Howell Raines' new piece in Portfolio is more or less an extended blast at Karl Rove, but he sets the scene with this tasty morsel:

In our audience sat 200 or so of the usual suspects from my generation of media muckety-mucks: Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, our version of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor; ­Andrea Mitchell, by my lights the hardest-working reporter in network television; Bill Kovach, my ex-boss at the New York Times' Washington bureau and a premier guardian of what we once called journalistic ethics; and Chris Matthews, reeling that evening from having just read an early copy of "that f*cking article" about him in the Times Magazine. My wife, Krystyna, seated at the same table, reported that Andrea assured Chris that "it wasn't that bad," but no creature in the universe is more fragile than a cable celeb who has just been mugged in print.