The owner of Café Milano and president of Georgetown Entertainment Group has a new award to add to a long list he’s received, including the Ellis Island Medal of Honor.

Franco Nuschese was born in Minori, Italy on the Amalfi Coast and has spent more than 20 years building a successful business and working to improve the lives of people across the globe. Now, Nuschese can be called “Commendatore dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana,” the third of six ranks in the organization which is comparable to Britain’s Order of the British Empire.

“Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic” is a prestigious honor conferred by Italian President Giorgio Napolitano for promoting a positive image of Italians around the world. Past honorees include designer Giorgio Armani, race car legend Mario Andretti, tennis star Francesca Schiavone, and astronaut Dr. Umberto Guidoni. Nuschese was presented with his new title December 13th at a dinner hosted by the Italian Ambassador to the United States, Giulio Terzi di Sant’Agata, at Villa Firenze, the Italian residence in Washington, D.C.

Guests included Nuschese’s son Gianfranco, a Georgetown University student; Supreme Court Justice and Mrs. Antonin Scalia; General and Mrs. Jim Jones; Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge; UAE Ambassador and Mrs. Yousef Al Otaiba; BET co-founder Bob Johnson; and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“I am grateful and humbled by this honor,” said Nushcese. “I will accept it as a tribute to my father, Giuseppe, who several weeks ago died in Italy after a long and wonderful life.”

When Nuschese opened Café Milano in 1992, it quickly became the place to spot politicos and celebrities alike. In 2008, Nuschese was so moved by being chosen to host a luncheon for the pope during his visit to Washington, D.C., he wrote about it for The Washington Post. The event for His Holiness Benedetto XVI happened to coincide on the pope’s 81st birthday and Nuschese left no detail unattended. President Bill Clinton was such a favorite regular at Café Milano, that Nuschese and legendary producer Quincy Jones were chosen to speak when Clinton was honored in May with the Lifetime Achievement Award for Public Service at the Sons of Italy Foundation’s 2010 NELA Gala.

Much like the former president, Nuschese has devoted himself to public service. He is the director of international relations for the Robert C. Gallo Foundation for AIDS and Virus Research, and is a member of the boards of the University of Maryland’s Institute of Human Virology, the Afghanistan World Foundation, the foundation for Georgetown University Hospital, the Washington National Opera, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

Congratulazioni, Commendatore Nuschese!

“Proud, grateful, wistful.”
That’s how former President Bill Clinton summed up his feelings about daughter Chelsea‘s upcoming summer nuptials to investment banker Marc Mezvinsky in an interview with another former first daughter, TODAY show contributor Jenna Bush Hager. “I just hope I can keep it together when I walk her down the aisle.”

Hager sat down with Clinton in Miami, Florida at the third annual Clinton Global Initiative University, where over 1,300 students met with university officials and leaders from nonprofits to talk about creative solutions to today’s global issues. Included among the students were six from Haiti. President Barack Obama called upon Clinton and Hager’s father, former President George W. Bush, to help in relief and recovery efforts in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake earlier this year.

One particular area of interest to both Clinton and Hager, a teacher and author when she’s not on NBC: education. Clinton says the issue is vitally important:
“The country needs to start educating its people, so what we’re trying to do now is use this as the beginning to total universal enrollment.”

Check out the entire interview below:

President George Bush at 2008 RTCA Dinner

In 2008, even its entertainer/host Mo Rocca dissed the RTCA dinner, calling it the Nicky (Hilton) to the White House Correspondent Dinner’s Paris. And indeed the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (aka “Senior Prom”) in recent years has bigger celebrities (the likes of Ozzy Osbourne, Pamela Anderson, Ben Affleck and Mariska Hargitay), more of them and more-buzzed about pre- and post-parties.  Check out some of the pics from last year here.

The RTCA dinner is now in its 65th year. It’s Hollywood quotient in the last decade was mostly limited to activist actors Ron Silver and Al Franken and hip hop mogul Russell Simmons, although Jon Voight and Fran Drescher also put in appearances. But it has a recent history of making headlines from the stage; highlights (lowlights?) include entertainer Don Imus’ raunchy jokes about President Bill Clinton’s personal life in 1996, a major PR gaffe by President George W. Bush in 2004, and, in 2007, a bizarre rappin’ “MC [Karl] Rove.” And unlike the Gridiron Club’s annual dinner, the RTCA’s, which in recent years has been held at the Washington Hilton, is open to TV cameras.

Once upon a time, the tables were switched: Radio and television correspondents worked for richer news organizations and were better paid than their print colleagues and many were glamorous stars in their own right, giving their dinner the higher profile of the two. In 1987, however, the Baltimore Sun’s Michael Kelly started inviting the likes of Fawn Hall and Donna Rice to the White House Correspondents’ dinner and the competition was on.

The Washington Post’s Kim Masters called Mr. Imus’ appearance in 1996 “a roast that turned into an inferno.” The radio shock jock, as President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton sat just feet away, joked that: “When Cal Ripkin broke Lou Gherig’s consecutive game record, the president was at Camden Yards doin’ play by play in the radio with John Miller. Bobby Bonilla hit a double, we all heard the President in his obvious excitement holler ‘Go Baby!’ I remember commenting at the time, I bet that’s not the first time he’s said that. Remember the Astroturf in the pickup?”

He also poked fun at ABC News’ Peter Jennings (who wasn’t there) and CBS News’ Dan Rather (who was.)

Don Imus

Mr. Imus was unrepentant (the New York Times reported that on his radio show the next Monday he said that he had “wimped out”) but the dinner committee issued a formal apology to the President, whose spokesman, Mike McCurry, called the routine  “pretty bad.” C-Span denied an administration request to pull a rebroadcast of the night’s events, but Imus’s comments live on in cyberspace.

Subsequent hosts–among them Lewis Black, Ben Stein, Darrell Hammond, Mo Rocca and Steve Bridges–trod more middle ground. TBS’ impressionist Frank Caliendo, at the time just making a name for himself, brought the house down in 2006, sending Vice President Cheney into fits of laughter.

Mr. Clinton knew how to give it back. The 2000 dinner had a much-sought-after souvenir: Red and green “Free Leo” buttons and stickers being handed out by White House staffers in a reference to the news-versus-entertainment brouhaha involving ABC News sending a then-25-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio, star of “Titanic,” to interview President Clinton for an Earth Day special.

The President, who was introduced that night not with the traditional “Hail to the Chief,” but with “Titanic” theme song “My Heart Will Go On,” quipped in his remarks that “ABC doesn’t know whether Leo and I had an interview, a walk-through or a drive-by.” As a stony-faced ABC News President David Westin looked on, he added that, “I’m not sure whether all this damage control is worth the effort: It’s a little bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the set of ‘This Week With Sam and Cokie,’ ” the network’s struggling Sunday morning show, and then continued: “Don’t you news people ever learn? It isn’t the mistake that kills you, it’s the cover-up.”

In 2003, the dinner was postponed from its March 20 date to June, due to uncertainty over the starting date for the Iraq War (a good call given that the invasion indeed began on the dinner’s original date.) The following year, President Bush came in for harsh criticism when his stand-up routine at the dinner include a slide show in which he joked about the search for weapons of mass destruction (one of the justifications for going into Iraq), showing him looking under the Oval Office furniture. Not everyone in the audience was laughing.

The following year, in 2005, the President and many other invited guests were unexpectedly off in Rome for Pope John Paul II’s funeral, so VP Dick Cheney filled in, and it was a sober event. CNN’s celebrity guests were a group of U.S. soldiers, wounded in Iraq, who were being treated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center

But Mr. Cheney was funnier in 2008, garbed in his supposed post-White House vacation clothes of fedora and sunglasses.

Still it was hard for him to White House adviser Karl Rove’s 2007 appearance, a bizarre moment in which, egged on by the “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” entertainment guys, he got up on stage and “rapped” as “MC Rove.” His jerky dancing and multi-octave sound effects were bizarre; NBC Correspondent David Gregory, dancing alongside, just looked awkward.

Not all is controversial at the RTCA event. After NBC’s David Bloom died of a pulmonary embolism in 2003 while covering the Iraq War, the association established an award in his name, for excellence in enterprise reporting, that produces many damp-eyed moments each year when it is handed out. Another honor — the Joan Shorenstein Barone Award for Excellence in Washington-based National Affairs/Public Policy Broadcasting–is also bestowed each year at the dinner, in remembrance of the former CBS News producer.