Veep Sweepstakes

Many a political railbird, convinced that he has the presidential nominations all doped out (Nixon and Kennedy), turned last week to the vice-presidential sweepstakes, where the horses were darker and the odds wilder. Moving up on the dopesheets last week:

DEMOCRATS. Minnesota's fluent, bouncy Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, 49, is a plausible Kennedy running mate because he is highly popular with three important groups--farmers, Negroes and organized labor--that tend to view John F. Kennedy with misgivings. After the bitterness of the West Virginia primary, in which Kennedy knocked Humphrey out of the presidential race, it seemed unlikely that they could ever join up as running mates, but they were soon paying each other peacemaking compliments. Last week the betting on Humphrey took a sharp upturn when, at Kennedy's urging, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. publicly apologized to Humphrey for "unnecessary and unwarranted statements" he had made while campaigning for Kennedy in West Virginia--innuendoes that Humphrey had dodged military service in World War II (physical disabilities kept him out of service). But Hubert Humphrey carries a heavy handicap: as an unbridled liberal, he is disliked in the South, has no appeal to independent voters.

The latest word from the horse's mouth was that Washington's boyishly earnest Senator Henry M. Jackson, 48, who is less intensely liberal than Humphrey, was coming up fast. One of the Senate's few bachelors, handsome "Scoop" Jackson (so called because he delivered newspapers as a boy) was a Congressman for twelve years before he got elected to the Senate in 1952. If Kennedy picks him as his running mate, the choice will be a sign that Jack expects to make national defense a major campaign issue: Jackson is a defense specialist, a frequent and responsible critic of Administration defense programs.

REPUBLICANS. The new importance of foreign-policy issues, stirred up by the summit collapse and the blowup in Japan, shortens the odds on Massachusetts' Henry Cabot Lodge, 57, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Veteran of 13 years in the Senate, Lodge is a tough campaigner who managed General Eisenhower's 1952 preconvention campaign. In Gallup polls he runs third, behind Vice President Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller as the Republican choice for President. As U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations for the past seven years, he has acquired national repute as the deft negotiator who talks tough to the Russians during world crises and generally comes out on the winning side. Lodge has a handicap that some Nixonites think will weigh against him if Kennedy is the Democratic presidential nominee: Lodge lost his Senate seat to Kennedy in 1952.

To strengthen the ticket's appeal in the border states and the South, Nixon might well turn to G.O.P. National Chairman Thruston B. Morton, 52, U.S. Senator from Kentucky. Ruggedly handsome, Ivy League educated (Yale, '29) and highly articulate, "Thrus" Morton served three terms in the House, then three years as an Assistant Secretary of State in charge of liaison with Congress, before winning his Senate seat in 1956. In the spring of 1959, with the Republican Party shaken and discouraged by its defeats of November 1958, Morton took over as national chairman at the urging of President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon. With his mixture of Kentucky-gentleman charm and tough-minded political savvy, Morton, working closely with Nixon, has managed to restore the morale of G.O.P. organizations across the land.

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