The Man Who Had the Best Time

Hail to the Chief, who in triumph advances . . .

"Are you comin' to the Inauguration, Aunt Jessie?" asked the Chief. Mrs. Jes sie Hunter, a widow and an old friend of the family, shook her head, flustered. "I haven't been asked," she piped politely. The President of the U.S. put his arm around the elderly woman. "Pack your dress," he said in that soft, earnest tone, "and come on with us. Be at the ranch no later than 4:40. Air Force One won't leave without you."

Well, Aunt Jessie made it. And so did just about everybody else worth naming —except a few. Cousin Oriole, in her 70s, was not up to the trip. Dwight Eisenhower was taking the California sun, Harry Truman was feeling under the weather, and Jacqueline Kennedy wanted to avoid the inescapably painful comparisons. Uncle Huffman Baines was present, and so was Sam Houston Johnson, Lyndon's brother, and Mrs. Josephs Saunders, Lyndon's aunt, and Rodney White, Lyndon's nephew, and Ave Johnson Cox, Lyndon's cousin, and Lyndon's two sisters, Mrs. Birge Alexander and Mrs. O. P. Bobbitt and their children, Becky Alexander and Philip Bobbitt, and Lady Bird's brother and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. A. J. Taylor, and Lady Bird's widowed sister-in-law, Mrs. Sarah Taylor, and her daughter Susan.

Shuffled Beds. With all these people staying at the White House and across the street at Blair House (where Margaret Truman Daniel and her husband were putting up), a lot of beds and rooms needed reshuffling. Luci gave up her bedroom for a dressing-room cot to make space for several good Texas friends; Lynda Bird shared her yellow boudoir with a girl friend, and Governor John Connally got to sleep in Lincoln's bed.

What with so many Texans present, it sometimes seemed as if it had been Jack Kennedy four years ago who really assembled the Great Society and Lyndon Johnson who was now opening up the New Frontier. If so, it was a prosperous, well-behaved and superbly dressed frontier—and a dazzling show. The colors and sounds and faces seemed always the same, suspended for a brief moment, only to shift into new combinations, new designs, new moods. Scenes of high and solemn moment, as in the oath taking, swiftly changed to crowded dance floors, to prancing horses and strutting drum majorettes, to humming cocktail parties, wriggling teenagers, somber prayers, to ear-shattering brass bands endlessly playing Hail to the Chief, to laughter and cheers, to sentimental squeezes and unashamed tears.

And the man who had the best time of all was Lyndon Baines Johnson. Make room for me, mister . . . The big preliminary event came Monday night, a Democratic gala at Washington's cavernous National Guard