The Flavor of the New

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.

Several Cabinet wives bring to the capital experience in community service, and in one case a considerable firsthand political background. Lenore Romney has campaigned effectively for her husband George both in Michigan and nationally; Barb Laird, on the other hand, says candidly: "I doubt if many political wives know much more about politics than I do, which is nothing." Both Mrs. Shultz, whose husband has been dean of the University of Chicago graduate business school, and Mrs. Clifford Hardin, married to the incoming Agriculture Secretary and ex-chancellor of the University of Nebraska, are used to the incessant social round of high college administrators. Ermalee Hickel, wife of the incoming Interior Secretary, works regularly for Cordelle (French for "towline"), a group that helps bring family cheer to Alaska's reform school for boys. The Romneys and the David Kennedys--he will be Nixon's Secretary of the Treasury--are good Mormons, and thus considerable contributors of both time and money to their church. Most of the others formally belong to churches, but are less active in them.

Cadillacs and a Continental. The life style among the Cabinet families is as solid as mahogany and red brick. Bill Rogers drives a silvery-grey 1967 Cadillac convertible, though his wife Adele will probably take it over now that her husband has a chauffeur-driven official limousine. David Kennedy has a Chrysler Imperial. More improbably, Cliff Hardin breaks the academic mold to drive a Cadillac himself, and favors dark suits cut in the conservative style of a banker. Maurice Stans collects primitive African art. The Blounts own fine antiques and Oriental rugs; he drives a Jaguar, she a Continental.

For many there are some mixed feelings about tearing up roots and coming to Washington. One of the Finch offspring at first objected: "Oh, gee, do we really have to move?" Mrs. Kennedy fears that the Washington whirl will be like "living in a fishbowl." Lenore Romney admits that when she realized she had to leave Michigan "I sat down and had a good cry with my daughter," but now she is looking forward to the challenge. "Washington," she says, "is more an opportunity than a place." That is true enough. With all of the capital's social problems, new, civic-minded leading citizens can find plenty of good causes to work for. Though John Kennedy once cracked that Washington is "a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm," it also boasts a gracious, glittering social life.

One center of that social life in the Nixon Administration is obviously going to be the Watergate apartments, a cooperative complex overlooking the Potomac. Secretary Stans and his wife have taken an apartment there, and Attorney General John Mitchell and his wife have just bought a $325,000 duplex in the building, which Washington Post Columnist Maxine Cheshire says will probably be "the most expensive and spectacular in the Nixon Administration." The Blounts are thinking of living at Watergate; so are Emil ("Bus") Mosbacher, who will be Chief of Protocol, and Nixon's longtime personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods. Also in northwest Washington will be the Romneys, at the Shoreham West apartments. George Romney's office is too close to permit his customary four-mile morning jog, but the new Secretary of HUD will probably lope off to work through Rock Creek Park as his chauffeur delivers lunch--a meat sandwich, a salad, a thermos of milk--to his desk.

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