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man dressed like Uncle Sam on ten-foot stilts who bore a curious but undeniable resemblance to Senator Eugene McCarthy. The Nixon daughters had come in to pleasant cheers, cries of pleasure from those who could see them in the crowd, the beating of the two bands, and they had passed through the crowd and into the lobby, both lovely looking girls. The older (who looked younger) was Tricia, gentle, bemused, a misty look to her face, but incontestably a beauty with very blonde hair. She had an extraordinary complexion— one would be forced to describe it with the terminology of the Victorian novel, alabaster and ivory could vie for prominence with peaches and cream. The other daughter, Julia, brown-haired, apple-cheeked, snub-nosed, was healthy, genial, a perfect soubrette for a family comedy on television. She was as American as Corporate Bakeries apple pie. And now engaged to David Eisenhower, grandson of Old Ike. It was an engagement which had caused much bitter chortling and a predictable tightening of the collective mouth when word came to liberal circles. There seemed at the time no limit to Richard Nixon’s iniquity. But in fact daughter Julia was a nice-looking girl, and Ike’s grandson who looked to be not yet twenty had a pleasant face, more than a hint of innocence in it, not only small-town but near to yokel, redeemed by the friendliest of simple smiles. An ambitious high school dramatics teacher might have picked him to play Billy Budd.
    The arrival of the girls and covert scrutiny of them by the reporter had produced one incontestable back-slapping turn-of-the-century guffaw: a man who could produce daughters like that could not be all bad. The remote possibility of some reappraisal of Richard Nixon was now forced to enter the works. It was, of course, remote, but the reporter was determined to be fair to all, and the notion was incontestably there. Nothing in his prior view of Nixon had ever prepared him to conceive of a man with two lovely girls. (Since the reporter had four fine daughters of his own, he was not inclined to look on such matters as accident.) And indeed later that night, the voice (agreeably well-brought-up but not remarkable) of one of Nixon’s daughters was heard for a fragment of dialogue on radio. No, she was saying, their father had never spanked them. It was indicated that Mother had been the disciplinarian. “But then,” the girl’s voice went on, simple clarity, even honest devotion in the tone, “we never wanted to displease him. We wanted to be good.” The reporter had not heard a girl make a remark like that about her father since his own mother had spoken in such fashion thirty-odd years ago.
    Of course the remote contingency of reappraising Nixon had been kept comfortably remote by the nature of the entertainment provided in the lobby of the Hilton Plaza after the daughters had made their entrance and well-regulated escape to some private suite upstairs. The Nixon Dancers were now entertaining the crowd. Thirty-six adolescent girls all seemingly between five feet, four inches and five feet, six inches came out to dance various sorts of cheerleader-type dances. Impossible to define the steps more neatly, it was some sort of cross between television entertainment at half-time and working on a farm team for the Rockettes. Later the girls made an exit in file, in profile, and a clear count was there to be made in noses. Six of the thirty-six had aquiline curves, six were straight-nosed, and the other twenty-four had turned-up buttons at the tip.
    Now heard was the white band. There were sixteen of them, about as good, and about as simple, as a good high school marching band. The Black band was something else, Eureka Brass Band by name, right out of Beale Street sixty years ago, ten Negroes in black pants, white shirts and white yachting caps with black visors did a Dixieland strut up and around the floor, led by their master, a tall disdainful wizardly