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Show Family Weekly/ November 20, 1968 A Reminiscence of President John F. Kennedy to the White House. Soon I was across from Salinger in his large, cluttered office. I told him, “I don’t want to go through here as a tourist. I want to go through the offices and private apartments making believe I am President.” Salinger agreed to cooperate. We set up a series of appointments, and it was on the following afternoon that I made my first of a half-dozen visits and sat in that chair. The. inspiring moment in that chair was intensified by other intimate and electric moments that fol- lowed in the next days. First Sal- inger, then a White House policeman; took me on a complete visit to every portion of the ground floor of the White House itself. I saw the housekeeper’s office, the private flower shop, the physician's office, the ‘modern chrome kitchen, the private movie-projection room that has chairs for 50, and I visited the private living quarters, too. Returning to the Oval Office—I counted $3 steps along an outdoor colonnaded walk to get there—the policeman said to me, “We'll all read whatever you write, you know, The Secret. Service studies all novels about the White House. They want to know how much the book might tell the public-about the de- tails of the dayout here—in case some crank gets a notion on how-to get into here and attempt to assas- sinate the President.” I had come to Washington,D. C., to the White House, to the Oval Office in the West Wing, and finally to the President’s chair because I wanted to writean intimate fiction- I had come to a halt. I was not sure I could make the background— mainly scenes in the White House —authentic enough to be believable, Perhaps I did not fully understand its role in our lives. 1 wrote to several friends in Washington, and asked how I could go about living inside, getting the real feel of the White House for a week or two. Soon I had one reply from a friend in the State Department. At a reception given by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, this friend had runinto the President’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, and he had relayed my wishes. Salinger had replied, “Tell Mr. Wallace I’ve ‘read a ‘couple of his books— and I'l) be glad to meet him.” ‘OnSept. 16, 1968, I arrived at the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance Later, having requested an interview with the President’s personal secretary of 11 years, Mrs. Evelyn N.Lincoln, whose office was next door to the President's own, I was introduced to her. She handled all of the President's personal-letters and engagements. “I don’t know if T should tell you this,” she said, “but T even get his suits for him and see that they are sent to him on time. Of course, he has definite tastes and orders what he wants, but_I- follow-through.” Little things, not big ones, remain in mind: the white match covers, with “The President's House” imprinted in gold, in an ashtray in the Lincoln Bedroom, where Mra. Rose Kennedy often slept; the leathertopped table behind a yellow sofa where the President worked in his living room late at night, while his wife curled up on the sofa and read beneath the brilliant Cézannes on the wall; the green pads on the white patio furniture outside on the Truman Balcony, where the President could stretch out during soft summer evenings, chatting: off-therecord with Lyndon B, Johnson and Congressional leaders; the giant humidor in the President's bedroom where he kept his cigars. As for President Kennedy himself, I saw him three times in those days. I did not interview him but rather saw him in action and close up., The first occasion was a morning in the Cabinet Room, when he smade some public remarks after the swearing in of new Representatives to the 18th United Nations General Assembly. Afterward, he and ‘Adlai Stevenson joked. I saw his remarks later in the official transcript, but not the jokes. The next occasion was more memorable. I was invited to the Oval Office to watch President Kennedy deliver a television broadcast to the nation on the tax cut he so much wanted. It was to be, although none of us knew it at the time, his last national television address, I watched as his desk was cleared of its gadgets, a black-drape hung behind it for a backdrop, and two pillows placed on his chair (I asked whether this was to make him’ taller, and {was told: ho, it was to make him more comfortable because of his bad back). T watched him enter the office, much huskier than I had imagined, and he nodded and greeted me,and I returned his greeting. I watched him run through the first paragraph for still photographers, and after the photographers were shown out, the red lights on the big television tameras blinked on, and the speech was under way. The third and last time I saw him, on a late afternoon, he was walking, alligator briefcase under his arm, across the lawn of the Rose Garden toward the huge helicopter squatting on its steel pad on the South Lawn, readying to fly to. New York and the United Nations. Some weeks later—it was noon, and I had just resumed work—my wife called from an appointment at her beauty parlor and cried out, “President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas.” With disbelief, I turned on my radio. An hourlater, stunned with the nation and the world, I learned that he was dead. + Family Weekly, November 20, 1966 7 |