Borderline Case

With National Chairman Paul Butler crisply presiding, the Democratic Convention Arrangements Committee gathered in a room in Chicago's Conrad Hilton Hotel one day last week to choose the convention keynoter. To begin with, there were polite mentions of 17 possible candidates for the job. but soon the selection narrowed down to three: Minnesota's Fair-Dealing Senator Hubert Humphrey, Oklahoma's stem-winding Senator Bob Kerr (keynoter in 1944). Tennessee's Frank Clement, 36, youngest governor in the U.S.

At first the signs were strong for Oilman Kerr, but because he had fought too hard for the natural-gas bill, roundly vetoed by the President (TIME, Jan. 30. et seq.), it was decided that Kerr was not the man for this year. Nor could the committee quite agree that the quick-tongued Humphrey should have center stage so early in the convention; he was too outspoken on civil rights, too vociferously in favor of Adlai Stevenson.

Eager friends of Border-Stater Clement moved in fast on behalf of their man. Clement, quietly staked out in the Stevenson camp (to the disgust of Fellow Tennessean Estes Kefauver), was generally acceptable to both North and South because of his "local-level" approach to school desegregation. Far more important than these attitudes was the fact that Boy Wonder Clement is a golden-throated political evangelist with an inexhaustible gift for fervent oratory (see box) and surefire TV appeal.

After the committee had wrangled for 2 1/2 hours, Paul Butler--who had backed Kerr--came out of the meeting to announce that Frank Clement had won the keynote spot. In Nashville, "Guv'nah Frank" tore up a telegram of congratulations he had prepared for Bob Kerr, allowed happily as how "we've had more telegrams and telephone messages on this than when we were re-elected governor."

Named this week to the critical job of chairman of the Democratic convention platform committee: Massachusetts' John W. McCormack, 64. House Majority Leader McCormack, who is, as National Chairman Butler put it, "widely respected both on Capitol Hill and throughout the country for his fairness and understanding," tackled the same chairmanship in 1952. His most ticklish chore this year: steering his committee through to an acceptable civil-rights plank.

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