And Now There Are Six

By WALTER ISAACSON

Glenn and Rollings join the Democratic field

It was storybook stuff: the smiling hero returns home to the high school named for him and announces that he will run for President. So it was last week at the John Glenn High School in New Concord (pop. 1,800), Ohio. "All Americans share the simple values we learned in this small town," Glenn said, evoking what will be the central theme of his middle-of-the-road campaign. "Those values are truly the heart of the American experiment, and they must be the soul of government as well."

With those words the first American to orbit the earth became the sixth announced candidate, and perhaps the last, to enter the race for the 1984 Democratic nomination. Glenn's Senate colleague, Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, earlier in the week joined the field, which already included former Vice President Walter Mondale, Colorado Senator Gary Hart, California Senator Alan Cranston and former Florida Governor Reubin Askew.

In the 21 years since his exploits in space, Glenn, 61, has lost one race for the Senate, won another and served eight years in Washington. Even so, he is thought of more as a hero than a politician, an image likely to be reinforced with the release in October of a movie based on The Right Stuff, a somewhat irreverent but also heroic book by Tom Wolfe about the astronauts. As an undeclared candidate for the past four months, Glenn has tried to stay above the fray. When he does go beyond comfortable cliches on controversial topics, he tends to focus on technical complexities, prompting another Senator's aide to call him "Jimmy Carter in a space suit."

Glenn's aloofness from the partisan to-and-fro has also been reflected in his campaign's inattention to grass-roots organizing and political stroking. "We were unorganized in January on purpose," Glenn says, making the reasonable point that a full year before the first primaries is soon enough to begin electioneering in earnest. At the center of the "right stuff-wrong staff' controversy is Glenn's campaign manager, William White, a smalltown lawyer with a notable lack of political savvy, who has been Glenn's closest aide for nine years. Admits White: "Kennedy's withdrawal did leave us temporarily exposed, and during that time the spotlight on us was a little brighter than we wanted. We weren't quite as organized as we hoped." Lately, however, the campaign has gathered strength. By April, $1.2 million had been raised. Sixty full-time staffers are in place, and veteran Media Adviser David Sawyer has been hired to do television ads.

Glenn's political style is almost the opposite of that of his chief opponent. Mondale, 55, the consummate politician, is wooing a traditional coalition of Democratic voting blocs with calculated passion, soothing rhetoric and promises, promises. By the beginning of April he had raised $2.4 million, far more than any of his rivals.

Mondale is going all out in the half-dozen preprimary votes, like the straw poll of party activists in Springfield, Mass., that he won two weeks ago. "You never know which of these events is going to be the first real test," says Mondale Strategist Jim Johnson.

Hart, 45, is basing his campaign on a network of grass-roots volunteers and detailed stands on issues. In a book to be published in May called A New Democracy, he puts forth a catalogue of specific proposals, including plans for industrial revitalization that call for a stronger Government hand in the economy. With less than $500,000 raised in campaign contributions so far, Hart has begun to concentrate on building up his treasury. He collected $15,000 at a Manhattan cocktail party last week at which Theodore Sorensen, a former aide to President Kennedy, served as host. Hart told the guests that the race was essentially a three-way contest in which he would beat out Glenn in the early primaries to become the sole challenger to Mondale.

This scenario, however, has been challenged by Cranston, 68, who until recently was not considered a credible candidate even in his home state of California. Cranston has scored political points by supporting a nuclear freeze and attracting publicity by outpolling Glenn and Hart in the Massachusetts straw poll. The other theme Cranston stresses is jobs, but his treatment of the issue contains more fervor than substance. As he limply explained in Springfield, "Within one week after election I will formally appoint a full-employment council. I will instruct the council to formalize a plan for full employment." Cranston has raised just under $500,000. According to Campaign Manager Sergio Bendixen, the Senator's strategy is to displace Hart this year as "the clear alternative to Mondale on the progressive side."

Rollings, 61, is well regarded for his wit, candor and legislative acumen in Washington. But he is virtually unknown outside the South, and only little known there. He stresses the need for Democrats to regain their sense of fiscal discipline and has proposed freezing federal spending until revenues can catch up with outlays. "The Democratic Party lost the 1980 election because we lost the faith of the American people," he noted in his announcement last week. "Every time a problem arose, we had but a single solution: spend more money."

Hollings and Askew, 54, are little more than asterisks in the opinion surveys now. Indeed, each of the other candidates now trails Mondale rather significantly. But the first real primaries are still ten months away and, as recent history shows, that is ample time to come from behind. In May of 1975, for example, Jimmy Carter was not even showing up in the polls; in early 1971, George McGovern was running fourth, with 5% support among Democrats. --By Walter Isaacson. Reported by Barbara B. Dolan/New Concord and Evan Thomas/Washington

With reporting by Barbara B. Dolan/New Concord, Evan Thomas/Washington This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.