Forward Look

The first salmon streaks of dawn were coming up over Washington's National Airport when the darkened Convair winged in from West Virginia. Jackie Kennedy lay curled in sleep on a back seat, but her husband, the hero of the night before, was wide awake. As soon as the plane door opened, he hurried over to a vending machine, plunked in a dime and plucked out an early edition of the Washington Post. KENNEDY SWEEPS WEST VA. VOTE, proclaimed the headline. Chuckled Jack Kennedy: "I wouldn't be surprised if Lyndon and Stu might be having a conference today."

It was a logical guess. Kennedy's big victory had produced a sinking feeling in the camps of his rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination. Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey withdrew from the race and hurried home to campaign for the Senate. Texas' Lyndon Johnson and Missouri's Stuart Symington, the candidates who had sidestepped the primaries, now had every reason to form a grand alliance. Each made the usual brave comments. Said Symington: "The primary will not be any more decisive than Wisconsin." Said Johnson: "The nation can start judging on the basis of merit." But nobody was fooled; the political hour was growing late for Johnson and Symington--and later still for Adlai Stevenson, whose friends indicated that if someone would just promise to make him Secretary of State, he'd be happy.

Liberal List. Washington waited in vain for the stop-Kennedy summit meeting. It never came. Neither Symington nor Johnson was willing at this time to bow out in favor of the other; Stevenson was urged to endorse Kennedy, but decided to wait out the results of this week's Oregon primary, where all hopefuls--including Oregon's own Wayne Morse--are entered. In the lull, United Auto Workers' Walter Reuther, political shop steward of Michigan's Governor G. Mennen Williams, came out for Kennedy. So did Humphreyman Joseph Rauh, vice chairman of Americans for Democratic Action.* 9And even Eleanor Roosevelt, who has had her reservations about Jack Kennedy's Catholicism, issued the matriarchal opinion that he, more than either Symington or Johnson, "will be considered the candidate of the liberals."

The Ichabod specter of Estes Kefauver clomped through the stop-Kennedy speculation and talk. In 1952, with a successful string of 13 primaries behind him, the Keef was stopped cold in mid-convention by President Harry Truman and the Democratic bosses simply because he did not fit their image of a nominee. No such feelings exist about Kennedy, and his one big bugaboo--his Catholic religion--was gone with West Virginia.

Southern Secession. With nobody willing to step aside and nobody really determined to stop Kennedy, the situation of the rivals began to disintegrate. Truman endorsed Symington, as everyone expected him to, but even that had a slight boomerang quality about it. Questioned in Chicago by reporters, Truman said limply that the only thing he had against Kennedy was the fact that "he lives in Massachusetts." Campaigning in Maryland, Jack cracked back: "I have news for Mr. Truman. Mr. Symington was born in Massachusetts." In the South there were signs of an incipient secession from Lyndon Johnson. A wobbly move to nominate Herman Talmadge as a strategic favorite son began in Georgia. Commented the Atlanta Constitution: "This will further increase the probability that Senator Kennedy will be nominated on the first ballot." In Arkansas, Governor Orval Faubus noted that Kennedy seems to have "started a trend."

A grim group of Washington strategists tossed out the possibility that a crisis growing out of the Paris summit conference might change the whole picture.Such a time of national peril, they suggested, could make the Democratic Convention reject Kennedy as too young and too inexperienced to cope with Nikita Khrushchev. A better crisis candidate, the whisper went, might be Johnson, the cool, bipartisan helmsman, or Symington, the military expert, or Stevenson, the internationalist. It all had the sound, though, of whistling in the growing dark.

* But not all liberals share the enthusiasm for Kennedy. Said the liberal Nation last week: "The Republican passion for Senator Kennedy is obviously based on the theory that however formidable he may be as a pre-convention candidate, he would be a weak nominee for the Democrats." In somewhat the same vein, Republicans have grinned over the fact that Kennedy has nominated New York's Nelson Rockefeller as his "strongest" possible opponent.

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