Missionary at the Mike

The Republican high command took one good hard look at the Democrats' boyish, oratorical keynoter, Idaho Senator Frank Church, 35, and decided that by the time the Republican Convention rolled around it would be time for a change. They set out in search of a keynoter who would be 1) a Midwesterner, 2) with evident maturity and 3) enough stature in foreign affairs to personify a cold-war tough line. Skipping over the heads of the Republican Governors, the G.O.P.'s Convention arrangements committee lighted on one of the most remarkable men in Congress: Minnesota's nine-term Congressman Walter H. Judd, 61.

Son of a hard-up Nebraska farmer and a schoolteacher mother, Walter Judd earned his way through the University of Nebraska as a dishwiper. got a Phi Beta Kappa and an M.D. ('23). Young Dr. Judd then sailed to China as a medical missionary for the Congregational Church, was almost killed by malaria and by Communist rebels. He came back to the U.S. in 1938 to preach of the peril of Japanese expansion, made 1,400 speeches in two years urging the U.S. to stop sending war supplies to the Japanese. "I spent my time taking American scrap out of Chinese men women and children," he told House and Senate hearings.

After Pearl Harbor, he was elected to Congress by Minneapolis neighbors who raised his funds and ran his campaign. In the capital he championed the cause of Nationalist China's Chiang Kai-shek when it was highly unpopular--a stand for which the Cowles-owned Minneapolis Star and Tribune still persistently belabor him. He thundered against the perils of the Chinese Communists, recently helped get statements from 7.000 Protestant clergymen backing his stand against U.S. recognition of Red China. He fought for foreign aid ("It offers the way to get the most security for the least cost") and help for Iron Curtain refugees ("Every refugee who comes out is a vote for our society"). When Nikita Khrushchev came to the U.S., Judd was among the minority who protested, and he refused to dine with U.S.-touring Anastas Mikoyan ("For the same reason we would not attend a social function honoring Hitler, Himmler, Nero or Genghis Khan").

Judd was surprised to be chosen to make the keynote speech but not at a loss for words. "I started writing that speech in 1942," he told a newsman. Which means that Walter Judd knows why he is a Republican, why he calls himself a "progressive conservative," and why he thinks Republicans are the best folks to entrust with the management of the nation's domestic and foreign affairs. He intends to see that the nation knows too.

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