(3 of 3)
Among the 15 college students and teen-agers accepted as summer interns in Senator Ted Kennedy's office is a President's daughter: Caroline Kennedy, 16. For three weeks, starting in late July, Caroline will be a "go-fer," sorting mail and operating the autopen that prints Uncle Ted's signature on routine letters. According to Kennedy's press secretary, Dick Drayne, "Interns have a lot of fun. They can go to hearings, onto the floor when the Senator is there, and get to a lot of parties." He added, "and Caroline wants to be treated like all the others." The bearer of another famous name will be interning this summer on Capitol Hill. John J. Sirica Jr., 21, a junior at Duke University—where President Nixon went to law school—is assigned to the Chicago Tribune's Washington bureau as a copy boy and writer trainee. However, John Jr. will not be assigned to cover the U.S. district court where his father presides over several Watergate cases.
Jack's language was cleaner than Dick's. This insight into the comparative virtues of the Administrations of Presidents Kennedy and Nixon was made last week in the Washington Post by JFK's press secretary Pierre Salinger. If transcripts of Kennedy's Oval Office conversations existed, asserts Pierre, they would have revealed Jack's easy authority over his staff. There would have been no need to have the letter P placed before his utterances, as it is in the Nixon transcripts, because Kennedy aides always called the boss "Sir" or "Mr. President." Pierre burnishes the memory of Kennedy's generally happy relationship with the press, but overlooks the late President's courting of reporters, his participation in the suppression of news about the Bay of Pigs, and his canceling a subscription to the critical New York Herald Tribune. Still, Salinger concludes, "The President understood one great truth about the relationship between the presidency and the press —and that is that they fundamentally have to be adversaries."