Meyner in the Majors

Stroking toward the crest of the Democratic tide that swept him back into office last fall, New Jersey's Governor Robert Baumle Meyner last week left the banks of the Delaware at Trenton for the banks of the Potomac to make his first full-dress speech since his reelection. Addressing an overflow audience in Washington's National Press Club, Meyner promptly identified himself as a politician, pointed out that politicians are nice to have around when the nation is in difficulty. Translation: Bob Meyner, 49, is very much available in 1960, when Democrats go after a presidential or vice-presidential nominee.

"Some of our national difficulties of the past few years have resulted from too few effective politicians in Washington and from too great a reliance upon people without substantial governmental or political experience," said he. Then Politico Meyner wisely put in a word for the Democratic-controlled Congress: "It is interesting to note that it is the practical politicians on the Hill who are now giving the defense program the forward push that it needed."

In a postspeech question-and-answer session, Meyner hedged not a bit on touchy domestic issues; e.g., he backs and will defend the Supreme Court on integration of schools, he opposes right-to-work legislation and would veto any such law that came across his desk. But asked bluntly whether he is weak on foreign policy, he did hedge: "I spend an hour to an hour and a half a day on newspapers--that's my knowledge of foreign affairs."

Also on the political soft-sell circuit last week were two other 1960 Democratic would-bes. Addressing Americans for Democratic Action in Manhattan, Adlai Stevenson proposed a U.N.-sponsored commission of private citizens from both nuclear and non-nuclear nations to examine all disarmament proposals and report to the Secretary-General "to clear the air of all bunk and phony proposals." At an A.D.A. dinner in Washington, Michigan's Governor G. Mennen Williams clubbed the Eisenhower Administration for being "narrow in outlook, shallow in substance, and [thinking] more of hard money than of hard negotiations for peace, more of budgets than of bold thinking in domestic and foreign programs and policies."

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