The Talkiest Jobs

It takes a heap o' talkin' to make a national political convention, and the talkiest jobs of all are permanent chairman and keynote speaker. Last week the Democratic National Committee tapped a Southern moderate and a Western Boy Senator for the posts.

The Southerner. Florida's Governor LeRoy Collins, 51. the new permanent chairman, has built up an image as a statesmanlike voice of moderation on race questions, but the image is considerably marred by Florida's slow school-integration progress--not notably faster in Collins' Florida than in neighboring Georgia and Alabama. Shortly after the National Committee selected him. Collins learned that Florida Gubernatorial Hopeful Doyle E. Carlton Jr., the candidate he had openly endorsed in the Democratic primary, had lost resoundingly. "I know he won't lie; I know he won't steal." Collins assured the voters in a TV speech, but they nevertheless showed a strong preference for Harvard-educated Lawyer Farris Bryant, a somewhat more outspoken segregationist than Carlton.

The Westerner. To make the keynote speech, the committee picked Idaho's ever smiling Senator Frank Church.* who is 35 but looks mid-twentyish. Church attracted national attention at 16. when he won an American Legion oratorical contest. In 1956 he orated himself into the Senate, where his most obvious dis tinction is to be that body's youngest member. Legend has it that an old lady visiting the Capitol once said to him: "I understand that you page boys are often mistaken for Senator Church."

The news that Church will make the 1960 keynote speech is not necessarily good either for Democrats generally or for Church himself. The paths of keynote-speech glory lead but to the political grave, it seems. Republican Arthur Langlie and Democrat Frank Clement, the 1956 keynoters, are both politically jobless. And Democrats might well worry a bit about Frank Church's florid oratorical style, ominously reminiscent of the embarrassingly overwrought tirade that Tennessee's Governor Clement gushed forth in 1956 ("How long, oh how long, America?"). Perhaps as a hint of things to come. Church last week managed to pack two cliches into a single sentence. He intended to "pull no punches" in his keynote speech, he vowed, but there would be no "hitting below the belt."

-'-' Permitting wags to say that no matter who the candidate is. Democrats will "have a Church as their keynote."

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