The Presidency: Exposure

"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 (thereby causing wags to wonder if Ipana, Stripe and Pepsodent would demand equal time). 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.