Washington D.C. is a place where people say, “I have a hard stop” at the start of meetings, unironically. It’s a place where the day starts with policy breakfasts at 7am, and the barbacks can name all nine Supreme Court Justices. As a new Californian, being in Washington in the days before the Mueller report dropped felt like culture shock, one in which I was bemused to discover photographers staking out to shoot photos of the Mueller lawyers picking up lunch, as if they were paparazzi staking out Harrison Ford.
Speaking of Harrison Ford, I had to get up for one of those early AF breakfasts to prepare for a white paper release event (Washington is also a place where there are white paper launch events). And I’m sitting there with the authors of the report, having breakfast and talking nuclear deterrence and sanctions sequencing when I casually look to my right and HARRISON FORD was sitting there, an arms length away, eating breakfast. Just like us.
I turned back to the table, made a crazy eyes face, and the others whispered, “Oh you’re just realizing this?” And then they dissuaded me from telling him I love him saying anything to him because they’d already observed him waving others away. Man, too bad. That is probably the biggest celebrity I’ve ever sat a foot away from at breakfast. He had the pleasure of hearing us go over a proposed policy toward North Korea that acknowledged it would not soon give up its nuclear weapons.