The Tense Hours

Around the person and the position of the President of the U.S. swirl all the problems of the nation and its citizens, their place in the world, their present and their future. Last week these problems afflicted John F. Kennedy, 44, as he spent long hours in the loneliness that only a President can know.

Berlin was the worst point of international crisis. As the week began, the President hurried back to the White House from Hyannisport to greet Vice President Lyndon Johnson, just returned from his morale-shoring trip to West Berlin. Throughout the week, Communist provocations in Berlin continued (see THE WORLD), until finally came the most direct and dangerous Red challenge of all: a Soviet threat to cut off Allied air access to the beleaguered city. Kennedy reacted swiftly and with unmistakable determination. The White House issued a statement that ranks as one of the toughest of the cold war: "The United States must serve a solemn warning to the Soviet Union that any interference by the Soviet Government or its East German regime with free access to West Berlin would be an aggressive act for the consequences of which the Soviet Government would bear full responsibility." This week the U.S. and Britain are preparing to send a major new diplomatic note to NATO for Allied approval. It would call for an East-West foreign ministers' meeting on Berlin, to be held in New York when the United Nations General Assembly convenes in mid-September.

Berlin was the worst problem confronting the President of the U.S.; it was by no means the only one. Following Johnson into the White House came Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon, back in the U.S. from the Alliance for Progress conference in Punta del Este. The crucial importance of that conference, at which the U.S. proposed to help its Latin American neighbors with a $1.1 billion, ten-year loan program, was underlined last week by the sudden resignation of Brazil's President Janio Quadros in a crisis that began over Quadros' too enthusiastic welcome for Cuba's visiting emissary, Communist-lining Che Guevara (see THE HEMISPHERE).

Close after Dillon came Roving Ambassador Averell Harriman to deliver a "not optimistic but realistic" appraisal of the 14-nation Geneva conference to decide the fate of Laos--still another prime factor in the equation of cold war politics that the President must weigh. Beyond this, there was the critical issue of whether the U.S. should resume its nuclear-weapons tests. The President dispatched Negotiator Arthur H. Dean back to Geneva on a "most vital mission," that of informing the Soviet Union in no uncertain terms that it must quit stalling on test-ban negotiations or face the consequences.

In the midst of such international problems, the President of the U.S. has other matters to consider. One is the matter of his presence with the people. Last week, while waiting patiently in a long tourist line at the White House, Mrs. Edith Sprayberry, a schoolteacher from Rome, Ga., was startled when a guard tapped her on the shoulder, politely asked her name and those of her party. She gave them: Husband Jack, Daughters Susan, 12, and Alice, 8, and Son Tom, 10. Without explanation, all were directed out of the line, ushered into the Cabinet Room, then motioned into a larger office. There stood the President.

Jack Kennedy smilingly informed Mrs. Sprayberry that she was the millionth visitor to the White House this year, an all-time high. While the children stood speechless ("For the first time in their lives," their mother said wryly), the President gave them an autographed photo of himself, observed that the White House is "virtually the only home of a head of state in the world where the people of the country are welcome as visitors." Then the President of the U.S. went back to the more somber work that his office demands.

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