Quickening Passions

Whether croaking out a few bars of a Polish ditty on Dyngus Day* in South Bend, Ind., or japing down hecklers in Coos Bay, Ore., Robert Kennedy continued to elicit the extremes of ardor and rancor.

Since the New Yorker took the field and the President renounced a second full term, residual anti-Kennedy passions have quickened. Condemned variously for his antiwar stand, his "opportunism" in entering the race, his hippie hair, his pro-civil rights proclivities, his vendetta against Teamster Boss Jimmy Hoffa, his indentureship in the '50s under Joe McCarthy and myriad unspecified acts of vindictiveness, Kennedy seems to many to appeal to "the darker impulses of the American spirit" --a sin that he was unwise enough to ascribe to Lyndon Johnson last month. Said a Los Angeles housewife last week, after switching her voting registration to Democrat so that she could vote against Bobby: "He is dogmatic, ruthless, dangerous, and as phony as an $18 bill."

Ecstatic Squeals. Kennedy is well enough aware of this side of his image and takes it with a fatalism that is brightened by the passion of his partisans. Last week, during a seven-state campaign swing from Indiana to California, Bobby--who has been depilating so steadily that he may soon look like a Marine boot--deliberately courted more mature audiences than the screaming bobby-hoppers that so often greet him. But age made little difference. Visiting an electronics plant near Portland, Ore., Kennedy encountered the same ecstatic squeals--from middle-aged women. Oddly enough, it was at the University of San Francisco, hard by the Haight-Ashbury, that Bobby encountered the most unbridled hostility of his campaign--from heckling hippies.

Careening through 18-hour campaign days toward the May 7 Indiana primary against Eugene McCarthy and favorite son Governor Roger Branigin, Kennedy has been profligate with his strength and sometimes sloppy in his tactics. Last week he admitted that 20 Senate employees working for himself and Brother Teddy on the U.S. payroll are engaged in campaign activities. Too often he allows his staffers to reinforce the image of ruthlessness, as when one Kennedy operative phoned a middle-level Washington official and demanded campaign assistance. "I'll be happy to do everything I can after the convention," said the official, an appointee committed to serving the President for the moment. Snapped the Kennedy aide: "After the convention we won't need you, buster."

Crew's Ransom. Nor did Kennedy win any points for statesmanship when he carped that the Administration's delay over settling on a peace-negotiation site was "unforgivable." Bobby repeated the simplistic notion that an end to the war would overnight redirect billions from military expenditures into urban programs.

Eugene McCarthy also complained that Johnson was too slow in agreeing to a site for peace negotiations. In Pittsburgh, he suggested that Secretary of State Dean Rusk be dismissed as a "symbolic" gesture, and in Philadelphia, though he later hedged the idea, he proposed that the U.S. pay ransom to North Korea for the return of the U.S.S. Pueblo's crew.

McCarthy, no less than Kennedy, has been forced to look at the world through a wider-angle lens since the President's renunciation. At the University of Pennsylvania, the Minnesotan reflected with almost casual eloquence on the misdirection of U.S. foreign policy. "We have relied too much on the conception of the political bloc," he said, "insisting that all nations in a given area must act as a totality. If we cannot respect nationalism and diversity in Europe, where diversity has always flourished, how can we expect to cope with diversity in Africa, Asia and Latin America? The Russian-Chinese split dramatizes the uselessness of the State Department view of Communism as a monolithic aggressor."

For that matter, the Democratic Party is hardly a monolith either. Last week 17 of the nation's 24 Democratic Governors gathered in St. Louis to discuss the candidates--and decided nothing. Awaiting Hubert Humphrey's announcement, the Governors resisted Kennedy pressures for an endorsement and concluded, as New Jersey's Richard Hughes put it, that "a pause is clearly in order."

* A traditional Polish spring holiday, which is the equivalent of April Fool's Day.

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