New Administration: Ornaments on the Tree

Jack Kennedy last week hung some new ornaments on the Administration's family tree—and, incidentally, paid off a few political debts. Among his latest appointees: John Connolly, 43, Secretary of the Navy. In 1937, handsome, well-tailored John Connally was a wheeling-and-dealing law student at the University of Texas when he signed on as a campaign aide to a promising candidate for Congress named Lyndon Baines Johnson. Connally has been Johnson's man ever since. After a term as Johnson's secretary in Washington, Connally took up law practice in Austin and eventually struck it rich as a friend and confidant of Texas' Big Rich oilmen. (After he moved to Fort Worth in 1952, he did legal spadework for the late Sid Richardson and is co-executor of the multimillion-dollar Richardson estate.) In appointing Connally for Johnson's sake, the Kennedys had much to forgive: as Johnson's presidential campaign manager, Connally distinguished himself at the Los Angeles convention by calling a desperation press conference to suggest that Rival Candidate Kennedy was suffering from a serious case of Addison's disease. Smooth politico Connally has Navy credentials: as a naval officer during World War II, he served as a fighter plane director aboard the carriers Essex and Bennington, won the Bronze Star and Legion of Merit.

Eugene M. Zuckert, 49, Secretary of the Air Force. As personally close to Missouri's Senator Stuart Symington as Texas' Connally is to Lyndon Johnson, affable, golf-loving Democrat Zuckert knew many a political big name When. Manhattan-born, he roomed at Connecticut's Salisbury School with Michigan's G. Mennen Williams (new Assistant State Secretary for African Affairs), studied law at Yale under William O. Douglas, now a Supreme Court Justice. For four years (1940-44) Zuckert taught at Harvard's Graduate School of Business Administration (among his fellow teachers: his new boss and good friend, incoming Defense Secretary Robert McNamara). After the war, Zuckert became executive assistant to Surplus Property Administrator Stu Symington, followed Symington into the Pentagon E-Ring as an Assistant Secretary of the Air Force. Appointed to the Atomic Energy Commission in 1952 by Harry Truman, Zuckert signed the controversial majority decision in 1954 that barred Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer from access to classified material. The day after the decision was announced Zuckert's A EC term expired and he went into Washington law practice.

Archibald Cox, 48, Solicitor General. Ever present at Senator John Kennedy's side during the 1958-59 congressional battles over a labor reform bill was a trim, crew-cut law professor whom North Carolina's grumpy Graham Barden dubbed "that nit picker from Harvard." Shy, witty