$420,000 in the Pot

When Bob Taft stepped out of an airplane at Chicago one day last week, an enthusiastic Republican delegation was there to welcome him. Among them was Miss Constance O'Brien, who stepped up and gave him a Taft-for-President button that her grandfather wore in 1908 when William Howard Taft, the Senator's father, ran for President.

Robert Taft was in Chicago, heart of the Taft country, to help Republicans raise money and to further his candidacy for the presidential nomination. For 30 hours Illinois Republicans reverently escorted their man on a whirlwind schedule from ham-and-eggs breakfast to political confab to press conference to lunch to cocktail party to dinner. At the press conference the candidate was affable and at ease, even when the touchy questions came up. What if General Eisenhower seeks the Republican nomination? "I don't think it would make much difference," said Taft. "The people who are for me are for me. They're not for me conditionally." What about Wisconsin's Joe McCarthy? "As far as McCarthy's campaign against Communists in Government, I'm for it," Taft replied. "I don't know whether I approve his methods or not. Sometimes I approve. Sometimes I don't."

The big affair, a Republican fund-raising dinner in the vast, concrete-floored International Amphitheater, required six special kitchens with 30 cooks, 60 kitchen helpers and 300 waitresses.

After dinner there was a "pageant," produced at a cost of $16,000 with a cast of 150. Narrators, musicians, singers, actors and ballet dancers extolled Republican virtues, lambasted Democrats, burlesqued Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Bob Taft, making penciled changes in his speech, watched little of it. Then he rose to bear down on the issues: the Truman Administration is leading the country away from free enterprise toward socialism. Its foreign-relations blunders built up the Communist menace, led to war in Korea. Corruption in government, sharply illustrated now by the income-tax racketeers, must be swept out.

When the night's proceeds were tallied, they showed that 4,200 dinner tickets at $100 each had poured $420,000 into the Republican campaign pot. It was the biggest fund-raising affair Republicans had ever had.*

* But the Democrats still hold the record. They scooped up $530,000 (5,300 diners at $100 per) at a Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Washington last April.

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