Straws in the Wind

P: Iowa's Democratic Governor Herschel Loveless, who has a vice-presidential gleam in his eye, made an unscheduled sortie across the Mississippi to Moline, Ill., for a testimonial dinner for Massachusetts, hard-running Senator Jack Kennedy. Asked if this meant an endorsement, Loveless smiled and replied: "You can say that rumor has it so." P: In Washington later, Senator Kennedy, having acknowledged privately that he might ultimately find himself Adlai Stevenson's vice-presidential candidate, let the word out that he entertains no vice-presidential ambitions for himself. P: Oregon's stormy Senator Wayne Morse, violent anti-Kennedyite and the capital's most accomplished collector of enemies, found a new one in his erstwhile chum, Wisconsin's Kennedy-leaning Senator William Proxmire. Invading Milwaukee for a speech, Morse lashed out at the "gutless wonders" and "phony liberals" who had voted for "the Kennedy-Landrum-Grifnn labor reform bill" (TIME, Sept. 14). Proxmire hit back: Morse's attack "indicates an unbalanced, arrogant extremism and speaks eloquently for the reform bill we passed." If Still in uphill pursuit of Vice President Richard Nixon for the Republican presidential nomination, New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller dropped by the White House for an hour-long chat with President Eisenhower. Officially, the two discussed civil defense but. Rocky admitted, they had got around to the subject of politics. Rockefeller grinningly refused to tell anything more, but word soon leaked out that he had received Ike's assurances of detached neutrality in the event of a Rockefeller-Nixon battle for the G.O.P. nomination. P: Adlai Stevenson's ghostly candidacy got a blunt no-confidence vote from a onetime backer. Jack Matthews, president of the Texas-for-Stevenson clubs, told reporters of a recent encounter with Harry Truman, who greeted him, he said, with a snapper: "You're backing a loser." When Matthews disagreed, Truman said flatly: "Well, he is gonna get beat!" "By whom?" asked Matthews. Replied Truman: "Me!" Truman denied that he had ever said any such thing. P: In Milwaukee, Averell Harriman, New York's ex-governor and onetime (1956) presidential hopeful, startled a group of local Democratic politicos with an announcement: "If I could appoint the next President, I would pick Humphrey." The partisans of Minnesota's Senator Hubert Humphrey were delighted (although Harriman can sway few of New York's 114 convention votes) and flabbergasted: they had assumed that because Harry Truman was backing the candidacy of Fellow-Missourian. Stuart Symington, Harriman would naturally fall in line with his great friend and onetime sponsor Truman. P: Minnesota's Senator Eugene McCarthy, co-chairman of the presidential campaign of his fellow Minnesotan, Senator Hubert Humphrey, was asked why he did not scuttle Humphrey and run himself. Grinned McCarthy: "That's not a bad idea. I'm twice as liberal as Humphrey, twice as Catholic as Kennedy and twice as smart as Symington."

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