In 2003 Jack Straw, Britain's foreign secretary, had an informal meeting in his hotel suite with the president of Iran, a country with which Britain had no diplomatic ties.
The Clintons "were in New York constantly, " Mr. Blauvelt reported, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, or I suppose any secretary of state, rates the Presidential Suite when the president isn't simultaneously in town.
Another memory from the 1977 mayoral race had the candidate and me pacing the hall outside a Midtown hotel suite where Vice President Walter Mondale, who was scheduled to campaign with Mr. Koch, had apparently overslept, or decided to sleep in. (I'd been summoned to take the Vice President's luggage back to the airport and Air Force Two.) Whatever it was, Koch took the mix-up stoically.