The Critical Contests

A tired-eyed Texan named Henry Zweifel stepped off a train at Chicago's Dearborn Station one day last week and took a yard-high, safelike steel filing case in tow. In the case, said Taftman Zweifel, were "more than 1,000 documents" to support his arguments that his Taft delegation from Texas should be seated in the Republican National Convention. He had watched over the case all night in his room on the train, he said, so no one would get away with the evidence. When word of Zweifel's arrival with case and comment reached Houston, there was an immediate reaction from H. J. ("Jack") Porter, head of the Eisenhower delegation from Texas. Said he: "The Taft forces couldn't get enough documentation in the hold of the Queen Mary to justify their brazen steal of delegates in Texas."

The Preliminaries. This front-of-curtain exchange between Texans Zweifel and Porter was a prologue to the drama which will occupy many of the Republicans' hours in Chicago: the fight for 70* contested delegates from Texas and four other states. The first Chicago round of the battle began this week as the Republican National Committee started its deliberations on the contests. The committee will hold hearings and decide which delegates should be seated temporarily. Ikemen have reason to be concerned about the refereeing, for the national committee is solidly dominated by Taftmen.

The Ike side of the credentials fight is being managed by New York Lawyer Herbert Brownell, a Dewey man who was the Dewey-Warren campaign manager in 1948. Working with Brownell is a staff of six lawyers, headed by William Pierce Rogers, onetime counsel for the Senate Investigations Committee (among his cases: the five-percenters). Part of their assignment: to get their best witnesses before television cameras, as well as before the committee, so that the U.S. public would get the full impact of their case.

In most of the contests, the basic arguments are the same. The Eisenhower supporters charge that Taft-controlled party organizations are trying to steal delegate seats which Republican caucuses and conventions gave to Eisenhower delegates. The Taft forces answer that the Ike delegates were elected by interlopers, in many cases Democrats, who illegally took over Republican meetings.

Rule & Custom. If the Ikemen lose the round before the pro-Taft national committee, they may throw their next punch on the floor of the convention within a few minutes after Republican Chairman Guy Gabrielson bangs the gavel for the first time. The Eisenhower campaign manager, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, can move to change a rule and a precedent which have applied at Republican conventions since William Howard Taft's steamroller ran down Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. The rule: the temporary chairman decides whether contested delegations seated temporarily by the national committee should be permitted to vote on contests appealed to the floor of the convention. The precedent: contested delegates may vote on other contests, but not on those from their own states.

For 1952, Massachusetts Delegate Lodge will propose that no contested delegation be permitted to vote on any question until that delegation's status is finally determined by the rest of the convention. The obvious objection is that such a rule will encourage future contests. Every delegation to some future convention might be contested, and no one could vote on anything. The Ikemen's reply is that 1952 is a special case calling for a special rule.

All of the contested delegations seated by the pro-Taft national committee could vote on Lodge's motion to change the rule. The Eisenhower forces might well lose such a vote, especially since some more or less neutral delegates may resent a move that starts a bitter fight in the first few minutes of the convention.

When the rule-change battle is over, no matter what the outcome, the struggle over the contested delegations will shift back to a committee room. The credentials committee, composed of one member of each state and territorial delegation--53 in all--will hear appeals from the national committee's decisions. Since Taft-men will probably control the credentials committee, the Eisenhower supporters again will have to battle against odds.

Ike's Best Chance. From the credentials committee, the contest decisions can be appealed to the floor of the convention. This is the stage at which the critical battles are most likely to occur. Last week Dwight Eisenhower said: "You put more than 1,200 Americans together, and if you get the facts before them, they will give a pretty decent decision."

The Eisenhower forces' best chance may well come on the vote to seat the last (alphabetically) of the contested delegations, Texas' 38. Speculation on how that vote might go must start with the status of the delegate holdings. This week they stood:

Taft................................................................... ...........469 Eisenhower............................................................. ....392 Warren................................................................. .......76 Stassen................................................................ ........26 McKeldin............................................................... .....24 MacArthur.............................................................. ....3 Contested.............................................................. .....70 Uncommitted............................................................ ..146 -- 1,206

Some reasonable assumptions can be made about how these votes would be reshuffled on a ballot to seat a Texas delegation. The line-up on such a vote would not be Taft v. Ike, but pro-Taft v. anti-Taft. On the Texas vote, Stassen's 26 and 70 of Warren's 76 votes could be expected to land on the Eisenhower side. The second choice of McKeldin's 24 from Maryland is 18 for Ike, six for Taft, and they could be expected to split that way on the Texas vote. Taft would get MacArthur's three.

Contests decided before the Texas vote may give Ike 15, Taft 17. All of Ike's would come from Georgia, where Taftman Harry Sommers, a member of the national committee, heads the Republican faction whose delegation probably would split 15-2 for Ike on the Texas-seating vote. Neither the national committee nor the convention is expected to repudiate Sommers by accepting the all-Taft rump delegation.

Taft's 17 would be made up of 13 from Louisiana, two from Georgia and one each from Kansas and Missouri. To complete this hypothetical breakdown of votes on the Texas contest, it may be assumed that the 146 votes now listed as uncommitted will split evenly (although, in fact, the majority of this group now seems to be leaning toward Ike).

On this basis, a vote on the Texas contest would result in 594 for the Ike delegation, 574 for the Taft delegation. This calculation does not take into account Senator Lodge's claim that many Taft delegates will vote against Taft on the Texas issue. Lodge may be right; on the Texas steal issue, he is far more likely to draw votes from Taft delegates than Taft is to get Eisenhower votes.

The Eisenhower delegation from Texas is divided 33 for Ike and five for Taft. With it seated, the division of votes might be 579 for Taft, 627 against Taft. Under those circumstances it might take only a few ballots to convert all the anti-Taft votes into Ike votes.

With delegate shifts bound to occur almost daily from now on, such calculations are far from foolproof. But they illustrate how an Eisenhower victory can be achieved despite Taft's control of the convention machinery. They also show why the battle over the contested delegations, particularly the Texas 38, is so bitter. The votes that mean victory may well come from the contested seats.

* This figure does not include Florida's 18 seats, contested between two state factions both favoring Taft, or Mississippi's five seats on which the Ike national campaign managers have decided to make no fight.

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