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At Potomac, Over all these SEC activities Chairman Kennedy keeps a sharp blue eye. In the Commission's Division of Labor, he personally reviews each & every appointment. But he drops into hearings, does the liaison work with other Govern-ment agencies, sees the President frequently, confers with his colleagues twice each day. No Federal official rides the airlines more than SEChairman Kennedy. In the last year he has flown more than 65,000 miles. Lately in one week he flew to San Francisco for the opening of a regional branch office, on to Los Angeles (with a stop-over at San Simeon to chat with William Randolph Hearst) and back to Washington via Pittsburgh. At the week's end he hopped to Manhattan. About once a fortnight he manages to week-end with his wife and as many of his nine children as he can collect—in the winter at Palm Beach, in the summer at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod.
In Washington he cultivates perspective by living about 20 miles outside the city at Potomac, Md. There he leased a lane luxurious house commanding two wide sweeps of the Potomac River, occupies it with an old Boston friend, Edward E. Moore, who serves as his assistant. On the terraces ''Joe'' Kennedy plays the urbane host at small dinners famed throughout the Capital for the excellence of cave and cuisine. In the private cinema theatre he may later entertain friends like Senator Wheeler, Legalite Cohen, General Counsel Burns. In the mornings before breakfast he takes a dip, naked, in the swimming pool.
Having set up the SEC machine, and got it running smoothly, Chairman Kennedy wanted to return to private life last spring. But. on the very day that he planned to take his resignation to the White House, the Supreme Court rocked the New Deal with its NRA decision. Loyally pocketing his resignation, Mr. Kennedy went back to work because he was too good a policeman to desert his post when the sky seemed to be falling on the White House.