Handle with Care

Three hundred Republican leaders, gathered last week in Tulsa's marble-columned Mayo Hotel, chose Chicago as the scene of the presidential convention in July 1952 and spent three days in blood-quickening tribal powwow and intramural argument.

Everybody agreed that at the moment Robert A. Taft was the leading candidate for 1952, though many seemed to consider him less the man to nominate than the man to beat. His recent foreign policy pronouncements had cooled off some supporters. The only other candidate much talked about: General Ike Eisenhower. Congressman Hugh Scott, the _ party's Dewey-picked national chairman in 1948, was talking up Eisenhower. Some of the delegates feared that if the Republicans don't choose Ike as their nominee, the Democrats will.

The one solid point at which virtually all 300 minds met: they definitely did not want General Douglas MacArthur as a candidate. "It would be a great mistake," said California's Committeeman Mclntyre Faries. "To even think of MacArthur is utter nonsense," said Arizona's Committeeman and Novelist Clarence Buding-ton Kelland. Almost none wanted to make an issue of MacArthur's dismissal, or to embrace his views on the war in Asia. But all felt that the MacArthur incident and the resultant damage to President Truman's prestige had created opportunity and campaign ammunition for the G.O.P. --if used with intelligence and care.

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