On with the Buzz-Buzz

Through long years of New Deal decrees, World War II emergencies, and Harry Truman's impulses, Washington had become the city of the unexpected. Last week Washington was just a city of routine. The typewriters clicked in steady rhythm from 8:45 to 4:45 (with time out for morning coffee and lunch), the long, black limousines nosed up to the State Department for diplomatic visits, the newspapers and press associations kept a corporal's guard on duty at the White House, and the tourists trekked from the Washington Monument to the Smithsonian and down the Mall to the Capitol. Yet beneath the routine, Washington was like Main Street--listening for the first drumbeats of the big parade.

It was a time when the most ordinary variations of sound rang out like cymbals. Along Pennsylvania Avenue the hammers beat together a cubistic forest of grandstands for the inauguration. A friend spotted Mrs. Dean Acheson--who is accustomed to a solidly booked social calendar--wandering into a movie. Dean Acheson showed up at a congressional hearing relatively unbriefed and unconcerned. Harry Truman earnestly asked Congress to make tax-free the expense accounts of the new President (saving Ike $39,000), Vice President (saving: $5,600) and Speaker of the House (saving: $3,600)--and urged Congress to hurry, because a President's salary can't be changed while he is in office. And a minor official got the Department of Agriculture into the news by ruling that holes in Grade A Swiss cheese may now be only 1/2in. in diameter instead of 9/10 in. (so that cheesemakers won't have to keep cheese in storage so long in order to get larger holes).

The most distracting sounds were the bugles from the direction the parade was supposed to come from. On Capitol Hill, the G.O.P. 83rd Congress organized like a disciplined advance guard, in amazing harmony. From a hotel suite in Manhattan, Citizen Eisenhower was making decisions which would ultimately chart the course for Washington and the nation.

All in all, it was an unnerving week for the city by the Potomac. There was just nothing left to do but go on with the droning buzz-buzz. But, as everybody well knew, there wasn't a conversation in town that wouldn't be broken off when the big parade rolled by.

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