Fury in the West

In the basement of Seattle's Civic Auditorium, delegates to the biennial convention of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Bricklayers Union were happily engaged in the normal pursuits of a beer bust one night last week when a pair of topflight Democratic politicians dropped in. He hoped, said Adlai Stevenson, that his amiable and popular companion, Washington's Democratic Senator Warren Magnuson, would be re-elected by a big majority. Then he added: "And I hope he can carry somebody else along with him."

Multiplied by Five. All last week, as he flailed away at Dwight Eisenhower and the Republicans in campaign speeches in Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and California, Stevenson industriously worked not only to ride the Democratic coattail but to cloak himself from head to foot in the popularity of his party's most attractive public figures. After reaching for Magnuson in Washington, he jumped to the side of Wayne Morse in Oregon. Then in California he multiplied the tactic by importing the services of five silver-tongued, big-name Democratic officeholders--New Jersey's Governor Robert Mey-ner, Pennsylvania's Governor George Leader, Tennessee's Governor Frank Clement and Senator Albert Gore, and Minnesota's Senator Hubert Humphrey. All but Clement appeared with Stevenson on a nationally televised panel discussion of the Government's role in public health (Stevenson would increase it). Later, in an operation dubbed the "Flying Front-Porch Campaign," the five fanned out through the state in small aircraft to deliver the Democratic message in smaller California communities, while Stevenson concentrated on the larger.

Still, it was Stevenson who did most of the talking,* and the farther he traveled, the harder he hit. And the harder he hit, the better the spirited audiences seemed to like it. The President, he told a capacity house in the Seattle auditorium, responded to his own suggestion that the H-bomb tests be curbed with "sneers and astonishing distortion of what I said." In Oakland he added: "I'll let the [American people] judge whether it is a 'theatrical gesture' ... to suggest a safe way to end the deadly competition to build and explode H-bombs." Of the President's press conference statement that he had said his "last word" on the subject, Stevenson snapped: "Well, I haven't said mine, and neither . . . have the people of this country, who have the only last word."

"Aging President." Between his H-bomb blasts, the candidate kept up his tough-talking attack on the G.O.P., Ike and Dick Nixon. Four years ago, he said, the Republicans promised "not to turn back the clock. They haven't, but they haven't wound it in four years either." Then, on the eve of the President's 66th birthday, Stevenson, 56, yanked Ike's age into the campaign in a manner to take the breath of the most impassioned Nixon critic. Said Adlai in San Diego: Dwight Eisenhower has given up trying to reshape his party, and its "future belongs not to an aging President, who could not succeed himself if re-elected,* but to his young, annointed, ambitious heir, Mr. Nixon."

At week's end Stevenson flew eastward to his Libertyville farm, radiant with satisfaction over the way things are going for the Democrats in the West. His estimate of his week's pulse-taking: Montana, "very, very optimistic"; Idaho, "reassuring"; Washington, good prospects for the ticket "and especially for Senator Magnuson"; Oregon, desperate Republicans are sending for Ike; California, "always hard to predict, but I am much encouraged."

*And this week provoked his erstwhile admirer, Columnist Stewart Alsop, to write: "Failure to communicate is Stevenson's great weakness, which he must somehow overcome in the few campaign weeks that remain if he is to have, a ghost of a chance of winning." -It is the 22nd Amendment (1951), not Ike's age, that limits him to two terms, will likewise limit all subsequent Presidents.

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