Last Chance?

Once, during an 80-day rebellion in 1925, a young gaucho leader named Oswaldo Aranha saved the town of Itaqui for the government by fighting off a rebel leader named Luis Carlos Prestes. Aranha spent the next year recuperating from a bullet-shattered leg, then went on to become a President-maker, a Cabinet minister for 12 years; he spent four distinguished years in Washington as Ambassador to the U.S., served once as U.N. General Assembly president. Rebel Prestes went on to become chief of Brazil's Communist Party, the hemisphere's biggest. Last week, while thousands watched a TV interview, old opponents Aranha and Prestes embraced and Prestes called Aranha "one of the best possible presidential candidates," while Aranha proclaimed his "fondness and solidarity" for Prestes.

At 64, proud, burly, white-thatched Oswaldo Aranha presumably has one last chance at his lifelong ambition: to sit in Catete Palace, Brazil's White House. If he does not make it in the October 1960 presidential election he will be too old afterward. Last week, in his frantic bid, Aranha seemed ready to toss away a lifetime record of liberalism, internationalism, Western Hemisphere solidarity.

He simultaneously wooed the extreme nationalists and the anti-American Reds (who polled 600,000 votes in 1945, the last time they ran a presidential candidate) by tooting a strident nationalist note, crying: "Brazil is no longer a colony of the imperialists." He plumped for the renewal of diplomatic relations with Russia, explaining: "Brazil is the only great nation now cut off from relations with Russia." He wagged a finger at the U.S.: "Brazilians feel that the United States takes our traditional friendship for granted."

Aranha probably has fewer enemies than any Brazilian in public life; virtually all politicos and parties like him; he has urbanity, intelligence, and political skill. But he has no political machine, and experts give him virtually no chance. Last week Aranha perhaps summed up his whole dilemma in one wistful phrase: "I am tired of second place."

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