Playing All the Bases

Since the Feb. 28 departure of McGeorge Bundy to the Ford Foundation, White House watchers have been curious about whether the President would name one man to replace Bundy in the well-publicized position of Special Assistant for National Security Affairs. Last week the President made it clear that he has no intention of offering Bundy's spotlight to any one man. At what he called a "regular, impromptu, unannounced, hurried-up press conference," he announced the appointment of two new White House aides.

To join his staff as the $30,000-a-year secretary to the Cabinet, Johnson named hard-driving Robert E. Kintner, 56, who just three months ago left his $200,000-a-year job as president of the National Broadcasting Co. (after a well-muffled company dispute). Less surprisingly but no less provocatively, he named as a special presidential assistant Walt Whitman Rostow, 49, a Kennedy-picked M.I.T. economic history professor who served as a White House aide before but left in 1961 to become a State Department policymaker because he did not get along with McGeorge Bundy.

When a reporter asked if it could be said that Rostow would be Bundy's successor, the President replied: "It could be, but that would be inaccurate. It would not be true. Most of the men play any position here, we hope." He added that Bundy's job has been split among White House Aides Robert Komer, Jack Valenti and Bill Moyers, and that Rostow would pick up some other pieces of it--"principally, but not necessarily exclusively, in the field of foreign policy, as well as special coordination of Latin American development." Rostow should feel at home: he has made several troubleshooting trips to Europe and Asia, helped to administer Latin American aid.

As for Kintner, a Johnson pal since the two first met in the early '30s while Kintner was a New York Herald Tribune reporter in Washington and Johnson was a young congressional secretary, even the President seemed a bit uncertain about where the gregarious ex-executive might wind up. There was a broad hint, though, that he just might be dealing with the press. "He will be at the service of the President, and if he needs to play first or second or third base, I hope he can do it," Johnson told reporters. "I don't want him to play any position too long because he gets too familiar with you, and familiarity breeds contempt."

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