The Working List

Veep guessing is perhaps the least profitable of political pastimes. But the guessers keep guessing and, more important, prospective presidential nominees encourage the game for all it's worth.

John F. Kennedy, during his 1960 pre-convention campaign, turned Veep playing from an inexact art into a high science; he had everyone from Herschel Loveless (Iowa) to George Docking (Kansas) to Edmund ("Pat") Brown (California) to Henry M. ("Scoop") Jackson (Washington) thinking they might be his running mate. And in so promoting the possibilities, he won a fair number of delegate votes from their states.

Last week it appeared that Barry Goldwater might have taken a page or two from Kennedy's book. At any rate, his San Francisco forces were passing around a "working list" of five top vice-presidential prospects--even while insisting that it was highly tentative and that the candidate himself had not yet made up his mind and was "committed to nobody."

The list:

>Pennsylvania's Scranton, whose presence on the ticket would promote G.O.P. unity and help Barry in the industrial Northeast. Scranton has repeatedly said he does not want the vice-presidential nomination, and last week Goldwater said: "I don't think either of us would be comfortable running with the other." Still, there are strong arguments that a Goldwater-Scranton ticket would make the best of political sense, and the possibility should not be ruled out.*

>G.O.P. National Committee Chairman William Miller, a New York Congressman who could also give the ticket a Northeastern tinge, a Catholic, an orator with a gift for tough-talking gab, a clean-cut looking 50-year-old with a handsome wife and four attractive chil dren who would be an asset in anybody's campaign. But he is a relatively unknown politician who is not even standing for re-election this year from his upstate New York congressional district.

>Michigan's Representative Gerald Ford, ranking Republican on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, whose views favoring an ever stronger U.S. defense posture generally coincide with Barry's, a husky 51-year-old who would campaign aggressively. He is little known nationally, although (who knows?) some voters might mistake him for kith or kin to the Ford family of Michigan.

> Kentucky's Senator Thruston Morton, an old State Department hand under Ike, who has served in both branches of Congress, a former National Committee chairman, a national figure who will be even better known after his TV appearances this week as the permanent chairman of the convention.

>Minnesota's Walter Judd, a former Congressman and the 1960 convention's keynote speaker, as eloquent and able an anti-Communist foreign policy spokesman as the G.O.P. has to offer, but a loser in his 1962 campaign for reelection in his own Minneapolis district.

*In 1960, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson scorned the suggestion that he might accept the Democratic vice-presidential nomination, saying it would be "trading a vote for a gavel." Before the reconciliation, he liked to refer to Kennedy as "young Jack," said Kennedy had rolled up primary victories because "Jack was out kissing babies while I was passing bills." In the heat of battle, Johnson wasn't above rattling the long-closeted skeleton of Old Joe Kennedy's days as U.S. Ambassador to England: "I wasn't any Chamberlain umbrella policy man. I never thought Hitler was right."

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