The Great-Grandson Race

In 1877, Alphonso Taft was Attorney General in the Cabinet of fellow Ohioan Ulysses S. Grant, and Patrick Gilligan, recently arrived in Cincinnati from Ireland's Sligo County, began a mortuary business. Cincinnati's Taft dynasty in succeeding generations occupied an ever more commanding role in the Republican Party and U.S. politics. The Gilligans also prospered in their chosen field.

It was not until Patrick's great-grandson John Joyce Gilligan decided to run for Congress in 1964 that the two families' destinies converged. Jack Gilligan not only beat the Taft-ruled organization's candidate, Representative Carl Rich, but in his re-election race this fall is running against Alphonso's great-grandson, Robert Taft Jr., grandson of a U.S. President, son of Mr. Republican.

Innovations. In his battle to hold the First Congressional District--covering the eastern half of Cincinnati and Hamilton County--Gilligan bucks more than Taft tradition. He owed his election two years ago to the Goldwater debacle and is only the third Democrat to be elected from the district in this century.* The first two were retired after one term. And Bob Taft, 49, has more impressive credentials than his illustrious name. Elected four times to the Ohio house of representatives, where he served as the Republican floor leader, he won his first statewide race in 1962 to become Congressman-at-large and would almost certainly have been elected to the U.S. Senate in 1964 save for the Lyndon landslide. Taft's chances have been boosted this year by the presence on the ticket of a popular Republican incumbent, Governor James Rhodes, and the fact that the First District has been reapportioned and is more heavily Republican than ever.

Yet it is a tight race. In less than two years, redhaired, blue-eyed Jack Gilligan, who never really stopped campaigning, has earned a reputation to match the motto on his placard: "The Congressman who gets things done." He opened a local office, started a newsletter--both innovations in the district --and even put out reports in Braille. He arranged free junkets to Washington for high school students and brought delegations of Washington officials to Cincinnati to discuss local problems with community leaders.

Making of a Soph. Most effective of all, Gilligan was the first to announce the news of every federal financial grant or industrial contract of benefit to his constituency, whether he had anything to do with it or not. As a loyal supporter of Lyndon Johnson and one of those Democratic freshmen that Johnson would like to make sophomores, Gilligan had plenty to report. Some items: a $750 million defense contract for a local plant, $4.7 million for a housing project, $285,000 to help convert the old Union Station into a museum. For a number of such boons, he claimed personal credit, notably State Department sponsorship of a world tour by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

Taft does not belittle such blessings. Nor can he match Democrat Gilligan's forceful, witty platform style. So day after day for the last eight months, Taft has plodded through bowling alleys and shopping centers, meeting the voters and doggedly trying to erase the touch of aloofness in his image that he inherited from his father along with a pleasant, bespectacled phiz. "No Taft for four generations," one of his aides observed, "has campaigned like this." Oddly, there is a shortage of clearly defined issues between the adversaries. Though they have exchanged many words over Viet Nam, both support the basic U.S. commitment there. Taft preaches "fiscal responsibility," while Gilligan argues that federal spending should, if anything, be increased; but this difference has stirred little passion in the district.

Ambassador to Ohio.Instead, the race has developed into a sharp personal conflict. Gilligan calls Taft a "bargain-basement New Dealer," relentlessly derides his opponent's reliance on his name, gibes at the campaign signs that "don't even carry his first name, don't carry the office he seeks, don't say vote, don't say Republican, don't say anything else. They've just got those four gorgeous letters: T -A -F -T."

Taft charges that Gilligan reached the "height of irresponsibility" in going all the way and then some for L.B.J.'s spending programs. When Gilligan voted against a measure to bar U.S. aid to countries that allow their shipping to enter North Vietnamese ports, Taft said that the vote indicated "approval of trade with North Viet Nam, the very same nation that is daily killing American men." Gilligan called that statement "a rather indelicate way of resorting to the old tool of McCarthyism."

One thing that Taft possesses and Gilligan cannot match is a superefficient personal campaign organization that has divided the district into 15 zones, each with its own headquarters. Taft volunteers have canvassed house to house to dig out potential Taft voters and get them registered. The organization is even using a computer to expedite the footwork, and make sure that each canvasser is used to the best advantage. Each of the 15 zones will have a battery of ten telephones working on election eve and election day to remind the right voters to go to the polls. These old-fashioned precinct labors have nothing to do with the issues, but on them may hang the continuance of an old political dynasty or the survival of the Congressman who calls himself the "ambassador from the Great Society to the people of southwestern Ohio."

* Extraordinary circumstances also applied in 1912, when the Bull Moose faction split the G.O.P., and in 1936, when Franklin D. Roosevelt swept all before him.

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