The Great Tunney-Brown Fight

From Los Angeles, TIME Bureau Chief Don Neff gives this impressionistic account of the California Democratic senatorial primary campaign and John Tunney's triumph:

TEETH. That's what you remember about John Tunney. He smiles--big, white, healthy, sparkling molars and incisors and canines. Surely they glow in the dark. Then comes that boyish face, blond hair and blue eyes, and the big frame, well over 6 feet, lanky with a little pot puffing up from too many gravied luncheons and dinners. But mainly he is arms and legs that might suddenly come unstrung one minute and collapse like an unravelable pretzel. With your eyes closed, the voice might be a Kennedy's--any of them, John or Robert or Edward.

He seemed a shoo-in for the nomination. Then along came George Brown, 50, a four-term Congressman from Los Angeles, a dropout who had dropped in, strictly a modern man. Like his mentor Gene McCarthy, Brown is so relaxed that at times it is hard to tell whether he is utterly exhausted or just doesn't give a damn. "I have no charisma," he groans. Yet he does, despite all that nonchalance. Heavy sideburns halfway down his face, a budding second chin that gives him a self-indulgent look, virile, thick, dark eyebrows and steady dark eyes, a calm voice--is there restrained passion underneath, or despair? So like McCarthy. To the kids he says the right things, he sounds straight, no shucking here, no bull.

With little money and an organization to match, a voting record so far to the left that he might have been from Outer Mongolia--in the whole House of Representatives he cast the only vote in 1966 and 1967 against military appropriations and was against Viet Nam right from the beginning--George Brown, in that calm, methodical, don't-give-a-damn. tell-it-likc-it-is way of his, hardly seemed a threat. He was safe for a fifth term in Congress: so why throw it all up to gamble for the Senate? "I wanted to carry the ball against Viet Nam. Anyway, I wasn't all that crazy about my old job."

He carried the ball, and he went a lot farther than anyone ever expected back in the winter days, when golden and toothy John Tunney seemed to have the sun to himself. After all, Big John's picture had been all over the newspapers, blood running from his nose and gasping for breath after diving 175 feet into the polluted Santa Barbara Channel to inspect the oil damage. Hey. the kids will dig that. How could he lose?

And there came Old George--a little chubby, a toneless voice, but those steady eyes, that sense of hidden pow er. Was there something here after all? Each day he hit the "senseless slaughter" in Viet Nam, with the accent on senseless; and he talked about the glacial impersonality of government and bureaucracy and political parties.

Those teeth and that lanky Viking countenance weren't enough. On the stump the son of the onetime heavyweight champion of the world. Gene Tunney, came across wooden, a" fugitive from a high school rhetoric class, arms shooting out stiffly, phrases as self-conscious as the morning after. Keeping his eye on November, not wanting to alienate anyone, Tunney tried to keep it moderate, walk that middle line. Only that's where the ennui was.

Brown stuck to the war, like some Chinese water torturer, coming back again and then again to the death tolls, the waste, the askew priorities that favor death to life. "Let us make this election a referendum on the Viet Nam War." he said. "If Richard Nixon understands nothing else, he understands politics--he understands how to count votes." The Cambodian venture and Kent State came along and played right into his strategy, falling in line so neatly that a Faust might have bargained his soul for them. As the campaign hit the homestretch and the kids flocked to Brown's camp, out ringing doorbells, mailing flyers, answering phones--they couldn't do enough--Tunney worried, and for the first time Brown seemed to be for real. By mid-May Brown was three points ahead in the public opinion polls. Brown could win--if. No one knew just what it took, but there was no question that Tunney had to do something. He did, all right.

The campaign got dirty. Tunney accused Brown--falsely--of advocating violence. He said that Brown was too liberal, some kind of kook who had no business eying one of those plush, prestigious hundred seats majestically fanned out under the Capitol dome. And Brown got mad too. He lashed out at Tunney, saying that he was "acting like a poor little rich boy." And then this enigma, this seemingly phlegmatic, hard man who barely gave a damn, melted and publicly apologized. "I shouldn't have said it," moaned Brown.

With Brown staying on the war issue. Tunney, too, joined the chorus, amplifying his earlier antiwar stand, making it the main theme of his homestretch spiel. "Why do I want to be a United States Senator?" intoned one of Tunney's final-days TV spots. "Because I want to help end the senseless killing in Southeast Asia." Most of Tunney's money went into TV, it seemed, because in the last few weeks he was all over the tube. It was enough to swing it. and though Tunney still seemed stiff and ill at ease up there before crowds, he looked good and he sounded right and, hell, he's not a bad guy. You could figure him. But Brown? No.

Still, it was close enough that the vote took all night, and it wasn't until late the next morning that Tunney wrapped it up for sure. George Brown held a post mortem press conference, and somebody asked him what he would do after his term in Congress is over. A shrug, a lift of the eyebrows: "I haven't thought about that." Fifty years old. out of a job--and he shrugs. That's George Brown.

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