Georgia Loses

From his office on Capitol Hill, Georgia's Walter Franklin George, 78, scholarly dean of the U.S. Senate, found it hard to believe the news he was getting from home. His friends told him that his rank as a statesman in Washington would never pull him through the Democratic primary in Georgia next September. Every sounding indicated that ex-Governor (1948-54) Herman Talmadge, 42, who had not even announced his candidacy, was pulling far ahead. Unable to face the prospect of a wearing campaign in the searing heat of July and August, George last week made the painful decision: he would withdraw from the Senate race.

The word moved across Georgia like a gale out of the Atlantic. Tearing up the statement he had planned to issue if George stayed in the race (asserting that Georgia needed a "young and vigorous" Senator), Herman Talmadge shot out a new announcement that included praise of George's service. Talmadge & Co. were jubilant; old Walter George's friends were sad but relieved.

A Senator's Senator. In the national capital, which had become George's spiritual home, there was a different reaction. State Department officers, from John Foster Dulles on down, hurried through the procedure to offer Democrat George a high-ranking diplomatic post. Before the Senator announced his decision, President Eisenhower telephoned to offer him the new position of U.S. Ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. George agreed to accept, but did not say when he would take the job. In the hand of an Assistant Secretary of State, the President rushed over a "Dear Walter" letter, praising the Georgian's "great career as a statesman."

On the Senate floor, one member of the club after another rose to pay wholehearted tribute to the colleague who had arrived in 1922, when Vice President Coolidge was presiding. As a moderate from the Deep South, Walter George had fought strenuously for his principles (anti-Ku Klux Klan, pro-Tennessee Valley Authority, anti-Franklin Roosevelt's plan to pack the Supreme Court). Connecticut's Republican Senator Prescott Bush said he hoped that he might some day command the kind of respect that prompted George's wife always to call him "Mr. George." Rolled into the Senate chamber in a wheelchair, Colorado's ailing Republican Senator Eugene Millikin, who is facing a re-election battle this year, wept as he paid his brief, barely audible tribute to his colleague. Tennessee's clear-headed Democratic Senator Albert Gore produced the day's best description of Walter George: "A Senator's Senator."

The Ironic Gauge. George's character was legend when Dwight Eisenhower was a little-known lieutenant colonel, but not until the Eisenhower Administration did George emerge as a national figure in the conduct of foreign affairs. In 1955, when the Democrats took over Congress, Eisenhower urged George to pass up the chairmanship of the Senate Finance Committee and to become, instead, Foreign Relations Chairman. George agreed, became the strong voice of foreign-policy bipartisanship on Capitol Hill (TIME. April 25, 1955). When Ike asked for a free hand in dealing with the Formosa area crisis, George's support produced an overwhelming bipartisan vote of confidence. His early, public espousal of a Big Four meeting was a key factor in the President's decision to attend the summit conference at Geneva last summer.

Ironically, George's increasing influence in Washington in 1956 was no gauge of his political position at home, especially in the wool-hat back country, where Herman Talmadge is strongest. He had been away too long. Georgia political leaders thought that his moderate position on segregation was an important reason for his most recent loss of political strength. Said Democratic Strategist Roy V. Harris: "If he had just made one speech giving the Supreme Court hell, nobody could have beat him."

O11 Gene's Boy. Herman Talmadge, who now appears to have clear sailing to the U.S. Senate, has no such trouble on the segregation issue. He learned his politics at the baggy knee of his father, gallus-snapping "Ol' Gene" Talmadge, one of the South's most notorious rabblerousers, governor of Georgia for six years (1933-36, 41-42). Herman watched his father run the state with the fist of a dictator, spit tobacco at his foes and graze milk cows on the statehouse lawn. He also saw his father try--and fail--to do what Herman has now done: turn Walter George out of the U.S. Senate.

A better-dressed, better-mannered politico than his father (Herman likes to chew tobacco, but generally settles for ten cigars a day), Talmadge Jr. ran an efficient state administration, is a successful farmer and lawyer as well as a bitter-end segregationist. He promises as a Senator to work to reverse the Supreme Court's school-desegregation decision and to restrict the court's power generally. He refers to the nine Supreme Court Justices as "a little group of politicians [who have] not had enough experience to handle one chicken thief in Mitchell County" (the bottom of Georgia's backwoods; county seat: Camilla, pop. 4,000). He calls the U.S. foreign-aid program a "global WPA," and roars: "We gave money to build grain elevators in Pakistan. Why, that's 12,500 miles from Georgia."*

When Walter George entered the U.S. Senate he took the seat that had been occupied by a Southern demagogue of the old school, Thomas E. Watson. When George steps out, he almost certainly will relinquish that seat to a new kind of Southern partisan. Viewing the prospect, nearly every member of the U.S. Senate agreed last week with the Baltimore Evening Sun: "Few men could step into Senator George's shoes; Mr. Talmadge couldn't even shine them."

*A figure for the wool-hats. Correct distance, Atlanta to Karachi: 8,700 miles.

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