The Week

• Now that we’ve had a nice close look at the tuberosities of the planet Mars, let’s get back once again to the main question. Is there intelligent life on earth?

• Theodore White reports that when Lyndon Johnson took office Kennedy Presidential aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. reported, as requested, for duty. Hands were shaken, cordialities exchanged, commitments expressed, and Schlesinger did not thereafter look on Lyndon’s face again. After three months of this he resigned to write A Thousand Days (rise, O Pulitzer Prize committee) and blow the gaff on Johnson. According to historian Schlesinger, John F. Kennedy did not choose LBJ as his running mate in 1960. “ ‘I didn’t offer the Vice Presidency to him … I just held it out like this’—here he simulated taking an object out of his pocket and holding it close to his body—‘and he grabbed at it.’ ” Thus the King of the Jungle to the ratcatcher. Schlesinger, who did not always look on JFK as a man after his own intellect, spends many of his commemorative pages pushing Kennedy’s brainpower to new Apollonian heights: the Kennedy mind, he writes, was “roving, direct, open, independent, impatient, objective, critical, practical, ironic, skeptical, unfettered and insatiable.” Just the qualities, one can’t help but conclude, to cherish in Presidential aides, assuming the President is too dull to possess them himself.

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• Now that we’ve had a nice close look at the tuberosities of the planet Mars, let’s get back once again to the main question. Is there intelligent life on earth?

• Theodore White reports that when Lyndon Johnson took office Kennedy Presidential aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. reported, as requested, for duty. Hands were shaken, cordialities exchanged, commitments expressed, and Schlesinger did not thereafter look on Lyndon’s face again. After three months of this he resigned to write A Thousand Days (rise, O Pulitzer Prize committee) and blow the gaff on Johnson. According to historian Schlesinger, John F. Kennedy did not choose LBJ as his running mate in 1960. “ ‘I didn’t offer the Vice Presidency to him … I just held it out like this’—here he simulated taking an object out of his pocket and holding it close to his body—‘and he grabbed at it.’ ” Thus the King of the Jungle to the ratcatcher. Schlesinger, who did not always look on JFK as a man after his own intellect, spends many of his commemorative pages pushing Kennedy’s brainpower to new Apollonian heights: the Kennedy mind, he writes, was “roving, direct, open, independent, impatient, objective, critical, practical, ironic, skeptical, unfettered and insatiable.” Just the qualities, one can’t help but conclude, to cherish in Presidential aides, assuming the President is too dull to possess them himself.