THE U.S. IN KALEIDOSCOPE

On a Fast-Moving Tour, Only Estes Is Unmoved

Wired TIME Correspondent Serrell Hillman from the Kefauver cavalcade last week :

LAST Saturday, it was Florida, with its un-fall-like weather, its grapefruit trees, its trailers fancied up with everything from built-on rooms and porches to landscaped lawns. Sunday, it was Cleveland, as coolly respectable as Florida, and unexpectedly flamboyant; Monday, the lush, velvety valleys, red barns and wind-stroked corn fields of Wisconsin; Tuesday, the tall towers of Minneapolis, rising sharply from the prairie and gleaming in the warm sun; old, mellow St. Paul with its distinguished piles of Victorian brick and stone on Summit Avenue, where Scott Fitzgerald lived.

The variety and vigor, the kaleidoscope of the American landscape, and the people on it fascinate reporters--when we have time to think. But to Candidate Kefauver, one state is like another, one meeting the same as the next, one hand no different from the previous 5,000. Already, the traveling press is tired to a maddening degree of Kefauver--tired physically because the man puts in one 18-hour day after another with no more sign of human emotion or human fatigue than a robot; tired mentally because Estes bores them with his unvarying routine, his dull, platitudinous, primerlike speeches repeated with little variation at stop after stop, his tedious habit of shaking one hand after another, looking at its owner with glazed, unseeing eyes, hardly hearing himself mouth some meaningless banality.

The Marx Brotherhood. Plodding on through the Northern farm states and into the Northwest, Kefauver worked hard at flushing out the voters, but was sublimely oblivious to the fact that his caravan seemed to be in the hands of the anarchical Marx brothers. Nothing seemed to go right. Suitcases were lost, people missed the plane. Top Aide J. Howard McGrath, his sodden cigar clamped in his jaw, once absentmindedly darted into a ladies' room; local leaders along the route were frequently unprepared for the Keef's arrival--late as it invariably was. There was something of the horse-drawn medicine show about Kefauver's approach--neither high road nor low road, but side-of-the-road. No one but Estes would pause to cut a hole in his sock because his toe hurt ("Gotta give it some air"); only Estes could stand in the Janesville, Wis. public square, beside a flower bed vivid with petunias and marigolds, and beneath a dingy World War monument, look into the inscrutable, tooth less faces of a small group of old people and murmur that he was going to work for "full employment and equal opportunities"; only he could deliver a major farm speech in an industrial center (Janesville)--with only 150 (cityfolk) present. Somewhat symbolic, moreover, was the King Turkey Day in Worthington, Minn., which featured a parade of 150 live, gobbling turkeys and the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, who managed an apprehensive smile when the mayor plumped a nervous turkey into his hands. As the days wore on, Kefauver began to show slight signs of weariness. Once he blooped that President Eisenhower "has been stacking the National Labor Relations Board with pro-labor people"; another time, that "the Republicans are winning Maine." At the Cleveland Steer Roast, 40,000 people turned out to hear him drone on aimlessly comparing the administrations of Eisenhower and Grant for an hour ("When Estes is tired," confided an aide, "he just can't stop talking").

Such are the confusions and complications surrounding Kefauver that reporters hesitate to say how the man is doing, even though on the surface he appears to be something of a bust. Much of the time, crowds have been small, tepid, granite-faced; there has been a notable scarcity of bands and banners and other normal accouterments of major campaigns. Said one veteran Washington reporter: "Estes and the people get along so well because they demand so little of each other." But among the people there is a good-natured feeling of kinship for him.

Currier & Ives. For, as Howard McGrath says, "the farther we get into the sticks, the bigger crowds we get." There was nothing synthetic about the crowd in Sidney, Mont., a sugar-beet, beans, sheep-feeding spot. As many as 500 people, some in jeans and cowboy boots, were at the tiny airport, really whooping it up. In the small communities like Sidney--all the way to Oregon--the Kefauver campaign, for all its chartered plane, portable Mimeograph, and closed-circuit telephone speech, has developed a refreshingly American-primitive quality. The beautiful little Oregon hamlets with their graceful maples, vivid green lawns, handsome courthouses, the little kids crying or laughing unconcernedly as the candidate drones on, old men sitting on benches with expressionless faces, sucking on their pipes, housewives carrying their groceries--all of this is a mellow throwback, reminiscent as a Currier and Ives print, to the pre-electronic-age campaigns.

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