Nation: The Sideburn Set

It isn’t that Richard Nixon necessarily dislikes sideburns, it’s just that those who wear them rarely turn out to be his kind of people. Back when his staff first settled into the White House, the only man around sporting face feathers was former Kansas Congressman Bob Ellsworth, a presidential adviser who has since gone to Brussels as U.S. Ambassador to NATO. John Sears took Ellsworth’s place as the sole representative of the sideburn set around the West Wing corridors, but by last fall he had lost out to Harry Dent as the White House political operative. The unsheared Sears, too, moved on.

It got so that one Nixon staff man wondered aloud: “If we see a set of sideburns on someone around here, we start wondering where he’s going.” But the cause of whiskers at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is not entirely lost. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Savile Row-tailored Democrat who is Nixon’s urban affairs adviser, is definitely long about the ears. Defying all auguries, he was promoted last week to the post of Counselor to the President and given Cabinet rank.