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Eventually 168 guests were seated at 17 tables in the White House State Dining Room and the adjoining Blue Room. French Chef René Verdon whipped his staff into a frenzy, served up lobster en Bellevue, stuffed bar Polignac, pheasant aspic. French wines were poured, including a superb 1959 dry white guaranteed to palpitate even a Frenchman. In the dining room John Kennedy leaned back, lit an Upmann cigar and smiled. In the Blue Room, Jacqueline Kennedy, brilliant in a pink strapless Dior, chatted in confidential murmurs with Malraux.
"Eating Place for Artists." Because Kennedy and Malraux were in separate rooms, the Army Signal Corps had rigged a two-mike public-address system for their toasts. The system failed—but the toasts went on. "This is becoming a sort of eating place for artists," quipped the President, "but they never ask us out." In more serious vein he saluted Malraux for being among those "who travel the far horizons of human destiny." Responding in French, the Minister congratulated the U.S. as "a country which has become the leader not through conquest but by seeking justice."
Following dinner, Violinist Isaac Stern picked up his Guarnerius, and with Pianist Eugene Istomin and Cellist Leonard Rose played Schubert's Trio in B-Flat Major, Opus 99. On that musical note the evening ended. The guests drifted into Washington's midnight while around them the great White House fountains shot prisms of lighted water into the darkness. For the New Society, it had been another marvelous evening.