Tracing the Footsteps Before the Foot Taps

The NIH houses are for the surgeon general, institute directors and other senior people, so some longtime HHS officials privately grumbled about Beato's presence there -- especially after her nomination for the assistant secretary's job died in the Senate in 2004 amid allegations that she had padded her r?sum?.

Beato left federal employment this year and was sworn in as deputy director of the Pan American Health Organization on April 27. But she continued to reside at the NIH. More grumbling followed.

Beato is still living there, HHS spokeswoman Christina Pearson said in an e-mail yesterday to our colleague Christopher Lee. She said Beato's eligibility for the subsidized housing expired when her federal service did. But the NIH has given her "a transition period" to move. "My understanding is that Dr. Beato is making arrangements to close on a house at the end of this month," Pearson wrote.

She's paying $1,795 a month, the NIH reports, for a four-bedroom duplex on the grounds of the NIH campus. She has been there since at least 2001.

You Seen That Manuscript? (Wink)

Remember the good old days when Douglas Feith, one of the Pentagon's leading Iraq hawks, would edit every comma in his subordinates' memoranda, provoking one subordinate to label his office the worst-managed she'd ever seen?

Well, they sure remember Feith's endless blue pencil antics over at the Pentagon. And turnabout is fair play, it seems.

Five months ago, the former undersecretary of defense for policy submitted for security review the first 10 parts of his Churchillian memoirs about leading America to victory in Iraq. He was doing so voluntarily -- unlike the CIA, the Pentagon doesn't require pre-publication review of books by former officials.

But the Pentagon review, being conducted by a couple of security squirrels, dragged on in the dungeons of the department. Concurrent reviews by the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council had been completed.

"I bent over backwards to keep it in regular channels and not call higher-up people," Feith told us yesterday. But time went on, and he couldn't get a response from the Pentagon. "It was from someone in my former office," Feith said -- surprise, surprise -- "but I don't know who."

So he made a call up the chain -- he won't say to whom -- and sure enough, the skies promptly cleared, and the problems -- apparently none of major import -- suddenly disappeared. One argument, we were told, developed over supporting documents for about five footnotes out of several hundred in the manuscript.

"The idea that this would take five months is a little astonishing," a Pentagon official aware of the security review told our colleague Tom Ricks. The official asked not to be identified because the public affairs people told her not to speak on the record, she said. "We have been slow. . . . We are certainly going to be more responsive and more timely." You betcha.

Feith said he recently sent over the final six chapters of "War and Decision," and he's hoping the clearance process this time will be only a few weeks. Meanwhile, Feith is beavering away, doing what he called "all the work that you have to do" on a book "after you think you're done," and looking to a January publication date.