Word: carpet
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Burns on the Carpet. With an eye for the smallest detail, Johnson also found time to snuff out a smoldering-though minor-crisis that involved the reporters. Having recently discovered two cigarette burns on the carpet of his oval office, the President, who stopped smoking after his 1955 heart attack, told Secret Service men to order reporters entering the office to ditch their lighted cigarettes. He also took to thrusting ashtrays at visitors, and recently, while walking with a guest outside his office, swooped down to pick up a crushed butt and dump it in an ashtray...
Washington's Gridiron show was a gasser, but hardly worth the hangover it cost Runyonesque Rabelaisian Toots Shor, 62, who had lumbered down from his Manhattan diner for the party. Packing up the day after, big Toots tripped on a hotel carpet, performed a dive of a high degree of difficulty and belted his 250-lb. bulk down onto the floor...
...Gates Dawes, a frugal fellow who came to deplore "the dirty demagogues of both parties who get the report and besmear and befog it in the minds of the public." Dawes (who became Coolidge's Vice President) had ingenious ways of calling free-spending military officers onto the carpet. On one occasion, he summoned some of them to his office, vigorously swept his rug with two brooms, then demanded of the stunned officers why the Navy spent 32? more than the Army for its brooms, since both brooms did the job equally well...
...hack away graft in government from the top down. First hit was the judiciary. At Helou's prodding, the Supreme Judicial Council in December fired 13 prominent judges whose "irregularities" were well known. Last week the diplomatic service was called up on its own red carpet. Sacked "for not properly representing Lebanon" were the ambassadors to Russia, Iran, Cyprus, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Senegal and Argentina (the ambassadors to Britain and Egypt had quit beforehand...
...Opposition's real opposition, Prime Minister Harold Wilson's ruling Laborites. But last week Heath finally kicked back. When his shadow minister for colonial affairs, dapper, dagger-tongued Angus Maude, wrote in the Spectator that "the Opposition has become a meaningless irrelevance," Heath called him on the carpet of his West End bachelor flat. When Maude emerged 30 minutes later, he announced his resignation from Heath's frontbench...