The Week

THE PRESIDENCY

President Kennedy was in ill humor at last week's press conference. He was, among other things, angered by the failure of Congress to move on the tax cut and civil rights bills.

"The fact of the matter is," Kennedy snapped, "that both these bills should be passed." But, he conceded, they stand almost no chance of being enacted before Congress goes home for Christmas Dec. 20. The President dourly predicted that the measures might collide on the Senate floor early next year, and the tax bill--with its $11 billion relief, which Kennedy, curiously, warns must come quickly to avoid a national recession next year--might be further delayed. If that happens, he reiterated, "I think the economy will suffer."

10,000 Sugar Cookies. But life was not all sour grapes for the President last week. On Veterans Day he took John Jr., dubbed "John-John" by the family, along for ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery. While the President and U.S. military leaders were marching toward the Tomb of the Unknowns, John-John escaped from Secret Servicemen and busted into the parade. Some folks thought that a good, firm nanny might well be employed to keep a 2 1/2-year-old out of solemn ceremonies, but the President thought the whole incident was hilarious. Anyhow, Look Magazine was closing an exclusive pictorial essay on the lad, and the White House, which likes to pass publicity around, felt that other photographers should have some pictures of John-John in action.

Next day, Jack, Jackie and the kids played host to 2,000 underprivileged Washington children, who downed 200 gallons of cocoa and 10,000 sugar cookies while a detachment of Scotland's famed Black Watch Regiment of bagpipers skirled and twirled on the White House lawn. It was the beginning of Jackie's official appearances after the death of two-day-old Patrick Bouvier Kennedy last August.

Ten Stop Lights. Near week's end, Kennedy flew into Manhattan, aged his Secret Service detail ten years by forgoing the usual motorcycle escort into the city. At one of ten midtown traffic lights that stopped the presidential limousine, an ambitious female camera bug rushed up and fired a flashbulb at Kennedy's side of the car. Moaned a New York police official: "She might well have been an assassin." As for the purpose of the President's stop-and-go entrance into New York, the official explanation was that he wanted no "fuss and feathers." It could only be presumed that Kennedy was zeroing in on the safe-motorists' vote.

Next morning Kennedy appeared before the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s fifth biennial convention--the last big Big Labor get-together before the '64 campaign. After reviewing New Frontier accomplishments, Kennedy launched into an impassioned plea for the tax bill's immediate enactment--something that he had despaired of the day before. With prompt passage of the tax bill, he said, "we will be sailing by next April on the, winds of the longest and strongest'' peacetime expansion in our nation's economic history."

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