WHO FOR NO. 2?

The polls showed he could add mil lions to the Democratic vote total.

Party leaders were virtually begging him to run for Vice President. Family tradition indicated an acceptance of the challenge, whatever the cost. Yet last week Edward Moore Kennedy ended the drama by ruling himself out of competition for 1968. "It is impossible," he said in a formal statement. "My reasons are purely personal. They arise from the change in my personal situation and responsibilities as a result of the event of last month."

Kennedy's "final, firm" decision will probably succeed in discouraging further pressure on him to run in the cause of party unity and loyalty. But the fourth and last Kennedy brother was hardly renouncing the family legacy of active political leadership. At 36, he has many years to build his career and a safe Senate seat as a base.

Last week he promised he would not be silent on "vital foreign and domestic policies." Rather than submerge himself in the vice-presidency, he can seek to carve out his own position in the next four or eight years whether the Democrats win or lose. And he can do it without allying himself now with either Hubert Humphrey, whose policies Bobby Kennedy attacked, or Eugene McCarthy, who is disliked by the clan.

Post-Pepsi. For the short run, Kennedy's decision had the heaviest impact on Humphrey. Teddy on the ticket would conciliate many R.F.K. and McCarthy dissidents. More than ever, Humphrey's campaign badly needs a transfusion of that younger blood. McCarthy last week japed that Humphrey "may have been under house arrest for the past four years," and the Veep is indeed having more and more trouble shedding the stigma of the Johnson Administration's policies while simultaneously preserving the image of a faithful Vice President.

In the polls he is scrambling to stay close to McCarthy--and often winding up embarrassingly distant. Audiences do not always warm to the Vice President's old-fashioned style, and his campaign forays of late have fallen flat. Last week in Manhattan when Diana Ross & the Supremes endorsed Humphrey, aides called a special press conference to announce the event. A reception for "Youthful Volunteers for Humphrey" drew a sparse crowd of political veterans well past the Pepsi generation.

Roundhouse Rhetoric. Humphrey's greatest predicament is that Lyndon Johnson, far from slipping into the shadows and allowing his putative successor to establish his own image and independence, is playing as strong a lead as ever. He even seems bent upon scripting the Chicago convention as a testimonial to the Johnson years. Humphrey last week persuaded former Postmaster General Larry O'Brien, an old adviser to Jack and Bob Kennedy, to become his campaign manager. O'Brien will first try to perk up the Vice President's flagging campaign, then attempt to influence convention arrangements--particularly those of the platform committee--to make Humphrey appear a strong candidate in his own right. His working assumption will be that Humphrey's most dangerous opponent is not McCarthy or a Republican, but the L.B.J. brand.

Humphrey and O'Brien will nonetheless be keeping a nervous eye on McCarthy. If they ever doubted that the Minnesota Senator's appeal is broadening remarkably, they had only to consult Wallaces Farmer, whose presidential poll of rural Iowans last week gave McCarthy an eight-point lead over Rockefeller and a five-point lead over Nixon, with H.H.H. losing to both Republicans. Similarly, Mervin Field's California Poll shows that McCarthy's name at the top of the Democratic ticket, regardless of his running mate, provides a clear edge over any combination of Republicans.

On the stump, McCarthy has begun to shake off the languorous air that has led some critics to question his temperamental fitness for the presidency. For a rally in Columbia, Md., thousands of supporters clogged highways for miles one steamy night. Hundreds who were bottled up in the traffic simply abandoned their cars on the roadside and struck out across the fields to hear the Minnesotan. McCarthy, in a rare fighting mood, let go a roundhouse attack on Humphrey's campaigning. "It is time to have done with the language of excess, of exaggeration," he said. "It is time not to carry more sail by way of rhetoric than the ship of state can in fact carry."

Outdrawing Yaz. Later in the week McCarthy turned up for a rally in Boston's Fenway Park before one of the largest political crowds ever drawn in Boston. The turnstile count was 35,875, with 4,000 more standees squeezing in and some 6,000 latecomers turned away --a gate that exceeded even Carl Yastrzemski's constituency at last fall's World Series.

With Ted Kennedy's withdrawal from consideration, such performances may suggest to Humphrey that he should try to induce McCarthy to become his running mate. Kennedy's brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, is also a possibility. At a Boston press conference, McCarthy hedged slightly on whether he would accept the role, but the chances seem remote. The two candidates are so far apart on Viet Nam policy that many of McCarthy's supporters would be irreconcilably embittered by an alliance. After his long and individualistic crusade, McCarthy at this stage is not much concerned with his chances for the second spot.

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