How Now, Nutmeg State?

His drive for re-election was in high gear. "Bush for Senate" stickers studded walls at Republican headquarters. From Hartford's Bond Hotel, his campaign staff passed out buttons and bumper strips, ordered placards for his triumphal renomination at the Connecticut G.O.P.

convention on June 4-5. But last week Republican Senator Prescott Bush startled everyone by announcing that he would not seek re-election this year.

Pres Bush, 67, said that he simply did not have "the strength and vigor needed to do full justice to the campaign ahead, or to the responsibilities involved in serving another six years in the Senate." He looked tired, wore a hearing aid for the first time in public. That the campaign would be strenuous was obvious--since former Democratic Governor Abe Ribicoff, a great Connecticut vote-getter, is leaving the Kennedy Cabinet to run for the Senate. Bush did beat Ribicoff for the Senate in the Eisenhower landslide of 1952, but private polls by both parties now showed him trailing Ribicoff.

Into the G.O.P. breach stepped John Davis Lodge, 58, brother of 1960 Republican Vice-Presidential Candidate Henry Cabot Lodge. Eager for a political comeback, the former Congressman (1947-51), Governor (1951-55) and Eisenhower Ambassador to Spain (1955-61) announced his Senate candidacy. Lodge hopes to avenge his 3,200-vote loss to Ribicoff for the governorship in 1954.

An urbane man who is a florid phrasemaker in four languages and a onetime movie actor (he played Shirley Temple's father in The Little Colonel), Lodge had been angling for the gubernatorial nomination until Bush's announcement.

Lodge's decision left no void among Republicans running for Governor. In the wildest G.O.P. melee in a millennium, there are still six candidates trying for a shot at Democratic Governor John Dempsey, 47, who moved up from Lieutenant Governor last year, when Ribicoff hied himself off to Washington. Dempsey inherited the big tax problems that Ribicoff's costly highway and education pro grams made inevitable. Of the six Republicans, two candidates seem to be ahead: John Alsop, Ivy-clad (Groton and Yale) brother of Writers Stewart and Joseph. Erudite and witty, Alsop -- defy ing the cliches of current political nomenclature -- calls himself a "progressive liberal." As a state legislator, he irked Catholics by introducing a birth control bill, has since made amends by backing Catholic charities. President of Mutual Insurance Company of Hartford, he barely missed the gubernatorial nomination in 1958. To those who suggested that he try for the Senate when Bush bowed out, Alsop replied with a quip: "There are enough Alsops in Washington now." Edwin H. May Jr., 37, a wavy-haired, hardheaded politician who was state Republican chairman from 1958 until last November. A basketball captain at Wesleyan University and former president of the Connecticut Junior Chamber of Commerce, he was elected to Congress at 32, defeated two years later, and is now an insurance agent. He considers himself an "Eisenhower Republican," recalls with de light an 18-hole golf round he once played with Ike.

The other Republicans in the race are no pushovers either. Connecticut House Speaker Anthony Wallace, 46, is well respected by his fellow legislators. Newman Marsilius, 44, is a conservative former state senator with an impressive knowledge of the state's economy. Peter Mariani, 46, minority leader of the state senate, built up from scratch the largest electrical-parts house in the state. John Mather Lupton, 45, an evangelistic conservative, stirs his audiences with charges that Ribicoff is a "collectivist," claims the John Birch Society is "no more extreme than the A.D.A." He stumped Lodge's home town of Westport, got his own slate of delegates elected (1,237 to 1,206) over a slate then pledged to Lodge for Governor.

The 660 delegates to the state convention must endorse one of these candidates ; yet the fratricide may not end there. Any one who gets 20% of the votes can de mand a primary election. And most seem determined to do just that.

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