“The Kennedy buildup goes on,” wrote
James MacGregor Burns, a Williams College political science professor
and John Kennedy's admiring biographer, in the New Republic. “The
adjectives tumble over one another. He is not only the handsomest, the
best-dressed, the most articulate, and graceful as a gazelle. He is
omniscient; he swallows and digests whole books in minutes; he
confounds experts with his superior knowledge of their field. He is
omnipotent.” Burns was worried, and so was many another Presidential
admirer, that John Kennedy and his family might soon suffer ill effects
from public overexposure. Wrote Burns: “The buildup is too
indiscriminate. The buildup will not last. The public can be cruel, and
so can the press. Americans build their triumphal arches out of brick,
Mr. Dooley said, so as to have missiles handy when their heroes have
fallen.” But Jack Kennedy was plainly unbothered. Last week both he and Jackie
continued to light up the front pages and the television screens with
their tireless activity. Equal Time? The week began with the President's traditional first-pitch
opening of the baseball season, and even then the reporters had a new
angle to write about. “Would you like to go to the ball game with me?”
Kennedy asked a morning visitor, 17-year-old Richard Lopez of El Paso,
the Boys' Clubs of America's “Boy of the Year.” Lopez surely did, and
was photographed with the President. “I felt 50 feet high,” he
reported. The next night Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy appeared on TV for an
hour-long intimate glimpse, taped earlier by NBC and sponsored by Crest
toothpaste . The First Lady won headlines with
her plaint that the fishbowl life of the White House was “very hard”
on the children, that she was striving to provide “normal” and
“private” lives for them. As for daughter Caroline, “Someday she is
going to have to go to school, and if she is in the papers all the
time, that will affect her little classmates, and they will treat her
differently.” “How Nice.” Jackie Kennedy also made a gracious gesture toward the
nation's newshens, inviting 200 of them for lunch. The presswomen, led
in through the southwest gate, which is usually reserved for state
occasions, drove past daughter Caroline's jungle-gym swings and duck
pond. Jackie greeted each guest with a warm friendliness. Said she to
Eugenia Sheppard, the New York Herald Tribune Women's Feature Editor:
“How nice to meet you, at last!” Eugenia melted, could barely wait to
rush off to her typewriter. “It was exactly the female kind of party
that we took up a career to get out of going to,” she wrote. “But
somehow, at the White House, it was different.” Everyone clucked about
Jackie's two-piece dress, a chic understatement in beige ottoman silk,
and her new chef, who had worked through the night to lay on a little
buffet of pates, hams, turkeys, lobster thermidor, and Hungarian
goulash. Before the dessert, Jackie stood up to welcome the women in words thai
women understood.
