What does a country do when three of its sailors are killed on a Friday evening in the Gulf? The answer, apparently, is host a dinner party.
We had it at Eliza’s, in the Georgetown townhouse where she has been hosting the same eight people in slightly different combinations since the Clinton administration. The news broke around five. By six, a bipartisan lobbyist whose name I won’t print because he asked me not to and I am still capable of small mercies had been booked on two Sunday shows. By seven, he was at Eliza’s, examining the cufflink on his left sleeve as though it required his immediate attention. The names of the dead had not been released.
I asked him, over the soup, what he was going to say in the morning. He said he was going to say what the moment required. I asked what the moment required. He said that was a question for the moment.
Eliza said, “Margaret, please.” She has been saying Margaret, please at her own dinner table since the second Bush administration, and I have never once not deserved it.
Across the table was my sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and was therefore the only person present whose job has anything to do with the actual permanence of words. She ate her fish. She did not look up.
Somebody — I think it was the wife of a deputy something at Treasury — said the Iranians had to be answered. Somebody else said any answer would be the wrong answer. The lobbyist said both things were true at once and managed to do it without contradicting himself, which is a craft they apparently teach now in the green rooms of Northwest Washington.
The Pentagon, by then, had announced that the sailors would not be named until next of kin had been notified. The cable bookings, I noticed, were not operating under the same protocol. Three families in three different American towns were, at that very moment, being told to wait for the doorbell. The panel of analysts had already been confirmed for seven a.m.
By the salad course we were on the bracket. Selection Sunday. Eliza had Gonzaga losing in the second round and was prepared to defend it through dessert. The lobbyist had taken Houston to the Final Four and wanted everyone to know he’d seen them play in person. Judy, who picks her bracket by ranking the mascots, had Saint Peter’s going further than was reasonable.
I do not know, and will not pretend to know, what the right policy response to Friday is. I know what I watched on Sunday morning, which was the lobbyist saying his sentences on one channel and then, an hour later, saying them in slightly different order on another. Both hosts thanked him for his clarity. By noon his publicist had emailed Eliza to say the segments had gone wonderfully and could she please pass along his thanks for the lamb.
Because of course it was lamb. It is always lamb at Eliza’s. Lamb is the one course nobody at this table has ever disagreed about, and at this point in the republic I think we should be honest about how grateful we all are for that — for the one subject on which unanimous consent can still be assumed, the one platter that arrives and is met, around the whole long table, with quiet, sincere approval.
We asked for the recipe. We always ask for the recipe.