The Cabinet: The Flavor of the New

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Winton ("Red") Blount, the incoming Postmaster General, keeps a pet pig named Elvira on his 60-acre spread near Montgomery, Ala. The Blounts also have a summer place on nearby Lake Martin, where they entertain friends and family aboard a Chinese junk. Robert Finch, who will be Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in the new Cabinet, sometimes sports socks with holes the size of a half-dollar. He turned up recently at a dressy function in a green shirt that he had worn all day working around the house. Says a friend: "I think he puts on clothes just to keep from being arrested." The new Secretary of Transportation, Massachusetts' John Volpe, drinks "Volpe mead"—honey and hot orange juice—for breakfast, dyes his hair but insists that regular doses of olive oil have kept him from going grey. Labor Secretary-designate George Shultz cooks for guests by plastering steaks with a half-inch coat of salt and throwing them in the living room fireplace.

Despite such minor quirks, the members of Richard Nixon's Cabinet are a staid lot who have generally similar tastes. They are not eight millionaires and a plumber, as Eisenhower's original choices were irreverently—but accurately—described. Though some are wealthy, most live unostentatiously. While one, Red Blount, is a qualified jet pilot, none of them is by any stretch a jet-setter. Their mode of living is mainly suburban middleclass, with strong emphasis on family life and informal entertaining at home. A possible exception to the pattern is New York Investment Banker Maurice Stans, the new Secretary of Commerce, who lives in a Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park and hunts big game in East Africa; he and his wife Kathleen prefer taking their friends out to top restaurants for dinner.

Community Service. Quite a few of the new Cabinet members are no strangers to Washington. Stans served as Eisenhower's budget director from 1958 to 1960. Finch was executive secretary to California Congressman Norris Poulson in the late 1940s, and administrative assistant to Vice President Nixon a decade later. Melvin Laird, the incoming Secretary of Defense, has been an eight-term Congressman from Wisconsin, and has become a highly influential Republican in the House. Secretary of State-designate William Rogers was Eisenhower's last Attorney General; during the Kennedy and Johnson years, he kept a handsome house in Bethesda, Md., and worked both in New York and Washington for a topflight New York law firm.