Ted's Troubles in the Tundra

It started as a sentimental, if some what political journey. Alaska's Indians and Eskimos, neglected in their isolation, had been a goal on Robert Kennedy's poverty itinerary that he did not live to make. Picking up his brother's trail last week, Senator Edward Kennedy undertook a threeday, 3,600-mile tour of remote Alaskan villages that took him to the shores of the Arctic Ocean. But before the trip was half over, Ted Kennedy was reminded once again of the complexity of Robert's legacy. Besides having inherited the constituency of the poor*, he is also heir to the charges of ruthless political ambition that always bedeviled Robert -- accusations that Ted was able to avoid as long as he was only the kid brother.

Revolt. For the first day and a half, it seemed like the typical congressional trip for Kennedy's Senate Subcommitteeon Indian Education. That tour was frankly set up, as such excursions are, to generate publicity for legislation -- in this case, to improve educational and anti-poverty programs for Eskimos and Indians. On the second day, however, Kennedy was faced with a mutiny by the three Republican Senators on his committee. They abruptly abandoned the trip, charging that it was "a stage-managed scenario" to boost Kennedy's presidential prospects. Hollywood's Senator George Murphy, who used to get star billing himself, took a look at the mob of cameramen focusing in on the Kennedy face and decided that the occasion "was turning into a kind of Roman circus." Said a Republican Committee aide of Murphy's pique: "He was just tired of a one-man show."

The immediate cause of the blowup was the disclosure of a 43-page confidential staff memorandum advising Kennedy to focus television coverage "on native poverty contrasted with the affluence of Government installations" in Alaska. The memo suggested that the word "colonialism" would describe the situation.

Kennedy defended the memo as routine for such a tour and said that the three Republicans, Murphy, Henry Bellmon of Oklahoma and William Saxbe of Ohio, had been sent copies. But the three said they had not received them before they left on the trip. Although committee staffs habitually do spadework prior to such tours, the Kennedy staff went further into detail than most and was blunter than it might have been in laying down conclusions and stage directions before the trip even began. Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Howard W. Pollock, Alaska Republicans, stuck with the tour and somewhat blunted the G.O.P. charges against Kennedy. Asked about alleged G.O.P. Policy Committee pressure on him to quit also, Stevens said angrily: "This fact-finding investigation is good for my state. I'm not going to criticize any aspect of it."

Overshadowed. The G.O.P. assault on a subcommittee chairman, almost unprecedented in the ceremonious Senate sanctum, was especially ironic in Kennedy's case. The young Senator has always gone out of his way to be respectful of Senate customs. Since his emergence as a possible presidential candidate, however, Republicans have been treating him like an opposition candidate; the Alaska revolt was not an isolated incident. Senator Everett Dirksen recently attempted to turn Kennedy's hearings on discriminatory hiring into an assault on Government "harassment" of business, and Administration spokesmen criticized the Senate Select Committee on Hunger after Kennedy helped it reverse a fund cutoff. After the Alaskan revolt, an Administration official was quoted as praising the Republican Senators' decision to abandon the inspection tour. One Democrat, Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale, suggested that the Administration, strapped for funds, was trying to play down disclosures of urgent welfare needs.

Although it was hoped that Kennedy's presence on the tour would draw public attention to the miserable condition of Alaskan natives, the flap overshadowed the poverty. Lost in the accusations was the close-up look that the subcommittee got at the squalor in a far-off corner of America. Landing on frozen rivers, slogging through thigh-high snow in zero temperature, the Senators visited primitive villages where the unemployment rate is 60%. They had to bend low to get into crude Eskimo homes, rancid one-room shacks with no plumbing that house up to eleven people. They visited a village where residents have to walk two miles for water, and areas where only eight out of 100 native Alaskans graduate from high school.

Conditions in Alaska have been improving rapidly in the past few years, but they still have a long way to go to catch up with the rest of the U.S. Excursions like Kennedy's, whatever the publicity dividends for the tour guide, help remind the nation of those beyond affluence's pale--just as Bob Kennedy's visits to Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta did. In the meantime, Ted Kennedy, like Robert before him, is making good political mileage out of his rapport with America's downtrodden.

*While Ted was in Alaska, Wife Joan went to Brooklyn to visit a job-training center that Robert Kennedy helped establish two years ago.

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