National Affairs: Capital Notes: Mar. 17, 1961

Full Employment

Despite public professions of satisfaction with his new job of Vice President. Lyndon Baines Johnson is restless—and the President of the U.S. knows it. Johnson's trips "downtown" were so frequent (19 in ten days) that President Kennedy assigned him a suite in the Executive Office Building, thus giving Johnson a fourth office to add to his two in the Senate Office Building and one in the Capitol. Kennedy also added another job to Johnson's bulging portfolio, appointing him the head of the new President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, a high-powered group which can influence the cancellation of Government contracts or the blacklisting of contractors who fail to employ—or train for employment—Negroes and other minority applicants.

Forgotten Man

Of all John Kennedy's erstwhile competitors for the Democratic presidential nomination, Missouri's Stuart Symington has done the fastest fadeout from the public eye and from the Kennedy Administration plans. The other Democratic front runners—Lyndon Johnson, Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey—are very much in evidence, but Symington is conspicuously cold-shouldered. He and the President are still on amiable social terms (they played golf together recently), but the relationship stops during office hours.

Mike's Nose-Count

Soviet Ambassador Mike Menshikov has been working overtime in his rounds of Washington parties. Over the cocktails Smiling Mike has been disarmingly and deliberately asking Senators how they feel about disarmament. State Department sleuths surmise that he is compiling his voting list with the knowledge that the U.S. Senate would have the final word on any disarmament proposal.

All in the Family

Actor Peter Lawford is virtually the only male relative of the Kennedy family who still has no Government job. In addition to Brother Bobby as Attorney General and Brother-in-Law Sarge Shriver as director of the Peace Corps, Brother-in-Law Steve Smith was discovered working quietly as an unpaid consultant for the Development Loan Fund. In faraway Seattle, Herbert Legg, Washington State Democratic chairman, was prompted to remark: "The Kennedys have what one might call an English awareness of friends and relatives, because they know their friends and relatives are qualified—else they wouldn't be friends and relatives."