Supporting Future White House Correspondents
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — The artist Tom Sachs, who has two exhibits opening in New York on May 8, looked at home in the wonky crowd at the White House Correspondents Association annual dinner Saturday. But a lot of the New Yorkers at the Washington Hilton stood out as the glamorous, social creatures they are (one even wore her Vanderbilt jewels).
The dinner has come a long way, as I learned from Helen Thomas early in the evening.
In 1961, Ms. Thomas, a dues-paying member of the association, was not permitted to attend. The next year, she convinced President Kennedy to insist that he would only attend if women did, too. Ms. Thomas has been coming to the dinner ever since, and was president of the association in 1975.
The guest list of a few thousand grows each year, banked by news and information companies with and without White House correspondents.
It is a spectacle for a good cause: the dinner raises scholarship money for journalism students. This year the association plans to dispense $132,000. That’s a good number, but it’s not a very New York number (Evelyn Lauder’s Breast Cancer Research Foundation gala, for instance, raised $5 million earlier this month).
agordon@nysun.com
