Inside the Beltway

Walk in the park

Given her many years surrounded by neckties, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice should have no trepidations when testifying today before the September 11 commission.

She was barely 35 when she toiled for the previous Bush administration as its “top Sovietologist.” Yet during the 1990 U.S.-Soviet Summit, Miss Rice stood out in the crowd of international negotiators, a young black woman whom Soviet diplomats once thought too pretty to be serious.

As Frank Murray, this newspaper’s White House correspondent at the time, observed: The child of segregated Birmingham, Ala., stood there in a red dress discussing the fate of the world with “15 older white men in suits.”

The rest, shall we say, is history.

Today, members of the special commission will be all ears as Miss Rice presents the Bush administration’s final rebuttal to accusations by former top counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke that President Bush and his national security team did not take al Qaeda’s threat seriously.

Casualties of love

A soldier in the Army Reserve has just returned home from a year in Iraq, where his transportation company operated near Tikrit.

The reservist tells this column there were 15 women in his unit when it was deployed to Iraq. Four of the female reservists were sent home because they got pregnant — a 26.7 percent attrition rate. All of the pregnancies were conceived outside wedlock.

Everything Kerry

Continuing our series of features leading up to this summer’s Democratic and Republican conventions in Boston and New York respectively, we pay a visit to the historic Ritz-Carlton in Boston, where doorman Norman Pashoian has been waiting ever so patiently for the politicians to come calling.

Mr. Pashoian, you see, has been greeting presidents and heads of state at his Arlington Street post for an amazing 57 years, opening his first door on the heels of Harry S. Truman becoming president.

Upstairs in the Ritz, we’ve learned, the plush presidential suite will be enhanced during the July 26-29 convention with framed photos and duplicates of presidential documents from the nearby John F. Kennedy Library.

Which leads us to wonder who will be staying in the famous suite, where composer Irving Berlin wrote songs for his Broadway show, “Mr. President.”

“The identity of the guest … will not be revealed in keeping with the nearly century-old tradition of discretion at the Ritz-Carlton, Boston,” says the hotel’s Caron Le Brun.

Still, we have it on good authority that the evening turndown service will not include the usual chocolate mints on the pillows, rather presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry’s favorite chocolate chip cookies. Hmmm.

Delegates staying in the hotel will be returning home with red, white and blue pillowcases embroidered with the words, “The Democratic National Convention, July 2004, The Ritz-Carlton, Boston.”

Mailbag

An overflowing sack of mail this week, on the top is a letter from Bob Emmrich of Cincinnati:

“While browsing the Associated Press wires Tuesday I came across the piece that reported President Bush’s 51-43 percent poll lead over John Kerry in Florida. The story was headlined ’Bush slightly ahead of Kerry in Florida poll.’

“Where else but in the mainstream American media would an 8 percentage point lead by a Republican candidate translate into ’slightly ahead?’ It’s going to be a long, ugly summer and fall, I suspect.”

As for John W. Dean’s new book, “Worse Than Watergate,” in which the former Nixon White House counsel charges that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have created “the most secretive presidency in my lifetime,” Marilyn Jameson of Pittsburgh writes:

“Please tell me, is this the John Dean that taught and professed the ’can’t recall’ testimony on the witness stand? You know, the defense Hillary Clinton took before she ’wrote’ her ’tell all’ book? John Dean/Monica Lewinsky — they just need to keep coming back again and again.”

Finally, regarding New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s disclosure that a middle-aged man handed her his business card with the handwritten message, “If you’re ever single, give me a call,” Mike Bates of Tinley Park, Ill., says:

“She should have shared with her readers who the flirtatious gent with the business card was: Dennis Kucinich.”

• John McCaslin, whose column is nationally syndicated, can be reached at 202/636-3284 or jmccaslin@washingtontimes.com.