Summit Simmer

For the 1,832 correspondents from 38 countries who packed into Paris last week, no story of the NATO conference was followed more avidly than President Eisenhower's health. News-starved reporters based endless prognostications on Ike's posture and color, analyzed his inflections with elocutionary zeal. With every minor schedule change came a new flock of rumors; the evening that Ike canceled his appearance at the initial NATO banquet, Paris-Presse reported breathlessly that he had brought along his oxygen tent. To scuttle the scuttlebutt, White House Press Secretary James C. Hagerty opened his thrice-daily press conference to the whole NATO press corps instead of the comparative dozens of correspondents who normally attend his briefings, and solemnly tried to give some sort of answer to almost all of the reporters' dogged, intimate, picayune questions.

Blanket Coverage. To the New York Herald Tribune's rumpled, rotund Art Buchwald, 32, whose tongue-in-cheeky, Paris-based column (TIME, Sept. 16) is carried by 46 other U.S. papers and the Paris Trib, the portentous triviality of the questions offered an irresistible cue for lampoonery. In a question-and-answer column resembling the transcript of a real-life White House press conference, a presidential spokesman identified only as "Jim" started out by apologizing to reporters for arriving late from the Lido, a Paris cabaret famed for its comely, nude show girls. Getting down to business, Buchwald's Jim fidgeted through a set of spoof Q's and A's. Samples:

Q. Jim, whose idea was it for the President to go to sleep?

A. It was the President's idea.

Q. What did he say to the Secretary of State?

A. He said, "Good night, Foster."

Q. Do you have any idea what the President is dreaming of this very moment?

A. No, the President has never revealed to me any of his dreams.

Q. When the President went to sleep . . . how many blankets were on the bed?

A. Maybe two or three. But certainly no more than he uses in Washington.

Q. One could have been kicked off during the night?

A. Yes, that could be possible, but it's unlikely.

Even more unlikely was genial Jim Hagerty's hopping-mad reaction to the column. Though Buchwald's jest was actually a spoof at the press (which took it as such, and laughed heartily), Press Secretary (and onetime New York Timesman) Hagerty took it as a personal affront, bawled out the Herald Tribune by telephone, barred Columnist Buchwald from all future briefings. Said he later: "I was so mad I could cry. The President read it and laughed. This made me madder. The President said: 'Simmer down, Jim, simmer down.' " Instead, the upsimmering Hagerty swore that he would "get even with the Trib." After calling his press conference half an hour early, he primly informed newsmen--among them Buchwald--that the Buchwald column "at no time" resembled "what I ever said at a public briefing." The Herald Tribune, "being a fair and decent paper," Hagerty added pointedly, would give his rebuttal the same Page One play it had given to Buchwald's "unadulterated rot." The intrepidly pro-Ike Trib complied.

Caput Potomacus. Pouncing on this unexpected morsel of merriment, newspapers round the world joined in the laugh on the press secretary; some cited Hagerty's thin-skinned reaction as a sign of growing nervousness within presidential high councils. The New York Times's Pundit Arthur Krock, whose four-times-weekly Washington column normally concerns itself with weightier matters, ungrammatically* but tellingly ascribed Hagerty's unprofessional blowup to "caput magnus Potomacus [Potomac big head]." Said Columnist Doris Fleeson in the New York Post: "The press secretary broke a cardinal rule of the trade; never tangle with a funnyman." "That's show business," quipped Funnyman Buchwald, and, striking while Hagerty was still hot, he wrote a second column that described another imaginary press conference, this one held by Buchwald's own secretary.

Q. One of Mr. Buchwald's readers said he wrote unadulterated rot.

A. No, that's not true. Mr. Buchwald has been known to write adulterated rot, but never to my knowledge has he written unadulterated rot.

Q. Is Mt. Buchwald entitled to severance pay?

A. Let's jump that hurdle when we come to it.

Q. What is Mr. Buchwald eating for lunch?

A. He plans to have a very light lunch. Pea soup, eggs Benedictine, duck with orange, souffle potatoes, cheese, salad and crepes suzette.

Q. Did the doctor put him on this regime ?

A. No, several sympathetic journalists offered to take him to lunch ... on their expense accounts.

* A more literate Latin would be caput magnum Potomacum.

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