Who's on First?

Settling back to enjoy the election-year bawlgame between Democrats and Republicans, New York voters discovered last week that the starting lineups were far from firm. Moreover, they needed political scorecards to recognize players fighting for positions on each team. Items: P: Seven-term Negro Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, 49, already under indictment for income tax evasion (TIME, May 19), flipped into trouble on another front. Under prodding by Tammany Chieftain Carmine De Sapio, Harlem political leaders declared Powell Democrat non grata for his support of the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket two years ago, looked around for another candidate. Pastor Powell (Abyssinian Baptist Church) churned into an oratorical frenzy. Cried he: "I am being purged because obviously I am a Negro and a Negro should stay on the plantation." Powell called New Yorker De Sapio "a Mississippi boss" and "a liar," spun off insults at Republicans and Democrats alike, announced that he would run for an eighth term as an independent Democrat. P: Conservative Republican Frederic R. Coudert Jr., 60, whose vote-pulling power in Manhattan's East Side silk-stocking 17th Congressional District was badly snagged the last two times out by big Democratic protest votes and near defeat, announced that he would not run for a seventh term. Coudert's withdrawal signaled a bloody primary and a bloodier general election to pick a successor. P: Two-term Republican Senator Irving McNeil Ives, 62, one of the Senate handful of steady Eisenhower Republicans, announced that poor health (high blood pressure) bars him from seeking a third term this autumn, /- Ives's retirement paved the way for the G.O.P. to break a growing deadlock over the gubernatorial nomination by supporting eager, onetime

National Chairman Leonard W. Hall, 57, for Governor and trying to divert Manhattan Millionaire Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, 49, from his persistent but unannounced interest in the Governor's chair to an interest in Irving Ives's Senate seat. Possible Democratic Senate contenders: New York's Mayor Robert F. Wagner, onetime Air Force Secretary Thomas K. Finletter and New York District Attorney Frank Hogan. Strongest of the three is Wagner, who swept back into city hall last November with the largest plurality ever granted a New York mayor, still wants to follow his father into the Senate, was defeated on his first try two years ago, and may run again this year before a current series of municipal scandals grows too unwieldy.

/- Making him the sixth Republican to decline to run for Senate reelection. The others: Vermont's Ralph Flanders, California's William Fife Knowland, Pennsylvania's Edward Martin, New Jersey's H. Alexander Smith and Indiana's William E. Jenner.

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