Whopping Turnout

Pleasantly flustered, Robert Alphonso Taft looked out over the ballroom in the Sherman Hotel and guessed that he "was getting more notorious than that great Chicago citizen, Al Capone." Some 1,500 Executives Club businessmen cheered lustily. In distant banquet rooms, an overflow 1,000 listened by public-address system. Senator Taft, arriving in Chicago for the first time since his November triumph, had pulled the biggest turnout of any lunch-club speaker in recent memory.

Flanked by the Midwest's most impressive industrial brass, Taft preached his own brand of reluctant internationalism,. Only two or three more U.S. divisions should be sent to Europe, he insisted, "and that would be doing a great deal more for them than they have done for us in Korea." The U.S. would probably have to shoulder at least 50% of the load in any war with Russia, "but I object to getting in so heavily that we find ourselves doing 90% of the job."

Local Republicans, frisking about him like cherubs in a progress of Apollo, whisked beaming Bob Taft over to G.O.P. county headquarters. There some 4,000 cheering party workers had stomped through a snowstorm to hear him. Taft gave them a rousing pep talk for the approaching municipal elections. Cried he: "We have the issues and will have them in 1952. I don't know who the presidential candidate will be." The crowd: "You!"

That Taft, to nobody's surprise, is the candidate of the political "pros" was made plain by an informal poll last week of some 65 G.O.P. national committeemen meeting in Washington: 29 for Taft, 12 for Ike, 24 scattered or just not talking.

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