Echoes of Courage

The commemoration of courageous moments and men brings out the best in President Kennedy. He likes heroes, medal winners and war stories. He stood tall and proud last week at the White House reception for Astronaut Gordon Cooper. In Manhattan, at the brief dedication of a monument to the 4,596 American men who perished in western Atlantic waters during World War II, the President was moved to emotion and eloquence.

The Generous Hands. A destroyer boomed a 21-gun salute, flags fluttered, and the noon sun bore down on Battery Park at the lower tip of Manhattan. The President stood solemnly before the memorial--eight 19-ft. granite pylons that bear the names of the dead and a giant bronze eagle that looks across the bay toward the Statue of Liberty. He spoke of the sea, struggle, sacrifice, and "what it all meant that we should be in such hazard today." Declared the President: "It means that every generation of Americans must be expected in their time to do their part to maintain freedom for their country and freedom for those associated with it. There is no final victory, but rather all Americans must be always prepared to play their proper part in a difficult and dangerous world."

Kennedy's 1 1/2-day New York trip also had its less stirring political moments. Some 600 business and professional men and Democratic notables, calling themselves the President's Club, chipped in $1,000 each to throw a birthday party for Kennedy at the Waldorf-Astoria. He would not be 46 for six more days, but it was a good excuse to come to the aid of the Democratic Party's chronic deficit with an estimated $600,000. During the dinner, a smiling Kennedy table-hopped to shake the generous hands. Alan Jay Lerner, the My Fair Lady lyricist and a Kennedy schoolmate at Choate and Harvard, directed a show-biz crowd that included Jimmy Durante, Louis Armstrong, and Brother-in-Law Peter Lawford through some tired song-and-dance routines. Audrey Hepburn sang "Happy Birthday" -and it was all, according to at least three different witnesses, "just awful."

This Way Out. But certainly it was no worse than the President's press conference, earlier in the week. There, as happens with increasing frequency, Kennedy was asked a lot of silly questions--and did not improve much on them in his answers. Inevitably Sarah McClendon, who is becoming television's most monumental bore, got her chance, rang in with a rambling query about an obscure Texas lead smelter that few people a quarter-mile outside of El Paso had ever heard of.

Rather than cut Sarah off, as she so richly deserves, the President of the U.S. promised to "look into it." Then there was a question about what Kennedy had once called the "genie" of unrestricted nuclear testing. With U.S.-Russian test-ban talks at a standstill, a reporter asked: "The genie, sir, is it out of the bottle?"

Replied Kennedy: "Well, it's neither in nor out right now, but I would say that we ought to--we'll know by the end of the summer whether it's finally out." When his press conference time was out, Kennedy leaped for the exit like a small boy on the last day of school.

Two nights later, at the annual dinner of White House correspondents and news photographers, Kennedy was again face to face with the press. There were no questions or speeches, only good-natured barbs about TFX, managed news and the New Frontier. Recalling that the President appeared at a recent press conference with his finger bandaged from a bread-slicing mishap, the newsmen presented Kennedy with a birthday gift--an electric bread slicer.

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