But certainly the New Frontier has brought to Washington a group more varied in background and interest.
Secretary of State Dean Rusk, a former Rhodes Scholar and Mills College dean, has headed the Rockefeller Foundation and in that role expended large sums for international cultural exchange.
One of his initial acts in office was to appoint Philip Coombs of the Ford Foundation as the first Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs.
("In the late forties and fifties", Coombs has declared in defining his role, "two strong new arms were added to reinforce United States foreign policy economic assistance and military assistance.
As we embark upon the sixties we have an opportunity to build a third strong arm, aimed at the development of people, at the fuller realization of their creative human potential, and a better understanding among them".
)

Many of the new appointees are art collectors.
Ambassador-at-Large Averell Harriman has returned to the capital with a collection of paintings that include Renoir, Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Matisse, Picasso, and Walt Kuhn.
The Director of the Peace Corps, R. Sargent Shriver, Jr., a Kennedy brother-in-law, collects heavily among the moderns, including Kenzo Okada and Josef Albers.
Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon owns a prize Monet, Femmes dans un Jardin.

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, former President of the Ford Motor Company, comes from a generation different from that of Eisenhower's own first Secretary of Defense, Charles Wilson, who had been head of General Motors.
Unlike Wilson, who at times seemed almost anti-intellectual in his earthy pragmatism.
McNamara is the scholar-businessman.
An inveterate reader of books, he chose while working in Detroit to live in the University community of Ann Arbor, almost forty miles away.
He selected as Comptroller of Defense, not a veteran accountant, but a former Rhodes Scholar, Charles Hitch, who is author of a study on The Economics Of Defense In The Nuclear Age.

One of the President's special assistants, the Harvard dean McGeorge Bundy, was co-author with Henry L. Stimson of the latter's classic memoir, On Active Service.
Another, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has won a Pulitzer Prize in history;
his wife, Marion, is a portrait painter.
The Press Secretary, Pierre Salinger, was a child prodigy as a pianist.
("It is always of sorrow to me when I find people who neither know nor understand music", he declared not long ago in proposing that White House prizes be awarded for music and art.
) Mrs. Arthur Goldberg, wife of the Secretary of Labor, paints professionally and helps sponsor the Associated Artists' Gallery in the District of Columbia.
("Artists are always at a new frontier", she claims.
"In fact, the search is almost more important than the find".
) Mrs. Henry Labouisse, wife of the new director of the foreign aid program, is the writer and lecturer Eve Curie.

The list goes on.
At last count, sixteen former Rhodes Scholars (see box on page 13) had been appointed to the Administration, second in number only to its Harvard graduates.
Besides Schlesinger, the Justice Department's Information Director, Edwin Guthman, has won a Pulitzer Prize (for national reporting).
Postmaster General J. Edward Day, who must deal with matters of postal censorship, is himself author of a novel, Bartholf Street, albeit one he was obliged to publish at his own expense.

Two men show promise of playing prominent roles:

William Walton, a writer-turned-painter, has been a long-time friend of the President.
They arrived in Washington about the same time during the early postwar years: Kennedy as the young Congressman from Massachusetts;
Walton, after a wartime stint with Time-Life, to become bureau chief for The New Republic.
Both lived in Georgetown, were unattached, and shared an active social life.
Walton, who soon made a break from journalism to become one of the capital's leading semi-abstract painters, vows that he and Kennedy never once discussed art in those days.
Nonetheless, they found common interests.
During last year's campaign, Kennedy asked Walton, an utter novice in organization politics, to assist him.
Walton dropped everything to serve as a district co-ordinator in the hard-fought Wisconsin primary and proved so useful that he was promoted to be liaison officer to critically important New York City.

Walton, who served as a correspondent with General James Gavin's paratroopers during the invasion of France, combines the soul of an artist with the lingo of a tough guy.
He provoked outraged editorials when, after a post-Inaugural inspection of the White House with Mrs. Kennedy, he remarked to reporters, "We just cased the joint to see what was there".
But his credentials are impeccable.
Already the President and the First Lady have deputized him to advise on matters ranging from the furnishing of the White House to the renovation of Lafayette Square.
A man of great talent, he will continue to serve as a sort of Presidential trouble-shooter, strictly ex officio, for culture.

A more official representative is the Secretary of the Interior.
Udall, who comes from one of the Mormon first-families of Arizona, is a bluff, plain-spoken man with a lust for politics and a habit of landing right in the middle of the fight.
But even while sparring furiously with Republican politicians, he displays a deep and awesome veneration for anyone with cultural attainments.
His private dining room has become a way station for visiting intellectuals such as C. P. Snow, Arnold Toynbee, and Aaron Copland.

Udall argues that Interior affairs should cover a great deal more than dams and wildlife preserves.
After promoting Frost's appearance at the Inauguration, he persuaded the poet to return several months later to give a reading to a select audience of Cabinet members, members of Congress, and other Washington notables gathered in the State Department auditorium.
The event was so successful that the Interior Secretary plans to serve as impresario for similar ones from time to time, hoping thereby to add to the cultural enrichment of the Administration.

His Ideas in this respect, however, sometimes arouse critical response.
One tempest was stirred up last March when Udall announced that an eight-and-a-half-foot bronze statue of William Jennings Bryan, sculpted by the late Gutzon Borglum, would be sent "on indefinite loan" to Salem, Illinois, Bryan's birthplace.
Spokesmen for the nation's tradition-minded sculptors promptly claimed that Udall was exiling the statue because of his own hostility to this art form.
They dug up a speech he had made two years earlier as a Congressman, decrying the more than two hundred statues, monuments, and memorials which "dot the Washington landscape as patriotic societies and zealous friends are constantly hatching new plans".
Hoping to cut down on such works, Udall had proposed that a politician be at least fifty years departed before he is memorialized.

He is not likely to win this battle easily.
In the case of the Borglum statue an Interior aide was obliged to announce that there had been a misunderstanding and that the Secretary had no desire to "hustle" it out of Washington.
The last Congress adopted seven bills for memorials, including one to Taras Shevchenko, the Ukrainian poet laureate;
eleven others were introduced.
Active warfare is raging between the forces pressing for a monument to the first Roosevelt on Theodore Roosevelt Island in the Potomac, and TR.'s own living children, who wish to preserve the island as a wildlife sanctuary.
The hotly debated plan for the capital's Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial, a circle of huge tablets engraved with his speeches (and promptly dubbed by one of its critics, "Instant Stonehenge"), is another of Udall's headaches, since as supervisor of the National Parks Commission he will share in the responsibility for building it.

"Washington", President Kennedy has been heard to remark ironically, "is a city of southern efficiency and northern charm".
There have been indications that he hopes to redress that situation, commencing with the White House.
One of Mrs. Kennedy's initial concerns as First Lady was the sad state of the furnishings in a building which is supposed to be a national shrine.
Ever since the fire of 1812 destroyed the beautiful furniture assembled by President Thomas Jefferson, the White House has collected a hodgepodge of period pieces, few of them authentic or aesthetic.

Mrs. Kennedy shows a determination to change all this.
Not long after moving in she turned up a richly carved desk, hewed from the timbers of the British ship H.M.S. Resolute and presented to President Hayes by Queen Victoria.
It now serves the President in his oval office.
Later, browsing in an old issue of the Gazette Des Beaux-Arts, she found a description of a handsome gilt pier-table purchased in 1817 by President James Monroe.
She traced it to a storage room.
With its coating of gold radiator paint removed -- a gaucherie of some earlier tenant -- it will now occupy its rightful place in the oval Blue Room on the first floor of the White House.

But it soon became clear that the search for eighteenth-century furniture (which Mrs. Kennedy feels is the proper period for the White House) must be pursued in places other than government storage rooms.
The First Lady appointed a Fine Arts Advisory Committee for the White House, to locate authentic pieces as well as to arrange ways to acquire them.
Her effort to put the home of living Presidents on the same basis as Mount Vernon and Monticello recognizes no party lines.
By rough estimate her Committee, headed by Henry Francis Du Pont, contains three times as many Republicans as Democrats.

The press releases emanating from the White House give a clue to the activity within.
A curator has been appointed.
A valuable pencil-and-sepia allegorical drawing of Benjamin Franklin by Jean-Honore Fragonard has been donated by the art dealer Georges Wildenstein and now hangs in the Blue Room.
The American Institute of Interior Designers is redecorating the White House library.
Secretary and Mrs. Dillon have contributed enough pieces of Empire furniture, including Dolley Madison's own sofa, to furnish a room in that style.
And part of a fabulous collection of vermeil hollowware, bequeathed to the White House by the late Mrs. Margaret Thompson Biddle, has been taken out of its locked cases and put on display in the State dining room.

Woman's place is in the home: man must attend to matters of the yard.
One of the vexatious problems to first confront President Kennedy was the property lying just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House.
Congress had already appropriated money, and plans were well along to tear down the buildings flanking Lafayette Square and replace them with what one critic calls the "marble monumentality" of government office buildings.
While a Senator, Kennedy had unsuccessfully pushed a bill to preserve the Belasco Theater, as well as the Dolley Madison and the Benjamin Taylor houses, all scheduled for razing.

What to do about it now that he was President?
Only a few days after moving into the White House.
Kennedy made a midnight inspection of the Square.
Then he called in his friend Walton and turned over the problem to him, with instructions to work out what was best -- provided it didn't pile unnecessary burdens on the President.

The situation involved some political perils.
One of the offices slated for reconstruction is the aged Court of Claims, diagonally across the street from the White House.
Logically, it should be moved downtown.
But Judge Marvin Jones, senior member of the Court, is an elderly gentleman who lives at the nearby Metropolitan Club and desires to walk to work.
More importantly, he also happens to be the brother-in-law of Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the House.

There were aesthetic problems as well as political.
On delving deeper, Walton discovered that most of the buildings fronting the Square could be classified as "early nondescript".
The old Belasco Theater, over which many people had grown sentimental, was only a shell of its former self after arduous years as a USO Center.
The Dolley Madison House, Walton concluded, was scarcely worth preserving.
"The attempt to save the Square's historic value", he declares, "came half a century too late".