Home on the Mountain

THE PRESIDENCY

It was going-home time for the President last week. Six months after their seven-bedroom retreat was built on Rattlesnake Mountain near Middleburg, Va., the First Family was off to spend their first weekend there.

The Virginia home had been rented for $1,000 a month during the summer --first to Washington Stockbroker Dana Hodgdon, then to San Diego Oilman Ogden Armour. But now the Blue Ridge Mountains were flaming in fall color. Besides, the foxhunt season had opened and Jacqueline Kennedy seemed anxious to ride to hounds again.

Early in the week, after a round of speechmaking in New England, the President had sandwiched in a visit to his father's Cape Cod home, where he cruised near Hyannis Harbor with Joe and Cousin Ann Gargan aboard Joe's 52-ft. yacht Marlin. Later old Joe, who rails at the handicaps of the partial paralysis and loss of speech he still suffers as a result of his stroke nearly two years ago, was off to Chicago. There he had a therapy treatment for his useless arm and leg at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and took a nostalgic tour of the Merchandise Mart, his favorite possession.

Back in Washington, the President greeted visiting Bolivian President Victor Paz Estenssoro on the White House south lawn (see THE HEMISPHERE). In a speech before the National Academy of Sciences he promised that henceforward the Government would explain in advance its major scientific experiments in order to "assure expert review before potentially risky experiments are undertaken."

At week's end Kennedy flew to Amherst College, where he accepted an honorary Doctor of Laws degree and paid his homage to artists in America in a speech at ground-breaking ceremonies for the school's Robert Frost Library. "Where power corrupts, poetry cleanses," said Kennedy. "I see little of more importance to our country and our civilization than recognition of the place of the artist. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda, it is a form of truth."

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