Making a House a Home

Awaiting the birth of her son, Jacqueline Kennedy had also been giving serious thought to her prospective role as First Lady of the land. The first obligation, she told a friend, must be "taking care of the President." Her next responsibility is to her children: "I don't want them to be brought up by nurses and Secret Service men. I will make every effort to be with my children even more now." Then she added, wistfully: "Also, they probably won't see as much of their father as ordinary children."

One of Jackie's first moves was the appointment of Letitia Baldrige, 33, to be her social secretary. Lively and chic, "Tish" Baldrige knows her way around Washington and a few foreign parts as well. The daughter of a onetime Republican Congressman, Nebraska's Malcolm Baldrige, she went to Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Conn. and to Vassar, served as social secretary to Mrs. David K.E. Bruce (when Bruce was ambassador in Paris) and Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce in Rome (Roman Candle, Tish's memoirs of her days in Italy, was published in 1956). Jackie and Tish have been friends since both were schoolgirls in Farmington.

In her first press conference last week, Tish Baldrige described a few plans of the new First Lady to make the big house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue a home: P: One of the rooms will become--for the first time since 1901--a nursery. P: Jackie plans to scatter some of her own eighteenth century French antiques and porcelains around the White House to give the family quarters a more familiar look.

P: Canvases of contemporary U.S. painters will be hung on the White House walls, says Tish, "even if it means putting paintings in front of paintings." P: An effort will be made to entertain informally, with "very much of a cross section of dinner lists," drawn from many walks of life.

P:Jackie will probably go right on stirring talk with her high-fashion gowns and bouffant hairdos, but the emphasis will become more American than French. Says Tish: "I don't think she feels she can play favorites among designers."

On the day after Jackie Kennedy's son was born, Mamie Eisenhower announced that she would invite her successor over to the White House soon, for a cellar-to-attic inspection tour. When? asked a reporter. "Well," smiled Mamie, "I have to wait now."

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