Just 72 hours before her meeting, Caroline Yee got word her keynote speaker, Dan Rather, was canceling (he was in Iraq). The cool-as-a-cucumber planner didn't bat an eye, though; there was already a fill-in ready to address the audience of corporate execs. Who? Carrot Top? Kato Kaelin? Nope -- none other than Bill Clinton. It's not every day a planner's headliner pulls out and a bigger name steps in. But this was no everyday event: The New York City spring confab by Yee's employer, nonprofit The Conference Board, featured a star-studded lineup -- including pundit/author Arianna Huffing-ton, Wall Street corruption fighter Eliot Spitzer, and ex-Fed head Paul Volcker -- all holding forth on how to restore public trust in business. Yee didn't snag any speakers; co-hosts like Harvard's Kennedy School of Govern-ment and Clinton ex-staffer Leon Panetta reached out to pals. (Why'd Clinton agree? Sponsor Walter Shorenstein, real-estate mogul/deep-pocket Dem donor/Friend Of Bill, pulled some strings.) Other than trying, vainly, to keep her speakers on schedule ("You can't tell the head of the New York Stock Exchange to speed it up"), Yee's biggest challenge was getting three months to locate an available Manhattan venue with meeting space for over 200. She claims "luck" landed her one of the city's best-known hotels: The Plaza. Modesty aside, Yee's no slouch at handling contingencies: The Frisco native started at Marriott in reservations, worked her way up to international sales (she handled incoming Japanese and European groups), then spent five years in Jordan and Singapore. In 1999, she moved to Manhattan on a whim and before long got her current gig. There's a downside to such professionalism -- like missing Clinton's lunchtime talk at the April 15 meeting. Did she slip out to mail her tax returns? Hardly: "I filed those back in March. I had to double-check the tent cards for the next session!"