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Ruiz Cortines meets his ministers in special committees, summons them to fortnightly briefing sessions to which they trot like schoolboys with their homework, and follows through on their day-to-day work by frequent telephone calls.
His passion for bureaucratic detail keeps him at his desk long hours. Rising punctually at 7, he breakfasts on lime juice,* soft-boiled eggs, rolls, cheese and coffee. After secretaries and officials bring him the most urgent business, he climbs into his Lincoln at 9:30 a.m. and rides, without escort, to the palace. On the way he reads the papers, often spotting items for which subordinates are called on the carpet later in the day. From 10 until 4 he works at his huge palace desk. After a two-hour break for a light lunch, he returns to his papers at Los Pinos, the presidential residence in Mexico City's west end, working from 6 until as late as n. He dines late, in the Spanish-American manner.
Despite such exhaustive attention to routine, the President appears to be thriving on the job. He has even gained a few pounds lately, and has pretty well lost the cadaverous, hollow-cheeked look that won him the campaign nickname of Cara de Calavera—Skullface. He drinks little, and just before taking office he stopped smoking. So far, he has managed to visit Veracruz once or twice, and one holiday weekend surf bathers at the Veracruz public beach were startled to see the presidential countenance emerge from a breaking wave. Of his old domino partners, he has kept closest contact with Veracruz Senator Jose Rodriguez Claveria. When Ruiz Cortines became President, he insisted that the Senator, as his intimate friend and closest adviser, dispose of his own shares in several profitable enterprises. The President demands similar self-denial in his family. On her first birthday after she became First Lady, Señora de Ruiz received 300 presents. The President had her write out a list of the donors, permitted her to keep 50 gifts from established friends, and sent the rest back.
Broadening the Base. Wholly preoccupied with his cleanup at home, Ruiz Cortines has so far taken only a perfunctory interest in foreign affairs, though he is a good friend and frequent visitor to the U.S., and will meet President Eisenhower on the border next month to inaugurate the joint U.S.-Mexican Falcon Dam on the Rio Grande. In domestic matters, his approach seems somewhat narrow after Alemán and his well-publicized program of industrial expansion. Last week, promising in his annual message to Congress to continue his fight for "honesty, decency, morality," he stressed that his administration's job is "consolidating" the work of the Alemán years. Ruiz Cortines has found that it is up to his regime to put furniture in the unfinished schools, to raise funds to bring professors to the still empty University City, to lay water pipes to fields so that the showy dams can start producing some food. Luckily, such mopping-up tasks can be done for relatively little money. One of the distressing things the new President discovered on taking office was that the Alemán regime had committed some 300 million pesos ($35 million) of this year's income last year.