Vernon Jordan was trying to be discreet. True, of all the shirts in his wardrobe, the president's close friend and adviser had chosen to wear the blue polo with the White House insignia.
Everyone in Edgartown says that Jordan, who has been coming to Martha's Vineyard for 20 summers, is the point man for the presidential visit. Everyone, that is, except Jordan."I'm on vacation," he said Wednesday afternoon, picking at a Caesar salad with chicken on the patio of the Farm Neck Golf Club, where he and Clinton will be teeing off daily over the next 10 days. "I'm just another islander."
But just then a neighbor of Jordan, Vernon Alden, a former president of Ohio University and a dedicated runner, approached his table. Could Jordan get him a jogging date with the president? Alden, who at age 70 is a seven-minute miler, said he would be happy to slow his pace.
Turning from his interviewer, Jordan said quietly that they would talk later.
In its own understated way, Martha's Vineyard is hyperventilating.
Indeed.
"I haven't seen so many serious people atwitter since I lived in London during the royal wedding," said Steven Rattner, an investment banker and summer resident of the town of West Tisbury.
Still, even as they are faxing party invitations to the White House, questioning everyone they know about the Clintons' social calendar, and passing along every unsubstantiated tidbit (There is a party at the Black Dog. There isn't a party at the Black Dog.), publicly they are bending over backward to act blase.
That is the way it is on Martha's Vineyard, where, as thrilling as it may be to spot Jacqueline Onassis at summer theater, people pretend to be more interested in the play. There is a code of celebrity etiquette here: Don't bother Mike Wallace, Walter Cronkite, Dan Akroyd, Spike Lee, Billy Joel, Carly Simon or any of the others. Don't even look twice.
Some people have been joking that Bill Clinton will get enough to eat on Martha's Vineyard. There is no McDonald's on the island. There is, however, a Dairy Queen in Edgartown and in keeping with the architecture it has weathered shingles and black shutters.
Thirty-one summers ago, novelist Ward Just, then a junior reporter for Newsweek magazine, was staking out the Kennedy compound in Hyannis, across Nantucket Sound in Cape Cod. It was the Fourth of July weekend, and President Kennedy was in residence. "I remember sitting in the bar and lying by the pool," Just said. "There was a briefing a day, which disclosed nothing. The president never appeared. His senior people never appeared."
Just does not stake out presidents anymore. Three weeks ago he finished his 10th novel, "Ambition and Love," about a 42-year-old painter named Georgia Whyte. Since then he has been catching up with his friends, and this week there is only one topic of conversation: the presidential visit.
"The big top has rolled into town," Just said. "And you want to be on ringside, unless you don't want to be."