Sperling Breakfast Catch of the Day: Ed Rollins   

Rep. Tom Foley has eyes only for his cereal bowl. He's arrived a few minutes late but is still determined to accomplish what most speakers at Sperling breakfasts have given up even trying to do – finishing his meal.

Godfrey Sperling Jr. isn't helping. Foley has just finished greeting the three dozen reporters who have gathered in the regal Crystal Ballroom of the Sheraton Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C. But Sperling, a 78-year-old Christian Science Monitor columnist who has presided over 2,600 such gatherings since 1966, has already begun the introduction.

"The group, as you know, is still trying to recover from the Rollins breakfast," Sperling says.

"So is Ed," quips the speaker of the House.

As Rollins demonstrated in early November, the Sperling breakfast sometimes has a knack for enticing its guests to say more than they expected.

The GOP consultant set off state and federal investigations when he suggested that one of his clients, the Christine Todd Whitman campaign, spent $500,000 to suppress black voter turnout during Whitman's successful New Jersey gubernatorial bid. Rollins later retracted his comments.

But even as he unwittingly jeopardized his career, Rollins highlighted a venerable Washington institution.

"I'm sorry about what happened to him," Sperling says. "But I'm not unmindful that it put our breakfast group center stage."

Although most reports about Rollins' remarks did not identify Sperling's gathering, the phrase "over breakfast with reporters" signaled to many that another speaker had served himself up to the former Monitor Washington bureau chief and his colleagues.

"Budge" Sperling has been bringing together public figures and journalists ever since he first gathered a group over lunch 27 years ago to meet a new Republican senator, Charles Percy, a fellow Illinoisan.

Nearly all of the meetings since then have been 8 a.m. breakfasts. Sperling's group has broken bread – and eggs – with cabinet members, congressional leaders, presidential candidates, governors and political consultants. They've also met with Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan and, on December 8, Clinton. The group met with George Bush several times as well, but never during his presidency.

To some degree, the years have aged not only Sperling, but also the ground rules, guests and gastronomy.

Television journalists and their cameras are banned, Sperling says, so "you don't have reporters or guests showing off." Wire services are also kept out because newspaper reporters "are not going to come here in the morning" if they return to their offices and find the story already being distributed.

The breakfasts were once informal briefings for a small cabal of bureau chiefs and columnists. For the past two decades or so, however, they've been on the record, and bureau chiefs now parcel out the invitations. (The bureaus pitch in to pay for the room and food.) A few women, such as Eileen Shanahan, Washington bureau chief of the St. Petersburg Times, now also sit amidst the mostly white, mostly male group.

Even the food has changed. The entree remains watery eggs, limp potatoes and crisp bacon, but most attendees now gravitate to the cereal and fruit bar.

Although the Sperling breakfast isn't as elite as it once seemed, such gatherings are still prone to charges of pack journalism. Many reporters say they use the breakfasts simply to save string for later stories; Tom Brazaitis of Cleveland's Plain Dealer has compared it to "fishing on a day when the fish aren't biting... Once in a great while, a big fish takes the bait."

The catch November 9: Rollins. Responding to a question about the New Jersey campaign, he dropped his bombshell. The comments jolted Tom Edsall of the Washington Post, who had covered the governor's race and was curious about what Rollins had to say.

Edsall, like many of the journalists who attend the breakfasts, doesn't expect breaking news. This day, however, he scrambled to find a tape of Rollins' remarks to check his quotes. The reporter says the page one story that followed reminded him that "there is the potential for news out of [the breakfast] at any time."

Maybe it's all that caffeine and cholesterol. Sperling attributes it to the civility of the setting and the respectful nature of the questions. That occasionally entices speakers to let their guard down, he says, "and I don't mind that."