Summer Interlude

In muggy, midsummer Washington, Summer Bachelor John Kennedy worked early and late on the problems of state, arriving in his office well ahead of his staff and retiring to the deserted White House at dusk with sheaves of work under his arm. After 18 months in the presidency, during which he has suffered as many downs as ups, the President these days looks cool, controlled and relaxed. Those who see him regularly think he has tempered his anguish at being unable to remake the nation, or to win over Harry Byrd, overnight. But they report him far from resigned to the way Congress has cut up his domestic program.

In those informal skull sessions he likes to have with passing visitors and newsmen he knows, he talks as if convinced that the real source of his troubles lies in a soft and complacent national mood that invites the Congress to stand pat--or at least tolerates its intransigence. As he sees it, his task this fall is to stir up public interest for the domestic programs that he believes both sound and necessary.

Despite his bitter defeat on medicare, he intends to use it to highlight the whole package of domestic legislation that he wants. He has already worked out a tentative schedule to appear in about 15 states, and beneath his easy and businesslike manner his aides sense a new and expectant mood of political combat. In characteristic Kennedy fashion, he poor-mouths the chance of picking up a few extra Democratic seats in Congress in the process.

Lost Battles. Whatever push he might still give Congress was not of much use now. The major battles were over, and some key ones lost--but there was international politicking to be done, and without stirring from Washington. Accompanied by his mother. Rose Kennedy, who is the President's official hostess while Jackie is on Cape Cod, he went out to Washington National Airport to welcome Ecuador's President Carlos Julio Arosemena. In two days of receptions, lunches and talks, the two Presidents discussed U.S.-Ecuadorian problems, but Kennedy often turned the conversation to the crisis in Peru, where Washington's stiff reaction to a military takeover was now embarrassed by the way the Peruvian brass seemed to be settling into authority without much public disorder.

The doggedly familiar questions returned in new forms. Berlin--more Soviet pressure; but Dean Rusk and Andrei Gromyko had made their disagreement explicit, so what more could be done? Disarmament--a meeting of 16 top-level officials around the rocking chair about whether to modify U.S. proposals for an H-test ban (see THE WORLD). Then the President rushed off to receive a visitor about whom he was openly curious: Laos Neutralist Prince Souvanna Phouma, the man whose inertia in the face of the Communists has been the despair of U.S. policy planning for two years. The President found the placid Prince looking far younger than his 60 years, and, if no minds were changed on either side, the U.S. did announce that it will remove its last troops from neighboring Thailand.

On the Balcony. There were also less-global affairs: a visit from Benny Goodman, reporting on his Russian jazz tour; a trip to the bedside of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, 79, who is recovering from a stroke; a White House meeting with a North Carolina admirer, aged 8, who is suffering from a heart deformity; and an enjoyable interlude with 24 blind teen-agers from California, who peppered him with questions. "Are you going to run for office again?" "I'm thinking about it.'' "Do you think your children will follow in your footsteps?" "I hope so."

After each day's work, Kennedy retired to the midsummer quiet of the White House to read in solitude, occasionally dine with Presidential Assistant Dave Powers and make one of his twice-daily calls to Hyannisport to check on his vacationing family. Sometimes the President paced in the White House gardens. Or, alone at sundown, he stood on Harry Truman's balcony overlooking the White House fountain, a soothing sight before him: the white spike of the Washington Monument, auto headlights flickering along Executive Avenue, the distant Jefferson Memorial. Perhaps such sights make a President think of his own place in history--but John Kennedy is not a man to stop thinking for long about the present.

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