As if a dress-up character had wandered into a White House event, a man waaaaaaaay in the way back of the press briefing room, his head barely visible through a thicket of reporters, boomed out a question for President Bush. "Should Mel Gibson be forgiven?" asked Sam Donaldson of ABC News, famous for his high-decibel inquisitions of President Ronald Reagan.

Donaldson had returned for a cameo at the final briefing in the famous blue-draped room before it closes for renovations that are supposed to take about nine months. The President rarely drops into the press quarters, but he had made a surprise appearance -- along with First Lady Laura Bush -- at the end of White House Press Secretary Tony Snow's briefing to mark the historic occasion and to banter with reporters. On Thursday, he heads to his ranch for a brief working vacation and the press will begin decamping to temporary quarters outside the White House gates in a building next to Lafayette Park.

Snow brought his children, and someone gave him a celebratory bottle of apple cranberry juice, perfect for brewing that refreshing summer concoction known as the cranflap. (Just add ginger ale.) A young press aide busted out his white bucks. Reporters snapped photos of each other in their dingy seats, many of them broken either from overuse or the surplus of overly ample frames that occupy them.

Back to Mel Gibson. The President smiled as he recognized the far-off voice and toupee, but did not respond quickly enough to suit Donaldson. "Should Mel Gibson be forgiven for claiming that the Jews start all the wars?" the Texas native repeated.

"Is that Sam Donaldson?" the President asked, grinning and drawing laughter. "Forget it! You're a has-been. We don't have to answer has-beens' questions." The press corps responded with a chorus of, "Ohhhhhh!" The President, warming to the impromptu roast, cupped his ear hammily and said, "I can't hear you. I'm over 60, just like you."

"Only Ronald Reagan could get away with that, sir," Donaldson admonished. A din had broken out, a little like a high-school class just before the closing bell rings. Someone pointed out that Helen Thomas, in her customary seat in the front row, had a birthday coming up. "She and Donaldson are about the same age," the President cracked, causing the correspondent to retort that Thomas was his mother. Donaldson is 72. Thomas -- who joined United Press, the future UPI, in 1943 -- will be 86 on Friday.

The theater has been the press room since 1970, when President Richard Nixon had it built over what used to be President Franklin Roosevelt's swimming pool. A trap door in the floor lets visitors look down to see where the pool once was, with the deep end under the press secretary's podium. A buddy of mine got to climb down there after he dropped his cellphone into the void during a tour. It wasn't a ruse but it should have been -- he was treated to a rare view of the White House. When the renovation was announced, reporters of course were paranoid that once they left the West Wing, they'd never be back. Snow joked that he should have brought a swimsuit on the final day, just to tease them. But he promised we'll be back and the President even said, "Looking forward to being here when you kick off the new room. You deserve better than this. I appreciate the relationship with the press." He added, "It's an important relationship."

Snow began the briefing normally, answering questions about the Middle East, Cuba and immigration. Then five former press secretaries came in, and Snow began the wind-up to the President, who had been delayed. The broadcaster in Snow came out and he streeeeeeeetch his remarks, finally confessing, "I'm vamping, as you've probably figured." Then Connie Lawn of USA Radio News, who also files ski reports and calls herself "The Skiing White House Reporter," suggested a round of "Auld Lang Syne." Snow told her to go ahead and the a cappella actually began when luckily the President and the First Lady arrived to spare the C-SPAN audience.

The former press secretaries were:

--Joe Lockhart, who served President Bill Clinton, joked to Bush that the audience was "some of the same crowd" that had tortured him.

--Dee Dee Myers, Clinton's first press secretary, offered some important perspective about the press room when she said afterward, "The first thing people say when they take a White House tour is, 'Boy, it's so small and it's kind of a dump.' It IS still in the West Wing of the White House.'

--Marlin Fitzwater, press secretary to President George H.W. Bush, noted that over about the last 10 years, the White House had become "the communications center of the world," with so many momentous events announced or explained at the podium.

--James Brady, who was injured in the assassination attempt on Reagan, came in his wheelchair with his wife Sarah and said that his best memory of the room -- which was officially named the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room on Feb. 11, 2000 -- was when his wife, Sarah Brady, who accompanied him onstage, used to drop by for lunch.

--Ron Nessen, who had to defend Nixon and is now journalist in residence at the Brookings Institution, marveled at Snow's sense of humor, saying, "I had a thin skin. I had a short temper."

A small sample of Snow's light approach came during the good-bye briefing. When someone asked Snow if the new briefing room would bring better answers, his riposte was: "In response to better questions."

Republicans spooked by the prospect of actually losing control of
congress this fall have been planning what they viewed as an early Halloween
fright show: a fall focus on the Democratic committee chairmen who
would likely take over if the GOP lost its House majority in the November
midterms. But the Democrats, sources tell TIME, have come up with their
own way to ease any potential voter fears about the members in question
-- they've started making it very clear that no ranking members are
guaranteed committee chairmanships.

The Republicans have begun making their case by focusing on the top
Democrats on each committee, on the assumption they would move from
ranking member to Chairman if the party took over: Rep. Charles B. Rangel
(D-NY.) at the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, Rep. John Conyers Jr.
(D-Mich.) at Judiciary and, perhaps scariest of all for the GOP, the
aggressive Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) at the Committee on Government
Reform, which can issue subpoenas.

House Republicans have put out "Democrats Unhinged: The REAL House
Democrat Agenda," as a preview of what the party would do if it won
control, and Republicans planned to go personal soon with a look at what a
Democratic Congress could look like. The party is prepared to use voting
records to argue that several of the chairs-in-waiting are out of the
mainstream, and that overall the new leadership would be overwhelmingly
liberal-leaning.

To try and defuse that line of attack, House Minority Leader Nancy
Pelosi (D-Calif.) recently announced to her ranking members before they
left for the summer break that they could not count on winning a
chairmanship if the party took over.

"She said members should not feel entitled and nobody should assume
anything, including who will be chairs," said a House Democratic aide.
"It's very clear that the Republican strategy is to attack the ranking
members. It's part of their scare campaign to try to sow fear of the
Democrats."

Although Pelosi's twist will not stop the GOP from speculating, it
muddies the argument about the characteristics of a Democratic House.
Pelosi held the 4:15 p.m. Thursday meeting in her conference room to remind
the ranking members of their need to keep the drumbeat of the
Democratic message going during the break so that President Bush wouldn't have a
clear playing field.

Republicans did not seem too torn up when told about the development.
Kevin Madden, spokesman for House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio),
said: "The prospective list of Democrat leadership and committee
chairmen reads like a 'Who's Who' of Democrat hysteria. As much as Nancy
Pelosi thinks she can sweep that mess under the rug right now, there is no
way she can hide the fact that these folks and their ideas are just way
out there. The idea of Charlie Rangel directing tax policy in this
country will keep our base awake at night, and it's sure to keep a lot of
moderate Democrats from pulling that lever in November as well."

Brendan Daly, Pelosi's spokesman, counters: "After 12 years of abusing their power for their special interest friends, no wonder Republicans are afraid of Democrats who will work for the priorities of everyday Americans. The vast majority of the nation wants to go in a new direction, and no amount of Republican fear-mongering will change that."

On Capitol Hill, some decisions are intended for leaking, and Pelosi's
warning to her leaders looks like one of them. She recently has taken
to kicking members' aides out of meetings for sensitive discussions so
that only lawmakers are present. But aides, who luckily for reporters
are often inclined to be chatty, were allowed to stay for her declaration
about chairmanships -- all but ensuring it would find its way to the
public and the opposition.

She has Bush's ear, global clout and a high profile. Now she needs
some results.

Back in 2003, Condoleezza Rice, then the national Security Adviser,
decided that U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer's plan for getting a
government going in Iraq wasn't viable. Without telling Bremer or his
boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Rice went to President
George W. Bush after her summer vacation to put the viceroy on a
shorter leash. She knew that the President exercised with Bremer when
he visited Washington, appreciated his strong Catholic faith and
treated him like a Cabinet member. But she drew on her even deeper
bond with the President. She soft-pedaled her views of Bremer's
record so as not to make it personal and got herself put in charge of
Iraq policy.

The episode, a precursor of Rice's outmaneuvering of Bush hard-liners
when she became Secretary of State, is revealed in Imperial Life in
the Emerald City, a forthcoming book about the Green Zone by the
Washington Post's former Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran.
The details were confirmed for Time by an official who was involved,
who added a telling coda: Bremer actually liked the new arrangement
because he "got to deal with Condi, who had the President's ear."
Since moving out of the West Wing to take over State in early 2005,
Rice has returned there often and has remained close to the President
and First Lady. Now the President's hopes for becoming a Middle East
peacemaker lie with the imperturbable and at times inflexible concert
pianist and childhood championship ice skater he calls "an
unsticker"--a solver of insoluble problems.

Rice announced before heading off to Israel and Lebanon last week
that she was not after "a temporary solution," much to the
consternation of Arab and European allies of the U.S. The New York
Times ran a vivid front-page photo of Rice, eyes closed, holding her
head as if in despair. In fact, she was wiping off perspiration that
was pouring down her forehead in a broiling conference room in Rome.
(The hall normally seats about 100 people but was packed with 1,000;
firefighters showed up to remove doors to cool the place down.) Her
goal is grander than the instant results demanded by her critics. She
says she is after nothing less than a changed Middle East, which
requires more than a cease-fire that could quickly be breached. As
White House press secretary Tony Snow put it, the objective is to
"create the conditions so that you not only have the piece of paper,
you have the peace."

Rice has greater access and latitude than any Secretary of State
since Henry Kissinger left government after Gerald Ford lost in 1976,
and she has capitalized on every bit of it. Many senior officials at
the National Security Council are Rice loyalists who date back to her
days there, so the State Department and the White House work closely
together and sometimes cut the Pentagon out, according to
participants. Until now, she has won generally glowing marks for a
record that includes offering the first substantive talks with Iran
in 27 years. But some Bush aides were miffed that she embarked on
what they sarcastically called the "Condi Rice Show" without a
clearly attainable goal. Her initial round of diplomacy in the
Israel-Hizballah hostilities was mostly portrayed as a failure, and
she looked drained as she emerged from a meeting of world powers in
Rome, where many allies had pushed to call for an immediate
cease-fire.

Earlier this month Rice took her senior staff to the Wye River
Conference Center on Maryland's Eastern Shore to plan the fall,
including a presidential trip to the U.N. The former plantation was
the site of Bill Clinton's negotiations between the Israelis and
Palestinians. A reprise looks very far off to the Bush team.
Nevertheless, friends say, Rice, 51, is thriving in her
higher-profile role, working from 6:30 a.m. until 7:30 or 8 at night,
then treating herself to tennis, the Kennedy Center and brunches with
friends on weekends. Roughly one Sunday a month she has her
chamber-music group over to her Watergate apartment.

She worked on the National Security Council of President George H.W.
Bush, and some Bush-family aides say Rice's election as the first
black and first woman President could be one of the clan's greatest
legacies. Although no national race appears to be in the offing for
2008, friends hope she will eventually run statewide in California.
Rice's staff recognizes that the speculation about her political
future may be useful, and has overhauled the optics of the job to
give her coverage greater pizazz. In Washington she appears with
world leaders in front of a fireplace that could be in the Oval
Office. Abroad, she is photographed stepping from a plane with an
almost presidential wave, a shot that Colin Powell's staff rarely
facilitated. "The time for diplomacy is now," she said at her
confirmation hearing. It was a message not only to the world but also
to parts of the Administration that had thwarted Powell.

Rice's staff asked State Department historians for the dossiers of
successful Secretaries. One characteristic they had in common was
clout. She can check that off. Now she must show she can use it.

—With reporting by Elaine Shannon, traveling with Rice