The Languid Battle

When New York's Mayor Vincent Impellitteri got beaten in the Democratic primary last month by Robert F. Wagner, 43, son of the late Senator Robert F. (Wagner Act) Wagner, he simply re-oiled his rusty armor and re-entered the lists as an independent. Since Impy got to City Hall in the first place by dubbing himself Galahad and tilting against his old Tammany pals, it seemed that he might add at least a breath of humor to the big city's dreariest modern campaign. But last week Impy was waved off on a technicality without so much as pinking a dragon.

His Experience Party, it turned out, was woefully inexperienced. To the mayor's embarrassment, a court ruled that only 5,276 of the 24,187 names on his petition for candidacy were valid. Impy carefully bent his neck, and dabbed at a nonexistent tear for the benefit of the photographers, thanked his "many thousands of volunteer workers," and tramped glumly from the arena.

Although this was technically a victory for the Wagner forces, who engineered the court fight over the signatures, the Wagnerites seemed almost as glum as Impy when it was all over. The move, they feared, on second thought, might just help Republican Candidate Harold Riegelman instead of damaging the Liberal Party's hornrimmed hoot owl, ex-Kefauver Committee Counsel Rudolph Halley. And the Wagnerites had cause to be embarrassed on another count: after crying that a mysterious, top-level Republican Mr. X had attempted to get Big-Time Racketeer Joey Fay out of prison (a charge calculated to embarrass not only local but state and national Republican administrations as well), they had, at week's end, dismally failed to name him.

Even the jeers, however, were moderate and dignified, and Republican Riegelman, with a roller canary's fierce, hot instinct for the jugular, left town in the midst of the uproar to confer with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles over the problem of U.S. policy toward Israel--a matter with some bearing on New York City's Jewish vote. The New York Daily News poll, hastily rejiggered to compensate for Impy's absence from the languid battle, showed Wagner ahead, 2 t01, nine days before election. But if the whole campaign had been conceived to drive the voters away from the polls, it could hardly have succeeded--or so it seemed at week's end--more brilliantly.

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