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The White House has been, often as not, a doghouse, according to the Ladies' Home Journal. The November issue contains a lengthy report on canine activity under the mastership of Presidents since 1951. Dog Lover Traphes L. Bryant, retired kennel keeper of the White House, reports that presidential pups have relieved themselves on carpets, Calder sculptures and on one memorable occasion, Jacqueline Kennedy. Dwight D. Eisenhower's Weimaraner infuriated her short-tempered master by chasing his golf balls. John F. Kennedy soothed himself during the Cuban missile crisis by taking time out to pet his daughter Caroline's Welsh terrier Charlie. Dog-lovingest President: Lyndon B. Johnson, who allowed one of his dogs to sleep in his bed and adored a white collie named Blanco, despite the fact that he was so vicious he had to be kept tranquilized. L.B.J. was so distraught over the death of Old Beagle that he had him cremated, then kept the ashes in a box on top of the refrigerator.
In The Bronx, a thousand or so people gathered to hear a talk by British Novelist-Scientist C.P. Snow. As they might have suspected, Lord Snow expounded on one of his pet subjects: genetics. "Men are equal in death," said Snow. "They are not born equal." It is nonsense, he continued, to think humans are born as blank sheets of paper to be filled in by parents, teachers and circumstances. After talking, Snow sipped tea, nibbled sandwiches, and allowed that he is very fond of the U.S. "I like the enormous intelligence of the people, the astonishing variety of virtue and skill. The top echelons of Leicester wouldn't compare with the top echelons of, say, Akron, Ohio."
"A little bit of rape is good for a man's soul," announced Norman Mailer in a speech at the University of California at Berkeley. While Mailer waxed outrageous and his audience enthusiastically heckled, someone tossed a burning jockstrap onto the stage and a prancing pair of Gay Liberationists got themselves busted. Despite the racket. Mailer held forth on his subject: "Richard Milhous Nixon and Women's Liberation." In the process he dropped such nuggets as "Richard Nixon walks like a puppet with strings controlled by a hand within his own head," "Most women have just started to think in the last two or three years," "McGovern is the only man who is morally superior to me." Finally Mailer invited "all the feminists in the audience to please hiss." When a satisfying number obliged, he commented: "Obedient little bitches."