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his party, and we thought we'd go up there because we really didn't know anybody on the floor or in any of the so-called boxes near us. Frederick Richmond joined us, and we sat in a section right behind the President's box. How we got there, God only knows. I think maybe Frederick Richmond arranged to get us through. As the President and Mrs. Kennedy came in, with his father and mother and the Harry Luces and a number of other people, one got the feeling of enormous freshness and youthfulness of spirit and their tremendous good looks and energy seemed entirely different from any other administration I had ever seen or could remember even in history.

I remember that after all the members of the administration sort of made a grand parade on the main floor in salute of the President, the President got restless and he got up from the area in which he was sitting and started to circulate around with the people who were near him. He came up to me to greet me and said to Bo Jones, “It's very good of you to come to help us,” after I introduced him. That was extraordinarily bright of him because I might have easily been with somebody who had nothing whatever to do with the Administration, but he recognized this man's name, even though this wasn't an important appointment from a President's point of view. He had an uncanny memory and an uncanny ability to recall what he needed to recall at the right moment.

Well, in spite of the enormous crowd at the ball and the fact that the Armory is hardly a good ballroom for anything, the party still had spirit and a youthful quality.