The Ketchup Comeback Kid
Roll Call Staff
The bureaucrat blamed for Ronald Reagan’s most notorious social policy faux pas — the cockamamie idea to count ketchup as a vegetable in school lunches — is finally feeling vindicated. Thanks to a little-noticed news report touting the nutritional value of ketchup, Bill Hoagland is rising above his critics and friends who have ruthlessly teased him for the past 24 years.
Hoagland, the Senate Republicans’ chief budget and appropriations adviser, saw an “Inside Scoop” e-mail from CBS News one day last week listing that night’s “Evening News” topics. The lead item: “DID YOU KNOW? 4 tablespoons of ketchup has about the same amount of nutrition as a ripe tomato?”
“Yahoo!” Hoagland thought, envisioning the lifting of the albatross from his neck. Mr. Fall Guy, no more! Hoagland, who was ousted from the Reagan Agriculture Department over the ketchup dust-up, whipped off an e-mail to GOP colleagues that forwarded the CBS news blurb and, of course, added the four words he had longed to say: “I told you so.”
One of the aides who received the e-mail was Bob Stevenson, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and a longtime friend and colleague of Hoagland going back to their days on the Senate Budget Committee. Smiling as he read the e-mail, Stevenson decided to reward his old buddy with breakfast at his desk Thursday morning.
He properly put a knife, fork, glass and china plate down on Hoagland’s desk, and on the plate he placed about 20 ketchup packets with a note reading, “Bon Appetit!”
You could almost hear Hoagland shaking his head when HOH asked how he liked his breakfast of champions. He said his surprise petit dejéuner reminded him of the day he returned to Capitol Hill in August 1982, following the ketchup debacle. He walked into his office, sat down at his desk, opened a drawer and ketchup packets began spilling out everywhere.
His wife had predicted he would be tossed from his job as administrator of the Food Nutritional Service. “You’re finished,” she told him when he came home late from work one night. “When Johnny Carson starts telling ‘ketchup is a vegetable’ stories in his monologue, you’re finished.” “She was right,” he sighed.
Hoagland just hopes the ribbing won’t last an eternity. He said he fears his loved ones will put “Ketchup Is a Vegetable” on his tombstone. “I’m hoping we can avoid that,” he said.
Kissinger and Rummy, Chummy. Fans of Donald “Rummy” Rumsfeld and Henry (we won’t call him “Kissi”) Kissinger went wild Thursday night at Bistro Bis when they spotted the swashbuckling duo dining together in a booth.
Folks knew there were VIPs inside when, as they walked into the Hotel George restaurant, they saw Secret Service officers looking through the plants near the entrance. “It was totally weird,” said one witness.
The former secretary of State arrived first and waited a good 15 minutes for Rummy. While he waited, sources say he ordered a Virgin Mary. (Who knows, maybe Kissinger wanted to stay sober to remember the moment in the event Rumsfeld apologized for that little spat that dates back to the day when he accused Kissinger of being too slow to pull out of Vietnam.)
Finally, the Defense secretary showed up with a big smile on his face and a warm handshake for Kissinger, who Rummy insisted stay seated.
Rummy drank white wine, our sources say. And it appeared they had a “chummy, nice, relaxing dinner,” said Angela Phelps, director of publicity at Regnery Publishing, who dined at a nearby table.
Phelps said that when Kissinger and Rumsfeld got up to leave Bis, they were nearly mobbed with folks taking pictures and wanting to chat with them. Clearly, Rumsfeld’s constituency dines at Bis: One former GOP Congressional staffer stopped the secretary to say he supported and appreciated the administration’s efforts in Iraq.
Phelps chimed in to say she agreed. She told Rumsfeld that her mother is from Iraq, and that her father served in the Army for 30 years and they are “big fans” of Rummy.
“He said, ‘What?’” So Phelps repeated that her mother is from Iraq and recounted how her father met her mother over there when he was serving at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad in 1967. (Phelps’ mother escaped from the country in 1968 and met up with Mr. Phelps in Tehran. Angela came later.)
“He said, ‘Really!’ He said, ‘Thank you’ and gave me a wink,” Phelps said.
She added that diners in the restaurant were “all over” the two men as they left.
Frosty Gets Busted. A reporter walking past the Supreme Court in the snow Monday night spotted a tussle between a Supreme Court police officer and what appeared to be the remnants of a snowman.
The reporter, who asked to remain anonymous so that his children’s snowmen will go unharmed this winter, said he stopped and watched the officer destroy the snowman. The officer repeatedly kicked one of two giant snowballs, what would have been Frosty’s body, the reporter said.
Finally, the journalist, asked, “Hey, what are you doing? What’s going on?”
“You never know what is in one of these things,” the scribe said the cop replied.
Energy and Commerce Committee: Barton Holds the Line for the GOP
March 15, 12 a.m.
Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) knows he’s outnumbered. He knows the Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where he serves as ranking member, have the ability to “slam things through” when they want to. Read Full Article
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