One More Democrat

"All my life, since I was a young lawyer, I have wanted to be a judge," Connecticut's big, friendly Republican Senator Raymond Baldwin declared last week. Instead, his path had kept him in politics for 20 years. After three terms as governor of Connecticut, he passed up a $30,000-a-year job as vice president of the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Co. to answer the party call again and make the race for the Senate.

But Baldwin had never been altogether happy in Washington. Ever since his election he had been in a frustrating and unsuccessful battle against the built-in conservatives of his own party. He had little leisure, he worried about financial security. Last week Ray Baldwin traded it all for his lifetime ambition and more security.

Slipping off to Hartford, he appeared at a press conference with Democratic Governor Chester Bowles at his side. Some time before the end of the year, they announced, Baldwin would resign from the Senate to take a $12,000-a-year vacancy on the state's Supreme Court of Errors. Though the appointment was nominally for only eight years, it was traditionally a lifetime job, and 55-year-old Raymond Baldwin would be in line for the post of chief justice in four years.

The announcement stunned Republicans in Connecticut and Washington. New Dealing Chester Bowles would almost certainly replace Baldwin with a Democrat, thus increasing Democratic strength in the Senate to 55, a majority of seven; at the same time the Republicans would lose their best vote getter in the state. When-Baldwin showed up at a dinner attended by bigwigs of both parties in Hartford last week, he was loudly booed by Republicans.

Back in Washington, he denied any "lack of faith in the future of the Republican Party ... It has good leadership, good candidates and, by & large, a good program."

But Republicans were not appeased. Cried New Hampshire's angry Styles Bridges: "Everyone on the Republican side this morning was either sick to his stomach or mad as hell. It is impossible for me to understand how any Republican Senator would resign his position of responsibility and trust when it meant turning the post over to a Democrat.* It doesn't smell good to me." But to the Democrats, and especially to Chester Bowles, it smelled fine.

*Just such a consideration has kept New York's ailing Democrat Robert Wagner from retiring, though he has not been seen on the floor of the Senate since May 27, 1947. Presumably, Governor Thomas E. Dewey would replace him with a Republican.

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