A little late, perhaps, but worth repeating nonetheless. From Peter Girnus, "a senior coordinating producer for the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner".
I was backstage at the Washington Hilton when the shots were fired.
The first thing I heard was not the gunfire. It was glass.
A champagne flute hit the floor of the International Ballroom at approximately 9:47 PM. Then a second. Then the sound that I have since been told was a 12-gauge shotgun, which from inside the ballroom sounded like a heavy door slamming in a parking garage. Then the Secret Service moved. They moved the President, the Vice President, the First Lady through the east corridor in under ninety seconds, which is protocol, which is practiced, which is the one part of the evening that worked exactly as it was designed.
Everything else was improvised.
I know this because I ordered the wine. 94 tables. Two bottles per table. 188 bottles of a Willamette Valley pinot noir that the Association selected in February after a tasting committee spent three meetings debating between Oregon and Burgundy. Oregon won. The budget was $14,200. I signed the invoice. I can tell you the vintage. I can tell you the distributor. I can tell you the per-bottle cost because I negotiated it down from $89 to $76.
What I cannot tell you is how 147 of those bottles left the building during an active shooter evacuation.
I can tell you what I saw. A correspondent from a network I will not name picked up two bottles on her way to the east exit. Full bottles. One in each hand. She was wearing heels and she did not spill. A man in a tuxedo tucked one inside his jacket the way you'd shoplift a paperback at an airport bookstore. A woman picked up a bottle, looked at the label, put it back, and took a different one.
She checked the vintage. During an evacuation. That's editorial judgment under pressure.
. . .
2,600 guests were directed to the exits by Secret Service agents, one of whom had just taken a shotgun round in his ballistic vest and walked to the ambulance on his own feet.
The agent's vest costs approximately $800. The wine that left the building was worth $11,172 at Association cost. At restaurant markup, roughly $29,000. The guests saved more in wine than the vest that saved the agent.
That's priority.
. . .
I have produced eleven of these dinners ... I have never, in eleven years, seen a guest leave a $76 bottle on the table during an evacuation. I have also never seen a guest check the label first. Both observations are consistent. The bottle is worth taking. The evacuation is worth surviving. The instinct is to do both simultaneously.
188 bottles placed. 41 recovered. 147 unaccounted for. One agent shot. Zero guests injured. Zero bottles broken.
A free press for a free people. The press is free. The wine was $76 a bottle. They took it anyway.
There's more at the link.
Mr. Girnus' post on X (formerly Twitter) has so far attracted over 4,000 replies and comments. Click over there to read them if you're interested. I particularly liked his reply to one comment:
They took the wine at a pace that suggested familiarity with hotel evacuation corridors. That's not elite behavior. That's logistics under pressure. I've seen worse at a Marriott fire alarm in Phoenix.
Word!
Needless to say, my opinion of most alleged journalists has not been improved by this fiasco . . .
Peter
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