What Rhymes with Turdblossom?*

Today's NYT has an obituary of someone who should have been far better known than he was: Myer "Mike" Feldman, who died two days ago at 92.

Mr. Feldman’s importance was suggested in The New York Times Magazine in an article in 1962 about the prestige of having a low license-plate number in the District of Columbia. His number, 116, was the lowest of any White House official’s.

But an article in The New York Post in 1964 called Mr. Feldman “the White House’s anonymous man.”

Feldman was also the Renaissance man: law school prof, exec assistant to the SEC chairman, adviser to JFK and LBJ, back-door liaison to Israel, founder of a law firm with 100 attorneys, buyer & seller of radio stations, real estate tycoon ("he helped finance the condominium boom in Washington in the 1970s"), adviser to political campaigns, chairman of the executive committee of the Special Olympics.

But wait! There's more. Read this and weep:

Mr. Feldman was a book review editor for the Saturday Review of Literature and helped produce six plays. In the Kennedy White House, where wit and intellect sometimes seemed a competitive sport, Mr. Feldman and Mr. [Theodore] Sorensen traded memos in rhyming couplets.

If only we could have a White House like that again. SIGH...

*Nerd possum