The Californians

The political wagon train led by California's Republican Governor Goodwin J. Knight has been beset by more breakdowns in recent months than a three-wheeled buckboard in a spring thaw. First off, Goodie, who wanted badly to run again for governor, was knocked off his seat by Senate Minority Leader Big Bill Knowland, who, with the support of Deadeye Dick Nixon, overran the Knight riders with big guns and big ambitions. Goodie thereupon picked himself up and allowed as how, on second thought, he would just as soon head East for Bill Knowland's seat in the U.S. Senate.

Rounding up Republican support for the primary election was something else again: Knight struggled for weeks against the growing power of San Francisco's G.O.P. Mayor George Christopher, who had his eyes set for the Senate, too. Last week in San Jose, at the showdown before the quasi-official Republican state assembly convention, Goodie took a handy edge toward full endorsement by his party for the primaries: the assembly's fact-finding committee handed him the whip by a vote of 29 to 7; all that remained was support by full vote of the entire assembly.

But hard-riding George Christopher was not about to hang up his hardware. After the fact-finding committee gave Goodie the nod, Christopher unleashed his pistols, accused Knight supporters of circulating literature of "such a low grade" as to be "vulgar and wholly un-American." It was, he said, a case of "bigotry" and "insipid intolerance." The literature included a pamphlet entitled "The ODDyssey of George Christopher," and somehow Christopher took it to be a slur on his Greek ancestry. What it did do was trace Christopher's switches in party registration--from Republican to Progressive to Democratic to Republican--since 1930. Said Christopher, whom the pamphlet labeled "Weathervane George": Goodie Knight directly approved the contents of the pamphlet.

"Ridiculous," cried Knight, who claimed that he never saw the pamphlet before last week. "I find it farfetched and fantastic to read anything into it other than the fact that several party registration switches were involved." By week's end it was clear that Christopher's charges had not hurt Goodie's chances at all: he won the full convention's endorsement, 109 to 44.

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