Presidential dinners

Former White House social secretary talks about presidential dinners in Malta, writes Eagle staff writer Matthew Watkins:

Laurie Firestone has planned dances for prime ministers, barbecues for senators and receptions for queens. But one of her most vivid memories is from an evening in which she prepared a dinner enjoyed by an aircraft carrier crew. The former White House social secretary spoke to several hundred people at the George Bush Library Friday evening about her time serving under the former president. She was at the library to promote her new book, An Affair to Remeber: State Dinners for Home Entertaining.

In 1989, Firestone said, she accompanied her boss to the Malta Summit, where Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the summit, Bush planned to have a luxurious dinner organized by Firestone on an American aircraft carrier. The dinner was to have fine food, expensive American wines and luxurious centerpieces for the two world leaders and their companions.

However, a storm blew through while the dinner was being prepared, turning the sea choppy. "We joked that we didn't know whether to put the Dramamine on the left or the right of the plates," Firestone recalled Friday. When the dinner preparations were finished, Firestone received word that Gorbachev refused to leave his own ship because of the rough waters and the canceled the dinner. Bush instead accompanied Gorbachev on his own boat. "The crew of our ship loved the supper," she said...