Calling Saigon

If it was a foregone conclusion, it was nonetheless handled with flair. Decked out in a grey-silk robe and red slippers, Michigan's Republican Representative Robert Griffin picked up the telephone in a Saigon villa. At the other end of the microwave-relay hookup was G.O.P. Governor George Romney in Lansing. Thus did Griffin, in Viet Nam with a House subcommittee investigating the AID program, learn of his appointment last week to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the death of Democrat Pat McNamara.

In his five terms in the House, the lean, bespectacled Congressman built a solid, mildly conservative record, most recently as a persistent critic of Great Society legislation. At the same time, he has advocated a hard line on Viet Nam. A lawyer, Griffin, 42, is more folksy than flashy, and his greatest claim to verve is his professed ability to prepare hamburger 55 different ways. Still, he has at times surprised his House colleagues with a display of drollery, as when he took the floor to propose that the number of Agriculture Department employees should not be allowed to exceed the number of U.S. farmers.

The son of an automobile-plant foreman, Griffin was an Army artilleryman in Europe during World War II, afterward enrolled at Central Michigan College of Education where he met his wife, Librarian Marjorie Jean Anderson. They have four children, aged five to 15.

Though now running as the incumbent, Griffin faces an uphill election fight in November against the Democratic nominee for his new post: either ex-Governor G. Mennen ("Soapy") Williams or Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh. Michigan's new Senator has the rare distinction of having his name attached to a significant, much-debated law; yet the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959 is his greatest election obstacle.

As Congressman from a district that encompasses the Muskegon industrial complex and vast acres of cherry orchards, Griffin sponsored the measure with the disinterested aim of curbing labor racketeering by institutionalized checks on union finances and elections. It won him no gratitude from those it was intended to benefit. Indeed, Griffin thereby incurred the implacable enmity of the union hierarchy, which automatically reacts to all such restrictive legislation as a personal affront.

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