THE PRESIDENT IN PERSON
McGrory, Mary
The President in Person by Mary McGrory The new President of the United States is a man who wastes nothing—time, money, or emotion. Everything in his life for the past four years has been bent to...
...He likes reporters, having been one himself, briefly...
...But something in his appearance suggests to the suggestible that he is lost, stolen, or strayed—a prince in exile, perhaps, or a very wealthy orphan...
...Another is Charles Spalding, a New York banker...
...When his wrath is spent, it is as though it never happened...
...Representative Thomas P. O'Neill Jr., who now holds the Kennedy Congress seat, remembers back to 1946, when the slender young Navy veteran was tentatively making his bid for a seat in the House of Representatives to the accompaniment of jeers from Boston pols...
...Callers sometimes confer with him over the roar of the showers he is always taking...
...He wears imported suits and shoes...
...He has hardly spent two consecutive days alike since 1956, when he began his perpetual-motion drive to the Presidency...
...I looked around at the others," he said calmly, "and I said to myself, "Why not me...
...It was realism, not humility...
...Lunch is a broiled lamb chop and a baked potato and vegetable, preferably mashed asparagus or some bland offering...
...For I could not vote against that nice boy...
...While the Kennedy appeal to women was epic, the menfolk did not resent him, either for that or his other advantages...
...For recreation he likes mysteries, favoring Ian Fleming...
...His wife is dazzling...
...Everything in his life for the past four years has been bent to the pursuit of the high office to which he was sworn January 20...
...But he has learned to live with them...
...he was more than willing to demonstrate it to dubious politicos...
...Once during his early days in the House of Representatives, he diverted reporters, after dismissing a band of earnest reformers, by saying: "Those goofs are really obnoxious...
...He resented having to campaign in the primaries against Hubert Humphrey, whom he did not consider a serious contender...
...The new President's idea of relaxation is a good movie...
...We would go down the drain with him gladly," says Kenneth O'Donnell, MARY McGRORY, herself a New Englander and former Boston newspaperwoman, has long known the Kennedy family...
...He is one of the handsomest men in American political life...
...Once in a while at a party he will fumble with a cigaret...
...When people have told him all he wants to know, he generates an aura of dismissal...
...Going on to display that collectedness which is his hallmark, he immediately added: "For the record, we're doing everything we can...
...he has two children...
...He regards the office as a challenge, and a challenge is what he likes best in the world...
...Although he must be recorded by all outward signs as the man who has everything, he still makes people want to help him...
...He consults the professional oracles of his trade, and he can rattle off percentages like the pollsters he hired in depth...
...Politics is in his blood...
...When he is brooding over something or giving expression to a complex thought, he wanders around a room picking up objects, putting them down—perhaps he will stop to remark on them...
...He likes to drive, and a recent sight in Florida was the windblown, sunburnt President-elect at the wheel pulling up at the airport with a triumphant grin while Secret Service men sat sheepishly in the back...
...After a while he began to enjoy it...
...Extremists of any kind get on his nerves...
...O'Neill reassured them he was not...
...The godmother of his son and namesake is Martha Bartlett, wife of Charles Bartlett of the Chattanooga Times...
...They have never seen him panic...
...But the Mother Machree strain which lurks in most Boston Irish politicians was entirely left out of his makeup...
...He now takes a drink of scotch occasionally and has recently discovered the daiquiri...
...He had tears in his eyes...
...Someone always carries his bags and gets his airline tickets for him...
...He does not care for effusive people...
...The only thing the new President is prodigal of is gesture...
...He has gone out of his way to make his staff happy...
...Thanks be to God," the answer came back...
...He collaborated with the poet Robert Frost on the revision of a line in "The Gift Outright," the poem Frost read at the inauguration...
...The article above Is adapted from the original which appeared in the New York Poet...
...Nevertheless, he inspires in them an almost feudal loyalty...
...If the vistor is a bore, he begins to mumble and his sentences trail off and he makes frustrated gestures...
...Someone once asked him in the early, seemingly futile days why, carrying the burden of his youth and his religion, he was running...
...The Kennedy magic, insofar as this commodity lends itself to analysis, rests in his ability to involve people in his problems...
...what do you have...
...One thing his staff hopes will be effected now that he is in the White House is the imposition of a daily routine...
...He is, in fact, quite talkative on occasion...
...As far as they can make out, he would, if settled down, get up about eight o'clock...
...The Bartletts introduced the new President to his wife...
...The other day his brother-in-law, actor Peter Lawford, and George Ken-nan, the expert on Russia, were seat-mates on his plane, the Caroline...
...Lately he has been training himself in solicitude...
...We have this many guns...
...They admire his intellectual capacity, his eagerness to learn, and certain thoroughbred qualities they never tire of detailing...
...He is always at home to Representative Torbert Macdon-ald, who was his roommate at Harvard...
...Sometimes they find him in stocking feet or his nightshirt...
...On the few occasions when he has stayed in Washington for any time, he has done his correspondence in the morning...
...One of his closest associates these days is Arthur M. Schles-inger, Jr., the liberal Harvard historian...
...He likes his daughter Caroline, three, to wait up for him...
...He is happiest in the afternoon between 4:30 and 6. This is when he tries to schedule his most important callers, does his best work, is his most congenial...
...a campaign aide now with him in the White House...
...Five minutes later he will chat equably on another matter...
...A more thrifty and self-possessed young man never reached such heights...
...Of all the candidates in the field he made the most modest and realistic claims...
...They have never seen him sulk...
...He began to relax and expand and to exhibit the Ernest Hemingway quality of grace under pressure...
...In the primaries his addresses were models of economy, if not oratory...
...When he talks he pumps his right hand up and down...
...He swims, sails, and golfs...
...He is a voracious reader...
...The main bout, against Vice President Nixon, he found rewarding...
...Both Irish Catholic immigrant grandfathers came up through the wards...
...In the backroom afterwards, with the recalcitrant political leaders, the conversation was equally terse...
...She covered the national conventions last year and traveled widely with Senator Kennedy during the Presidential campaign in behalf of the Washington Star...
...It was a maximum effort which had a Yankee frugality at the core...
...His manner is casual to the point of negligence...
...O'Neill, then a state legislator, was making his usual rounds among the Irish in the North Cambridge tenements and receiving his usual cordial welcome...
...Another indispensable in the Kennedy entourage is his factotum from Boston, "Muggsy" O'Leary, who, like his boss only pronounces the letter "r" in words where it does not occur, like "Afric-er...
...He likes dessert, has a small boy's preference for rich chocolate concoctions or, failing that, a pudding...
...When things went wrong, his staff heard about it, in Anglo-Saxon terms worthy of a longshoreman...
...His closest friend in the Senate is George Smathers of Florida, a friend from House days...
...The kind of people he likes best are old friends...
...and Mrs...
...He dislikes anything of a socially significant nature, prefers a good comedy...
...He is constantly in action...
...Kennedy never talked about his effect on people in the mass...
...He sought it for that rather than for the power involved...
...You would do things for Jack you wouldn't do for your own mother," says David E. Powers, his favorite campaign handler...
...He relaxes with these people...
...Whatever it is, it is pure gold...
...He is hospitable to a wide variety of people...
...The bursting Kennedy household always entertained troops of friends...
...The new President can be impatient with people...
...Except for his years in the Navy, he has led what might be called a charmed life...
...was about the size of it...
...Those who know him best say he will not be a reposeful President...
...He remembers that many conversations ended this way: "Ah, Tip," the lady of the house would say, "of course, you're not running against that Kennedy boy...
...But he is on a steady diet of chewy fare, political biographies, histories and, at the moment, task force reports...
...He is extremely matter-of-fact, however, and quite undemonstrative...
...His closest professional associate is Theodore C. Sorenson, a brainy, 32-year-old Nebraskan who is somewhat baffled by the ins and outs of Boston politics, but never misses a beat when the new President is operating in the world of information and ideas...
...His roommate at Choate, LeMoyne Billings, was present in Hyannis Port with the family on election day...
...Words interest him greatly...
...At the eye of a self-generated hurricane, he knows where he is going...
...This gentle baseball statistician, the first time he saw the new President, in 1946, declared, "everything about him was class...
...He goes to bed around 11:30 p.m...
...Although his progress appears helter-skelter, he can keep details in mind...
...he called up all the rejected candidates for high government posts and expressed his regrets...
...His interest turns off like an electric light...
...He smokes a cigar now and then...
...Schlesinger were his first post-victory guests at Hyannis Port...
...he was born rich, and he has been lucky...
...At one point he told an interviewer that he was "uncomfortable" with liberals...
...Or he fingers his tie...
...He is not an early riser, but knows he must be up and doing and the hour is a compromise...
...Sometimes he just walks away with a vague farewell...
...His manner is remarkably devoid of unction...
...He likes his neighbor, Benjamin C. Bradlee of Newsweek...
...He is as graceful as a greyhound, and can be as beguiling as a sunny day...
...He paces while dictating...
...His greatest loyalties are to his family and to Harvard University...
...He has always enjoyed individuals...
...He has conquered serious illness...
...He always answers difficult letters first...
...The only sentiment anyone saw him display in public was when, after his razor-thin victory over Vice President Nixon, he went to the armory to claim his prize...
...But he is, perhaps thanks to a profound acquaintance with history, patient with events...
...His political sense is half-instinctive and half-intellectual...
...He is an enthusiastic participator in sports...
...It was evident from the earliest days...
...That is not to say that he is a taciturn man in the style of Calvin Cool-idge, another New Englander...
...He enjoys hearing the political lore of his native Boston, where politics is played with all the gentility of professional football...
...He let it go with a few remarks about the institution of the Presidency, a spate of statistics and a quote or two from the classics...
...They liked his directness and his war record and the fight he showed in the TV debates...
...He was rarely heard to rail against a candidate's fate during the back-breaking days when he ate on the run and slept on the plane whenever he could...
...One day he entertained at lunch Walt Ros-tow, the MIT economist and a considerable intellectual, and the genial politician Governor Edmund Brown of California...
...He is ready to pause and marvel at all manner of things: the speed of a jet plane, a well-played football game, a political coup, or the proficiency in foreign languages of his beautiful wife, Jacqueline...
...But in attaining his ends, he husbanded his resources...
...His breakfast is unvarying: one glass of orange juice, two four-minute eggs, toast and jam and coffee with a little cream...
...He wasted few words and no soft soap...
Vol. 25 • March 1961 • No. 3
