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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Catholics in the Washington, D.C., area were relieved of the proscription against eating meat on Friday, January 20, 1961, by special order of His Holiness Pope John XXIII, in recognition of the inauguration, that day, of the first Roman Catholic President of the United States. John F. Kennedy took advantage of the papal dispensation by having bacon for breakfast. He was a man accustomed to the discreet aid and succor of the intelligent, the beautiful, and the well-placed.
The Pope's dietary intercession must be one of the very few stories with a connection to the inauguration that did not make it into "Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America" (Holt; $25), Thurston Clarke's earnestly exuberant, nearly minute-by-minute re-creation of the writing and delivery of Kennedy's famous inaugural address. (The story appears in Richard Reeves's illuminating "President Kennedy: Profile of Power.") "Ask Not" is a short book, but there are many berries on the bush. There was plenty of press around in 1961, and lots of cameras, but it was still only the dawn of the era of the unblinking media eye, our own panoptic regime, in which every twitch of the celebrated is monitored and made instantly available for mass titillation. Not all of the celebrated had made the adjustment in 1961, and there was some amusing leakage around the borders of the official script. Frank Sinatra (a well-placed friend if you happened to be interested in making the acquaintance of compliant young actresses) responds to a reporter's query at the entrance to a pre-inaugural party by snapping, "Where are you from? Bulgaria?" In the car on the way to the inauguration, Mamie Eisenhower makes conversation with Jackie Kennedy, who is the wife of a man about to become the first Irish-American President, and who is seven-eighths Irish herself, by remarking, "Doesn't Ike look like Paddy the Irishman in that hat?"
At the inaugural ceremony, Cardinal Cushing, of Boston, delivering the invocation, notices smoke issuing from the lectern. Believing it to indicate the presence of an assassin's bomb, the Cardinal slows down what is already being regarded as an interminable address, in the hope that, when the bomb goes off, his body will shield Kennedy from the blast. (The smoking stopped when an electrician yanked, more or less at random, one of the wires running under the lectern.) Congressman Howard Smith, Democrat of Virginia, walks out...
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