The Hunters

As round as a hoot owl's eye, the hunter's moon rose in its full phase last week, and political hunters by the score burst into feverish bush beating, suddenly aware that the season was all too short. The first crucial presidential primary--New Hampshire's on March 8--was barely 20 weeks away. The gavel would call the Democratic convention to order in Los Angeles in less than nine months, with the Republican convention in Chicago only two weeks behind. And soon after the hunter's moon of 1960 had waned to a sliver, the U.S. would elect a new President.

Massachusetts' youthful Jack Kennedy, still the fustest-and fastest-running Democrat, busied himself flushing delegates' votes in the canebrakes of Louisiana, went north to work his way through Wisconsin and Illinois, and headed toward heavy speaking dates in California two weeks hence. Missouri's Stuart Symington was marching through Georgia, booked solidly ahead for shooting matches from Massachusetts to Florida over the next weeks. Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey scored an unexpected bull's-eye with the United Auto Workers in Atlantic City, pushed on to Denver. In Dallas, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, who customarily presides over the Democratic Convention, nominated fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson for his presidential candidate. Illinois' Adlai Stevenson held court with visiting politicos but maintained an inscrutable silence at his Libertyville home. California's Governor

Edmund G. ("Pat") Brown pondered the question of taking out a hunting license, headed east this week to talk it over with Harry Truman, Stevenson and other officers of the Democratic Rod & Gun Club.

In the Republican camp there was the briefest stillness as Vice President Richard Nixon left off campaigning for a short vacation in Palm Beach. It was shattered hours later in Albany when New York's Nelson Rockefeller announced plans for a November invasion of Nixon's own hunting preserve in California, with the implicit promise that the G.O.P., too, faced a real contest for its political blue ribbon.

Between now and November 1960, there would be many a casualty in the big hunt. Until then, no one could accurately tell the hunters from the hunted.

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