The President-Elect: Boundless & Endless

By plane, train and automobile the leaders and the led, the great and the grateful converged in the Kennedy villa at Palm Beach last week. They talked jobs, patronage, budget, legislation, inauguration, and between sessions discovered that life with the Kennedys is something like life on a trampoline.

First to be bounced in were Vice President-elect Johnson and Lady Bird in their private Convair. Typically, some body fouled up the schedule, and LBJ had to wait for 30 minutes in his plane before the welcoming committee arrived. And then there was added bustle: Lady Bird had not been expected (there are only six bedrooms in the Kennedy house, and present or invited — besides Jack — were Jackie, the new baby, Daughter Caroline, and Joe and Rose Kennedy). Next, gruff old Sam Rayburn, the "Speakah," as the Kennedys called him, flew in from Bonham, Texas in the Kennedy family plane.

Bald & Proud. Scarcely had the visitors unpacked when Kennedy ordered them out for one of his frequent rounds of golf— (no pictures, please, ordered Kennedy's aides). With security agents lurking with gun and radio in the rough, the group pounded away, but flatly refused to disclose their scores. Word got around that when Mr. Sam beheld Johnson's first drive, he said hell, he could do as well as that, and did.

Greeting Mr. Sam later, three-year-old Caroline observed that "you haven't got a hair on your head." Replied Mr. Sam: he hoped Caroline would do as well with all her locks as he had done with no hair. Caroline seemed satisfied with that, and then sought out Lyndon Johnson to discover whether the master political craftsman knew how to make sand pies. Disappointingly, he didn't. One morning Sam Rayburn also tried his hand at fishing off the Palm Beach seawall with little Joe Kennedy, Bobby's son, caught eight fish to Joe's seven. As if that had not been enough of a challenge, Sam Rayburn also had to sleep next to the nursery; the baby, remarked Jack Kennedy next day, "had a restless night."

House Master. With the arrival of Montana's Senator Mike Mansfield, who will be the new Majority Leader, Kennedy and his guests sat down to the serious business of planning the congressional goals of the New Frontier. Most of the promised bills had been defeated or abandoned in the dismal dead-end session of Congress last August: a medical care bill tied to social security, expanded federal housing, a $1.25 minimum wage, assistance for depressed areas, and federal aid to education.

Observing the proprieties, the fellows put on their neckties before confronting waiting newsmen with word of the serious business of the day. Sam Rayburn made it clear that he still considered himself the man in charge of the House. Despite big campaign promises of legislation for teachers' salaries, the emphasis, he said, would be on school construction—period. Vice President Johnson came away with two new assignments: chairmanship of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, which will set U.S. space exploration goals for both military and civilian agencies, and chairmanship of the Committee on Government Contract Compliance, aimed at ending discrimination in companies that deal with the Federal Government (outgoing chairman: Vice President Richard M. Nixon).