Situation: Fluid

Under cover of darkness, the Administration's elite forces last week launched their offensive against the outnumbered but well-entrenched army of Robert Alphonso Taft, top general in that doughty old resistance group, the Republican Party. The invaders opened up first with a secret weapon--the ordinarily quiet, nonpolitical, White House Foreign Policy Strategist W. Averell Harriman.

Big Gun Harriman was camouflaged in yards of commonplace comments on world affairs and smuggled around Bob Taft's southern flank to Houston, where the A.F.L. was bivouacked for its annual convention. He was aimed straight at Taft territory in Ohio and went off with a horrendous political karrumph.

Opening Barrage. He wasn't going to be partisan, Harriman explained. But his first shot ripped smack into the leaky hulk of bipartisan foreign policy. He blasted Taft for his constant guerrilla warfare against foreign-policy measures, nominated him for political execution and concluded with the resounding detonation: "When you look at his record, you cannot escape the conclusion that if the Congress had adopted his positions, Communist objectives would thereby have been furthered." From Washington, old Artilleryman Harry Truman, the commander in chief, fired another barrage. He agreed emphatically, he made clear, with every word of Harriman's attack.

The Administration had chosen its prime target for the 1950 campaign and the issue was joined. Others trundled up to the firing line. John L. Lewis, the well-known underground leader, muscled into the fighting uninvited, unlimbered his smoke-belching Elizabethan firing piece and lobbed what he hoped would be a death-dealing cannonball at the prime author of the Taft-Hartley law. "Taft's secret political handlers propose to have him enter the coal mines," wrote Lewis in a letter to Ohio mine operators. "This will be bad from the standpoint of coal production. Taft was born encased in velvet pants and has lived to rivet an iron collar around the necks of millions of Americans . . . The effluvia of the oppressor is ever disagreeable and could enrage the men to a point of evacuation of the mine . . . You should refuse him entry . . ."

Behind the Lines. Old John's cannonball turned out to be nothing but a blivis,* which landed with a wet splat that embarrassed Taft's opponents, probably helped, and certainly did not hurt, the Senator's chances for reelection. Inside Taft's lines, organized labor and the Administration fought more effectively.

The C.I.O. and A.F.L. stepped up the well-financed campaign of harassment and rock-throwing they opened against Taft months ago. The Democratic National Committee decided to send a stream of campaign commandos, including four Cabinet officers, into Taftland before Nov. 7. Vice President Alben Barkley set aside two days for peppering Taft during a forthcoming nationwide political tour.

The President himself, confined to Washington by the Korean war, did not entirely abandon plans for invading Ohio, and he planned at least to bombard the No. 1 Republican position by radio before Election Day. Taft's opponent, State Auditor Joseph T. ("Jumping Joe") Ferguson, was adding to the fireworks with a far more effective campaign than even his supporters had expected, although he conceded that a Democratic victory would come more from votes against Taft than from votes for Ferguson.

Shot for Shot. At the receiving end of all the shot & shell, the carnage should have been ghastly. But that was far from the case. Shot for shot, Taft fired back. Who had been in charge of U.S. foreign policy for the last 18 years? he demanded. He taunted the Democrats and labor for invading Ohio to dictate to the voters, challenged the unwilling Ferguson to platform debates, visited factories during working hours and got himself photographed with grinning workmen. In the voice that often sounds like a twanging zither, he replied to Averell Harriman in kind: "Until his conversion of a few years ago, Mr. Averell Harriman was one of those most sympathetic to Soviet Russia and Joe Stalin. To him, as to President Truman, Joe Stalin was 'Good old Joe.' '

The greatest blow of the week for Bob Taft was struck by Ohio Democrats. At the Democratic state convention last week, the party's two most important vote-getters--Governor Frank Lausche and Cleveland Mayor Thomas Burke--pointedly refused to endorse Jumping Joe Ferguson for Senator. This was not quite an endorsement of Republican Taft, but it was not calculated to aid the Democratic cause.

In all the smoke and confusion, a dutiful communique writer could not be very precise. At week's end, with six weeks of shooting still to come, the situation in Ohio was, in a word, fluid.

-A mythical projectile, described in some ordnance circles as two pounds of cooked oatmeal in a one-pound sack.

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