Blue Bloods

This fall in Massachusetts no Senator has a seat at stake, no important Representative is likely to be liquidated and the most engaging characters on the political stage are two young Boston blue bloods. Robert F. Bradford, now 35, is the son of the late famed Surgeon Edward Hickling Bradford in direct descent from Pilgrim Father William Bradford. Thomas Hopkinson Eliot, 31, is a son of the famed liberal Unitarian minister, Samuel Eliot, and grandson of the late, even more famed Harvard President Charles W. Eliot.

As striplings they attended exclusive Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, rowed on its crews, matriculated at Harvard, rowed some more, worked on the Crimson (college daily), and survived the intellectual rigors of Harvard Law School. Both still live in Cambridge, still row singles shells for fun on the Charles River. Good-looking in a well-scrubbed, boyish way, they are great friends.

Bradford served his worldly apprenticeship as secretary (1931-34) to Democratic Governor Ely, Eliot as assistant solicitor in the U. S. Department of Labor, where he helped write the Social Security Act. Now these almost identical twins, self-consecrated to the cause of better government, are both in politics under opposite labels. In Middlesex County, in which one-quarter of Massachusetts' people live, a better element group, determined to oust Republican District Attorney Warren L. Bishop, whom they accuse of backsliding, drafted Republican Bob Bradford to run against him in the primaries September 20. In the 9th Congressional District (Boston's western outskirts, including Cambridge, Brookline, Newton, Wellesley), the New Deal has given its blessing, although it did not handpick him, to independent Democrat Tom Eliot.

Last week. Bob Bradford invaded Incumbent Bishop's home town of Wayland, flayed him for personally trying only 19 cases in eight years, for dismissing without prosecution 3,396 cases, including a male degenerate's confessed sex crime against a 12-year-old girl. With ample financial support to fight Mr. Bishop's local machine, Bob Bradford was given a better-than-even chance of winning, and Republican nomination in Middlesex is tantamount to election.

Tom Eliot--a Democrat since, aged 10, he alone voted for Woodrow Wilson in a class poll--is opposed by three Irishmen, in a heavily Irish district. His chance--rated even by local experts--lies in the Irish vote's splitting. Last week one of his opponents, Carroll Lehane, crashed an Eliot rally in Brighton. Instead of letting Mr. Lehane be bum's-rushed out. Candidate Eliot, trained to sportsmanship on the playing fields of Cambridge, invited him to speak. If nominated, Tom Eliot's harder fight will come in November, against crafty old Republican Robert Luce, 75, president of famed Luce's Press Clipping Bureau, who is seeking a tenth term in Congress.

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