process at a dinner like this?" Chase stopped, stared, said: "What? This is serious business; I can't digest what you just said." Stung into silence, I missed the next three celebrities to walk past. McCombs, a few feet away, was speaking loudly, and asking the same basic questions, over and over: "How are ya tonight? What are ya lookin' forward to?" And he was getting great quotes. I tried it. It worked.

I tried simply calling to the guests louder than the ABC reporter next to me. That worked too: I started hogging them ruthlessly—staking out the red carpet and even keeping them just long enough that they'd refuse any further press queries. The ABC reporter did not get a single quote from a Somebody among the last 300 guests. Those, I assumed, would turn out to be my lessons for the night: get quotes with simple questions; get people with loud commands; get it all exclusive by standing first on the rope and annoying the stars. The rest I was writing off as a disaster.

But at 10:27 p.m., McCombs filed our piece—the wing-and-a-prayer Columbus-nukes version. It was ugly, it was quote-heavy, it left out—I realized too late—any mention of the Pakistani snub. But it made deadline. And—it struck me suddenly—it was also authentic, truthful, a reflection of what had happened. News.