Volume 4, Number 12 · July 15, 1965
A Day at the White House
By Dwight Macdonald
'President and Mrs. Johnson are planning the most extensive arts festival ever held in the White House,' reported the New York Times on May 27th. It would last thirteen hours, there would be exhibitions of current American painting, sculpture, and photography; programs of American plays, movies, ballet, and music; and readings by two novelists, Saul Bellow and John Hersey, two poets. Robert Lowell and Phyllis McGinley, and one popular biographer, Catherine Drinker Bowen. The Johnsonian consensus: Bellow and Lowell balanced against Hersey and McGinley, with Miss Bowen added to the democratic, or kitschy, side of the scale to make it all the more consensual. As the drunk said about the books in Jay Gatsby's library: 'Absolutely real—have pages and everything…. See! It's a bona-fide piece of printed matter…. This fella's a regular Belasco! What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too—didn't cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?' Our President, too, is a regular Belasco for realistic stage settings and, like Gatsby, he knows when, and where, to stop: just beyond Miss Bowen. He doesn't cut the pages. But what do you want, what do you expect? A consensus is a consensus.
Feature, 5401 words
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