(See Cover)
The great day was at hand, and all seemed ready. The White House and the dome of the Capitol shimmered under fresh coats of paint. Timetables had been meticulously planned; the parade, for example, would last two hours and 46 minutes, not a moment longer. The invitations had gone out; and from all the states of the Union swarmed victorious Democrats, rushing jubilantly from party to party, Andy Jacksons in black ties.
Then came the storm. The snow began to fall at noon, Jan. 19. It strangled Washington. Out like shattered glass went all the best-laid plans. For agonizing hours the huge event seemed destined to become a fiasco. Foulups, fumbles and failures fell upon one another in a tangled heap. The inaugural ceremony itself might have to be postponed.
But it was not postponed. Snow stopped falling, the sky cleared, and a white winter sun shone down. At 12:51 o'clock on Jan. 20, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, his breath frosty in the frigid air, raised his right hand and pronounced the fateful words: "I do solemnly swear . . ."
Thus last week did Jack Kennedy become the 35th President of the U.S. This was his time of personal triumph. But it was more than that. For the moment of Kennedy's oath taking gave meaning to all the ritual and ceremony, to all the high jinks and low capers, to all the confusion bordering on chaos, that had gone before in a wild and wonderful week.
Getting Ready. Into that week had gone hundreds of thousands of man-hours. For more than a month before, workers on double shift had labored at constructing the stands in front of the Capitol. No detail was overlooked. The National Park Service, seeking to achieve a touch of spring, sprayed fresh green dye on the lawns surrounding the Lincoln Memorial. Trees along the inaugural route got a light coating of Roost-No-More, a compound guaranteed to put Washington's pesky starlings to flight. Secret Service agents battened down manhole covers on the right of way to forestall any bomb-planting saboteur, set up surveillance posts on rooftops and other strategic spots, organized an overall security guard of 5,000 men.
In Rock Creek Park, the police cavalry, worried lest its horses should react violently to the roar of the parade and crowds, spent hours conditioning the mounts by feeding them heavy doses of Spike Jones recordings over loudspeakers. As a result, by Inauguration Day the horses were immune to noise, but the cops were nervous wrecks. Parade officials put on a small-scale dry run down Pennsylvania Avenue, pronounced everything satisfactory. They arranged for a helicopter to hover over the parade and radio traffic information to an Army-run command post. There, in a van off Pennsylvania Avenue, a control center was fitted out with radio-telephone connections to a swarm of roving observers. Closed-circuit TV cameras focused on possible bottlenecks, relayed their pictures to a row of TV monitors at the command post.