Mr. Pierpoint was an avid tennis player, something that made for a mixed fashion statement one Saturday in the early 1970s when he reported from the White House lawn.
Mr. Pierpoint wore a suit jacket, dress shirt and tie but, as The New York Times later reported in an article on men’s fashions in Washington, “what the television camera did not reveal was that Mr. Pierpoint’s proper attire topped a pair of tennis shorts, tennis sneakers and bare legs.”
In his memoir “At the White House: Assignment to Six Presidents” (Putnam, 1981), Mr. Pierpoint wrote that he had hurriedly received a story assignment but was about to play tennis with Ron Ziegler, President Nixon’s communications aide. He changed into a tennis outfit he kept in his locker at the White House, in anticipation of the match, while keeping the suit jacket on.
He wrote that when a photo of his full frame later appeared in a book and newspapers, “my superiors were far from pleased, apparently feeling that tennis shorts, a jacket and tie did not provide a dignified image.”
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