Hubbub in Nebraska

Not since Chief Yellow Hand went on the warpath had Nebraska seen such an invasion. All week long three candidates in Nebraska's free-for-all presidential primary swept across the rich, rolling cattle-&-wheat country, whooping up the vote. Local air waves throbbed with campaign oratory. Autograph hunters had a field day. One enterprising Lincoln girl named Louise Carter managed to get herself photographed shaking hands with Bob Taft, Tom Dewey and Harold Stassen inside three days.

Headwinds. As the week opened, Bob Taft hurried in to repair his earlier flub on farm prices, assured the voters that he meant revision, not reduction, of the parity ratio. While Taft took the low road (North Platte, Grand Island, Crete, Beatrice, Wahoo), wife Martha took the high road (Hyannis, Broken Bow, York, Seward, O'Neill). In three jampacked days, Bob addressed 8,000 in 13 speeches; Martha delivered a dozen more.

No sooner had the Tafts bustled back to Washington than Tom Dewey flew into Grand Island from Albany. Standing bareheaded on a sound truck outside the Yancey Hotel, he apologized for his late arrival. Said he: "I ran into headwinds. I am tired of headwinds. I ran into a strong headwind in Wisconsin and I don't want any more."

Next morning he bounced out of bed for an early breakfast in Kearney. He hustled on to examine an irrigation project en route to Holdredge, addressed a businessmen's lunch, talked to a bumper crowd of 7,500 at the University of Nebraska's Coliseum.

He rolled on to Omaha by bus. He flew to Buffalo Bill's old territory around North Platte, and to the cowtown of Alliance. He hung professionally over the ring of a hog auction, attended a farm picnic of hot dogs and baked beans, spoke from the top of a hotel marquee with his hair flying in the wind.

Everywhere he drummed home his main themes: that he is a farmer himself who understands farm problems; that he knows how to handle Communists (keep them out in the open where they can be watched); that the Administration is bungling the U.S. into war. But mainly he tried to sell himself as a solid good fellow and no highfalutin' Easterner.

Helping Hands. If Tom Dewey set a fast pace, Harold Stassen was even faster. On his first day he talked to overflowing crowds at Lincoln's Union College, at Nebraska Wesleyan, at the University of Nebraska. He stopped to visit his Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity brothers, hustled out to a veterans' settlement called Huskerville, where he broadcast above the squawling of babies and a yelping dogfight.

He had brought with him a whole troupe of campaigners: Minnesota's Governor Luther Youngdahl and Senator Ed Thye; Wisconsin's Senator Joe McCarthy. While they stumped on their own, Stassen kept rolling: to a breakfast of the Platte County Republicans at Columbus (where he promised the Midwest a Secretary of Agriculture); to Norfolk (where he plumped for the inclusion of farm labor costs in parity prices) ; to Fremont (where he backed the Pick-Sloan plan for developing the Missouri River Valley, called for outlawing of the Communist party). He even found time to go to a Shrine circus.

Sound Tactics. But he was never in too much of a hurry to answer questions at every stop or to clamp a firm grip on every hand in sight (average time: one hand every second and a half). The tactics paid off. Said one admiring Nebraskan: "Taft and Dewey went by so fast I thought they were jet-propelled. Stassen stops and says howdy."

This week Nebraska's voters cast their verdict. There were four other candidates in the race: Arthur Vandenberg, Earl Warren, Joe Martin and Douglas MacArthur--none of whom campaigned. But Candidates Dewey, Stassen and Taft had made it a fight to the last bell.

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