The Capital: Brass & Iron

When starchy Strongman Mohammed Ayub Khan, 54, stepped from his green and white Boeing 707 at Washington’s Andrews Air Force Base last week, U.S. officials were well aware that they had come to meet a talkative tiger. Days before in London, the plain-spoken President of Pakistan had demonstrated his old soldier’s scorn for diplomatic niceties, had loudly broadcast his doubts about U.S. policy in Southeast Asia and threatened to “reexamine” his country’s SEATO and CENTO commitments. At planeside, his grey guardsman’s mustache bristling, Ayub was terse and blunt. “We naturally take deepest interest,” he told President Kennedy, “in what goes on in this country—and especially what you do, sir.” Then he strode to Kennedy’s new bubble-topped Lincoln and plunged into a giddy, four-day whirl unrivaled in recent capital history.

Highlight of Ayub’s busy week was his first night in Washington, when he was guest of honor at Jackie Kennedy’s imaginative fête champêtre at Mount Vernon. The silty Potomac glittered golden in the setting sun as 138 guests boarded four flower-laden boats (each with its own musicians) for the 15-mile cruise to George Washington’s sprawling estate. The ladies had been instructed to wear short dresses (the better to clamber about Mount Vernon’s expansive lawn), and the men wore white dinner coats—except, unaccountably—the clothes-conscious President and his brother Bobby. Both turned out in black tuxedos.

Beautiful Evening. Ashore, the Mount Vernon grounds had been solicitously sprayed with DDT to rid them of their native gnats, mosquitoes, ants and chiggers. George Washington’s white-pillared manor house was equipped with electric lights for the first time in its history. White House Chef René Verdon presided proudly over Army field kitchens that served avocado and crabmeat mimosa, poulet chasseur avec couronne de riz clamart (hunter-style chicken with rice), framboises à la crème Chantilly and petits jours secs. After dinner, the guests strolled across the lawn to rows of camp chairs, settled back for a concert by the National Symphony Orchestra (selections: Mozart’s Allegro con Spirito from Symphony No. 35 in D Major, Gershwin’s American in Paris).

Brains & Backbone. Next morning, after only two hours of sleep, Ayub showed up at 9 a.m. to lay a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, then checked in at the White House for a long, serious talk with the President. This time, he came bearing gifts: two Pakistani rugs for the President, a painting for Mrs. Kennedy, a doll for Caroline and two silver rattles for John Jr. In return, Kennedy had Ayub measured for a tailor-made, gold-inlaid shotgun (a 12-gauge Winchester 21), which will be sent directly to Pakistan as soon as it is completed. At noon Ayub addressed Congress (see above), moved taciturn House Speaker Sam Rayburn to remark: “We have been in the presence of a man with iron in his backbone and brains in his head.”

For the rest of his exhausting U.S. tour, Ayub needed all the iron he had. He found the President deaf to his impertinent insistence that the U.S. halt military aid to neutral India, got only silence from Catholic Kennedy when he asked for U.S. help in controlling Pakistan’s soaring birth rate. (Said Ayub: “We want to be able to make ’em take a pill, then poof, that’s that.”) But Ayub did not hesitate to tell Kennedy exactly what he thought of Nehru (“People think he’s thinking. Actually, he’s just in a trance”), and dismissed SEATO as a weak-spined organization, daring only to “send telegrams back and forth.” He submitted to an hour of questioning at the National Press Club, and played host himself at a dinner for President Kennedy and for his old friend, Dwight Eisenhower. On another evening, he traded war stories with Secretary of State Dean Rusk—an old Burma hand—and was chided by protocol officers for forgetting to toast the health of the U.S. President. Having survived all the festivities, Ayub flew off for a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan and a visit to Ike’s Gettysburg, Pa. farm. Still ahead of him were more gastronomical trials: a U.N. dinner and a barbecue at the Texas ranch of Vice President Johnson.