Down to Eartha

THE FIRST LADY

White House luncheons hosted by the First Lady are traditionally as dulcet as the ladies' favorite dessert of peppermint mousse. When Mrs. Lyndon Johnson invited 50 women "doers" to the first of a new series of campaign-oriented repasts devoted to national problems last week, she did not anticipate a side order of vinegar from one of her best-known guests, Negro Entertainer Eartha Kitt.

A South Carolina cotton picker as a child, Harlem slum dweller as a teenager, Singer Kitt listened with growing impatience to the women's pernickety reports about the causes of crime in the streets. Finally she spoke up--with passion, if not with convincing logic.

"I think we may have missed the main point," volunteered Singer Kitt, 39. "The young people are angry, and their parents are angry, because they are being so highly taxed and there's a war on--and Americans don't know why." Staring at Mrs. Johnson, she snapped: "You are a mother too, although you had daughters and not sons. I am a mother, and I know the feeling of having a baby come out of my gut. I have a baby and then you send him/- off to war. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot--and in case you don't understand the lingo, that's marijuana."

The assault left the First Lady speechless. But not the usually jovial wife of New Jersey's Governor Richard Hughes, mother of eleven. "Anybody who is taking pot just because there is a war in Viet Nam is some kind of kook," shot back Mrs. Hughes, whose first husband died in World War II.

"From time immemorial, there has been nobody to do the fighting except the flower of our manhood. But we still can't condone crimes in the street."

Pale and tense to the point of tears, Mrs. Johnson rejoined: "Because there is a war on--and I pray there will come a just and lasting peace--that still does not give us a free ticket not to try to work at bettering the things in this country that we can better. Crime in the streets is one thing that we can solve. I am sorry I can't speak as well or as passionately on conditions of slums as you, because I have not lived there."

Eartha stuck to her guns: "I have to say what is in my heart." So did Mrs. Hughes: "I just felt that someone had to speak up for the average American. The average young American boy doesn't want to go to war, and his mother doesn't want him to go. But if he has to, I believe America is worth it."

/- Her child, by white ex-Husband William McDonald, a Los Angeles carpet manufacturer, is a daughter, Kitt, 6.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.