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Kissinger, who claims to be "a secret swinger," lavishes his attentions on plenty of other Washington ladies. By making a pact with White House Social Secretary Lucy Winchester, he has contrived to be seated next to the most beautiful women at presidential dinners, even though protocol would normally demand that he sit with the visiting dignitaries. At the state dinner for South Korea's President Chung Hee Park in San Francisco, Kissinger wound up beside Zsa Zsa Gabor. Occasionally, he turns up with Gloria Steinem, the smashing-looking Gucci liberal who writes for New York Magazine. "He's terribly intelligent and funny," says Gloria. "He really understood Bobby Kennedy, and that made me know he was not Dr. Strangelove."
Mollenhoff Cocktail. Some of Nixon's men are emerging at last as fairly colorful in their business hours as well. White House Aide Clark Mollenhoff's attack on opponents of Judge Clement Haynsworth on a Washington television program was so vehement that it caused one of the participants to threaten a libel action. Mollenhoff's repeated fulminations led to a Washington jape about the "Mollenhoff Cocktail—you throw it and it backfires." Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, an old Goldwater operative, sits up front on the Nixonian stage, riding shotgun for John Mitchell on the Moratorium marchers. Everywhere on TV is Herb Klein, the Administration's director of communications, who with boyish grin and crinkly eyes, has proved a master of articulating the President's get-tough policies with a lowered voice.
For all the Administration's grape-shots at reporters, there are those favored journalists. One is Columnist Joseph Alsop, the closest thing in the Washington press corps to an "effete snob." The stories about Alsop abound: how he reads Sun Tzu's The Art of War in the original Chinese, how he once shattered the calm of the Paris Ritz by howling at the maitre d': "You have destroyed my broccoli!" Alsop, a resolute hard-liner on the war, is the only reporter who has twice been invited to dine at Nixon's White House.
Another columnist in good graces is William S. White, a Lyndon Johnson apologist for many years. Though Washingtonians expected White's presidential source to run dry after L.B.J. left, he has won the Administration's approval with continued attacks on "knee-jerk liberals"—a phrase that he contributed to the language.
The Nixon influence has not yet saturated Washington in the way that John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson impressed their personalities on the city. But it has at least begun defining its own style. In time, it may become the Silent Majority's Camelot, although it is difficult to foresee the day when John Mitchell will be heaved into a swimming pool.